A bit about where I'm coming from
Since talking with Michelle Mattalino a few weeks back, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the influence of fear on behavior and relationships. I think our fears, and our experiences with being in fear states, are so important to reflect upon. Good relationships depend on this. Those of us who are drawn to professions focused on human development are particularly interested in how we (as associates, as family members, as humans) impact one another. This can be a challenge because it is not possible, and frequently not even preferable, to keep the learning we are doing in our personal lives separate from the learning we are doing academically and professionally. This is definitely a challenge when writing about how various topics affect families.
As students of the human condition, we also have a responsibility to move mindfully and respectfully of others within both our personal and professional realms. We need to be careful with other people's information. We also don't want to assume we fully understand the experiences of others. As humans, we are all influenced by our own perspectives. There is usually ample opportunity to learn about what is motivating others, but this requires listening rather than speculating. I'll admit listening is a work for me.
I have a couple of wise and seasoned sensemakers in mind to invite for interviews, people with years of experience educating about the helping/human development professions. I also am thinking of inviting some people who are newer to and very passionate about the helping realm. This is something I really want to get back to, again and again and again, because it can be a complicated dance.
In the spirit of acknowledging the influence of my lens, and in doing my best to maneuver this space between my personal and professional/academic interests, I want to share only a few details about how the fear and love topic is relevant in my own family right now (hence, why it is so important to me).
We moved our son into public school for the first time this year. This was driven by his own insistent desire to go to school with other children in our neighborhood. Even though much of his experience has been good, this transition has triggered a rough patch for our family. There are big emotions surrounding how much more homework he is responsible for at his new school.
The thing is, recently I have been talking to quite a few families who are in a "rough patch." Their struggles are not related to homework, but to a variety of triggers. Considerations about the impact of fear seem very relevant to their concerns as well.
Fear
First of all, I want to be as clear as day about something before talking about fear. My thinking about this topic relates to loving families and well-intentioned people. I'm not addressing situations related to frightful violence. I'm talking about the fear that arises within us when we are in conflict, dealing with uncertainty, when resources are limited, etc. Even in environments consistently being prepared to promote warmth, fear can impact our relationships.
To help break up the long content, and give your brain a rest, I'm going to plug in some Halloween pics that are meaningful to me.. These pictures do not specifically relate to the content, but looking back at these pictures does influence me to want to be the best parent I can be.
I remember on an attachment parenting list serv years ago, a mother suggested smelling your child's hair when you are triggered. This can quickly bring you to the bonding feelings you need to get back to a centered place. Unfortunately, I don't recall who said this and cannot give her credit. I will say, I have found this to be very helpful advice. Looking back on your child's baby pictures is sort of like smelling your baby's sweet head, I think. There aren't many experiences more inspiring. I encourage you to look through pictures of your loved ones, young and older.
Since my talk with Michelle, there have been many opportunities for observation surrounding the impact of fear. I thought about this in the craft store while observing a parent getting impatient with an over-tired toddler, when I recalled a memory of witnessing a mother spanking her (not yet walking or talking) baby after he crawled into the parking lot and was nearly hit by a car, and in numerous interactions within my own home and communities.
The longer I live on this earth, the more I believe most people are good at heart. Most people have the best of intentions. I believe most of us want the best for our relationships, for the people in our lives, and even for people “out there” in the world. Wanting the best, and being at our best, are of course very different matters. Intention can only take us so far on the path to being the people we want to be. Especially in relationships where we have a lot of responsibility for and to the other person, we sometimes really have to work to do our best.
I keep thinking about the parenting discovery Dr. Pryor shared, about why other people’s misbehavior often triggers fear in us. Often we are either fearful about what their behavior says about us (the kind of parent we are, the kind of partner we are, the kind of professional we are), or about the social mirror. I have also been thinking about fear, in relation to change and ambiguity, because there is so much change going on in my life right now. I think it is important to be mindful about how unusual times can trigger us to act differently...even to behave in ways that are not true to ourselves.
When I was less experienced (and less informed) about relationships, I thought people showed their “true colors” during emotionally charged situations. I thought, “Oh, I see how you are. If that is how you act when you are mad, that must be how you really feel!” Such nonsense! Those are the times when good thinking is most blocked.
We are responsible for, and should be accountable for, our own behavior in all situations. I'm not making excuses for anyone. I'm simply saying...good people make more mistakes when they are fearful or distressed.
According to Parker Palmer, “to be in the world nonviolently means learning to hold the tension of opposites, trusting that the tension itself will pull our hearts and minds open to a third way of thinking and acting. In particular, we must learn to hold the tension between the reality of the moment and the possibility that something better might emerge.” There is also that old saying, “it always helps to have something to look forward to.”
When fear and ambiguity abide, it can be helpful to hold onto the very real possibility that "something better might emerge. " I think this is especially important when we get into rough patches with our children. They count on us. They really need for us to believe in them, to believe they are authentic when they are at their best. They need our warmth and forgiveness.
Our children internalize much of what we, as parents, believe about them. Also, as Michelle mentioned in our interview, they know us. If we do not authentically believe in them, we need to do some work with re-examining our paradigms.
I like thinking about fear because, even when days are rosy, I am certain I will face it again and again. I also know other people in my life will face it. I would like to help rather than be reactive. Hard work. Chop wood, carry water, chop wood, carry water, chop wood, carry water... In crisis situations, I want to be able to subordinate the yearning to defend against fear to the possibility of connection. This can be a hefty task for most of us. The stronger our muscles are, the better.
When I try to open a new can of worms (sometimes we need to), I can usually tell if I have been working out lately.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been rotating back and forth between reading Parker Palmer's work and Erin Pringle-Toungate's collection of beautiful, but dark, short stories in The Floating Order. Despite the nightmarish predicaments in Erin's stories, I keep thinking about the complexities of relationships and how fear (and that inner dialog surrounding our assumptions) impacts people. I am focusing on how (at least some of) the characters spend time in the stories looking forward to something. While I certainly don't claim to know this focus to be the author's intention, this has certainly been interesting to think about through my recent lens. Strength to you for facing your fears, and I'm not referring to the little goblins and witches that will soon be knocking at your door.
Third interview: Erin Pringle-Toungate shares about her fiction & other loveliness
Erin Pringle-Toungate is an enamoring fiction author and educator. From her website: Erin has her undergraduate and graduate degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing, respectively. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (in conjunction with W. Craghead); named a Best American Notable Non-Required Reading; and shortlisted for the 2007 Charles Pick Fellowship. Her first book of stories, The Floating Order, is published by Two Ravens Press (2009). She is at work on a second collection, tentatively entitled Midwest in Memoriam.
Erin is also married to my brother, and I am delighted to claim her as a sister. Adore, adore, adore! By the way, did I tell you, I adore her? I am so appreciative about her willigness to spend time sharing with me for this blog. Also, much appreciation to Erin and Erin's mother, for supplying some adorable pictures of Erin as a child during Halloween seasons.
Misty: When did you start writing fiction?
Before I could read. I would tell stories and my mother would write them down and make small books out of them. I wrote a story in first-grade that I won a prize for, about a church mouse that lived in a teacup. I think it was pretty derivative of Disney, since they tend to have sweet mice in their animated features.
Misty: What are your influences?
Visual art—painting, photography, film. I tend to find myself drawn to the absurd and nonsense—both for adults and children, so I like Lewis Carroll for much of the same reason I like Edward Albee.
Misty: I really enjoyed the child resizing in the only child, which reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. Will you tell me your feelings about Alice and talk more about Carroll's influence?
I think at around the time I wrote “The Only Child” I was reading Carroll in one of my graduate school children’s literature classes. I never really liked Alice as a child, and even in rereading Carroll, I didn’t enjoy her as a character—she's just not very interesting because she's so appalled by all the interesting things that are happening around her.
But children play out what they know, and since Alice is (or, at least once was) a commonly known figure, that was convenient in its own way. But, I agree in many ways with what Bruno Bettelheim talks about in regards to fairy tales and how they allow children to feel empowered since children constantly find themselves in situations in which they have no control over themselves since adults rule the world. (Well, I like the concept anyway). Plus, I have control issues, so I'm always interested in theories about it. A bit of an egoist, me.
I think children identify with the situation of growing bigger or smaller both because it's funny and strange, but also because it connects with not knowing how to control oneself—the consumption of food, in this case, being the controller; that is, knowing how to control one's actions but always being ultimately controlled by the adult in charge. I felt pretty controlled by adults when I was a kid—I hated not being taken seriously, and felt that it was merely my age that kept adults from listening to me; after all, they had little trouble taking each other seriously.
But back to control, I think death is similar, perhaps, for adults in feeling powerless. Maybe death's not so much an oppressor (or maybe so?), but that it has a similar effect in that many of us struggle with—the control it has over our lives and how defenseless we are to it. We like to, or must, pretend to have control over it, maybe like the child pretending the woman is alive or taking the woman on as a sort of mask in order to comprehend or play out a past reality.
Ultimately, the child is not doing anything strange in the story, “The Only Child” and neither is the father. The setting is strange, perhaps, since it's a morgue. But the child is merely playing make-believe, which is a way to understand reality—little different than what children or adults do when they read fictional stories or go to the movies. And the way the reader is asked to comprehend reality is by viewing it through the child's games, through the child's perspective. If it's rattling for the reader, it's because the child knows everything that's going on but the reader has to piece it together—a bit opposite of normal child-adult relationships. The adult reader has to watch and listen to the child to understand the world of the story.
This is similar to, I suppose, Alice being constantly irritated by Wonderland because it functions against the rules that are comprehensible in the world she comes from—or, at least, Wonderland exposes the absurdity of assuming a set of rules governs all, when it's the characters themselves, their actions, that govern how Alice must behave in order to survive. Understanding of the world, then, in “The Only Child”, comes from the child's dialogue and behavior. It's just that we typically, I think, interpret children in order to understand them (why they're behaving as they do) rather than to understand the world in which we live. But, I think, and perhaps this is misguided, that the world doesn't begin after adulthood and that many things adults do and say they've been doing since they were children. But that's the story I use in order to try to comprehend why people act the way they do.
Misty: I absolutely agree with your thoughts on the adult tendency to analyze children rather than simply experience the world with them. I think parents being responsible to and for children is a big trigger point for this type of, perhaps misplaced, focus. Thinking about these things is important work, so I am really glad you are bringing this up and I find it so interesting how much these things have influenced your writing.
On a slightly related note, I know the stories in the Floating Order are dark, but they inspired me to want to be a more playful parent with my 8-year old. I find it easy to be playful with a baby. As children get older though, with all of the expectations they have to meet with school and other relationships, it gets more and more complicated. Play, warmth, and touch are so important for connected relationhips though. What do you think about me walking away from your stories wanting to be more playful?
I think that's the power of a good story, and I'm humbled to know that my stories can have that effect. When I read Grapes of Wrath, I was extremely moved because he gave me a way of thinking about myself in relation to the world that empowered me. I think his novel is often talked about in terms of political agenda, but if that's all it was, it wouldn't touch its readers. And, obviously, his novel is much larger than the time and place and people he was talking about, which shows that he knew he was doing a lot more than cleverly cloaking an agenda in fiction. It's nearly impossible, or so it has been my experience, to write a good story that also has a political thesis at its heart since human beings populate stories, and since humans are complicated, they can't act out simple ideas without becoming cardboard.
But the sort of magic that happens between storyteller and reader/listener is that the reader comes with his or her own experiences and uses them to inform and make sense of the story. So, I think that you're as much showing that you're a good reader—you're able to take what you read and figure out how it applies to the world in which you live. For people who don't read much or who don't read well, they don't get to make the magic that a strong reader has constantly. Which is hard to think about as a storyteller since I'm not an oral one but of the printed word.
Misty: I really enjoy how you reveal so many lovely things about the characters and their environment, despite the dark and complex situations the characters find themselves in. Crafting ornaments, setting on the porch during storms, wind chimes, "catalogs for rainy day paper doll days"...Tell me about the things you love and some ways this influences your writing?
A lot of the things I love are in the stories, you're right. I like wind chimes—or really, I like the idea of windchimes. Mom had some glass windchimes that hung on the back patio, and I thought they were pretty. Their sound wasn't so appealing, really, but I love the idea of wind making music. My mother and I also made ornaments a few Christmases. We did many arts & crafty things when I was a child. My father was pretty artistic—painting, photography, sculpture, and he encouraged that side in me, and my mother encouraged art in terms of crafts. Making things has always been treasured by my family, whether that's making bookends or a kite or fixing a car or singing or telling stories. Anything manufactured by an outside source just holds very little value for us.
As a much younger sibling than my brothers and sisters, I was lucky because I was played with all the time. My sister had projects we would do together, my brothers and I would draw together, my father would take me out to take photographs when the light was right or if he'd seen something interesting, my mother took me to the library all the time. So, when I write, I try to reflect what I find valuable, and that's why it falls in these lines. In one of my recent stories, “This Bomb My Heart”, the brother character makes angel wings out of plywood and Queen Anne's Lace. I think it's lovely, just lovely that anyone would do this for anyone, much less a little sister. This didn't happen to me, but I think that giving something that you created to someone really shows how deeply you feel about the person. That's what my mother taught me from an early age and everyone reinforced.
Misty: One of my favorite things you have shared with me was the interview you did with your Mom a few years ago. Will you talk more about your background and how this has influenced your writing?
I'm really proud of that interview, too. My mother was a third-grade teacher for most of her life, and now she works as a teacher's aid at the same school. I was lucky to have a teacher for a mother because learning never ended when I came home from school. She loved children's books and knew they were important, and knew all the very good children's books, so I was exposed early on to reading as necessary to existence. She read to me most every night before I could read, and going to the library with her was a daily event before I became school-age.
We'd check out tons of books all at once since she had an adult library card and there wasn't a limit. I have very fond memories of the library and enjoy returning to the same library when I go home to visit. My father was a draftsman by trade, drawing up blueprints for oil-lines. He was an artist in mind and heart, though, and as such I grew up in a house full of paintings—his or someone else's, and if he and I went to the library, we looked at art books full of Renoir and Van Gogh and Rembrandt. I remember feeling very important as a child for knowing the names of artists. My father was a man of varied interests, from collecting old sewing machines to making model cars to studying trains to making cartoons for friends.
Misty: You sew, crochet, knit (right?), paint, do photography...you are not only a writer an educator but a very crafty person (since childhood, yes). Tell me whatever you feel like sharing about your love of crafting/art, etc.
I used to do all those things. I played piano, I painted. I don't know how to crochet, but I knit a little. I knitted a headband for 4-H when I was a kid and won a ribbon of some sort. I was really involved in the crafts side of 4-H (4-H, for those unfamiliar, is an agricultural organization for children and young adults—typically, a kid in 4-H lives on a farm and raises a pig or a cow all year and then takes it to show at the fair). I didn't live on a farm, but the town I lived in—and the surrounding towns—were farming towns. So, to be involved, I did all the crafts things—wire sculpture, metal tooling, and so on.
My maternal grandmother was a very good crocheter and seamstress. She sewed ornaments every year for every grandchild, and my first stocking was made by her. When I remember her, I remember the lace she made and the liter of Diet Rite that she used to keep her yarn in so that it wouldn't tangle as she tatted or embroidered. My sister was a good seamstress, too, and made many beautiful quilts—all her curtains were quilts, actually. She was especially influenced by my grandmother's fluency in needlework. You have the same birthday as my grandmother, actually. That's how I remember yours.
How did you come to play multiple musical instruments? I have always admired this about you.
Thanks, Misty. When my mother was a little girl, she would walk past a house that had a sign in the window about piano lessons. Her family couldn't afford lessons or a piano, but that didn't end her wish that she could play. So, when my sister was a little girl, there was a piano and lessons. By the timem I was born, the piano was still there, and I would play around on it, until finally, in fourth grade, I started lessons. Beside the piano was my father's organ, and he would play on that. He was self-taught, and he had also taught himself how to play the clarinet.
Fifth grade was the year school band began and I chose the flute. Music was always important in my family. I sang in the children's choir, my mother sang in the church's adult choir. My sister sang too, but had grown up 16 years ahead of me, though she never stopped singing or playing piano. Now her children are studying to become opera singers.
Music, t
he arts, literature--we're a family that puts that at the top of values. We've never dissuaded e
ach other from doing those things, only encouraged. I'm very lucky in that respect, which I didn't realize until I met so many people in the arts whose families didn't support such vocations--maybe they supported the arts as fruitful hobbies but nothing more than that. So, I'm lucky to have never sat down to write and wondered if this is worthwhile or heard the family voices criticizing what I'm doing.
The only dissuading voice is my own since I know now how impossible it is to sustain onself only on the arts. It's the rare few who can write fiction for a living, and everyone in this country could name those people on two hands.
Misty: Did you visit graveyard as a child? Since reading the Floating Order the first time I have wondered if we had this in common. I'm sure my brother has told you about our adventures in graveyards prompted by our grandmother.
We lived down the road from one, and so we drove past a graveyard every day. The schoolbus took the same route. I remember my mother getting into genealogy, and so that took us to graveyards, making rubbings and such. Graveyards captured my imagination. Everyone who had lived in the town had ended up in one. Then, part of the town's teenage folklore included visiting either graveyards or places where hauntings might occur in the country. I was part of the drive-out-into-the country crowd, though mostly I just heard about what would happen if you went to the bridge and did such and such. I was never very brave or popular enough to find myself very often at such "haunted" sites but would imagine what I would do were I.
But graveyards have never ceased to interest me, maybe more now since I know more people who now exist in them. So I do visit more now, though not so much the ones where I know the people whose names are on the stones. For example, the graveyard in Fredericksburg, TX is a really interesting one because of the amount of children's graves--and that the children's graves are in their own section and many of them have metal bassinets made around them. Graveyards understand grief. I find them to be empathetic places to go.
Misty: What do you love about being an educator?
I like the feeling that I'm empowering my students by teaching them how to write. I teach essay writing and part of that is critical thinking. I think it's very important that someone can do both, as they're more likely to be successful once they can do both well.
Misty: What do you not like about being an educator?
The actual assessing of grades. I like reading their papers and responding to them, but I do not like putting a letter grade on anything my students produce. I feel like they'd learn much more without that grade there because the grade is often equated with success, and how can a student be extra successful in a class in which they're learning a skill? It's not until the end of the quarter that that can happen and so I now grade such that students can turn in revisions of all their papers at the end of the quarter, and whatever grade their most final revisions earn is the grade. It makes me more comfortable and, from my observations, them, too.
Misty: Will you tell me about your love for going to church around the holidays?
I'm not religious, but I like listening to one person talk. What I liked most about college was listening to professors lecture. Churches during holidays are peaceful places to go, especially because of the way the candles look in a dark sanctuary that has beautiful architecture. If libraries had candle-lit services, I'd go there instead and have a better time. :)
Misty: Talk to me about yur love for Hallween. What are your plans for this year?
My sister loved Halloween. I was two or three when she first dressed me up (as a ghost) and took me trick-or-treating.
She bought my first pumpkin to carve, I think. She was the one who, every year, would do my costume make-up. It was very special. I loved decorating the house for it, too. But I loved decorating the house for whatever holiday it was. The farmers who lived down the road always had a haybale that was stuck with parts of a mannequin, like somebody had gotten caught in a baler.
My music teacher, and later piano teacher, always had great Halloween songs for us children to sing, and on Halloween, she would hang Tom Dooley (from the folksong) from one of the trees by her house, so it was a big deal to go trick-or-treat her and see the man from the song we'd been singing. Autumn, Halloween, the trees changing, all of it has been my favorite. I dressed up until I was 16 or something because I loved it so much--I still dress up, but I mean, I would try to go trick-or-treating way past the cut-off age, and it wasn't because of the candy. This year, I know that my students are turning in an essay on Halloween and that Jeremy and I may dress up. We've been batting costume ideas back and forth.
I really appreciate your willingness to spend your time. This is all so fascinating.
Oh, Misty, thank you for having me. :)
I am so inspired by Erin and the experiences she shared about her creative family!
5 things I have been enjoying at home
1) Cooler temperatures
Can somebody give me an Amen?!
2) Fort building/playing
3) Contribution
4) Sibling love
5) Projects with burlap
Our gratitude banner. I sewed the burlap onto some favorite fall colored scraps, but (as you can probably tell), I lazily just sketched the letters on the burlap with a sharpie. I love how it turned out.
I did one pillow cover with burlap, with some scrap fabric I adore but only had a quarter of. I only made the one because while he agreed it was cute, the 8-year old made the good point that the burlap is not very comfortable for a pillow cover.
Leaves for our thankful tree. One family member will contribute something they are thankful for each day in November, and write on back of a leaf. We will rotate. I went ahead and made some examples, because we are certainly thankful for these.
Using burlap as the shelf liner for our nature display. I did not do any sewing for this. I just snipped a piece and laid it across the space. Our nature display is growing every day, as we are collecting on each walk. This photo is from a week or so back. I'll post another later in the fall.
I'm so glad fall is here!
Of other interest:
- Dr. Dan Pryor (see the interview from last post) has another servant leadership workshop at Still Waters November 3, 10, 17 from 9:30AM-12:30PM. Feel free to contact me for more details
- My Aunt Royanne just passed along the link from Life as a Thrifter blog on to me, and I love it. I don't think I would do the exact project, but I have some ideas a stirring inspired by this. More to come...I'm also just happy to find out about this blog and the projects there.
- Please stop by for my interview next week with local artist and doll designer, Rhonda Baird. I am very excited about the opportunity to talk with her.
I enjoyed reading the blog and seeing all the great pictures. I found it interesting to read about childhood memories and the influence they had on the interviewees life. Your writing style is very comfortable to read and the introduction about fear perfectly setup the interview. Great job!
Posted by: Rhonda Baird | 10/15/2011 at 07:13 PM