meh...

The sum total of my blogging career can be summed up in three letters: meh. Pretty mediocre and patchy, if you ask me. Instead of worrying so much about posting "the perfect blog", I'm just going to write whatever about whatever. Sound good, non-existent audience? Excellent! Then we're on the same page.

Life is bogging me down as of late. Everything in my life seems to be occurring in lurches; like the roller coaster ride that creates thrills by jolting you around corners instead of careening smoothly downward from lofty heights. Speed up for vacation... errrch! Road trip. Speed up for trip back to Canada... errrch! Speed up to fly back home... errrch! Fly over to Maui to help with project... errrch! We're moving back to Maui. Get the picture? Each time I think I'm going one way, I end up being jerked in a different direction. Not necessarily in a bad or wrong direction, just different than I expected. Needless to say, my days of carefully planning for the future are tentatively over, but who knows??? maybe even my plans to stop planning will be turned up-side down like everything else in my life lately.

Mmmmm.... "up-side down" reminds me of the pineapple up-side down cake I baked for an informal 10 year reunion with some friends from high school. We collectively agreed to skip the formal reunion and have our own. None of us cared to get in touch with most of the kids we went to school with and preferred instead to have a casual barbeque, let the kids run wild, and catch up on each others' lives. Definitely one of the highlights of my trip. And that's saying a lot. I touched hands with Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, experienced Disneyland through the eyes of my young children, witnessed their heroes come to life and watched my four year old defeat Darth Vader in light saber to light saber combat. Pretty magical summer, if you ask me.

But now that the magic is over, I'm plummeted back to reality and the realization that yet another move is imminent. Moving and I have a "love/hate" relationship. I love de-junking my home, downsizing, rediscovering things I'd lost and the tetris-like joy of organizing all that remains into the back of my GMC crossover. I hate the hurriedness of having to do all of the above in the space of three days, the uncertainty of where we're going to live next, the disappointment of moving back in with the in-laws until a more permanent solution presents itself, the unpacking of said items into a 12X12 room, and the growing frustration of uncertainty.

So... in a word: meh.

January 21

I’ll always remember that date. We used to invite our entire building to the hockey games for a huge group activity during the hockey season. My sisters were a little shier than I was, so I was usually the one put on “call duty”- calling everyone in the building and inviting them to the game. That night we all met at our apartment to divide up into groups and carpool to the game. One guy from the building had it in his head that my invitation to the game had been a personal date invitation! Oops! I didn’t want to lose a potential fan by setting him straight, so I played along. I began to be worried when he insisted on driving my mini-group, opening the front passenger door for me and claiming a seat next to me at the game. None of that mattered the second I saw the puck hit Jaxon. Jaxon was a true freshman trying to stake his place on the first string of the hockey team. He’d gone down to block a slapshot during the last few seconds of a penalty kill. He managed to skate back to the bench, collapsing head-first into it. I spent the rest of that night surrounded by family and friends, praying that our friend would recover. He never did. The hospital pronounced him dead on arrival.

I attempted to deal with my grief by altering an English assignment about consumer “branding” into a personal obituary for my friend. Click here to view the essay. My professor, while sympathetic, was not impressed. Thankfully he allowed me to correctly complete the assignment without penalty. The essay about Jaxon is one of the most honest pieces I’ve ever written. 

The Outsider Finds Solace in the Masses

It took me a long time to appreciate growing up always on the outside. Not belonging to any particular group gave me the freedom to become whatever I wanted later in life. When I entered University in the States, I wasn’t limited by a certain identity or type of friend. I was free to pursue interests I’d never known existed. No longer did I feel embarrassed for “being Native but not looking it”. I floated easily between cultural groups- always accepted. My unique features made it difficult to place me in a single category and instead of being excluded, I found myself accepted in each of them. I found I could finally accept and feel peace with my cultural identity, rather than shame. I began to volunteer with the cultural youth groups and found a job mentoring Native American high school students in southern Utah and Arizona. I was very active in many cultural groups on campus and I had friends of every color and ethnicity imaginable.

I'd grown up playing pond hockey with my brothers and cousins. At University I had the opportunity to play organized women’s hockey. My brother also played for the men’s team. My family and I were big supporters of the hockey team and helped to grow their fan base. During my third year of college, I was living with my older and younger sister in a large apartment building. 

brown

The Native kids were not much better. They would’ve gladly spent time at our house (over the years a handful did), but secretly they snickered behind our backs because, according to them, we thought we were “too good” for them. That didn’t stop our neighbors from running to our house in times of crises. I’m not exactly sure what we did (or didn’t do) that gave off the impression that we thought we were better than them. Maybe the fact that we didn’t smoke, drink, do drugs, beat each other up, play bingo, or travel the pow wow circuit. Or maybe it was because my dad was a doctor and my mom had her Master’s degree and neither would settle for children who did not make academics a priority. Probably it was because of our religious beliefs.

Whatever the reasons, I grew up in the little space between oil and water. Not quite part of one, but never fitting in with the other. Two opposing elements content to perpetuate deep seeded hatred and misunderstandings. It was a lonely life. I used to pester my parents to move to town so we could feel a part of a community. Now I’m glad that we didn’t. Always being on the fringes has made me keenly aware of the loneliness of others.

white

Mom was the spontaneous one. Where dad’s money went to buy the necessities and save “for later”, Mom was the one who took my sisters and I on “girl’s day out” and helped my brothers purchase their snowboards and video games, and was always the one we could count on for movie night.

It wasn’t until late elementary, early jr. high that I began to notice the racial and religious tension, the “no man’s land” my family fell into. The first time I heard the term “apple Indian” it was directed at me by a ninth grade Native boy I had a small crush on. I was an awkward seventh grader with braces and knock-knees trying to find my place in the microcosm of jr. high. My circle of friends was a rag tag group of social misfits: the smarter Native’s, the wannabe-rebel white girls, and the athletes from out of town. I had to ask one of my Native friends what an “apple’ Indian was. She told me it meant that I was “red on the outside, white on the inside”. Later I would laugh at the description. A “banana” would have been a better description, what with my yellowish skin tone and slightly Asian features. Nevertheless, the gibe stung and I began to wonder where it was that I fit in. In all honesty, my best friend was my younger sister, but now that I had entered jr. high, I was on my own for two years until she entered seventh grade.

Playing sports blurred the line between “white” and “Indian”. A little. I had white friends and I had Native friends, both of which could be lumped into the category of “school friends”, but for very different reasons. My white friends were part of the same religious group that I was, yet there was an unspoken rule that, because I was Native, they could only associate with me at school. I remember the first time I had a white friend come to play at my house. The miracle occurred in large part because my friend had an older sister who was also a friend of my older sister. Their mom dropped them off on a beautiful Saturday morning in spring. She drove to the nearest non-Native community (a small hamlet, ten minutes away) turned around and picked up her daughters. Our play date lasted a total of thirty minutes. In high school, one of my white friends who lived in that small community told me how one of her town friends had insisted on locking the doors and speeding through the reservation “in case one of the Indians tries to jump into the car”. Don’t even get me started on the logistics of something like that ever occurring.

An eclectic Composition

How do you answer the question: Who are you??? 

Every good story has a beginning, for me that would be January 30, 1984 on a cold winter’s day in Iowa. The setting is a typical mid-western, small-town mall, home and furniture section of your average department store. On this most-average of days a young, pregnant mother of six feels the familiar pangs heralding the immediate onset of labor. Scared out of his wits, the young furniture salesman encourages the young mother to sit down (on a water bed no less!) to “rest” for a few minutes. Thankfully the young mother trusted her carefully honed instincts and knew that sitting down for any length of time would increase her likelihood of delivery right there on a waterbed in the middle of an Iowa department store. “No thank you!” she replies politely, waddling quickly to the exit, clutching her bulging stomach. Shortly thereafter, in the nearby hospital, an eight pound, black haired, squalling baby girl entered the world. “Determined” (some would say “bull-headed”) is a word that would define much of my life.

My story isn’t all that unique. Like many, I grew up in a large family (eight children in total: 5 girls, 3 boys). My mother taught school, and the first four years of my life were spent in perpetual preschool (taught by my mother). Most preschools would have forced my mom to put my sister (younger by 2 years) and I into daycare, but thankfully the reservation school where my mother taught was so grateful to have her that they were willing to overlook the obvious age violations.

During my early years, my father focused most of his efforts on building his Chiropractic practice in the small non-Native community we were never quite a part of. The first Native doctor from his reservation, my father had a lot of racial red-tape to cut through. It helped that, at first glance, my father would easily be mistaken for a “white” man, but it took a lot of patience, persistence and just being good at what he did for his practice to, well, not quite “thrive” but to make enough to support eight growing children. One thing I regret about those early years, and in talking later to my dad, a regret we shared, was that he didn’t live more. I wish he would’ve bought more horses so we could’ve done more riding. The one horse we did own was an ornery old thing that threw at least two of my siblings and sufficiently scared the rest of us into steering clear of him.

... stay tuned for more!

Just getting started

Whew! I am completely wet behind the ears when it comes to blogging. Up until about a year ago I had no clue what a blog was- sure I’d heard the term being bounced around for the past couple of years, but I was at a complete loss for a definition.

In my mind, a blog is akin to an online journal geared towards a specific audience with a specific interest. My interest is writing, specifically to write novels worthy of publishing. Hopefully one of your interests is to read about writing. My goal is to create a fan base with which I can “test-write” my ideas, receive feedback and improve my writing, and yes, eventually get published. Lofty goals? I agree. That’s why I’m casting my net far and wide in hopes that the general public will keep me in tune with what they want from my writing. I hope you will enjoy reading my posts, tracking my progress, reading sample chapters, and giving feedback on my eclectic writing interests. So, before we begin this exciting, nerve-wracking (for me) journey, let me take a moment (read: several posts) to introduce myself.