A Mom Like Me

One April afternoon, my husband and I walked from our hotel in Cusco, Peru, to the city's central plaza. After living for ten years at or near sea level, Cusco's 10,000 foot elevation had us sucking wind like we had just one lung between us, and the five minute walk had wiped us out. We sat down to catch our breath on the lip of the fountain shown in the above picture.

It was a beautiful day. Temperatures in the 70s, a light breeze floating over the city, children playing -- heavenly. Provided I had an endless supply of oxygen tanks, I really believe I could live in Cusco.

Not long after we reached the fountain, we were approached by a Peruvian woman of perhaps sixty. She was dressed traditionally, and carried a satchel from which she drew a carved gourd. This one, to be precise:

I thought it was lovely, and thoroughly Peruvian. She claimed to have carved it herself, although I suspected they all said that. Still, I was interested in buying it from her, and asked her the price.

Before we could continue, however,  a police officer showed up and chastised her for selling to the tourists. Even my assurances that I didn't mind her being there couldn't sway him; he hustled her across the street. But before she turned to leave, she caught my eye, and I winked at her.

The little Peruvian woman understood the signal; as soon as the policeman was on the other side of the plaza, she returned to the fountain and carefully withdrew the gourd. Quickly, I paid the asking price and dropped the prize into my bag. Nothing to see here, officer.

We began to chat, this stealthy gourd seller and me. I asked if Cusco was her home, and she told me no, she lived another mile up the mountain, in the village we had come to Peru to help. She had lived there all her life -- had been born there. She went on to say that she walked to the city every day with her children, who attended the private Catholic school there. While the kids were in school, she sold gourds to the tourists to earn the money for their tuition.

This woman was immensely proud of her four children. They were the first in her family to attend school, the first to learn to read. I told her that I, too, had four children, that two of them were with me in Peru, and that watching them grow into selfless, delightful teenagers was the joy of my life.

Oh, she said, my children are still small. How do you manage them when they are grown? Sometimes, I said, I think they manage me. We laughed at that. She shared stories of her little family, of the daily walk up and down the muddy Andean mountainside, of the constant challenge involved in keeping their uniforms clean, of arriving at the school and scraping mud off the kids' shoes before sending them to class, and before taking up her bag of gourds and heading to the plaza.

I considered the work our humanitarian group was doing. Just the day before, my 15-year old daughter had helped lay pipe for a water system that would eliminate the need to walk a half mile straight up the mountain to the well, and I hoped that somehow it would make cleaning those school clothes a little easier.

Her children were young; the oldest was ten. I found that odd, considering her seemingly advanced age. She was weathered, her skin ruddy and lined from years of exposure to the sun and wind. Had she really not started her family until she was in her fifties? It seemed unlikely.

So, in my typically bold way, I asked her: "How old are you?"

"Forty-one," she said. Forty-one! My age!

"Ah!" I said. "I'm forty-one!"

She grinned. "No," she said, "you look so young!"

"Not so young as I once was," I said. "Kids make you old." She nodded vigorously. We laughed again.

"I will be forty-two in June," I added.

"I will also be forty-two in June!"

Our eyes widened in that "We're so much alike!" look that women share -- that women crave, thrive on.

"When?" I asked. "When is your birthday?"

"June 29," she said.

This woman whom I had taken to be my mother's age, was in fact twelve days younger than me.

"June 17," I said. "See? We're practically twins!"

Could any women have had more different lives, I wondered. I was born in a modern hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. She arrived two weeks later, in a still-primitive village high in the Peruvian Andes. I could read by the time I was three. I had my first job in a comfortable shopping center near my home. Studied music, graduated from college. Drove a car, travelled, swam in my backyard pool.

And she walked down the mountainside every day, to take her children to school and evade the police while she eked out a meager living selling gourds.

So different. And yet, on that lovely spring morning on the edge of a city fountain, we were just two moms, sharing the joys and struggles of raising kids. We were doing what we had to do, day after day, sometimes at a cost, often without giving it much thought.

Life in the Andes is hard; most villagers don't live much past fifty, and this year, she and I will be forty-nine. I hope she's still alive, that her kids are happy, that she's getting her shot at managing teenagers.

She's a long way away from everything I know. But she's a mother.

A mother.

Just like me.

Blogging as a Path to Self-Discovery. No, seriously.

 

Story @ Home / Roots Tech 2013

It was important to include the exit sign over the door,

to show that people could have fled safely

if they had felt the need.

You will note, there is no fleeing happening.

In the public speaking biz, we call that a 'fully successful gig.'



Hey, everybody! Did you miss me? Well, I was right here, in my winter-defying orange sherbet jacket, yapping and flailing like usual. Shoulda looked here first!

So, I spoke at the above mentioned Story @ Home conference again this year. Gosh, I love that event. You totally have to come next time. We have such fun. It's all about story -- story this, story that, story, story, story.

There's a blogging / Internet track, and that's where you find me. My topic was The Journey of Self-Discovery, which on first blush seems just far too froo-froo for yours truly.

But honestly? It was a great subject to think about and share with others. I think most bloggers agree that, regardless of why they started to blog, the experience turned into something more. Nearly everyone I meet in the blogging world has some story to tell about the things they learned along the way about themselves, their goals, their priorities, their businesses, and -- depending on the camera angle -- the importance of wearing properly fitted jeans.

Now, I don't want to appear immodest (and by that I mean, I don't want you to know how truly stuck-up I am), but my class was stuffed clean to the gills. And there were people in the hall, looking in. I suppose it was possible they were getting the gist simply by watching my windmill arms, and of course it helps to have a voice like a foghorn. So I hope everyone who attended got what they came for.

But some lamented later that they couldn't get into the class (stupid fire codes) and would like a sum-up of what we talked about.

So in a move that is completely out of the ordinary for me, I thought I'd put something useful on my blog. Please don't panic; the silliness will return soon.

The main ideas of that presentation are here. And please, use the comments to share your own stories of this unexpected path that leads to, "Wow. Didn't know that about myself" land.

Discovering What Has Already Been, and Things as They Are Now

The first part of the class centered on the common use of blogging (at least old-school blogging, before we all decided that, with enough typing, we could become millionaires), namely, chronicling the current events of life, and / or recording stories from our past.

There is something about the act of writing that requires an element of focus, which in turn tends to slough off details that we may have felt were 'the point of the story' but really turned out to be extraneous to the core experience. This isn't to suggest that those details aren't worthy of their own story, only to say that for a given telling of a specific story, there is a lot that drops off.

For me, this has meant bringing clarity to memories that had always just been a sort of foggy blur. The most extreme example of this (on my blog, anyway), and the one I typically share at conferences, is a post I wrote called The Wendy Bird, where I thought I was just reminiscing about pretending to be Samantha Stevens with my little neighbor friend back in the third grade, and discovered in the writing that I was telling a very different story -- one whose ending I hadn't understood until I was an adult.

I spent some time talking about my dear friend Debbie Frampton, and her own journey -- taken on the blogging road -- to forgiveness and understanding surrounding the death of her father by drug overdose when she was just 15. Her blog, which on the surface is just funny and goofy and random, has nonetheless led her to such an extraordinary place that she is now writing one of the most beautiful, delightful memoirs I've ever read. Move over, Haven Kimmel. There's a new sheriff in town.

The interactive nature of blogging sets it apart from journaling. Not only do we share our own stories, we then get the feedback and commiseration of our community. A nothing little blog post on the subject of falling down in public was improved 1,000% by the comments that came later. It is one of the funniest posts on my blog -- and you don't even hit the good stuff until I stop talking and my readers start.

I have found that even the posts I've written over the years that deal with difficult things -- depression, betrayal, loneliness, and loss -- have brought me closer to making peace with life's unexpected turns, and have invariably taken me to a place where I could not only forgive and move on, but I was actually grateful for the good that came with the bad, and with the deeper love I've felt for and from God during difficult times. Left alone with my thoughts, I undoubtedly would have become bitter and isolated; blogging about trials put me in the company of people I love and trust, who gave their whole hearts to the effort of healing mine.

Blogging as a Way to Write a Better Story for your Life

The other part of the presentation had to do with some inspiring ideas I got from the book "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" by Donald Miller. (Incidentally, I've never been paid to endorse any product, and that includes this book.) If you'll just read that, you'll have everything I wanted to tell you in that part of the presentation but ran out of time.

Miller's experience is interesting: He found himself in the position of having to write a fictional version of himself for a film about his first memoir. And he realized that the screenplay wasn't working -- the story was lackluster -- because his own story was boring. So rather than just tell a bunch of tales about the fictional Don Miller that weren't true, he decided to live a more deliberate, more interesting story, and then put that in the film.

 

The Peruvian Andes

Over the years, we've done similar things. Our humanitarian trip to Peru, my husband's radical career change from accountant for the LDS church to FBI agent, our multiple moves, including four wild and wacky years in the Caribbean, even my decision to become a writer and public speaker -- all of these represented focused, deliberate choices to wrestle the pen out of the hands of Fate and write a new chapter for ourselves.

A blog is a great place to announce those kinds of intentions to the universe. The feedback, suggestions, encouragement, and accountability that come from your friends (and that's how I think of my readers -- real friends, who take a genuine interest in my well-being) can take a simple 'what if' and turn it into a life changing, story changing reality. And of course, where better to record your experiences than a blog?

What's the next step?

Well, there are a lot of things you can do with your blog. I encourage you to build a little redundancy into your archives -- use the various blog-publishing sites and tools that will print your blog as-is for a nominal fee, or back everything up on another drive, or print off your favorite posts as Word docs. For me and 16 other writers, our blogs became the resources for the book "Tell Me Who I Am," many of whose chapters were refined versions of posts that were first published on our blogs. I mentioned Debbie Frampton's memoir. I am a columnist for Meridian Magazine, and I'm also putting together two different essay collections. Many of those essays and even a few of my Meridian articles lived their first lives on my blog.

And of course, you can just enjoy what you've written. Go back a year or two, and re-read the stories you were telling back then. I'm not ashamed to admit (see 'stuck-up' above) that I have spent many hours reading old posts and laughing with my friends as the dialogue poured onto the comments page. In many ways, my blog has always felt like my virtual living room, where anyone who promised to play nice and not hog all the digital Diet Coke was welcome. Those little snapshots of my life, and the relationships that grew out of them, have become some of my richest treasures.

So, there you go.

Those are the highlights of my presentation on Blogging as a Journey of Self-Discovery. There was more, of course. Lots of laughing, and a little crying (because if I can't roll through at least 17 emotional stages in any given class, then I haven't done it right) and a bit of sharing, and a renewed enthusiasm for telling our own stories and being the authors of our own lives -- that pretty much sums up those thoroughly enjoyable 50 minutes, for me anyway.

Now it's your turn.

Tell us how blogging has taught you more about yourself. Why did you start blogging? Did it turn out the way you thought it would?  What surprises did it hold? What would you change if you could?

Old-school blogging is MY school of blogging. But regardless of why you blog, promise me one thing: Keep telling your stories. I'm reading. I'm engaged. And I'm dying to see how it all turns out for you!

All We, Like Sheep

Note: This piece, written three years ago, is one of just a handful that I've had requests for reprints. It was certainly a fun essay to write, and I've been delighted at how many people have enjoyed and related to it. Every word is true -- we were every bit the completely naive fools described in this story. The fact that the sheep didn't manage to herd US off the cliff into the Urubamba river speaks only to the lack of imagination in your standard Ovis Aries, and does not in any way suggest that the 35 college graduates involved could have found half a brain between them. Nevertheless, what we lacked in intelligence or even a semi-reasonable game plan, we made up for in determination and good old fashioned American obstinacy. And I, for one, learned a little more about the love and patience required to save creatures who would just rather be left to their fate.

(If you enjoy this, I invite you to read 'Tell Me Who I Am,' found on my sidebar.)

********************************************************************* 

Easter 2006 found my family in the Peruvian Andes. How it ever thought to look there was a true mystery; all we could remember was one minute we were playing "Quién es mas macho?" with an Incan bartender, and the next we were sniffing llama poo.

(Just kidding. The only drinking game my family plays is the one where you eat a fistful of Mentos and drink a jumbo extra grande Diet Coke and then watch each other's heads explode. It's all good fun 'til someone loses an eye.)

Anyway, we were working with a humanitarian group in the little village of Salkantay, which is a mile above and 200 years behind Cuzco.

There is not a more beautiful place on the earth than Salkantay, Peru. Those Andes don't mess around with gentle slopes and rolling foot-hills. They shoot straight up into the stratosphere, beyond, it seems, the 14,000 foot elevation where the village is situated, thumbing their majestic noses at wimpy ideas like gravity.

My guy, a long way from home

They're green and precipitous and, in every possible sense of the word, breathtaking. This is the only place I've ever visited where you actually order oxygen from the hotel desk, and a bellman brings it to your room and, if necessary, straps a bicycle pump to your face and re-inflates your lungs.

Our group spent a week or so helping the villagers with a variety of projects, including building a greenhouse, constructing a running water system, and introducing the little Peruvian children to the modern, transcendent wonders of Spicy Cheetos.

Many of the villagers were descendents of the Inca, and only spoke Ketchua. A few spoke Spanish as well. None spoke English.

Yet it was so great to see our kids working side-by-side with these villagers, communicating with sign language and stick-in-the-dirt drawings and the kind of laughter you get when you realize the table you just spent an hour building together has three legs pointing south and one due west.

It was life changing. I have forever after looked at my oldest two children with different eyes.

One morning, however, we arrived at the village to learn that we would be participating in a new project.

The village was raising a special variety of sheep. (I'm not sure which breed. I think it was the "Woolicus Stupidus," but I could be lying.)

It was hoped that these sheep, if kept healthy, would provide a high-quality wool which could be used to make blankets, clothing, and other products which the villagers would take into Cuzco and sell. The impoverished residents of Salkantay had pinned a lot of their hopes for future prosperity on those sheep.

Well, a big part of keeping the sheep healthy long enough to realize a return on the village's investment was immunizing them. I couldn't tell you what kinds of diseases sheep are likely to get (mad cow?) but we were nonetheless pegged for the job of getting them vaccinated.

It should probably be noted here that, to a man, not a single member of our humanitarian expedition knew the first thing about sheep. Zip. I'm not sure any could even spell 'sheep.'

Nevertheless, possessed of the hubris that is the downfall of tourists everywhere, we trotted up the hillside to assume our duties as Sheep Herding & Immunization Technology Specialists, or for short, umm…well, never mind. We won't abbreviate that one.

The first thing we noticed after regaining consciousness (remember, we were three stinkin' miles above sea level) was that there were no sheep in the pasture. There was, technically, no pasture in the pasture. It was more along the lines of a grassy wall, which ran at a gentle 175 degree angle until it met with an ascending cliff that rose so aggressively "up" it appeared to loop back on the geometric continuum, qualifying more as an inverted "down".

This cliff was where the sheep were grazing, evidently affixed to the mountain by Velcro. And keeping them company was a herd of llamas.

Also on that vertiginous mountainside were some of the local shepherds, who, upon noticing our group sucking wind and collapsing like fish on a boat bottom, began to direct both the sheep and the llamas toward the pasture.

I can't really describe how they did it (tasers, perhaps) but somehow they managed to separate the llamas from the sheep, dispatching the llamas toward the village and leaving the sheep - and their victims - to their respective fates.

One of the men began instructing our group on the finer points of immunizing sheep. It seemed we were to first encourage the sheep into an adobe pen, where the local toughs would then single out individual animals and, using a complex formula known as "guessing," would holler out to we, the volunteer sheep-dopers, the amount of medicine their sheep required.

After the medicine had been administered, another batch of idiots, er, I mean humanitarians, would 'paint' the heads of the now-vaccinated sheep with red goo, which indicated that they were finished, and point them in the direction of the gate.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Oh. My. Word.

Let it here be observed, when the Lord referred to His children as "sheep" He was not paying them a compliment.

The only creatures on that hillside who were more brainless, more stubborn, more skittish and goofy and easily distracted than those blasted sheep were the human volunteers. The pasture and the pen were only maybe fifty yards away from each other (forty-nine of those yards pointing straight down; we could have simply picked up the sheep and dropped them into the pen if we could have caught the crazy beasts), but it took us nearly an hour of sheer buffoonery to do the job.

First, we thought we could just 'holler' them down the hill. "Go, sheep! Go on! Go, sheep, go!" Like we'd been scripted by Dr. Seuss.

The sheep, naturally, heeded our counsel by running in a circle and pooing.

So we determined that we were going to have to 'chase' them to the pen. We removed various jackets and hats and began jogging and flailing and, by this time, breathing out threatenings against those cursed sheep and their posterity to the third and fourth generations, convinced that we could scare them into cooperating.

The sheep responded by assuming individual trajectories and running in what was now forty different circles and bleating revolutionary slogans back at their tormentors. And pooing some more.

Next on the agenda, then, was an attempt at creating a Lifetime Original Movie moment by kidnapping a few of the lambs and carrying them toward the pen, confident that their mothers would follow along out of powerful maternal instinct. Oh, the mileage we would get out of this object lesson!

See? Moms stick close to their little ones. Right? Right? Well, I did anyway.

Unfortunately, sheep don't watch Lifetime Original Movies, and instead read in our act of collecting all the lambs an offer of free babysitting. They celebrated their new-found liberty by frolicking in a general anti-pen direction, and of course, pooing.

The hillside was becoming a slippery slope of unmentionable terrors for we gringos, who were wearing our "old" sneakers for the job. This meant we had essentially strapped rubber ice skates to our feet and were now trying to keep from falling into what you get when you combine a stressed-out sheep with a grass-intensive brunch.

My son, Dave, was one of many victims.

I think we burned his clothes and made him return to the hotel wearing a festively colored poncho.
Or at least we should have.

Strangely, we had the best luck when we simply hid from the sheep. "They're getting nervous," we reasoned. "Give them some time to settle down. Let 'em think we've lost interest. Then we'll break out the tranquilizer darts."

And sure enough, a few sheep gravitated toward the pen. Typical. And once we got three or four contained, the rest, as sheep are wont to do, followed them in.

Now it was time for the wrestling match wherein the local herdsmen would quite literally pick up a sheep in a position reminiscent of the Heimlich maneuver, and call out "Dos!" or "Cuatro!" which told the volunteers how many cc's of medicine that sheep would need.

Meanwhile, we were either filling syringes with anywhere from two to five cc's of this milky substance or handing them to others, who would then rush over to the Heimliched sheep and squirt the medicine into its mouth.

Yeah, that went well.

Not knowing that this stuff could well mean the difference between good health and poor, perhaps even between surviving the wet Andean winter or not, the sheep had less than zero interest in cooperating with the immunizers.

They spit. They thrashed. They pulled out shivs and menaced the other sheep. They mouthed off and stomped up to their rooms.
 

As if that weren't enough, once the medicine which wasn't all over the volunteer's shoe was in the sheep's mouth, the volunteer would actually have to massage its throat to FORCE it to swallow.

Then the immunizer would shout "PAINT!" and another volunteer would rush over to brush red dye on the sheep's head, who would finally be released to go its way, only to be as obstinate and stupid about exiting the pen as it had been about entering.

From start to finish, it was one big exercise in coercion and, at times, sheer, teeth-gritting determination not to be out-maneuvered by a 150 pound bag of helium in a wool sweater. Those sheep did everything they could to reject what was being offered to them.

They were short-sighted and temperamental and even aggressively determined to remain unprotected, exposed, and vulnerable to whatever disease lay ahead. They had to be led, pushed, and threatened. Some took several attempts from several well-stomped laborers to finally get the job done.

But at the end of the day, every one of those silly sheep bore on its head the symbol of its renewed health and brighter future.

Sheep Herding & Immunization Technology Specialists

I learned a lot of things that morning. About sheep and people and how mind-blowingly difficult it can sometimes be to do something good and necessary and life-saving for others.

 

About the kind of vision and effort it takes to call and contain and get the attention of creatures who might otherwise never pay any heed to what you do or say or want for them.

About the love that is poured into the healing of all mortality's pain, including -- especially -- the healing of broken hearts, and the mark set upon those hearts when they have been made whole by the Master Physician.

And mostly, I learned a little more about the Good Shepherd, who on another hillside on another Easter, reclaimed His sheep and, one by one, anointed their heads with salvation, inviting them to forever lie down in the green pastures of eternal life.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray. But we hear the voice of the Shepherd, who knows us, who has borne our griefs, carried our sorrows, and graven us on the palms of His hands.

And we follow Him.

Happy Easter.