The Last Grandparent

Lucky was how I considered myself.  Lucky to have never broken a bone.  Lucky to have never been stung by a bee or wasp.  Lucky that all four grandparents lived through my college years.  These were the simple - if not at times childish - metrics by which I measured my fortune, my health, my future.

Of course, time passes and bones break.  Insects chase the tender flesh of others, but death rattles the door knob and one by one three grandparents pass followed now by the fourth.  If my parents follow in my paternal grandparent's footsteps there will be no nursing homes to visit, no tearful goodbye trips to arrange and no last ditch efforts to capture the genealogical history for the next 25 years (knock on wood). 

Funerals bring obvious sadness but they bring joy too.  They are impromptu family reunions for those who left the farm years ago.  In central Illinois my family roots are grounded in the soil of corn fields and I smile hearing the story of how Dorothy drove a horse-drawn carriage to school each day.  We all smile through tears to hear once more how a migrant farm hand from Sweden watched her drive by, telling his friends how he was "going to marry that girl one day."  Married for 72 years, eight years have passed since his own death.  Is he waiting for her with open arms on the other side? 

We know these stories like the back of our hands, but how well do any of us know these near-Centenarians?  

The wind howls. Temperatures drop to the teens outside the Hampton Inn on 51 and I ask my parents whether any of my grandparents were happy.  Could one or all of them look back on their lives and conclude that they lived their lives without regret?  What lessons do we take from their lives?  Can we apply them to our own?

In my mind's eye I see my father's parents walking across the threshold of our Topeka trailer.  The morning sun hangs behind them and light poors in as they greet my sister and me with cheerful hugs and kisses.  Grandpa speaks with that charming Swedish accent, mispronouncing his G's and J's.  I know at five that these joyful grandparents are different from the ones two states over. 

Through the years the differences remain.  One set grows melancholy and gives up by 75 while the other lives independently to 97.  The latter pair isn't perfect.  Dad's history of his life (and theirs) is strung with myriad threads of pain but funerals aren't a time for rehashing the could haves, should haves or would haves.  In the end my mom and dad agree on this:  my paternal grandparents never had much money, yet they lived lives rich in experiences, friendships and family.  Mom says, "I never once heard them complain that they didn't have something.  They never sat around wishing they had 'more'."

And her parents?

What mattered most to my maternal grandparents was working hard to make sure there was money left for the kids.  They had to make sure their bills were paid.  They spent their lives working and paying bills, working and saving, working and wishing for more. 

My paternal grandparents worked into their 80's.  They worked for the joys of working and having purpose.  Their final months and years were bitter sweet.  Both were more than ready to go, but it is the view of my mom and dad that Bertel and Dorothy could look back on their lives and conclude only one thing:  that they lived happy lives without regret.

I reflect on Grandma's Korean minister speaking at her funeral.  He butchers the English language and while I anticipate cousin Phillip's impersonation later at dinner I am struck by the fact that this man was more than some clown pulled in at the last minute from the nearest protestant church. 

He recalls a recent visit and how at 99 she grabbed his hand, berating him for an attempt to cut their visit short without hymns.  "You're not going to leave without singing are you?" she asked.  She surprised him further remembering every note, every word, every verse. 

Will I be like this at 99?  Will I grab the hands of those nearby to recount with clear conviction the songs of my youth?  Will I stand at the end of my days and reflect that I gave it my all with a joyful heart?  Or will I lament over how I could have made different choices, should have pursued the really bold dreams and would have loved differently had I been confident enough to do so? 

At age five I knew that if I could choose I would choose to model my life after my paternal grandparents.  At 40 I feel off track as I consider my craving for more.  Yes, times are different.  Yes, TV, movies and fast food supplant square dancing, sewing clubs and potluck dinners.  The more our society changes the more our desires grow; but the more our world matures the more our conscious mind evolves too, right?

Maybe.  My grandparents with their Swedish connections and simple lives were enlightened without knowing the meaning of the word.  They were masters of the now.  My maternal grandparents?  Puppets of the past and pessimists of the future. 

The last grandparent crosses to the other side and I grow silent as I consider whose example to model my own life upon.  It seems a given to choose hers and my immigrant grandfather's, but the genetic pull of more is strong.  The habit of complaining even stronger.

My frustrations over relationship and money boil over and while there is a certain inevitability regarding my longterm happiness, I fret over the short-term management of it all.

Heroine with a Thousand Faces

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lighting Thief came out last Friday, February 12th and film critic, Kenneth Turan, reviewed it on NPR's Morning Edition saying, "Here we go again. A boy goes to a prep school, and a teacher tells him he has magical powers... [it's] about a young hero with parental issues, who is marked as the chosen one by his peers." 

Another Harry Potter knock-off?  Or yet one more movie about the male's heroic journey?  Admittedly, my favorite movies include The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and - the latest - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Then there are the stories of mythology and classic literature with their emphasis on heroes recognized by Joseph Campbell in, "Hero with a Thousand Faces." 

I can curse Campbell (and Hollywood) for his rejection of the feminine journey, but as he noted toward the end of his life, "It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths... [because] the women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories."

So where do we turn for our inspiration?  Sex and the City, Bridget Jones or Titanic?  Or worse, soap operas?  Are our adventures boiled down to sex, drama and romance (both rompy and melancholy) because we're too busy building families while balancing households with careers?  Sex and romance - requirements for a feminine future but also the cornerstones to our transformation?  Do they net us the discovery of important self-knowledge?

Valentine's Night 2010 ends with a repeat viewing of Sex and the City.  Carrie Bradshaw (Candace Bushnell) sets up the movie with a 30-second review of each character's life over the past three years.  Her own review comparmentalizes her lovers into chapters.  Is there a modern woman alive who can watch that without reflecting on her own biography of lovers?  Is the seductive allure of someone new our call to adventure?  Will we reach enlightenment if we survive love's trials in his "unusual world of strange powers and events?"

It sounds a bit pathetic.  I mean, I'd like to think there's more to life than, "pursuing and getting a man," but my track record says otherwise.  My life is a study in sex, drama and romance.  Can I pass my lessons along to my daughters without sending them down the same watershed path?  I am waiting for an inspiring heroine to show all of us the way but the promise of a phophet is an empty one.  I -- we -- must carve out and share our own heroine journeys be they grounded in love or other more worldly pursuits.

The Drama of Mother

I used to wonder about the possibility of other siblings "out there" and always in my imagination I pictured this brother or sister as the product of some indiscretion of Dad's.  I never expressed this fantasy to anyone in my family and then one day it happened.

Mom and Dad -- retired at 55 and traveling in an RV worth more than any house I ever grew up in -- were visiting from up North and we had just finished our Tex-Mex.  My then-boyfriend (now husband) and I prepared to leave when Mom said, "Before you leave there's something we want to talk about with you."

My stomach dropped and I returned my bag to the floor.  I waited to hear one of them say the word cancer.

"Go ahead and have a seat," Dad said.  I looked at Mom.  Was there a grin playing at the corner of her mouth? 

"Do you remember me talking about Roger?"  Yes, he was that one that Mom let get away.  He was the one Dad always referred to with great disdain, you could've chosen Roger.  Roger ~ eternal man of mystery to my sister and me.  He lived in Minnesota or Montana or somewhere up there.

"Well, before you were born..."

Holy crap!  "Are you getting ready to tell me that I have a sibling other than Kim?"  I looked for hidden cameras, sure this moment was being taped for Oprah or Jerry Springer. 

Sure enough, that goofy grin on her face grew to a full-blown smile as she recounted the conception and delivery of her only son.  The birth my Grandma forced her to experience alone, dropping her off at the hospital with a parting comment, "call me when you're done and ready to come home."  Yikes.

He was born five years before me and one of my mother's greatest concerns over the years was that I would come home with a new boyfriend only to discover I'd slept with my brother! 

Fortunately, that storyline was left to the writers of daytime soap drama.  She disclosed the details of Stephen's entrance into the world and Roger's return to Vietnam, asking me whether I recalled her increased moodiness each autumn.  Did I notice it?  Was she kidding?  My mom was a moody rag every season of the year.  There was no way the month of October stood out separately from the others.

The evening grew surreal as her story unfolded.  It wasn't that I was no longer the all-important oldest, but that everyone all around me (except for Kim) had known I wasn't the oldest.  I felt - if only for a 24-hour window - that I had lived this lie, perfectly fostered by my grandparents, aunts and uncles.  Then the surreal window closed and I realized that no change in birth order could alter who I was - even if I learned the truth at 31.

Ah, but something shifted that night.  I watched and listened to Mom and for the first time in my life I began to see her as more than just this bitchy woman who nagged at me to empty the dishwasher and compared me to my father when she was particularly pissed.

She was more than a mom, she was more than my keeper... she was a woman who'd experienced more than the caress of one lover.  She was a sexual being with a colorful past, more interesting than she had been the day before.  The box I'd put her in was too small and I delighted not only in meeting my newly-found brother but in connecting with this other person I thought I'd always known but was meeting for the very first time.

Seven Dating Dramas

Here they are...

1.  The Drama of Relationship and Career
2.  The Drama of Self Pity
3.  The Drama of Man's Sexuality
4.  The Drama of Mother
5.  The Drama of Competition
6.  The Drama of Communication
7.  The Drama of Woman's Sexuality

You know that saying, "if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all"?  That's where I'm at tonight.  I'm channeling Debbie Downer and seem incapable of escaping this negative field to say or write anything inspiring.  I feel emotionally exposed and embarrassed. 

More to come...

What is ~ Drama Queen's Guide to Dating

Dating did not come easy to me.  I was (and am still) a late bloomer.  I watched my teen girlfriends embrace the dating game with ease while I fumbled around desperately.  Cheerleader Natalie played the cute card and knoodled (sp?) with John through 8th grade.  Athlete Kelly leveraged her wholesome, girl-next-door card through 9th.  Forensic Chris and Journalistic Carol played their sensible cards through junior and senior year.

I was a sophomore in college before a series of unfortunate events landed me in relationship.  Alison died in a car wreck and the floor fell out from under my feet.  Alison, the coolest freak with a rat tail I'd ever met that didn't have to pretend to be my friend.  Alison, who lived life out loud and wrote naughty little stories with her boyfriend and passed them around the school.  Alison, who demonstrated the proper way to eat a slice, experience the City 110 stories up and start from the top in the Guggenheim.  Alison, who helped me pass algebra and who loved Sting more than anything else in this world.  She was going to write for Rolling Stone.  Instead, she took a road trip to Chicago and overturned her car while trying to change out a CD. 

I received the news Sunday night after it happened and I immediately called Sean who drove me to KC to hear Alison's mother say it wasn't so.  But it was "so" and I was drowning in denial.

Death draws a circle around those of us left behind.  It unites us in a club none of us ask to join and gives us shared experiences with those we might not otherwise engage.  Sean had been my friend since the start of school, but the drive home that Sunday night revealed our mutual loss and grieving became bearable as friendship evolved into something more. 

There will be more to say about Sean, so suffice it to say that our story eventually (and dramatically) came to an end. Dating awkwardness -- temporarily diminished in college -- rebounded with a fury upon graduation and the search for "The One" resumed. 

In my Definitions post (January 25th), I posed the question, what is a drama queen.  Since its inception, I have struggled to reconcile whether "Drama Queen's Guide to Dating" is a book about drama queens or a book about dating dramas.  The latter certainly offers the promise of a NY Times Best Seller with its seven-step, self-help structure. 

Dating has been awkward in the best of times and dramatic in the worst.  Everyone has their path toward enlightenment and mine has more often than not been the path of romantic adventure and finding "the one"... you know:  the knight, the soul mate, the one who would complete me.  I stand by my January 25th post and declare that being a drama queen is less about suffering with some borderline personality disorder than it is about living my life in the fullest and loudest pursuit of consciousness.  It is about living my life in the most colorful pursuit of connection with a man.

The dating dramas are a pathway to relationship, marriage and family.  They are the houses dotting the landscape toward partnership.

Transition to ~ Drama Queen's Guide to Dating

Events from last month's annual meeting remind me of marriage's inherent upside:  stability.  In my mind the scene from Mr. Meditteranean's room plays out again and again, sitting in my stomach like a raw donut.  Any day now I will move on, get over it and delegate it to a trunk of memories past, but a question pulls at my attention:  he knew I was married before inviting me to his room, so why the invite? 

Uhg ~ such misery.  We take, create or force opportunities to get to know those with whom we'd like to be connected.  Sometimes they reciprocate and sometimes they pass.  In between there is that moment that hangs in the air... will they feel the same?  And sometimes that suspended tension is better than the answer itself because it exists without judgment, without rejection.  It is perfection if only momentary.

Perfection passes, gravity wins and even the most intagible falls back to Earth.  If the moment passes with an unhappy ending we're back out the following weekend donning our sexiest shoes and accoutrements.  Will the next connection transform into something beautiful? 

Dramas unfold in pursuit of our happy ending.  We date in an endless search for "The One" wondering why it has to be so hard yet failing to realize we're the ones making it hard.

Drama Queen Definitions - Addendum

Someone with a [pathological] need for attention (maybe): 

Look at me!
Like me!
Love me!

Drama Queen Definitions

Here's the thing:  funny though it might sound, I know I'm selling myself short when I describe myself as a drama queen.  I sometimes qualify it with a dash of humor by saying I'm in recovery but regardless, it's self-deprecating. 

Most people consider a drama queen to be some version of a high-strung teenager, a Jewish American Princess (Shelia's words - not mine) or a desperate 30-something-year-old watching Bridget Jones for the 27th time.  None of these are the image I want for myself so I want to expand a bit on my January 10th entry and paint a bigger picture.

When the teleconference wrapped seven years ago I went right to work and cranked out a synopsis, chapter outline and marketing plan to promote my book, "Drama Queen's Guide to Dating."  I booked a flight to LA and spent two days pimping my book proposal with my good friend Melinda. 

If you ever want someone to walk beside you and sell your wares then Melinda is that person.  I was talking to yet another chick-lit publisher when I heard Melinda talking to a rep from Adam's Media Corporation.  "Have you heard of S.K. Karlsson?"  Her light, professional style engaged them immediately and I turned to make the close.  They liked my angle, they liked my proposal and they wanted to see my first draft. 

Maybe it was my own lack of clarity around what a drama queen was.  Maybe it was that my concept was born out of a moment of self-pity.  Maybe it was that I was trying to write a book to fit Adam's parameters for non-fiction.  Whatever the case, my writing was pedantic at best and the publisher eventually passed on the project.  

I started over, returning to my original idea and pounding out a rough draft within ten months.  I sent copies to my girlfriends, setting up a sort of focus-group where I'd throw a little happy hour in exchange for feedback.  They were kind, but something was missing.

Around the same time my then-boyfriend was tired of bearing the financial burden for our two-person family.  He asked me to contribute more to our household doing something... anything.  He wouldn't say the words, "return to Corporate America," but what else could I do?  Each creative project sat in a binder with rejection letters and exotic dancing was not my forte.  I swallowed my pride, updated my resume and returned to work within three months. 

Seven years later I make excellent money at a job that utilizes many of my quirky talents (excluding writing).  I'm fortunate because if I'm going to work in a corporate environment then I work in a place where it's like "peas and carrots." In other words, I like my job.  But as I said earlier this month, something is missing and I yearn for something more.  I yearn to be fully me, to not filter my words through the corporate machine nor supress the loudest expressions of my sexuality and twisted sense of humor.  My job may feel like a second skin, but only because I'm working incredibly hard to make up for lost time and money. 

On one hand it's frustrating to wake up seven years later with a balance in my account, but no Oscar or million dollar paycheck.  On the other hand, what I've found in the past six years is my voice.  Finding my voice took finding my audience and finding my audience took having children... it took having daughters. 

What is a drama queen?  Is it someone who's over reactive, addicted to their emotions because they cannot control them?  Is it something you can pen on an ethnic group as Shelia did in my focus group?  Is it a filter through which someone -- me -- sees the world?  Is a drama queen a victim who sees anyone who opposes her as a villain?  Is it a label found in the anals of DSM-IV?  Is it nothing more than a tension (or unity) of opposites that on its best day is the source of great fiction? 

Maybe for me, being a drama queen is living life in the fullest and loudest pursuit of consciousness.  It's being the type of woman my daughters might one day look up to and find inspiration as they navigate their own road to self-awareness.  If I succeed at one thing in life it will be that my daughters know themselves.  That they will not rely on others to define them and they will reach this place of acceptance earlier in their lives with me as their mother than they would have had they chosen otherwise.

Drama Queen Expert???

Picking up the trail from where I left off in December, here is my Drama Queen saga...

I sat on my couch feeling sorry for myself.  "Everyone is the expert of something," the teleconference coach stated.  Enrolled in a 8-week course to launch my "infopreneuring" career, my goal was to write a non-fiction book and marketing plan I could take to Book Expo in LA.  The problem was that I had neither a topic nor an area of expertise.  It was 2003 and I was creeping up on 34 with as much clarity on my career as I had had at 20.


I graduated from college with a Bachelor's of Science in Journalism.  Majoring in advertising, I landed my dream job as a media buyer three years after graduation.  Three years after that I was an account executive and could not care less about advertising - so I left the safety of my paycheck and health insurance to pursue writing.  Except that I soon discovered a penchant for comedy and took the route of performing instead.  A few years later I wrote, produced and starred in my own short film which then lead to the creation of two screenplays and a brief involvement with a cult (more on that later).  To pay the bills I donned the hat of project manager meets sales consultant.  It barely paid the bills which brought me back to the worlds of waitressing and temping until I finally met a man who would work a real job while I watched Oprah and dabbled in "being creative."

So here I was on the couch and as I reflected back over the previous 12 years I concluded that I had blown it.  I had wasted a dozen years resenting Corporate America, procrastinating on any number of good ideas and distracting myself with romance.  It seemed that by their mid-thirties any number of people had pulled their act together to produce a decent living - be it at a job or even at writing.  Not me though, and as I sat there facing the culmination of my choices I felt the urge to cry.  Except I didn't.  At that moment when I could neither beat myself up nor feel sorry for myself any further a subtle realization crept over me.  These thoughts... these emotions... they were familiar.  They were identifiable and fixable.  I knew they'd pass and I knew then that I was the expert of something.  I wasn't the expert of feeling sorry for myself so much as I was the expert of drama.  I could take the smallest passing thought, the slightest comment or casual look and spin it into a three-movie franchise called, "What About Me??????????????"

And that is how I finally identified myself as the expert of something.  I was an expert drama queen and could see all the phases of my life bleed into each other with the fullest sprectrum of emotion one can experience without being bipolar.  I hung up from my conference call and the seeds of my realization took root in a book called, Drama Queen's Guide to Dating.  The book I eventually wrote remains unpublished and I dare say that copius amounts of drama have continued to unfold in my life over the past [gasp] seven years.  Life is as stable as it can get (knock on wood) with a great corporate gig, loving family and fabulous house, and yet there is yearning for more.