Category: Accounts

My mom’s dartboard

Just over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about living (not grieving) beside Judith. In it, I recall a speech my mom gave to a woman’s group about the creative process. One of my favorite parts of the speech was her discussion of how she deals with the Censor–that voice of negativity inside of her that tries to make her doubt herself. I particularly love her line about how to use a dartboard to shut down the Censor. She writes, “another thing that is very effective is to personify the Censor and paste its picture on the wall and throw darts at it. I have done that as well.”

Here’s what I wrote about her line:

I love her comment about the dartboard. I remember that dartboard. It was in our basement (well, at least in one or two of our basements. We moved around a lot). I also remember her telling me that she loved to play darts. She never said why…Now I know.

I do have one memory of her in the basement by the dartboard. Her lips are pursed and she is aiming the dart with quite a bit of determination and a playful twinkle in her eye. It’s a wonderful memory to have. To me, it speaks to her refusal to give in to the Censor and her great sense of humor.

Just a few minutes ago, I was looking through some old film footage of our family farm and I found a few images of that dartboard (at least, I think it was the same dartboard?). I wish I had some footage of my mom throwing darts at it…

 

Why do we tell stories?

I just came across this short film on Ken Burns and storytelling (via Brainpickings and originally posted on the Atlantic):

I was struck by a particular comment that Burns makes as he discusses why we tell stories:

We tell stories to continue ourselves. We all think an exception is going to be made in our case, and we’re going to live forever. And being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that’s not going to be. Story is there to just remind us that it’s just okay.

I’m troubled by his claims here. Why? I agree with them to some extent, but I disagree with the overemphasis on the individual and their existential crisis. I don’t think that we tell stories just (or primarily) to continue ourselves and to comfort us in the face of our impending death. Personally, I wouldn’t want to live forever. My (sometimes urgent) need to tell stories comes from a strong sense of responsibility that I feel to pass on the stories that I know/that I’ve heard and to give an account of who I am and what I experience. Of course this need springs partially from a desire to have my own voice heard and to leave a trace after I’ve died, but it also, and more importantly, comes from a recognition that I am a self in community and beside generations of others.

As I write these lines, I’m reminded of the second farm film that I created (along with STA) about the Puotinen women as storytellers. In that video, I used Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Grandma’s Stories,” a chapter from Woman, Native, Other, to frame the various stories. Here’s the passage from Trinh’s essay that I used to introduce me as one of the Puotinen storytellers:

Burns offers a compelling vision of the storyteller, but it is about the Storyteller-as-Self with a capital S who skillfully crafts narratives (that lie and manipulate in hopefully productive, meaningful and complicated ways, says Burns in the video) that convince us that it’s okay to die. I want to imagine the storyteller as a different sort of self who crafts stories that provide comfort and meaning to more themselves, but to and with their communities. And who shares stories that aren’t aimed at dealing with impending death, but with finding ways to help us make sense of and (hopefully) flourish in our lives.

Twitter, Care and Mother’s Day

Ever since my mom died–well, actually, ever since she got really sick–mother’s day has been hard. And, surprisingly, I never expect it to be. I’ve spent a lot of time developing ways to live beside my grief for my mom. And, as I’ve suggested on this blog and in my latest digital video about this blog, I’ve shifted a lot of my recent focus away from grieving over her loss and towards celebrating (her) life. Yet, even though I feel like I’ve come to some sort of peace with her death, I still woke up yesterday with that unsettled, irritable feeling that made me just want to be alone. When I feel this way, I don’t always immediately read it as grief. Grief is supposed to be waves of sadness and feelings of loss, right? Maybe not; my grief rarely comes in those forms.

According to J Butler (whom I’ve written about a lot on this blog), grief is about coming undone:

I think one is hit by waves, and that one starts out the day with an aim, aproject, a plan, and one finds oneself foiled. …Something takes hold, but is this something coming from the self, from the outside, or from some region where the difference between the two is indeterminable? What is it that claims us at such moments, such that we are not the masters of ourselves? In what are we tied? And by what are we seized (Undoing Gender, 18)?

In my case, what took hold yesterday morning were waves of irritation, anger, intolerance and a strong sense of coming undone as a mother, especially a mother without a mother. Luckily the feeling didn’t last that long, and much of the rest of the day–a beautiful one at a baseball game–was good. But, it always helps me to remember that Mother’s Day, much like my mom’s birthday or the day that she died, will probably always be difficult. And in ways that I might never be able to anticipate.

As I was reading through my twitter feed right before bed last night, I came across lots of RTs (retweets) by Xeni Jardin from people who were grieving because of cancer on mother’s day (kids who had lost their moms to cancer, or moms who had lost their kids to cancer, or moms who were living with cancer, etc). Jardin started the series with this tweet:


You can check out many of the tweets on this storify by Josh Sterns. What a powerful series of tweets! As I read through them, I was reminded of how I’m not alone and that plenty of people were having the same trouble I was with mother’s day.

Earlier in the year, I wrote a blog post about Xeni Jardin and her use of twitter to practice an ethics of care. Since that post, Jardin’s use of twitter in relation to (her) cancer has continued to involve multiple caring practices. Her tweets on mother’s day are just one more example.

the greatest hits: year three, may 2011-april 2012

My 300th post! It’s one day before the third anniversary and I’m counting down my greatest hits and some of my most memorable posts. I’ve already posted on year one and year two. Today, it’s year three: may 2011-april 2012.

greatest hits

1. oh bother: fitness ads for women/ october 2011/ 201 hits
2. oh bother! the today show takes on gender-neutral parenting/ May 27, 2011/ 178 hits
3. On privilege/ November 30, 2011/ 123 hits
4. What does it mean to engage? Part One/ August 22, 2011/ 108 hits
5.  I was 7 in 1981/ December 19, 2011/ 105 hits
6. oh bother! or, don’t bother? mansplaining and whitesplaining, the gene marks edition/ December 16, 2011/ 99 hits

some favorite posts

1. More Twitter Hatin’ and Conflatin’/ May 28. 2011
I had a lot of fun writing this post. It signals a turn on this blog to (even) more writing and thinking about twitter, troublemaking and ethics. This post served as a foundation for a paper proposal on twitter and ethics that was eventually published earlier this year.

2. Troublemaking? Is there an app for that?/ July 25, 2011
Last summer I came up with the idea of developing a troublemaking app, or at least hacking/troubling other apps–that is, using the apps in ways that they aren’t intended to be using for virtuous troublemaking goals. I love this project and hope to get back to it soon. Ha!

3. Who Cares? I Do/ August 1, 2011
This post describes yet another research/thinking/creating project that I’m interested in. It links troublemaking, feminist ethics of care, virtue ethics, Foucault,  self-help literature and blogs/social media. Linking these all together is a key way I’m thinking (and hope to writing soon) about social media, trouble and ethics. I like my description of how I’ve been shaped by self-help literature and ideas (via my dad):

Self-help books and products (smartphone apps, websites, etc) are promoted as ways to care for your Self. In some ways, I was raised on self-help speak. Not by my mom; she liked to tell family stories and talk about literature, American history and art. But by my dad. An ordained Lutheran pastor with an MBA (and a PhD in church history with a dissertation on Finnish radicals, unions and copper mining in the upper peninsula of Michigan–what an interesting mix, huh?), he didn’t just read self-help books (a couple favorites: The Power of Positive Thinking, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff) he used their slogans to shape our family traditions. Every Christmas he would ask us to go around the table and answer: What 3 things did you accomplish this year? What 3 things do you want to accomplish in the upcoming year? I must confess that I liked this tradition, which ended a few years before my mom died, even as I dislike self-help books and their simplistic, business-oriented frameworks. I am not interested in using self-help logic (framework/language) in my articulation of troublemaking as a form of (self)care. However, I do need to come to terms with how self-help literature has shaped my thinking by engaging with it directly. Plus, I like making trouble for self-help (by disrupting it, playing with it, uprooting it) because I see its production of easy, soundbite answers that encourage us to stop thinking and just start doing as having seriously harmful effects for critical and creative thinking, feeling and engaging.

4. Live-tweeting halloween (the movie) with @room34 (STA)/ November 2, 2011
So much fun! A yearly tradition, perhaps?

There are so many more I could add here. One thing that I noticed as I scrolled through my 300 posts over 3 years is that I was a lot more playful with this blog in year one. I wrote a lot more about pop culture and tracking various representations of trouble. Why is that? Do I want to go back to that particular version of playfulness? Much of year two was focused on dealing with my mom’s death and with my struggles to keep enjoying teaching. In year three, my playfulness turned into experiments on other forms of social media, like Smartphone Apps, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo and Storify. What will I do in year 4? I wonder…