I am participating in Momalom’s Five for Ten, but I’m slow on the uptake and forgot about their designated topics.  I will be back on the wagon with an extra post tomorrow, and another on Wednesday. 

Let’s pretend you’re a friend of mine in the real world.  (Maybe you are.)  Let’s pretend that we know each other and used to keep in close contact, but due to the obligations of career and family we don’t check in as often as we used to.  And let’s pretend I wrote you the following letter (or e-mail, we should be a little realistic) last week.

Dear Friend,

Hi there.  How’ve you been?  It’s been a few weeks since we last talked and I just wanted to say hello and let you know what I’ve been up to.  Life is, for the most part, normal, and we are all doing well. 

I finally went through the stacks of journals and letters that my mom brought up last month.  It was pretty embarrassing to read so many of my thoughts from those years.  I suppose adolescence is a cross we all must bear, but after reliving it through the journal entries, I’m glad it’s behind me.  One by one I’m throwing them out, and I have to say, it feels good.

GAP’s sister and her husband came to visit recently.  We had a great time getting caught up with them.  They hadn’t seen IEP in a while and I think they had fun playing with him.  We had a fun outing to a park one afternoon.  And Saturday night we went out to dinner and had some really interesting conversation.  I really enjoy their visits.

IEP’s sign language is coming along and I’m so thankful that he picks up new signs so quickly, since his words are coming more slowly.  We’re working hard to get him to express his needs as specifically as possible, and he does pretty well.  His 18-month check-up is coming up and I’m excited to see how much he’s grown.

Not much else to report.  Please drop me a line when you can and fill me in on your most recent ongoings.  And let’s talk soon.

Love,
Gale

Okay, now let’s pretend that instead of the e-mail above, you saw the following updates to my Facebook status.

• Ugh.  Sorting through old journals and letters this weekend.  So glad not to be in adolescence anymore. 
• In-laws coming to visit this weekend.  It’s been ages since we’ve seen them and I can’t wait.
• Weekend with in-laws was a blast.  Fun with IEP and a terrific grown-up dinner too.  Thanks for coming, guys.
• IEP is learning new signs left and right these days.  I’m so proud of him.  Keeps us all sane until he starts learning more words. 

The same basic information was communicated in both formats.  But by comparison, the FB updates seem so terse and impersonal.  They are a scattershot out to a couple hundred people who may or may not be reading, and may or may not (likely not) say anything back.  On the other hand, my oh my, is FB efficient!  In less than 30 seconds I can update scores of people on my life.  I could never write all these people an individual e-mail.  I’d have carpal tunnel and sleep deprivation within a day.  I’d feel smothered by the obligation of so much correspondence.  And after a while I’d cease to enjoy the personal touch of one-on-one communication.

Nevertheless, these days I’m really struggling with the inundation of communication that never goes deeper than a text message.  Yes, my message gets to more people more quickly via FB updates or Twitter.  But to what end?  I’ve delivered a fact.  Some people will read it.  A few of them will smile and be happy to know that I’m doing well and what I’m up to.  But what does it really accomplish for me to put my life on a virtual (and password-protected) billboard if true back-and-forth interaction never occurs?  (Yes, I understand that you can comment back and forth on FB and Twitter updates, but I don’t count that as meaningful interaction.)  Just because I know that Friend A’s trip to Vegas was a success, and Friend B ate too much cheesecake for dessert, and Friend C is stuck at the office on a Saturday doesn’t mean that a relationship exists there.  They’re all just data points.

Isn’t data, though, when shared back and forth in a thoughtful and reciprocal way what constitutes a relationship in the first place?  Why should I discriminate against this type of exchange, especially if I concede that it facilitates communication with a much broader range of people than I could ever manage on my own?  And this is exactly where I start to bang my head against the wall:

Would I rather have a fewer number of friends (or “friends”) with whom I communicate regularly and in depth?  Or would I rather stay abreast of broad swaths of people from my past but never really communicate with them?  And perhaps most perplexing of all, if I choose the former, is there anyone out there who’s willing to travel the same path?  Or has everyone migrated so thoroughly over to the FB model that I no longer have a choice? 

Every time the electronic world takes a leap forward the media jumps up and down publishing stories about how technology moves more quickly than a culture’s ability to adapt to it.  I’m finding myself in one of those moments; struggling to understand in this new landscape of friendship not only what I want, but whether it’s even available to me anymore.

Every Friday Nanny takes IEP to a local bookstore for story hour.  They get ready to leave, IEP drags the diaper bag to the front door, waves “bye bye” to the house, and they load up in the car for their morning adventures.  At the bookstore all the kids are treated to animal cookies and a bit of a sing-along before the story-telling begins. 

On one such outing the story had just begun, and IEP perched in Nanny’s lap on the floor.  Per her retelling, just a few pages into the book IEP started signing “more” and “please” tirelessly in rotation.  After several pages of his silent antics the reader paused the story, looked at Nanny, and asked, “Does he know sign language?”

“Yes.  He wants another cookie,” Nanny responded.  The story teller didn’t know quite what to make of such a blatant request, and went on with her reading. 

Similarly, about 400 times each day IEP says, “Mama? Mama?”  I typically respond by saying “Yes?” or “What?”  But lately I’ve added a new reply to the rotation.  I ask, “What do you need?”  Bothering over semantics with an 18-month-old may seem silly.  And I concede that it’s a subtle distinction, but it’s one that I believe matters.  My rationale is that as of recently, it’s a question he can answer. 

You see, IEP has added a new sign to his repertoire.  Words are coming slowly, but he picks up new signs quite readily.  His latest addition is “help.”  His little fists move up and down in his own modified version of the gesture, usually preceded by vigorous pointing at something.  He uses it when he wants a cup of milk or juice, but can’t open the ice box.  When he wants to ride his little toy car, but can’t pull it out from behind another toy.  When he wants to stand in our bay window and watch the street below, but can’t get up to it on his own.  His context is actually surprisingly good.

I tell you these stories not to brag about how brilliant my son is.  (He is brilliant, though.  Just like your kids…)  I tell you these stories because they illustrate something that we value in children, but yet eschew from our own lives as adults:  he makes his needs known. 

We spend so much time and energy trying to coax this kind of communication out of little kids.  We gesture.  We repeat.  We sign.  We point.  We offer this or that.  We implore them with every ounce of our patience to communicate their wants and needs with something more sophisticated than a tantrum.   At this tender age of toddler-hood we want nothing more than to hear the words, “Mommy, I want more pasta,” or “Mommy, I want to go up the stairs by myself.”  We don’t even care about please and thank you at this point (although we make IEP sign both).  Just to hear the words spoken in plain English would be music. 

Yet as adults we become reluctant to make our needs known.  Not the banal, logistical, everyday needs.  Not the “I need to get up early tomorrow” or “I need to run to the store” or “I need a drink” needs.  I’m talking about the things we need that make us feel vulnerable.  I’m talking about the things we need that we don’t like to admit.  I’m talking about the things we should not be ashamed to need, but sometimes are. 

I need a hug.  I need to talk this out.  I need some alone time.  I need to feel more appreciated. I need to laugh.  I need be able to say that I’m proud of myself.

These things – these needs – are so real to each of us.  They make the difference between connection and distance.  Speaking them aloud draws the line between confidence and fear.  Knowing that they are universal, no matter how little they are confessed, buoys us against tides that feel overwhelming much of the time. 

So why is it, then, that the behavior we encourage in our children we so often fail to exemplify ourselves?  We say we are fine when we are not.  We say we are fine when we are hurt, or bone tired, or lonely, or regretful, or ashamed.  We say we are fine because we don’t want to admit that we aren’t. 

We have needs.  So why on earth don’t we say so? 

Perhaps for many of us, it is the judgment of others that worries us.  But I suspect that it’s our own self-judgment that we fear even more.  There is something about our culture that values self-sufficiency to a fault.  We feel obligated to handle everything on our own.  We are reluctant to admit that we need help in any way.  And I can’t help but think that if we just fessed up, leaned on someone, and then returned the favor that we’d all be happier, less stressed, and more resilient in the face of our own needs, knowing that we are flanked by helpers.

The thing is, I imagine many of us are already flanked by helpers.  We just don’t realize it because we’ve never asked.

I love going out to dinner.  More than that, I love going out to dinner and eating delicious food.  More than that, I love going out to dinner, eating delicious food, and sharing equally delicious conversation with interesting people.  On Saturday night I did all those things.

Last weekend the Family P was treated to a visit from GAP’s sister and her husband.  It was a visit that had been on the books for a couple of months and I was eagerly looking forward to it.  Nothing about the weekend disappointed, least of all the dinner conversation.

As we sat at one of my favorite French joints we covered all manner of topics, from reading, to writing, to careers, to travel, to… loneliness.  Loneliness?  Well, aloneness is probably more accurate.  We talked about the experience of being alone.  Whether at home, in your office, while traveling, or any other place, being alone with yourself is an experience that everyone handles differently. 

What surprised me most about this conversation was learning that my brother-in-law, who is probably the single most extroverted person I’ve ever known, cherishes being alone.  For someone who takes to people – new or familiar – as easily as he does, I never figured him for a guy who’d want anything other than being surrounded by people.  But as I thought about it more, it began to make sense.  Someone whose natural charisma is so strong that people gravitate to him unconsciously might have a hard time finding opportunities to be alone.  Those quiet moments might be few and far between.  I don’t know this – it is merely my conjecture.  But it makes sense to me.

Our conversation made its way around the table as we each confessed our comfort level with the solitary state.  It was interesting listening to everyone’s perspective on the topic and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. 

In thinking about our lives there is an ebb and flow to the amount of alone time we have.  Childhood rarely leaves us alone – we are supervised, accompanied, and chaperoned.  Early adulthood provides the opportunity for quite a bit of time alone, should we choose to avail ourselves of it.  Marriage and parenthood see it diminish.  But twenty-some-odd years later when the nest empties, time to ourselves comes rushing back.  Nevertheless, despite the cyclical nature of aloneness in our lives, our need for it is constant.    

I think.

The need for aloneness seems like the sort of thing that would be universal.  I assume that we all need time without the input of other people.  Time to be uninfluenced.  Time to be silent.  Time to spend as we choose, wholly independent of the preferences of others.  Yet I know that there are people who find it uncomfortable to be alone.  There are people who fear being in public alone – dining or move-going without a companion.  There are people who go out in public alone in order to find other people and prevent themselves from being alone.  And there are people who feel the most alone in the midst of a crowd. 

I wonder what our attitudes about aloneness say about us.  Is there a perfect amount of aloneness - some magic place on the continuum that gives us the most peace and space while still allowing us to be connected to other people?  And I wonder what influence our habits about solitude have on our relationships.  If we spend too much time alone does our ability to bond and relate atrophy?  Conversely, without enough time alone do we lose our grasp on our true self, being constantly shaped and molded by the people around us?

In this, as in all things human, I know that we are different.  We come to these questions via disparate paths.  We bring our stories and experiences to the table.  And we (maybe) share them in order to explain why we are as we are.  Or maybe we don’t.  Maybe we let people wonder what made us this way; why we love being alone, or why we don’t.

We carry our childhoods with us throughout our adult lives.  For some of us this is only metaphorical in that we are forever influenced by the experiences we had as younger people.  For others of us there is a more literal component to it.  I am someone for whom both interpretations are true. 

Over the past several years my mother has been wielding empty threats at my sister and me about culling through the artifacts of our childhood that have been sitting in my parents’ attic for more than ten years.  We made halfhearted attempts during various visits home, but never really made much progress.  Then, last fall, my entire family converged on my home for a Labor Day get-together and my parents arrived with a trunk full of boxes.

Starting that weekend and over the course of two additional weekend visits home I finally completed the process I’d been not-so-gently reminded of for several years.  Many things were thrown out and donated:  Old prom dresses and ballet costumes.  Helmets from my days of competitive horseback riding that no longer fit.  Silly serial books I read in junior high.  Board games missing cards and pieces.

But there were other things that I couldn’t, even today, bring myself to discard:  My full boxed sets of Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Avonlea books.  Leftover wedding invitations.  Berenstain Bear books.  The spiral notebooks from my my semester abroad courses, full of notes taken entirely in Spanish.  A stack of journals with every line filled.  And three shoeboxes’ worth of letters, notes, and printed e-mails from a roughly eight-year span of my life. 

The books have been stored.  So have the wedding invitations.  But the journals and the letters required a more thoughtful dispensation.  After skimming the journals I am decidedly embarrassed.  They contain the self-absorbed ramblings of a teenaged girl.  Melodrama of all stripes: friends, boys, clothes, parents, siblings, and the like.  They seem like they were written by another person.  They are fickle, insecure, predictable, and a tad shallow.  I can hardly deny that I was that girl back then – the evidence is there in my back-slanted lefty script.  But I am not that girl today.  And she’s not a girl I’m inclined to keep in storage.  The letters are less embarrassing, but only because fewer of them were written by me.  Within them also resides a portrait of a lesser Gale. 

Thus, the purge. 

One by one I’m reading sections of each journal; taking one last glimpse at a person I left behind.  And one by one, I’m tearing the pages from their spiral bindings and shredding them.  The letters were subjected to a similar culling.  Summer camp letters from old boyfriends have been tossed.  The letter my mother wrote to my Aunt B the day before I was born was not.  Long-winded e-mails from girlfriends whose bond didn’t stand the test of time are now in the trash.  My sixteenth birthday card from my first love is safely tucked away.  And each letter that GAP and I wrote to each other during the summer before we started dating – ours was an old-fashioned and long-distance courtship - is also in the keeper pile.  Many others are not.

Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not all that nostalgic about letting these things go.  It’s freeing in a way to know that this hard evidence can be destroyed and that I am not tethered to a version of myself I’d rather leave in the past.  It makes me wonder how I would feel about my adolescent self without so much documentation.  Would I remember myself accurately?  Or would I just think back on a hazier version of the same clichéd memories of junior high and high school without being bothered by the granularity of my actual thoughts? 

While this process of reliving a few moderately miserable years (no more miserable than anyone else’s teen years) has been humbling, it has also been a bit redeeming.  In addition to some awkward moments with myself, I’ve been proud as well.  I am not that girl anymore.  And it was a long and sometimes arduous journey that brought me to today.  I spared myself no challenge, no pain, no character-building experience.  And I’m happy to report that it was well worth it.  Having such a crystalline view of what I left behind makes me realize exactly what changes I’ve made. 

As I think about it now, I deserve the purge.  I’ve earned it.  Adolescence is an unfriendly time of life.  And those of us who’ve found ourselves bettered on the other side are entitled to cut that proverbial cord.  I expected to be misty-eyed and reluctant over this process.  But quite the contrary, I think it’s been a catharsis I didn’t know I needed.