I want to set up a website for memories of mom. I hope not only will it give people a place to share stories about her, but give me a place to upload photos, writings and other memories of her as I work through her papers. Yet, with our money situation right now, we don't have the money to even set up the website. I'll understand if others are too strapped, but even a little would help.

Donations to support the set up of a Memorial website for Mary E. Atkins:

If the donate button doesn't work, let me know. The paypal email address is: purplerabbit13@gmail.com

I have been reading a box of letters I've carried around, unread, for 35 years.

It's a love story and it's beautiful and makes me cry. All of them are from my mom (Mary) to my dad (John) who was in Viet Nam that year (1968). Mom had left her abusive husband (with Johnny's help) and was waiting for him to return so they could marry and start their life together.

I wish I had Johnny's side of the letters, but I only have mom's. She was 28, had three little girls and no money. The letters detail her struggle to survive, her battle for a divorce from her ex and her longing for Johnny. She wrote nearly every day for nine months. They also sent tapes, though those have not survived.

She tells her daily life with three small children. She sent children's drawings and a list of the first words I learned to read. She tells him how important it is that he survive. Always, how much she needs him and the life they will create together.

I was there. I was 6 and I remember this. I remember mom crying all the time, not having enough food, bill collectors pounding on the door and her hiding from them, the red white and blue letters from John... soo much coming back to me.

It's an amazing story. It does remind me that romance novels drive me crazy because "happy endings" depend on where you end. If you stop when he comes back, marries "us" (he said that), carries us off to our new home in Oklahoma, and they have another baby, then it's a happy ending.

Problem is that the happy ended 6 years later when a hit and run driver killed him.

Mom went through a grief purge and tried to throw away all of his stuff. I managed to save a lot. I remember finding the letters and deciding not to read them but to save them for the future. I carried that box of letters around for the next 35 years, knowing that when mom died, I would read them.

These letters are such an amazing window into the past. I've always planned to write a book about mom's life.

After he died, mom became an activist. She changed the world in so many ways, saved so many women's lives, both individually and through the changes she helped bring about. She never remarried. On her deathbed she was talking about how now she would "go dancing with Johnny" again.

It makes me cry for her again.

My husbands say it's why I have a thing for tragic angsty romances. And why I still like to give them a happy ending no matter how much bad happens. Someday though, I will write the story where one dies and write about grief.

It's so important but most love stories don't write about surviving that kind of loss. Even most tragic love stories have both of them die, like Romeo & Juliet. The really hard thing is honoring the person by going on.  Mom did it for us - four children.

When dad died, my aunt sent my mom a bouquet of six roses - one for each precious year they had together.

Remember that makes my tear up every time. Those six years though - they were worth it. They saved us. They taught me it could happen, that love like that was real.

You are invited to celebrate the life of Mary Elizabeth Atkins (nee Davis) -- Born September 23, 1940, Died October 22, 2011

Memorial will take place Sunday, November 13, 2011, 1-4 PM at the home of her eldest daughter, Dany (Dawn) Atkins and family (at 27446 Green Wood Rd, Hayward, California 94544). In seventy-one years, Mary did more than most people could imagine accomplishing. Come join us in celebrating her life. Come share stories of her life. Mary invites you to dress in some way that honors the spirit with which she lived. Wear purple, or dress in colorful or symbolic clothes. (Red Hatters – Please come in full regalia.) Please bring food and/or drink to share if you can. It would help us to know who to expect, so please RSVP.

Mary had been ill for a very long time but the sudden decline still caught us by surprise. When her heart, lungs and other organs went into rapid failure, Mary chose to go to hospice to die with her family supporting her. She passed peacefully in the early morning hours, with myself, her eldest daughter, beside her.

In lieu of flowers or other gifts of support, Mary would prefer that you made a donation in her name to one of the many causes she supported. She worked for most of her life to defend and support survivors of domestic violence, to help preserve the environment, to defend equal rights for women, especially reproductive choice, and to support an array of social justice issues. If you make a donation in her name, please let us know about it so we can put it in her memory book. You may email me for a list of suggested organizations.

We will also be collecting written stories about Mary's life. In fact, Dany hopes to write a biography about her amazing journey. Please feel free to write letters or bring any photos or letters from Mary to add to the archive she is creating. Do you have a story about Mary to share? Do you have any letters she wrote? Photographs of her? Even if you can't attend the memorial, we would welcome contributions to her archive. (I also hope to establish a website for folks to contribute.)

Mama said it would get better.

I nearly killed myself a month before my fifteenth birthday. It seemed to me at the time, that the pain was beyond my ability to cope. Sixteen months before, my dad had been the victim of a hit and run accident, left half dead and brain damaged. He was institutionalized in a semi-vegetative state. He didn't know my name.

Dad's loss had plunged my mother and I both into depression, forced Mom back into the job market and left me in charge of the household and my three younger sisters. I'd had a secret first love, a girlfriend, who dropped me during this awful time. Then I got Hepatitis A, nearly died and spent months sick and lonely. I had to do double time to catch up on school work from missing nine weeks. All this while, I was enduring the constant torture of bullying as a geek in junior high school. It was unending taunting and even violence.

Is it any wonder I cracked. I remember it so clearly that my skin can still feel it. I was taking a bath, during one of those rare times when I was home alone. I sat in the bath, thinking about the horror that my life had become and unable to imagine how to get through it, to imagine anything other than things getting worse and worse. I remember still the feel of the blade I took out of my mother's shaving razor. I remember sitting in the water growing cold and staring at it. I know I didn't really want to die. I didn't think I had a real option. I couldn't take any more.

I froze, in a sort of fugue state, blade held between my fingers trying to will myself to either use it or put it down. My mother found me like this. She asked what I was doing. I remember answering in that distant, flat voice that I thought it would be better if I was dead.

I remember her gently taking that blade from between my finger tips, opening the drain and reaching for a towel. "No," she said. "Do you know how much I need you? How much I love you?"

She wrapped me in the towel and urged me out of the tub, leading me down the short hall to her bedroom, where she bundled me up, holding me and she kept talking. "I can't lose you. I know it's been hard, so very hard. It won't always be this way. Someday you will find people who are like you and can appreciate you. In the mean time, we have each other. I love you." Over and over she rocked me and told me how much I meant to her. Promised me we would find a way to get through it. Promised me I wasn't alone. Promised me it would get better.

And it did. She worked hard to make sure it did. We both did.

***

Right now, I wake up each day with such a heavy weight in my chest that breathing hurts. I feel that same sense of disconnect, like the world is spinning around me and I just can't follow it. I remember after dad's accident, watching children playing outside and unable to understand how the world could just keep going on when my life had turned upside down.

Dad's body finally died only weeks before my twenty-fourth birthday. I had been in an awful place that winter, living alone in a basement studio apartment and working temp jobs to keep myself fed. The death of Dad's body so long after the death of his mind, had been like a freeing of the grief that had held us in such pain for eleven years. Yes, we had learned to go on without him, to live with the ache and unresolved loss. That final release though, it was like a miracle. Things raced forward and miracles happened. I went back to college, met Troy and Mom moved to Santa Cruz. We found a place for ourselves.

One night there, I woke up from a horrible dream. It shook me so badly that I went next door to my mother's place and got into bed with her. She held me while I told her that I'd dreamed she died. It had become my greatest fear and it haunted me, knowing that someday it would happen. She rocked me and told me I would have to face it, she couldn't help that because she did not want me to die before her. It was the way of things, she said. It's a great wrong when the child dies before the parent. She said that she had once heard that you were never completely grown up until both your parents had died. Hers were still alive then, so she smiled and told me that made me more grown up than her.

My mom's life was never easy. There was at least one real scare per decade of her life where she was hospitalized and I had to face the possibility of losing her. She fought hard to live, to see her children grown and even to be there for her grandchildren. In the last nine years, she was in and out of hospitals and complained about seeing more doctors than friends. Last year, she was diagnosed with COPD – her heart was failing. She'd already had one heart surgery and would not survive another. Even then, I begged for more time. I couldn't let her go yet.

Last month, when the call came that she was in the hospital and this time there was nothing they could do, I knew it was time. She wanted to invoke her right to die, but she wanted me there with her. It had always promised that when there was nothing that could be done, no quality of life, I would be there to let her go. Now was time to honor the promise. She saw me and smiled. She said, "Please let me go." All four of her daughters told her, in tears as they said it, that they understood and that she could go now.

I sat beside her for the next thirty hours, helping her through the process of dying – singing songs of spirit and comfort to help her let go. In the night, while she lay there laboring to breath and struggling to find release, I talked. I told her how much I loved her, recounted what an amazing person she had been and encouraged her to find that next adventure. I asked her forgiveness for the times I let her down and thanked her for all that she had done for me. In the still dark night, she breathed her final breath and stopped. I felt the warmth of her again as she passed.

***

Mom's love for me, and for my sisters, was unconditional. It didn't mean she always approved of what we did. It meant she loved us even when we messed up. And when we did well, she was always there to cheer us on, to tell us how much our success meant to her. And when were down, she was always there to tell us it will get better.

So every morning I wake and remember that she is dead, the weight of it so much I have to remember to breathe, to find a way to get up and face the day – I remind myself it will get better. It won't go away. Even my grief for Dad's loss has never gone away, surging up with Mom even now. I just know that there will be good times again. I have husbands who love and care for me. I have a son, who is for me, like her daughters were for her, like sunlight that warms my heart.

It only gets better if we let it. If we work through the dark painful times to get to the other side. The only way out is through.

"Well, I'm gonna get out of bed every morning... breathe in and out all day long. Then, after a while I won't have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out..." (From Sleepless in Seattle.)

My mother, Mary E. Atkins, an amazing feminist and social justice activist for nearly half a century, died Saturday. There are no words to describe the void left.

I sat beside her bed, holding her hand and singing to her for the last two days of her life. To say that my mother and I were close would be an extreme understatement. My dad died when I was 13. That left mom with four children to raise and I am the eldest. Mom and I took care of each other and my sisters. Mom was my friend, my ally, my teacher, my mentor and so much more.

One of my mother's favorite songs about our relationship was, "You and Me Agaisnt the World" by Helen Reddy:

You and me against the world
Sometimes it seems like you and me against the world
When all the others turn their backs and walk away
You can count on my to stay

And when one of us is gone
And one of us is left to carry on
Then remembering will have to do
Our memories alone will get us through
Think about the days of me and you
You and me against the world

I am trying to make myself edit one of the many first drafts I have in my que. My ability to focus on the task as definitely been off for a couple months.

I love writing. Yet, I will admit to enjoying writing the first draft and re-reading the finished product better than all the hard work in the middle. Rewriting/editing also requires a kind of flexible but strong ego that can be hard to muster some days. I need to be flexible and discerning enough to be able to see where the story needs to improve, the writing tightened or expanded, etc. and strong enough to believe "I'm good and know I can do this." I have to be able to see my mistakes but not be daunted by them, and, instead, get excited about improving on what I've already done.

I also have a number of solo works that are currently on my "to do list." I need to start carving out time for both the editing and the solo work. I love co-authoring, yet there are stories I can probably only tell on my own. It's hard to balance so many projects needing my attention, especially when my ability to pay attention has been hampered. There are, of course, real-world stuff outside my control that impact all this and have increased my tendency lately to just want to escape into reading instead of editing.

Now, don't get me wrong. Reading is actually an important part of writing. I read a lot of non-fiction, for example, that provides a lot of the material that goes into my fiction. And I read other people's fiction both for the fun of it and for the examples of what to do (and not do) in my own work.

Someone else's well written story can make me yearn to write that well. But the ego thing comes back into play here. Sometimes good writing by someone else can do the opposite of inspire but leave me feeling hopelessly unfit to write. I have to have a strong enough ego to work past the insecurity around my own shortcomings and try to improve them.

The trick for me can be how to get me to go back to it rather than throw my hands up in disgust at my own work. I have had days where comments from readers who like my work made a difference in whether or not I could keep writing that day. Even weirder, sometimes reading badly done fiction by someone else helps too. It can inspire, the "I can do this better" mentality that gets me back at the keyboard. Other times, just telling someone about the story I have not finished can remind me of the things I liked about the story and get me to go back to it.

Not sure if this post was for you or me. Am I procrastinating editing or getting myself psyched to do it? Both? As long as it works, eh?

On the positive side of the scale today... Received another royalty check from books I wrote over a decade ago. Non-fiction doesn't usually have that long a sales life. It can become outdated quickly. Yet, my first book continues to sell. The publisher closed it's doors a couple years ago, but the corporation that owned it keeps selling the stock and I still get those checks.

I write for me, I edit for readers. Writing is as much a compulsion as a talent for me, so back to that editing so I can share what I've written with others.

Instructions: Highlight in BOLD whatever applies to you. [I made a few notes and italics on questionable ones.]

( Read more... )

Only one person has answered as available for the clothing swap. Does that mean folks aren't interested or just don't have those dates available? Should I just give all this clothing to charity? Or try another set of dates?

Poll #1447896 Clothing Swap and Tea Party at Rabbit Warren
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 1

If you want to come to a Clothing Swap, could you attend any of these dates? Check all that apply.