Julie Unplugged

Fear and One of My Frequently Appearing "Friends"

Samuel actually AGREED to be in this photo. He liked being with "the girls" - no wonder! This is at the Hollywood/Highland complex where the Chinese theater is. Those people "looking out" are checking out the Hollywood sign.

I have this unfortunate friend I now refer to as “My Nervous Cough.” The first time I had it on an ongoing basis was in college, when I would actually wake up from sleeping and not be able to catch my breath. I would cough and cough and not breathe and not breathe and not breathe. The doctor at the infirmary found nothing.

I used to think my nervous cough was only mine, like there was only one Shamu. The day I overheard a woman from San Antonio saying THEY had Shamu at their Sea World I was so bewildered. How can there be more than one?

It is true: chronic coughing like I have with “MY Nervous Cough” is actually caused by fear and anxiety. There is even a name for it. Something Neuropathy, but I got freaked out while reading about it so I don’t remember the name. Not relevant to the story, anyway.

Just yesterday I was in Hollywood with my children, fifteen-year-old Emma and eleven-year-old Samuel. We also had two of Emma’s friends in our group. I was enjoying myself whole heartedly but when Emma and her friend, Sabrina, didn’t get a drink along with their fries and snack wrap, I had a minor/major coughing incident.

I had planned to take a sip of the drink because I was very thirsty and I hadn’t remembered there are plentiful places in the Hollywood/Highland complex that had inexpensive drinks.

I heard myself say, “You didn’t get anything to drink?” and bam. I huge cough barked up through my throat. A few more coughs and I left the table. I wanted to ask for a water but have you seen the lines a McDonald’s on Hollywood Boulevard generates? Seems everyone else had the same idea to use the restroom for the fee of fries and a snack wrap.

I stood, hand on my chest, coughing. I closed my eyes and “talked myself down” in my head. “Everything is fine. You are going to be fine.”

The last time I had a coughing fit related to a trip to Los Angeles it got so bad I vomited. Yes, it can get this bad.

All because of fear and anxiety and after yesterday, it seems to happen when I feel as if I have a lot of responsibility and the whole world might collapse if I let anyone down.

I talked about it to my former therapist, Adam, who was the finest therapist I have ever had the privilege to have such a relationship. Unfortunately he was also a PhD intern and has since left Bakersfield for… Los Angeles, ironically.  I remember telling him how I finally got this crazy cough under control.

You can imagine how awkward it feels to see its reappearance, once again.

Uh oh, my throat is getting dry and scratchy and… oh, no. Not again.

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This post was prompted by my friends at The Scintilla Project.

The prompt went like this: Fears come in different sized packages. Tell the story of a time you had a face a fear, big or small.

 What you just read was my story. What is yours?

 

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Buzzing with Newborn Happiness

Today, from my friends at Scintilla Project: Write about spending time with a baby or child under the age of two. The challenge: if you're a parent, do not talk about your own child.

It was a wild New Years Day, 2013. My dear friend called me, telling me her daughter had gone into labor in San Francisco. I was the designated driver from Bakersfield to San Francisco when the grandbaby was born, so I was now considered on alert.

A half an hour later, she was getting ready to push and I was running out of the house with the clothes on my back, my purse and very little else.

It took five hours to get there from Bakersfield and we went straight to the hospital. Within an hour I was alone in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit holding a tiny, five pound baby girl. There were no nurses around me, I didn’t have to show identification or wear a special “I am related to this tiny being” bracelet or badge.

Everyone else just let me be with her, holding her, feeding her.

I have a baby longing… well, truth be told I think I’ve had it since I was a toddler and my brother was born. Babies are to be held, loved, watched out for with everything you’ve got.

I couldn’t understand why these hospital people weren’t concerned about leaving me alone with her.

She was so tiny and I truly had no business being there with her.

I rocked her and talked to her, told her how loved she was and how grateful everyone was to finally get to see her.  I sent photos home to my friends who know I am baby crazy.

I held her as long as I could, until someone else came along who was supposed to be with her due to actually being related or a nurse, and when I stood up, I was buzzing from happiness.

I haven’t taken the time to write of this until now, but for the past couple weeks, I have felt the energy of rebirth pushing through my pores. It has been an odder than odd six months. When I woke up on January 2 in San Francisco, I remembered I had been there three of the last four years on New Year’s Day.  

My love of San Francisco is almost as strong as my baby hunger.

I wondered in my journal why the universe keeps bringing me back here at the start of a new year and now this year, something so remote had happened here.

I said yes to my friend – which most people thought I was some sort of saint for being the driver – and I said Yes again – to hold the baby – and I said Yes to all of it.

Now, I realize I am also saying Yes to this whole rebirthing that is happening to me.

I am agreeing the time is right, I am ready, I am strong, I have lived through enough shaking and shattering. 

It is such a gift, the concept of rebirth.

It fills my spirit with joy that isn’t one I can describe with words yet.

What I know is I feel like laundry, hanging on the line, freely dancing and singing and smelling great while every opportunity is open to me. “Where will I go?” response, “Wherever my wearer takes me will be great, and even if other people don’t think its great, the reward is to come back here, to the sunshine, again – as long as I say ‘Yes’.”

Yes.

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© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

The Sweet Memories of Getting Lost on a Family Roadtrip

Today's post was inspired by this prompt from the folks at Scintilla Project. " Talk about where you were going the day you got lost. Were you alone? Did you ever get to where you were going?

If my GPS were human I would marry it. I don’t know what I would do without it, seriously.

It shows me faster ways to get places, warns me if traffic is ahead and lets me choose an alternate path, it is even patient with me when I inadvertently go the wrong way.

I started using a handheld GPS on road trips with my children.

One day in the wilds of Butte, Montana the GPS we called Pete took us onto a private ranch road. I was scared a crazed rancher with a long shot gun was going to chase after me, taking my children hostage and feeding them to a hungry buffalo or whatever big, meat eating animal roams around those parts of the country. I turned back. Pete was

The Beauty of the Montana Sky took my breath away. Photos can't capture that feeling it gives off....

not amused. He kept saying, "Take a U-Turn as soon as possible!”

Over and over again as the widest most beautiful sunset was taking place all around us we were told, "Take a U-Turn as soon as possible" we found our way back to our funky motel. Butte’s name was quite a joke for my children. We still laugh about it. Samuel was seven at the time and any sort of “naughty body part” humor had him in stitches and he repeated it over and over and over again.

My favorite “ohmigawsh, we’re lost!” took place outside Cambridge, Massachusetts when we were trying to get to my friend, Pegi’s house in Hyannis on Cape Cod. I can still see the road in front of me: it was one of those chaotic stretches of highway which is like a doorway to roads in every direction and if you take the wrong one, you can pretty much be guaranteed a heckuva long detour.

We went into a tunnel – with me praying I made the right choice and then, we lost our

Yes - once the worry of "Well Guys, We're on our own!" we had a lovely Easter Celebration in Cape Cod

GPS signal. The girls and I moaned. We then went silent until Samuel, now nine and completely logical declared, “Well, guys, it looks like we are on our own!” which made the girls and I grown and laugh hysterically. We popped out of the tunnel, the GPS received its signal again and we were exactly where we were supposed to be.

Why is it the getting lost or almost getting lost or going the wrong way stories seem to wind up as favorite stories to tell later? They’re often more memorable than all the well thought out plans: the National Park, the amusement park, the beach. Those activities become fuzzy, but sitting in the car together laughing and moaning as we sit close together, wide-eyed while sipping on both wonder and worry live forever.

 

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© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

How a Simple Question from an Unexpected World Changer Transformed Me

This post came from a prompt from the folks at the Scintilla Project. I opened my email, read the prompt and started writing. I didn't move, I didn't refill my coffee cup, I didn't think. I just wrote. I knew this story needed to be told more than anything else right now, except silent gratitude to the birds singing out my window and the incredible privilege it is to share our stories with each other.

It was like many other nights before it as I drove through the line at McDonald’s, getting an iced tea for Emma and fries for Samuel. Over my shoulder I heard a voice say, “Excuse me, Ma’am?” and over his next phrase I layered, “Sorry, I don’t have anything extra right now,” so I couldn’t even hear his request.

Something different happened though: I looked up and into the eyes of this person asking for spare change. He was a kid. Just a kid. He shook his head and said, “Ok,

This photo is not my friend, but similar in age and clothing. Photo via Creative Commons Licence courtesy of Elvert Barnes

sorry to bother you, Ma’am” and turned, taking his Kennedy-family-esque blue eyes and fair skin with him.

 

My eyes burned with salty tears forming a curtain across them. My face burned with shame about my for too long unconscious automatic response, “Sorry, I don’t have anything extra right now” may be true and yet, just because I’m paying with a card doesn’t mean I couldn’t buy an extra burger or something for this young man who looked like the boys who graduated high school with my daughter several years ago.

I got my children’s snacks and parked my car instead of rolling it away like I normally would have done, quickly wiping my consciousness of homeless people which have gotten to be like regulars in my mind. There’s the guy who sits by that church with his dog. There’s the woman who smokes while she panhandles. There’s the “skater” homeless guy.

I waved the blue-eyed boy over. I pressed a dollar fifty in his hand. “Where is your mother?” I asked him.

“She’s in Isabella,” he responded, which I knew to be a town about 40 miles away on the other side of the Kern Canyon. It is a small, somewhat isolated city who calls itself, “California’s Best Kept Secret.”

I paused and said, “Does she know where you are?” He put his head down and nodded. I went on to ask about siblings and discovered his sister was still at home and his brother was with him, in Bakersfield, which I took to mean they were homeless together. He also told me quite freely where they lived now.

My incredulity overcame my usual polite behavior when I asked “What happened?” I heard a story that is probably not all that uncommon. The stepfather beats the Mom. The sons attempt to come to her rescue and get into it with the stepfather. I imagine the local authorities know the family. The Stepdad gives his battered wife an ultimatum, “It’s them or me.”

The mother chose her abuser and sent her sons away. They had been living here for eight months now, he said. “How old are you?” I finally got the courage to ask.

“Twenty.”

Again, my politeness had evaporated and I heard a gasp escape from me. Twenty. My daughter turned twenty-one on Christmas Day.

I told him I wished I could give him more, but he understood and was grateful for the dollar and change I offered.

In that instant, my mind changed not only for my friend and his brother, but for the other homeless people had been slowly and surely turning invisible in my mind.

A few days later I saw the skater homeless guy. He was standing at the same spot with a can of tuna in his hand. “Excuse me, Ma’am, do you have a can opener I could use?” I said no, and asked him his name. Sure enough, he was the brother of my new young friend.

Again, I drove past and came back around, this time with a five dollar bill so he could go to a nearby store and buy a can opener.

Maybe the five dollars would end up elsewhere, but I wanted this kid – who is the same age as my daughter Marlena would be if she had lived – to know I was listening. Someone out here in the world had heard his request and honored it as best as she could.

I carry bags with food with me now. I offer them freely to people as I am out and about. I look them in the eye, smile and say, “I wish I had more for you” and for the first time, I truly mean it.

I have also continued to get to know these two brothers. I have discovered one is mentally ill, which doesn’t surprise me, and the other one has a primary purpose of watching out for him, to serve him, as a protector. It reminds me of my childhood protector status with my own brother who had Down’s Syndrome.

I have chosen to be a listener, a giver and a receiver to the homeless in my area who are not, for whatever reason, currently served by the homeless shelters or other agencies. This never wouldn’t have happened if for I hadn’t taken the extra moment to glance up. It was then I looked into the boys eyes and saw  the reflection of both my own eyes and the entire world’s eyes in his.

I have always believed real world change doesn't happen because of government programs, it happens in the hearts of people communicating with each other. My new friendship is a contribution to world change on the smallest level.

What would happen if we all chose to be more aware and looked beyond helping at the level of institutions - if we are comfortable with that - or helping in agencies and looking at these folks in the eye and hearing what they say and who they are and sharing yourself back with them.

Be on the lookout for your micro-world-change assignment today. It's almost as if this simple blog post is a doorbell on your heart, ringing.

This post was inspired by the folks at Scintilla13 - Here's what they have to tell us:

We believe that who we are is informed by our stories. Here, we want to offer you a space to introduce yourself, and a guide to share your history and make some connections along the way. We’ll be offering daily prompts for two weeks beginning on March 13th.

 Follow me on Twitter: @JulieJordanScot  

 Be sure to "Like" WritingCampwithJJS on Facebook. (Thank you!)

© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

Wisdom from My Brother: Lessons He Taught Me

Today's prompt from the folks at Scintilla13  goes like this:

What talent do you have that your usual blog readers don't know about? Talk about a time when you showed it to its best advantage.

I have an exceptionally strong ability to "read" people. To hear them with my eyes.

I attribute this talent to my brother John. His verbal language skills were never all that great, but he and I connected deeper than language. Our communication was fully embodied and seemed, to some, ethereal.

It was a spiritual practice, now that I look back on it.

John taught me how to listen with my eyes as well as to catch that listening in the tiniest shift, sometimes in the movement of air or energy rather than anything other people might see or hear. Some people call this empathic but that doesn’t quite describe it.

It is sort of like “intuition unplugged”.

Sometimes when I work with life coaching clients I will ask them, “What’s going on with your shoulder today?” and from three thousand miles away they will report an injury or just a tightness within their muscles. This is more of the empathy way, but I also think of intuition as primarily from the gut.

I’m getting tangled up in words which is ironic because what I am attempting to explain has nothing to do with conventional language.

I remember when John was in the process of dying. Five of the six siblings were together: the largest assembly at his hospital. We wanted to talk with the doctors about John’s treatment when he had been sick for a few months. We were all chattering in the doorway to his room or rather others were chattering. John couldn’t speak because of his tracheotomy. I was listening with my eyes.

No one else heard his obvious to me plea, “I can’t see the tv because someone pulled the curtain in front of it. Would someone please move the screen so I can see the tv?”

I did. I also apologized verbally to John for not noticing it more quickly.

He rested his head against the pillow. That day confused him and it was the only time during his illness my Mom saw him cry. We were all there, but we were hovering about and we all left, including Mom, for this meeting. The only person left out was John.

The first time I noticed it was in college, when a group of young women were in my dorm room. There was one quiet girl named Monica who was sitting on one of the couches. This particular group of college women were very talkative, myself included. My eyes heard Monica had something she wanted to say. I said to her, “Are you feeling well, Monica? Do you need something?”

With that, Monica started to tear up.

She had been longing to be heard. My eyes heard her, first. In another crowded room with all sorts of chatter, I heard the one who needed to be heard with my eyes first.

I realize now not everyone can do this.

It is a continuing spiritual practice, one I need to remember. I practice with people, with trees, with birds. I slow down and bend my body - be it my ears, my mind, my eyes - and listen.

Are you listening, too?

Kris and Jimmy, where are you now? I'm sitting in an almond orchard in Bakersfield, California.

 

This post was inspired by the folks at Scintilla13 - Here's what they have to tell us:

We believe that who we are is informed by our stories. Here, we want to offer you a space to introduce yourself, and a guide to share your history and make some connections along the way. We’ll be offering daily prompts for two weeks beginning on March 13th.

 Follow me on Twitter: @JulieJordanScot  

 Be sure to "Like" WritingCampwithJJS on Facebook. (Thank you!)

© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

The Summer of '77: Fleetwood Mac, Roosevelt Stadium & Jimmy from Jersey City

This post and all the laughter and fun it brought up in me (and perhaps in you as well) was inspired by my friends with the Scintilla Project, a fortnight of prompts so you will become a more talented storyteller while being involved in a phenomenal community of other storytellers. There is still time to join the creative souls with the Scintilla Project. Simply click here.

Does your memory do this, too?

A doorbell to your past rings and you are swept up in a long ago moment you hadn’t remembered the day before or even the month or even years before. That’s how it happened for me.

It was an early-ish morning, meaning the children were tucked away in school and I was free to do my many theater chores. I was producing Steel Magnolia’s at the time and for reasons my memory is fuzzy on, I was at Hancock’s Fabric in its old location. It once lived in a run-down shopping center that was, for the most part deserted. Now it is even more deserted.

Roosevelt Stadium Circa 1977 when the Indians Played. Its condos now.

It strikes me now as how nebulous many of the details are: I can’t remember precisely what car I was driving at the time, I can’t remember my exact purpose for being at the fabric store, I just remember hearing Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” because in that instant I was transported from my car in the early part of this millennium to the Summer of 1997 at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. I was waiting for a Jersey City Indians AA Minor League game to start with my friend, Madeleine at my side and a quirky guy named Jimmy who was from Jersey City leaning over the bleachers beside us.

 

He was singing along with Fleetwood Mac in his scratchy, very New Jersey accent, “It’ll be here, better than before, yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone…. Ohhhhhh, don’t you look back.”

This is Kris Yoder, the player I had a serious fifteen-year-old crush on. Ha ha ha. I never knew he made it to "The Show" with the Braves!

I have the kind of memory that does that: when I am not expecting it I evaporate from the present and find myself plunked down at a different place, in a different time, and the me now is living in the body of the me of whatever date and time I have landed within. It is the wiser, older, less cute and heavier me arriving inside the form I wore at fifteen-year-old when I had an active crush on one of the players and was entertained by the other people who wound up at Roosevelt Stadium along with me: friends and strangers for the moment as well.

 

There was the cop, the requisite accent included, who asked “Where do you lovely young ladies live?” and when we answered, “Glen Ridge.” He said, “Where? I don’t know where that is but it must be God’s country.”

Do you recognize Tom Cruise here in the short oh so short cut off jeans? Pretty funny....

He would know who Tom Mapother was, but Tom moved to Glen Ridge that summer and before high school had ended, he had become Tom Cruise and appeared as in Brooke Shield’s Endless Love  playing her brother, Billy. Ian Ziering of the original 90210 was in the film, too, with a higher billing than Tom. Irony lives and breathes in the credits of old movies. I believe Tom had started filming Taps as well, but I could have the timing wrong because Tom and I were like ships in the night. He moved into God’s country right when I moved out.

 

Nonetheless, the cop made me smile and Jimmy made me smile more. He was a skinny boy, a year younger than Madeleine and me and he was always happy to see us. I never even thought of crushing on the fourteen-year-old peer of mine.His voice singing the then ubiquitous Fleetwood Mac song was just icing on the cake. I can still hear it. I hear it now, the smiling voice of Jimmy from Jersey City.

I was happy then. Life was simple. I knew every day I would sit at a big table in the cafeteria with nine of my closest friends. As I write this more than thirty-five years later, my daughter who now attends Smith College in Massachusetts is on her way to spend Spring Break with one of those nine girls who is now a lawyer living in Maine.

I don’t know how long I sat there, in my car, while actually within the confines of Roosevelt Stadium in the Summer of 1977, but it brought me a deep level of contentment.  Even in the rewriting of the moment those feelings return. My belly goes soft and my mouth settles into a sigh-filled smile.

 

Kris and Jimmy, where are you now? I'm sitting in an almond orchard in Bakersfield, California.

 

This post was inspired by the folks at Scintilla13 - Here's what they have to tell us:

We believe that who we are is informed by our stories. Here, we want to offer you a space to introduce yourself, and a guide to share your history and make some connections along the way. We’ll be offering daily prompts for two weeks beginning on March 13th.

 Follow me on Twitter: @JulieJordanScot  

 Be sure to "Like" WritingCampwithJJS on Facebook. (Thank you!)

© 2013 by Julie Jordan Scott

The First & Last Job I Had as a Mom (and will never have again.)

Last weekend I was at a writing workshop – this time as a participant, though I am oftentimes a leader at the same venue. One of the other women who I met last month asked me, “So, what is it you do?”

I responded like I often do: with a comma laden stream of consciousness “I do this and that and those and them and these other things…” followed up in my next breath… “oh, yeah, and that too.”

I wasn’t always this way.

Once upon a time in my first and last job as a Mommy I was a Deputy Conservator. My first day on that job was October 24, 1994. Yes. I remember because the entire time I was there it felt like a place I was sentenced.

I did it for all the right reasons: I was supporting my husband who wanted to start his own law practice. I had the job of being the “Good Wifey” and providing health insurance and meals on the table for my family.

On paper, the Sentence/Job looked perfect. I would be working with folks with severe mental illness as what is often called a Public Guardian. I was to make decisions much like a parent would for her child except this is the one position outside the criminal system that will insist people live in a specific place and take specific medicine and have a specific budget which I manage for them, as measly as most of their money was – primarily a cap for SSI and sometimes Social Security kicked in as well.

The only people I served were people the court decided had so much interference from the symptoms of their mental illness they were neither able to provide themselves with food, clothing and shelter, they also couldn’t accept third party assistance.

Most of my clients loved me. I loved nearly all of my clients.

Even the ones who threatened to kill me.

The whole death threat story has become legendary. When I had worked for the county for four and a half years, two of my mentally ill clients threatened to kill me. They had very specific threats with very specific ways to implement them.

I was scared. Beyond scared. I had been going to therapy for the first incident – I had broken out in hives, I couldn’t concentrate, I couldn’t enjoy myself – and then the second threat happened. It got worse. I would pace and talk too quickly and not be able to sleep. I still had hives.

My co-workers and boss were reasonably helpful, but my boss was more condescending than I can put into words. He is one of the few people in this world I don’t care for at all. I’m over detesting him, that doesn’t serve anyone but mostly I just don’t want to ever encounter him again.

In fact, it wasn’t the death threats that made me leave my job, it was the way I was treated by the bureaucracy where I worked that felt even more hazardous to my health and safety. Taking time off and going through the process of a mental health leave gave me a lot of courage and a lot of insight.

I was finally a self advocate.

I was finally breaking through other people’s expectations of me into the me I was always meant to be.

I have had jobs in the past. I have had many first jobs. The job I had first as a Mom is also the last I will have as a Mom.

Now I am many things, some of which I have put in a non-list list.

I am a quirky personified comma lover. I don’t have a job, I have a wardrobe labeled, “clothes for the things I love to do which sustain my life work and my family.” Attire: a writing dress, a poet performer beret, an advocate suit, a professional  expert  back pack, blogger pencil eraser, a Mommy nurses hat/life crossing guard stop sign and of course the requisite compact suv to drive around far too endlessly, an artist’s smock adorned with paint, mod podge and spray adhesive  because I often get these on my hands which I then wipe on my smock.

Back in the old days, I had a commitment to a job with a boss and all the benefits.  Now, my only job is being me and doing the best I can with what I have in any given moment.

I am blessed.

= = =

This post was inspired by the folks at Scintilla13 - Here's what they have to tell us:

We believe that who we are is informed by our stories. Here, we want to offer you a space to introduce yourself, and a guide to share your history and make some connections along the way. We’ll be offering daily prompts for two weeks beginning on March 13th.