Dear Nate,

If you can read this, know that I love you very much. I think about you all the time. Dylan does too. We miss you so much, and we hate the fact that we’ve already missed so much. I sent you birthday cards with a check every year until your 12 birthday. The checks were never cashed and my counselor told me that it was unhealthy to keep sending the cards if you weren’t receiving them. I wrote you a letter telling you that I was only ceasing sending you cards because I didn’t think you were getting them. That I love you and will always be here for you. I am your big sister – forever and ever. I never heard back so I assumed that your parents never gave them to you. Whenever you’re ready to reach out, I’m here for you. I love you.

Love,

Me

Can we be frank?

I am so tired of what it means to be a woman in this world today. And I am even more haggard by the fact that women are supposed to sit back and ignore the slights that they receive EVERDAY. I’m so sick of my professor joking “polysilicon” sounds more like the name of an exotic dancer than a plastic. I’m so sick of the fact that a Vice President candidate can be a pawn, obviously uninformed, questionably with any intelligence as she runs around wearing skirts and winking at everyone. I am angered by the suggestion that men’s healthy sex lives are normal and women with healthy sex lives are considered sluts. Or that a woman cheating on a man is far more of a crime because she gets off intellectually and he only uses one part of his body in the process of love making. It’s all a lie. A man can be deeply emotionally involved to have sex and a woman is capable of using one body part during intercourse. I’m not saying what is right or wrong here – but I am stating facts. I’ve had it with the double-standards with men and women concerning age and beauty – how we are so quick to through away an aging woman and get a younger model with women, but men are considered “dashing” and “distinguished” as they age. I think it is a joke that it is EVER brought into question what a woman does with her own body – yes, I’m talking about abortion. I hate the fact that women are thought of as “over-emotional” and “erratic” but when men fight for what they believe in they are “passionate” and “full-of-depth”. Even when you talk about people it is in the context of “he” or “she” so we are automatically assigning people into gender stereotypes – we do that with race and religion too – but we have to work at it the “white man” or the “Hispanic woman” and the “protestant woman” and the “Muslim man”. With sex it is automatic, inescapable.

I also hate the fact that “feminism” has become a bad word in this society. That conjures up images for you – doesn’t it? A lesbian who is unattractive, possibly overweight, with armpit hair long enough to braid and a hell-bent mentality and hate for men. Am I close? Fuck that. I am a feminist – and I do not fit that description one bit. Well, maybe the hell-bent part. But aren’t we all hell-bent over something? People cringe at the word feminism. But it got us to where we are today. It got us to vote, it got us out of the home and into jobs, it gave our lives more meaning than just being labeled “baby maker”, it fought and “won” our right to fair pay (but lets be honest with ourselves – we aren’t quite there yet, are we?). I am happy with these rights – and if you are (no matter if you are male or female than you are a feminist too). Be proud! These are good things! But I know we can do better. I know that we don’t have to work a full-day and then come home to a man who has worked EQUALLY as hard and make him dinner and clean the house, do the laundry, wash the dishes. I know that we don’t have to work hard to get into a successful career only to be rationalized by our man that when it is time to have a baby whose career is going to be put on hold? I know that we don’t have to listen to our professors snide remarks about our gender. I know that we don’t have to be seen as sexual objects – it is society’s choice to put us into that category – and it can be our choice to remove ourselves from that category just as easily – by NOT striping, working at Hooters, prancing around a boxing ring in a bikini, etc. I am proud to be a woman. I am happy to be a woman. I’m just tired of all the b.s. I have to put up with because of it.

Follow your heart . . .

One minute, my life was heading down one road – it was a boring old dirt country road, and the next? The next minute, it changed directions, altitudes, dimensions all at once – and then I realized I was heading down a river and not a road at all. It was flowing quickly with rapids, and there were peaceful sunlit pools and dark cool banks to rest upon. Hesse said it best, “One must find the source within one’s own Self, one must possess it.” I feel like I finally found my source. FINALLY. My source is my music. It is so strong in me that I know I must create and perform music. There is no choice. Now that I know it is my source, I can’t deny myself, and I MUST posses it. I must become a musician.

It’s funny because, if my life was a movie and I was the protagonist of that movie and you were the camera filming it all, you would be rolling your eyes at me – hardcore. You would laugh with aggravation and say, “Duh! You have been so utterly in love with music and singing since you were five years old!!!!!” And its true. When I was five, I watched the classical singers sing opera on PBS, and told my mother I could sing just like them (“only faster”). When I was eight, I lounged in the big overstuffed armchair in the living room listening to my mom’s old records (Tracy Chapman, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan, just to name a few) for hours. What kind of kid just listens to music for hours? A freak! That’s who . . . When I was nine I started writing poetry. When I was ten, I sang every moment I found myself alone. Once, my parents and I watched a special on Mariah Carey and they said that when she listened to headphones she’d sing along. Guess what I was doing soon afterward?  When I was in high school, my life easily would have expired without music (not to be dramatic or anything). Tom Petty and Radiohead, Tori Amos and The Wallflowers, Belly and DiCaprio’s Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack, Fiona Apple and Jewel . . . yes, I was a true teen queen, I’m sure. And after high school was even worse. I moved in with people that introduced me to a heaps of music I’d never listened to: The Bare Naked Ladies, Ben Folds Five, Liz Phair, Miles Davis, Dave Matthews Band, Beck, etc. It was then that one of my roommates showed me a couple of chords on the guitar. I bought my first guitar when I was 18 and started writing songs.

The next house I lived in, I will never forget! It was a house full of artists.  There was a painter and musician, a writer, a poet and official music appreciator (a John Cusack in High Fidelity-type) , a DJ, an MC, and me. We had a music room with a drum set, keyboard, guitars and basses, and microphones. I would play around on the keys and write sad breakup songs dedicated to my ex-boyfriend. Sometimes, when they were jamming, I would jump on the mic and sing Mary Had A Little Lamb with jazz styling. I even recorded one of my songs and sent it to New York for a songwriters competition.

Then, I met my then-future-ex-husband. And like every “good” girl brought up in a small logging town, I forsake my music, I forsake myself, and I lived his life with him. Until I woke up one morning and realized I was incredibly unhappy, and when I looked in the metaphorical mirror – I barely recognized myself. The year we split I took voice and piano lessons, got a keyboard, and dusted off my guitar.

So, maybe you could say that this epiphany I had, was really a long time in the making . . . and to you, the camera, you saw it coming for y-e-a-r-s, but to me, it came on as sudden as a high desert summer rainstorm. Now, I want to cry with joy, because I feel so lucky! I finally found my kindred spirit – musical soul mate – a no-easy task. I get to sit around and make music with him. Not only is he an excellent songwriter and innovative musician, but we have great chemistry. It’s beyond chemistry though. It’s like were linked up to the same music station somehow. It’s undefinable. It’s one of those things that only comes around a very once in a while. I’m not even sure it happens more than once in a lifetime. If I was a typical egotisitcal and pretentious musician I would tell you we are the next Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. But I’m not, so I won’t.

Now, I’m creating music and living my dream. Someday, maybe I’ll be on an album that a young girl in high school will dive into deeper than a wishing well . . . A girl can dream, can’t she? Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be famous. Really. The gluttonous wealth, the hounding privacy avengers with flashing lights, the absence of a personal life, the shallowness of it all . . .  No. No, thank you. But I would love to be able to make a living off of creating music and performing it for others to enjoy. THAT would be something else. I could spend endless amounts of time with my one true love, my source, my purpose — my music.

In saying all of this, let me now get to the point. Once you find your passion, follow your heart. . .

What Do You Do With A Broken Heart?

Do you drown it in wine? Do you stand on the corner with a cardboard sign that reads “It’s already been torn out, please come stomp on it a little more”? Do you try to put it back together? Take out your needle and thread – and get to work? But what if it is a Patchwork Heart?  It has already been broken so many times — or at least it was SO profoundly broken on one or more occasions — that it’s just a mess of patches from all the cracks and, consequently, all of the stitching you’ve already done.  What if it feels unrepairable at this point? I know what you’d say . . . “It just takes that one special person to magically take all those stitches away and leave you standing there with a brand new shiny heart — just waiting to be swept off the feet.”  Riiiiggghhhhttttt.

I need to date a musician . . . at least I could hear how he feels about me when he’s playing one of his sets.  Even if he never tells me when we’re alone.  Even if he’s so consumed with protecting his own heart that he never even hints of it with a whisper at the corners of his mouth.  Even if he is bruting and hollow to me — but at night when the lights come on and the crowd comes out and he belts to the world, “I should have kissed you when we were alone.”  Then I could hear his pain and his deep desire and admiration of me — that would be enough.  It would probably still leave me tangled up in blue most of the time — but at least I wouldn’t be tangled up in the bluest of blues ALL of the time.

But I just gotta ask, why are we always the ones that end up with these broken, unusable, good-for-nothing hearts? “We”, the bright and the beautiful, the funny and the charming, the caring and the sweet, the girls with the hearts too big and too gold for our own chest cavities. You know who you are. So why is your heart broke? Are you listening to Damien Rice with a couple of wet cheeks too? Why?! You are the last person on Earth that should be commencing your sorrows to the heart wrenching voice of Damien Rice and his raw and honest lyrics!  ”Why’d you sing hallelujah, if it means nothing to ya? Why’d you sing with me at all?” . . . It’s because we are the girls at the top of the apple tree.  The average boys never climb the tree high enough to reach us.  We are the shiniest and juiciest but we are the most work — so they settle for something that is in easy reach.  That’s why.  Great. So now we’re stuck up here waiting for a guy with two balls, two cents, and another two sense to get the nerve and the muscle up to climb his ass up here? Not this apple. I’m not waiting around for NO prince charming.  If we cross paths, fine. Whatever. But I am not some prize either. I’m a human being. A woman. A person.  And even though I am at the tiptop of the tree, and I am the shiniest and the juiciest, — I am not an apple. I am not fixed to that tree.  I am free to move about as I please. And I’m “looking at happiness, keeping my flavor fresh” . . .

I came across a bumper sticker once that read, “If life is the school then love is the lesson.” So, I suppose there’s a lesson for me in here somewhere.  It might take a little perspective before I can see it and learn from it though . . .   You would have thought that a Patchwork Heart would be a very schooled and wise thing.  Ha! But I guess you can say that getting your heart broken is like ridding a bike.  So there’s something to be said for that.  And what of my dear old broken heart? I suppose, I will tend to you, but you better get your act together. You can’t expect me to do all the work over here.  I mean, don’t get me wrong.  I will not neglect you.  I will not forsake you.  I promise.  But you’ve gotta hold your own this time.  Hell.  This ain’t our first rodeo.

So what do you do with a broken heart? . . . Well, I suppose, it is time for this tiptop-apple-tree-golden-Patchwork-Hearted woman to let her heart rest, let it heal, and prepare for new beginnings . . .