Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

What’s Permanent?

The wave of a hairdo?

An adult tooth?

The American flag as a fixture upon the moon?

The markers, with which Jeb has a fistful, sketching with the Muse at the kitchen table while I quickly slide an underlay beneath his renderings?

Some kind of press cycle on the washing machine I never use?

A type of vacation that’s the title of a Jim Jarmusch movie, an Aerosmith album, and a getaway that I will doubtfully attain at such length in this lifetime?

A resident?

As in, the Bohemian. Whose foreign-born body has been granted the card – more sci-fi holographic, than green – that says he gets to stay. With conditions, that is.

A resident with conditions.

Like us all.

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Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don’t struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality. – Pema Chodron

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 2 Comments

Natural Consequence

There’s the basics and the extras.

That’s how I’m breaking it down to Jeb these days. Of course, it’s all relative, too.

A few posts ago, I was grappling with the statistics that showed three billion humans living on less than $1000 a year. So by saying that putting Jeb’s dirty plate in the dishwasher is a ‘basic’, is already an ‘extra’ for nearly half the planet.

That said, since I’m giving you a glimpse into our little reality bubble, the extras here are things like riding with his friends at the skatepark. Using his iTouch. Watching a movie on a school night.

And the basics are just the usual. Take care of your body (wash it and brush your teeth), clean up after yourself, do your homework, be respectful.

These fundamentals are supposed to be our guiding compass. Something solid. A foundation from which the bonuses can then blossom.

And this last week, Jeb and I delved into his nine-year old world of add-ons. He stepped up with the basics and reaped the rewards, reveling in the feel-good place of supplements. He got an extra helping of ollies and pop shuvit’s at the skate ramp, and more time with Maroon 5 crooning on his iTouch.

Things were smooth. Our infrastructure secure. All was well in this perfect equilibrium of checks and balances. It was all so streamlined I should have known a seismic shake-up was just around the corner.

Simply put, yesterday was a debacle.

I’ll spare you (and our family’s public profile) the rattling of details on how the basics just weren’t met yesterday. But here’s the gist of me, in all of my lost, self-command of cool.

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“No extras without the basics.”

My words meet air in an exasperated shrill.

I hear myself. I am some strange kingpin who’s invented her own language. If I wasn’t so vexed, I’d be laughing at myself. Words leave my mouth as Mother, but I am alienated from the woman who utters them. Who is this lady? Her hands move in exacting gestures, iterating the importance of her point.

My husband – the Bohemian – sits on the couch watching the scene. Ever-patient, ever-supportive, he agrees with what I’m saying, yet for now, he is quiet.

In this moment, I am far from sexy. In this moment, I am far from the calm, enlightened parent I want to be. In this moment, I am irritation embodied. And right now, I think I hate homework more than Jeb does.

The whole thing is embarrassing. This admission that often I am not the parent I wish to be.

Contemplating the family model of 100 years ago, it seems parents didn’t question themselves. Five-year olds were on the farm, feeding livestock right along side their moms and dads. Home life conditions may have been more harsh – not quite so warm and fuzzy – but the basics seemed to be quite clear. Undisputed.

Today, we are no longer in the 1900’s. We have evolved, right? (right?)

I do my best to live a conscious life, and so that means I make attempts at parenting with awareness, too. I’m trying. But the worst is when I’m in the limbo. Not old-school “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” but not the Cesar-Millan-of-child-rearing with “calm-assertive” energy, either.

No, just the convoluted mix of neither, which finds me in the hell realms, wavering in an amorphous midland of second-guesses steeped in aggravation.

So what’s the point of dragging you into this inferno with me? I don’t think this sharing is just about the vent.

Perhaps it’s the practice of being transparent. Admitting that there are times when, not only am I a conscious parenting failure, but I fall short of my human potential, too.

During yesterday’s disaster, you could glimpse inside the living room to see a family of three, dealing with dirty clothes on the bathroom floor, an overflowing compost bucket, and a misplaced spelling list.

Take a look outside that little room, and you’ll see the extras were coming on in spades.

Just beyond that family’s front door, exotic fruit ripened on the trees, with names like sugar-apple, chiku, and surinam cherry. Mother nature does not hold back. The basics of rain, sun and fertile soil are enough to illicit the sweetest nectar of bumper crops.

Far from the negotiations had about age-appropriate apps to be downloaded on electronic devices, the life cycle of a tree roots in the simple. It’s not complex. No second guessing. All compass points align with True.

Extras, just a natural consequence.

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Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 8 Comments

Distilling the Essence

Yesterday marked two years ago that I met the Bohemian. I was walking the beach at sunset and there he was. I could say ‘how could I have known he would become my husband?’ but the truth is, from the moment I saw him, there was something stirred deep within me.

In the months following that fateful day, my heart opened wide, I grappled with fear, I surrendered to Love (with minor, random freak-outs), and when he asked me to marry him, I said ‘Yes.’

Before the Bohemian, I had been living as a single woman, raising Jeb from the age of nine months, essentially on my own, but for the supportive ‘tribe’ of a handful of friends that offered love and presence. For nearly seven years, I was solitary on a small, remote island, only dipping my toes in the pond of romance with a few long-distance relationships.

Mostly, it was me, Jeb, work and school, with sporadic moments of magic. On occasion I would catch a glimpse: Jeb sitting on the porch rail strumming his six-year old hand on ukulele strings. The rare treat of me on a solo morning swim, both the sun and moon in the blue above.

I wanted to capture these moments in a jar and save them. Uncork the bottle and inhale the essence of all-things-love-and-life as a remedy to remember. Keep that panacea close for whenever I was lonely, or exhausted, or simply numbed in the bread aisle of the grocery store.

That year before the Bohemian was a turning point. I had dared to dream that I could find a mate, fostering two remote relationships with promise (one in India, the other Switzerland). In both instances, I broke through scar tissue from the past and poured my heart and soul into nurturing hope in love. And in both cases, when reality stepped in, up close and personal (like dishes in the sink, or a fussy six-year old), they both stepped out.

And thank goodness. Because little did I know, the Bohemian awaited just ahead. But that would be later.

At the time, I took my heartache and my longing for that pure, poignant essence of life and bet it all on bottling it in writing. If I could record my moments, day by day, maybe I’d find some thread of something meaningful. Maybe I would feel more alive. Maybe it would help me remember that that. That something special, which is present even when I’m price comparing sourdough and whole wheat, baguette or sliced.

Despite the doubt that no one cared to hear commentary about my son discovering the existence of coupons, or how I stayed home to study spelling words instead of going out to the hip restaurant with friends, I wrote about it anyway. It was the process of moving through my fear to express myself that was as important as the pieces that were produced.

And all along, I held this understanding that none of it was important, really. Not important like global warming, Syrian refugees, or domination of the world’s food supply by GMO experimenters. Those things mattered.

I only had my little world of bite-size chunks. But I figured that I needed to start with what was before me, before expanding to larger realms. So I worked with what I had. And what I had was Lego guys and a little loneliness. Heartbreak and sorting the junk drawer.

From that place, For the Archives began. That was three years and over 700 posts ago.

Today I work in the distillery. Taking yet another leap of faith that any of this matters (and yet, again, knowing it does not – not, really). I have collected some highlights from that first year of blogging. Made a book and it is currently in process of being published, expected to be available at the end of this month. (In fact, as I type this, the proof for my cover comes through and I’ll admit, I get a little teary when I see it, alive and real and surprisingly beautiful).

And, no, this little collection is not significant. Not like a mission to Mars, not impacting like the work of Joan Didion. But it is mine, and so, in that way, it matters. Just like everyone’s expression matters. And the world needs each of us to express our deepest gift of creativity and truth.

So in my process of sharing the distilled essence of these moments of the everyday, I’m hopeful that each reader may relate to their own mundane and see some magic.

Infuse their own bottle of remembering. Inhale deeply. Share it, too.

photo courtesy of Paul Nelson
photo courtesy of Paul Nelson