Janice Lynch Schuster – Janice Lynch Schuster

When Saving a Kingfisher Saved the Day

I’d only been at my company a couple months when a coworker, Ben Markowitz, posted in a corporate Slack channel, that he was running late because he was trying to save a kingfisher he’d spotted stuck high in a tree near his house. Our colleagues responded quickly with ideas and compassion. In that moment, I knew that I myself had landed with the right group (flock?) of people. I’d been worried about it: I’m among the oldest members of the team, I’m new to the world of start-ups, and more. But smart, compassionate people? When you find yourself among them, it’s good fortune.

I was lucky to be able to tell Ben’s story a few weeks later for The Washington Post. It reminded me of something that happened nearly a decade ago, when my daughter, Alyson, and my niece, Alanna, had spotted a bluebird chick trapped in a storm drain. With a crab net and perseverance, they rescued it and took it to a local wildlife refuge. I can’t remember anymore the fate of the bird. I remember the pride and relief I felt in having raised a kind girl.

In an era when we are trying so desperately and earnestly to unite ourselves across and despite the awful history of racism and America, and despite the awful toll of COVID-19, and the absolute evil of the current Administration, I find solace in the kindness of others, in small hope that somehow this will prevail and guide us to the path we meant to build.

I Came to Live in Color

I have spent so much of my life seeking to connect and be connected with others, that it rarely seemed worth the effort to connect to myself. I had so much invested in other relationships. And adulthood, with its usual joys, challenges, demands, losses and more, left little time to do much more than keep … Continue reading “I Came to Live in Color”

From "What Are Mothers For?" — From “What Are Mothers For?”

My longing to be connected is rooted in the oh-so-human need to love and be loved. For some of us, it takes a lifetime to understand that this means loving ourselves, too. And for most of my life, such connection has come through the roles I have played, first as a daughter and sister, and later as a lover, wife, mother, and grandmother. But most of all, as a writer.

From the moment I wrote my first sentence, I decided I was a writer. I have written ever since, moving from childhood limericks and lovelorn adolescence to a master’s degree in creative writing, and a career as a writer of essays, articles, and more. I have shelves full of journals that date from 1974, when I was 12.

– See more at: http://www.disruptivewomen.net/2015/12/03/i-came-to-live-in-color-reaching-the-age-of-audacity/#sthash.1kWx8D7W.dpuf

JUST BEYOND THE GARDEN GATE

I ate that apple, whole. I spit its tiny black seeds into my hands. Later, I’ll plant them to see what clay makes, other than that creature who found me here, blaming me for that ache in his side, and a chunk missing from the apple in his hand. No one said Paradise would be … Continue reading “JUST BEYOND THE GARDEN GATE”

I ate that apple, whole. I spit
its tiny black seeds into my hands.
Later, I’ll plant them to see
what clay makes, other than that
creature who found me here, blaming
me for that ache in his side, and a chunk
missing from the apple in his hand.

No one said Paradise would be easy,
or that a bed of roses—I’m talking thorns, hon—
is a place I’d ever lay my head.

Adam is off, shaking his fist at me
and pleading with the clouds. I will not
let him drag me down,, all that anger
and finger-pointing. Who has time?

O! This sweet apple is so filling,
its skin so red and unblemished.
O! That satisfying crunch every bite
I take! That hard white center
is irresistible. For all the trouble
it has caused, I am savoring
every morsel. It is so ripe,
my lips run with juice.

key words: poetry, Janice Lynch Schuster, Eve, Garden of Eden, apples

Stillbirths: All Too Common, Too Much Unknown

To tell this story is to tell its end first. On Sept. 1, 2012, Makenna, the only child of Heather Thompson and Geoff Duff of Alexandria, Va., was born dead. She had been alive in her mother’s womb on Aug. 30, but no heartbeat could be found the next day. Her umbilical cord had knotted, … Continue reading “Stillbirths: All Too Common, Too Much Unknown”

To tell this story is to tell its end first. On Sept. 1, 2012, Makenna, the only child of Heather Thompson and Geoff Duff of Alexandria, Va., was born dead. She had been alive in her mother’s womb on Aug. 30, but no heartbeat could be found the next day. Her umbilical cord had knotted, then wrapped around her neck, and, at 39 weeks, she was stillborn. Until her baby’s heartbeat could not be found, Thompson says, the pregnancy had been medically uneventful.

Read the full article here.

Balance of Power in the Pharmacy

I meet a boy who carries a notebook in his breast pocket. “That’s quite a weapon,” I tease, pointing to the blue stain spreading across his lab coat. He is a man, but so clean-shaven and slim, he seems young enough to be a child. High school job, I think, or between classes. We wait … Continue reading “Balance of Power in the Pharmacy”

I meet a boy who carries a notebook in his breast pocket.
“That’s quite a weapon,” I tease, pointing to the blue stain
spreading across his lab coat. He is a man, but so clean-shaven
and slim, he seems young enough to be a child.
High school job, I think, or between classes.
We wait for my pain pills, which the pharmacist measures
so slowly, he could be using coffeespoons.
His lilting accent assures me I will be relieved.
We are close to done, he says, counting pills.

We are far from it.

The man-child says he is two years
past the Navy, where he worked on ships that lined
the suffering shores of the world, witness to the worst
humans could visit on the living.

He tells me his thoughts move faster
than debris in a hurricane, and he gathers them
in the notebook, trying to piece
his life together again. If only he could collect
them all in one place, put a lid on them,
bury them deep, and move on.
Then, he says, he might find sense
in this incomprehensible place.

What is poetry that does not save nations
but souls? The kid mentions that he is a lefty,
able to spot four-leaf clovers in fields of grass and weeds.
He collects them in his wallet.

Life shoots dreams down. To him, I am one more old woman
with pain pills and worry and grey temples and belly fat.
I want to hold his smooth young hand in mine
and tell him how little we know but this:

words, gathered like storm clouds
on a horizon can unleash a torrent
that changes the landscape of this world.
What’s in his mind, he says, he cannot see.
But it is there, and ready.
He did not sail so many seas, he promises,
for his voice to be lost in the wind.

key words: Janice Lynch Schuster, veterans, dreams, writing, creativity, poetry

Orders

what did I mean to save that day I stood pounding your chest, fired by urgency that was not love but habit a current that ran once? I felt it for years even after it had stopped and you could not deliver what did I hope would return to life that night with my desperate … Continue reading “Orders”

what did I hope would return
to life that night
with my desperate pleas
my counted breaths
my lips pressed hard
to yours, together

what was left
in the cold spaces
between us, the disruption
like Arctic air pushed south
to Tampa. We were tangled
up in wires

if only I had shut off
that device, the one that jolts
me awake lonely nights
when I reach across a smooth sheet
for your rough hand
closed into a fist
you will never open

key words: DNR, love, grief, poetry, Janice Lynch Schuster

Steel

I was forged by desire, hot, molten, flaming that lovers stoked at their own risk. They melted into me. I was hammered by love, reduced by its aftermath. My leaden feet lifted by force of will, I learned to dance with monkeys and their crosses and that weight on my back. What else could we … Continue reading “Steel”

I was forged by desire,
hot, molten, flaming
that lovers stoked
at their own risk.

They melted into me.
I was hammered
by love, reduced
by its aftermath.

My leaden feet lifted
by force of will,
I learned to dance
with monkeys
and their crosses
and that weight
on my back.

What else could we do?

When nothing ever happened
on time, when doors slammed
with us behind them,
when we witnessed
everything
but saw nothing,
when we prayed for help,
and were left to ourselves?

Weren’t we all steeled
by love, etched on singular
faces, long after the bodies
have gone to dust?

What wouldn’t we try
to be so warm
again, to strike
over and over,
casting our mistakes
without regret?

key words: Janice Lynch Schuster, poetry

What Fire Was Like

What we needed, we did not want. What we wanted, we did not need. Whatever safety I sought in you Did not exist there. We were in a cold room, two sticks for hearts. When they rubbed together, some kind of furious dance, a spark, ignited the bed, set the house on fire. … Continue reading “What Fire Was Like”

What we needed, we did not want.
What we wanted, we did not need.
Whatever safety I sought in you
Did not exist there.

We were in a cold room, two sticks
for hearts. When they rubbed
together, some kind of furious dance,
a spark, ignited the bed,
set the house on fire.

There is no joy in melting
into the other. No self in the end,
no sense of what made
us whole—or what we made.

The skeleton frame of the house
stood still, smoldering and terrible,
while we watched, our hands seared
by nothing we could touch.

key words: Janice Lynch Schuster, poetry, divorce

Boxing Lessons for Life

There is nothing like turning fifty, fat and unfit, to make a body feel old. It did mine. Combined with encroaching arthritis and an orthopedist who called me “dear”, before I knew it, I was hobbling down the road to my own old age, not quite sure how I got there. Too young for … Continue reading “Boxing Lessons for Life”

Too young for knee replacement surgery, too wary of long-term NSAIDS, what, really, was my body to do? The last straw hit in February, when I took my 11-year old on our annual ski trip. Despite warnings from friends whose own artificial knees keep them upright, I hit the slopes. By the end of the week, I could barely move.

An MRI confirmed what my body knew: I’d damaged the knee, and badly. When I limped into the orthopedist’s office, he pulled up the images and asked me what on earth kind of spill I had taken, to have created the contusion he could see. I told him it was all physics: My overweight body, torqueing around a bend on that tiny pole and those little sticks.

He told me I needed to lay off it, wear a brace, walk with a cane, lose some weight. So every once in a while, I’d haul myself to the gym or walk a few blocks, but my aching knees and a bout with chronic nerve pain took my heart out of it.

I’d spent most of my life swimming and doing aerobics, bellydancing and, more recently, boxing. In fact, for a few years in my late 40s, boxing brought real joy to my experience, trimmed inches from my waist, and bolstered my confidence (it helped that the handsome trainer called me “baby,” somehow less patronizing than the doctor’s “dear”).

But chronic pain froze me. I put my gym membership on hold, and began to count the two-block walk to my office as exercise. Who was I kidding? Not my body. When I went to pull out my fall wardrobe, nothing fit.

You can acquire an amazing number of bad habits, just sitting around. Eat too much ice cream, for instance. Spend way too much time online. When even my fat pants proved to be too tight, I knew something had to give.

So I signed up for a yoga class at the gym, and slowly, slowly, moved my aching body enough that, literally, it stopped creaking when I stood up. Every beautiful summer day that came along, I’d email my friend and neighbor to join me for a long walk. Strengthened—but still hauling too much weight—I decided to hit a few Zumba classes, too, because there is nothing like fast music and lots of dancing women to make you feel exhilarated, if only for a moment.

For a few steps, I felt out-of-place and awkward, unable to jump. But a grapevine replaced that, and no one else cared.

In the midst of my sit-still-I’m-in-pain-summer, my college roommate cheered me on with links to old sketches by Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon. I laughed so hard, I choked. When I saw that Justin was Jimmy’s guest recently, I watched a bit of his live-from-LA concert, then Googled his song, TKO.

Which is why Wednesday morning, I was back in the gym, this time for something called BodyCombat. An apt name, since the real battle is within and with myself, the struggle to get the upper-hand on pain, the relentless war on calories, fat and sugar.

It turns out that the class features mixed-martial arts moves, but mostly consists of boxing, made girly. Before I knew it, the two years I’d spent training with a boxer came back to me. It was like riding a bike, only better, because in the course of boxing, I’d also picked up lessons about living, too.

While I jabbed and snapped and crossed, my brain was remembering all the things my trainer had shown me, and all the metaphor hiding in the glove.

It reminded me, for instance, how vital it is to stay in the moment. The present moment is always the last thing on my mind, which often strays to and regrets the past, or frets about the future. The physical challenge of boxing makes even my worried brain hush: The only way to get through difficult times is stay present.

Focus on the one moment: The feel of the body’s weight, for instance, or the strength of the thighs. The knowledge that any single moment can be endured—and even celebrated. The realization that moments build to minutes to hours to a lifetime.

I remembered to keep my guard up. In the aerobics studio at the gym, you can’t escape your own image, surrounded on all sides by mirrors. There is no looking pretty when sweat is pouring from your eyebrows, and there is no chance to straighten your hair. You have to resist the urge to primp and care what others think: You need to keep your guard up.

No matter what is happening, no matter what you see, when you are boxing, you always keep your guard up. And as much as I like to embrace the world and open wide to things that come my way, it is a good idea, sometimes, to exercise caution. Reach out and reach in—see what’s coming, and be ready to respond. Guard up, and you won’t take it on the chin.

Learn to slip. When challenges are coming fast and furious, slip by them. In boxing, you bend the knees, plant the feet, and slip under the punches headed your way. It is not always necessary to respond immediately, to fight back, to lash out. Better to slip a little, duck, and figure out some other response.

In the ring—as I never was or will be or want to be—boxers take the full measure of their opponents. As I understand it, sometimes their weary embrace is just a façade, a chance to test for weak spots and vulnerabilities. In life, too, it helps to see the full picture, to embrace the things that come our way, to know where and when and how it will move in relationship to us, and to know how to respond.

Boxers rely on their trainers to call combinations, series of punches and moves that they have rehearsed for hours in the gym. As someone who lives with chronic anxiety and depression, it has helped over the years to learn a few combinations to keep sadness at bay. To see the triggers before they hit, and to respond with strategies and tools that allow me to stay standing.

You are stronger than you know. When my trainer first had me hitting the mitts, I held back. Having been a girl in the 1960s, I learned to keep my aggression to myself. Back when I was boxing with a group, I’d be paired with some twenty-year old guy on the other side of a punching bag. All my ladylike skills could not withstand that punching bag when he clobbered it, setting it swinging wildly in my direction.

The only thing to do—short of jumping out of the way—was to hit it back. It turned out I could do all kinds of unexpected things: Run across the floor with a 50 pound weight. Pump weights overhead for three minutes while jogging in place. I learned to snap a jab, and I learned to breathe. I learned that when I let go of fear and all the habits that came with it, my reserves were endless.

By the time Wednesday’s class ended, I was drenched and exhausted. But I felt better than I had in months. For hours, the neuropathic pain vanished. And my knees didn’t crack or creak till that night.

My clothes still don’t fit, of course, but my heart and mind feel better. I remember who I am. I know who I have been. And I know where I’m going.

Dear? Baby? I’m just Janice, ready for the world.

Reposted from www.mariashriver.com, original posting 10-28-2013

Life Is a Discotheque: Dance, Whatever They Play

I had gone to bed early last Mother’s Day, exhausted by the energy I’d spent trying to cope with a recently acquired chronic pain syndrome. Sleep had become my friend and my remedy, a respite from the burning pain of a nerve injury. I was halfway to sleep when my 11-year-old came in my room … Continue reading “Life Is a Discotheque: Dance, Whatever They Play”

I was halfway to sleep when my 11-year-old came in my room and laid down beside me, facedown in the pillows, head nestled against my elbow. I could tell from a shudder in his shoulders that he was crying.

When I asked what was wrong, he said, “Who would shoot people on Mother’s Day? Who?” Via social media, he had seen news of a shooting rampage: 19 injured during a New Orleans Mother’s Day parade.

“I’m not going to go to Philadelphia on Friday,” he said. Philadelphia was the destination for his fifth-grade class trip, something for which they had prepared all spring. A coach bus! The Liberty Bell! Money for trinkets and lunch! A day with friends!

“You’ll be fine,” I said, slowly coming back to the world and the reality of his pain—the psychic pain to which all of our children are exposed these days, when violence erupts so constantly, so nearby.

“I’m not going,” he said. “I’m just not.”

I rifled through my maternal stash of platitudes and reassurance, and finally decided that the best advice of all has been circulating for months now, courtesy of Mr. Rogers and what his mother told him: When bad things happen, she said, look for the helpers. They will always be there.

I riffed on that, telling my son that the world is, in fact, more good than bad, and that we live among people who are more good than bad. Each day, we encounter them: teachers and day care workers, cafeteria ladies and crossing guards, hospital workers on the night shift and firefighters, paramedics, physicians and nurses, pharmacists.

We live among people who feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, comfort the sad, and care for the sick and the dying. Our lives are touched by the imagination and creativity of people who explore the universe and the earth, who look for cures for disease and disability, who build our schools and homes and hospitals, who protect our borders. We are enriched by people who create art, literature, music, film, theater, and culture.

It is true that, as my son puts it, some people have dark hearts. Indeed, their dark hearts can make the world dangerous and frightening place. They people our nightmares as they disrupt and destroy lives. Some days, it seems, they out-maneuver us—they implement any number of weapons aimed to destroy, cripple, and overpower others.

Yet no matter how much they try to defeat us, we mostly end up still standing. We emerge from the dust and the dark, the bullets and the chaos, and we fashion our lives and move forward.

The dark-hearted ones may take over the headlines on CNN—but they cannot take over our thoughts and how we choose to live each day.

I did not say all of this to him. Instead, I held him closer, and told him the short version—that the world is mostly a good place and, for most of us, life is a rich experience. We have good days, and not-so-good days.

In the midst of learning to live with my own pain, I have focused on keeping up with work. I thought about a recent cab trip across town. It was a rainy day, and I complained about that to the cabbie.

“Any day you wake up is a good day!” he said. As we drove down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, he told me about his life: conscripted in the Eritrean military at the age of 15, the war-time deaths of both of his parents, the war in which he himself was badly injured.

Through it all, he said, he remembered his father’s advice: If you are alive, it is a good day. It may be a challenging day, but there is no such thing as a bad day. As the cabbie put it, “Life is like a discotheque. You need to dance, no matter what music you hear.”

So that’s what I told my son: How important it will be as he grows up to dance—with and despite the music, to find a place within and around it.

Living afraid is no life, and worry gets us nowhere.

Posted originally, October 9, 2013, by www.mariashriver.com: http://mariashriver.com/blog/2013/10/dance-no-matter-what-music-you-hear-janice-lynch-schuster/

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