South of Ordinary Second Edition Published

After I finished my first memoir, Sunlight on My Shadow, I was looking for a new project. Writing fills me up. I write to make sense of my world.

Tessie suggested that I write the story of her dad and my back-pack trip to South America. She had loved sitting on his lap while he told adventure stories. How we back packed through Mexico, Central and South America and how he travelled in the jungle to visit wild Indians who had lived in the high sierras for centuries.

I liked her suggestion. There were some crazy adventure stories I could tell. But unlike Dave, the trip to South America was not packed with fond memories for me. While his passion was to get to the next crazy thing, my desire was to find a safe, cozy little house somewhere, build friendships with locals and other travelers, hang out, learn the Latin American ways. Our druthers were at opposite ends of the spectrum. I didn’t really know what I wanted out of traveling until I wrote the story and dug deeper.

Although he calls our travels the best time of his life, my memories were dampened by the danger he put into motion around each corner. There I was on a year and a half long trip with everything we owned on our backs, a million miles from home. I had two choices. I could go along to get along or I could go home. He wasn’t the negotiating type.  In our early days together, I was deeply in love and drawn to his passion for travel. I admired his bravery and his ability to tackle anything that came his way. He was curious about things. He would go to the ends of the earth to find out what life had in store. I found this all very attractive. In the telling of the story, I let myself remember our young love which was truly magical.

I liked writing the first part our story —life in the mountain cabin in Fraser with Grandma and Grandpa. Those were delicious, living-off-the-land memories set in the majestic, Colorado Rockies. Then when I got to the part when we left Fraser and set out to see the world, my pen slogged along. I didn’t quite know how to tell this story that was really his story and I didn’t like remembering some of the anxiety that still stuck in my craw. I struggled, but kept writing albeit with a veil of resistance. Yet, not one to give up on a project, I finished the book and published it in 2017. Some people said they liked the book. But my daughter’s words hit me like an arrow to the heart. Kiona, who is good at summing up the truth, said, “Hmpff it’s not every day you get a birds-eye-view of your parent’s dysfunction.” Had I done my daughters wrong by writing the book?  Have I revealed too much?

I was not proud of this my second memoir, South of Ordinary like I was Sunlight on My Shadow. Sunlight changed my life because I was able to put so much of the grief and shame of my story to rest. Through the writing I understood and forgave that young girl. With South of Ordinary, I wasn’t healed but got stirred up as I remembered how my fears and desires were inconsequential when Dave had a plan in mind. As I wrote, I held back and never got to the raw truth of my own story. It exposed some of the dysfunction in our marriage and there was no redeeming conclusion.

So it occurred to me that I could give the story another try. I could unpublish it, and come in the side door. With the help of my writing teacher, Elizabeth Jarret Andrew, I realized I could tell it like it was my story and not just Dave’s. I could take it slow and peek under the carpet and ask myself how did this trip change me and I could write that.

So I unpublished it. It took four more years to get the book right. The first edition gave me a stomach ache. My friend Annie’s words haunted me, “It doesn’t make you look good,” she said. Well, looking good wasn’t my objective but I certainly didn’t want to come off like a victim, a wimp, holding a grudge, and for Dave to come off like a jerk, or me like a jerkette, as my friend Cathy said. I was probably all these things at times, but I didn’t have to focus on this.

The facts remain that Dave and I had a dynamic that was not healthy for my self-esteem or independence. There was only so much I could do with the raw material, but I think that the new edition of South of Ordinary tells more detail about my relationship to traveling and what I learned during the trip. I wrote what it was like to be in a foreign country and not understand why people laughed when I asked a simple question. Were they making fun of me or did they think I was cute? I had no clue. I took a closer look at my fear, how I dealt with the anxiety by ignoring and stuffing and how I thought I was weak to have the emotions of fear and jealousy. You see, this was my modus operandi, to stuff and ignore my fears. It was all I knew to do back then— a coping mechanism I learned when I was trying to be strong and faced with an unplanned pregnancy back when I was 16.  The best way I knew to deal with all the grief and shame was to numb these emotions. I was like a deer in the headlights. Brene Brown says when you numb the bad emotions, you numb them all, and are unable to feel the good ones, the joy. Yet, it was the only way I knew to get through it. I wrote about my emotional reactions which felt as real as if it was yesterday instead of fifty years ago. I wrote about how today, I have learned better ways from our teachers, like Pema Chodron and Brene Brown. I learned how to honor and acknowledge instead of pushing away emotions. I’m still working on this. In the writing, I came to know that I was not weak for staying behind at times. I could honor the common sense that kept me from hiking higher, following Dave to brush noses with-head-hunter Indians.

What I mean about getting the book right is that it says what I wanted it to say. I learned some things and grew in understanding of that girl in her 20’s. The process of the rewrite helped me understand why I did what I did and again like in Sunlight on My Shadow, I found forgiveness for myself and for Dave because I better understood our dynamic and came to accept that girl-in-love who thought she had to sacrifice so much in order to be a companion to her beloved Dave.

I published it to Amazon today. I hope you dear readers will give South of Ordinary another chance and find it a satisfying and a good read. It still is a bit of a pitiful and sad story, but you can only do so much with the truth. As they say, the truth will set you free but not before it has its way with you.