Life - What's Really Happening

My boss told me yesterday I need to get Life written down so my son can read about it someday when Life becomes more important to him than being ten, playing with his friends, watching tv, playing Nintendo DS gaming or Wii, and tolerating everything else.

To me, Life is a common noun that needs to be capitalized. It's never a simple, mundane experience. There are critical times when change hits with such force, things never quite ever are the same again. There are fleeting times, when everything is rushing past in the emotions and experience of the moment, when you can't believe that suddenly it is all over and it has all become a memory. There are the painful times, when even a second of remembrance brings those tears and wrenches that heart. Then there are the images you hold close and cling to and revisit again and again, private images that Life has exposed you to.

My mom used to point out sometimes that we were going through yet another phase, with the undertone that it, too, would soon change and things would be different yet again. I never fully understood this until I, too, became a mom. Now I see my son going through phases, experiencing Life. His stories will be so very, very different from mine and have been since before he was born.

I've also always been a writer, and yes, a talker. I think talking can be a defensive wall sometimes. When I was Deaf, I was still talking all of the time. I know I got this from my dad. Mom always got impatient with it, and her family would joke about how my father loved to talk with people and leave everyone else waiting and waiting for him to get done. When you talk a lot, you don't need to listen, and sometimes, you don't need to feel, but my family will be the first to tell you that I've always let feelings out in all their extremes, and now that I'm married to someone who has rarely ever shown emotions and held everything inside, I can confirm that getting it all out can be much healthier for our psyche.

I'm not writing this for you, by the way. I'm doing this for me, and for my son some day. I've always been a writer, it seems, or had a camera in my hands. In a family of super athletes, being the chubby literate one who looked at everything as a story and hating to do most of the activities my siblings and parents thrived on, from long walks or jogs, to basketball and almost all sports, made me different. I think I was also one of the more emotional ones, but that probably ties with my brother. Six years younger than me, his temper as a young child and the competitiveness between us makes it a true miracle that we all survived. Not only survived, but became friends as adults, and now share a closeness all the more powerful because of how it used to be.

If I had to describe Life in one paragraph, Life resonates around sounds. After learning I was losing my hearing when I was seven, and having a mom, uncles, and maternal grandmother who were all deaf but not part of the Deaf world, Life became defined with that missing sense. Deafness shaped me in ways that likely Life never would have if I hadn't had to compensate. So from childhood until after my 50th birthday, I was deaf... and became Deaf... and that was Life.

Then I left Deafness behind. Sort of.

I can still retreat into Deafness when I want to be me again.

And now I'll stop this first Life of an Alaskan Author blog... because it's supposed to be one page. Today. Tomorrow, I'll go for the second.