4 Question Interview
Check me out! My first press for Perfect Likeness.
Author Bethany Maines interviewed me for the Stiletto Gang, a mystery/romance blog. Check out the interview here!
Archive for year: 2015
Work-Life Balance
Dear Readers,
When I first started this particular version of my blog, I had such high hopes of making and keeping to a regular posting schedule. The more time that passed from my last blog post, the more guilt I felt, and the harder it was to come up with a topic to write about. Every sentence I typed felt like it sucked, and I developed a keen sense of self-consciousness that no one wanted to hear anything that I had to say anyway.
I work in a very demanding profession, and the past several months have been brutal for me. I have some new very complicated cases that are stretching my capabilities to their breaking points. I am behind on paperwork, which while being a constant, makes me feel like any time spent writing should be spent writing progress notes. I am feeling very burned out, in general.
During the past several months I also had to go through and edit my book after it came back from the editor, and while I started the process feeling optimistic and excited, I quickly found myself drowning in doubt in that area as well. What had I written? Why would I think anyone would want to read it?
It is no secret to anyone who knows me that I suffer from depression, and that my symptoms are easily triggered whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, when I feel things starting to slip away from me. In the last months, I took on a second job, and a time-consuming volunteer opportunity — along with the challenging cases and the book edits — and it was way more than I could chew. I became very symptomatic, which meant I spent more energy avoiding things than doing things.
So how do you come back from that and be like, hi! I’m blogging again! Hope you keep reading! Do you acknowledge the lapse or ignore it and hope everyone else does too? Do you talk about your depression? Do you talk about how being a part-time writer with a full-time job is super challenging? I somehow doubt that’s the way to connect with fans and sell books. And yet…
Hi! I’m blogging again! I am going to a cider festival this weekend, of which I will be writing a review. I want to talk about the exciting things other authors in the Blue Zephyr Press group are doing. I want to say that my book cover is almost done and I can’t wait to share it with everyone once the final touches are done. I want to talk about other cool book-related things and life related things. And I will!
But first I wanted to write this: writing of any kind is a practice in vulnerability. I have spent enough time in my past life as a marketing person and public relations executive to know that a public image is something that should be carefully cultivated and maintained. There isn’t a lot of room in that cultivation for genuine vulnerability. But I think it is my fear of being vulnerable in this space that is holding me back from the very thing I want to do as a writer — connect with readers. So in the name of vulnerability and connection, I can’t just start this blog up again without any explanation of why it has been months since my last post.
And the explanation is this: a work-life (or sometimes, work and other-more-creative-work) balance is very hard to maintain. I am working on doing a better job with that balance, and I hope you follow along my journey as I do.
Till next week!
–Jennae
Why I’m Not Saying Goodbye To All That
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. – Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That
The first time I came to New York, it was with a friend who was getting her book published. She came out to the city to meet with “the book people”, as she collectively called them, in person. Her agent took us out to a fancy lunch (my going on the lunch was something my friend finagled for me) and while she went and had an official meeting even she couldn’t get me into, I took myself to see the Chelsea Hotel. Awed and humbled by the history, the symbolism, the raw and dark artistic hope, I daydreamed about a time when I would have my own “book people” and my own romantic return to New York as a published author.
When I moved to New York 4 years later, it was not as a writer or an author, but as a student embarking on a career that seemed like it would take me far away from that daydream. Still, I couldn’t escape the feeling of awe and wonder that I would have the privilege of living in one of the greatest cities in the world.
I was living in Los Angeles, a city I was born in and in which I had spent many formative years. LA has its own romantic reputation as a city where dreams come true and stars are born. In fact, the two cities are often compared and contrasted for just that reason — these are cities full of those in the hungry professions, the artists and actors and musicians and writers starving (in more ways than one) to make it. Coming from one city full of wonders and moving to another, you might think I would be immune to the thrill of walking down Broadway, or staring up at the Empire State Building. Didn’t I have Hollywood Boulevard and the Griffith Observatory? Hadn’t I regularly gazed up at the Hollywood sign, enjoyed the sights and sounds of Olvera Street, toured Hollyhock House? But it was the city I knew, and I had grown immune to its charms, while New York’s were still waiting to be discovered. And I wanted to discover them all.
Then this winter, two of my dearest New York friends made a plan to move to Los Angeles. Suddenly all I heard around me were stories of people leaving the Big Apple, people fed up with the high rents, the never-ending winters, the MTA fare hikes, and the general grittiness. Joan Didion’s essay came up again and again, naturally, as she wrote so honestly about her own love affair with New York, and her eventual realization it was time to leave. Transplants to the city, she wrote, never truly felt they belonged: everyone who came to New York from the West and the South always feel like they are living on borrowed time, waiting for the right moment to go home.
Every year since moving here I have asked myself if this is perhaps my last year. My last winter, my last Christmas, my last Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, my last exhibit at the Guggenheim, my last debate about whether or not it would be worth it to line up for free Shakespeare in the Park (which I still have never quite been able to make myself do). Once I have gotten past the feeling that I just can’t take one more snowfall or deal with one more fellow train passenger who believes they are the only person who deserves space, I find that little voice inside myself that says “not yet.”
Here is where I no longer connect to Didion’s essay: I didn’t spend my 20s in New York. I didn’t come to be an artist or spend time with them. I bought furniture, put up shelves, settled in. Work shapes my days and weeks and leaves little room for parties you stay too long at, or afternoons spent drinking until you feel better. At some point during the last five years, I stopped thinking of myself as a tourist, and when I go visit other spaces, I feel this longing for the conversational comfort of my tree-lined Brooklyn street.
And somehow, in the corners of my routines, I found space for writing again: before-work writing, lunch-break writing, afternoons in a pub writing, staying up too late writing, writing grounded in effort and escape, persistence and pleasure, brilliance and balance. I traded daydream for action, naive optimism for optimism subsumed in a work ethic that fills the trains and buses I take every day and moves throngs in that mad rush that amazes tourists and baffles anyone longing for a quieter life. I like my life noisy. I like it just slightly rushed — it makes me appreciate those moments of quiet stillness in a way I never could before.
For now, I am staying in New York (not that the city cares much, one way or another), and listening to the voice that says “not yet.” I’m investing in a new pair of snow boots, and learning to accept high rent for small spaces. I still feel privileged to live here. I know next year I will again talk to myself about how long, really, I have left in the city. But I also wonder if there might be a point when the conversation will change from “is it time to leave New York and go back home?” to “is it time to admit you are home?”
Is the narrative of New York that people always leave it? Or is there a counter narrative, an anti-Didion essay that declares not that New York fails to deliver on the promises of “an infinitely romantic notion”, but that it refuses to be an object of “the shining and perishable dream itself” and instead must always assert its own imperfections blatantly and honestly and dare you to love it anyway. Or not. I’m not sure the city requires love; it is a city known best for its indifference and read as cold, but who I always think of as a very old and wise teacher sitting in the back of the room and looking on as you learn your lessons. Maybe people leave New York when they have learned everything the city is able to teach them. Maybe people leave New York because they are ready for new lessons, lessons taught in LA’s sunshine, Austin’s creativity, or Seattle’s pragmatism.
Me — I still have a lot to learn about New York, and from it. But I will miss my friends when they move to the Coast.
Selfie
On March 28th, 2013, my mother died. She died in a hospital. It was the third time she had flat-lined, and the all the efforts of all the doctors couldn’t bring her back. My step-father had called me in the middle of dinner, sometime after the second time she was brought back; he left a voice mail that said simply to call him back. When I did, maybe an hour later, the machines were going off in the background, his voice was strained, and he told me the facts baldly — she has flat-lined again. This is her third time. I don’t know what to say. I’ll call you back.
2013 was the year of the selfie. Fancy phones with reversed lenses made taking pictures of yourself easier than ever, so much so that the OED word of the year was in fact “selfie.” It was surmised that everyone was taking self-photos: pop stars, presidents, even bald eagles.
So I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising that when my mother spent 40 days in the hospital in early 2013 and much of that time on her fancy phone with the reversed camera, that she should decide to take a selfie too.
Except that she hated to have her photo taken.
My mother was notorious for hiding from the camera, not just in later years when she decided she was “too big” to be in any given picture, or too old, or too something, but even when she was young, thin, and as beautiful as I’ve ever seen her. She had a great fascination with photography and had enrolled in a course, which meant that me, my brother, my stepsisters – hell, anyone in the family she could get — were forced to pose for various photography assignments. This being the 80s, most of these pictures ended up on slides. She had a special machine for viewing them all, technology that seemed both super advanced at the time, and still oddly ancient as it seemed to be a throw back to old camera reels that people watched home videos (without sound) on.
My mother was a talented photographer; she felt much more at ease behind the camera than in front of it, capturing beauty and smiles and moments. Photographs were very important in her life — she was always trying to capture the moments as they slipped by. Birthday parties, vacations, holidays, family dinners, just cuz days when the camera had film. Taking the photos was the easy part — she had rolls and rolls of unprocessed film filling up junk drawers and old suitcases, and boxes of photos that never made it out of their envelopes.
When the digital age hit, she traded in her fancy film camera for a fancy digital one, and taught herself some basic photoshop skills. She made a project out of trying to scan and repair old photos, starting with photos from her parents’ lives, removing the tears and wrinkles and printing them up and framing them. She tried to get as many of the old rolls of film that had sat in drawers developed and spent tons of money on fancy labs that promised to do their best to properly color the aged negatives, save what images they could. I bought her a fancy scanner that could take images from the negatives themselves, and even from her old slides. She bough albums and photo boxes. She spent countless hours immersed in images of the past.
Despite all the time spent trying to preserve and organize these images, it always seemed as if it was the lives of other people she wanted to cherish forever in 5 by 7 or 4 by 6. Her children. Her siblings. Her friends.
But not her.
Getting her in front of a camera was a group effort, a huge ordeal of cajoling and pleading, and sometimes snapping photos without her being aware of it. Her efforts to get people to delete unflattering photos of her were epic, particularly since she considered every photo unflattering. As her health declined and she gained weight (though at the time we thought she gained weight which caused her health to decline), her phobia of being captured as she was (in her words gross and fat and ugly) meant that years of her life went completely undocumented.
So imagine my surprise when I started going through the photos taken with her smartphone and saw that not only had she taken photos of herself, she’d taken these photos at her most vulnerable: while lying in a hospital bed, tubes and wires coming out of her skin, gown open and stretched to barely cover her, hair flat and matted, skin made pale in the fluorescent light. She’d taken several photos, some of her making faces, some looking serious and somber, as though she felt the need to preserve (at least for her own eyes) some record of what it meant to be in a hospital. Probably she was just bored. And yet, she didn’t delete these photos.
I know she never thought they would be seen. I know she never imagined a future where her daughter might scroll through her photo stream and, among all the photos texted to her, find these selfies.
Shockingly, these weren’t the only ones. There is one where she is at home, probably in her room, and she is peering out from over her glasses, looking bemusedly at the camera as if to say, yeah, what? She was fond of saying “whatever” and the look in her eyes in that photo declares the same. Whatever. So I’m old. Whatever. So I got fat. Whatever. So I wear glasses and probably my bangs are too long (her bangs were always either too long or too short, never actually achieving the right length). Whatever.
And still another photo is of her peering out over a mixing bowl, wooden spoon in hand, a small smile on her face. This one is my favorite, capturing her in the midst of one of her favorite pastimes, mixing together some recipe that probably only existed in her head, and tasted better than anything I will ever be able to put together.
The thing about the selfie is that it allows the person taking the photo to control their own image, to capture themselves just how they want to be captured. Artists have made entire careers out of the self-portrait, carefully crafted images with just the right lighting, set, style, flash. The fact that the less artistically trained are using photo-apps to do the same shouldn’t mean the intention is any less noble. We are all trying to shape our own images, to present the version of ourselves we see in our heads, to preserve not just how we look at any given time, but how we thought we should look, should be seen, should be known as.
My mother did not share these selfies with the world, and that somehow makes them more poignant: these were not images of how she wanted others to see her, but private moments she shared with herself. They are the remnants of some dialogue she had with herself, some moment of reflection, and of pure human vanity — or whatever it is that drives so many to flip the lens around on their cameras and capture themselves.
When I found these photos, I sent them to everyone — her siblings, her friends, her husband, and all were as equally amazed that the woman who hid from every other camera had so willingly posed for her own. But of course she would. Of course she did. It was the most human thing to do.
And I will always be grateful that she did.
Social Work and Connection
I have a social work crush. A few years back, when I was first starting out as a social worker, I discovered this TED Talk:
[ted id=1042 lang=en]
Not only did I completely connect with Brené Brown’s ideas, I found a role model for the type of social worker I wanted to be, the kind that could create/discover an idea that everyone could benefit from. Brené talks about wanting to study connection and vulnerability as an attempt to solve her own struggles with those things. I think most social workers come to the profession with a secret goal to fix something in themselves, in their families, in their neighborhoods, or in their communities. They come to social work because they see themselves in the populations they serve, and they want to make a difference.
The longer I do this work, the more I fully embrace Brené’s ideas about vulnerability, shame, and the need for connection. In fact, the biggest problem I see most of my families face is isolation — they lack the natural supports that other people have, the proverbial village that helps raise a child. Without a natural village, a village of professionals and systems come in to support the family. Instead of extended family that can help provide child care, there are child care vouchers for day-care centers. Instead of a relative staying with the family to help with the kids or the house, homemaking services come in to offer support to overwhelmed parents. These families don’t have a lot of reliable friends. They tend not to be active in religious communities. They mostly don’t work so there aren’t supportive co-workers to help pick up any slack either. Sometimes they live in shelters, a housing system that forces isolation on families as a way to ensure that they don’t get too comfortable.
I spend most of my time with families trying to connect them to systems and seeing if they can possibly find a way to connect, or reconnect with those supports they do have, build on the connections they already have in their families, friends, and communities. The heart of family therapy is about strengthening the connections within the family to help the family function, as a whole, better.
Then there is this article on drug addiction:
Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
Connection, again, is key. But the inherent struggle of connection is that it presupposes that you are worthy of it. Many of the individuals and families I encounter don’t feel worthy of connection. It’s part of what keeps them isolated (I strongly recommend you watch the above video in its entirety).
Next week, for social worker month, my co-workers and I will be participating in Secret Social Worker (even though among us we also have Marriage and Family Counselors and Mental Health Counselors – a collective of clinical helping professionals). We will draw names and randomly get assigned someone to do little things for every day for a week, before revealing our identities. We do these things not just because they are fun (and trust me, they are), but because it helps us all connect a little more to each other. As those whose job it is to help others connect, it is vitally important that we too stay connected to whatever supports we can muster.
This month is also the month I lost two vital members of my personal village, my grandmother and my mother, and so I would like to take a moment to recognize all my other connections, my friends, family, and especially those friends who have become family. These are the people I can be vulnerable with, who tell me I am a worthy person. While I do this work to help other people connect, I only CAN do this work because of the connections that sustain me.
So I will close of National Social Work Month with big huge thank you! Thank you Brené Brown for helping inspire my working philosophy, and thank you to all the connections in my life that keep me grounded and cared for. I literally couldn’t do this without you!
Cider Love: Magners, Irish Cider
Dear Readers,
Magners is a lie. Yes dear readers, the original name of Magners and how it is known in its native Ireland is not actually Magners. It is called Bulmers. I… I can’t even….
The lie.
So the story goes that the cider that we know in the United States as Magners was first created in 1935 by a man from South Tipperary, Ireland named William Magner. But then H.P. Bulmer, an English cider making company first established in 1887 in Hereford, England, bought 50% shares in William’s successful cider company in 1937. (H.P. Bulmer also owns Strongbow, but we’ll get to that, dear readers, some other time.) After the war, in 1946, H.P. Bulmers bought the remaining shares of the Magners cider company and changed the name to Bulmers. Then in the 60s, after a losing a lawsuit, they were forced to sell the Bulmers Magners company to Guinness and Allied Breweries. They continued to sell Bulmers in Ireland, and based on that success, decided to go international. But in doing so, they created a separate brand: the original Magners name. It has only been available in the United States in mass market production since about 2005.
I first had it in 2007. I did not know any of its history then, nor was I fully aware that it was made from 17 varieties of apples which contributes to its “unique and refreshing taste”. I only knew, as my last Cider Love entry may have informed you, that it introduced me to the world of cider and saved my social outings. The bottle is beer-bottle shaped and the cap must be removed by a bottle opener, the edge of a table, or if you’re the type, a set of very strong teeth (not recommended). It has the word “original” on it, which spoke to my fierce independent American soul, and the word “Irish” which spoke to my also very American need to claim some culture other than American as my roots, and also the word “cider”, which is what the bottle with the hard to open cap contained.
The beverage itself has that fermented fruit flavor unique to the cider category. As the bottle suggests, it definitely has a unique and distinctive taste. I just can’t really define for you what that taste is. Magners is heavy on the fermentation flavor and light on the fruit (unlike some other ciders). You might imagine that one of the 17 varieties of apples that goes in to the brew is perhaps a little on the mushy side, bruised and starting to turn. These are not apple pie apples. These are Irish apples which I have to imagine have had to weather some bad, well, weather, and grown and thrived against the odds and possibly against the desires of their neighbors, and likely aren’t the kind you pick out so much as end up with. These are the red-headed step-children of apples, is what I’m saying. I mean, when you think of Ireland, are apples really what come to mind?
Castles yes, apple orchards, no. I mean, are there even apple trees in this picture? Maybe Google Images lied to me.
Magners tastes better than beer. But not that much better than beer. In fact, it is on the beer-y side of flavours that cider can come in and is missing perhaps only the hops (horrible horrible hops) flavor that makes beer something I personally cannot with any enjoyment consume. I can consume Magners with enjoyment, and I will voluntarily order it at any bar I find it at, unless there is maybe a better tasting cider option (which often there is not, so successful is the brand). That is to say, Magners, while being my first cider, is not my favorite cider. You never forget your first, but, you know, I’ve had better. My memory of it as this delicious amazing apple-y drink that is not beer doesn’t often hold up to the actual taste of it as this sort of slightly bitter apple-y drink that while not being beer is definitely in the same family. It is better over ice, or on draught (all things are better on draught) and on a hot summer day or a humid NYC evening, it most definitely hits the spot. The second bottle or pint is always better than the first. By the third, Irish eyes are smiling, and by the fourth (particularly if you’ve been having pints), you might be inclined to talk about how Irish weather is better than regular weather and squishy apples that grow where you don’t think apples should grow are better apples because, damnit, they GROW, don’t they, and they do it despite everything and you really should go to Ireland, it’s so beautiful, and if you do, go to the The Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival in September for the single lads and lasses, and Oh Danny Boy and all that.
Actually, Magners really is a fine cider, a lovely cider, the best cider really, and probably we should all have another round.
Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!
Cheers,
J.M. Phillippe
(re)Collection
I have my grandmother’s cats. There are two of them, ceramic, shiny. I can’t remember them clearly; one is more pinkish, the other more purple or more blue. I think the pinkish one is sitting up, while the other is laying down. They are patchwork, but I couldn’t tell you a single detail of a single patch. I can tell you that they are currently sitting in the bedroom that used to be my room, on top of the wooden chest my mom bought me, and are among a handful of items of my grandmother’s scattered about the house. Her vanity. A lamp (I think). Several vases. And actually and properly hung up on the wall, oil paintings of roses she painted herself.
My memories of my grandmother are always of seeing her in her space, surrounded by these decorative items she collected, many of them gifts from her children and grandchildren. She and my grandfather lived in many houses, but every home had the same overall feel as the last, thanks to the furniture and items they took with them, thanks to Nanny’s display case, her tea pots, her porcelain flowers, her vases, her cats, her treasures. It was in her last home, the first she and my grandfather owned and which my aunts and uncles helped her paint and decorate, that I have the strongest memories of her. This was after my grandfather had died, after my brother had died, when I would go up to visit friends and family in a state I no longer lived in and stay with my grandmother, and we would sit in her living room among all her items and talk.
Most every other memory I have of my grandmother was through the lens of my mother. I heard more stories about her than from her. I heard about how complicated my mother’s relationship was with her. I heard about all the hurts and slights. I heard about the harshness in my mother’s reported childhood, the not-so-secret secrets, the dramas and hysterics and proof that my mother had it harder than me.
Those visits are the only memories I have of just my grandmother and me together.
Nanny told me about the loss of her own brother, when he was only 31. She would listen to me talk about mine, and add her own insights into how she saw her grandson. We would talk about the grieving process together, about the loss of her husband, about the loss of her grandson, about how much she missed having peers, people her age, to talk to.
Her hands would never sit idle, always playing with something, twisting something, tearing some piece of paper or cardboard into tiny confetti that she would later scoop up and throw away. My hands are her hands, always seeking something out to twist and twirl and fold and tear.
It’s not that I didn’t think that someday I would have in my possession things that belonged to my grandmother. I knew I would. This is the order of inheritance, of heirloom, of items passed down from generation to generation with the value of each item in the hands that held them before.
My grandmother passed away in March of 2006. And for the next 7 years, items that were hers were my mother’s. And then in March of 2013, they became mine.
My grandmother and I talked about my mother. My mother hated secrets, and wanted to know everything about everyone she cared about, and it was this insistence of knowing that most put her at odds with my grandmother in their later years together, because my grandmother was good at keeping secrets. Her rule with me (and with many family members) was that I could tell her anything — and she wouldn’t share what I said with anyone else. I know she didn’t share with my mother, because we both knew that what we talked about would be too hard for my mother to hear.
My grandmother with my mom or one of my aunts.
We talked about how difficult and stubborn my mother was. We talked about how her grief was not like anyone else’s we knew. We talked about how hard it was for me to make my own space — in grieving my brother, in living my life, in holding the line between my mother and me — because my mom took up so much room. Nestled in among the soft pastels and muted jewel tones of my grandmother’s home, the sun going down without either of us getting up to turn on the lights, we shared the secret that my mother drove us both crazy, and that we loved her nonetheless.
We had two perspectives on the same person, the one who raised her and the one raised by her, and yet our conclusions were often much the same. I took great comfort that I was not imagining the things I saw in my mother, that I was not just an ungrateful daughter who couldn’t find a way to make my mother my priority in life. I told Nanny things I didn’t dare tell anyone else, and she nodded, understanding, telling me it was okay, that I was okay, that I would keep being okay.
Visiting with my grandmother was easy. She was not a demanding host, and always insisted that I not alter my plans to accommodate her. I’d take her to the store, if she’d let me, or at least go to the store for her and always be sure to remember to bring her back something sweet. She let me sleep in in the mornings, shooing her dog away from the guest bedroom door so as not to disturb me. She let me come and go as I pleased. She made no demands. Her door was always open.
The room I slept in used to be hers; in their later years, she and my grandfather each had their own bedroom, and after he passed (and with help from my aunts) she redecorated and moved into his, turning her old one into the guest bedroom. I slept near the vanity that would someday find a spot in my old bedroom in my mother’s house. Every room of my grandmother’s home was decorated with various tchotskies so that the eye always had something interesting to rest on, some small treasure to find. (My mom would decorate her home with the same philosophy, if different color palette.) Nanny’s garden was much the same way, with surprises nestled in the wild-flowers and bushes to always give a visitor a sense of wonder.
Conversation with my grandmother was like taking a tour of her home; talks were peppered with jewels of information and insight, and any twist in the conversation could lead to a story I’d never heard told before, or never heard her tell in quite the same way. But the stories were so quiet and the insights so subtle that like the patchwork ceramic cats that were always on a side-table, I overlooked them. I remember the feel of our conversations better than the actual details.
Nanny and Bucka (my grandmother and grandfather).
I mourn the stories she told, and would still be telling. I wish I had written them down, recorded them, found some way of preserving them. I remember my grandmother much the same way I remember those cats that are in a home 3,000 miles away from me: as a vague shape, a tinge of color, a feeling. She is a conversation at twilight, a bit of torn up paper, a collection of pretties.
I wish I knew her better.
*This post originally was published on another personal blog I no longer keep up.
For All the Amazing Women in My Life
This month is National Social Work Month, which is something that probably only social workers and people who work with social workers know about, let alone celebrate. It is also Women’s History Month. Not so coincidentally, the social work profession is dominated by women — 82% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are a lot of different explanations for this, from the fact that women were instrumental in creating social work as a field, to the idea that social work is women’s work (which some men want to change). All I know is that I happen to be surrounded by women most of the time in my daily work and this month I get to celebrate them twice.
I also happen to be part of an all-female writing group. This wasn’t by design — this was just the writing group that I ended up in after years of being part of various other writing groups. But one of the things that all the women in my group have in common is the desire to read and write about smart, capable, and complex female characters. And that is in part because we wanted to read characters that felt more like the women we actually know. Okay, so maybe the women in our day-to-day lives weren’t involved in secret all-women spy agencies, other world conflict surrounding a teen girl, or San Juan Island murder mysteries, but they are all smart, capable, and complex.
The other thing that this month holds for me, personally, is the reminder of some of the amazing women I have lost along the way, including my grandmother and mother, both who died in March (though in different years). There may be more blog entries this month than I normally would schedule just to try to get a chance to talk about everything that March holds for me: celebration, community, grief, and legacy.
I am very grateful to be a part of these communities, and to be surrounded by amazing women as a social worker, a writer, and a friend. The women in my life have shaped who I am in ways I am still discovering. They have taught me to be kind to myself, to take risks, to push boundaries. They have lead by example, and made me want to be an example as well.
So to each and everyone of them I say: thank you. I wouldn’t be here without you.
Cider Love: An Introduction
Dear Readers,
Let us start with a confession: I do not like beer. In fact, for the longest time, I did not like the taste of alcohol at all. My first alcoholic drink that I remember ever fully trying was a Zima my elder brother had procured for me. I was maybe 16 or 17. I made a face after every sip of the blasted theoretically fun and fizzy drink and followed it up with another sip of soda to drown out the taste. I only made it half-way through the bottle, after which my brother swore I was intoxicated and started cussing up a storm (I did not cuss in those days) but I believe this to be an exaggeration stapled on to the story over the years in order to give the tale some flavor. The drink certainly had none.
There were other forays into the world of alcohol, but all with similar outcomes of choking down the stuff with bewilderment that drinking was such a popular activity. Then someone gave me a mixed drink, blue in color and sweet-and-sour in taste, filled with more sugar than an 11 year old at a birthday party, and my taste buds began to shift. It was a needed shift as I had spent much of my early twenties feeling like a social pariah, the odd one out who never played a game where the point was to force your opponent to drink alcohol likely tainted by a ping pong ball or quarter, who never bought a pitcher of some pale yellow substance to share with friends in some sort of bonding ritual of bad decisions, and who spent every party trying to hide the fact that I was the one that consumed the last of the “mixers” which is why everyone was now doing ill-advised shots.
Then a dear friend handed me a bottle and changed my social drinking life forever: a bottle of Magners Irish Cider. You cannot imagine the complete relief I felt after discovering that there was an alcoholic drink that I actually enjoyed, and that came in a pack that I could buy and bring with me to parties. No more would I have to try to find that one beer that tasted the most like (filthy, gross) water and shove lemons and limes in it and nurse it with the same enthusiasm formerly reserved for eating Brussel sprouts. No longer would I have to buy a six pack of whatever beer I happened to last see a commercial for and present it to the party like an entrance fee while only actually consuming the fruit punch flavored water I brought with me.
No, in Magners I had found that rare beast of party-acceptable beverage that I actually wanted to consume myself. It didn’t even matter if no one but me drank my proffered prize – it just meant more cider for me. I also had a reason to prefer one drinking establishment over another based on how they answered this question: “do you have any hard cider?” Bottle or pint in hand, I could walk among my fellow drunken revelers confident in my ability to fit in with the throngs while also remaining somehow unique, which is the ultimate goal of most twenty-somethings.
My palate for alcohol has sophisticated since my first sip of Magners, and the discovery that I liked both wine and whiskey has ensured that I can always find a drink appropriate to the social occasion, but my love of hard cider as a category has only deepened. Thus, every month I will pick one cider to review for you, my dear readers, so that you may share my enthusiasm for all things fermented apple.
Next month: Magners, my first cider.
Libation-fueled love,
J. M. Phillippe
More Than a Day Job
I didn’t start out life wanting to be a social worker. Honestly, I had no idea what a social worker did, and certainly never had any aspirations to pursue a career in the field. I had graduated with a dual degree in English (creative writing) and Journalism, and was convinced that I was on the Jack London/Hemingway journalist-to-novelist path.
Life, of course, had other plans, and where I eventually ended up was public relations. I am sure there are people for whom public relations is the right career. I am not that person. I was searching for something more than the long list of crappy day jobs I’d held throughout my twenties, something different than the marketing-focused writing I was doing, and someone suggested that social work might be the right way for me to go. It was a two-year professional masters degree. There were licenses to earn that would eventually put me at the “can have a private practice” level, and all my experience working in various types of jobs over the years would be an asset in the field.
So I did my research and discovered that social work was actually a very interesting and varied field, with clinical work, community organizing work, and even jobs in the for-profit sector. There were tons of different populations I could work with, in a huge range of job titles, but it was the clinical parts that appealed to me. Social work has been described as psychology meets sociology, or possibly, applied psychology. Clinical social workers are less interested in how people got to where they are than helping them make the changes they need to make for a successful future. Most social workers want to put themselves out of work. That is, the goal is to get our clients to a point where they no longer need our services because whatever goal they came to us with has been achieved.
For me it ended up being the ultimate day job, because it doesn’t feel like a day job. I currently work for an agency that serves families who are at risk of having their children placed into foster care. I do family therapy; it is the most challenging work I have ever done. And yes, it is rewarding, but not in the way most people think of. Like being a writer, the moments that make it all worth it are more sporadic than people want to admit. But they are there, and they are amazing.
Whenever I told people I was a freelance writer, they would sort of nod along and ask me how it was going with a tone that suggested that it probably wasn’t going very well. To be fair, in my case they were probably right. Now, when I tell people I am a social worker, those who have a sense of the field usually make some sort of comment along the lines of “I don’t know how you do it.” There is usually a sense of oh, you’re one of those really socially minded people who like, helps other people. Well, yes. I am. And yes, it is hard. But also, it’s a job. I’m not a saint. I collect a paycheck, too.
But if it sounds impressive, I’ll take it. 😉