1 : not genuine
2a : intentionally untrue

I am in the process of reading an exceptionally good book right now.  As with most good non-fiction books, I am taking it slowly.  Not because the writing is dense nor difficult, but because there is so much truth there for my soul to soak up.  I need to read it slowly and give each truth time to settle down into my soul before moving on.  The book is When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd and it recounts the author's own spiritual crisis and the process of active waiting she embraced during this time.  As she attempts to discover who she really is, Monk Kidd investigates and names her false selves:

...I began a process of "naming" my false selves, a process that spanned many weeks of looking within and reflecting on my life.  By naming the inner patterns that imprison us, we come to know them more fully and obtain a certain power over them.

Finding and naming our false selves enables us to answer questions like: If all of my roles were taken away, who would I be?  If not wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, who am I?  What are the masks I wear and who do I don them for?

My bookmark has been sitting on the precipice of the section Naming False Selves for days.  Not because I don't want to read more, but because I think I need to at least make an attempt to see my own constructs before reading Monk Kidd's.  So as I took a very brisk walk yesterday in colder than expected weather, I contemplated what masks I've worn to get through my life to this point. 

Valedictorian
The first one that popped to mind was valedictorian.  If you've only known me for the last five years, I'm not sure whether it would be surprising to know I was valedictorian of my high school class.  I'd like to think you would be surprised - not because you'd think I'm not smart enough to have been so, but because you might see that I am not a person given to competition nor am I particularly achievement oriented.  As I've come to know myself better, I've realized that I don't like competition because competing divides people whereas I long for unity.  My healthier adult self doesn't long to be better than or smarter than other people.  I don't pursue things in order to stand out, but because they interest me or help me grow as a person.

I wore the mask of valedictorian because it was expected of me, even demanded of me.  Without pressure would I have been first in my class?  I think it's unlikely.  I think I still would have had good grades and done well on standardized tests, but I might have been able to relax a bit and enjoy school rather than seeing it as a place where academic performance was of the utmost importance.

The Misfit
Welcome to my college years.  If I felt pressure to be perfect in high school, that fell away the first semester of my freshman year.  I brought home three B's and a C that semester and felt no shame about it.  What I felt instead was a decided case of not-belonging, which persisted right through graduation.  Some of this was borne of being a middle class scholarship girl in the midst of wealthy private school born and bred peers.  Some of it was simply my discomfort in my own skin.  For most of my time at Vanderbilt, I felt like everyone there had been cut out with the same cookie cutter except me. 

I think this is a mask that still appears regularly in my repertoire.  When I'm wearing the misfit mask, I struggle with a desire to fit in that collides with a desire to be seen.  Because if I'm really fitting in and blending in, I'm not being seen for who I am.

The Bitch
Hopefully many of you have never seen this incarnation of me.  In the post-valedictorian, post-misfit years, the bitch was how I coped with working full time, excelling at that work and never feeling very fulfilled by it.  I wanted to understand my work, do it with excellence and help my clients and co-workers.  I felt such pressure to perform and my employer's solution to any complaint I voiced was to throw money at me.  This was not particularly effective.

So I set aside my feelings and hardened myself.  It worked fairly well and in some ways it looked a lot like the valedictorian mask, only with harder lines.  I learned a lot from a very demanding boss, I honed computer skills that still serve me well years later and I compartmentalized my self to be who they needed me to be.  This was not particularly effective, either.

The Conformist
Then came the evangelical years, when I wanted desperately to respond to God's voice and to be accepted by the women in my church as one of them.  I can still remember the hurt of a group leader who strongly disliked me.  In my desire to conform and be accepted, I couldn't tell whether she simply didn't like me or God didn't, either.   Then there were the theological collisions.  I spent years attempting to reconcile the church's belief in the inerrancy of scripture with my own heart and mind's objections that you can't take the portions of scripture on women literally, but ascribe passages on slavery to being from a different historical context.  To conform, I tried to hold back the parts of me that didn't fit my church's image of who women should be.

That was working reasonably well until I gave birth to three diverse, strong girls.  If I could accept the shame thrown upon my shoulders week after week, I could not saddle my daughters with it.  After seeing one daughter labeled as not enough one too many times, the mask of conformity shattered and I let go of the myth that there was only one right path to God.

I'm sure there are other masks in my closet, but I think identifying these four gives me enough insight into myself to move forward with reading about Sue Monk Kidd's false selves.  As I look at these Shannons that used to be, I feel more frustration and shame than compassion.  But I want to be compassionate to these selves that shielded the real and fragile me from the world.  Because they weren't constructed as intentionally untrue.  Instead, they simply took one aspect of my personality and magnified it past the point of being genuine.

What I want for the next decade of my life is to be the things required of me as wife, mother, daughter and friend, but hold tight to a sense of who I truly am, separate from what I do.  May I have compassion on my many selves, both when I fail and when I succeed in seeing the real me.

DRESS-WEARER

:descriptor of me by my 13 year old daughter

I want to know who I am.  Not just who I think I am or tell myself I am, but who I really am and who God made me to be.  To help me explore that concept, I bought a journal and asked people I love and trust to use this journal to tell me how they see me.  It is my hope that their words will sink into my heart and eat away at the lies that I have allowed to live and breathe there for years.

I let my immediate family write first.  Amongst A's descriptive words of me was the term "dress-wearer."  Its truth made me smile.  I love dresses.  And skirts.  I have for years.  I can remember wearing dresses in high school, when all of my friends favored jeans.  Don't get me wrong, I wore jeans, I just wanted some dresses to mix things up.

Over the years, I've weeded the pants from my wardrobe until a few years ago I gave them all away at a clothing swap.  I just don't like wearing pants.  I'm short and curvy, not long and lean.  Dresses and skirts are more flattering and more comfortable.  Dresses have the added bonus of being an easy choice in the mornings - there's no choosing a blouse or belt to match my pants - just pick a pair of boots and throw on a dress - decision making over.

I started this post with the idea in my mind that it would be a lighthearted one that encourages you to smile a bit at my idiosyncratic ways of wearing dresses or skirts year round - no matter the heat, cold, rain or snow.  But that just wasn't working.  I was stalled and couldn't see a way forward, so I saved and waited.  Today I realized why - I was missing the bigger truth that lies behind the description "dress-wearer."  And there is a bigger truth there than my desire to minimize morning decisions.

The truth is that I have fought my way to my current sense of style.  I've cycled through years of wearing what my mother wanted me to wear, wearing what my friends were wearing, what made me fit in and what I needed to for my job.  It was only in my mid-thirties that I began to really think about what I wanted to wear and what felt best on my body.  Some clothes make me feel constricted or exposed, so why would I want to wear them?  Others make me feel like I am pretending to be someone I'm not.  But the right outfit feels like slipping into a second skin.  The right outfit can make me feel feminine, confident and ready.

I think the key was that I started to not only ask myself what I wanted to wear, but to actually listen to my heart.  I've received push back or comments from people along the way.  A friend once complained that I always seemed more dressed up than she did.  When she said it, I felt ashamed that I would make someone else feel they were under-dressed.  But looking back, I think my motivations were and are pure.  I do tend to be on the dressier side, but not because I'm competing with others.  I just want to feel good in what I wear.

In the interest of honesty, I want to admit that the right outfit can also make me feel armored for my day.  I hate to go to certain parts of town if I'm not dressed the right way.  In places where I feel like I stand out for not being enough (pretty enough, thin enough, wealthy enough), I want the armor of the right dress and boots because it makes me feel like the glances that come my way will skim over me rather than penetrate and wound.

None of my daughters are currently drawn to dresses.  Even on Sundays, they opt for a pair of jeans without holes rather than a dress for church.  When she was between 5 and 8, B wore dresses quite often.  She's always been a strong and active child, so it made me smile to see her climb a tree or walk a creek in a dress.  It also encouraged me to see her wear what appealed to her with little regard to what others were wearing.  There has always been so much to learn from my children.

A, B and K each picked their favorite mom dress

I don't know how my wardrobe will evolve in years to come, but I hope it will evolve.  Because I hope I'll change and grow and be willing to let those changes show on the outside as well as in my heart and soul.

STORY

2 a : an account of incidents or events
3 b : the intrigue or plot of a narrative or dramatic work

Some stories just stick with you.  I recently read Wherever I Wind Up, a book by a baseball player from Nashville.  It was a good book (aided by the fact that I used to be in bible study with the author's wife), but it was a great story.  It wasn't so much the content of the story that made it great, but that he told his story, complete with traumatic events and poor choices on his part, without shame.  I felt a lot of things as I read it - among them, envy.

Over the years, I've managed to tell part of my story to people.  I've even managed to share some difficult parts aloud.  But to do so without shame is still largely outside my grasp.

This weekend, I am driving my daughters to Wisconsin for a long weekend with their grandparents.  While they visit family and soak up time together, I'll be on a personal retreat at a nearby center run by Dominican nuns.  This will be my first retreat without a spiritual director with me.  And I've pondered whether to use one of the spiritual directors available via the retreat center.  But ultimately I feel I would be better served spending these days exploring my story - attempting to remember the things my subconscious has hidden away, the things I wish had never happened, the things that still make me flush with shame.

I think it's important to know and own my story because as much as I want it to not be so, my story is not just my story, but my children's and even those who know and love me, but are not a part of my family.  Because our stories are interconnected.

This summer, Cheekwood has seven tree houses based on literature.  One of my favorite houses is based on a short story that I haven't read (yet).  But I will read it, because here is an excerpt:

“He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale.” -- Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1991 

My story weaves in and out of those around it in ways I can not even begin to grasp.  I can't control that or change that (and I'm not sure I would want to), but I can take one end of the string and slowly but surely work my way through the knots and twists and turns to know the rope of my story better, to accept it as my own, to try to see the beauty and the value in it.  And to maybe even come to see that my story supports me and, joined together with other stories, helps me go places that I couldn't otherwise go.

LAPSE

1 a : a slight error typically due to forgetfulness or inattention

There has been a significantly longer than usual lapse in my blog posting.  While it hasn't been due to forgetfulness, it has been an exceptionally busy month.  Over the course of the last six weekends, I've hosted an Easter lunch and egg hunt, been a single parent while J went to Atlanta, managed volunteers for a dance recital and then a performance of Coppelia, attended a KY Derby party and hosted a prayer and planning day for homeschool moms.  Please stop to breathe now.  Like I said, it's been a bit busy around here.

Blogging hasn't been the only lapse.  There have been laundry pile-ups, lessons pushed from one day to another, prepared foods instead of homemade ones.  This week has brought a bit of breathing room.  Ballet is over (for a few weeks).  A & B's tutorial is over.  We have finished our math book, much to the delight of both teacher and students.  Instead of decimals and fractions, we are spending our time reading a classic book together and planning a family trip to Philadelphia.  The laundry is oh-so-momentarily done.  The weather is lovely and beckoning and I can't wait for summer to arrive with its gifts of time at the lake, sleeping in and Fun Jar activities.

Last week, as I was still feeling rocked by busy-ness, I went to my Wednesday evening Lectio Divina group.  While there, we read and contemplated the Mary and Martha passage in Luke.  I was struck by both my desire to be Mary (who sits at Jesus' feet instead of helping her sister) and my need to be Martha (who gets busy hosting Jesus and his disciples).  At this season in my life, I can't completely forsake either of these parts of myself.  The only wisdom I saw as I prayed was that there is great blessing in listening to my own heart.  It is a gift to myself and my family when I do what needs to be done but stop for rest and rejuvenation.  And the only way to know when one activity should yield to the other is to listen to what my heart is saying and go where it is leading me.

I can't promise there won't be another lapse in blogging - or in my thinking - or in my laundry processing.  In fact, I'm pretty sure those lapses will occur again.  But I hope I'll feel the freedom to stay in the moment and let my knowledge of my lapses slip through my fingers like grains of sand instead of smacking me in the face with shame.  Because we all make errors - we just don't have to let them define us.

FEAR

: to be afraid or apprehensive

Our first full week of home school ended on Friday.  These first five days stirred up many of my fears for the upcoming year.  Fear of B pushing every boundary, as I know she is inclined to do.  Fear of the ensuing conflict when I enforce boundaries and help her re-formulate what it means to learn.  Fear that I am not up to the task of dividing my teaching time and talents (which I freely admit are few to begin with).  Fear that B will hate homeschooling.  Fear that this year will be an unmitigated failure.  Can you tell the week did not go well?  Tears on 3 out of 5 days is not what I was hoping for.  I knew the adjustment would be hard.  I just didn't know it would be this difficult.

On our way to church today, I remembered the single blog post that I'd written in Tobago and never posted.  Aptly enough, it dealt with fear - and conquering it.  Here's what I wrote back on August 3rd.

Today I stood up to fear, but let shame beat me.

On day 3 of our Tobago experience, we opted for a tour.  Our plan was to snorkel, ride a glass bottomed boat and tour the old English fort, Fort King George.  I had read in our guidebook that you could drive all the way around Tobago in four hours, but that you would never want to do so.  I found this statement a bit puzzling until I spent an hour and a half riding in the back of a sedan as we sped along the coast, navigating switchback after switchback as we made our way from one end of the island to another.  We passed numerous villages along the way, but were rarely out of sight of the ocean.  The Tobagonian winding way reminded me of what my mother said about a road in my own hometown, "You have to wonder why they wanted the road as close as possible to the water every inch of the way."  I did wonder that today - more than once.

We all four arrives in Speyside a bit nauseous and more than ready to be out of the car.  I'm not sure any of us envisioned a boat ride as the ideal solution for our ill-treated equilibrium.  Yet after 10 minutes or so to change, we stepped aboard a boat for what would be my first snorkeling experience.

The friends with us had each snorkeled before - not extensively, but a time or two.  J and I were novices, but I (arrogantly?) thought it sounded rather easy - breathe through a tube and look through a mask.  How hard could it be?  I grew up near the water (hence the aforementioned winding beach roads) and I'm a fairly confident, if not consistent, swimmer.

I listened as the guides explained how to put our masks on.  I either wasn't listening or missed altogether the explanation of how to actually breathe without inhaling salt water.  So my first attempt yielded a mouthful of brine and a skittish me.  After asking for a bit of help, I was able to do it, but only when I pushed past the fear that rose up every single time I needed to put my face down into the water.  I tried to minimize the need for this by staying in position with my face immersed, but it's impossible to see where you are when looking straight down into the water.  So I needed to occasionally look up - to see where I was in relation to the boat, to locate J, T and M, to decide whether I re-orient.  Every time I wanted to go back to snorkeling after a short break above water, a bit of fear would bubble up inside me - fear that I wouldn't be able to breathe, that my mask would full with water, that I wouldn't be biting the mouthpiece hard enough to keep my mouth from flooding.

I would steel myself and push past the fear and put my face down.  Then I would focus on the comforting sound of my own breathing and its rhythm - a slow inhale, a slow exhale - echoing in my ears to the exclusion of all else.  It calmed me and I was able to focus on the coral, the fish and the sea life.

We only snorkeled at the first stop for a few minutes before heading to another location near a large reef with several types of coral.  I did better on our second outing, but still had to push past fear to put my face in and get started.  I did it anyway and was proud of myself that I didn't let the fear stop me.

There are things for me to hold on to and remember from this.  First and foremost, that I can choose to let fear keep me from some really great experiences or I can choose to reach for the experience in spite of the fear.  I also think it's telling that (as I reference in the first sentence, but never got around to explaining) I fought the fear, but I let shame win.

After snorkeling, we stopped at Argyle Falls.  We hiked through the rain forest and reached a lovely waterfall.  The guide didn't offer to hike up the falls with us, but pointed the way for those interested.  J, T and M perked up immediately.  I, on the other hand, had been slipping and sliding my way over wet rocks with a camera in one hand and my balance compromised and I felt defeated before I even thought about hiking up two levels.  It didn't help my shame that I was by far the least athletic of our quartet.  I was embarrassed and felt I'd hold the others back.  Without so much as a second thought, I encouraged the other three to go ahead without me.  They had a great time and came down satisfied and soaked - having been caught in a surprise rainfall in the rainforest.

The lesson here?  I feel fear as an invasive presence - and I can push through the barriers it puts in front of me.  Shame, on the other hand, is so much a constant companion that I often don't even realize until after the fact that I've let go of the driving wheel and put shame in charge.

I don't want to let shame keep me from doing my best to teach B - even when she throws some curveballs at me.  (Last week, she complained that I should not workout during the day because teachers don't do that.)  I think I can push past my fear that our year will fail.  But I'll have to be far more vigilant to recognize shame's insidious presence, whispering in my ear at every turn, sabotaging me before I ever start.