Returning to Source and Writing Again
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Returning to Source and Writing Again

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Write again, they are telling me. You must write, Traci. 

It’s the new theme: writing again.

The past twelve months have been excruciating. I am struggling.

It’s been a year of comings and goings from my life; intermittency like a suddenly thrown grenade blew up my peace of mind. It has been a year of travel, loss, loneliness, bad advice, uncertainty, sadness, emptiness, tough choices, betrayal, humiliation.

It has also been a year of joy: the birth of my beautiful grandson, deepening friendships, richer closeness with my sweet middle daughter. A lot of yoga! Books newly cherished. A beautiful place that has come into my consciousness as a home.

Change is afoot.

Write again, my husband says, as if that will erase everything that has passed between us. His eyes are soft and his voice is loving as he counsels me. Write again. He holds me often throughout the day.

His hands on my shoulders, my arms, my breasts, my belly help me. He is kind. And I am still struggling.

In every moment brims the fullness of the spiritual imperative: We are here to love, to learn, to work, and to play. We are here to choose love over fear.

Why then this heart ache?

For what reason did I come here? I’ve asked myself a thousand times over the last span of time.

What is the imperative that I am mindful of it?

How have I betrayed myself?

I suspect it’s the effort to answer these questions that will heal me. It’s the journey itself that will return me to Source–whatever the destination may be.

 

 

Snooty Rich Women Are Everywhere, Including New Zealand
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Snooty Rich Women Are Everywhere, Including New Zealand

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Snooty rich women are everywhere, including New Zealand

Places change but people don’t.

A recent trip to Wellington showed me the commonality of human traits, especially foibles. In a land where people pride themselves on being non-materialistic and friendly, I got to experience the same self-aggrandizing arrogance that I see in New York city.

Here in the Big Apple, my daughter attends an excellent school. Many of the students are the privileged scions of Masters of the Universe. Now, most of the kids are lovely people, and most of the parents are lovely and congenial. There are many kind, decent people who happen to be wealthy. Even enormously so.

And then there are the moms who’ve known me for the eight years since our children were in kindergarten together–and they still look at me every time they see me as if they’ve never met me before.

What makes them so special? It mystifies me.

An experience last fall illustrated this point. My daughter was doing a project with another girl at the girl’s house. I went to pick up my daughter. I stood in the entry foyer of the 20,000 square foot, marble-floored Park Avenue apartment, waiting. It became clear that the girls were finishing slowly. Reluctantly, the mom invited me in. She spent the next half-hour talking exclusively about herself. She didn’t pause in her self-recitation to ask one single question about me.

I walked out laughing, because, really, such enormous self-absorption is funny.

Cut to Wellington, New Zealand, where my husband worked for six months. Our daughter spent a month with him, attending school there. It was a great adventure for her to see how Kiwis live and to immerse herself in another culture for a month.

But people are people in all cultures.

My husband’s landlady had hosted my daughter every day for the month of August when she was there; she would climb 20 yards up the hill to their house and play with their daughter. The landlady and her husband, an enormously successful entrepreneur, hosted my husband for dinner twenty times. But when I arrived, they pretended I didn’t exist.

It is true that they, along with several other people in Wellington, were trying to break up our marriage. I overheard the husband on speakerphone dissing our marriage before we returned to New Zealand together for my husband to finish his work.

I spent some weeks with my husband in Wellington. No word from the rich folks up the hill who had been so inclusive to my daughter and my husband.

The last week, I bought a pastry and climbed the hill and introduced myself to the rich lady. I gave her the pastry and said, “I’d like to thank you for your kindness to my daughter and my husband.”

She spent the next fifteen minutes talking about herself.

I took my leave and climbed back down to the house my husband had rented, thinking I had found a snooty Park Avenue lady in Wellington, NZ.

I felt badly for my husband, because he had actually considered these people friends. Their treatment of me, his wife, proved that they weren’t. In the eyes of God and the law, he and I are one person. How people treat me is how they are treating him. He had a day of heart-ache about it. Then he let go of those snooty folks.

It is hurtful when people treat me badly. I feel pain and sadness when people are nasty to me.

Because of the 9000 mile separation, and because of other issues before he left to do the project, my husband and I had reached a dark place in our marriage. He had vocalized his upset to people in Wellington. In the short time he was there, he had reached out to many people and built a community for himself.

It was clear to me that his real friends were the people who welcomed me. The people who truly cared about him were the ones who said, “Fix your marriage. You’ve been nearly 20 years with your wife. You have a child with her.” These are the people who were able to take a nuanced view of what he said, the people mature enough to understand that there are two sides to every story. Those were the people who value marriage and who understand that a long marriage goes through long cycles, and that the imperative is to return to the marriage and to work at it until you fall back in love with your spouse.

It would have been wonderful–and I think correct–if the wealthy people up the hill had invited me for a drink within a few days of my arrival. It would have been kind and humane.

Of course, I know that how people treat me is a reflection of them, not of me. Their behavior reveals them. It’s not about me at all.

But I still felt hurt to be treated so shabbily. Wellington, New Zealand, left my heart with some scars that won’t heal quickly.

For the image for this blog piece, I have selected an image of myself. This was taken in Paris last year. A writing partner whom I love took this photo. It goes along with this post because in the picture, I am vulnerable.

From HuffPo: Review of ADDicted, A Sensitive Film About Adderall Abuse
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From HuffPo: Review of ADDicted, A Sensitive Film About Adderall Abuse

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This is my review of ADDicted, first posted on the Huffington Post.

In the way that synchronicity happens, I received an email about the film ADDicted one week after my middle daughter and I had discussed “performance enhancing drugs.”

My beautiful daughter, who is now a straight A student at college, was diagnosed with a Learning Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (LDNOS) in 8th grade. Her grades had dropped precipitously; her behavior was execrable. She was eventually diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin.

It was a long, twisty, agonizing road before my daughter’s journey led her to double-majoring at a well-regarded university. I’m fascinated with her study choices, which are highly intellectual. I’m proud of the responsible, mature young woman she’s become. But we had some moments of despair and heartache along the way.

I wondered what she thought of the medications she had been prescribed as a teen. She doesn’t take them now.

“So many college kids go around asking for Adderall,” she said. “I’m so glad I developed strategies for studying that don’t depend on performance enhancing drugs.”

She commented on the prevalence of Adderall use at college. “Kids who are not ADD take them to get through exams and papers,” she stated, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if everyone knew about Adderall use. She went on to tell me that part of the problem, for her, had been that she wasn’t interested in the classes she was assigned in high school. “Now I love my courses. I love what I’m studying.”

It made me smile. I’m not sure Latin is everyone’s cup of tea. I’m pretty sure she would have thrown a Latin book at me in 9th grade if I’d tried to get her to take it then. But now she’s acing it. She came to it authentically, through her own choices.

The pitch for the movie arrived in my inbox and I was intrigued because of our recent conversation.
The movie ADDicted, written and directed by Dan Jenski, dramatizes what my daughter had told me: college kids who aren’t diagnosed with ADD/ADHD try to score the drug in order to cope with the overwhelming stresses of exams, papers, and extracurricular obligations.

The protagonist is a young man negotiating personal and academic stressors. Drew is likable, relatable, engaging. He’s barely hanging on in the face of an overly full life and the demands of classwork, football, his girlfriend, and his ambitious and widowed mother.

A tough but fair-minded professor fails Drew’s paper on the basis of plagiarism, that most heinous of academic crimes. Drew pleads for a second chance and is granted one. Unfortunately, he entrusts this crucial paper to the girlfriend with whom he recently broke up. She’s desperate to win him back after betraying him. She snags some Adderall from him to get her through his paper and three others, though she is not diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Even with the enhancement, she fails to give him the paper on time. Drew is suspended and barred from playing football.

Drew faces his team and admits to his mistakes. His speech is a fine moment of taking ownership. There’s not a whiff of self-pity in this character, just an acknowledgment that he’d made poor choices and now the whole team must suffer the consequences. It’s a poignant moment that makes Drew even more sympathetic.

Drew’s ex-girlfriend isn’t the only person hitting him up for “Addies.” A teammate on the path to pro football begs some off him, as well. Drew the good and empathic friend, wanting his buddy to succeed, obliges.

Drew’s teammate fares well but the former girlfriend ultimately pays a steep price for using Adderall without a prescription. Note that the girlfriend did not suffer from ADD/ADHD, nor was there a doctor overseeing her use of Adderall. She prescribed herself by way of a stolen bottle.

Some viewers might take from this film a cautionary tale that warns against the use of ADD/ADHD medication altogether. However, that’s not the point of this sensitive, well-constructed story.
The point is that abuse of Adderall is common. It’s also dangerous. People who aren’t diagnosed with ADD/ADHD and who aren’t under the care of a physician should beware. These drugs are addictive, they have strong side effects, and they are very, very dangerous.

In the way it goes when you’ve raised a bunch of children in a city, I know kids who have been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, who are under the care of a physician, and who greatly benefit from Adderall and Ritalin. These drugs can truly help people who struggle with ADD/ADHD. Not every person with a learning disorder can do as my daughter has done and develop non-pharmaceutical strategies for succeeding at academic work.

In the end, Drew’s way out of his predicaments mirrored my daughter’s way out. He had to still himself, to turn within and to listen to his heart. Once he did that, he started making good choices.
I sent a draft of this piece to Dan Jenski, asking if he had any comments. He sent back a quote and it’s perspicacious enough that I’ll give it pride of place, punctuating my review of ADDicted at the end.

“I was almost put on Ritalin as a kid and was able to find my true calling without taking pills. If every child received a customized education where he/she got to choose their own path, at a point earlier than college, based on their individual wants and desires, there wouldn’t be an ADD/ADHD epidemic or the need for Adderall. These disorders exist because less and less people are fitting into an archaic, underfunded, one-size-fits-all education system. We need to let children lead the way with their education.”

review of ADDicted movie

In the HuffPost, International Conference in Shared Parenting 2017
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In the HuffPost, International Conference in Shared Parenting 2017

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International Conference Shared Parenting 2017

This week I took the train to Boston to attend the International Conference in Shared Parenting. This conference gathered together specialists in post-divorce child development from all over the world. I sat down with a very lovely Dr. Holstein to discuss the Conference, and I wrote about my experience in the HuffPost.

From my article:

…Despite advances in recognizing fathers’ fundamental rights to be equally involved in their children’s lives, the problem of not implementing that right continues within the legal system. At the same time, there’s a growing awareness that relegating one parent, whether father or mother, to second-class citizen parent status is not in the best interests of the child, when neither parent is actually abusive. There is a growing understanding that, post-separation, children need both parents to be fully present in their lives for optimal wholeness.

I sat down with Dr. Ned Holstein, the founder and chairman of the board of the National Parents Organization, at the International Conference on Shared Parenting in Boston. The National Parents Organization has a mission to preserve the bond between parents and children. To that end, at this conference, the world’s most renowned child development experts in the area of post-divorce parenting have gathered to share their research results. How do children fare with and without shared parenting post-divorce?…

“Court practices haven’t kept up with the growing research evidence on the benefits of shared parenting, so our intention was to gather all the world experts in one place at one time to compile the evidence that needs to be recognized as a basis for changing what our current practices are in the courts,” Dr. Holstein told me. “Based on the work of world experts at our conference today, ‘Best Interests of the Child’ means shared parenting for most children.”

Read the whole post here.

International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017

International Conference Shared Parenting

 

Chris Strickland’s Story: My Article in Parent Survival Magazine
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Chris Strickland’s Story: My Article in Parent Survival Magazine

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Chris Strickland’s Story

Chris Strickland is a lesbian mom in Mississippi who was a target parent for parental alienation. Her story was complicated by the fact that she wasn’t listed on the adoption papers for her older son nor on the birth certificate for her younger son. She and her partner married in Massachusetts, and their marriage wasn’t legal in Mississippi.

Chris got caught in the lag between marriage in one state and her marriage’s recognition in her home state, where she and her wife were raising their kids. Then her wife left her for a man.

In a few months, her wife moved with the kids and the new man, and Chris didn’t see her sons for almost fourteen months. The former wife told the kids to stop calling Chris “mom.”

Parental alienation is the severing of a child’s bonds with a parent by the other parent, and it is unutterably cruel. Dr. Amy Baker has done a lot of work in the subject and she says, “It’s when one parent gives the child permission to break the other parent’s heart.”

What results is a child who refuses, without good reason, to see a parent, called the target parent. If the child grudgingly sees the target parent, the target parent is, in the child’s mind, the lesser parent. The target parent’s feelings do not matter: the child has been trained to believe that. The child often is coldly cruel to the target parent.

Often the alienating parent is personality disordered: a narcissist, a borderline. Anyone who has worked with or studied these disorders knows how difficult they are to deal with.

Parental alienation isn’t an accident. The alienating parent uses a number of strategies to accomplish the divide between a parent and her beloved child. Amy Baker identifies 17 of them. It’s not just about badmouthing the target parent, and often an alienating parent can claim that they don’t do so. There are other, subtler forces at work, such as when the target parent is from a different ethnic, educational, or socio-economic group. To whit: “You dad isn’t Catholic like us,” or “Your mother didn’t go to college and isn’t French like us.” Alienating parents use identity against the target parents.

Alienating parents do whatever they can to destroy the target parent’s moral authority with their children. “Your mother’s rules don’t apply at my house,” is a classic line that an alienating father uses.

Parental alienation devastates the target parent. It does the same to the child, though the child probably won’t recognize it until he or she is much older–maybe not until his or her 30’s. Children who have been alienated this way often suffer from self esteem issues and terrible anxiety. The parentectomy she pursues to please the alienating parent leaves her scourged with anxiety, and the child doesn’t know that coming back into rightful relationship with the target parent is a crucial step in healing the anxiety.

I also wonder about a child’s relationships when they have been taught by the alienating parent that the target parent’s feelings don’t matter. This is a setup to create broader heartlessness and even narcissism in the child: other people exist only to serve the child, and other people’s needs don’t matter; when someone asks for their needs to be honored, the child sees them as a bad person.

I wrote about Chris Strickland because she was a target parent, and her complicated case took her all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Chris Strickland's story

Paranormal Romance Guild: Scamming Authors Who Pay in Good Faith
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Paranormal Romance Guild: Scamming Authors Who Pay in Good Faith

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Paranormal Romance Guild Scamming Authors

Note to authors who’ve paid for membership in the Paranormal Romance Guild: check to see if your reviews of the last few years are live on the site. If not, email the PRG.

Be aware that the board members of the PRG will launch a vicious personal attack against you if you point out that you paid for a service which they abruptly dropped without notification. Ask yourself if you really want to do business with a group whose idea of customer service lacks respect and courtesy and instead depends on ad hominem attacks.

**Update: The PRG board made a big fuss about how they are a volunteer organization. However, the Vice President is paid $400 per month. Did the PRG cut author services in order to pay the board? Is the board using the membership fees as their own private slush fund?**

I have been a member of the Paranormal Romance Guild for several years. As an author who is both traditionally and independently published, I seek always to publicize and promote my novels. This is imperative because I can write the best books in the world but if no one knows about my books, no one will buy them.

It isn’t always easy to promote a book. There are many book PR sites and companies that promise a lot and deliver little. I scour the internet for opportunities to introduce readers to my novels. Readers are usually glad to have found my books–I get a lot of good reviews online and I receive regular complimentary emails about my books. Anyone can check Amazon or my website to see what I mean.

So several years ago I discovered the Paranormal Romance Guild, probably through a book publicist. They started running reviews of my novels, especially my dystopian novels Fallen, Cold Light, Far Shore, and Blood Sky.

In 2011, a PRG reviewer submitted Fallen for a Reviewer’s Choice Award, and I rallied my family, friends, and readers to vote for Fallen. Fallen Won! Yay!

I started paying for membership to the site. It wasn’t a lot but it was something, and there were two tiers, and I budget carefully for book promotion. I bought the membership in good faith that my awards, books, and reviews would stay live. That’s what I’ve been paying for. I’ve been paying every year. I’ve been paying in good faith.

A month ago, the founding member of the PRG who was also a former board member and webmaster sent out a disturbing email. This email spoke of her experience of being unceremoniously dumped from the PRG, a book review site that she had helped to build.

She had devoted a great deal of time and energy to the PRG over several years and they arbitrarily dumped her.

Her email made me uneasy. Of course there were two sides to the story, but it seemed that she had been treated unfairly. I will copy her email to the bottom of this post.

Then a few days ago, I, a paying member of the PRG, discovered that the reviews of my award-winning books had been stripped from their new site.

I emailed to inquire and was told that this was a decision by the PRG. There was a lot of condescending hooey from the PRG in the emails that followed.

The bottom line is that the “new” Paranormal Romance Guild arbitrarily cut the reviews of my award-winning novels without even telling me that would happen–despite the fact that I am a paying member of several years.

This is a way to scam authors. It’s bait and switch: taking money and then suddenly changing the terms.

The Paranormal Romance Guild has behaved disgracefully.

***

Letter from the founding member dumped from the PRG:

Many of you know me fairly well by now. I am a founding member who helped create PRG 7+ years ago. I was webmaster, a former President & VP, and a board member, who worked all these years as though PRG was my 2nd job, even though for most of the time I was an unpaid volunteer. My largest fault has been that I work too hard and want things done right – because I believe that if we expect authors to pay for membership, they deserve a site that is done well and looks professional. I have taken great pride in all that I’ve done for PRG.

I have just been informed that I have been unceremoniously removed from my roles in the organization today. After 7 years of hard work (and friendship, I thought) I was not given a phone call for discussion of this major change, nor was the Board of Directors given opportunity to vote as they properly should have. This decision was made by President Kelly Abell & VP Fred Feeley because they have “decided to go in another direction”. I was not given an opportunity to speak on my own behalf about this important change and the Board was insulted by having this decision made for them as though they are incompetent for the roles they were elected to and their opinions are worthless. I did not even receive a professional email informing me of this executive decision until 10 hours after I was unexpectedly locked out of the PRG Reviewer’s Choice Award preparations I was working on for all of you. 

I have only ever wanted what was best for PRG. Our recent webhost problems were beyond my control, but I had prepared a new website and worked hard to ensure our members would experience minimum interruptions in service. A webhost change may ultimately be deemed necessary, but as elected WebMaster I had hoped to be part of the conversation and transition, rather than stepped over and kicked to the curb. Our elected Officers and Board Members are supposed to have opportunity to voice their opinions, and changes are supposed to be voted upon as a group – because we created a community founded upon group spirit. Please be aware that apparently, that is no longer the case in PRG.

I am disappointed that the organization I worked so hard to help create and grow over the years has so mishandled this transition. For all the times I dropped everything to quickly help members and co-workers with problems, or help with emergency site changes and review postings…for all the times I put my own writing career aside to help better PRG, this is an extremely unfair and cruel turn of events. In 7 years of emergencies and last minute projects, I have never let PRG down. However, PRG has let me down terribly. 

I have many wonderful memories from my time with PRG and have made great friendships that will continue on. I do not know what new direction The Paranormal Romance Guild will be taking in the future, but I wanted to let you all know that I will not be taking part in it, because for an organization to treat a hard working, loyal, founding member this way is disgraceful.