the embarrassing elevator

Years ago, I took Frances and Gabriel to swimming lessons with a relentlessly encouraging teacher in the too-warm waters of an indoor hotel swimming pool. She herself was ah-MAY-zing, a delight to watch in action, and ceremoniously presented each and every child, no matter their performance, with a personalized gummy candy prize after each lesson.

...And for the person who did the best dolphin kicks and put her face under the water and was so, so brave? A DOLPHIN GUMMY!!

And all the kids, criers included, just freakin' loved it.

Every week we'd trudge through the lobby, or rather I would trudge - laden with towels and goggles and dry clothes - while the children would dash ahead, past the clear plastic case of sad-looking Otis Spunkmeyer cookies on the front desk (having already asked about them and already heard they're just for hotel guests countless times), in a race to the elevator to be the first to press the button.

I don't know how it started, but around that time I taught them how to sing/chant hey Frances, it's your birthday, not for real though, just for play play and it tickled them to no end. Somehow the goal became to sing it with as many of our names as we could in the time it took the elevator to descend from the lobby to the pool level. And sometimes I would do the running man or the roger rabbit for them while we sang. Or a kind of hip hop Axl Rose impersonation. And then they would join me, doing their own crazy dances.

So we called it The Embarrassing Elevator. As soon as the doors closed, we broke out into wild song and dance, acting like joyful lunatics, but the moment the doors parted to open, we had to compose ourselves. Quick! Return to normal. Because it would be really embarrassing if anyone else saw us. Our behavior was strictly for the hermetically sealed world of the elevator.

But it was really, really fun. They cracked me up. We let something wild and real loose in that little container.

Over the past few weeks I've had occasion to listen to Terry Gross interview Mary Karr and Lena Dunham. She asked them both about oversharing. When does a person cross that line? Both of them talked about protecting the privacy of other people. Well, sure. That part is easy. (Lena Dunham also observed the gendered nature of the "TMI" accusation. Men are brave for sharing something difficult and personal; women are just oversharing. I thought that was  pretty astute.)

But neither person really got to the heart of it. Is there a problem with writing about oneself in a personal way? I want to say absolutely not, especially given the nature of my blog...but. But why do we roll our eyes? Why does the memoir as genre seem so annoying sometimes?

I have childhood memories of feeling frustrated, downright furious, about the impossibility of making the sentences I formed in my journal match up to the intensity and confusion of whatever it was I was feeling at the time. Nine year old Meagan simply could not do justice, at least not via the written word, to the emotional realities of fourth grade. But I really, really wanted to. I wanted my language to link up and firmly connect to my inner world. Yet it always seemed to fall short.

Because for whatever reason, authenticity was (and is) a value, and I thought I might embody it by sharing the brilliant mess of my feelings and thoughts with others. Only connect, says Mr. Emerson in A Room with a View. And how to connect? Through some kind of honest expression of, and receptivity to, what matters.

I've been keeping family and friends abreast of Mike's experience with his cancer treatment online, and I've written about how crappy it is to deal with cancer here. I love to post photos of the kids on Facebook. Is it oversharing? Is it too much? Should I cultivate just a little bit of good old fashioned restraint? Sometimes I wonder, and I don't have an answer - though deep down my intuition says it's fine. It's hard to write about what is happening to my family, but it helps me bridge the gulf between this strange reality and the rest of my world.

This blog is my embarrassing elevator. I want to dance and sing, exuberantly. I want to tell you about all of the things that a person waiting for the elevator doors to open on the pool level would never, ever see: the arc of drips left on the carpet from when I whisked a peeing Beatrice up the stairs last night, my voice off key, singing along with Hank Williams in the car, the crazy dance I do while Gabriel practices the piano to make Bea laugh, my tendency to anxiously eat Halloween candy after the children are in bed, the heartbreak I feel looking at the jewel-like red maple leaves littering my front lawn.

I want to share my singular weirdness with you, so that you might do the same with me. And so that there might be just a little more truth and beauty in the world, some clarity in all this muddle. Only connect.