Be Brave Friday: The Birthday Blizzard

I paint like a child. I know that.

I’m okay with it.

But I still have a hard time sharing paintings—sharing them feels raw and vulnerable for me in a way that words aren’t.

Which is why I do it.

It is almost my birthday. So, I’m going to share a story about my stepdad and an ancient birthday party of mine.

There was blizzard on the same day as my 11^th birthday party. It was a monster blizzard. The kind where everyone goes to the grocery store and buys bottled water and can goods and Allen’s Coffee Brandy and beer.

Things were bad.

My mom was pacing back and forth across our cramped kitchen’s linoleum floors as one mother after another called to cancel because of the road conditions, the wind, the snow billowing down.

The cabinets in that kitchen were old pine, so knotty that I’d use my fingers to draw faces in between the dark circles, connecting the blackness into eyes, a nose, a mouth, something less scary. I would have used a black magic marker to make those faces real if I could, but I wasn’t the type of kid who did that sort of thing. I was the type of kid who followed the rules, who hugged their friends, who cared about everyone’s feelings more than her own, trying desperately to fit in to a town that had exploded with wealth.

Everyone in Bedford was rich except us. You get used to that after awhile, but that doesn’t mean you’re ever cool with it. I couldn’t afford to ski with everyone. I couldn’t even afford to play softball.

We were different.

My mom wasn’t cool with it either and she always felt excluded and looked-down on.

My little hobbit dad built our ranch house sixteen years before I was born and back then our town was little and mostly all lower working class people. Tractor salesmen were a big deal. Truckers and mechanics like my dad were the norm. All the men volunteered at the fire department and everyone knew the three cops by name. My mom was the town clerk back then.

And then it changed. There was a bit of a tech bubble and all these people moved up from Massachusetts, building subdivisions filled with McMansions and wearing clothes that weren’t from K-Mart. We weren’t the norm anymore. We were below the norm by a lot. Property taxes rose. A recession happened. My mom worried that we’d have to sell the house because we couldn’t afford the taxes.

Spoiler: we did.

And when my parents divorced, we became poor even after my mom and stepdad married because although he was a contractor, he’d moved all the way from California to marry her, and he’d had to build up his business from scratch. When he died was when my Nana would get government cheese for us. Mom would take the giant blocks with a grimace and Nana would say, “But you love cheese. You work hard.”

But this isn’t about my nana. It isn’t even about property taxes. This is about my bonus dad.

On the blizzard day of my birthday party, his little green Toyota truck trundled up the hill towards the house, a Kermit-The-Frog-colored beacon in the billowing white snow. Mom joined me at the picture window, arms crossed over her chest, staring out at him trying to make it up the hill, failing as the truck slid backwards a bit, trying again.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she whispered.

“It’s okay,” I told her, but she knew I was lying.

Daddy parked the truck and started walking up the hill. She left me to meet him in the kitchen. I leaned my head against the cold pane of the window, listening. He stomped his boots free of the snow and then the whisperings started.

I didn’t need to listen. I knew she was telling him about the cancellations, how I actually cried, which I was horrified about and kind of embarrassed.

There was the gross sound of lips smacking against each other. Kissing. Muffled noises of secret conversations sounded just below my hearing capabilities.

Daddy came into the living room. His socks were stained from where snow leaked into his boots. The snow line on his pants went up almost to his knees. He held his arms open and I ran into them.

“Hey, Miss America, you doing okay?” He had a gruff voice from decades of cigarettes, and it was soft spoken. Old people had to lean in sometimes when he talked, which wasn’t much. He never talked much.

“I’m okay.” I lied again. It was my favorite lie.

He kissed the top of my head. “Your mom told me what’s going on.”

“Nobody can come.”

“I know, I heard.” He bent down and pulled the sock off one foot, exposing dark skin, wiggling toes. Then he moved to the other. “She’s going to make some phone calls and we’re going to see if those scaredy-cat moms will let me go get their girls and bring them here.”

“Really?” I squealed.

He handed me his wet socks and moved over to the couch. “Really. You get me some new socks, put those on the sink to dry and we have a deal okay?”

“Deal!”

About 15 minutes later, only one mother refused to let my dad pick up her daughter. Mom kissed his cheek, I gave him a great big hug and he ventured out into the storm, picking up five girls. They smooshed together in his truck and later he told me that they all chattered the entire time.

“I didn’t have to say anything.” He tucked me in the next night, after all the sleeping bags were rolled up, the presents tucked away, and the last of my yellow cake with chocolate frosting was being digested in a rumbling stomach.

The thing is he usually didn’t have to say anything. His love showed in everything he did. There’s a certain magic in that, in acting with love and confidence. In showing love in ways of actions.

When we have time to choose and make decisions, we often have a moment to think about our intent. Are we acting with love or because of fear?

Here’s a really interesting article about how our intentions and our fear often close us down to opportunity and happiness. We might be afraid to get hurt by loved ones or afraid of losing control over a work situation, so we keep information to ourselves, refuse to delegate, are guarded.

But if we let the fear control us, then we become that fear. We lose our ability to expand, to share our stories, to pick up little girls during a blizzard.

In a post on Psychology Today’s website, Nancy Collier speaks about ‘operating from love.’

I like this quote. It is Wise.

Operating from love is to set our own ego aside long enough to listen to the experience of the other, to be courageous enough to be willing to try and understand what the other person is experiencing, no matter how radically different it is from what we intended to happen, think happened, or believe was the cause of what happened. It is to have the strength of heart to understand and open our heart to what the pain is that the other is skillfully or unskillfully trying to express. A response (not reaction) that comes from love is listening to the other’s upset as if we were just ears hearing, ears alone, not ears attached to a head, attached to an ego, attached to an identity, attached to a person intent on remaining intact and unchanged.

Collier, LCSW, Rev

It would have been so much easier for my tired dad to leave those girls at their homes, for me not to have a birthday party. He had an out. There was a blizzard. He didn’t take that out though because he acted out of love. He made that decision.

In small and big ways, we have choices every day where we can listen to our intentions and understand why we do what we do. We can live from love. We can live from fear. But I think one is a lot better than the other.

So What Does It Mean to Live From Love?

To live from love not fear, on a practical level, is to shift from a goal of protecting our ego, being right, winning the argument, being not to blame, and move into actually being kind, being loving—in our actions. It is to be willing to stop proving that we’re a good person and actually be that good person—to be courageous enough to open our heart and be love even when our ego is screaming in fear.

Collier again

It sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? I hope we all can start moving forward in this journey with that intent. It requires being brave. I think it’s worth it. I think you’re worth it.

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