Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under …married life | why i write…

During a recent interview for The Writer Magazine, short story writer, Antonya Nelson, also dubbed, “…master of domestic drama…” received the received the statement, “...your work focuses on family-centered problems. Sue Miller has said men used to light out for the territories, but that ‘home’ is the new frontier.”

To the interviewer, Sarah Anne Johnson’s question, “Do you agree?” Nelson responded, “I write about families because that’s what I know. I’m very glad other writers are writing about other things and places, adventures abroad, wars and plagues and science and zombies. But what I know intimately, what I can report on honestly, what I think about endlessly, is the relations among people who are attached to one another helplessly by faithfulness and need, as well as wrestling a contrary urge to be individuals. Family dramas are always positing the self vs. community, private vs. the public, and most importantly, the head vs. the heart.”
–A Gift for the Short Form, by Sarah Anne Johnson, The Writer Magazine, September 2010

Reading this I knew immediately that Antonya Nelson was someone whose work I needed to start reading, not simply and so much from my perspective as a writer, but as a person who loves reading about families working it out, trying to work it out, sometimes, and oftentimes failing to work it out.

I am also a writer, who as a wife of 28 years and mother of 3, ages 11, 18, and 23, continually ponders and explores the nature of the marriage relationship, connections that spin and sprout from this union and how ripples in this union spread to those interactions of family members surrounding them. Read the rest of this entry…

Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under Articles and Essays, Why Do I Write & What Is My Process

Teaching in the NYC Public Schools was not only gratifying but also meaningful. Working with students in grades one through six for the first part of my career.

My Principal felt that I had a special talent and expertise when working with students in learning difficulties and encouraged me to get my second Master’s in Reading and Learning Disabilities. I am glad that I did. The next 19 years I worked as the Reading Specialist and then Staff Developer in both reading and writing.

The best part is I worked in the same school all of those years and the children and parents became part of my extended family.

I taught children from other countries and helped them learn to read, understand our language and excel in school. Before leaving, my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I was the Dean of Discipline and helped create a Peer Mediation Program in my school.

Freedom of expression is important, and after retiring from teaching, I realized that there were many new things I could learn to do. I love writing because it allows me to express my true feelings about any subject I choose. Read the rest of this entry…

•August 8, 2010 • Leave a Comment (Edit)

Khyentse Rinpoche writes in the commentary, “Instead of being convinced that there is a self-entity, we realize that self is a mere concept.“

His words immediately drew me in.

A psychotherapist, I am forever pondering notions of self and other, phenomena, as Khyentse Rinpoche urges are but constructions of the mind in it, and our feeble efforts to understand and navigate the world, life and loving.
But there I go again, linking the mind, my thoughts and feelings to me, and who I really am.

Khyentse’s commentary, listed in the Summer 2010 Issue of the Buddhist Review, Tricycle, followed a brief article by Jakob Leschly, wherein Leschly describes his 16-year experience, starting in 1975, of studying with Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche along with many others who were students of the meditation master.

Master Khyentse’s axiom on the our obsession with self as an entity separate from others are a balm that both soothes and grates on our nerves and fears reaching into and rooted in our deepest anxieties. It is those, rather these, internal worries that both divide and link us as humans.

I wonder what would happen if we could be more open about what frightens us the most, haunts our securities, hunts down our egos with threats of destroying us, this notion of self that stands between us and them, me and you, self and other.

My soon-to-be released novel, The House, displays the protagonist, a wife, whose husband she was divorcing does this when learning that he is dying of cancer.

As a wife these ponderings cut to the thick of what I think marriage is all about–self and other and the battle to become one in body and spirit, soul and mind.

In a culture such as America where the notion of and individual self stands head and shoulders above all other pursuits, even that most sacred of happiness, I often wonder if this is why the divorce rate stands enormously tall, or perhaps we at least find the act of remaining in and committed to relationship almost repulsive.

Words like, …strong…, and …independent.., combined with phrases such as …I felt crowded in, needed my space…, and/or …I don’t want to become too dependent or weak…, allude to the desire to see ourselves as strong through the ability to divide and separate ourselves from another, and deny our need for intimacies that but for relationship with other we will not experience.

The need to stand firm and strong propels us to cut ourselves from the very parts of who we are.

Isolation breeds not only further isolation, and loneliness, but also ignorance of who we truly are, the ground of being that lies beneath the aggregates of our human organs encapsulated in the flesh of our body swirling in the more ethereal phenomena of thoughts and feelings that give us this elusive and illusionary sense of self.

When in meditation and contemplating in the midst of fleeting thoughts and the ebbs and flows of the vicissitudes of emotions rising and falling, who this being called Anjuelle is and the meaning and purpose of my life and living beyond buying, spending, working and toiling at activities wrapped in various sheaths of impermanence, I must always fall back upon my experiences of being both a wife and friend to my husband, a companion who promised in our vows, my promise, to serve faithfully and unto death as a helpmate and lover.

I can do no other.

Any less would abdicate myself from what stands at the center of my heart’s desires, the path on which my soul yearns not simply to tread but immerse my life and living in–that of losing my ego, this sense of separateness that divides both me and others from the phenomena of my existence.

To embrace impermanence and the transitory nature of this life we must hold onto what is real and substantive.

For me these are life, death, and the wheel of continual change, and at the center of which stand love and everlasting compassion and respect for those who have stepped from among the trees of other and for no explainable reason loved and adored us.

One day it was May 31st and our middle was finishing what had been their eleventh grade year–they were a high school junior–and two days later we were listening to a message left by the school photographer stating that senior pictures would be made the following week and leaving the date and time our child was to be photographed in their cap and gown.

The previous week our eldest, a graduate student, had left for Brussels, Belgium three days after turning in spring semester papers.

They would be interning 8 weeks at the European Parliament as an assistant to a Member of Parliament from a former Eastern Block country.

Three weeks to the afternoon I stood watching the photographer snap senior pictures of our middle, I boarded a flight to Brussels with out youngest.

The previous school year had been crazy to say the least. I had not spent enough time with the baby of our family. I needed to get re-acquainted with our pre-adoloescent, soon to be teenager.

Time flies when you’re working for those you love.

Through all of this, I longed to run away with my husband.

Parenting takes a fair amount of money, patience, skill and nerves. It also takes an enormous amount of time. We do not usually borrow that time from work, but instead from ourselves and our spouses.

For certain, I do not regret having children.

And while I have often wished to have accomplished more in the way of my passions–writing and abstract painting–I will never truly regret marrying.

My husband and I celebrated our 28th anniversary of marriage in this summer. I had arrived in Belgium five days earlier.

On the afternoon we left for Brussels the card I had purchased for my husband lay in the bag from the store where I had purchased it.

As our plane lifted from the runway I thought of it, unsigned, my plans for inscribing it with a note and placing it under his pillow, forgotten in the rush of leaving.

I wasn’t a horrible wife, only a harried one trying to be a good mother and at times feeling like I had failed at both.

On arriving at our hotel in Brussels 17 hours later and very tired, I slept while our eldest took my over tired and wired youngest out for dinner.

Upon awakening I settled myself, ate breakfast, read The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times’ version for those abroad and only able to decipher English.

And then I had an idea.

I then returned to my room. Our youngest was still sleep.

As she lay beside me, I turned on my trusty computer, and in a ms document, wrote all I had intended to say to my husband in the anniversary card.

Searching through Flickr I found a flower with petals that actually lilted. I pasted the flower on the document, wound my words around it and forwarded it to my husband in an e-mail.

On instructing him how to open the new e-mail account I had set up for him, he was pleasantly surprised to see I had not forgotten the day we tied the knot.

“Wow, this is nice. How’d you do it?” he said from over 10,000 miles away.

I explained. And he expressed further awe.

This is marriage–a string of hopes not always fulfilled in ways that we would like, but chocked full of attempts that sometimes achieve more than our initial plans had hoped.

Experiencing love, unadulterated, unconditional, and freely given soothes us in places long hardened and crusted over time by insults and wounds inflicted in the flesh and to our character and emotions.

Love and acceptance despite and because of who we are, faults, shortcomings, warts and all exhumes not only our previous injuries, but lifts our vulnerabilities to the surface.

The frightened girls and boys that our hard exteriors have hidden over the years are summoned forth.

We descend to our knees in the face of an eternal truth.

We all need and crave love.

Without it we grow stale and hard-hearted, hating and despising not only the world around us, but most poignantly and sadly, ourselves.

Assailed by the torrents of tight finances and too little time spent with each other due to the demands of work and responsibilities to family of origin, never mind our culture’s obsession with youth and ever present call to work out, exercise, meditate and better ourselves, it is a wonder we even consider the possibility of marrying.

Once bound in matrimony by either the laws of our residence or that along with our religious beliefs, we resort to the above and start down the path of affairs with those aspects of ourselves that we refuse to bring into the marriage.

Infidelity exists both in the flesh and in the heart. The truth for most of use lies in the latter. Unable to love and accept ourselves as we are, we refuse and continually avoid beholding our reflection in the eyes of our Beloved.

What would it mean to see who we are, as we are in the reflection of our husband or wife’s eyes?

I am my Beloved; my Beloved is mine. (Song of Solomon/Song of Songs, 6:3)

Are we so awful that no possibility exists for self-acceptance?

Or is it the pursuit of perfection that blinds us to the beauty of the imperfection that not only  makes us human and whole, but also opens the door to transformation?

The dark blots of failures and what we most hate about ourselves give us character. The jagged edges of character and personality provide a rack or handle upon which to catch the love and adoration of another.

Who wants to be married to a deity all perfect and excellent?

Most often what draws us to another is the weakness and human frailty we see in them, but that reflects which we loathe in ourselves.

Offering our love we seek to heal not just them, but to transform ourselves.

And when they return the favor, and love us back?

What then?

Or perhaps we seek healing in the arms of another, seeing ourselves as broken and destroyed we surmise that by attaching ourselves to the all perfect person of The Other they will save us.

But what if in joining our weak selves to them we strengthen them?

What if in loving us they truly bring forth our beauty, our perfect qualities, all that we have abandoned and relinquished hope of ever seeing in ourselves?

What if they recognize the humanity in us and love us as we are, something we have never done or envisioned doing, or that we even could?

Marriage is a rocky road, one of give and take, holding and relinquishing, standing and kneeling, conviction and surrender.

Marianne Williamson sums up our greatest challenge that of realizing that we are lovable in this poem.

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
 but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, 
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking 
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
 our presence automatically liberates others.

~Nelson Mandela
Last Modified by Ryan Keeling Oct. 29, 2005

My novel, “The House,” chronicles the experience of a woman, Anna Manning, during the last 3 months of her marriage wherein her husband, Edward, has withheld aspects of his true nature from. Throughout their nearly thirty-three years of marriage has been unfaithful Edward, involved in 3 longstanding affairs of which Anna knew.

These affairs, horrible as they were stemmed from vulnerabilities and emotional injuries rooted in Edward’s childhood, and of which he never discussed with Anna.

Much of his behavior during the last three months of their marriage, during which he is dying, indicates he has never discussed these matters of childhood with anyone.

Beyond acknowledging and making it clear that he sincerely regrets his behavior through the marriage, Edward, says little of what he feels led him to be unfaithful.

In so many ways he cannot. Not until faced with Anna’s request for a divorce and then learning that he has interminable cancer, about which he never tells Anna–she discovers on her own–does Edward come to grips with an inner pain he has carried most of his life.

The only child of a poor, single mother who used drugs to carry her through life, Edward never knew his father, though he suspected the man’s identity, knowledge of which further enraged Edward.

A successful international realtor, Edward compensated for his losses, both material and emotional by creating financial wealth and maintaining Anna, in a lifestyle which Edward’s mother never experienced.

Despite not having to work and having her primary needs well attended to, Anna’s marriage lacked much of what the relationship with her mother from childhood to adulthood never touched encompassed.

The only child of a minister and his wife, Elena, Anna, much as in her marriage, never lacked for the primary needs of human existence. Anna’s family was solidly middle class.

In an effort to protect and cope, Anna became adept at hiding her true and authentic self. The role of wife and mother came easy to her. With little effort she gave to her and Edward’s four children the emotional nurturance that she never received from her mother.

This Edward both envied and loved.

During the last few weeks of Edward’s life, both reach out to each other and deeper within themselves and grasp aspects of their essential identities in an effort to create and present the other what their marriage never held.

To see and be seen.

The possibilities of doing and experiencing both exhilarate and frighten us.

What is it about looking into the eyes of another and not only seeing to the core of their soul, but to ours as well terrifies us so?

What is it about meeting weaknesses and vulnerabilities in another that land us in the center of our deepest fears, hopes, dreams and regrets?

How much of a marriage stands grounded on this ability to view the other at their best and their worst and in our response of comforting, we then reveal aspects we despise and wish to alter and modify about ourselves.

So much of my writing stands rooted in self-inquiry. I want to know myself, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

At times  it is easier to behold that which need modification, that those fragments that stand pristine and perfect in their own right.

And yet the basis for the experience seeing into myself, much of which I yield through my writing stands rooted in the relationship with my husband.

He is both my Muse and the lense through I behold not simply the other of him, but those aspects of myself too distant and brooding, hidden and tangled for me to grasp but for engagement with other.

Without him I would have not set of eyes in which to behold myself.

And it is in seeing myself, viewing all these knotted aspects that I am pushed, propelled, prodded and pulled into a dance choreographed by my marriage, but arranged and designed according to the music me.

Our 11th grader needed guidance on how to organize her study and tutoring sessions for her Chemistry and Algebra finals along with preparing an outline for her 3rd and thankfully, last term paper. And our youngest, having been home for the holiday in observance of honoring Cinco de Mayo, simply wanted to go out.

Having had a strenuous week of trying to play catch-up on my writing–I had spent last weekend helping our middle edit the first two term papers 12-15 pages each–I was scoured with fatigue.

Dinner with my husband at our favorite restaurant down by the water in Berkeley would have been a godsend.

To do that would mean leaving our elder children two home with our youngest. Like our youngest, the two elder siblings wanted a break before settling down to accomplish their tasks. And who could blame them. They’re good kids.

They have no desire to obtain their driver license to drive. “It’s too dangerous out there. You could kill someone and yourself too,” is their mantra. I couldn’t agree more.

Driving in California’s urban areas is not for the faint of heart nor the young and inexperienced.

Part and parcel to that means that part of my job as stay-at-home wife and mother also includes running a livery service if public transportation doesn’t reach where our children want to go.

This mall where they wanted to go, though quite safe, is not easily accessible by bus or subway.

As everyone’s needs and desires reached a quite, but substantive crescendo, my need to get away and have a few moments with my husband escalated.

As always when arriving home, he came to me. “How are you?” he said.

“I could cry. But I’m so tired I can’t.”

He left the study where I had been working, where I always work here at the computer typing. I’m a writer, an author.

“Wow! That’s really supportive.” I thought as he trailed through the doorway. So taken aback by his exit I did not notice him returning downstairs to the garage.

Like the strong woman I try to be, I returned to my writing.

Better get in as many words as possible before one of the kids returns with yet another worry, concern, or feeling greater angst in not having edged closer to achieving their goal.

On his return my husband approached the desk to which I was sitting, where I am now as I write, his hand outstretched and holding a white bag holding what seemed a box. “I was going to give this to you on Sunday. But since you’re having such a bad day, maybe this will cheer you.” Cautiously he smiled.

I laid the box in my lap upon removing it from the bag. Inside the box within the bag is an iPad. I burst into tears.

I have yet to open the box. I’ve been to busy.

Yesterday we attended a college fair gathering information for our middle who will become a high school senior upon completing final exams in three weeks.

School closes for the summer on May 27, 2010. The heat is on.

Our youngest has a science project due on May 17, 2010. Our eldest is scheduled to leave May 24, 2010 for an internship in Europe.

My novel, The House, is now ready for publication. I just need to send it to the printer.

I also need to open the box containing my iPad and synchronize it with my desktop computer.

For now, and until I have the time to do so, and actually forever, the gesture of my husband not only having purchased it but offering it to me when I felt most lost and despairing, feeling like a mother less child, will warm my heart and soul.

For all those who have chosen motherhood as a path in this life, I hope and pray you had a wonderful Mother’s Day–that you received a little bit of what we give each day–love and mothering.

I write about love, committed and constant, persevering and sustaining, which he has given me.

My stories and novels express what I know and have learned in relationship with my husband.

Love holds a most transforming power.

It dispenses hope beyond our wildest dreams.

In a culture where society has primed most of us for rejection, the experience of someone opening their heart and saying, ‘yes,’ to us, who we are and displaying affection frightens us terribly.

Love incites fear in hearts more so than rejection.

Where rejection provides the perfect excuse for us to grow angry and resentful, love melts away our reasons for despair and the need to complain and show condescension and express doubt.

Love reveals the thick defenses covering the wounds of our hearts and souls.

Love shows us how much we yearn for goodness and redemption. Love brings us alive, betrays our vulnerabilities and our need for intimacy.

Love makes us whole and in so doing exposes our inner child.

Many people, men and women, avoid intimacy as if it is a plague.

They refuse love in favor or relationships that carry the word “doomed” in every aspect.

The French word for sex, la petite mort, means the little death. Each time we truly make love either in the physical form or spiritual, a little of who we are dies.

I like to think that in the physical climax where souls merge that love, when present, transforms our doubts and hurts, deep seated resentments and shades of long standing despair into grace, mercy, joy and gratitude.

These are the vicissitudes of emotions, the various hues of  human experience I have undergone within the crucible of my marriage.

The affections my husband has expressed, the constancy of acceptance and commitment to me, not for what I do and have done, but who I am, the dimensions of which I have at many times and still loathe, has stripped me of the callouses hiding festering scars that found healing in the light of his love.

For this I am forever thankful, in this lifetime and those of the world to come.

The stories I write exemplify my gratitude to him and the divining movements of the universe that brought us together and bound our hearts and souls.

Though I haven’t always felt this way, presently I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.

I like being married. I like being a mother.

It’s hard work both as a wife and as a mother.

The challenges of motherhood are pretty generic. The ones I encounter as a wife have less to do with my husband. He’s great, loving, loyal, more than I could have ever expected.

At 49 I struggle with feeling alone, not as a mother, but more as a wife.

I wish I had more people with whom to relate, women like me, who love their husbands, believe in the institution of marriage despite all the naysayers and the terrible happenings with celebrities and people I know, who for myriad reasons have lost both their spouses and the hope in love and giving and the experience of receiving loyalty.

It’s sad when a person attributes a recent success and achievement to their spouse being at their back, such as Sandra Bullock did only to learn days later that that other person whom they loved–he and in many cases, she–was not really in their corner and had not been there in quite some time.

It is sad.

And yet this kind of occurrence has become commonplace.

With each incident like that which takes place I feel myself more of a minority in a culture where love and commitment to one person through the act of marriage has become less of what occurs and more of what people admire from a distance and seek to understand.

I suppose that’s why I write. To give myself company in the act of challenging the status quo that says, “No good deed goes unpunished–even in the act of marriage and with family.”

I believe in love. I also believe that it is hard to love–others and yourself–and even those who matter most–other and yourself.

How many times have we lashed out in anger at our spouse, not because she or he truly did something that was hateful or terribly wrong, but because we felt vulnerable?

Marriage is about vulnerability, accepting that it is inherent to the human condition and that it frightens us terribly.

And yet sharing our vulnerabilities, acknowledging that we have them propels us to seek partners with whom to share our lives, life long and possibly for eternity.

Without my husband having entered my life I would have remained lost.

Much of the truth I to which I have awakened has occurred within the confines of our marriage, not that I learned everything from him. Having a marriage, a family, someone in my corner has enabled me to open up to the uncertainties of life, see the dark spots within me and enter them.

Marriage saved me from myself.

Part and parcel to this taking place, this transformation, I had to know that I was lost.