"In the Loop"
Minnesota Public Radio
Throw my name into Google and you’d believe I’m an authority on home,
yard and garden care. See - I’m a freelance writer and I wrote this story
called “First Aid for your Lawn, Remedies for your Hurtin’ Turf.” Then -it
snowballed. Magazines that previously wouldn’t reply to my story ideas
were now phoning me. And before I knew it, I’m writing a trail of do-it-
yourself articles for a national magazine. 1.2 million readers are learning
how to bend rebar into a garden trellis, build a closet organizer out of a
sheet and half of oak veneer plywood and throw that perfect corn roast –
from me.
Online I come off as some great Fix-it guru with the flair of Martha Stewart,
but I prefer to think myself more a Carrie Bradshaw ala Sex in the City. We’
re both wavy hair writers, have predominant noses and write about
ballcocks and screws – though I’m plainly more PBS, less HBO.
But here’s the cold truth, despite my stories on lavatory faucet repair and
do-it-yourself mosaic tile planters, I’m not all that handy – or crafty, or even
a good cook. If it weren’t for an army of behind-the-scene experts
coaching me along, there’d be no articles. In fact, and I hate to admit this, I
had a leaky shower for the better part of a year. And we’re not talking
some slow trickler either. This gusher was contributing to a dinosaur-sized
carbon footprint threatening to crush us all. Finally, my husband paid
someone to fix it.
So while my online status feels disingenuous, it’s also entirely heady -and
fun. I get to go to photo shoots and prop shopping, --but if I were in danger
of becoming smug from any this - there’s always my real life to bring me
down to size. I’m a mostly stay-at-home parent – or as I like to say – a
“surface wiper” – nose, mouth, bottom, highchair, counter, repeat – and it’
s a damn humbling job.
There’s been some true lows –like the difficult period when my infant child
stopped gaining weight. First her height and weight percentiles flat-lined,
then dipped and then she fell off the graph altogether. It got worse.
Our baby was diagnosed with a condition called “Failure to Thrive” –
Failure to Thrive? How can I not feel bad about this? The diagnosis has
the word ‘failure’ right in it? The situation bottomed out when a medical
professional suggested I may be starving my child - on purpose.
I started to write about it, just to cope. I poured it all into a piece called,
Your Mama's a Failure and You ain't Thriving. It lived on my computer hard
drive for a long time – a few years, actually. I wasn’t quite ready to roll that
whole “suspected of child neglect” thing into my image – on or offline. But
friends convinced me it was a story to be shared. I sent it to some editors,
threw it on my website and it got picked up by a few blogs and magazines.
And that’s when the emails started. They’re time-stamped the dead of
night, from parents going through the same stuff. And while I can’t fix their
problems, they seem relieved to connect with someone who has walked
through this same, dark tunnel and emerged on the other side -humor
intact. They don’t care if I can make a centerpiece out of shucked corn
leaves or whether or not I fix my own shower. They’re struggling surfaces
wipers like me and our connection is a potent one.
So if sharing my genuinely imperfect self online becomes a shiny glint of
something to those panning the data stream late night looking for answers
- then I guess I’m willing to take the Google hit for it.
