Ma’am is a word thrown around here in the South like syrup at a Waffle House. I’m not a fan. It fits like a high school letterman’s jacket after forty years and an extra hundred pounds. I repel it, really. So when a peer, a native and respectable Southerner, says it, I’ve gone from inwardly cringing to externally trying to shut it down. Without any luck.
“Ma’am?” my coach friend Katie said as we were taking the field for practice. Not hearing what I said, “Ma’am” was used in the place of what, to encourage me to repeat the question.
“I’m not from here. It’s just Jaclynn where I’m from.”
Her laughing reply doubled back at me, as she tossed a “Well, I am” over her shoulder at me.
Ugh. A stalemate. For now.
It’s 8:24 p.m., and Evelyn’s uneaten dinner was just shoveled down. I delighted in thawing the thick halibut steak, salmon, and smoked salmon my Dad flew cross-country to us. Once or twice a year, he takes a chartered trip to Alaska with friends, and being a receiver of the fruits of his labor is something I appreciate even more now that I’m not a sitcom’s-length drive away from him.
It was lively here earlier tonight. With Dave’s brother, wife, and kids, along with Dave, Evelyn, and me, we sat for over an hour at the dining room table.
I was calmer tonight. I’ve been calmer. Often, I’m in my head at these functions. For some reason, the pressure I put on myself has lessened. Like, a lot.
The difference is as noticeable as flooring the gas pedal to setting the car to cruise.
I was cruising.
I both welcomed and winced at the reminder from Maria that, “How about we not do tit for tat but appreciate and accept what’s given,” regarding my comment about tonight’s dinner being repayment for us inviting ourselves over for hamburger dinners three nights ago.
But who would I be if I didn’t owe, wasn’t in debt, didn’t hold in my mind the weight of who and what and where I need to repay?
Less stressed, that’s for sure.
It seems wherever I look, whatever I’ve allotted for stress, has been less. My best guess is the permission to be me. To own the quirks I bring to the day. To allow others theirs. To see how those quirks do-si-do and jig a square dance together.
I see myself pulling out of a moment, and I wonder, “Why?”
I trust that the reaction is showing me something. Something I don’t understand, perhaps?
That curiosity is such a soft spot to be. To wonder, to contemplate, to exist in a space without a next demand or expectation.
Did I mention I resigned from my job, that one where I rushed? That must have something to do with all this.
Because before, there’d be a hundred different ways that energy would whoosh in, raise the stakes, and the pressure’d be on.
I challenged it one night.
After a late session, and having not written a blog, I felt the panic. The rush.
I have to write! I thought.
Have to?
Do I?
At any cost?
The unformed clay in my hand—the more I held it, the more I felt the rush without substance, the more it formed. And formed. And formed.
And eventually, the answer was clear.
I will not write like that.
What a great boundary, right? All I can say is it felt like permission for my all-too-achy body to be laid in the cup of the gentlest hand, and just be.
Man, I hate saying goodbye. But it’s late, the chickens need to be put up, and I’d like a few minutes to get back into reading my latest book club book, a Stephen King one called Joyland. Not his usual horror, I hear, rather a mystery. I’m only 6% in, and I’m already sitting with a corn pipe in my mouth wondering whodunnit.
Y’all take care out there.
Love, Jaclynn (not Ma’am)
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