The Censor And The Sea

"My" long swim beach

Some people enjoy long runs.  I don’t.  I enjoy long swims.  Fortunately for me I live on a beach and get to swim back and forth from ocean post to ocean post for a couple of miles each weekend.  Sometimes I swim twice in a weekend. I don’t get bored.  I hear my breath.  I look at the fish.  I search for stuff in the sea grass bed below me.  There is a sense of oneness with nature.  Of peace. Of calm.  And I love it. It is swimming that I find my voice, I work out situations, I meditate and I “write” my blog posts or at least  I come up with a story to tell. 

Today I thought about my grandmother Daisy, now 94, who has written on her journal every single day since she was fifteen years old.  When she left Cuba, her diaries where the one thing she made sure she got out.  To my knowledge she has never let anyone read them.  As she explains it, she writes events as she sees it at the moment, and at some moments she may be upset at someone and she wants to feel the liberty of writing about it.  She would feel bad if years later, someone read something they didn’t like or agree with and get upset.  She is afraid of what others might think of her given what she wrote.  But imagine, a whole lifetime is documented every single day.  World wars, civil wars, births, deaths, and family dramas all documented through the eyes of a single person.  She says she wants her diaries burned once she passes away.  I sincerely doubt anyone will let that happen.  Daisy censors herself.

I began blogging because I love writing and hadn’t done it in a long time.  I thought I wanted to get back to it and if I made a “public” commitment to writing then the chances of my keeping it up would be greater than if my stories stayed private.  Putting up the first post was interesting.  I was concerned about what someone out there would think.  I thought “I can’t write about this or that because so and so will think something or other”.  I was afraid of hurting someone and of being judged.  My husband Joe encourages me.  He wisely reminds me there will always be people out there that won’t like me or what I write regardless of what I do.  There will always be critics.  So what?  There will always be people that I don’t like nor do I like what they write.  I am also a critic:  one with nothing to hide.  I let go of much of that initial fear and while swimming I discovered a list of fun stories to share.   Mostly about how my experiences in my youth, and the many mistakes that came with it, has helped me become who I am today.  How the past shapes the future.  How I unconsciously try to either relive or run away from the past.  Deep, literary genius stuff.

So when someone who cares about me suggested I think twice about what I write I got stumped.  After all, this person pointed out, I am a teacher in a small community and still represent the school … even if in my blog.  Let’s say I write about something crazy I did in high school. We have all done at least one crazy thing in high school, but a parent at my school might read it and judge “how can someone like that be teaching children, especially at a Christian school”.  I get it.  I understand.  But I don’t like it.  As I began talking more about this I heard teachers at the public school cannot have Facebook pages, or colleges see kids Facebook pages and that influences admissions, and even employers asking for Facebook passwords from potential employees to see what is behind the private settings.  What the heck!  (notice my constraint in that exclamation!) That is crazy.  But from what I understand it really does happen. 

Now all of a sudden, that super funny story about when my sister Bia and I were backpacking in Europe during the summer of 1990 … is no longer suitable for my blog.  Or that one, or that other one, because to be on the safe side I have to stick to parenting stories.  I can’t go wrong with that.  And although I love my children more than anything, there is more to me than being a mom.  Or let’s say, the mom I am today is shaped by a whole slew of stories that someone else may deem inappropriate.  My mistakes and mishaps were mine and I learned from them.  To pretend I am a holier than thou seems fake, and if I have to be fake then I might as well write fiction.  Not that there is anything wrong with fiction, it’s just not what I wanted to do when I started my humble blog.  Or to be private and safe, I could write a journal, like my grandmother.  I could even write under a pseudonym to be private since then no one would read it at all given that most of my readers are my friends. 

So I am stuck.  Stuck because there are people out there who judge others instead of looking at themselves.  Because it is easier to see how someone is unfit to do something whether it is going to college, getting a job, or being a teacher, instead of looking at what really causes their upset.  Because someone’s moral standards might be so high that no one, at least no one who is honest with themselves and with the world, will ever be able to meet them.

And for the hour and a half that I swam this morning looking at the ocean floor I thought of tons of anecdotes and am not able to write about any of them.  Sure I will be able to write them later … I could probably figure out a politically correct way of telling the same story with less details.  Yet for today, the story that kept creeping into my thoughts as I blew bubbles underwater is the one I am writing now. This one, about the lack of a more appropriate one.

With Felipe after today's long swim