Eat, Pray, Love - and Leave

What does leaving home to 'find oneself' mean if you don't go back home? 


I was captivated reading Eat, Pray, Love. I'm eager to see the movie starring Julia Roberts if and when it comes to Turkey because I love a good story of transformation. It's akin to the feeling I get when reading coming of age novels - a sense of cheering for the neophyte when life lessons are learned and the world feels a little bit bigger and better. 


The book Everything is Going to Be Great by Rachel Shukert came to my attention after reading her essay in the Wall Street Journal on her memoir of her time in Europe. The fact she references and criticizes Eat, Pray, Love makes me think it'll be the not-so-feel-good version of EPL. There is another similarity between the books, though, beyond two women setting off on an adventure of self-discovery abroad.  


Both writers eventually go back home.  


Rachel Shukert's website describes the book as being about "reality-adjusting culture shock that every twentysomething faces when sent off to negotiate "the real world"—whatever that may be." Culture shock. Sending off to negotiate the real world. Those are familiar concepts to me. But rather than "whatever that may be" what about "wherever" that may be? It could be an internal shift, a change in how one looks at the world that is untethered to location.  


Do stories of self-finding and transformation only resonate with us if the protagonist goes back home?  


What if Elizabeth Gilbert had decided to stay in Bali indefinitely, no traipsing back and forth to the US except for holidays? Would we have loved her story as much? Would the transformation ring as true? Why can't I shake the notion that leaving the places you "discovered" yourself in is akin to shaking off a too-needy lover? Get what you want and then leave? The flip side of that question would be why would you stay if the feeling is gone? I admit it leaves me wondering.  


I explore transformation in my post 5 Years in Turkey and 5 Insights. Anastasia Ashman talks about creatives surviving and thriving abroad. Catherine Yigit in Mercury Brief explores being an expat mother in a legendary historical town without an expat community. Tara Lutman Agacayak lists the ten (more) things she learned living in Turkey. There are turning points and transformation stories that have nothing to do with crossing the finish line of returning home.  


What's yours?


Thanks to My Dog Ate My Blog, this post at Love, Rose was mentioned in a discussion on the perpetual pursuit of happiness. 

Summer stories

In the maroon recliner in our living room with the overhead fan whirling, I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn And Maggie-Now every summer until we moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota. My reading grew to include contraband paperbacks I hid behind bookshelves and the now defunct Sassy magazine.  My first summer in Turkey I read everything by Jane Austen. I measured periods of time by the books I read and the beverages I drank while processing the melodic, confusing sounds of Turkish. 

This summer I have my own story to offer - The Mercy Troupers, set in the desert and trailer parks to the tune of evangelical roadies. I scratched out the first draft when I was 21 and sitting on a park bench next to Lake Mendota. Now ten years later it's the first story I've published.

Another summer tale, shot on our Canon Powershot SX10IS and edited in iMovie, is a casting video for House Hunters International. The video peeks into our home and neighborhood in Izmit. It's a love story. And a story about leaving home.

What story, book or otherwise, is captivating you right now?

Half life

I live a double life. Half of me is resident crumb-sweeper and bedtime storyteller of our family of four, while the other half is mentally miles away dreaming up projects, threading the needle of a story, and compulsively suggesting to Amazon that Penguin make The Poisoner's Handbook available on the Kindle until it is. I'm a junk food addict who has convinced herself to eat healthily. I'm a recovering over-achiever who can be extremely lazy. I'm what Figen Çakır calls people like us, a 'double agent': half of the time defending Turkey when I'm in the US, half the time longing for all things Americana when I'm here.

My last post is about being a hybrid of two-or-more things.  I wonder while burning sage to clear out negative energy in my house if I've left some parts of my life deliberately hidden to savor and protect them. Kept the dualities and unlikely opposites tucked away. Can all this business about duality and different aspects of one self start to be a drain on the senses? Enter the half-life. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a half-life is the time taken for the radioactivity of a specific isotope to fall to half its original value. I'm interested in how science, creativity, and domesticity intersect in this respect. If I were to equate it to being a work-at-home mom while living abroad, have I been quietly urging myself along to be half-living in several realms at the same time?

Yanking myself from one realm to the other has become second nature, but I'm starting to slow down, to make the transitions smoother. My daughter is nearly two, and she has taken reign over my computer, navigating keys effortlessly to fast-forward through two hours of Sesame Street in four minutes. While she pages away, I work on a cross-stitch of frolicking bunnies. Some days this all seems more surreal than is healthy. She now eats at the counter with me, scooping up cream cheese with crackers from the tub while I think 'this is not a good long-term habit' and munch along with her. This simple act of eating makes me think of my mother. She supposedly liked bread with butter and cream cheese, and lately I've sorely been wishing I knew more about her than that and she read Ingrid Bergman: My Story and canned all sorts of fruits and vegetables. But invention and imagination are wonderful devices in filling in the gaps, and creating a legacy of eating crackers and cream cheese with my daughter at the counter might be one microscopic way to stay present in all these contrasting realms.

An entangled inheritance

I've been thinking a lot about the things that are supposed to come naturally, like knowing when to comfort and nurture. Thinking about grief. Thinking about the things that seem contrary to reason, like that my genetic offspring have sprouted feet that jump onto glass tables, climb bookshelves, and drop breakable momentos on the floor. Thinking about resolutions, evolution, and expectations interwoven with fears of failure not just limited to creative work.

A Mother Near or Far

Motherhood in Turkey began for me nearly three years ago, early in the morning in late October. In the history of motherhood, this is but a blip on a radar screen, but it connects me to a legion of mothers that have come before and will come after me. It is humbling to think as women we carry in our eggs future generations, even more so when we know that the grandmothers who birthed our mothers carried the egg that created us. Nestled inside us are generations. 

It's not Mother's Day. Today of all days I feel an unlikely spokesperson for artfully managing the affairs of home and work as Catherine Yığıt also explores in Housekeeping, though I know out of the turmoil can come something remarkable, like Alia El-Bermani shares in Artist and Mother. So that's why I'm sharing part of the Op/Ed I wrote for the Hürriyet Daily News for Mother's Day, 2009. Because the elixir, the elements (and not always happy ones) that connect mother and child happens on a social, cultural, and cellular level as well as an intangible one. This was my way to untangle my threads. 

We spent most of this week in the hospital, trying to find out what was causing my son to throw up, and finding that all of us, including our baby daughter, had been hit again by the flu. While at the hospital, I thought that this is parenting. This is motherhood. This is what we do every day – we get up and take on the vast risk that our children will experience life and that it won’t be fatal.

But what happens when the opposite occurs? When a mother leaves before a child is grown? As was the case with my own mother, who died when I was a mousy-haired, buck-toothed pre-kindergartner with a cherubic little blond brother who needed glasses. His glasses broke so many times at the playground from bigger kids bullying him. I was an overprotective sister, bullying in my own right, singling out the boys who hurt my brother, and being a tattletale. This did not go over well, and my brother was actually more resentful of my help. I was getting an early taste of mothering, letting someone you love and want to protect go and get hurt. 

I know I am still grieving for my mother, but not in the same way as I did years ago. I want to know what her life lessons would be, how she would react to my toddler slamming doors and drawing on the walls. I know I have a unique relationship to my mother. I talk to her, and sometimes she answers. Like the time I wrote to my godmother, and asked her, “How did you and mom learn to be so patient?” She instructed me: understand yourself first, and patience will follow. And then, at the end, a postscript: “Ask your mom and she will show you, but you need to be listening and watching.” My mother was of Jewish descent, and this is not the first time I’ve gotten the message that she is right here, beside me, a Jewish mother nudging me from the beyond.

Because I was born of her, I am also of Jewish descent, and now my daughter. My daughter can claim three religions to her name, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Is this perhaps the greatest gift a mother can give? I am not certain, but I do hope, that at least in some small way she is symbolic of the potential for disparate things to exist peacefully. What is passed from mother to child may only be revealed generations down the line.

Can inheritance be predicted in our childhood scrawls, as I intuit from E.Victoria Flynn's post? Can it be constructed in a life abroad with a new community and different resources, as Verity discusses?

From the inside out

Four years of nurturing a 'homepreneur' habit, and 2+ years of gently deflecting kind people who still ask why I don't teach English, I've just started to feel it is the right fit to work at home.  I venture to guess that most artists don't think of themselves as entrepreneurs (will have to save this thought for later investigation), and most of the time I don't think I am, either. But if you work for yourself (mostly), and make money doing something you love, doesn't business play a part in it? Over at IC, they talk about being a creative entrepreneur and it resonates with me. 

What I wonder is, where does the word 'entrepreneur' fit into this real-life description?: rise at morn to feed hungry duo-national Ameri-Turks + Turkish spouse, shuttle off first-born to nursery school after noisy stampede around house until 11 am, engage in quiet work time while second-born naps for a mere hour and a half, resume negotiations with second-born not to destroy house while I write or work on projects, do laundry, eat lunch, etc. until 5:30 when first-born comes home, followed by escapist downtime in kitchen making dinner while husband reacquaints himself with home and kids, ending with a song and dance bedtime routine and my own bleary eyes held open until midnight... I know I'm not alone in this, and that some women in this position would call themselves 'mompreneurs', but I'm still uncomfortable with this tag. I find myself gravitating towards the new domesticity. It fits a little bit better. Where's your tribe?

There was a time (a wee 3 years ago) when I was making handbags (while getting paid hourly to plead with university-level students to speak English at a language school), that I felt I had to hide the fact that I didn't have a "real" studio, atelier, or brick 'n mortar shop for my handbags. Now it is almost the opposite: I've invited more and more people into my home studio through twitter, illustration, and active engagement with others about crafting a creative life like in this blog post. This is such a relief. To align my work with my life instead of the other way around.

Lately I've been thinking about what's next. One day (soon) the kids will be too old to share a room. We live in a modest 3-bedroom apartment and I'll either have to leave the nest to work in a studio space outside, or we'll have to search for a 4-bedroom apartment in Turkey, which is more difficult than it sounds. I'm not sure about re-entry into outside life. I quite like it here.

Fall Delights

Staples at a Midwestern Thanksgiving dinner table? At our house in Wisconsin: turkey basted according to a timing method made by my engineer-father, champagne for the adults to sip while waiting, broccoli/cauliflower and cheese-whiz bake, canned cranberries, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, butter on French bread, and pumpkin pie. For a saucy tale of secret ingredients at the holiday table, read cultural producer Anastasia Ashman's post here.

Here in Türkiye, I do what I can to recreate our meal, but it is never quite the same (though I've become much better at making gravy than I used to be!). I tend to throw in some healthier alternatives, but canned cranberries have never disappointed me, despite how unreal they look coming out of the can, ridges in the cranberry mold shaped like the aluminum can. Food and fall go hand-in-hand for me because the kitchen seems to come to life, me and the kitchen less sweaty and grumbling than in the summer when cold soups and salads are staples. In the fall, rich flavors mingle with our expectations for sharing meals together, sheltered against the cold. What keeps you fed body and soul during the fall? Afiyet olsun!

The non-binary life

When an emerging American artist moves to Turkey and starts a family, she navigates new definitions of career and home life. What does that look like? Come join the discussion on art + domesticity cohabitating at expat+HAREM where I am a guest poster on art, nesting, and being an expatriate.

Corner with blanket

This is where I want to sit everyday, yet I manage only to look at it with longing from the other side of the room as I either work from the table or circle around the room picking up toys and papers and clothes like a robot. The temperature dropped and now my hands are always cold, though I'm wearing a knitted poncho my mother made more than 30 years ago around the house. It's only for inside. I'm not brave enough to wear purple, pink, turquoise, lime green, two shades of pink and olive green all at once, much as I love bright colors. This morning I decided I would start appliqueing a quilt square, which turn a turn for the worse when the bird I was appliqueing started to look like a worm. I don't know why I always get the bright idea that I can do any one project in a day. So I'm starting over on that, maybe not using stuffing this time. I'm blogging this month over at Intarsia Concept, so come take a look if you want to get on the color wheel...

Stuffing

I'm fascinated by what is on the inside of things - between walls, under the flooring, old wallpaper layers. The literal stuff. So it was with glee when I snapped these pictures of the doorframe once the old one had been removed. We had all our windows and two balcony doors replaced over the last two days and it has been a dusty, yet quick experience.

Everything is back to normal, mostly, with wiring issues and I'm happy to be reunited with my computer and my phone. Even though I use my phone far less than I did in the US, it's kind of like a walkie-talkie for me and Devrim. Instant dial - reach husband - confirm something - hang up.

And now construction on the outside of the building has started, and though we've only lived in our building a year, it was a long, cold winter. We live in the ugliest building in the neighborhood (this is not an exaggeration - ask anyone) and I'm so excited about the paint job and insulation.

Wiring issues

Today I am using the oldest ever Nokia in Turkey while my one-year old cell phone is getting serviced. In the meantime, my computer decided to crash while doing Auto Update (what's the point of this function if it only causes mid-week distress?), which means victory points for my darling husband who hates Apple. And to top it off, I couldn't speak Turkish today to save my life while trying to explain said malfunction. So everything is on hold again, except for the fact that I was able to sneak in a stop at the habberdashery (love that word) for DMC floss and canvas. No photo today because I'm separated from my computer, of course. Hoping your day was more pleasant...

Babar the Pillow

This weekend marks the start of Sugar Holiday, Şeker Bayramı, the end of Ramazan, and with it comes visiting family and delicious food. This usually entails a freshly cleaned house for visitors, too, and new outfits for the kids. Tomorrow I'll be cleaning and baking (looks like I'll make a brunch cake with blackberries), and I'm already hungry thinking about it. I managed to squeeze in one last project before fall cleaning takes over, though, and it turned out to be a (tiny) pillow.

I stitched this Babar pattern when I was pregnant with Lina and needed a quick project. I think that if I just did rows and rows of x's without any pattern at all, I would be just as happy as a real pattern because a good, long row of uninterrupted stitches is as close I get to meditation these days. But it's hard to gift projects with random stitches. I read somewhere, several years back, about how really truly subversive stitching has been for women at various points in history, because in the act of stitching, one has contemplative thought and makes room for imagination and desire. That could, of course, be dangerous if you were not encouraged to think. My friend Tara talks about this regarding the intricate 'oya' lace patterns traditionally done by village women in Turkey in her blog post Needlework and Crystals.

Today I made the little pillow and stuffed it, propping it on Topi's bed where I hope he'll discover it when he comes home from nursery today.

Happy Bayram! Iyi bayramlar!

Home

I've recovered two of my very first, badly made stitching projects from my childhood home. One I write about here, or hint at, rather. It's a stitching of a pink rabbit I probably started when I was between 8 to 10 years old that I never finished, and for the fun of it thought I would not only finish now at age 30, but also turn into Lina's birth record. I'm nearly done, but keep finding some reason not to finish it just yet. I wonder if it being 22-years old and sentimental has anything to do with it.


The second is of this little house, still in the aqua blue plastic hoop from when I dropped this project, probably around the same age. I think it must have come before the pink rabbit because my stitching is atrocious. The back-side of it is a maze of sad, confused and knotted yarn, all the strands wrapped around each other in an attempt to get somewhere else. I don't remember who helped me with this piece. I learned from a few different people, including my Grandma Schueller, our lovely elderly neighbor Evelyn Sveum across the ridge (we lived in a valley, and our nearest neighbors were on actual hilly ridges), or my babysitter. I certainly know it wasn't my mother because she had died when I was six. I have a framed "My Sampler of Stitches" that my mom made when she was 10 and it hangs now in my hallway here, after being stuck in a box for four years.

The needle

But whoever is responsible for teaching me let me use an extremely large needle for this small project! No wonder I had anxious decision making about where to put it and how to pull it through the fabric. Or maybe I had picked the needle myself, thinking that the bigger, sharper, and more deadly the needle, the better. Regardless, sadly, I let this one remain unfinished. Unlike the pink bunny, there is no resuscitation for this ugly little house. I'm thinking I'll just take off the hoop, hand-clean it and iron it and then frame it. Why frame it? It's ugly in a cute way, I guess, and I'm going through a phase where I like to frame everything. I've framed a lot of cross-stitching in the last year or so, like this, this, and this, and more. The problem is that our walls are concrete and it is impossible to nail and/or drill through them. So they act as props, or I rotate them. But framing a stitching somehow elevates it, kitsch-ifies it, and gives it more proper attention than stored away, don't you think?

A Day of Rest

 Big Sky, Little Hideaway, 2004

It shouldn't surprise me that now that I've finally got time to work (baby sleeping, Topi at school), I'm indisposed.  The snails in our neighborhood have more energy than me right now, using it to bravely cross trecherous sidewalks, of which there are plenty (snails and trecherous sidewalks). The same snails that I adore and point out excitedly to my husband or kids or to passers-by and then accidentally step on with a horrible crunch, usually at night, after a rainfall. If I've mentioned this before, I'm sorry. I still swear I can hear the tiny snail scream as it suffers below my hoof. My husband, when he really wants to touch a nerve, calls me affectionately, "Snail Killer."

I suppose that if I have enough energy to muse about dying snails, I should have enough to work on one of many things that make my desk look like mini-pilgrimages up the Pyramids. Neatly stacked things does not mean organization, though. It means orderly disfunction, in my world. It means that in the process of trying to arrange my life and control it that I make little piles of things, group things together in platonic relationships so that I feel better.

The lack of energy does come from something legit, though. It started with a few unhappy grumbles of my stomach three days ago (could have been the excessive amount of chocolate milk I was drinking with my children, just like Topi likes it: milk in a glass with two scoops of chocolate milk power on top, not mixed, so he can scoop out the chocolate and ask for more. I protested this until I tried it out myself, realizing it was delicious.) and has turned into my late-summer-early-fall stomach flu. Without fail this time of year for the last three years I have to eat salted potatoes and rice with yogurt (and butter, because I can't live without the butter) and wave goodbye to my family as I cloister myself in the bathroom for a week. Sorry.

I chalk it up to the seasons changing, or that my life tends to change in some way in the fall, mimicking the start of the school year like it used to. Either way, despite the unpleasantness, forced rest is usually just what I need because most of the time I am either really excited about something or panicking about it. Both can happen in the same five minutes. 

I'm reading a book that everyone else is reading right now about another 30-year old who's personal experiment (this time, in the kitchen) turned into literary fame while I rest, and waiting for feedback on some work I've done so I can do revision #210. The calm right now, the illusion of calm, I should say, is only because I've gone through my Gmail and labeled everything so they are in neat little subcategories. Look, no mail! But my TO DO label in bright red still haunts me from the left-hand side of the screen and I meekly look at it and hope it doesn't start flashing. 

Does anybody really listen to their body when they are worn down, tired, anxious and overdoing it? If you do, pray tell. I have lost count of the number of times I've cut back, made changes, etc, to slow down the pace, and I pretty much always end up right where I started. In the most pleasant way, I am grateful for this because I always find things that captivate me that I want to do, make, learn about. On the other hand, over-committment and exhaustion go hand in hand. Even reading becomes a sporting event, hurtling through pages so I can start another one because I just don't know when I'll have the time again. But regardless, this time I'm listening to the clanging bell of my body telling me to take a break and only moving my fingers about the keyboard because the idea struck me that you, too, might relate to that. And if so, I'd like to know about it. 

The calm and the storm

The calm

I've been back in Turkey for two weeks, and now that it is September 1st (my favorite month because psst... it's my birthday month! and because I've never lost the thrill of fall and the start of school) I'm back in full swing after taking my sweet old time. Which means I'm skipping the part about being calm and stress-free and going straight to fried and edgy.

The storm

The big news this week is that Topi has started "school" and with that comes a real routine! For the first time in three years! Lina will stay home with me, and we'll work something out, but I'll still be working while she naps and when I can bribe her to play independently after she wakes up.


This morning, when it hit me that I'm back where I started regarding the stress of juggling two kids while working at home, I thought of the three Escape Tactics I use to deal with it all: reading, stitching, and cleaning (but how come my house is never clean?). I'm determined to finish Lina's birth record before she is 2, so I picked this up again while my living room swirled with two little kids swinging from the pipes and using the phone cord as a jump rope (yes, we have a phone with a cord because Topi destroyed our cordless two years ago. I'm not going to replace it until they are both 10 years old). And now I'm going to pick up my embroidery floss off the floor.

A Happy First

On Sunday we celebrated Lina's first birthday with a chocolate brownie slathered in frosting (thanks Rebecca!) and sprinkles. Typically I post about my children on our Deniz Babies blog, but this time there is a little DIY in the birthday pics. The party was very last minute and thrown together in a couple hours with the help of Rebecca, who has been staying with us while working with me as a volunteer for Nest. That requires a whole slew of photos that will have to come later. But in the meantime, we hastily cut out letters from an old newspaper and spelled out Lina Joan while guests were arriving. They were baffled by our scissors and DIY efforts, but we were pretty happy with the end result, and now get to read the news from last week in little snippets.


Here's to year number two in the Deniz household and hoping we can survive having two toddlers under one roof!

Happy Curtains

On this hot, humid, and tiring day I need happy curtains, and nothing but happy curtains will do. So, dear friends, here are the curtains I hung a few days ago. It feels like I have a new living room. I just can't get enough of magenta, orange and red.

Turquoise Breakfast

My favorite color made an appearance this morning at breakfast. Between Devrim's shirt, our coffee mugs, bowls and the kitchen walls, it was a turquoise dream come true. If only all our breakfasts were this colorful.

Sugar Pink

The sugar pink of this spread in June's Elle Decor Turkey transports me back to my bedroom when I was thirteen. It was on the top floor of our new house that we had moved to from St. Paul, MN to Wauwatosa in Milwaukee. There was a pink tiled bathroom on that floor and the attic. Someone had decided there was room for that bathroom and a garret bedroom with built in trunks under a window. Because the roof was so prominent, there wasn't one spot where the wall was taller than me, so I had these low walls against which I put a desk, and my books on built-in bookshelves painted white. The wall behind my bed I papered in a kind of country floral rose, with muted purples, mauves and green vine. From my window I could see over everybody else and down into backyards. It was the perfect room for a 13 year old girl, but we moved by the time I was 15. I still remember the carpeting being blue and plush. I wonder if the occupants of the house now have ever replaced the pink shower stall with a monthly breast exam sticker stuck to the tile that I was fascinated by. At 13, I had to wonder. My dad's bathroom was all over green tile. It was a fantastic house excepting the 'updates' like wall to wall carpeting.

This issue is still on the shelves until the end of this month if anyone would like a copy. There are some other delicious spreads in there, too.

Friday Photos at Home

I've blogged more this week than I usually do, and I think it has something to do with the quality of light for taking photos. Winter is drab and dreary here, and now I feel like everything from my mood to the world outside has improved with a little sun therapy. This morning I was thinking about how when I started this blog in 2005, it was to promote my handbags and my newly founded business, and to focus on design in Turkey. So much has changed since then because I am not making handbags right now, nor promoting a business. This is a relief to me, and blogging now has become more of a joy than a chore.

The photo above has a very casually pasted family portrait on our entryway wall. It is covering a hole in the wall where I tried to nail into cement. Bad idea. I need a pro. It is of my Great-Great Grandfather Sambur and his grandchildren. The tiny girl with the curly blonde hair on his lap (the only blond one of the crew of Jewish children) is my maternal grandmother, Edna. I should frame this photo, but fortunately I have two; one is tucked away between tissue for framing, and this is a replica.

Here's a high contrast glimpse into our living room. If you live in a house with rectangular-shaped rooms, you will understand my plight while taking photos. There is no good angle, everything is narrow and hard to get into the frame. I held my camera up high and happened to get a slice of our entryway light fixture (a pretty cut glass purple thing that I just had to have) in the process. It makes our living room look otherworldly and far more modern than it really is.

Have a happy Friday. I'm off to savor the last few minutes I might have on my own in a quiet house before I pick up the kids and my normally hectic pace continues.

Wednesday Pillow

Say hello the newest member of our pillow family, sewn yesterday out of Anna Maria Horner's Good Folks fabric. When I got this 1/2 yard in the mail it was begging to be made into a pillow. It would have taken much less time to make had I thought about a closure before I started sewing, but the buttons worked out, and I like how they dress it up a little bit. Those buttons are vintage, from my mother's stash that I've kept for 2o years.