Blog Archives - trish hermanson

Got Misery?

7/29/2017

Frank, a character in the movie The Light Between Oceans captured me even though he plays a minor role. Frank’s community bullies him, then rejects him because he’s ethnically different. He refuses to bear a grudge and remains remarkably happy because he calculates the price of withholding forgiveness and isn’t willing to pay it. “You only have to forgive once,” Frank says. “To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. All the time. You have to keep remembering the bad things.” He pauses and smiles. “It’s too much work.”
I get what he’s talking about. I’ve clung to affronts much smaller than Frank endured. I’ve let them fill my mind. Turn my stomach sour. Make me miserable.
Which I why I was thrilled when a reader of my new novel “The Wooden Indian Resurrection” wrote that the book got him thinking about forgiving former friends for how they hurt him, and of forgiving himself for bad choices he’d made. Maybe my hard-earned lessons are seeping out in this fictional story of a deeply wounded person. Maybe others won’t have to chew on bitter fruit as I have.
If “The Wooden Indian Resurrection” impacts you, would you let me know? It’s available on Amazon in both paperback and ebook.

How Pat Became Wonder Woman

7/22/2017

   Move over Gal Gadot. There’s another Wonder Woman in town, all because of a choice she made.
     What first caught my attention about Pat in Zumba class is the smile that fills her face as she moves to the mambo. Then I noticed her prosthesis, yet she never misses a salsa step or a tango twirl. All with an artificial hip on one side of her body and an artificial foot and leg up to her knee on the other.
     A car accident in the Rocky Mountains twelve years ago left her body broken, Pat told me. After two years of surgery, the doctor gave her a choice: “A wheelchair, or go to the gym.”    She chose the gym. She cha chas, sambas, merengues, and dances a haughty hip hop, breaking a sweat with the rest of us. She’s never turned back. A determined choice carries her forward.
     Which reminds me how important it is that I make wise choices and follow through with them. They may not make me a Wonder Woman like Pat, but they do affect my future.

What It Takes to Cross the Finish Line

7/15/2017

Never mind that I’m running the wrong direction. I finished the race, didn’t I?
Actually, no. At this event at Bear Creek I was a spectator and crossed the finish line without running the race.
Which got me thinking about the big questions again. The questions I ponder more these days because I’m in that stage of life in which I wonder why my mother is staring back at me in the mirror. I ask myself: Am I running the race I’ve been given to run? Am I moving in the right direction? Am I encouraging fellow runners along the way? When I’ve had missteps and stumbled and fallen, have a gotten back up and pressed on? When the race is finished, will I explode with gratitude for the journey?
Important questions. Because at some point we all cross the finish line.

How Lost Puzzle Pieces Found Each Other

7/8/2017

My nephew had been adopted at birth and happily raised on a Midwest farm. But his unknown roots tugged at him. When he launched the search for his biological parents as a young adult, he learned they hadn’t stayed together, and his father had died.    His mother? Not a trace of her.
Now twenty-seven-years old, he was about to get married. Driving down the interstate one day, his phone jangled. A call from Denver. A number he didn’t recognize.
     He picked it up, thinking it was my husband and me, who planned to attend his wedding. No one there. So he called the number. “Hey,” he said.
   “You know who I am?” The woman’s voice spoke with hesitation.
     “Ah, no.”
     “I’m your mother.”
The tectonic plates in his world shifted.
     Just as hers had when she’d cried out to God, asking for news of the son she’d relinquished at birth. The son she’d never held. A week later she heard from a relative half way around the world who had her son’s phone number from his search years ago.
More phone calls followed between mother and son. Then nineteen days after his wedding, he and his bride flew to Denver. My husband and I drove them across town to his mother’s home.
     He knocked at the door.
     A dog barked from inside.
   His mother appeared. The same rich complexion as his. The same jet-black hair. The same piercing eyes. The same wide smile. Both wearing sunglasses propped on their heads. They embraced - their first embrace - and a holy silence filled the room.
     “I never thought this would happen,” she whispered, still in his arms.
     “Me neither.” His voice was quiet, then he regained control. “And this is my wife and my aunt and uncle.”
     She ushered her son and his bride to another room. “I got you something for your wedding. It’s not much.”
     He opened the package in pink paper. The first gift he’d held from his mother.
  My husband and I made a quick exit, leaving mother, son, and bride to sift through emotions that spanned decades. As we walked to the car, we held hands, awestruck in the miracle of witnessing missing puzzle pieces snap into place in the mural of two lives.

Why Settle for the Butt End?

7/1/2017

He was such a failure in art classes that teachers relegated him to draw the butt side of female models. (The talented students earned the more interesting angle.) He continued to get the butt end in life, suffering from psychotic episodes that led to hospitalization. When he died in poverty at age thirty-seven, he was considered a madman and a failure. His name?
Vincent Van Gogh - now esteemed as one of the most influential figures in art. But in his time - unrecognized.
I wonder what it would have done for Van Gogh if recognition had not been delayed.
   Which prompts me to want to give all the masters around me their due now. All the masters in cooking and cleaning and raising kids and serving bosses and paying bills and guarding crosswalks and crunching numbers and writing code.
   I’m amazed at the response I get when I tell someone, “You make my life better by the way you fill in the blank.” Or, “I love how you fill in the blank.”
Such a little thing, yet recognition fills our tanks and keeps us rolling down life’s highway. After all, we are all masters at something.
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Image: "Self Portrait with Felt Hat" by artist.