Back when I was trapped on the set of "Ordinary People", i.e., living with my hubby and four children in the upper middle class northern suburbs of Chicago, saddled with a real but less extreme underground rumble of Aeschylean tragedy, I had a friend in similar straits. The main difference between us was that Ana was born and raised a Midwestern girl, that is to say she was blonde and leggy (my mother would have said "corn-fed" but then my mother could be pretty waspish when it came to leggy, blonde women), and had struggled with a life-long submission to the Northern European female ethic of clean and tidy surfaces. In that world, you just don't speak of any subsurface, unscrubbable grime; if you don't speak of it, it isn't there, plus then the neighbors won't know about it. My struggle was different in that I didn't have to fight myself while I fought the system; all I had to do was resist while seeming to comply until I could get the hell away from it. Ana's plight was a lot harder to get out of, and it was costing her dearly.
Anyway, one bleak winter day Ana said to me, through tears of frustration, "Why is it that I have to Do Do Do all the damned time? Why can't I just Be Be Be?" I couldn't answer in any useful way; all I could do was listen to her, agree with her and try to comfort her, and finally offer her the name and number of my shrink (with whom she had an affair soon after, but that's a WHOLE 'nother blog).
When I was small and my mother would be cleaning or cooking or paying bills or doing anything but sewing (which she loved, right up until the finishing part of a project), my sisters and I were careful to look as busy and helpful as we could, so that her resentments wouldn't turn themselves toward us and drive her to a lot of snarling and smacking. During my first marriage (the traditional one -- I haven't qualified the other two, but I will as soon as I get clearer on them, or, as Garrison Keillor says, as soon as they're funny), the DoDoDo precept was clouded by similar resentments on my part, and bewilderment on the part of my very traditional husband, who had no idea of nor curiosity about the symbolism of wifely drudgery. (The constant exhaustion and worry was yet another layer, but there didn't seem to be anything anybody could do to fix that.)
Many years and, God knows, many social revolutions have passed since then, yet Ana's entreaties still haunt me. As with other ingrained habits, I find that over time I have trained myself to monitor carefully and relentlessly my state of Busyness at any given moment; should I find myself unaccountably wool-gathering or reading something merely entertaining and not buhroaaaaaaadening, something in me snaps and I start in with the chiding and mental self-slapping-around. I've lived long enough to know that slapping ourselves around is destructive, pointless and probably excessive, since there are plenty of people lining up to judge and reprove and disapprove of us and our behavior; doing it to ourselves is just piling on. I don't like it in football, I don't like it in myself. Or in anybody I love, for that matter. The trick is to root out the original stimulus for the self-slap, and retrain the inner Swedish Grandmother. (Leggy blonde or no, that woman is fierce and very stubborn.)
This is all coming from a mesomorph, you understand; it is even possible that I'm transforming, breaking out of that athletic chrysalis into a full-blown soft, sedentary, bulbous endomorph (Jabba-the-Hut comes to mind; and you just shut up, Helga). What I have never been is one of those wiry, active, occasionally jittery ectomorphs; you know them when you see them: they're always moving, they eat like pigs and burn it off immediately, they twitch when forced to sit still for more than a few minutes. I had an ectomorphic sister, I live with one, at least one of my children is one and I think his wife is, too, thank a merciful God. The worst of the ecto's are smug and self-righteous, and they easily get away with it in this American world which is dominated by the Puritan ethic. The best of them just keep trucking, hying themselves off to the gym when they can't stand being still anymore; they happily pick up the ball when the rest of us are prostrate from frenzied or unaccustomed activity. Ectomorphs are the people you want to have around for fund-raisers of all kinds. They also come in handy for a blitzkrieg of the house because the Swedish grandmother is coming to town; they KNOW what she's looking for.
The trick is to accept that most of us AREN'T ectomorphs, to let 'em go, to be thankful for the kindly meshing of body/mind/spirit/metabolism types, and enjoy whatever it is one is doing or, better, NOT doing at the moment. Tall order. Any suggestions?
