I've been reading Gail Collins' latest [When Everything Changed] about the stunning revolution in the lives of women since 1960. Having lived it, every single minute of it, it still makes me cross to read about where things stood with women in 1960. I can't read this book before I go to sleep at night because it pisses me off to the extent that I'm sleeplessly thrashing for hours, or, if sleeping, grinding my teeth to the point where it wakes me up and I get mad all over again.
Today on CBS Sunday Morning, I listened to David Edelstein recommending various off-beat DVD's to give for Christmas, and in explaining a couple of funny-in-their-anachronisms hygiene movies from the 50s [How to be a Man, How to be a Woman] he quoted his cousin the sociologist saying that when World War II was over, the men coming home were so shaken by their experience that they did everything they could to shape their world into a normality that never was. The Donna Reed/Father Knows Best society they set up wasn't, then, just a question of men demanding their jobs back from Rosie the Riveter, nor just that men demanded to take up their remembered positions as petty tyrants, pushing women and children around in order to reassert what they felt was their rightful place in God's world. What we know now about PTSD, what I remember in my own life from my father's temperament and that of my friends' fathers, after a nightmarish time in the Pacific Theater, is now shading, just a bit, the conversation in my head about the gender revolution.
Our parents, the Greatest Generation, persisted in their trajectory during the childhoods of the revolutionaries. The men who had been to war stayed manly and refused to talk about the horror they'd done and had done to them, bottling up their emotions (all of their emotions -- can't shut down just one, in case you haven't noticed), closing off emotionally from their wives and children. They doggedly trudged off to work day in and day out, living the only way they felt safe, feeding and simultaneously protecting their families from the bloody violence they knew pulsed and breathed, barely hidden, inside themselves. Their sons grew up angry and sullen; without a model of male self-expression the boys had no definition in their emotional lives, they only saw that emotion was dangerous and that in denial was safety. The daughters of the Greatest Generation, less angry and too wary of the unnamed monster to exhibit "attitude", watched and learned as their mothers embodied household drudgery and -- afraid of the latent violence, and sorrowful in their understanding of their wounded husbands -- kept their mouths firmly shut, conspiring in the silence.
The sexual revolution was executed in very angry terms; all of a sudden young wives were enraged at the treatment they had suffered at the hands of their most intimate lovers -- the stony silences, the belittling, the dry sarcasms and the brute force exerted when the belittling and the sarcasm didn't force their submission. Consciousness-raising groups implanted a sensor in our brains for when that process might be starting, and at any moment there could be an uproar in our stage-set homes. Paranoia struck deep in the heartland, and very soon men who hadn't even been of age to go to the war started wearing hunted expressions, and began to feel abused themselves. "GOOD!" said the women; "How does it feel, asshole?"
When Vietnam came around further hell broke loose, here and abroad; my closest woman friend says we are all -- ALL of us -- broken and battered veterans of war.
I'm just saying.... We could give men a bit of a break here, and acknowledge the sorrow, and the wounds, we all carry from common international misadventure.
******
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
My Mother, my Self
I dreamt about my mother last night; I do that a lot, and now that the twenty-seventh anniversary of her death has passed, I don't feel quite so sharply the gut-wrench of grief that I suffered for the first twenty of those years. I dream situational dreams when she's in them, and my mother's role is almost always that of a beloved traveling companion, the best kind: one of great humor and tireless optimism. I wake thinking that it's easy for her to play that role now, and not so easy for those of us still struggling to untangle this mortal coil, and I feel a little bit put-upon that she's in a better, clearer place than I. However, I am always grateful for her company.
Another friend reports that she too dreamt of her mother last night, and she doesn't have those dreams as often as I do. It seems to be time for a review of mothers, generally and specifically, not least because Mary's mother is slip-sliding away right now, and we are all trying to be Mary's beloved traveling companions, the best kind. I can only help by freely offering up my experience and my love, and not making a difficult situation worse by mooing over my own, admittedly devastating, loss nearly three decades ago.
Mary's mother had a tough life, made tougher by being surrounded by beautiful, brilliant people: her husband and her children all handsome and handsomely educated, and if not educated to the hilt, then blessed with great good looks and calm, gallant personality. Junerose, of small stature and rampant insecurity, dealt with living in the midst of this glory by going on the defensive, and it was not pretty, nor nurturing, nor loving, nor helpful in getting any of her kids on their way in this life. I myself have taken a lot of punches from her, and while it really pissed me off and made me avoid contact with her at almost any cost, I should have realized somewhere along the line that she was only defending herself against another, newer relation, and this one big and glib and sometimes frighteningly forthright.
Mary has made those allowances for her mother all along, at first out of huge guilt and obligation, and more recently out of love and the rock-ribbed philosophy that we are all human, all children of God and all of us doing the very best we can. Like her mother, Mary also has a small body, but I don't know anybody stronger than she, nor anyone with a bigger heart.
I summarized the situation with other friends this morning, and one of them remarked that with her mother's death, Mary will have lost all possibility of having a good mom. That stopped me cold, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind all day. I think it's true that all of us (though maybe it's just women) hold out that absurd and irrational sense that somehow we can retrieve our eleventh or fifteenth or twenty-first year of life, and THIS time get the mother we needed then. As long as she lives, she can take us back to that time when we stumbled badly and her counsel and love were required and she simply was not available. Doesn't matter what her troubles and her limitations are or were, it doesn't matter that perhaps we did not tell her how much we needed her at the time, it doesn't matter if that solitary struggle made us stronger and better prepared for life in a difficult world, and it doesn't matter that we have long since passed the age where good mothering can make us happier. It only matters that she didn't come through in what we thought was a life or death crunch.
And then she dies, and our hopes for retroactive salvation are dashed, forever. I'll bet a pretty big slice of our inconsolable grief can be attributed to that. It's aside from -- it's beyond -- all the things we wish we had said to her, our regret of all the disappointments we subjected her to, all the good family fun we will miss so acutely; it's even beyond losing the one person in the world that will by God love us no matter what. It's having to give up a doomed expectation that we didn't even know we had.
I have posted in my profile on Facebook that I am a mother in recovery, looking for a more respectable line of work. I still feel that's true -- it really is time for me to take up my few remaining years and enjoy them in freedom from responsibility for anything my children do or say -- but I also owe my mother, and Mary's mother, and my children, and most of all myself, an apology for asking, even demanding, the impossible. The irony of the universe is heavy and unavoidable; just another opportunity for growth, folks. Step right up.
********
Another friend reports that she too dreamt of her mother last night, and she doesn't have those dreams as often as I do. It seems to be time for a review of mothers, generally and specifically, not least because Mary's mother is slip-sliding away right now, and we are all trying to be Mary's beloved traveling companions, the best kind. I can only help by freely offering up my experience and my love, and not making a difficult situation worse by mooing over my own, admittedly devastating, loss nearly three decades ago.
Mary's mother had a tough life, made tougher by being surrounded by beautiful, brilliant people: her husband and her children all handsome and handsomely educated, and if not educated to the hilt, then blessed with great good looks and calm, gallant personality. Junerose, of small stature and rampant insecurity, dealt with living in the midst of this glory by going on the defensive, and it was not pretty, nor nurturing, nor loving, nor helpful in getting any of her kids on their way in this life. I myself have taken a lot of punches from her, and while it really pissed me off and made me avoid contact with her at almost any cost, I should have realized somewhere along the line that she was only defending herself against another, newer relation, and this one big and glib and sometimes frighteningly forthright.
Mary has made those allowances for her mother all along, at first out of huge guilt and obligation, and more recently out of love and the rock-ribbed philosophy that we are all human, all children of God and all of us doing the very best we can. Like her mother, Mary also has a small body, but I don't know anybody stronger than she, nor anyone with a bigger heart.
I summarized the situation with other friends this morning, and one of them remarked that with her mother's death, Mary will have lost all possibility of having a good mom. That stopped me cold, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind all day. I think it's true that all of us (though maybe it's just women) hold out that absurd and irrational sense that somehow we can retrieve our eleventh or fifteenth or twenty-first year of life, and THIS time get the mother we needed then. As long as she lives, she can take us back to that time when we stumbled badly and her counsel and love were required and she simply was not available. Doesn't matter what her troubles and her limitations are or were, it doesn't matter that perhaps we did not tell her how much we needed her at the time, it doesn't matter if that solitary struggle made us stronger and better prepared for life in a difficult world, and it doesn't matter that we have long since passed the age where good mothering can make us happier. It only matters that she didn't come through in what we thought was a life or death crunch.
And then she dies, and our hopes for retroactive salvation are dashed, forever. I'll bet a pretty big slice of our inconsolable grief can be attributed to that. It's aside from -- it's beyond -- all the things we wish we had said to her, our regret of all the disappointments we subjected her to, all the good family fun we will miss so acutely; it's even beyond losing the one person in the world that will by God love us no matter what. It's having to give up a doomed expectation that we didn't even know we had.
I have posted in my profile on Facebook that I am a mother in recovery, looking for a more respectable line of work. I still feel that's true -- it really is time for me to take up my few remaining years and enjoy them in freedom from responsibility for anything my children do or say -- but I also owe my mother, and Mary's mother, and my children, and most of all myself, an apology for asking, even demanding, the impossible. The irony of the universe is heavy and unavoidable; just another opportunity for growth, folks. Step right up.
********
Monday, August 24, 2009
Just had to do it
I just had to put in this link -- I've had SO many complaints from my men friends (and a couple of women friends) that I just talk too damned much. I think I was cursed from birth.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Time's Not Up
Yesterday was the birthday of the offspring that is most hostile to me; I was dutiful, sent a card and a congratulatory twenty dollar bill, and enclosed all the love I could muster along with it. It's really the best I can do at the moment, being under siege and all.
Then I thought that that child's birth was one of the four biggest days of MY life, as well. I mean, really: how can anybody deliver a baby and not count it as a HUGE deal? This baby particularly, while distinctly not planned, was so welcome, so immediately loved and doted on, and would be the last. (I was adamant on that; I don't like surprises of such magnitude.) We were nevertheless delighted.
And then all hell broke loose. About six months ago, I was in the process of writing a flashback journal of that child's first year, and as I recounted it as faithfully and as dispassionately as I possibly could, I remembered far too clearly that it was twelve months of terror and torture and illness and accidents. In the end the marriage simply could not survive the blows. We limped along for a couple more years, but it was clear the diseased limb needed to be amputated or the life and health of six psyches would be gravely threatened.
I stopped the journal a little bit short of its designated twelve-month end point, and I suppose that eventually I'll finish it, but truly the recounting was just harrowing for me. I lived that dreadful time all over again, having carefully tucked it away for several decades, and was still nursing those old wounds when a new series of blows was delivered on my head early this summer.
I've been kind of rattling around the house ever since, exhorting myself to pull myself together, then chastising myself for not being able to do it, working on my connection-with-myself exercise as best I can, but for the most part reading as many books as I can track at one time, and watching old West Wing episodes. In short, I think I've been depressed, wounded, sad, and it's not even the right season for it! Jeez.
When friends of mine are depressed or grieving, I tell them to treat themselves as if they had the flu, for in such sorrow the body and the mind are truly in need of succor, of what we in my family used to call pat-pats, of a general King's-X on what is usually expected of friends. Do what you feel like, I tell them, do only what you can do easily, and for God's sake, be nice to yourself. Don't join your detractors in their judgments -- nevermind them, their assessment of you is not what counts, it's not even true. Watch and listen to what your friends say and do, and do THAT. Be NICE to yourself; give yourself a break. And if you feel like crying, then make a damned meal out of it; weep and moan and hiccup and drip and let your face get ugly. Every injury has its allotted number of tears, and they must be shed, all of them, before you can truly heal.
That's what I tell them. I'm so smart.
I was okay, I mean I was being a little soldier about everything, until I finally watched a movie I had TiVo'd a few weeks ago and had not got around to watching until I ran out of "Saving Grace" episodes. It was "Heart of Gold", Jonathan Demme's documentary of a particularly poignant Neil Young concert. Well, why didn't somebody REMIND ME that Neil Young has been through absolute hell in his life, and is still here, loving and accepting as well as anybody I ever heard of, and writing just heart-breaking music about it all? I made it almost to the middle of the movie and then started weeping. I stopped the movie, but wept until I went to bed, and I wept in my bed, and I woke up this morning and wept some more.
Mary was not startled, she didn't even remark on it, she seemed to think that it was NORMAL, to be expected in my situation, and in fact seemed a little relieved that the damned dam had finally broken. I'm better now, at least I'm not sobbing aloud, and am able to imagine a nice dinner and maybe a movie after that, but I thought I'd better get all this written down.
I'm not a hypocrite, I don't mean to be an example of a stiff upper lip when one is enduring great sorrow, and I certainly don't want anybody to think I CONDONE holding one's breath against the tears. I don't even think that my good advice isn't good enough for me, or that I'm too good to cry. I just forgot about the practice of loving and writing myself out of a migraine or a broken heart. I had the theory pretty well set, but the doing takes a little longer.
We all need a little more time than we think we do. If we start hiccuping over a commercial, then that's a hint that still more time is needed. I don't know how I'll know when time's up, but I count on one of you to tell me. Promise you will do that, and I can let some of this stuff go. Okay? Deal?
---
Then I thought that that child's birth was one of the four biggest days of MY life, as well. I mean, really: how can anybody deliver a baby and not count it as a HUGE deal? This baby particularly, while distinctly not planned, was so welcome, so immediately loved and doted on, and would be the last. (I was adamant on that; I don't like surprises of such magnitude.) We were nevertheless delighted.
And then all hell broke loose. About six months ago, I was in the process of writing a flashback journal of that child's first year, and as I recounted it as faithfully and as dispassionately as I possibly could, I remembered far too clearly that it was twelve months of terror and torture and illness and accidents. In the end the marriage simply could not survive the blows. We limped along for a couple more years, but it was clear the diseased limb needed to be amputated or the life and health of six psyches would be gravely threatened.
I stopped the journal a little bit short of its designated twelve-month end point, and I suppose that eventually I'll finish it, but truly the recounting was just harrowing for me. I lived that dreadful time all over again, having carefully tucked it away for several decades, and was still nursing those old wounds when a new series of blows was delivered on my head early this summer.
I've been kind of rattling around the house ever since, exhorting myself to pull myself together, then chastising myself for not being able to do it, working on my connection-with-myself exercise as best I can, but for the most part reading as many books as I can track at one time, and watching old West Wing episodes. In short, I think I've been depressed, wounded, sad, and it's not even the right season for it! Jeez.
When friends of mine are depressed or grieving, I tell them to treat themselves as if they had the flu, for in such sorrow the body and the mind are truly in need of succor, of what we in my family used to call pat-pats, of a general King's-X on what is usually expected of friends. Do what you feel like, I tell them, do only what you can do easily, and for God's sake, be nice to yourself. Don't join your detractors in their judgments -- nevermind them, their assessment of you is not what counts, it's not even true. Watch and listen to what your friends say and do, and do THAT. Be NICE to yourself; give yourself a break. And if you feel like crying, then make a damned meal out of it; weep and moan and hiccup and drip and let your face get ugly. Every injury has its allotted number of tears, and they must be shed, all of them, before you can truly heal.
That's what I tell them. I'm so smart.
I was okay, I mean I was being a little soldier about everything, until I finally watched a movie I had TiVo'd a few weeks ago and had not got around to watching until I ran out of "Saving Grace" episodes. It was "Heart of Gold", Jonathan Demme's documentary of a particularly poignant Neil Young concert. Well, why didn't somebody REMIND ME that Neil Young has been through absolute hell in his life, and is still here, loving and accepting as well as anybody I ever heard of, and writing just heart-breaking music about it all? I made it almost to the middle of the movie and then started weeping. I stopped the movie, but wept until I went to bed, and I wept in my bed, and I woke up this morning and wept some more.
Mary was not startled, she didn't even remark on it, she seemed to think that it was NORMAL, to be expected in my situation, and in fact seemed a little relieved that the damned dam had finally broken. I'm better now, at least I'm not sobbing aloud, and am able to imagine a nice dinner and maybe a movie after that, but I thought I'd better get all this written down.
I'm not a hypocrite, I don't mean to be an example of a stiff upper lip when one is enduring great sorrow, and I certainly don't want anybody to think I CONDONE holding one's breath against the tears. I don't even think that my good advice isn't good enough for me, or that I'm too good to cry. I just forgot about the practice of loving and writing myself out of a migraine or a broken heart. I had the theory pretty well set, but the doing takes a little longer.
We all need a little more time than we think we do. If we start hiccuping over a commercial, then that's a hint that still more time is needed. I don't know how I'll know when time's up, but I count on one of you to tell me. Promise you will do that, and I can let some of this stuff go. Okay? Deal?
---
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
The quality of love
Today, fellow students, we discuss love beyond quality (No. 4 in your texts). Ahem.
I think it's like energy: People talk about suffering from negative energy, and what they really mean is they're not getting what they think they want, or they're feeling threatened by somebody not giving them what they want, or they're mad at somebody for SAYING they're not going to give them what they want. Anyway, there isn't good or bad or positive or negative energy. It's just energy. We use it or misuse it, but if we don't get the results we were looking for, it isn't because the energy is bad, it's because we're misguided or manipulative or greedy (proceed with listing the rest of the seven deadly sins here), or maybe just screwing up the experiment.
Likewise Love: There obviously can't be negative (bad) love, right? There's pounding on someone you say you love; or there's sacrificing oneself until one becomes a piece of broccoli in the name of loving one's master; or there's "loving" your children into complete incapacity and laziness, to the extent that they can't even feed themselves when they grow up and finally, very reluctantly, leave home. Well, clearly none of that is love.
If we're both generally and specifically loving, then we're fulfilling our lives and destinies. As I have said before (a lot) you can love people without having to buy them a beer. I don't think that by suggesting we turn the other cheek, Jesus meant that we should let ourselves get beaten up over and over again; I think he meant we can comfortably leave the premises and love from a much calmer and safer distance. Hitting back only perpetuates the non-love going on at the moment. Get the hell out of there (literally and figuratively) and go back to loving as hard as you can.
That's the only way out of this mess. Well, that and the tango: When you're all tangled up, tango on. (Sorry, I can't find the original soothsayer of that, or I'd attribute it for sure. I didn't think it up, but I'm not above using a sooth when I run across it.)
----
I think it's like energy: People talk about suffering from negative energy, and what they really mean is they're not getting what they think they want, or they're feeling threatened by somebody not giving them what they want, or they're mad at somebody for SAYING they're not going to give them what they want. Anyway, there isn't good or bad or positive or negative energy. It's just energy. We use it or misuse it, but if we don't get the results we were looking for, it isn't because the energy is bad, it's because we're misguided or manipulative or greedy (proceed with listing the rest of the seven deadly sins here), or maybe just screwing up the experiment.
Likewise Love: There obviously can't be negative (bad) love, right? There's pounding on someone you say you love; or there's sacrificing oneself until one becomes a piece of broccoli in the name of loving one's master; or there's "loving" your children into complete incapacity and laziness, to the extent that they can't even feed themselves when they grow up and finally, very reluctantly, leave home. Well, clearly none of that is love.
If we're both generally and specifically loving, then we're fulfilling our lives and destinies. As I have said before (a lot) you can love people without having to buy them a beer. I don't think that by suggesting we turn the other cheek, Jesus meant that we should let ourselves get beaten up over and over again; I think he meant we can comfortably leave the premises and love from a much calmer and safer distance. Hitting back only perpetuates the non-love going on at the moment. Get the hell out of there (literally and figuratively) and go back to loving as hard as you can.
That's the only way out of this mess. Well, that and the tango: When you're all tangled up, tango on. (Sorry, I can't find the original soothsayer of that, or I'd attribute it for sure. I didn't think it up, but I'm not above using a sooth when I run across it.)
----
Friday, July 17, 2009
Fear and Loathing on the road to Atlanta
I once wrote my way out of a migraine. It occurred on our Odyssey from California to Atlanta in the height of the heat of the summer of 1995, after we had endured the 120-degree temperature in Hayes, Kansas and were progressing to the Land of the Dark Lutheran, toward a motel in Concordia, Missouri. I was struggling with the steering wheel, keeping it between 10:30 and 11 o’clock in rotation just so the 15-foot Ryder truck wouldn’t be blown completely off the right shoulder while rolling along at a breakneck, governed 55 mph. At about 3 in the afternoon I felt the fingers of a migraine stealing up my neck, over my right ear, plunging into the center of my temple and down to paralyze my TMJ. Once we were able to stop, the horror of the headache would certainly bloom in living, psychedelic color.
Now, in those days, my migraines were spectacular: they lasted exactly 56 hours, and if I could not make myself sleep, I would lie in bed, sweating foul fluid and vomiting ceaselessly. Those attacks reduced me to a begging and puling infant; I am told the color of my face moved from yellow to green and back again -- the whites of my eyes stayed steadily yellow, and cleared up to a perfect white within minutes of the passing of the migraine. Not pretty, not fun, unmistakably a curse of some sort. To this day, though I’m now free of them, I have not understood the provenance of nor the release from those agonizing spells. Eventually Imitrex and its spinoffs were put on the market; I spent about 8 years jealously guarding those pills (they cost about $20 each, and, as I say, I was broke much of that time and without health insurance). At one point, in desperation, I begged a physician friend of mine for a prescription, and, again shamelessly begging, persuaded two of my kids to pay for my migraine drugs for a year or so. I finally resorted to importing Imitrex from an internet site (God knows the exact compound of the pills I took – some things are better left unexamined). Then, sometime between 2006 and 2008, the headaches stopped. I still have Imitrexes around – I know exactly where they are and exactly how many remain, more than a year after my last attack. The memories of those migraine headaches are as much a part of me as my smallpox vaccination scar and my big feet.
So there we were, in the middle of the nauseating amber waves of grain in unspeakable heat, the gritty gusts of crosswinds thudding into the truck at 45 knots. We were hocked to the last penny on our remaining credit card, I driving a truck that rented at $100 a day and cost the same amount in fuel, Mary in the chase car carrying a dying dog and a stoic but fading cat in un-air-conditioned misery. The truck had AC, but wouldn't go faster than 55 mph so the whole thing, to my increasingly hysterical mind, became fresh Hell in very slow motion.
Arriving at the motel, we unloaded the animals and the necessary luggage including my little Mac Plus that I had brought along to check in online in the evenings with friends, and to send an update of how this remarkable trip was going. (I said when we were deciding to do it, “How hard could it be?” By the end of its first 45 minutes, when, using the truck body as a crowbar, I ripped the rain gutter off of a dentist’s office building in Scotts Valley, I vowed I would never utter those words again. I haven’t yet, except in desperate jest.) Our friends and my children were all shaking their heads throughout the making of the arrangements and, even during the trip itself, I was sure that I heard the clicking sounds of eyes rolling in heads across the nation. Anyway, I had promised to keep in touch with all of them, and was sending out nightly group emails to the effect that we had made it another day closer to Atlanta (where we knew NO ONE).
That night of the lowering migraine, I was giddy with panic and relief: panic because we could not afford to stop for my usual 56 hours of migraine prostration, and relief because I had not in fact ridden the damned truck into a drainage ditch. I decided to hell with reassuring all our loved ones, to hell with being too arrogant to admit that this MIGHT have been a mistake, I would just write and tell them all exactly how, as they said on “The West Wing” when the President was shot, my day had been. Mary and I had agreed that neither of us would complain to the other for the length of the trip and the settling in afterwards – there was nothing to be gained by it and it would only bring the other one down; despair was not an option. On the other hand, that night I was no longer in the mood to be brave, or even as stoic as my cat, and so decided to tell the truth to people that loved me.
I wrote and wrote and wrote; too hot and nauseated to eat, I just wrote until I couldn’t think of another single thing to set down. I was completely focused on logging the whole day. When I was finished, I found that I had no headache; the prelude aura had disappeared, my appetite was back, Mary swore my color was a healthy pink (well, it was REALLY pink because the heat was still brutal, but at least it wasn’t yellow).
Now, I know that I said in the previous blog that physical pain could stop connection in its tracks. When I think of that mindless feat of writing my migraine away, of connecting so solidly with myself that I was not able to tell the same lie as those of delightful adventures of the previous days, I’m not so sure. Perhaps if the headache had fully bloomed and I had given over my body and soul to it, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to THINK about writing, much less the capacity actually to do it. Once that letter was written, I began to take back my life from the grip of the FEAR of the migraines – the headaches were bad enough, but the fear had been just as crippling, effectively doubling the pain, not to mention a constant anxiety about when the next one would jump me.
I think of fear as being one of the Great Disconnectors, and I am pretty sure I get that one. Pain is what you get for having a body: nobody gets through life pain-free. Fear, and its brothers grief and anger, are what you get when you lie to yourself.
--
Now, in those days, my migraines were spectacular: they lasted exactly 56 hours, and if I could not make myself sleep, I would lie in bed, sweating foul fluid and vomiting ceaselessly. Those attacks reduced me to a begging and puling infant; I am told the color of my face moved from yellow to green and back again -- the whites of my eyes stayed steadily yellow, and cleared up to a perfect white within minutes of the passing of the migraine. Not pretty, not fun, unmistakably a curse of some sort. To this day, though I’m now free of them, I have not understood the provenance of nor the release from those agonizing spells. Eventually Imitrex and its spinoffs were put on the market; I spent about 8 years jealously guarding those pills (they cost about $20 each, and, as I say, I was broke much of that time and without health insurance). At one point, in desperation, I begged a physician friend of mine for a prescription, and, again shamelessly begging, persuaded two of my kids to pay for my migraine drugs for a year or so. I finally resorted to importing Imitrex from an internet site (God knows the exact compound of the pills I took – some things are better left unexamined). Then, sometime between 2006 and 2008, the headaches stopped. I still have Imitrexes around – I know exactly where they are and exactly how many remain, more than a year after my last attack. The memories of those migraine headaches are as much a part of me as my smallpox vaccination scar and my big feet.
So there we were, in the middle of the nauseating amber waves of grain in unspeakable heat, the gritty gusts of crosswinds thudding into the truck at 45 knots. We were hocked to the last penny on our remaining credit card, I driving a truck that rented at $100 a day and cost the same amount in fuel, Mary in the chase car carrying a dying dog and a stoic but fading cat in un-air-conditioned misery. The truck had AC, but wouldn't go faster than 55 mph so the whole thing, to my increasingly hysterical mind, became fresh Hell in very slow motion.
Arriving at the motel, we unloaded the animals and the necessary luggage including my little Mac Plus that I had brought along to check in online in the evenings with friends, and to send an update of how this remarkable trip was going. (I said when we were deciding to do it, “How hard could it be?” By the end of its first 45 minutes, when, using the truck body as a crowbar, I ripped the rain gutter off of a dentist’s office building in Scotts Valley, I vowed I would never utter those words again. I haven’t yet, except in desperate jest.) Our friends and my children were all shaking their heads throughout the making of the arrangements and, even during the trip itself, I was sure that I heard the clicking sounds of eyes rolling in heads across the nation. Anyway, I had promised to keep in touch with all of them, and was sending out nightly group emails to the effect that we had made it another day closer to Atlanta (where we knew NO ONE).
That night of the lowering migraine, I was giddy with panic and relief: panic because we could not afford to stop for my usual 56 hours of migraine prostration, and relief because I had not in fact ridden the damned truck into a drainage ditch. I decided to hell with reassuring all our loved ones, to hell with being too arrogant to admit that this MIGHT have been a mistake, I would just write and tell them all exactly how, as they said on “The West Wing” when the President was shot, my day had been. Mary and I had agreed that neither of us would complain to the other for the length of the trip and the settling in afterwards – there was nothing to be gained by it and it would only bring the other one down; despair was not an option. On the other hand, that night I was no longer in the mood to be brave, or even as stoic as my cat, and so decided to tell the truth to people that loved me.
I wrote and wrote and wrote; too hot and nauseated to eat, I just wrote until I couldn’t think of another single thing to set down. I was completely focused on logging the whole day. When I was finished, I found that I had no headache; the prelude aura had disappeared, my appetite was back, Mary swore my color was a healthy pink (well, it was REALLY pink because the heat was still brutal, but at least it wasn’t yellow).
Now, I know that I said in the previous blog that physical pain could stop connection in its tracks. When I think of that mindless feat of writing my migraine away, of connecting so solidly with myself that I was not able to tell the same lie as those of delightful adventures of the previous days, I’m not so sure. Perhaps if the headache had fully bloomed and I had given over my body and soul to it, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to THINK about writing, much less the capacity actually to do it. Once that letter was written, I began to take back my life from the grip of the FEAR of the migraines – the headaches were bad enough, but the fear had been just as crippling, effectively doubling the pain, not to mention a constant anxiety about when the next one would jump me.
I think of fear as being one of the Great Disconnectors, and I am pretty sure I get that one. Pain is what you get for having a body: nobody gets through life pain-free. Fear, and its brothers grief and anger, are what you get when you lie to yourself.
--
Monday, July 13, 2009
Okay, now what?
Man, this connection-with-self exercise is really hard. I know I keep going on and on about it, but it does seem to be true what I've heard: all effective and satisfying relationships begin with it, and without it all we are is lost and alone.
I know of only one shortcut to connection with oneself (unless you're the Dalai Lama), and it's definitely the hard way: that is to get physically injured or really sick. Winning the lottery pales when one has just barked one's shin on the open dishwasher door for the fourth time that day. The most expensive, exotic, fabulous and food-filled ocean cruise is utterly lost on someone who is wretchedly, wrenchingly, and retchingly seasick. It is easy to get one's own attention if the body is in distress -- ask any cutter. And that is really sad, isn't it?
So, masochism aside, how in the world do we find ourselves, secure the connection, fit back into our own skins? I happen to have the luxury of examining this today, because my stomach is upset. Maybe it's the heat, which has been brutal for a week and will be for another 5 days at least. Maybe it's some kind of food allergy. Could be sympathy for the dogs (who entertained themselves and us all day yesterday with a festival of diarrhea). Whatever it is I have no desire to accomplish anything today, but am feeling too lousy to sleep. That leaves me trudging back to my lesson plan.
In review, then, boys and girls, here's the process of connection (which, you'll recall, is what we get when we love):
[Note: Art Buchwald (I think) on a day of pleasant ball-tossing and other familial bonhomie, ordered his eight-year-old son to sign an affidavit to the effect that he was having a happy childhood. If only I had thought of that, my children and I wouldn't now be saddled with only the memories of sad and painful times of their (and my!) youth. We're running out of witnesses to the happy, funny, loving occasions, and are being held hostage to the miserable ones.]
Therefore, all that being so, we tiptoe out of the amphitheater of guilt, leaving the Greeks to do their garment-rending in peace.
We progress onto (2): Love beyond vision. I am still not sure what that might be, but a friend suggests that it is faith. In the darkest possible part of the forest, it's all we can do to see the next safe place to step. We guess that it's in the general direction of home, we hope that there's not a snake hidden under the leaves, we pray that if there ARE any guardian angels they're still awake at the switch. We proceed anyway.
Must be a control problem. Is there ANYONE of my acquaintance here that has the tiniest issue with control? If so, please speak up. It is not a subject with which I have any familiarity. (Right, Juls.)
----
I know of only one shortcut to connection with oneself (unless you're the Dalai Lama), and it's definitely the hard way: that is to get physically injured or really sick. Winning the lottery pales when one has just barked one's shin on the open dishwasher door for the fourth time that day. The most expensive, exotic, fabulous and food-filled ocean cruise is utterly lost on someone who is wretchedly, wrenchingly, and retchingly seasick. It is easy to get one's own attention if the body is in distress -- ask any cutter. And that is really sad, isn't it?
So, masochism aside, how in the world do we find ourselves, secure the connection, fit back into our own skins? I happen to have the luxury of examining this today, because my stomach is upset. Maybe it's the heat, which has been brutal for a week and will be for another 5 days at least. Maybe it's some kind of food allergy. Could be sympathy for the dogs (who entertained themselves and us all day yesterday with a festival of diarrhea). Whatever it is I have no desire to accomplish anything today, but am feeling too lousy to sleep. That leaves me trudging back to my lesson plan.
In review, then, boys and girls, here's the process of connection (which, you'll recall, is what we get when we love):
- Love beyond recollection (that must be the forgiveness thing);
- Love beyond vision;
- Love beyond judgment;
- Love beyond quality;
- Love beyond condition;
- Love beyond expectation; and
- Love beyond reciprocation.
[Note: Art Buchwald (I think) on a day of pleasant ball-tossing and other familial bonhomie, ordered his eight-year-old son to sign an affidavit to the effect that he was having a happy childhood. If only I had thought of that, my children and I wouldn't now be saddled with only the memories of sad and painful times of their (and my!) youth. We're running out of witnesses to the happy, funny, loving occasions, and are being held hostage to the miserable ones.]
Therefore, all that being so, we tiptoe out of the amphitheater of guilt, leaving the Greeks to do their garment-rending in peace.
We progress onto (2): Love beyond vision. I am still not sure what that might be, but a friend suggests that it is faith. In the darkest possible part of the forest, it's all we can do to see the next safe place to step. We guess that it's in the general direction of home, we hope that there's not a snake hidden under the leaves, we pray that if there ARE any guardian angels they're still awake at the switch. We proceed anyway.
Must be a control problem. Is there ANYONE of my acquaintance here that has the tiniest issue with control? If so, please speak up. It is not a subject with which I have any familiarity. (Right, Juls.)
----
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Hip Hip Hooray
I am going to throw a party in honor of my youngest child's 39th birthday next month. It's going to be a surprise, so don't tell ANYBODY! I am inviting all of her brothers, her sister, her aunts, ward of one aunt, husband of another aunt. I'm going to include her cousins, and their spouses and children, her nieces and nephews, her sister-in-law, the parents and aunt of her sister-in-law, the mother of a parent of her sister-in-law. I'm inviting the guy that delivers pizza to the house of any of these people, plus their pool guys, their gardeners, their cleaning crews. I'm sending all of them to the house of the guest of honor, treating them to a delightful weekend for this most auspicious occasion.
I'm sparing no expense, leaving no stone unturned. I'm inviting Mohammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabi; also invited are the Boston Strangler and Osama bin Laden. Bernie Madoff will get special leave to be there. I'm inviting all of her FaceBookFriends (FBF's) -- ALL of them -- and all of the FBF's of all of her FBF's that she's poached over the years.
Unfortunately, I am unable to invite myself, but this huge and expensive party is the very least I can do for my baby girl. It is an honor to reduce myself to just making it happen for her. She's lonely, she's frightened for her future, and is nearly eaten alive with hate. Poor kid -- maybe this will make her feel better.
----
I'm sparing no expense, leaving no stone unturned. I'm inviting Mohammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabi; also invited are the Boston Strangler and Osama bin Laden. Bernie Madoff will get special leave to be there. I'm inviting all of her FaceBookFriends (FBF's) -- ALL of them -- and all of the FBF's of all of her FBF's that she's poached over the years.
Unfortunately, I am unable to invite myself, but this huge and expensive party is the very least I can do for my baby girl. It is an honor to reduce myself to just making it happen for her. She's lonely, she's frightened for her future, and is nearly eaten alive with hate. Poor kid -- maybe this will make her feel better.
----
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Surrender Dorothy!
A few weeks ago a friend was being scared witless by a cascade of medical issues her husband was exhibiting, from cancer to heart issues to shingles aftermaths to God knows what else. In one of those automatic but surprisingly useful comments, I told her not to give in to the fear. She said later that that was exactly what she needed to hear; I took credit for it though I'm not sure "I" was the one that came up with it.
Lately I've been tempted to "give in" but even in the middle of the stomach-drop, I can "hear" myself (or somebody) telling me not to give in to the grief, either. When a person in mourning says that she's afraid to start crying for fear she'll never stop, I know exactly what she means. When someone gets crazy with panic -- hysterical, unhearing, unseeing -- I know exactly what's happened: he's given in to the fear. Likewise, someone becoming enraged has just offered up his own psyche to it, and it's pure surrender of self. In the last case, that of anger out of control, everybody else in the room is busy getting the hell out of the way of it, but if one of them felt physically safe enough, he could understand what was going on and perhaps help the one slamming around get back to himself. Or not, but at least there would be a sober witness to it. In turn, fear and grief can be contagious and our emotional antibodies need to be invoked or all the world would run mad.
My teacher once told me that the three Great Disconnectors are fear, grief and anger. If it is true that connection begins with self, then certainly we disconnect from ourselves when giving over to one of them. Common terms for this surrender are "unhinged", "unspooled", "deranged", "losing it" and we know it when we see it. I'm not sure we know it when we are ourselves coming unspooled; we usually know it in retrospect, and heap embarrassment and shame upon our own heads for having "lost it." It would be helpful if we could spot it either before the episode or in the early stages of it; that way maybe we could get on top of it before it gets on top of us.
On the other hand, there's quite a rush with any of these conditions, and the rush is very seductive. Sometimes we think that the antidote to incipient depression is violent feeling -- wailing and gnashing of teeth -- but in fact it's only the flip side of depression, and it's every bit as destructive as the original depression. Raging is particularly attractive because when we're in full-on rage, people tend to scatter (and rightfully so), which makes us feel powerful, tough, in charge. We're not any of those things, of course; when goddamning around, all we are is somebody throwing a tantrum, and most parents know that a child in tantrum mode has become a suicide bomber because he has no other weapons left to him; he's entirely WITHOUT power, and so he sacrifices himself just to get a little taste of it.
Losing it through fear or grief can be attractive as well; it puts us squarely in the position of Victim, and often there's a professional Rescuer around who can rush in and make himself feel powerful by trying to reassure or comfort us. Of course, we're getting off on this whole thing by massive infusions of self-pity, and by the frantic attentions of the Rescuer(s), and so we resist getting better. Thus the Rescuer can't do his job and is spurred on to ever greater efforts, and so it goes. It seems to be great fun, and satisfying to all involved, as long as everybody in the play remembers his lines and his blocking (ha). We're not connecting with the other actors, we're only pretending to so we can keep things going. In the end, nobody really gets better, nobody really feels better, the real issues have not been addressed and we keep racing around the maze, smacking into walls and wearing ourselves out with frustration and soul-searing loneliness.
The only way out is Love, the active verb, not the (direct or indirect) object. I was given a discipline; I haven't tried it yet because it's early in the day and I seem only to be subject to the blues in the late afternoon/evening, but I'm hoping (a) that today I won't GET the blues, but (b) if I do get blue that invoking the discpline will ease it, and/or (c) if I can even remember the damned discipline in the first place I will have struck a blow toward self-connection, that is to say my brain will have been fruitfully engaged and that always makes me feel better.
Anyway, here's the discipline: first I say, "I am doing the very best I can;" then I am to name every single thing that I love, starting with myself; I name all the big and small things, no matter how trivial, including even the things I don't like. It would go something like this: "I love myself, I love my dogs, I love my house, my friends, my tomato plants; I love to write; I love to swim; I love my children; I love the sunset; I love my fake fingernails, the dust on the bookcase...," you get the point. Then all that is loved becomes one, and the act of loving has transformed the grief, the fear, the anger; all that energy gets channeled in a positive direction and I'm back inside my Self, my home, my heart, and I feel better.
I am doing the best I can, and I love practical suggestions.
----
Lately I've been tempted to "give in" but even in the middle of the stomach-drop, I can "hear" myself (or somebody) telling me not to give in to the grief, either. When a person in mourning says that she's afraid to start crying for fear she'll never stop, I know exactly what she means. When someone gets crazy with panic -- hysterical, unhearing, unseeing -- I know exactly what's happened: he's given in to the fear. Likewise, someone becoming enraged has just offered up his own psyche to it, and it's pure surrender of self. In the last case, that of anger out of control, everybody else in the room is busy getting the hell out of the way of it, but if one of them felt physically safe enough, he could understand what was going on and perhaps help the one slamming around get back to himself. Or not, but at least there would be a sober witness to it. In turn, fear and grief can be contagious and our emotional antibodies need to be invoked or all the world would run mad.
My teacher once told me that the three Great Disconnectors are fear, grief and anger. If it is true that connection begins with self, then certainly we disconnect from ourselves when giving over to one of them. Common terms for this surrender are "unhinged", "unspooled", "deranged", "losing it" and we know it when we see it. I'm not sure we know it when we are ourselves coming unspooled; we usually know it in retrospect, and heap embarrassment and shame upon our own heads for having "lost it." It would be helpful if we could spot it either before the episode or in the early stages of it; that way maybe we could get on top of it before it gets on top of us.
On the other hand, there's quite a rush with any of these conditions, and the rush is very seductive. Sometimes we think that the antidote to incipient depression is violent feeling -- wailing and gnashing of teeth -- but in fact it's only the flip side of depression, and it's every bit as destructive as the original depression. Raging is particularly attractive because when we're in full-on rage, people tend to scatter (and rightfully so), which makes us feel powerful, tough, in charge. We're not any of those things, of course; when goddamning around, all we are is somebody throwing a tantrum, and most parents know that a child in tantrum mode has become a suicide bomber because he has no other weapons left to him; he's entirely WITHOUT power, and so he sacrifices himself just to get a little taste of it.
Losing it through fear or grief can be attractive as well; it puts us squarely in the position of Victim, and often there's a professional Rescuer around who can rush in and make himself feel powerful by trying to reassure or comfort us. Of course, we're getting off on this whole thing by massive infusions of self-pity, and by the frantic attentions of the Rescuer(s), and so we resist getting better. Thus the Rescuer can't do his job and is spurred on to ever greater efforts, and so it goes. It seems to be great fun, and satisfying to all involved, as long as everybody in the play remembers his lines and his blocking (ha). We're not connecting with the other actors, we're only pretending to so we can keep things going. In the end, nobody really gets better, nobody really feels better, the real issues have not been addressed and we keep racing around the maze, smacking into walls and wearing ourselves out with frustration and soul-searing loneliness.
The only way out is Love, the active verb, not the (direct or indirect) object. I was given a discipline; I haven't tried it yet because it's early in the day and I seem only to be subject to the blues in the late afternoon/evening, but I'm hoping (a) that today I won't GET the blues, but (b) if I do get blue that invoking the discpline will ease it, and/or (c) if I can even remember the damned discipline in the first place I will have struck a blow toward self-connection, that is to say my brain will have been fruitfully engaged and that always makes me feel better.
Anyway, here's the discipline: first I say, "I am doing the very best I can;" then I am to name every single thing that I love, starting with myself; I name all the big and small things, no matter how trivial, including even the things I don't like. It would go something like this: "I love myself, I love my dogs, I love my house, my friends, my tomato plants; I love to write; I love to swim; I love my children; I love the sunset; I love my fake fingernails, the dust on the bookcase...," you get the point. Then all that is loved becomes one, and the act of loving has transformed the grief, the fear, the anger; all that energy gets channeled in a positive direction and I'm back inside my Self, my home, my heart, and I feel better.
I am doing the best I can, and I love practical suggestions.
----
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
So much for the high road
As my little family soap opera continues to unfold, abate, get dull and tedious, then recycle, many people are sharing their own stories of adjustment with their grown children. One reports that her kids like her but hate each other, which is painful but probably not as painful as it might be if they, like mine, had bonded over their dislike of her. Another says her kids aren't on drugs (probably), but in their twenties, one with a child, and all still living with her. She feels ambivalent about the household, but loves the granddaughter and is glad she's there. One tells me that I was the mother she always wanted to be, that her kids didn't finish college, and she likes them okay, but really depends on her friends for diversion, support, connection. She says my kids, and I, should be goddamned grateful that they're educated, healthy and have JOBS, and they should stop whining and I should stop caring if they do.
My friend Cathy tells me that the only time she ever hit her kids was when the younger, ruder one was 18, and she slapped her, hard, across the face. Cathy has never forgotten it, but has never for a minute felt guilty about it. Those of us who have lived with teens understand the impulse, and I'm a little envious. I wish I'd had the nerve to do something like that when confronted with unspeakable rudeness and disrespect. I might -- MIGHT -- not be in the spot I'm in today. I told Cathy how she was a kind of hero to me, and she told me the story of her next door neighbor -- it's a cautionary tale.
When the neighbor's kids were teens they were unbelievably snotty to her. It was relentless and steadily worsened over time. Cathy remembers feeling terribly inadequate because the neighbor mother was unfailingly loving and patient with the little bastards, ignoring the slights and insults, always encouraging and rewarding their occasional good behavior, while Cathy was short-tempered and, finally, see above, physical when one of her kids mouthed off to her.
Finally all the neighborhood kids left home, and one evening, after the neighbor's daughter had been arrested in Argentina on drug charges and then released and deported back to the US, the girl went on Nightline to talk about it, and to say that the whole incident was her mother's fault. The neighbor's son, after being sprung from drug rehab for the nth time, came to his mother's house and tried to kill her when she refused him money for more drugs. Failing in the matricide, the kid ran to his father's house (father had divorced the mother when he found a younger version of her) for sanctuary, and his father, a lawyer, waited three days before turning him in.
Now, my mother urged us always to take the high road in relationship squabbles, and I am doing my level best to proceed as she would have, but I gotta say tales like that one give me pause. Not that any of my kids are completely nuts like that, but there are times....
And another friend this morning said what's up? I'm not supposed to be thinking about them anymore. I can only say it's got to be a process, that it doesn't begin and end with a decision. I'm thinking in terms of a wound -- a skinned knee for example -- that scabbed over too early and became pussy and inflamed; it takes a while, and a lot of antibiotics, topical as well as systemic, to fix it. The Chinese say we heal from the bottom up and the inside out, so just getting the pus out is a major accomplishment. I haven't yet found the appropriate, metaphorical antibiotic cream.
Too much? Sorry, but the metaphor seems apt this morning.
---
My friend Cathy tells me that the only time she ever hit her kids was when the younger, ruder one was 18, and she slapped her, hard, across the face. Cathy has never forgotten it, but has never for a minute felt guilty about it. Those of us who have lived with teens understand the impulse, and I'm a little envious. I wish I'd had the nerve to do something like that when confronted with unspeakable rudeness and disrespect. I might -- MIGHT -- not be in the spot I'm in today. I told Cathy how she was a kind of hero to me, and she told me the story of her next door neighbor -- it's a cautionary tale.
When the neighbor's kids were teens they were unbelievably snotty to her. It was relentless and steadily worsened over time. Cathy remembers feeling terribly inadequate because the neighbor mother was unfailingly loving and patient with the little bastards, ignoring the slights and insults, always encouraging and rewarding their occasional good behavior, while Cathy was short-tempered and, finally, see above, physical when one of her kids mouthed off to her.
Finally all the neighborhood kids left home, and one evening, after the neighbor's daughter had been arrested in Argentina on drug charges and then released and deported back to the US, the girl went on Nightline to talk about it, and to say that the whole incident was her mother's fault. The neighbor's son, after being sprung from drug rehab for the nth time, came to his mother's house and tried to kill her when she refused him money for more drugs. Failing in the matricide, the kid ran to his father's house (father had divorced the mother when he found a younger version of her) for sanctuary, and his father, a lawyer, waited three days before turning him in.
Now, my mother urged us always to take the high road in relationship squabbles, and I am doing my level best to proceed as she would have, but I gotta say tales like that one give me pause. Not that any of my kids are completely nuts like that, but there are times....
And another friend this morning said what's up? I'm not supposed to be thinking about them anymore. I can only say it's got to be a process, that it doesn't begin and end with a decision. I'm thinking in terms of a wound -- a skinned knee for example -- that scabbed over too early and became pussy and inflamed; it takes a while, and a lot of antibiotics, topical as well as systemic, to fix it. The Chinese say we heal from the bottom up and the inside out, so just getting the pus out is a major accomplishment. I haven't yet found the appropriate, metaphorical antibiotic cream.
Too much? Sorry, but the metaphor seems apt this morning.
---
Sunday, June 28, 2009
The 9190.8km morning hike: HUT HUT HUT
All right, boys and girls; let's leave the gore for a bit and try to focus on today's lesson: Connection across space, over time. Last week, while getting ready for her adventure in Vienna, Mary said that her pre-trip anxiety had more to do with distance than time away from home. If there's an emergency here, she can't get back to help easily or quickly; she worries that I'll not be able to handle Things -- the present family psychodrama while grinding out daily chores -- and I have had some concerns about that as well.
Besides that, she knows that the sudden immersion in a different culture makes for disorientation and a certain sense of having cast oneself away: Where is home? Who am I when I'm not at home? Where are my loved ones, and will they love me still, now while I'm so far away and later when I get home, altered by these strange circumstances?
In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a big, fast ocean liner, changing my clock every night when I retired, and so I had time to adjust psychologically and physically as readily as I did chronologically. After five days of clock- and body-resetting, a day in Cherbourg, a night on the English Channel, then a couple of days in London (after a hellish train ride up from Southampton), it all seemed like tourism, "going abroad" as it was probably experienced by the upper classes for several centuries before air travel. I enjoyed the whole thing, and while I missed my home, I felt the connection to it, solid, waiting, welcoming.
Today I rest inside that home and my connection with Mary (who soars at 35,000 feet at the moment) feels more secure than my own feet on my own floor. True, I'm still trying to find my way through some tattered relationships, to get back inside myself, to act initially and continuously as if I'm going to be fine until I truly am fine. (That formula really works, by the way, and if I can just keep it going, it shouldn't take too long to accomplish.) Irrespective of distance, then, connection is sustenance; and we can communicate readily in any number of ways (viz. those poor children on the streets of Tehran, Tweeting as if their lives depended on it, blazing their cell phone videos around the planet). I am sustained, fed, supported, encouraged, loved -- I can feel it. It thrums along some kind of invisible fiber optic channel; it practically catches me in the middle of a stumble, lifts me and sets me squarely on my feet again.
I guess I can go ahead and crash around the house, weep or sleep depending on what needs doing; my healing is not arrested, not even postponed -- it continues regardless. It's heartening, and I thought you all ought to know about it.
---
Besides that, she knows that the sudden immersion in a different culture makes for disorientation and a certain sense of having cast oneself away: Where is home? Who am I when I'm not at home? Where are my loved ones, and will they love me still, now while I'm so far away and later when I get home, altered by these strange circumstances?
In 2003, I crossed the Atlantic on a big, fast ocean liner, changing my clock every night when I retired, and so I had time to adjust psychologically and physically as readily as I did chronologically. After five days of clock- and body-resetting, a day in Cherbourg, a night on the English Channel, then a couple of days in London (after a hellish train ride up from Southampton), it all seemed like tourism, "going abroad" as it was probably experienced by the upper classes for several centuries before air travel. I enjoyed the whole thing, and while I missed my home, I felt the connection to it, solid, waiting, welcoming.
Today I rest inside that home and my connection with Mary (who soars at 35,000 feet at the moment) feels more secure than my own feet on my own floor. True, I'm still trying to find my way through some tattered relationships, to get back inside myself, to act initially and continuously as if I'm going to be fine until I truly am fine. (That formula really works, by the way, and if I can just keep it going, it shouldn't take too long to accomplish.) Irrespective of distance, then, connection is sustenance; and we can communicate readily in any number of ways (viz. those poor children on the streets of Tehran, Tweeting as if their lives depended on it, blazing their cell phone videos around the planet). I am sustained, fed, supported, encouraged, loved -- I can feel it. It thrums along some kind of invisible fiber optic channel; it practically catches me in the middle of a stumble, lifts me and sets me squarely on my feet again.
I guess I can go ahead and crash around the house, weep or sleep depending on what needs doing; my healing is not arrested, not even postponed -- it continues regardless. It's heartening, and I thought you all ought to know about it.
---
Friday, June 26, 2009
Field Work
Okay, here's today's lesson in the cursillo entitled Connection 101-544; this time it's practical application, field work, if you will. Remember in the last post I told you about the slap in the face as you get off the bus at boot camp? Today we're past that and on to the shaving of the head and donning uniforms that don't fit (yet).
My children and I have agreed on a trial separation. We are all of us very familiar with the steps toward mending or abandoning a broken relationship, and we proceed in order. It doesn't matter, for the sake of this exercise, the nature of the presenting issue; it doesn't even matter what each of them has to endure for his/her own growth process (since I can't do anything about it), and the less I know about what they might be going through (or not!), the better off we all are.
And THAT'S because I am retiring as Mother. I know, I know, I should have retired long since; all but the baby are in their40's, for God's sake, and the baby is racing towards that milestone herself. I should have abandoned them to their own resources years ago. The problem is that today, this morning, I'm not so sure I ever really fit the MotherMold as generally thought of, so it's possible that I have to paw through all the detritus of this dynamic even to figure out what I'm leaving behind.
I've pretty much been making up Motherhood from the start, since I have no younger siblings and therefore could not follow my own mother's excellent model for how to love them, civilize them and not kill them (or myself -- a distinct and frequently-occurring possibility) in the process. Their father, whose mother died tragically when he was fourteen, didn't have a model either, except for his own father, whom he chose not to emulate except when on automatic pilot, and that emulation was unhearing, uncaring and often brutal. Furthermore, any rule books we might have studied for help were cast away -- if not burned along with the bras -- in the sixties and seventies, so the old standards were not only not followed, they were to be eschewed. That left us -- all parents, single or not -- on our own, and most of us had relocated far far away from our extended families, who could have helped with all the gratuitous advice we so hated when living in each others' pockets. Cruel irony, that.
By the evidence at hand, I've done okay Mothering my kids: none of them is on drugs, none has been arrested (well there was that time when one of them slugged a neighbor, but the neighbor richly deserved it, so I'm not counting that; oh, and those little shoplifting peccadilloes during a troubled adolescence -- let's not count that either); they all graduated from college, they are all employed and functioning, even contributing, members of society; and three of the four are in therapy. (Wait, is that a good or a bad indicator of the quality of their Mothering? That has got to be a whole 'nother blog....) Two have divorced (and paid the price for it, so it's a good if painful thing); they enjoy each other's company, finally, and are even sweet and generous and careful of each other; they're all really funny, which has saved them (and will again) in hard and scary times.
So, my ad hoc method of Mothering has worked as far as my obligations to society are concerned, i.e., once having given birth to the little savages, I managed to civilize them. They may even have civilized themselves, but at the very least I didn't muddy the process with, say, alcoholism or addiction to smack, that sort of thing.
Okay, so I fit the MotherMold in terms of results, but not so much in terms of throwing myself whole-heartedly, selflessly, even gratefully, into the job of Child-Rearing. Not having any rules, and embarking on Motherhood at the age of 19, I never knew if I was measuring up, or if the kids were, for that matter, until each was safely launched. I never learned how to play with them, for example; their father did that (thank God), by wrestling and shooting hoops and taking hikes, etc. I felt too painfully the onus of taking care of business, like the laundry or the cooking or the nursing or the bathing or the shopping or the education, all of it for four children, and I always felt I came up short. It was a JOB, and one I never felt I was very good at, therefore I didn't feel I could take the time or energy to enjoy it, even if I knew what that meant, since I was always having to buckle down.
ANYWAY, I know I made a lot of mistakes, but I'm damned if I know what they were, and I've been too guilt-ridden to ask any of the kids. I do know that I worked hard and constantly to get it right, I never didn't do the best I knew how. Since the children have grown and gone, I have connected with them mostly from a position of sorrysorrysorry, craven and crawling, begging for crumbs of attention. My God, we do teach people how to treat us, and my reward has been entirely appropriate to what I thought I deserved.
Gotta change that, gotta find a new way to connect -- or choose not to -- with my kids. In 1989 I was driven to figure out how to live my life in full without a live-in male; it took years, but I figured it out, and have even come to enjoy the company of men again. I'm hoping this cursillo won't take as long to learn; I'm running out of time.
It seems obvious that, if I'm no longer the Mother of my kids, then we have to determine if there's any OTHER reason to sustain a relationship. That will have to happen with each one of them, with different criteria, 'cause if I'm not Mothering then I no longer have to treat them equally, right? Of course right.
My children and I have agreed on a trial separation. We are all of us very familiar with the steps toward mending or abandoning a broken relationship, and we proceed in order. It doesn't matter, for the sake of this exercise, the nature of the presenting issue; it doesn't even matter what each of them has to endure for his/her own growth process (since I can't do anything about it), and the less I know about what they might be going through (or not!), the better off we all are.
And THAT'S because I am retiring as Mother. I know, I know, I should have retired long since; all but the baby are in their40's, for God's sake, and the baby is racing towards that milestone herself. I should have abandoned them to their own resources years ago. The problem is that today, this morning, I'm not so sure I ever really fit the MotherMold as generally thought of, so it's possible that I have to paw through all the detritus of this dynamic even to figure out what I'm leaving behind.
I've pretty much been making up Motherhood from the start, since I have no younger siblings and therefore could not follow my own mother's excellent model for how to love them, civilize them and not kill them (or myself -- a distinct and frequently-occurring possibility) in the process. Their father, whose mother died tragically when he was fourteen, didn't have a model either, except for his own father, whom he chose not to emulate except when on automatic pilot, and that emulation was unhearing, uncaring and often brutal. Furthermore, any rule books we might have studied for help were cast away -- if not burned along with the bras -- in the sixties and seventies, so the old standards were not only not followed, they were to be eschewed. That left us -- all parents, single or not -- on our own, and most of us had relocated far far away from our extended families, who could have helped with all the gratuitous advice we so hated when living in each others' pockets. Cruel irony, that.
By the evidence at hand, I've done okay Mothering my kids: none of them is on drugs, none has been arrested (well there was that time when one of them slugged a neighbor, but the neighbor richly deserved it, so I'm not counting that; oh, and those little shoplifting peccadilloes during a troubled adolescence -- let's not count that either); they all graduated from college, they are all employed and functioning, even contributing, members of society; and three of the four are in therapy. (Wait, is that a good or a bad indicator of the quality of their Mothering? That has got to be a whole 'nother blog....) Two have divorced (and paid the price for it, so it's a good if painful thing); they enjoy each other's company, finally, and are even sweet and generous and careful of each other; they're all really funny, which has saved them (and will again) in hard and scary times.
So, my ad hoc method of Mothering has worked as far as my obligations to society are concerned, i.e., once having given birth to the little savages, I managed to civilize them. They may even have civilized themselves, but at the very least I didn't muddy the process with, say, alcoholism or addiction to smack, that sort of thing.
Okay, so I fit the MotherMold in terms of results, but not so much in terms of throwing myself whole-heartedly, selflessly, even gratefully, into the job of Child-Rearing. Not having any rules, and embarking on Motherhood at the age of 19, I never knew if I was measuring up, or if the kids were, for that matter, until each was safely launched. I never learned how to play with them, for example; their father did that (thank God), by wrestling and shooting hoops and taking hikes, etc. I felt too painfully the onus of taking care of business, like the laundry or the cooking or the nursing or the bathing or the shopping or the education, all of it for four children, and I always felt I came up short. It was a JOB, and one I never felt I was very good at, therefore I didn't feel I could take the time or energy to enjoy it, even if I knew what that meant, since I was always having to buckle down.
ANYWAY, I know I made a lot of mistakes, but I'm damned if I know what they were, and I've been too guilt-ridden to ask any of the kids. I do know that I worked hard and constantly to get it right, I never didn't do the best I knew how. Since the children have grown and gone, I have connected with them mostly from a position of sorrysorrysorry, craven and crawling, begging for crumbs of attention. My God, we do teach people how to treat us, and my reward has been entirely appropriate to what I thought I deserved.
Gotta change that, gotta find a new way to connect -- or choose not to -- with my kids. In 1989 I was driven to figure out how to live my life in full without a live-in male; it took years, but I figured it out, and have even come to enjoy the company of men again. I'm hoping this cursillo won't take as long to learn; I'm running out of time.
It seems obvious that, if I'm no longer the Mother of my kids, then we have to determine if there's any OTHER reason to sustain a relationship. That will have to happen with each one of them, with different criteria, 'cause if I'm not Mothering then I no longer have to treat them equally, right? Of course right.
- One of them might love me, but there's more a sense of obligation to me than love freely given; I like that kid, but we've never hung out with the same lack of expectation that I have with my closest friends.
- One of them has never really connected with me -- all our contact has either been out of obligation -- weddings, graduations, etc., or at my insistence, or because something was needed from me, like a free night's room and board in Atlanta on the way back from an exotic island; that couple came and went in the dark, so a relationship with me probably wouldn't survive the cold light of day.
- One of my kids can barely control active and visceral loathing for me -- in fact doesn't bother controlling it most of the time; I don't hold out much hope for a connection there.
- And the other kid I've come to love in a very clear and accepting way, probably because we had The Talk years ago, and because I tried to help during a very painful divorce. I think we enjoy each other's company; I have the most optimism for this one, even though I caused pain in the last presenting episode. I've been forgiven before, and I hope to be again.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Uh Oh
Starting today we will be treated to three months of boot camp in the mine-laden field of connection through communication. Lesson one will be the slap in the face as soon as we get off the bus, i.e., in order to get with the program, we must first be punished for NOT having connected well already. "How does it feel to be disconnected, you feckless piece of chopped liver?" "Not good, Drill Sergeant, SIR!" Fall in. The last time I had a lesson in connection was in 1989, the year that the love of my life left me for a younger woman, I went bankrupt, my sister died, and the 7.1 Loma Prieta Earthquake epicenter occurred a mile from my house. You'll excuse me if I'm a touch paranoid on the subject of connection; I learned, God knows, but the lesson was brutal.
Here's what I know so far about connection:
We cannot connect by intention or by design. That's why manipulation doesn't work: you KNOW there's an agenda at work here and it ain't yours.
We can only connect with love:
That's about all I can come up with by intellectualizing, and the intellectual process is merely scratching away at the front gate; rarely does it give one any headway in an emotional or spiritual problem.
I sure could use some help here, my friends. Anybody have any ideas?
Here's what I know so far about connection:
- It's the whole reason for living.
- A life well-lived depends not on what you do, but on whom you know, and it applies on every level, from the most money-grubbing and mundane in service of our baser desires, to the quest for intimacy, to pure enlightened compassion.
- The order of connection is: with Self first (save yourself, love yourself, use the dropped-down oxygen mask yourself before offering it to that squirming screaming child in your lap); then with Other (lovers, children, friends, etc.); and only then with God. (I wonder if the order is set up like that because the only way to God is to love self and then love the other? If you take the cut-through, over the hedges and cyclone fences, across Mr. Dobbeck's lawn, it isn't real? Food for thought. As if I didn't have enough already.)
- Connection begins and continues through the Heart chakra; connection at other chakras is not True Connection, it is merely a matter of convenience or the resolution of karma. (One must not confuse karma with connection -- the drive to reconcile karma may SEEM like connection, as in, "This is my soulmate, I'm just SURE of it!", but that's the drug of karma resolution. True Connection is compassionate, not impassioned.) Obsession is one example of connection NOT at the heart.
- Connection is what you get when you love.
- Love is what you get when you connect.
We cannot connect by intention or by design. That's why manipulation doesn't work: you KNOW there's an agenda at work here and it ain't yours.
We can only connect with love:
- Love beyond recollection (that must be the forgiveness thing);
- Love beyond vision (I don't quite understand that one);
- Love beyond judgment (judgment is almost the opposite of love, certainly it blocks connection);
- Love beyond quality (love is not good or bad or tainted or pure, it just is);
- Love beyond condition (well, YES -- mother love is an example of that, I suppose);
- Love beyond expectation (expectation is massively troublesome, always); and
- Love beyond reciprocation (I think I get THAT one, after all these years -- if you only love hoping for reciprocation, you really are screwed).
That's about all I can come up with by intellectualizing, and the intellectual process is merely scratching away at the front gate; rarely does it give one any headway in an emotional or spiritual problem.
I sure could use some help here, my friends. Anybody have any ideas?
Monday, January 19, 2009
Twenty-five bullet points
I did the following for Facebook (which has a million different ways of distracting the narcissist), and I post it here just because it's written and I can delay a REAL blog. I hope I can get it done before another 6 (six!) months go by.
Twenty-five Random Things About Me
1. I love and hate these things, like Marco; it's a lot easier if there are questions already given (favorite color? name of your pet?), but NOOOO. I have to start from the beginning. "And then when I was five...."
2. I used to be stuck on blue, then jewel green, a long time with white (5 Elements Chinese medicine people would have a terrific time with this); now, since I live in the desert, I'm fond of dusty rose and sage greens. Even the odd brown.
3. Just got a new pet, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Bindi.
What I like about Bindi is that he likes ME, wants to do whatever I'm doing, and when he sits with me, he goes very very still.
4. I love traveling, though I overpack every time; I'm only now accepting that that is how it is.
5. I cry -- sometimes really hard -- at TV stories about military casualties; they're all the brothers I never had.
6. I feel guilty for not keeping up with my blog.
7. I feel guilty for not writing with discipline (e.g., get up every day at 5, write for 4 hours).
8. Hell, I feel guilty for not doing EVERYTHING with discipline (get up every day at 5, write for 4 hours, eat egg whites and dry toast, work out for 45 minutes, swim for another 45, meditate for an hour, read great literature for 2 hours, grind the flour to make the biscuits for dinner, etc.).
9. On the other hand, I wish I had used guilt more effectively when my kids were little. (On THEM, for God's sake, not on MYSELF! Jeez -- try to keep up.)
10. I cannot tell a lie. I've tried, but the unblinking gaze from my mother's large, liquid brown eyes killed lying for me forever.
11. I'm not worried about my neck, but the rippling skin on the insides of my forearms startles me. Again, I live in the desert, so I suppose that in the end my skin will look like that of Georgia O'Keeffe. And there's no Stieglitz hanging around to tell me it's ravishing (and then hit me? hm -- maybe I'm bettah off).
12. I do like the color of my eyes, which is greeny blue most of the time; I've been told that when I'm mad, they go really green. I don't know if that's true; when I'm mad I'm very focused and the focus is never on the color of my own eyes.
13. I can't stand hearing or reading about the suffering of animals. It's a real problem -- it just stops me in my tracks.
14. I'm an excellent driver, even now.
15. I'm not afraid of death, but I would surely like to pick the manner of the dying.
16. I'm a pretty good cook, but I don't think I'll ever again be able to do it all the time every day.
17. I think all of my kids are really funny and really smart. I wish I could avail myself of the delightful conversations they have among themselves, but it's similar to the frustration of a scientist with an experiment -- the fact of my being there alters the dynamic and they're just not as funny when I'm around. I miss them. I miss being almost one of them.
18. I like to sing, but only in chorus; the collaboration just thrills me.
19. Speaking of singing, Renée Fleming knocks my socks off.
20. I like butter, sugar and chocolate in most combinations.
21. I LOVE Sarticious gin, and Jon Girvetz will one day be sorry he introduced me to it.
22. I really don't have any regrets (though some residual guilt, see nos. 6-9 above). My life has been full and never, as they say, have I had a dull moment.
23. I like my hands, too, though they're big and not graceful at all; they pretty much do whatever I want them to, so far they'er not particularly arthritic, and they perform feats of reiki magic.
24. I think I have hermit tendencies, but I don't think it counts if, in solitude, I'm online with friends a pretty large portion of the day. Maybe I'm only hermitlike because of the comfy pajamas part.
25. I don't know enough about wine, but I know whom to ask about it.
Twenty-five Random Things About Me
1. I love and hate these things, like Marco; it's a lot easier if there are questions already given (favorite color? name of your pet?), but NOOOO. I have to start from the beginning. "And then when I was five...."
2. I used to be stuck on blue, then jewel green, a long time with white (5 Elements Chinese medicine people would have a terrific time with this); now, since I live in the desert, I'm fond of dusty rose and sage greens. Even the odd brown.
3. Just got a new pet, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Bindi.
What I like about Bindi is that he likes ME, wants to do whatever I'm doing, and when he sits with me, he goes very very still. 4. I love traveling, though I overpack every time; I'm only now accepting that that is how it is.
5. I cry -- sometimes really hard -- at TV stories about military casualties; they're all the brothers I never had.
6. I feel guilty for not keeping up with my blog.
7. I feel guilty for not writing with discipline (e.g., get up every day at 5, write for 4 hours).
8. Hell, I feel guilty for not doing EVERYTHING with discipline (get up every day at 5, write for 4 hours, eat egg whites and dry toast, work out for 45 minutes, swim for another 45, meditate for an hour, read great literature for 2 hours, grind the flour to make the biscuits for dinner, etc.).
9. On the other hand, I wish I had used guilt more effectively when my kids were little. (On THEM, for God's sake, not on MYSELF! Jeez -- try to keep up.)
10. I cannot tell a lie. I've tried, but the unblinking gaze from my mother's large, liquid brown eyes killed lying for me forever.
11. I'm not worried about my neck, but the rippling skin on the insides of my forearms startles me. Again, I live in the desert, so I suppose that in the end my skin will look like that of Georgia O'Keeffe. And there's no Stieglitz hanging around to tell me it's ravishing (and then hit me? hm -- maybe I'm bettah off).
12. I do like the color of my eyes, which is greeny blue most of the time; I've been told that when I'm mad, they go really green. I don't know if that's true; when I'm mad I'm very focused and the focus is never on the color of my own eyes.
13. I can't stand hearing or reading about the suffering of animals. It's a real problem -- it just stops me in my tracks.
14. I'm an excellent driver, even now.
15. I'm not afraid of death, but I would surely like to pick the manner of the dying.
16. I'm a pretty good cook, but I don't think I'll ever again be able to do it all the time every day.
17. I think all of my kids are really funny and really smart. I wish I could avail myself of the delightful conversations they have among themselves, but it's similar to the frustration of a scientist with an experiment -- the fact of my being there alters the dynamic and they're just not as funny when I'm around. I miss them. I miss being almost one of them.
18. I like to sing, but only in chorus; the collaboration just thrills me.
19. Speaking of singing, Renée Fleming knocks my socks off.
20. I like butter, sugar and chocolate in most combinations.
21. I LOVE Sarticious gin, and Jon Girvetz will one day be sorry he introduced me to it.
22. I really don't have any regrets (though some residual guilt, see nos. 6-9 above). My life has been full and never, as they say, have I had a dull moment.
23. I like my hands, too, though they're big and not graceful at all; they pretty much do whatever I want them to, so far they'er not particularly arthritic, and they perform feats of reiki magic.
24. I think I have hermit tendencies, but I don't think it counts if, in solitude, I'm online with friends a pretty large portion of the day. Maybe I'm only hermitlike because of the comfy pajamas part.
25. I don't know enough about wine, but I know whom to ask about it.
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