Excavator

Poor Backslider*

2011-09-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

I've been deeply ashamed of my fear of what others think of me. Being afraid has caused me to do things I didn't particularly want to do, in order to not risk displeasing someone else. When Shannon asked me once when I'd lost connection with myself I assumed it was because I'd given up something I wanted in favor of what someone else wanted in order to avoid them thinking less of me. Something about the prospect made me feel so horrible inside I just couldn't face that feeling and it was easier to give in.

Then culture changed on me, and all at once we were supposed to be able to say no. Enter the shame of not being able to say no or set limits (remember the assertiveness training fad? "When I Say No I Feel Guilty"?). All at once, in order to please others, I had to show some spine, and not just go along.

Now there was a bind.

I see now, as I've written before, that there was a very real fear that if I displeased someone, if I disrupted their own fragile sense of self (ego), they would blame me and break connection. In order to maintain connection with them, I'd see myself the way they saw me (selfish, small, mean, etc), but at the price of staying connected to my own perspective.

My history of Christian fundamentalism predisposes me to think of life in a "Pilgrim's Progress" sort of way. One is going forward, or one is backsliding. Last week, on the roof, my discomfort with the woman parking herself within my family circle was compounded by my thoughts that the whole episode represented backsliding in the progress I've made. I felt that familiar feeling of bind. Was my inability to resolve the situation without removing myself from it undermining this new Self I've been working so hard to build?

So I took it in to Shannon as grist for the mill. I told her that whenever I'd imagine any means of getting what I wanted that involved personally asking the lady to go, well, it just felt impossible. I couldn't imagine doing it without it being hurtful and humiliating, no matter how gently I asked. I'd feel a wall of horror at the prospect. My dilemma was that in this situation I was able to stay in complete connection with myself and my desire to separate (at least that's progress--in the past I would have blamed myself and put away those feelings and forced myself to engage), and I couldn't do that and be one with her. How do I "be one" with someone I desperately want to go?

Shannon wanted to know if there was anything inside of me that reminded me of this woman. Yes, I suppose it would be the me who's felt humiliated when I'd thought I was a wanted presence and instead the opposite was true. Or I'd thought something was true and found out later that everyone but me knew different. That's when I realized--those feelings I'd have whenever I imagined telling the woman the truth--that was me, this part in me, connecting to that part in her. But, I was resisting the connection. That's what felt like the dilemma. I was afraid I was reverting to my old history of fear of displeasing someone. I think it may be different now. I think the real discomfort came from my empathy with her--or, with the part of me that she reminded me of. Maybe when I feel resistance like that in company with other people, it's a signal to me that I'm vibrating to something in them that is true of something in me, but I'm complicating it by resisting. Shannon said, "You'll have to play with this. But I wonder if you'd find that if you stayed one with that part of you in her, if the resonance from vibration at that shared frequency might resolve the whole dilemma."

Now there's a challenge. I'm not very adept at staying self-aware in 'field conditions'. It's going to take a shift to experience resistance as resonance instead of as dislike or self-recrimination.

But I like the idea that maybe there is no backsliding. Shannon said, "You can't go back."

*from the song "Poor Backslider" by Greg Brown

The One-ness Experiment--day 14

2011-09-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

Recap of nearly 5 years of therapy: I learned to disconnect from myself in order to be in connection with others. To disconnect from myself I had to not-see much of what I saw. I had to not-feel much of what I felt. To not-see and not-feel I had to put my very perceptions in doubt. I got really good at it. The result was I was snarled in a knot I couldn't begin to evaluate and unravel. My very foundation of thinking was disrupted whenever I'd try to figure this out, by the conviction that I couldn't trust myself.

I spent several years with Shannon's support, realizing that I had assumed a burden of responsibility that wasn't mine to assume. I harbored the doubt that with every conflict I was somehow at fault, due to some ineptness, selfishness, or flaw within. I took the perspective of the Other, because I wanted to be fair. I discovered that taking on the perspective of the Other meant abandoning my own perspective. As I became aware of the pattern I began to realize that I didn't have to do that. I mulled it over. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of closing out the perspectives of others--God knows I knew enough people who did that. They were often bullies, self-righteous; I didn't want to be that. So I came to understand that the question was, "How can I see the perspective of Others without losing my own?" Shannon answered, "By being One with them."

I asked, in an earlier post, what this looks like in real life. I've been experimenting ever since. What does Oneness look like; what does it have to do with:

The apartment building I live in has 25 floors. The 25th is the roof, which has picnic tables, a barbecue, lounge chairs. The management hosted a party yesterday; they probably do it every year. Up on the roof, from 10 to 2 yesterday. Hot dogs, ice cream, lemonade would be served. Residents would display their art, their talents.

It's my turn to live here, since Friday evening. Gary brought the boys over Saturday around 12:30 so we could go to the party. My car was already in the space that we rent. Gary said he'd 'jacked' someone else's spot. I asked what happened if that person came back. He said they'd just left. I said, "What if they were just going to the store, and coming back shortly?" He said they could just take one of the open spots. I asked about the people who were paying for those "open" spots. He said it was no big deal, it would all get sorted out. I told him to take the boys up on the roof; I would take the car he'd parked in the lot and find a place on the street.

I joined them a little later. A middle-aged woman was displaying her belly-dancing talent to Connor's embarrassment. I joined him, Scott, and Gary on some lounge chairs. We hadn't been there long when a woman came over asking how long we'd lived here. To my surprise she pulled up a chair and sat down. I remember the odd feeling of encroachment inside; very different from an experience of welcome. We talked for a bit; how long we had lived at the apt--and I realized that at any moment a decision might be required: how much to tell her about our 'living arrangement'. How much did we want to reveal to a stranger? I steered the conversation to what kinds of interesting restaurants and shops were around the building, when I noticed she was holding a "bingo" card. Kind of a creative mixer device, she was to mark off a square for various "finds"--challenges. Looking over, I could see several. She was to find someone who'd lived in the building for over 10 years (hence her question, but that didn't explain why she pulled up a chair). She was to find someone who'd been to Europe. Someone who liked sushi. Not a bad idea, the bingo card. Maybe I'll borrow it someday if I have a party with a lot of people who don't know each other. Yesterday I saw it as an opportunity. I'd realized I wasn't taking pleasure in her being with us, and I wanted her to go away. I'd noticed that I'd come close to abandoning my connection with myself in order to pretend she was a wanted guest. I didn't want to model that for the boys, but the dilemma was that I could not think of a middle ground between asking her to leave, and putting up with her until she decided to go. It seemed she was settling in. In calling attention to the bingo game I hoped to remind her that she'd come for a purpose, she'd fulfilled it, and she could move on to other people. I asked her if we'd helped her in filling in her card. She said we had; asked us if we liked sushi. We do. She was curious about how my boys had come to like it. Connor said off-handedly that when he was once a 'picky eater' he wouldn't have even tried it. She said she had some kind of background as a nutritionist; was always interested in what turned someone from being finicky to not. He said he didn't know, he just became hungry for things he hadn't been before. This was kind of an interesting topic for me, since I'd endured years of his pickiness. I never forced him to eat, though I did try the suggestion of insisting he take "one bite" of anything new he was resisting. It didn't last long, that experiment, and I didn't force the issue. It clearly didn't work for our family to force even "one bite" on him. I lived for years with people remarking on his refusal to eat, to try things and held to my inner lifeline that he would not starve himself, and that he would someday grow beyond a palate of Fruit Loops, cheese crackers, macaroni and cheese. So it's sweet to see that he has indeed become an omnivorous eater, and didn't require any pushing of the river on my part. I mentioned that I too had been a picky eater, who came from an era where parents forced their children to eat. I said that I have a very broad range of food interests now, and having been forced to eat did not have anything to do with it; it was merely a matter of maturity and development. She asked Connor if I'd made him take tastes of things. She wanted to know if I'd kept a variety of different foods in the refrigerator, had a variety of dishes available. Connor didn't seem comfortable, I wasn't comfortable, and I sat with the dilemma. What did Oneness mean in a situation like this? I couldn't imagine it meant having to be at the mercy of this woman, but neither could I imagine myself asking her to go. Had I already "abandoned myself" because I hadn't? When she was exchanging a few words with Gary I excused myself, got up, took away our plates to put in the trash, looked at some of the displayed artwork. I hoped she'd be gone when I got back. She wasn't. It was a strange quandary. I didn't want to be unassertive, but neither did I want to be a doormat. I was clear inside that her presence felt like an intrusion, but I just couldn't come up with any way of sending her away that didn't feel too harsh to me. The only way I could see to get her to leave was to leave ourselves, and the second there was an opening in the conversation I talked to the boys about moving on to our next agenda item. As courteously as possible we pulled away and said goodbye.

So what would Oneness look like in a situation like this? I suppose the younger me would have resisted the feelings of aversion I was having toward her and redoubled my efforts to connect with her in conversation. I would have felt there was something wrong in me, some prejudice, or in-graciousness that made me want to run the other way, so I would have pushed the feeling away and not let myself know I didn't want to talk to her. I don't know that I would have been resisting her, but I would have been resisting my inclination to move away. So I stayed at One with myself, even if it meant feeling the discomfort of being with her and not knowing how to separate. I wonder, if I'd managed to be at One with her at the same time if I may have found another way to separate which wouldn't have meant that my family and I would have to leave the roof? I thought of being in connection with her, but I don't think I managed to do it.

It's a paradox. I think I found a way to be At One with myself, while not denying unpleasant feelings I was having. I don't know if I've figured out a way to be At One with someone I'm feeling uncomfortable with, let alone do both simultaneously. I think that my inability to pull that off probably reinforced a feeling of duality--me against her.

All of this is trivial in comparison with the horror and violence of That Day 10 years ago when the jets crashed, hundreds died at the Pentagon and on the planes, thousands in the twin towers. But isn't duality the common element? In the early days and weeks after the attacks, it seemed I was seeing a reflective, thoughtful America. I remember hearing on the radio that people who hadn't spoken in years were inspired to reach out to each other. I remember hearing that the impulse toward unity prevailed, early on. It seems it was drowned out. Duality begets and feeds on itself, with a vengeance. But maybe there's hope in knowing that at least at first, the impulse was toward kindness, and oneness.

Experimenting

2011-09-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

I did some experimenting this week with the concept of becoming One with people around me. I watched a jet take off from the apartment window and imagined myself One with the passengers on that plane.

"What was that like?" asked Sharon. "I...I don't...know..." Because something felt different inside, but in the vaguest of ways, like the hazy edges of a dream that are impossible to describe.

I experimented closer to where I live. In the absence of any obvious separation activity, such as arguments, I thought of some people I've disliked. Or I've thought of behavior I didn't like from people I do. I tried to apply becoming One with them.

Now this had a much more tangible effect. I realized that by connecting in this way with someone, the whole picture shifted. Of one person who has a need to one-up and has seemed grasping and self-righteous, I had a very different experience. I was able to locate the Me in Her and understand the ways that I want to be "right", and feel anxious about being "wrong". Feeling this, I could also see that the experience of being "right" is a mistaken attempt at connection. Or what passes for it. Somewhere in this life, a belief that being better-than came to feel like the Connection humans seek. If not in connection with others, than at least within oneself. Connection understood this way is oppositional--striving-against enhances that feeling of unity. I realized that true Connection is always there, always available, hiding in plain sight, and that one doesn't need to strive for it, or enhance it by attempting to take it from someone else. I realized this as a direct consequence of imagining myself at One with the Other. I think I even felt...compassion. And not in the compassion-through-will-power sense. It rose in response to Seeing what I saw. And recognizing that this experience of need and scarcity exists inside of me, too. And in that sense, it's true that if we see a quality in another person, it's because we have it within us.

That's such a change from how I understood it before. I'd heard and acknowledged it was probably true that what I didn't like in someone was a quality of mine too, but that idea was undermining, not empowering. If I dislike something, and the disliking means that I'm guilty of the things I don't like, then how do I have any leverage in negotiation when our wants collide? Also, in addition to disliking this person, or what they do, I have to dislike myself, too. Then I was simply confused and lost touch with my Self, because I couldn't think through it. My very ground of understanding was quaking. Before I could deal with this person I had to try to sort out if I really was like them. And I was too knotted up to be able to do that effectively. I was a deer in headlights.

I tried to "cultivate" compassion, but my feelings always got in the way.

This new version of that old lesson doesn't look much different on the surface, but how it changes things. Disliking something in someone is indeed an opportunity to meet and accept and help mature that element in me. Separating that quality from myself and polarizing in opposition does provide a kind of inner solidity, because it concentrates a sense of myself (without those hated elements), but it's at the expense of wholeness. This shift sort of changes the "is it me or is it them" question. Because the answer is "Yes".

When my children were very young and were just beginning to grapple with the feelings of ownership and desire, I can see that behaviors that our culture once branded as "selfish" were really just the crude beginnings of mastering identity, separation, and negotiation. In this way, raising children has been very spiritual for me, because as they've developed I've recognized (and remembered) their behavioral and emotional states from an adult perspective. I can see that desirable behavior isn't a result of shaming immaturity. In a large part, it's a function of development (with some adult shaping needed to organize and give meaning to their learning). As children get older and develop, they begin to understand that while they are separate beings, they don't need that object as a part of their self- identification and begin to value their friends more than things. There was nothing I could have done to "teach" them that. They simply matured.

Sometimes we don't.

If I become One with Another, I see the me in them, and the them in me (just as I saw the me in my children, and my children in me). I thought of my MIL, and realized that a lot of her behavior is motivated by a desire for connection. Unfortunately it's coupled with a belief in scarcity, and thus anxiety about losing it and misguided ways of seeking it. I recognize the part of myself that longs to be close to someone, and can't bear the thought of my own behavior pushing someone further away. I see the part of me that is so anxious about loss that I try to grasp, I need to be loved "best of all"--nothing else will do. And so I redouble the efforts that only undercut the quality of my relationships.

In this way healing and understanding can come disguised as someone I don't like. I get it now.

"Very good", said Sharon. Now, do you feel like it might be possible to be in a room..." "--I don't know if I'd go that far..." laughter

I haven't actually tried this yet in field conditions. As I said, there have been no arguments or conflicts this week (knocking on wood). But it seems that having that sense of equanimity while in conflict or in tricky situations might be a tall order. Can I really apply what I think I know in theory to fully-dimensional real-life?

And, I notice I feel afraid, a little. Does feeling compassion for someone make me vulnerable to them? Will I merely find myself giving way to their whims and desires?

And, I realize that I also gain some sense of inner cohesion and inner connection when I'm in opposition to someone. I can extend the sense of connection by finding someone to share the opposition to the Other with, and there is a sense of satisfaction in that. And while I'm sitting here, and I can see that this is an altered and inferior sense of oneness, it seems there may be a vacuum if I don't have that anymore. In a way I'm afraid to give it up.

And I still don't feel quite ready to be in a room with these people...

Stay tuned.

One

2011-08-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

I noticed a progression in my last two blog posts. I can see that I was exploring the ways that one gives oneself over to another. How someone can give up themselves, in the context of a life, and in the context of a conversation with a friend.

Since my last post I had an opportunity to explore the question of giving oneself up in the context of an important and intimate friendship.

Again the precipitating event wasn't a big deal: Marti and I have had a standing date for breakfast every Saturday for years and years. Our usual practice has been to email each other to confirm it. I didn't this time, because we'd stated our intention at the prior week's breakfast. Marti is a highly responsible and reliable person. I didn't think it necessary. But that Saturday I arrived, and she didn't.

I made several phone calls, and even texted her (a big deal for me since I don't have a texting plan with my phone). No answer; I gave her a half hour and left. It worked out fine, since my grocery store was close by and I used the time to do the week's shopping. I hoped she was ok.

Later in the day I found a message from her in my voice mail, with a heartfelt and sincere apology...she'd completely forgotten and had driven out to Toni's place in the Gorge. I felt myself move into the wonderful place of our hearts meeting and dissolving any rift, until her message kept going and she said something about us "missing each other", a misunderstanding. It's "dangerous" to not call her.

Which brought me up short. "Misunderstanding", and "missing each other" belonged to a different kind of reality, one where there was sort of a shared responsibility. There was no misunderstanding or confusion on my part: we have a standing date every Saturday, we'd agreed that it was on when we last saw each other, so I'd seen no need to confirm. "It's Marti" was what I thought; she doesn't need reminding. So I understood perfectly. And we didn't "miss" each other because she was nowhere near me.

The inconsistency of the world she was coming from with the world I was living in was a small one. She was saying a happened, and I was pretty sure it was b.

So what do I do with this? I didn't call her for several days as I thought it over. One--it wasn't that big a deal. The place wasn't far from my house, I got my shopping done, all I lost was a half hour (the cafe even bought my coffee for me!). Maybe I did "share" some responsibility for having not contacted her to confirm ("but it was Marti") (and, confirmation goes the other way too. I'm not the designated confirmer). Two--it's such a small shift, the difference in our realities. Why not go ahead and let it pass without comment? Three--I can't think of a way to discuss this with her without seeming nit-picky and small Four--If it's important to her to believe that the mistake was between us, rather than her own, why not do a dear friend the kindness of letting her version of the story stand? Five--I can't think of any way to talk about this that doesn't sound like I'm a bully, forcing her arm behind her back til she says, "OK! It was my fault! All my fault!" Six--I can't think of any way of talking about this that wouldn't seem accusing, wouldn't make her defensive, wouldn't bring on counter-accusations...wouldn't alter our friendship.

I see that all of the above was a classic and nearly involuntary talking myself out of something by putting my own self into doubt. It's simple. I love Marti and want to be in connection with her. That connection is threatened, potentially, by correcting her version of the story. If I break connection with mySelf, as I was systematically doing above, I can stay in connection with her.

The trouble with that is, I'd have to be out of Self-connection on an ongoing basis, because what I know to be true would be like the pea under the mattress.

Another problem with talking about it with her though, is that I (also nearly involuntarily) take on the perspective of the person I'm talking to. And when I do, I can't get back to whatever it was that was informing me. I only see myself through the other person's eyes, and in that context it's possible I am nitpicky, bullying, overly sensitive, legalistic, and accusing. And I come away feeling totally yucky and confused. I suppose fear of that can be added as a number Seven above.

Sharon said I allow the Other's perspective in out of a desire for fairness. But once the Other's perspective is in me I lose myself. The door is closed and I can't get back.

I thought about it over the week. Particularly interesting was the hint that I was attempting connection with the Other in taking on their perspective. I was attempting to be at One with them, but it was at the price of my connection within my Self.

So when I saw Sharon again I said, "So the question becomes, how can I be open to Another's perspective without losing myself?" She said, "By becoming One with them."

Say WHAT????

She said, "If you consider the Other to be a part of you, and that other is yelling at you, it's very different to wonder why you are yelling at you? What's angry in my Self?"

Now is this really possible? Really?

"So when did you lose your connection with your Self?"

2011-06-28T11:02:00.000-07:00

Denise inspired this post with her very kind comments on my last.

I've been mining an incident that's kind of related to "I don't do that anymore". It's a surprise that I'd be able to find so much in what amounted to a simple awkward conversation. I suppose there are all kinds of ways someone can give up themSelves in order to accommodate somebody else.

"I don't do that anymore" came back to haunt me in a different guise.

The incident was this: bookreading group night. Sitting in conversation with Marybeth who asks how things are going with the separation, the switching off of house to apartment, and the job. It's brief filler talk, meant to last until dinner is served. Marybeth wanted to know if I'd set the boys up with chores for helping out.

For me this is kind of like being asked if I breast or bottle-feed my baby. Or if I let them play videogames, or how many hours they play. There's already a right answer, and often I'm on the wrong side of it.

This question had the feel of that. I could feel the air around me bend into the gravity of a world where children should have chores, where any answer but yes carries some kind of whiff of apology. The world becomes tipped that way and anything said feels like justification of a deficiency.

I took a deep breath and said, "Well, no. I just ask them for help when I feel like I need it, and it seems to work out."

The truth is that I've made half-hearted attempts to get job charts and codify chore assignment. And the fact is that my heart hasn't been in it. I don't have a problem with the status quo, where 'help' is fluid and ad hoc. I don't feel over-burdened.

But Marybeth went on: "When I lived in India the women were fascinated with the freedom of American women. And they'd bemoan the lack of freedom in their lives. And I'd say, 'The place to start is your sons. Raise your sons so they'll assume equal responsibility.' Indian women spoil their sons", she went on. "And spoiled sons grow up with a sense of entitlement that perpetuates the problem on to the next generation."

Who the hell can argue with that?

So I was in turmoil. She's just said something that in principle I agree with, yet I'm not really practicing in my home. Furthermore, the vibe I'm getting from her feels as if she's attempting to persuade me. I'm feeling something that says she wants agreement. At least it feels like something is expected of me. And I don't feel honest with a specific endorsement and I can't bring myself to even nod. It was a mini-dilemma, with a woman I don't see but once a month, but consider a friend. I split the difference and in essence crossed my fingers behind my back. I gave her the agreement she was looking for to discharge the unease, but in my mind I was agreeing only with the principle: "women shouldn't spoil their sons".

But I'm feeling a thickening in the air between us. The hallmarks of a meaningful conversation are missing. I absolutely can't think of anything to say. I'm a deer in headlights. I sense it, and I wonder if she's sensing it too. After all, if the animation that makes a conversation a conversation drains, isn't that noticeable? Could she sense that I wasn't in entire agreement? Because she pressed her point a little further.

Then we were called to dinner.

That's it. I've been thinking about it ever since when I have some time to muse. Each time I think about it I see another facet.

At first I focused on the sense I'd had that agreement was sought, and disagreement carried a penalty--of a hint of shame, of apology. As I considered it, it occurred to me that if I felt like there wasn't a conversation, in a way it was because there wasn't. She had her own agenda, which was to convince me that the boys should have chores. She was presenting reasons why I should be doing it, and in a sense was trespassing. I'd sensed a power struggle and I handled it by letting her think she'd 'won'. Yet I felt strange and awkward after that.

So, I reasoned, some of what was going on was I was feeling trespassed upon and didn't assert my boundaries. And I was feeling unauthentic in that I was having these feelings and not telling her. In other words, I was representing myself as other than what I am.

But the conversation didn't seem to leave room for anything but a kind of shame-facedness in disagreeing, because again, who can argue with what she was saying? And, while it might be possible to have a conversation that included my quasi-diagreement without having to wear a cone of shame, it would take some time to get there, which we didn't have.

So in a sense I was putting "blame" on Marybeth with a narrative that she wasn't seeing me at all in the conversation, but was seeking something.

That's certainly plausible. That's what's in common, I think, with many unsolicited advice givers. An implication of a kind of superiority: I'm doing something that you're not and you should be like me. This superiority requires agreement to be maintained in the giver's psyche--it depends on validation.

When I talked about it with my counselor, she suggested that Marybeth could have just been operating under the assumption that I was in total agreement already, vs trying to convince me of something.

Which opened up another can of worms. A very old one, which is probably what kept me in a bad marriage. If I'm feeling something from someone that's negative, since it's being processed by me and filtered through me, how do I know it's not merely a projection? (And if I'm 'projecting', what is it I'm projecting? Am I projecting self-disapproval onto them directed toward me? Am I really kicking myself for not having the boys do regular chores, but making the Other the vehicle?) And if I can't know that it's not a projection, then how can I trust myself at all? I've spent a lifetime exploring this very question. It kept me from being able to objectively evaluate the nature of many of the conflicts I had with Gary. Sharon had spent nearly 5 years helping me lean into listening to this voice, and now I've got to question it again?

Looking again at what was present in that moment: A sense of being 'accused' of spoiling my kids and contributing to gender inequity in the world. I think there was a realization that while I agree with the principle of raising boys to be responsible men, the way I'm doing it probably doesn't clear the bar she seemed to be setting. And that was a conflict, because to get to anywhere except acknowledging my 'lack' and getting more evangelization would take a while and we didn't have it. But here I am with this circle that's begging to be closed with my agreement. And my brain was blank when it came to other areas of engagement that might circumvent this dilemma. I think another thing present was that I like Marybeth. And I sense that she gives me a kind of credit for intimacy and closeness of friendship that hasn't yet been backed up with a bulk of intimate conversations and shared experience. I sensed that she was offering me an opportunity for connection to back up that credit, and I was going to have to let it go by. And just today I realized that a hidden element that was also present in that moment was that I sensed I was accusing her. I was accusing her of giving unsolicited advice, for misreading me as a person who 'needs' help, of having an agenda that she was pressing at the expense of seeing me in the conversation. I was accusing a well-meaning friend of encroachment.

As someone who has felt accused much of her life, it takes a lot to get me to accuse others. I'm allergic to it and would rather accuse myself by default than accuse someone else. Especially a friend.

No wonder I was a deer in headlights.

I guess the takeaway is that I became good at sensing what people want from me. And implicit was a condition that this "something" was required to satisfy their own self-esteem needs. To withhold was to hurt. Case in point: another conversation about the boys doing chores. A kitchen table of a friend. After a long list of things I should do to which I responded with silence, one of the women asked. I replied that while their good intentions are appreciated, I'm someone who needs to find my own way, organically, from inside of me. And anything I've said about various difficulties in my life at that time should not be construed as a call for help. I said it in a factual tone with no intent of anger behind it. She actually began to cry.

So there are many faces to the conditions where one can lose herself. The pernicious ones are more obvious. The well-meaning ones, well, those are more deeply rooted.

One year on, six months on

2011-06-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

One year ago I had just begun a new job, working outside of the home for the first time in 11 years. My first day was May 26, so this time last year I was still aquiver with the abrupt shift in lives. I got the job so six months ago I could get the apartment where I sit right now.

Six months ago I began the culmination, the logical consequence as it were, to years of exhaustive examination of my marriage, my self. I was sifting through every single detail to find a way to stay in that life, and not be here in this. I suppose all of that searching distilled to a single question: "Is it my fault it's not working, and if it is, can I change myself so it will?"

I didn't have very stable ground from which to be objective because I've always felt confused about whether or not something is my fault. I've certainly been afraid that "things" are my fault, in the deer-in-headlights sense.

So, were things not working because I was too selfish? If I became angry because Gary was unreasonable, was I too sensitive? Too quick-on-the-trigger to react? An angry, mean person at core? Someone who felt inherently inferior and so when Gary was scornful when I didn't read his mind accurately it confirmed my own sense of worthlessness and that's why I'd get angry? Did I just not have a sense of humor? Was I 'just' a chronically unhappy person who brought everyone around her down too? Someone no one could make happy?

I certainly was afraid I was those things. In trying to confront those accusations I was sort of cut off at the knees by my awareness that people often rationalize their bad behavior, and why should I be so special that I wasn't? How would I know if I wasn't 'just' rationalizing?

So it took years to work my way through what a different kind of person may have cleared up in a few minutes. Self-doubt had been a strategy a long time ago that I developed to help me tolerate situations I was powerless to change. Then my own strategy hamstrung me so that I was powerless to change.

Years ago I saw "A Clockwork Orange". A brilliantly horrifying movie, but what reached into my psyche and totally disturbed me was the aversion "therapy" our psychopathic subject underwent once he was caught and brought to justice. Any of you who know the story know that he was a totally repugnant and violent hooligan; that he was 'cured' by being forced to watch images of violence and sex while being fed a drug that would make him violently ill. Eventually nausea was so tightly associated with aggression that the slightest hint of aggression rendered him helpless. The scene at the end where he himself is jumped and is unable to defend himself--in fact, his own natural defenses now wrapped him up and delivered him like a package to his attackers--haunted me for days. I'd seen violent images in movies before but this one really got to me, at my core. I see why now. It was an extreme representation of my own dilemma, which was my own strategy for being with people whose behavior I couldn't understand, which often seemed capricious, arbitrary, and unfair. (Yeah, I guess I'm talking about my parents, but not in the "blame" sense. They were products of their own culture, time, and upbringing. I can say that there were things I needed to do to adapt to the implicit demands of my culture, as expressed through the people who raised and love me that have not served me well. I can say this while knowing deeply that I love my parents.)

I got pretty good at it, and so was well-groomed for the marriage I chose. Once I was able to clear up the baggage about whether or not I was a flawed individual and that's why I was seeing things the way I saw them, it really became very simple. What does the marriage need to succeed? Are we willing to do what it takes?

To feel satisfied in a marriage, I need to be with a partner who is willing to negotiate disagreement and build bridges after rifts. This means being with someone who is timely in airing grievances (rather than storing them up and then leaking resentful feelings like a cracked gas tank). In short, I need someone who has the tools to partner with me to bring a marriage back into emotional equilibrium when something has disrupted it. I believe I have the tools in my own personal skillset, but I see that I can no more do it for both of us then I could fly if I was a bird with one wing. And he needs a partner who is either thick-skinned, impervious to passive aggression, totally devoted, or willing to absorb and hold whatever he dishes out without a need to hold him accountable or otherwise bother him with it. He is unwilling or unable to be the partner I need, and after 5 years of examining this marriage from every angle to see if I could be the partner he needs I see that I cannot. Or, I could, but I'd have to undercut myself with self-doubt in order to tolerate it.

I don't do that any more.

I take full credit. If you live in the Pacific NW you owe me a thank you

2011-05-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

We've had a wet, and cold spring. Hell, it's the first of May and our leaves aren't even out.

I'm not someone whose moods brighten or darken with the sunlight. I don't mind cloudy, wet days. To me they're permission to get cozy and write and think. So I've not suffered this extended winter, but I have noted that we had yet to have two days of sunlight in a row. And nights have been dipping down into the 30's temp-wise.

A year and a half ago we got a new furnace. Our home was built to heat radiantly, with the source being a gas-fired boiler. So we were committed to boilers. This one was 30 years old, and bound to fail (it did), but we'd kept it alive for awhile with patch jobs. One of those patches was a circulating pump, installed a mere 4 years ago to the tune of about $600. When we replaced the furnace the pump was only 2 1/2 years old, so we kept it on.

Gary left on a retreat last week. That night I noted the house felt cold and checked the thermostat. Holy cow, it was 59 degrees, despite the thermostat's setting of 66. WTF?

I went downstairs to look at the boiler. Since it was so new, and had only been serviced a month ago, I just knew it had to be something stupid--someone had accidentally pushed a switch or pulled something. I called the number on the sticker on the unit to be told that no, she was a dispatcher, not a technician and so we could not try to do a phone trouble-shoot (to avoid a $99 service call). She wanted to know if I wanted to schedule. Half thinking the thing would fix itself by morning I said no; I'd just try to call next day and see if there was someone who could talk me through ruling some stuff out before scheduling.

Next morning it was 57 degrees in the house, and I was having trouble getting the boys out of bed. I sighed and called the heating company to schedule our service call. I had to work that day, so made arrangements to leave the furnace door open for the technician. After the Scott pick-up I found a message on my cell. There was a problem in the circulating pump blowing fuses that protect the circuit between the main boiler and the circulating pump. When the big unit would tell the circulator to fire, it would draw so much power that the fuses would pop. If it was only a matter of some new fuses and a little clean-up, the cost would be only $200-ish. He hoped that was the case; there was a chance it was more serious and would require a new circulating pump. WTF! $1K. WTF!

That night it got down to 53 degrees in the house, because of course it wasn't a matter of replacing fuses and the new unit wouldn't arrive until the next morning (of course they didn't have one in their supplies already and had to order one). (It was a difficult decision, knowing that the weather has to warm up soon, but not wanting to suffer through any more cold nights and a weekend coming up. I could have just taken the unit to a shop that repairs motors, but then we wouldn't have heat until this week.)

So now a credit card company is earning interest on the use of their card, and the house is nice and warm--without the heat even being on, because it's SUNNY AND WARM OUTSIDE--for the...second day in a row!!! Supposed to get up into the 70's this week for the first time this year.

Bitter? Well, it'll be good to have next winter, and that's kind of a long time to wait.

Lookin' out my back door

When the hurricane stops

2011-04-24T19:03:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by my the view from my window in the apartment. I love to sit where I can lift my eyes periodically and take it in. If you look hard at the 'Yesterday' shot, left of the bridge the arc isn't a cloud, but Mt. St. Helens with some cloud shadows obscuring the base.

Yesterday

A clearer picture of Mt. St. Helens

We're finishing up month the fourth of our marital separation. It was such a slow grind getting here and I'm not even sure how we managed to accomplish it. Next month will mark the first anniversary of ending my eleven years as an at-home mom and returning to my profession.

I was talking about the particulars of this with a friend; what it's like to finally be doing it. He'd had a major rough patch in his marriage himself during a time of extended unemployment. Things were said. Things were done. He is employed now and things seemingly back to normal.

I wondered at some of the things that were done. Had this been my marriage the fissures revealed would be cause for some major questions, because they seemed to go to some issues that were beyond the strain of prolonged unemployment. They seemed to reveal some cracks in core foundational assumptions.

I figured once the crisis was past he would do his best to forget those things. He'd tell himself to 'forgive and forget' and set his intentions on forgetting. He would resolve to start over with a blank slate. From what I knew of him, this seemed like a safe prediction.

So he was asking me about my marriage, more specifically about the separation from my marriage. I was doing my best to answer him in the face of not really knowing. Four months really isn't that long, and I think it's still too new to draw any conclusions. The data isn't in, and the questions are open (am I doing the right thing? Am I harming our sons? Does separation from me for a week at a time harm them more than being free of the toxic atmosphere Gary and I create benefits them? Will I find this was merely a lateral move--miserable there, miserable here?)

He surprised me. He said on a television program a main character, when asked if she was happy said, "Am I happy? Or is it just relief that the hurricane has stopped?" In my life I've experienced something like this, where a chance phrase I read or hear somewhere suddenly sheds light and understanding on a question I didn't know I had. It's like reading a passage online and suddenly a link is highlighted. I was delighted that he had experiences like that too. Furthermore, we weren't talking about my marriage any more. We were talking about his.

He said that things seemed better with him and his wife. He said it was great to have a steady income again, with insurance benefits for him and his family. He hesitated a moment, and said that he wasn't sure if he was really happy, or if he was just in the relief of the hurricane being over. He said that right now, he doesn't want to disturb his relief by probing, rocking the boat. He's unsure if he ever will. He's poised between further evaluation or resolutely determining that bygones will be bygones.

I think someone making the decision to rock a boat creates a ripple effect. It sets precedent, and nudges awake decisions once thought settled and asleep.

Today

One Quarter In

2011-04-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

view from 16th floor

On sunny days (we can't seem to muster two in a row yet this spring) there's a view of Mt. St. Helens, Mt Rainier (I think that's what the wild double-peak is I see behind Mt. St. Helen's right shoulder) (when it's clear) and Mt. Adams .

We're three months into implementation of Major Life Change. I spent an extraordinarily long time getting to this point. I spent several years blogging my decision (please forgive any repetitiveness; my life's changes have meant distance from the blogging world, and I may have already said this stuff and forgotten). Sometime in 2009 I decided, then got a job in 2010 (May 26 to be exact. It's not even been a year since I left my 11 year gig as an at-home mother). Notice--I decided in 2009; I got a job in 2010, and not until 2011 did we do the roll-out. Am I a deliberate decider or what. You can't accuse me of being impulsive.

So now I blog the experience of a separated woman, working in the professional world and raising two young sons. I blog the experience of living in two places: the house in a rural part of the city; the apartment, which is about as urban as you can get. I blog the attempt to partner in separation/divorce with a man I couldn't partner with in marriage, in order to keep home as stable as possible for the boys. To that end he and I do the moving back and forth from one domicile to the other, taking turns at either the house, or the apartment. I'm at the apartment now, til Monday after I pick up Scott from school.

Gary has his office at the house, so we see each other daily. Even on my days at the apartment I continue to transport Scott, though it's a little suspenseful; I have to have finished my final patient and then be at his school by 3:00. Sometimes I have a needy patient who needs extra time. Sometimes I've made bad guesses and I'm running late. Sometimes I'm caught in traffic. My job is with a small home health agency that I suspect gets the dregs of patients discharged from hospitals. That is, the uncomplicated close-in patients I think are sucked up by the large organizations, leaving marginal patients on the margins of the city. In other words, I'm often driving major mileage.

Anyway, we're only 3 months into this new way of living. On the 18th we'll have been married 19 years, and we were together nearly 3 years before we got married. So, though there's been a big shift and pivot, I am nowhere near out from under the penumbra of the momentum of 22 years of life.

I honestly have to say I don't really feel much of anything. I guess the description is "flat". It's not really sorrow, more a kind of dutifulness.

It's way too early to say whether or not this was a good move. No... I wouldn't put it that way. I think it's more accurate to say that it's way too early to expect my emotional affect to reflect that this was a good move. (It has to be a good move, because it's preferable to how I was living. I can't imagine going back, not without some major changes that I've accepted aren't likely to happen.) It's odd how in so many ways I've already moved on to a point where I don't realize that when people ask how I am, they're meaning the separation, not just the general pleasantry. When I took the boys to visit my parents over President's Day, the subject didn't even come up. Later my brother was concerned that I'd thought it was because they didn't care. Which surprised me. As far as I was concerned it hadn't come up in the way that the subject of our marriage wouldn't have come up years ago. It's a done deal and not any more a topic of conversation than the air that we breathe. Apparently I've moved on...they haven't. I appreciate that they're being respectful of my privacy, but it's really the last thing on my mind. Someone I hadn't seen for a while asked me how the boys were getting along, and it was only later that I realized that he meant with the separation. I thought he was asking how they were getting along with each other. So I went into a long story about how they treat each other. Funny.

So really, I'm just living with each day of this New Life, and putting one foot in front of the other, with no idea what the future holds. If I were an ant on a jigsaw puzzle right now, I'd be on one of those maddening transitional pieces, where a shadow is giving way to something else, where the shades of difference are subtle. I've got to give this at least a year.

P.S.

2011-03-26T11:11:00.000-07:00

In another interview with Steven Galloway, he was asked:

It's a very morally engaged book, if that's not too cliched a way to put it. Do you think a writer is obliged to take a moral position? Is that moral aspect important to you as a writer?

It is to me, currently. I don't know if it's important for all writers to do it. It's been an interesting process for me, becoming a writer, in the eight-to-ten years since my first book was published: first you want to become a writer because you think you can, and because it would be neat or something, but slowly over time a lot of the things that you thought would be rewarding about being a writer evaporate. Book tours aren't much fun or glamorous. The attention is self-defeating in a way. There are two valuable things that are left then, at least to me as a writer: first, you get to spend most of your working time in a room by yourself living in an imaginary world - something that appeals to me greatly, and a second thing is that you get to be involved in that larger world conversation about what we can do while we're on this earth. You don't get that in many professions. If you're an orthodontist you perform a great an noble service, but you don't get to participate in the same way in that conversation. What keeps me in that little room by myself is that conversation - so it's important to me.

I italicized that section at the end above.

It's so important to me, too. I miss, miss so much regular participation in that conversation. Sipping from the pools of others through their blogs, and contributing to my own.

A True Day Off

2011-03-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe not entirely 'true' because I'm not entirely free of obligation. The Stupid Dog is on my lap, shuddering, or licking my hands as I try to type. So now he's needy. The cat stirs, and like an explosion he's up to go harass her. Thanks, Sheila.

I've taken him out a jillion times and he refuses to eliminate. He also only does one function at a time, so pooping and peeing require separate trips. The trouble is, his cues are so muddled, that whining can mean, "I'm bored" "I'm hungry" "I'm lonely" or, "I need to go potty." I've logged thousands of miles already in trips out the back door to his toilet. I just get tired of taking him out to have nothing happen. But my carpet is held hostage; though to anyone looking at it, it's no longer worth protecting. The hostage is already dead.

Fridays are my days off from my job as a home health physical therapist. So far it's been rare that it's been a true day off. Between the phone calls it takes to hold everything together, coordinate care, communicate with team members, request orders from doctors, and wend my way through the maze of the computer program and still come up with a note that summarizes and convinces Medicare that my home visit was skilled and necessary, I usually have hours of work left to do on a Friday. Even if I get up really early, and even if I was up really late the night before. And, even on the Fridays when I'm not the one living with the boys, I pick up Scott from school which is only half-days on Fridays.

This date things lined up well for a Day Off. It's spring break, so no school pick-up, and Gary took the boys on a spring trip. I've ruefully noted that it's too bad I have to waste that time with working, and it's very true that my evenings have been consumed with work. But I made a big push last night and didn't even have to work that long, before managing to finish most of those responsibilities and be able to feel that today really is a Day Off.

(I hope Gary and the boys don't come home early and spoil it)

The dog is making very ominous gastric noises and spasms like hiccups. I don't even want to think about what that might mean, especially since he's on my lap and on my bed.

I let my Day Off agenda choose me. My bookreading group is reading "The Cellist of Sarajevo" by Steven Galloway for our discussion book this April. I actually nominated this book the cycle before this last 18 months ago and it wasn't chosen. I had the book and so decided to read it anyway, 18 months ago. So I wasn't in that big a hurry to get it from the library when this month rolled around. Until I realized that I'm the facilitator for the month of April. So I got it again and started reading.

I shouldn't be surprised anymore by the enriching a second reading can give. I read it through quickly a year and a half ago, because it does read pretty easily. This time, I've been able to pause and notice some of the questions the author poses, and the ways his characters mull them over. They're questions we consider even under the best of circumstances, so it's not just a book about life under siege.

The author grounds the story/stories firmly within the setting of the city, naming streets and landmarks, neighborhoods as his characters walk through them. Oftentimes I breeze past place references, but for whatever reason I went searching for street maps of Sarajevo. Now I could locate his people, and walk the streets with them.

Which makes the effect more shocking and ominous. It forces me to consider how thin the veneer of civilization is. If it could happen in Sarajevo, host of the 1984 Olympics, it could happen in any city. The objects of civilization around us seem to carry their own inherent stability and sense of permanence. I think unconsciously my whole life I've been comforted by this illusion, as if the roads, buildings, museums keep chaos from happening here. Their underlying message seems to whisper "It can't happen here." But as Galloway said in an interview, "These things are able to exist through an agreement human beings make as to how we treat each other." It's a little breathtaking to realize the implications of this. Things that appear so solid are built on the underlying quaking earth of an agreement. In Sarajevo that agreement was broken and not only were over 10,000 of their residents killed (many, many of them children) and many maimed, and orphaned, but their museums and National Library, which contained irreplaceable, priceless texts were destroyed. (The besiegers shot at the firefighters who came).

It's horrifying to me to think of making that leap between the kind of normal we in the West are accustomed to and don't even notice, to the kind of normal which is running across intersections and bridges for fear of being shot, shells exploding just because you've queued up for bread or water, walking past husks of buildings that used to be the university, or the National Library.

One of the questions that is ongoing for his female character Arrow is that of hatred. The author visits and revisits the evolution of her thoughts, as she considers her role as a counter-sniper and her motivations. Periodically she reassesses what it is that distinguishes her from them, "the men on the hills." At first she tells herself that they shoot and shell civilians, while she only kills soldiers. Later she tells herself that the men she is killing could have killed many people in her city. Later she acknowledges in her heart that she is killing them because she hates them. BUT, what's interesting and novel about this to me, is she goes further and considers why she hates them. And her answer is that she hates them because they made her hate. Them. Furthermore, she realizes that the men on the hills told her she hated them by giving her reason, and in that sense have dictated what she feels and what she does. She notices that she didn't fight this very hard. Later in the book the theme is returned to: That what is happening is a result of the men on the hills needing the people of the city to hate them.

The author writes: “Do the men on the hills hate her? Or do they hate the idea of her, because she’s different from them, and that in this difference there might be some sort of inferiority or superiority that is hers or theirs, that in the end threatens the potential happiness of everyone?”
Years ago, when my children were barely out of toddlerhood, I noticed something. I'd take them to the park, or library where there were other children. Sometimes when walking past another mother and child I'd see the children look at each other. And I could feel something exchange between them--oftentimes a sort of spontaneous mutual hostility. They'd never seen each other before, but their emotional landscape was already tipped toward dislike.

It makes me wonder if that's the "agreement" upon which our justification for the wholesale murder of war rests. It occurs to me that war is kind of like civilization, in that it rests upon an agreement of how we treat each other, and it too has an illusion of permanence and stability. Maybe the word "inevitability" is what I mean. God knows there are enough resources devoted to it; so much so that it's become an industry of its own. Run by people whose own self-interest depends upon it.

What really amazes me is that people aren't sickened enough by the result of just one wounding to shudder away in revulsion and resolve to never do that again. And yet we do.

From the diary of an overwhelmed working mother...

2010-12-30T19:29:00.000-08:00

I guess what I’m saying is, this is probably not the best time to test the theory of happy new life. I’ve had to let drop so many things I enjoyed when I was an at-home mom. My blog is moribund. I haven’t read any of the other blogs I liked so well. If a news segment caught my ear and I didn’t catch it at the time I could always go back to my computer later and read a transcript. Now I’m helplessly hearing stuff that interests me and I want to know more about slide right on by. I feel ignorant. I feel really weighted down by this job. I feel anchored to it like it’s a ball and chain. I’m faster on the documentation, but the real slow-down is the phone calling. Call a dr, call a patient back, call another staff member to coordinate something and try to remember everything I want to tell them so I don’t have to call them a second time. I really do wish people used email, because I could communicate much more efficiently. I’m burning through my phone minutes but there’s no way I can not use it on the job. I have to call back assistants to tell them a plan of care for patients, and I then have to be thinking about that pt, remembering who they are, any special things about them. Yesterday I saw 6 patients, drove 80 miles, and I’ve only worked my way down to the third one I saw in documenting, and I’m not yet done with that. I went from downtown (where I had to scrounge for change for parking because I’d forgotten my wallet at home). I guess I’m just trying to describe the pieces that add up to overwhelemed, and also me coming home from working, doing documentation, taking a break to fix dinner, or go to an appointment, or a teacher conference at Connor’s school, and that puts me behind the whole next day. Even if I get up at 5. Even if I go to bed at 11 and then get up at 5. Which I’ve been doing for a while, and I suppose that’s another nail in the coffin of morose. The dog has been particularly wearing, whining pitifully this sound that is like nails on a blackboard. Take him outside and he doesn’t want to go because it’s cold. I don’t want to take him out because I have to stand there while he sniffs aimlessly and I’m cold. It seems like all we’re doing is stopping our activities and taking him outside to poop or pee. And that’s not counting the ‘accidents’ in the house. The house is a mess, and this is really distressing for me. When it’s in such disorder…counters unwiped, sticky on the floor, crumbs, food left out…I just start to feel like it’s one more Other demanding my attention. The work demands seem implacable—patients need orders for service, and they deserve to have them done quickly and seamlessly. However, this agency is not seamless. All of this, and I don’t think I’m even meeting productivity. And with the pressure to pass patients on to assistants, where I do an evaluation and then don’t see the patient again until I discharge, yet I have to keep track of what the goals are for that person, and the increments toward that goal, and is the assistant doing it. And then have to really think about the ‘skill’ part of my visit (and assessments don’t count)—just dissect what I’m doing to present on a documentation template that tends to give a cookie-cutter ambiance to the session anyway. My head is spinning, and I just don’t feel like I’m keeping track the way I should, and there’s always something more to do. And there’s calling patients beforehand the night before to arrange visit schedules, as well as having to bring up the computer and look up each one and figure out a system of sequence that makes sense, only to have it derailed if that doesn’t work for the patient. So yesterday morning I also had to take the next door neighbors kids to school, and I hadn’t yet written down a schematic of a patient list and directions to each, and telephone numbers (because it’s hell to try to find that on the computer while driving—take off sunglasses, locate bifocals, open computer, turn to avoid glare—oh, the car ahead is moving now—and the stupid cursor is taking forever to appear, and I can’t see the list of patients to select the one I want and then I have to drive some more, select the ‘basic’ box to call up name/address/phone. Squint because it’s difficult to find the number and read it because the font is so small. Scott is like trying to push jello through a straw and the two boys begin fighting viciously with Scott yelling so loud it hurts my head and then Connor trying to yell over him to the point that I tell them I don’t want to risk this kind of behavior in a motel room, or a restaurant; I haven’t washed my hair and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be time to; there are dishes in the sink, then we have to wait for several minutes for the kids next door to come out of their house and I’m fretting because I need to be downtown before 9:00 to see this guy. Which reminds me of another phone call I should make—to his orthotist to be sure that he’s following the stump changes. Then I’m getting calls from people asking me about other people.

In other words, there’s an avalanche of details that each need attention, and triaging them and figuring out which are most important while not losing any of them is really taxing for me. I’m trying to keep a notebook but that system has its limitations with my scrawled cryptic messages and phone numbers. And I let a big detail drop through cracks, where a patient that was on my schedule for Mon had not come home from the hosp Sunday and I’m on the phone with his wife Sunday night and she’s wanting a schedule for when I’m coming and we agree on Tues in the afternoon. Then he was moved to a different day on my schedule, and I honest-to-god don’t know if I did it myself because I’d gotten the impression he wasn’t going home from the hospital til Tuesday—but I also remember feeling surprised to see him on my schedule Wed. I don’t know if I did it, in an effort to see which configuration of visits would work, and then forgot to switch it back, or if a scheduler may have done it—because sometimes they do move things on my schedule: I’d forgotten he was a Dr. T pt with a fairly strict protocol: nurse and PT go out on the same day. It was team meeting morning and I’m trying to get out the door because my first patient is in Newberg and my next in West Linn, and I’m seeing the schedule I’d constructed the night before slipping away and I may have to be making more phone calls and if I have to be I want to be doing it from the office because my cell phone bill was over $120 due to phone overages, but then that keeps me from leaving too because I have to look up the pt’s phone numbers and write them down, then take them to another phone in another part of the office because the phone that’s usually in the conference room where my computer is set up is not there, and I don’t really like to take my laptop with me because then I’m unplugging it from its power source and wearing down the battery. Then I’m called to talk to—whatever the hell position it is that Carol has, warrenting her own (shared) office—because I’d bypassed an important step in a patient’s hospitalization which I hadn’t known about until the wife called me after he was already home, and I’d just gotten orders to continue PT without realizing he was in the hosp, and the wife requests no therapy the rest of that week (it’s Wed night), and I talk to the dr. on Fri, who says she thinks we should wait to continue until pt’s wife feels able, so I call the wife and she asks to take the next week off too, which means more phone calls to keep track of because then I’ll need to call her on the Sunday just prior to that week to see if they are ready for more, and I have to call the dr’s office for orders and in the meantime I inadvertantly bypassed this whole other official channel where there is this whole transfer and resume process, re-referral and getting new orders to resume and I’ve skipped all that because I’d been working with the doctor’s office and they’d said to go ahead and that’s what they’re calling me into Carol’s office for. Further squeezing down the time to get to my first boonies patient and feeling myself getting later and later, and at least, thank god there is a person who offerred to pick up my son at school and take him to her house, so I have longer at the end of the day before having to pick him up—because that’s usually the firm deadline that I have to get everything else to conform to and usually that really compresses and squeezes a day. So I leave the office to go see my patient and get lost, meaning I’m having to stop and pull out the computer for the map that I'd kept the window of, but it’s not resolving to the detail I need so I have no choice but to completely retrace my steps, and now I’m having to call people and tell them to expect me about an hour later than the times I’d originally scheduled and hoping I won’t have to call and revise again. So it’s while I’m on my way to my final patient’s that the cell phone sounds as I’m driving so I don’t pick up until I pull over (watching the time drain) and listen to the voice mail and it’s a very clipped voice of the patient’s wife whose agreement with I’d forgotten about seeing them this day—because he’d been moved on my schedule (by me? By a scheduler?) and so I’ve got to call her and get a really frosty reception when I apologize. So I’m feeling just unsettled and yucky as I head to my last patient.

And that’s just one day. I spent a great deal of Wednesday trying to hold together a schedule that kept threatening to collapse—so it was phone call after phone call. One Adult Foster Home would only render a fax tone so I called the pt’s dtr who gave me the number of the home’s manager, who I called and got the visit scheduled. One lady is way out in the boonies, and this was to be a final visit and she was one whose daughter had never gotten back to me to schedule a Monday visit and so I drove out blind and stood knocking at a locked door after having gotten lost and wandered in ever-increasing traffic for a while and it’s probably partly my fault because I hadn’t persisted in calling after I didn't get an answer when I called over the weekend but I have so many phone calls to make and I’d thought the number that was hers might be an office number and so I’d have less of a chance of speaking with her than the home number, and I’ve sensed a certain passivity of the daughter in advocating for her mother anyway—have offerred to meet her at the house (at least before turning her over to an assistant, but I’d asked the assistant to see if she could arrange a visit when the daughter would be home, and I guess I never verified that the assistant did this or not), but not been taken up on it—no return call after I left a note on the door that Monday—just a peculiar kind of disconnect when it comes to bridging concern about her mother’s condition with action to address it.

And this doesn’t touch the times I open the computer and attempt to change a scheduled visit to someone else’s schedule, or schedule someone else’s to mine, only to get an error message saying that will exceed authorized visits and a lot of times it’s because the computer has duplicated the schedule; this doesn’t count the times of calling the office with either a question of my own or to answer a question they had for me, only to get put through to a voice mail. Calling a dr’s office and wading through all the menu options (with the tantalizing feeling that maybe this is the office that I can bypass all of this by pressing 2, and wondering if I should take a chance and press 2, or wait it out in case pressing 2 will delay me further and the voice message comes to the end and tells me that in the future I can bypass this message by pressing 2, and then the receptionist asks me to hold.)

One more hour, and I really didn’t mean to put this time into work woes, but it actually did help to capture a slice of my day. It helps me to get a sense that maybe anyone would feel overwhelmed too. And I forget that Gary’s been gone in Asia which double-duties me as far as kid and animal care, I have phone calls hanging out there that I haven’t returned—personal friend phone calls—or family—and we just moved stuff into a place we’ve barely used. I just didn’t have it in me to do the scramble required to find some sort of child care for Scott and a ride to the school for Connor on Wednesday night—which was on the day I’d see Sharon. I wracked my brain for options and eventually gave up and missed the session with Sharon. Didn’t know if this would be a productive one anyway, given the others I’ve had. I guess it could be said that there is some sort of ‘message’ in my having forgotten her check the week before, and then missing this session. This is the first time I’ve missed a session, other than when we’ve been travelling, ever. The truth is, I think, that I am in a slack, slack period. Haven’t moved in to the apartment yet, that is, gotten serious about establishing the rotation with Gary. It’s Christmas, which is usually a pretty overwhelming time, but I don’t have to be doing any of it this year, so I’m not that overwhelmed, except with some remorse that I’ve been looking at all these Christmas trees in people’s homes with gifts piled high beneath them and nary a one under ours (in part because I can’t quite trust that Scott will be able to overcome his inquisitiveness and inability to handle the suspense—as well as the possibility that he may shake some packages and possibly damage what’s inside. So this is the first year in a long time that I’ve not been dogged by Christmas busywork shit, but the slack is all taken up by my job. So I’m as busy, but just haven’t had the additional Christmas busy on top of it. For which I’m glad. But, I wonder if the bare underneath of the tree is a metaphor for the bareness of Christmas enthusiasm within me to share with them. I know that part of the fun of Christmas is having adults share their enthusiasm, to kind of reflect it and amplify. So I’m totally lacking in that regard. And if I was any kind of measuring up to the standard of a good mother, I wouldn’t be here writing, but out buying some gifts to have under the tree for them when they get home.

But this is really the first moment I’ve had to myself since last Friday. Literally. If I haven’t been up at 5 I’ve been up at 1 (once, when I woke and couldn’t get back to sleep and decided I may as well work—and did so for about 3 hours)

And in choosing this I’ve also chosen to not go and look at some material that’s been up in tabs on my browser forever, which probably isn’t good for the computer; probably uses up tons of memory. Some of the stuff I’ve had to ‘cut’ (funny, guess it’s metaphoric for what’s going on everywhere, states cutting their budgets, all these demands that the US cut theirs, other nations cutting back severly) has been pretty hard. Losing my sense of being informed, that’s a hard one to let go.

I wonder if I can call it a lack of intelligence on my part, that I can’t just absorb the important parts of the news as they’re being presented on the radio. I zone out without realizing, and then 'come back’ just as something is said that I have a question about and realize they’d answered it ‘just’ before I ‘came back’. Just trying to get a weather forecast does this. I listen consciously for it, then when the broadcaster starts talking about program sponsors I zone out only to find that without a break they’ve gone into a forecast and I only get to hear the Eastern Oregon forecast because they did the Portland one first before I ‘woke up.’

My brain is scrambled eggs.

Pressed and Compressed

2010-11-20T10:08:00.000-08:00

I had an inspiration about "Worth" and "Worthiness" and the role it plays in Shame, and what humans do to avoid it.

Funny how it seems to be universal, and visceral.

No time to develop that.

We got a dachshund about 6 weeks ago from a rescue service. I should back up and say we lost our black lab, who had been failing for months. The boys set up a chorus: "No more old dogs!" Connor found the mutt. Showing far more initiative then he ever gives his schoolwork, he tracked this one down and presented his photo.

Well, he is cute.

And it's a good thing because in the short time we've had him he's proved to be a lusty barker (the rescue person said he'd been raised in a condominium and was a non-barker: she was "worried" about this) especially when provoked by the cat, proved to not be reliably toilet trained (seems to ask to go out; taken out--requires a leash as our yard has no fence and there are cars in the front and coyotes in back--pees, urged to go some more, indicates he's finished, take him inside, poops on the floor), is interfering as I type right now, received a paralyzing back injury when he jumped from a low surface (which fortunately resolved on its own), and began to vomit, on the sofa, in between the cushions and into the deep seams of the cushions, a foul, poop-smelling substance. What did I do with my time before we got a dachshund: number one on the list for dogs most likely to bite?

AND, we secured the apartment. Spent last weekend doing some shopping for it and moving big stuff in. It's a 16th floor one-bedroom, which looks north over the river, the west part of downtown, and the peaks. The boys have embraced it enthusiastically and have had no hesitation in claiming it for their own.

We haven't begun the rotation formally yet. Gary took the boys over to spend last night and I'm typing this in the space I have before they get home. What I should be doing? Answering emails, vacuuming floors, doing laundry, taking the dog out to poop/pee, making a shopping list, prepping my work schedule for Monday, and writing in my diary.

We're finally on the crux of something I've been moving toward since well before starting this blog. I began blogging with the intent of recording my decision process, and now am reaching the outcome of this path my husband and I have been on for years and years. This last bit is moving as agonizingly slowly as the last few weeks of a pregnancy. And then this will be in the rear view mirror. I've been preoccupied with this for so long, and guided, kicking and screaming to this point, that it's strange to imagine what life will be like on The Other Side.

The Latest

2010-10-25T07:12:00.000-07:00

It's late October.

I have 20 minutes before I need to start getting the kids up for school.

Gary and I started looking for places last week doing drive-by's.

The boys are excited about this, stating their preferences of where they want us to look. Connor wants a place he can skate and walk to skateboard shops. Scott's hoping we'll have cable TV.

We found a place on Saturday that's midway between our house and Connor's school. About 3 miles away. It's a daylight basement in a house on 3 acres of spectacularly gardened property. As we spoke with the man who was showing it, I learned his wife is a published author.

She'd be an interesting person to live next to. Or below, I guess.

Though the apartment is quite nice, it's also quite small. I'm not sure I wouldn't feel claustrophobic.

Yesterday I'd put together an itinerary of about 10 properties to look at; we started north and worked our way south. The last one on our list had a sign out that said the leasing office was open so we parked in their lot and went to have a look-see.

There's no denying the location is superb. It's located a block or two from Washington Park, and straddles the Northwest 23rd district and downtown. It's a high-rise with unobstructed views of Portland to the north. She took us to an apartment that approximates the ones that will come available, but are still occupied and couldn't be shown. As we got off the elevator, a man asked us if we were looking at places and said, "It's great living here!" We walked in to the view, and a spectacularly clear rainbow that spanned the city. She took us to the rooftop, 24th floor which is open and appointed with tables, a sink, and barbeque.

Granted, the place she showed us may have given us an unrealistically positive impression, because it was a double studio. To get the accurate feel we had to imagine a wall running through the middle of it and halving the living area we were standing in. It is also on the 21st floor. Maybe the actual flat that's available wouldn't give such a positive impression. Parking in this neighborhood is cheek-by-jowl, though for an extra $100/mo there is outside assigned parking in their lot. For $135 we can park inside the garage.

I can't help but wistfully think about what we could do with our house with a thousand + a month. If nothing else we could be saving a great nest egg for retirement; putting away sufficient money for the boys' college, landscaping our own property...

But I've just spent the past 5 years examining and re-examining the life he and I create together and concluding that it's not acceptable. And it's not going to change.

Separation is the logical outcome of the life we've been living. We haven't been living a life that supports any alternative to separation, that would support us in a partnership of raising our kids, improving our property together, saving for our future. We could still do it, but it would be at odds with the life we're living--a horse's mask on a pig's body. To live true to the life we've been living, we need to follow it's trajectory, which leads to spending over a thousand dollars a month to support a separate residence. That's all there is to it, and I should quit looking back.

Maybe that's what turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. Looking back immobilized her.

Fear

2010-09-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, there was Accusation. And Accusation felt so horrific that the Family learned to do whatever it took to avoid It. Differences in opinion and preference came to resemble Accusation, and were suppressed. Claiming space for oneself, and setting boundaries are other examples. A sensitivity developed that created alerts whenever approaching the threshold, even coming near to it.

There were some exceptions. Adults could feel free to accuse children.

I've written before about people who resented being held accountable for their actions or inaction. I see this now as the responses of people who felt accused, and lashed out. I've been surrounded by people like this my entire life, and I've lived my life to appease them. I've learned to self-censor when I get that tingly anxiety that tells me something I'm about to say will sound accusatory.

There have been times when I'm in conversation and notice that I'm feeling uneasy. I may be talking about an action I took, or a response to another person. Suddenly I find myself bent in an orbit where I imagine the other person thinks I handled it 'wrong', or that I'm rationalizing and making excuses for myself. It's as if suddenly I'm in a glass sphere, where no matter how I move I can't escape the gravity that seems to be bending me into a defensive feeling.

I see now. I learned to defend myself against accusation by attempting to beat the Other to the punch and accuse myself first.

I realized how it goes: I was talking with my friend Marti about my son Scott. I was telling her how he's been disclosing to me details of a summer baseball camp 2 or 3 years ago. Since these details involve some cruelty they are very difficult to hear and absorb, as is the realization of the courage he showed. The situation predisposed him to act out aggressively. He did not. I was marveling to Marti about his self-control when she said, "He's had problems with anger before, hasn't he?"

I felt very awkward, because suddenly it seemed as if our orientation had shifted, and no matter what I said I'd be confirming something I suddenly wanted to defend against: that I am a mother who minimizes my son's weaknesses, makes excuses for him...is in denial. One of those mothers, whose widdle baby can do no wrong. I didn't even have to say anything. It's as if this was our context and anything I said would merely confirm it.

I spoke with my counselor about this, because this is by no means an isolated example of suddenly feeling...odd, as if I'm in a universe where I'm in agreement about something that I'm not, really, yet feel anything I say will merely prove that I am. Sharon said, "Whenever I feel like that, I realize that it's usually because I'm thinking I'm not supposed to be a certain way, or a certain person. And so I've not given room to that person, or quality inside, and the only way it has to speak is in the voices outside of me, in others."

So who is this person I'm not supposed to be? Well, I'm not supposed to be a mother who minimizes and denies her son's problems, and makes excuses. Is it possible I could be that person? And I realize I could. Because inside of me there is a person who is afraid for her son, and has great hope for him. She knows that the qualities he has that set him apart from being 'typical' put him at risk. The field is tilted toward him becoming a behavior problem, if his needs aren't met. Something needs to happen to engage him so he can participate meaningfully in activities, like school. I have such hope that what is going on with him will not tip him into a pattern of how he sees himself and how others see him that will be very difficult to undo. I have such hope that many of his issues are caused by the pace of the maturation of his nervous system. I have such hope that he will mature to the point where his nervous system can tolerate some of life's perturbations with resilience.

And I realized: This is the person that I am accusing. This hopefulness is what gives a grain of truth to the accusation that I'm in denial. It was so automatic for me accuse it and fear that it confirmed my worst fears about myself. And, the grain of truth to the accusation really isn't so awful. I also can reflect on the fact that I've put in place all of the systems that can support Scott should his issues be beyond what maturity can resolve (or at least protect him while the maturation continues). So there is evidence that I'm not in denial and making excuses.

So I suppose what I can learn from this is that whenever I feel that odd bending of reality, I should look for the accusation, then look for the grain of truth in the accusation that I have in turn accused. As a means of defending myself from the accusations of others.

I've had a feeling like a band around my chest for so much of my life. It makes my breathing shallow, unless I get really conscious of it. I feel it loosen. Perhaps this is the knot that's been at my center which finally is beginning to soften, unravel.

Communication breakdown...

2010-08-24T20:35:00.000-07:00

From today's diary:

8/24/10

1505

Tuesday

At the dental office with the boys. Connor being seen; Scott beside me.

During the day I’ve been ruminating.

I’ve been pissed off the past few days, at the office of Scott’s nurse practitioner. This is the second month in a row where I’ve notified them that I needed a new prescription for Scott’s medications and kept notifying them as the supply dwindled; didn’t get a call back, don’t know if my messages are getting through, and finally have to call them on it and express my displeasure—also via message. Though I don’t like having to be this way, it is appropriate for me to be this way. It is appropriate to be angry when repeated calls and requests are met with silence. My requests are reasonable, and they are not doing their part; and the consequence is that Scott will have his last medication tomorrow. This means that there will probably be a bigger gap because oftentimes the pharmacy doesn’t have the medication in stock and we have to wait a couple days for them to get it. We have an appointment with her on Friday, so I suppose my messages will be fresh in mind. They’ll probably be being careful with me. I’ve not said things before when things like this happen; I’ve given the benefit of the doubt.

Communication seems to be an issue today. Calling dr. M’s office directly after having received nothing back from her schedulers, where I’ve usually had a live body to talk to in the past. I’ve spoken either with them or left a message each day for the past 4 business days: from “please let Dr. M know that I’ve not received the prescription yet; I’ve had a bad experience with the prescription not arriving” (both on machine and to live bodies) to: “Please call me. The prescription hasn’t arrived yet and I need to make arrangements to pick it up” to “I’m not receiving the response from you that I need and it’s going to cost me” to “What can I do so that I don’t have to go right up to the very end of my supply and then have to scramble to get some? This is not working and has to change.” Just the mechanics of calling has been difficult; her numbers stored in my cell, so scrolling through the screens to find her numbers to dial on our home phone since my cell doesn’t work well at our house, to listening through her nearly 3 minute long greeting and ears pricking up when she said something about a cell and wondering if that’s different from the other mobile # I have and checking my cell contact list and sure enough it is so then I hang up before her message has finished to dial that number, only I’m not sure if it’s the correct number because she’d already said it before I realized it might be a different number from what I have so I dial the one I wrote down and get lots of rings with no answer and so while that’s ringing I try to use my cell to call her office # back in hopes that it can be working its way through the message and back to where she gives her cell phone # again, and finally the ringing phone is interrupted by a recording that says the party is unavailable and my cell phone has no bars showing and so I dial her number on our land line again (office) and wait through her message to get her cell # which is a different number and in the process learn that the pager I’d tried dialing yesterday was no longer being used (which is just as well because the pager had never resulted in my getting a call back anyway when I tried it before, and I never knew for sure if I’d done it right or not because it does nothing after I press in my phone number—that is, acknowledges that my “numeric” message will be sent, and if I follow it with a #, which it didn’t instruct me to do--it didn’t instruct me to do anything--which is part of why I’m left wondering if I’ve done it wrong and no message at all has gotten through: my “numeric page”.) and so that may explain why yesterday’s page wasn’t answered (or, it may mean I did it wrong, and I keep intending to ask Dr. M what is the right way to use it), and so I hang up again and call the cell phone and leave a stern message about this being really difficult, my voice trembling with emotion because I feel like crying, and I’m partly ashamed to be reduced to this kind of anger and in essence criticizing her communication system. Then I call back her schedulers to inform them that they did not respond to a direct request, a reasonable request, which I am entitled to have responded to in a timely manner.

Jesus.

A Fever of Expectation

2010-07-31T11:04:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I mentioned that I belong to a bookreading group; have for over 25 years. We're a well-oiled machine by now, with a system for choosing our books, the day each month we meet, who facilitates the discussion, and who hosts our gatherings.

I've read some incredible books with this group, books I'd have never read on my own. And I've had my experience of any given book greatly enhanced in discussion.

This month we're reading The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones. She also wrote Lost In Translation. (By the way, years after the movie garnered the acclaim it did, I finally saw it. I'm afraid I was rather...underwhelmed. But I don't hold her responsible for that.)

There's a new twist to our August meeting, however. Mones is a Portland resident. And, she will take groups that read her book to a Chinese restaurant in town, and she will do the ordering, and "facilitate" the meal while we discuss her book.

When the possibility for this option was proposed, I'll admit I was a little resistant. This was when I wasn't working and I had a feeling it might be pretty expensive.

As I read the book, I slap my forehead and wonder what I was thinking when I hesitated.

I've never read descriptions of food like this. She's awakened--no, she's inspired--longings I never knew existed for flavors and textures I've only read about. Cravings have opened like holes that only specific shapes can fill. I wonder if she's up to the challenge of fulfilling them. I cannot wait for this meal.

This book explores the theme that food is about far more than eating. It's almost like tantric sex, a gateway through the senses to enlightenment. In addition to being a path to the divine, it's also a language in which subtleties such as rank and favor are communicated. There are literary connections slyly conveyed, and a great chef can be the inspiration for great works of art.

So it piques my interest. I wonder how many other aspects of ourselves might be engaged in this meal. Should I look for hidden messages, obscure connections?

But what if I'm not so crazy about the story itself? Can we really have an honest discussion with the author right there?

Problem for me is...the book has some flaws. They're small, yet erode the fundamentals of my willingness to believe. We have Maggie, a recent (one year) widow who is a food writer who has to go to China to address a paternity claim against her deceased husband. Of course it's a shock to her memory of her beloved husband, and her belief in who they had been as a couple. To confirm the suit's legitimacy she has to take a DNA kit to the child and obtain a sample. Her editor asks ("since you're going to be there anyway") if she'll take an assignment of profiling a restaurant that will be opening in Beijing, with a young American-Chinese chef who cooks exclusively in the classical Chinese tradition. In tandem with the restaurant's opening is the publication of a book written by his grandfather, "The Last Chinese Chef." When Maggie arrives the funding source for the opening has just dried up; his chef 'uncles' who've taught him all he knows through brutal "tough-love" urge him to enter a cooking contest for the Cultural Olympics as a means toward finding more capital. Maggie pivots to focus her story on the competition. The time-frames for verification of her departed husband's culpability and the cooking competition roughly coincide.

I guess my quarrel is it's so predictable that the two will fall in love. And the story just doesn't have much depth--push against its two-dimensionality and it will fall right down. I like to lean into a story and have it support me. This one's too flimsy. Not a bad read, not a great one.

I can forgive this by rationalizing that the romance really isn't the point. It's merely an artifice to celebrate Chinese cuisine--its history, language, symbolism, cultural significance. The food writing truly titillates, and it's clear from her acknowledgments page that this is where she put the bulk of her efforts. Her research includes Chinese cooking/food books hundreds, and thousands of years old. There's depth to burn behind all writing concerning food. No problems with substance there.

So what happens if I'm honest about my experience of her story? Will she order something 'special' for me?

I think I may just keep my mouth shut...except to eat.

(And I'm going to read Lost In Translation, too, to take a second look at her fiction.)

A strange kind of limbo

2010-07-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

This process of coming to a decision to end my marriage has proceeded agonizingly slowly. For me, anyway, since I spent at least 5 years seriously considering it (and arguably as much as 13 years before that getting to the point of seriously considering it).

Before kids, Gary and I together were part of a vigorous and vibrant outdoor community. We mainly based our pursuits around ski touring into wilderness areas on heavy gear, to then climb and ski the wild slopes. It was in the context of this community that I met Gary.

It was a fun life, that of adventurer and animal-woman. It cost me, though. I had to do a lot of overriding of my inner signals to maintain this life. I realize now that though I made a lot of friends and our respect/liking was mutual, my main impetus toward this life was to counter being the-person-that-I'm-not-supposed-to-be (timid, agoraphobic, limited, dull). It was fear of being This Person that motivated me to be That Person. I held it together for a lot of years, but when I got pregnant at 40, I was really ready to stop pushing myself so hard.

That had a cost too. I genuinely like the people who were my companions and took great pleasure in their company--intellectual as well as physical. Most of the members of our particular group aren't even married, and of the ones who are, only one couple has children. (Their children are very close in age to mine, but in a twist of irony, our kids don't really get along.) I knew it was inevitable that parenthood would become a barrier between us--how could it not? Many of our gatherings were about decompressing after a trip and laughing at the shared mishaps and adventures. An avenue of connection would inevitably close, once we weren't sharing those trips.

Connor was born. Two years later we moved to St. Louis. Life went on in Portland without us. When we returned in late 2004 I had Scott, and he was only 3 years old and freaked out by the move. Things weren't well with Gary and I; and I was traumatized and exhausted by the move (and all that had gone before) as well. To be able to participate with these people, who had continued their pursuits in our absence, and to not hold them back, or even be a hazard, would have required an effort from me I wasn't capable of giving. I was seriously depressed, yet it felt normal. All I knew was that I lacked the motivation to do the things that would get me up to speed with my friends, and be a good parent. I didn't think I was being a good parent as it was.

The past 5 and a half years haven't seen me rise much above the rock bottom I hit when I got here. I've simply not had it in me to seek out my old friends, not much anyway, and I haven't really enjoyed it when I did. When I did it was because I was dutiful, but I had to dig way down deep inside of myself. About all I had energy to do, once the boys were both in school, was to try to take stock of my life and see if it was my fault that Gary and I sucked so badly together.

Here's where things stand right now. I'm working for a home health agency and have been doing so since late May. These 4 or 5 weeks into it I'm struggling to learn a complex computer documentation system to deal with a byzantine process of getting paid through medicare. While in orientation I've been putting in 10+ hours a day, but I'm hoping to be independently operational by next week. Then I want to cut my hours back to 6 a day and be home a little more with the boys for the summer. Since Gary is working out of a home office he's around to provide an adult presence for the boys, and I've needed him for this during this period of training. It's confused some of the boundaries we've laid though. Gary hasn't yet gotten himself an alternate place to stay. I'm staying with my friend Marti. I'm there for 3 nights and then come back to my house for 3. In theory that's what Gary's supposed to be doing too. I'd told him until he found a place he could sleep here the nights I'm on my rotation as long as he is away during the boys' waking hours--that is, not come in while they're still up, and be 'gone' (in his basement office) by time they awaken. This is complicated by summertime and the freedom to stay up later that the boys enjoy.

I told him tonight that he needs to get serious about finding a place.

We're in the fourth week of the back and forth "rotation" (since Gary's really not 'rotating'. Maybe this could be called a 'failure to launch'.). This is so brand new sometimes I'm shocked by it. Six weeks ago I was an at-home mom and had been for eleven years. I commute 20 miles on I-5 through brutal traffic going and coming. During the day when I'm seeing patients this is my primary means from point A to B. This is an unfamiliar part of the region and I'm having to learn the fundamentals from scratch. So I'm frequently lost. I've been driving up to 60 miles in a day seeing patients, in addition to the 40 mile round trip from home.

Sometimes I can't quite believe what I've done. Perhaps the way I feel is the way a homeowner does who has demolished a dwelling that's too small for her and is looking at the rubble feeling a long ways away from the new, completed home.

Although we've told our immediate families, and our kids have told some of their friends' kids who have told their parents, we haven't talked much about our change in status with the others circle of adults we know. This includes our climbing friends. One of them has a birthday today. There were many years we spent his birthday with him--in the Goat Rocks, on top of Mt. Shasta, in the Indian Heaven wilderness. Gary was to join a group of them snow camping on the west side of Mt. Hood yesterday because the weather was supposed to be good. Instead they got blown off the mountain by relentless winds and Gary returned to the house (so much for the rotation). This afternoon he said one of the guys had called and we were invited to a barbecue at his house tonight. Gary said he told him about us splitting. So the circumstances surrounding our going to a party to celebrate a friends' birthday would be people learning for the first time that we are done.

I just didn't feel up for that. The group has of course evolved with new people that I've met but certainly am not on intimate terms with. It's not an appropriate setting or gathering for the two of us to be there together. I called with my regrets.

There's a good chance that if friendships get divided up like so many possessions in a relationship split that I've just ceded those friendships to Gary. He's kept in better touch with them since we've returned from St. Louis. Since his is the first face they'll see following the news, it's likely it's the face that will garner the most sympathy.

I do have an answer should anyone ask a "Why" that I feel like answering with more than, "Not available for discussion." It's succinct: "We suck. We suck together."

I do not regret that I am doing this. Uncomfortable as much of this is, it's less uncomfortable than staying in a marriage that I suck in.

Missing child

2010-06-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

Please post on your blogs. You never know what might be the link in the chain that brings this boy home where he belongs.

An old debate

2010-06-18T11:41:00.000-07:00

Several years ago my FIL sent us this video. What was remarkable to me was seeing what really happens. I had no idea that the water inside the balloon retains the overall shape of the balloon, even as it falls. It amazed me to see the speed with which the "skin", the latex, contracts, leaving the water naked. I remembered basic high school science when we talked about "adhesion", and "cohesion." Adhesion is the quality of one substance adhering to a different substance, like water drops on a wall. Cohesion is the force that holds like elements together, like the water in that balloon.

So what defines an object? Its "skin", or the turgor of what presses against the skin? The skin proves structure and shape, but the interior also shapes the skin in pushing against it. It reminds me of the argument about form vs substance. It's also a metaphor for the debate about externals vs internals ("Beauty is only skin deep").

I've mused about this off and on over the years, and sometimes find situations in life that exemplify that conflict: the container, or what it contains?

I know a woman who I thought I was on the way to a deep friendship with. After a time though, I found myself more reluctant to pick up the phone to call her. I noticed a sinking inside when there'd be a message from her obligating me to call her back.

So I tried to track down the source of this resistance. And I realized that I didn't like a feeling I had when I was with her. As a mother, one of my relief valves is to air my perplexity at my childrens' behavior. I love to hear the thoughts of most of the mothers I'm friends with, who often have some insight and enrich my perspective. I realized with this mother, though, that the quality of conversation was different. She would advise me, tell me what I "needed" to be doing.

I had not been asking for help. And I sensed it would be very uncomfortable if I was to say so. Something in her tone, her body language, seemed to send a message that 'no' was not an option. This is a feeling I've often sensed from my MIL when she'd give gifts or offer favors. Essentially she was asking us the favor of allowing her to feel generous by accepting whatever she was offering. Except it wasn't an offer; the feeling was it was mandatory to "accept", and the consequences of not would be her feelings would be hurt and it would be our fault.

I used to wonder if it was something mean-spirited in me that caused me to feel that initial revulsion when she gave us something she wanted us to have (newspaper articles, magazine articles she'd clipped and written notes on). How could I feel that way about someone who only wanted to share of herself?

I think the key is in the nature of the threat. The threat is that she will be 'hurt' if we don't do as she asks. She has an image of herself, a role, as it were, that she needs supporting actors to reinforce. Therefore, her actions in character require corresponding actions of people around her. Particularly the ones she's related to. Furthermore the role requires not letting on that you know your role is to bolster her sense of self esteem.

There was a similar feeling with my friend. She wanted to help, but her helping required me to be one-who-needs-to-be-helped. Maybe it's more accurate to say she wanted to be a helper. She too, has a role for herself that requires complementary responses on the part of Others. I think in both of these situations, my MIL, and my former (now distanced) friend, there is a sense that not acting accordingly is an existential threat--their very self-concept is threatened.

I have dear friends who don't require a role from me to support an image of themselves. These are people I can easily say 'no' to, if necessary. There isn't a feeling of impending catastrophe if I do. All that is required of me is that I treat them decently and respectfully, and keep my agreements.

I believe it is the life within me that pushes out against my skin, that gives me substance and solidity. Press against me, and you feel a response, that of my life responding to yours. This kind of life force can no longer be constrained into a role that is too small for it, in order to protect someone else.

Form gives shape to substance, and substance gives meaning to form. The relationship between the two is what is essential.

Diarrhea (or, it's 1030 am and can I start drinking?)

2010-05-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Ailey inspired me to write a post, but I'm going to have to put it off.

I'm trying to not feel too sorry for myself here. I was looking forward to having the morning to myself at the dojo after dropping Scott at school. I'd have the first real chance to do some writing in several days.

Because I started the job. I'm working for the man. In this orientation period I'm largely shielded from the stressful aspects of home health. I won't even be going on home visits with therapists/nurses for a while. Instead I've sat in the middle of the office warren with a computer monitor working my way through an online course on hepatitis.

The office culture swirling around me is pleasant. I think this will work out ok.

Due to Scott's school schedule (half days only on Fridays) I'll work a 4 day a week schedule, with Fridays off. So this morning's plan was to take him to school, and nip over the dojo for a few hours until pick-up time.

I'd be just gathering up my stuff right now to fetch him, had things gone to plan. He woke me at at 4:30 this morning to tell me there was "some diarrhea in the bed."

Two weeks ago we had the nausea and vomiting. The advice nurse said the vomiting should be tapering off in a few days and the trots could go two weeks. We had daily diarrhea, with some lapses and relapses, ending the Wednesday before last. He's been in school since then.

This Wednesday it was Connor, the morning after the Dinner From Hell. (Subject, perhaps, of another post) It appears to be short lived, with his return to school Thursday. But the intermittent nature of the symptoms keeps me from counting on it, and I may have doomed myself with the phrase "short lived".

Witness this morning. After the first wake-up Scott was in the bathroom two more times, excreting copious amounts. I sighed and weighed the options. He was entirely chipper, talkative even--way too talkative--and didn't seem sick. I remembered the advice nurse's...advice...that he could go to school as long as he had enough bowel control to get to the bathroom and was under about 3 movements a day. Well, we'd had three already so we were in a gray area. I made the call to keep him home and he hasn't had a movement since.

Gary said bye bye and went to a meeting, or a series. Said he'd be late. Left me with a child who's bouncing off the walls. A child I feel duty-bound to insist upon educational activities as opposed to video games or videos on You Tube. And that means I have to enforce it.

He held up his end of the bargain and read a couple books online and took quizzes afterward. So I let him play with the computer for a while. He's waiting for me to read to him from "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" right now, while playing the piano in such experimental ways I can't think straight.

Hence the Delayed Post.

Reflections on my last days as an at-home mother

2010-05-25T11:51:00.000-07:00

Another step down the path:

Make decision check
inform husband     check

long latency
lo-o-o-ong latency

look for work     check
apply for jobs     check
inform sons        (sigh) check
obtain job and start date     check
husband's trip corresponds with trial run for rotation     check
3 nights at friend's home to complete trial run for separate living rotation   check

Remaining to do:

1st day at work
formally begin separate living rotation 3 nights on, 3 off
get established in this rhythm
find another place (rather than doing rotation at a friend's)
take care of legal details of divorce

This morning I'm very conscious that this is my next-to-the-last morning to wake as an at-home mother.

Child development research posits 9 temperamental characteristics. Among other things these affect the ease with which transitions are made. I approach the boundary from one life into the next. The circle of my at-home-mom life has already intersected the circle of work-out-of-the-home-mom life, the shadow of the latter looming over the (soon to be) former. Transitions aren't easy for me; I don't negotiate them gracefully.

Already one of my feet is in the working world, and I feel longing for the world of at-home mom. Yet the longing is tinged with irony because I appreciated at-home-momming most when my kids were in school so I could be alone. I regret that I didn't enjoy my children, and their presences more when I was home full time. I regret that I wasn't better at that job.

As companion to this regret I also feel sorrow in surrendering my alone time for professional life.

My hope is that my solitary reflection and writing time has served its purpose. I thought my alone time was to help me to recover from the demands of children in the context of an unhappy and unsupportive marriage. I thought the purpose was to have some uninterrupted thinking time to consider if my unhappiness was my fault. I thought the purpose was to write my pain and name it so it was more bearable. In all these ways my alone time has served me.

But it's done more. It has enabled me to discern the shape of the Pattern that has been at the core of my life, and present from the beginning. It's a Pattern that has required my participation, which I ably gave in the form of self-doubt. I had to doubt myself and my own visceral feelings, intuitions in order to stay in service to the pattern. At one time the pattern served to keep me in subjection to authority, and religion reinforced the bonds. It probably served a survival function at a time when displeasing adults could be harshly punished, yet persisted beyond its usefulness.. Once it was a strategy to keep me in line when I very much needed to stay in line: I was very afraid of pain. If my feelings and intuitions conflicted with the demands of others it was dangerous to maintain my truth. If I could poison the well of my own truth, by accusing it of being selfish, self-serving, stupid, or just plain WRONG, then it was easier to submit. Sadly the strategy became habitual, and became a part of me. Some form of it has manifested in nearly every area of my life and my marriage is its current embodiment. The only way I can continue in this marriage is by continuing to poison my own well, doubting the legitimacy of my feelings and intuitions. To stay in this marriage, I stay in Pattern. And I say no to Pattern.

Perhaps to uncover these insights, and use them as a basis for decision, has been the reason for the hunger for so much time alone. Perhaps I no longer need this solitary time and it has served its purpose.

Bad mom; or life, other plans, blah blah

2010-05-19T07:23:00.000-07:00

I am so unsuited to have a child who has adhd. A child who has adhd needs a mother who is an extrovert, who doesn't feel drained by demands on her time. He needs a mom who can readily drop a task orientation and smell the (goddamn) roses, because such a child is unable to move from one moment to the next without smelling the (g..d...) roses. I should be appreciating his outside-the-box world view and his capacity to be charmed by details I wouldn't ordinarily notice. Instead my first response is impatience, frustration, and to feel just plain harried as we try to move through a day. I worry a lot that I give Scott way too many "it's-not-ok-to-be-me" messages. I'm sure he gets lots of such messages, even in the progressive school he attends.

I'm ashamed to say that I welcome school days and tend to dread holidays. Sick days are like being robbed. Sick days that involve vomiting and diarrhea are just plain unfair. This child is not docile and compliant when he's sick. His activity level isn't appreciably diminished.

Phase one of the Dry Run was completed late Sunday night. This was to be The Demonstration to the boys of what we hoped the next few years of their lives would look like with Gary and I apart. The hope is that if we can do it right, their lives won't feel a whole lot different than Gary gone on a business trip and then me gone on a weekend with the girls. Gary was in Asia for about 10 days and I planned to go stay with Marti for a few days upon his return Sunday night. Ideally I'd have left Monday night, but out of the goodness of my heart decided to give Gary a chance to get over jet-lag first. So I decided Wednesday would be the day. I'd take Scott to school as usual, and Gary would be responsible for pick-up, then all of the childcare until I returned sometime on Saturday. Then we'd have to get serious about finding another place.

By the way, since we've told the boys that Gary and I will be separating, the atmosphere around here has been largely positive. The boys have been getting along (knock on wood) pretty well, with Connor much more tolerant of Scott, and Scott openly affectionate with Connor. He's been much less inclined to do things to deliberately annoy, and Connor's been less ready to be annoyed. If anything, this seemed improved in Gary's absence.

Friday morning last week I was looking forward to one last day alone in the house before Gary's return. On the ride to Scott's school I started hearing ominous sounds from the back seat. Hastily I grabbed the litter bag and thrust it behind at him. Clearly I couldn't take him to school, and did a big pivot to take him home.

The rest of the day he seemed fine, and I thought maybe the morning episode had been a fluke. In the afternoon he began having diarrhea. By evening I started to take it seriously. At midnight I was awakened to wretching and the glorious dilemma of both ends erupting at once. This involved a linen change and emergency laundering. He was up again at 5 a.m. saying he'd "diarrhea-ed" in his boxers.

Then he was fine all day Saturday. I regretted having called and canceled his piano lesson. He slept through Saturday night with no incidents. He kept food down just fine. Sunday afternoon he began to complain of a sick stomach and Sunday evening began to vomit. So much for school next day. He was home Monday and I was fully on duty as Gary slept off his jet lag. As I've said, illness doesn't diminish Scott's desire for entertainment, and I'd resolved that if he was too sick for school, he was too sick for TV and video games. And though he returned to school without incident yesterday, last night he was in the bathroom too many times to count and vomited a small amount this morning. There's no question he's home again today.

Here's the exhausting part: he goes into the bathroom, diarrhea; he gets up, I remind him (again) to keep his hands away from his face until he’s washed them—sometimes I have to remind him several times and I start to get angry, or at least very irritated because sometimes his hands are going up around his mouth even as I’m reminding him; he wipes, I remind him to not use such huge wads of toilet paper because a clogged toilet and plumber are NOT sweet thoughts…sometimes he stands up and then has to sit back down again, and sometimes he’s up and washing his hands (me reminding him to (1) wet his hands FIRST (2) apply soap (3) wash between his fingers (4) THEN rinse—because his tendency is to put a bunch of soap in his hands but then put it under the running water thus rinsing it away before he has a chance to use it to clean his hands—(5) then dry)—he’ll get all that done and then have to sit down again: sometimes this will happen 3 or 4 times in just one sitting. And then the next sitting is within 10 or 15 minutes.

This has called into question The Plan for The Demonstration which was supposed to launch today. Sure, it might be instructive for Gary to be responsible to care for a child who is running at two openings at once, possibly for several days on end. Sure I really want a break from parenting in these conditions.

BUT, the purpose of The Demonstration is also to show the boys that their lives aren't going to feel much different. Throwing Gary to the wolves, so to speak, may not be the wisest thing to do, given that objective.

I'd hoped I'd spend my last week as a stay-at-home-mom in contemplation and writing. It's been 10 and a half years, so this really marks the end of an era. I signed the letter accepting the offer of a home health company yesterday. Orientation day is Wednesday next week. I'll begin with 24 hours a week and transition to full time with benefits once the summer is done. I guess it's ironic that I'll spend my last days as an at-home mom, really being an at-home mom.

Coincidentally I had breakfast with some of my former co-workers from nearly 13 years ago. We'd worked together for at least 10 years. The company we worked for was sold, sold again, and yet again. It's owned now by a huge national chain. Many of my co-workers have retired. It feels...odd to be reentering a field at an age when many of my contemporaries are retiring. But that's nothing new. I did start having my kids at an age when most of my contemporaries were seeing their offspring graduate from college, or even start having grandchildren.

From the Void

2010-04-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

One of the things I've been occupied with during this blog blackout has been a search for employment. I had an interesting experience that illustrates a paradox. It's archetypal and summed up as "fish or cut bait" (usually posed as a question).

I wasn't finding anything in Portland on my profession's website. Someone suggested I try Crai.gslist. I found a company and decided to contact them. At this point I was only beginning to get serious about looking for work, and my purpose was to explore various work settings and what the environment might be like in them. The recruitment officer said he was impressed by my many years of experience and we set up a meeting time. I saw it as basically informational, but still dressed as if it was a formal interview.

I was there right on time. I sat, and waited, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. I began to feel a bit impatient and to wonder if this might be a clue to how the organization is run. Finally the clinical supervisor arrived and took me back to the recruiter's office. There were three of them.

It seemed the meeting went well. They showed me around their office complex. I told them I was there for informational purposes and was still working out in my mind what would be a schedule that could meet their needs and accommodate the needs of my family. There were a few other hurdles I needed to accomplish, such as completing requirements for my license renewal and getting certified in CPR. As she bade me goodbye the clinical supervisor asked if I'd let them know my plans in the next week or two. I said I would.

This meeting was on a Monday. It seemed they had liked me and I liked them. I felt the business, though a for-profit (I'd only worked for non-profits in my employment history), did put patient welfare first. I had a sense that they were serious about supporting their staff in meeting patient needs.

On Wednesday I sent thank-you notes to the three who interviewed me and told them I would contact them on Monday the following week. On Monday I sent them an email, copied to all of them, with some questions I'd not asked during the interview, as well as an update on my progress of renewing my license and signing up for a CPR course. Additionally, I was tracking down some former co-workers and supervisors to ask if I could use as references--this wasn't easy since it had been better than 10 years since I'd worked with or seen them...and the company I'd worked for is no more (bought out by a company that was bought out by a company, that was bought by a huge for-profit that trades publicly on the stock market).

I was surprised to not hear back from them, and even called the recruiter to ask if they had received my message. This was on his voice mail. Perhaps he spoke with the clinical supervisor because on Friday I received an email from the clinical supervisor that answered most of my questions. I responded with an update on my licensure and CPR certification and asked how many references they wanted. I also proposed a certain schedule and start date, subject to negotiation.

No response.

A few days later I sent a message with three references I'd tracked down.

No response.

It had been three weeks since the interview. On Thursday I called and spoke directly to the clinical supervisor. "Oh, HI!" I gave her a date I'd be available to start, and proposed a schedule. She said they "might have a position available" and told me to send my proposed schedule and availability date--in an email! This I did.

No response, to this day. And, when I was glancing through Cra.igslist yesterday, I saw a position posted for this company.

In the meantime I'd found a job position open at another company and contacted their recruiter. She not only responded, she attached their benefit package for my perusal. Two days later she emailed again and said she'd like to talk to me and they could "create a position" for me that would be to our mutual advantage. I filled out an application online and attached my resume. She sent a message to tell me she'd received it. Tuesday night she called and left a voice mail saying she'd like to talk to me before scheduling an interview. Yesterday as I was picking up the phone to call her it rang and it was her. She had a few questions which I answered and we scheduled an interview for tomorrow.

I don't know if I'll be offered a job there or not. Its headquarters, where team members would have to meet once a week, is quite a drive. But it's possible that I could be working in an area that would have close proximity to Scott's school, with a schedule flexible enough to allow for pick-ups and drop-offs.

I can't help but notice the contrast between the brisk responsiveness I've received with the second business in regards to the first. I considered contacting the first place (which is closer, and we meet at the headquarters only every-other week instead of weekly) to tell them I was looking into a position elsewhere. When I prepared to write a message something stayed my hand. It occurred to me that I'd gotten enough messages in the "body language" to tell me why I didn't want to work for them. They had been telling me why, and it was best to let it go.

The interesting paradox is one hand saying that the difficulty in engaging with the first company is evidence enough that it's not meant to be--particularly when it's contrasted with the responsiveness of the second. But for every scenario that says difficulty in achieving an objective is a 'sign' that this is not a path to take, there's another that says that anything worth doing has some obstacles to screen out those who aren't serious.

I think I've been a person who was inclined toward the second...persisting in fishing too long, and almost unable to give up.

Wish me luck tomorrow.

Update

2010-04-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

We've come out. Sunday we told the boys that we, the parents are going to separate and most likely divorce. We told them they will stay in the house, while Gary and I do rotations of living with them, probably on a week by week basis. (We may start out with shorter rotations because a week may be too long for Scott. He's never been separate from me for more than 2 nights)

A useful opportunity is coming up. Gary is going to Asia and will be gone about 10 days. The boys have experienced this many times before. When he returns I'm going to stay at a friend's house for a few days. Thus we'll have a real-time dry run which will demonstrate to the boys what their lives will look and feel like. The goal is that life not feel much different than it does right now. (That's the least I'm hoping for. My cherished hope is that absent the poison atmosphere the combination of Gary and I give off, life will feel lighter, better to them, and to me too.)

We've informed our wider families, our own parents and siblings.

We'll need another place for the times we're not at home with the boys. I don't know yet if we'll share one or each get one. I need a job and I have an interview on Friday.

That's all for now. It's a very committing move we've made and we need to follow through with the next one as soon as possible. I'm glad to have it in the open, finally--to at last be taking meaningful steps.

Um, uh, about this silence...

2010-03-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

I guess you could say I'm on sabbatical.

I may have mentioned once that I've been working on a project of transcribing my older diaries into my computer? Currently I'm up to fall of 1987 and recording the 50th volume.

1986/87 were very significant years for me, and I've found I've had little energy to do much else. So my focus has narrowed, I haven't been blogging, or reading blogs. Perhaps when I get past this particular era in my life I'll broaden my focus again.

On an unrelated topic, my sons have been out of school for spring break. Scott gets 2 weeks, and is just beginning week 2. He was fascinated with q.uicksand, and I encouraged him to look up some information on the web.

Did you know that there is a whole niche of fet.ish that involves beautiful women sinking in q.uicksand?

Sigh.

I think the family pattern doesn't need me

2010-03-12T15:31:00.000-08:00

Situations like the one I've described earlier surface periodically. They're a perfect microcosm of a bigger system. In this case, there is a lie perpetuated, and telling the truth is more threatening than the lie. The fact that a lie has occurred takes a back seat to preserving an image of What Should Be. Therefore, telling the truth is threatening to a family system that is based on What Should Be.

I'd had not realized that Telling the Truth is only one part of affecting a system. There is also the Accepting of the Truth.

There were many scenarios in my family where the emperor had no clothes. I learned painfully that while being admonished to tell the truth, the real lesson was to keep silent. Therefore I came to doubt my own eyes. Maybe I was mistaken, and the emperor was wearing clothes that just made him look naked. Maybe his appearance to me as naked was evidence of my own sinfulness, the devil tempting me from the One True Way (that he was dressed in finery). Maybe I was delusional, prideful, thought I "knew better than anyone else".

The family pattern protects itself. Self-doubt is very effective in preventing serious questioning. But if one of the family members breaks through that and begins to question/challenge, there is the fail-safe. The pattern can refuse to accept the truth. One way it does this is to cast doubt upon the veracity of the teller.

Such was the position I found myself in when my father told me he had 'no choice' but to accept my brothers' word. And since my own Word was in direct contradiction to my brothers', where did that leave me? I asked him and he talked about something else.

I went over and over it in my mind to see if I could be mistaken. I asked one brother if he could reconcile the seeming conflicting "facts" of the situation and he too didn't answer.

I finally came to a resolve that I was not okay with my brothers' word being invited in to dinner and mine on the porch or out in the yard. While my father wasn't overtly calling me a liar, my Word was relegated to some ambiguous half-state: the penumbra of questionable. I felt the weight of the pressure to just accept this and say no more about it. That was my role in the family. I felt the familiar machinations of Pattern to silence me: self doubt (doubt about the facts, doubt about my character, a peculiar sensation of unreality). Also, threat: if I asserted my truth, it could destroy the family. A family fight could disintegrate us, and it would be all my fault. Peace in the family was riding on my willingness to sacrifice my truth and allow it to be left outside. This is what I've always been required to do and what I've always done.

I wrote my father:

The part I keep returning to is that if I told you something that contradicts what they said, and you're saying you have to believe them, what does that say about me and what I told you? It seems like it puts my Word off in some ambiguous place that resembles a lie.

I'm having trouble with that.

I don't know if you're telling me that you believe me, but for the purposes of family peace and stability you're going to behave as if you believe them? I can be fine with that, but I really want to know if you believe me... because it sure seems if you're "accepting their word", then you must be rejecting mine. If what they told you not only contradicts what I told you, but contradicts everything Dan has told me for the past 16 months, then I don't know how you can't be saying that I'm lying. I've tried looking at this from every angle, but I just can't seem to find another way to look at it.

My father's response was that there was no way that he thought I was lying, and he must have misunderstood (or wanted to) whatever it was my brothers told him, or that he's screwed up in some way.

Again, the substance of the truth was not addressed and I see it will not be. He is willfully refusing to see something that is in front of him, and very obvious. What Should Be trumps What Is.

But, this doesn't have to be at the price of my own compliance in betraying my truth. It appears that the Pattern can make accommodation for my opting out of my role through my father accepting "blame". He can absorb the cost through saying he was mistaken somehow. And the belief in family As It Should Be stays intact, and unthreatened.

I broke down the first line of defense of the family image by speaking the truth. But he is firmly holding the second line of defense by refusing to see, and accept, the truth.

That's none of my business.

What's important to me is that this latest manifestation that exemplifies our family dynamic, has been a vehicle for seeing clearly what has been going on, and to firmly and consciously refuse it.

I don't know that I've ever done that before.

The official version

2010-03-07T14:39:00.000-08:00

For the past 16 months at least there has been an ongoing lie in my family. One brother asked another for money, (or his wife did), and asked him to say nothing (to our father). That brother told me, and asked me to say nothing. I've kept quiet for 16 months. Over time the feeling that something was very wrong grew inside, as did a strong sense that my silence was amounting to complicity, and protecting people who were behaving unethically.

Yeah, it was me. And I broke silence last week and told my father everything. When the brother who'd told me what was going on asked I felt compelled to be honest with him too. So he knows I've talked with my father.

To review. One brother swore another to secrecy, and believed he was keeping everyone in the dark. That brother told me and swore me to secrecy, with the first brother being in the dark--he didn't know that I know. I broke silence and now my father knows. He doesn't know that I told my brother that swore me to secrecy that he knows. So now, everyone knows, but the first brother, and his wife, who ironically are now in the dark.

Without revealing that he knew what he knows, my father says he talked to each of my brothers. He said one brother told him his version of reality (that is, that he stopped accepting money from his brother when my parents stepped in to help them with their monthly expenses) and the other one confirmed it.

If my parents helped them all of last year, and my brother helped them all of last year, in what universe did the one brother stop accepting money from the other when our parents "stepped in to help?"

My father wrote to me: "I have no choice but to believe that neither Kevin nor Dan would tell me a direct lie when I asked a direct question. So I have accepted their word..."

I responded: You're aware that what Kevin and Dan told you directly contradicts what I told you. And, it directly contradicts what Dan has been telling me for 16 months. I don't know how you can reconcile that.

My father hasn't called me a liar. Yet what's true is he is indicating that he is legitimizing their word as what he will consider real, which must exclude mine. The firmness of his tone says he wants no more discussion on this matter.

I wrote: I know you don't want to believe it, and maybe you can find a way to believe them and not think that I am a liar, because that's the way this squares...I stand by what I said, because it's the truth

His next message was about something else and did not address what I said.

I asked the lending brother how it could be true that he'd helped them in the last quarter of 2008, and all of 2009, and my parents had helped them in 2009--how could it then be true that he'd stopped giving them money when my parents started?

He has not answered me.

I'm just beginning to comprehend the implications of this. There is an official version. And my father has firmly "said" that he doesn't want to be backed into a corner with the Truth. We will act as if one brother gave the other money, for a little while, but stopped when the parents stepped in. The truth has no place in the official version...and where does that leave me? Hint: the wind blows cold, and the underside of the bus is greasy.

This is what I've been thinking about for days now. I haven't talked with them because I'm not sure how to. And that's what I'm trying to come to grips with.

What seems clear is that in my family a lie has more legitimacy than the truth, if it supports an image of the family. If Truth undermines the accepted version, well, then it is to be discarded.

In other news, tomorrow I go to talk to someone about a job. It's more of an informational interview--I'll be interviewing them as much as they me. I want to talk to a number of places and get a feel for which setting will be the best. I'm eager to get moving on the divorce process, so we can tell our sons and larger families and finally stop holding this secret. I'm thoroughly tired of secrets.

The ties that bind

2010-03-05T20:18:00.000-08:00

It seems I can hardly mention my counselor, Sharon, without wanting to fill in our history. It doesn't seem enough to say that I'm in counseling; I feel compelled to say that I began with her 25 years ago and saw her weekly for 7 years. We had a very unsatisfactory ending. I used to record our sessions, and I believe our last one is recorded too, but I've never been able to bring myself to listen to it. She was going through her own changes, the nature of which I will probably never know. It was impacting the way in which she did therapy, and the change was not something I could adapt to. Not long after we parted she stopped practicing as a counselor altogether.

Over time the hurt faded and I was able to remember the positive aspects of therapy, and the lasting good it was doing me.

Fourteen years passed. I had my two children, moved to St. Louis, and back, faced a deteriorating marriage, and turned 50. The deteriorating marriage was a catalyst for some intensive writing. I had time to do it when my youngest began kindergarten. I wanted to examine how, why, and where things would go wrong between my husband and me. Most of the things I read suggested that the onus was on me to change. Any given interaction could fall apart so quickly and I really wanted to get a handle on exactly what would happen. Was there really something about myself that needed to change--an attitude, a belief, a sensitivity? If his behavior was offensive to me, was it because I was offended, therefore I needed to change whatever part of me took offense?

I spent hours trying to deconstruct some of our arguments or communications-gone-south, mentally laying them out like an exploded diagram of some machine.

I was in the midst of such soul searching when I realized that I owed my ability to even do so to the seven years I'd spent with Sharon. I felt gratitude and decided to thank her. So I looked her up online and saw that she was leading a study group of an author I'd recently come across. I emailed her to see if I could join. She called me and asked that I come in for a session first. She was again practicing psychotherapy, to her own surprise, she said. When she'd left the field of counseling, she never expected to return. She didn't detail the path that took her through training to be an Archetypal Pattern Analyst. I was intrigued enough by her study group to agree to see her for a session. That was over 3 years ago. I never joined the group.

Indeed, in the course of my life I'd often been frustrated by what seemed to be the emergence of a pattern. The people and circumstances appeared to be different, but over time I'd realize there seemed to be an underlying template. There seemed to be a Pattern that was self-similar, and it usually manifested in disheartening ways. Its course was that I'd involve myself with people in relationships that seemed promising at first, but proved eventually to be unavailable. There were a few forms of this. In one men would present themselves as intensely interested, open up their hearts, yet get "scared" when mine opened in response. It used to seem that the kiss of death of a relationship would be my own interest, which seemed to confirm the old "play hard to get" gambit. I began to brace myself for the signs of a chill, and could usually sense immediately when the connection was broken--as soon as I began to want it. I was left bleeding, furious that it had happened yet again: an event like that propelled me into therapy with Sharon 25 years ago. I thought I had healed that dynamic when I met Gary, until I realized that unavailability has more subtle forms than physically staying, or not. Another form of Pattern I experienced was in the realm of accountability. Certain important people were very offended if I attempted to hold them responsible for some broken agreement. The implication was that there was some tacit agreement to let it pass unacknowledged--and I was trespassing. The spotlight wasn't on the lapse, but on my mentioning it. Their feelings were hurt because I named the act that had hurt my feelings. It was as if my hurt feelings hurt their feelings. Thus I spent a lot of time confused. Was I wanting too much? Was I too sensitive (a dreaded accusation)? Was I predisposed to take things the "wrong" way? Was what I wanted unreasonable? The benefit of the doubt did not belong to me. I was always afraid that I was in the wrong.

The dynamic was so much a part of who I was that I didn't really see it. It didn't stand out as something that was worthy of mention to Sharon when we resumed our therapy relationship with her as Pattern Analyst. It came up by chance in the course of a different conversation.

Even as I write the above I can hear echoes of the old doubts. I can hear voices accusing me of "feeling sorry for myself", blaming others for my troubles, whining, 'poor me' and soliciting sympathy. The driving force behind those thoughts strait-jacketed me and I could not penetrate it. Understanding eluded me. It was easier to assume I was just wrong, period. But then I felt miserable, and had a nagging feeling that that really wasn't It, yet I couldn't come up with what was. I'd just get more confused.

I was wound very tight. But with the help of Sharon's mentoring, I'm beginning to see the elements of the ties that bind.

Recent events reveal the bones of the pattern at its starkest. I see very clearly that love in my family was not unconditional. Love depended on allegiance to a certain unarticulated Code. And if Truth conflicted with the Code, then Truth was to be sacrificed for What Should Be, instead of What Is. Loyalty to What Should Be was a requirement for love. Lies were required, even while a superficial version of the "truth" was demanded. As Palemother commented, "truth" in my family was about control and obedience. What does one who has taken the expectation of Truth literally (and to heart) do when the demands of Truth cross the demands of Code? What does one who loves the Truth do when required to lie, on pain of losing love?

One doubts oneself. One poisons the well of her/his own feelings by doubting them. This solves the problem of lying, when one's heart is devoted to the Truth. Doubt, and confusion serve a protective function, even if that act of survival makes a person vulnerable in other areas. This is because such a person is denied access to the hunches and inner promptings that guide our choices. Such a person is prey to the demands of others because such a person believes the emotions meant to protect are motivated by selfishness. Such a person has to make a way blind in a world that's often pitiless. Of course, the Code was meant to replace the guidance of a responsive heart and sensitivity.

More later, perhaps.

Truth dynamics in a family

2010-03-03T11:03:00.000-08:00

I've been away from the blogs for at least 2 weeks because I've been so preoccupied with a family situation.

I am left to wonder if truth is like a light, or a vibration that shines through a family, and is transmitted generation to generation. I wonder if each member of a family is like a facet of a kaleidoscope, reflecting and manifesting truth in unique ways.

I think all parents tell their children to "tell the truth". A lie was severely punished, and shamed. As the oldest child in the family I must have really taken to heart the obligation to be faithful to the truth. For a while I confused telling the truth with admitting to some wrong-doing, even if I hadn't done it. I got that straightened out.

My parents were rather restrictive, and as the firstborn they were even more overprotective of me. Thus, I chafed while I watched many of my friends do things that I wasn't allowed. My friends urged me to join them behind my parents' back, yet I couldn't. To do so would be to lie. When hemlines in dresses went high any of my friends with stricter parents merely rolled up their skirts once they left the house. Mine stayed at the mandated one inch above my knee. I turned down a number of rides home from school because my father would not let me ride in a car with teenagers. On one of my early dates with my first love, when we were juniors in high school, we went over to the house of an older friend of his. (Rick was mature for his age and most of his friends were already independently-living young adults) My father had told me I could not go into that friends' house and so I would not, even when everyone else went in, even when the friend was insulted and wanted to know "what was wrong" with his house. Rick did go inside, but not for long. He came back out to me and later told me I had "shown a hell of a lot of backbone" and that he respected me for it.

My strategy for juggling my adherence to truth in the conditions of overbearing parents was to wait them out. I abided by their rules while I was "living under their roof", and as soon as I could left home. I was 18 and I never looked back. Those 18 years sometimes seemed to take forever.

My father was raised by a very harsh disciplinarian. And while he probably was not as harsh as his father, he did manage to be very intimidating. The fear of physical punishment guided our behavior to conform to the family rules, values, beliefs. He did not outright beat us. It wasn't like that. At least for me.

Perhaps it was different for my brothers. I was seven when they were born and my sister was 5. In a sense we were two separate families. I wonder if the father-to-son dynamics may have carried more threat of violence than father-to-daughter. I remember one of my brothers telling me that he truly felt that our father was capable of "beating us up".

If he ever doubted the rightness of his chosen disciplinary path, all four of us eliminated it. We were poster children for the effectiveness of spanking: compliant, respectful, model behavior. We were probably people who didn't need to be spanked by temperament--eager to please, easily cowed.

My brothers' strategy for juggling truth and overbearing parents was concealment. They chose to not wait out their term with the family to be able to do as they pleased. They found our parents' restrictions unbearable, and unbearable to wait the many years before they were out from under them. So they resorted to lies, when necessary, to conceal a truth that might generate harsh punishment.

It is interesting the degree to which a family which stressed the truth so emphatically in words, is invested in and with lies.

I guess I will leave it at that.

Damn. Spamn.

2010-02-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

All right. I've got to turn on the dreaded word verification because I'm sick of getting notified of comments on old posts that turn out to be spam.

I'm a kid at Christmas when my email program animates; the prospect of a comment like opening a package. I'm sick of being distracted from other work I'm doing by spam comments.

I only hope that this setting retroactively protects my older posts, because that's where the spammers hit. I suppose there's some comic relief in finding ads for penile enhancers among my comments, but I get to choose when to activate my sense of humor.

Spammers, approach me directly. Maybe if you pay me I might consider it.

My apologies to those who hate word verification. The devil made me do it.

Dilemma part 2

2010-02-14T16:44:00.000-08:00

Say someone you know has a friend. That friend has two brothers. One of the brothers is married with children, and the other not. The married brother's wife decided to start a business, and borrowed from her brother-in-law. She and her husband found a site, which required a five year lease and the owner wanted a co-signer in case they defaulted. They begged, they cajoled. This was the perfect spot! No other place would do! Please, please! Reluctantly, the unmarried brother signed.

The business did not do well. It had problems getting licensure with their state and local governments, and so they were stuck paying months on a lease in a building where they couldn't operate. They started out behind, and then did not recover. It's a business that requires a steady stream of clients. In addition to their lease they also had to have a specialized person on staff, so their overhead was high. Some days the building stood empty.

The married brother lost his job. He filed a lawsuit for wrongful firing, in a case that would grind on for 18 months.

The brother who had lent the money realized he may soon be responsible for a lease on a building a thousand miles away. So when they came to him for more money, he felt he had no choice but to give it to them. And they came again and again and soon he was sending them money monthly and keeping them afloat. The promise was he'd be paid back if the lawsuit was successful.

No one was supposed to know. The married couple asked him to keep it a secret. But one day, he told his sister, the friend, about what was going on. He asked his sister to continue to keep it a secret from their parents. Their parents were also helping the couple monthly and had no idea how deeply in trouble they were. He also requested that brother and sister-in-law not know that she knew.

The friends' brother continued the flow of money. When the friend counseled him to stop he said he couldn't because his brother was saying he, wife, kids would all be in the street. The friend begged him to tell their parents, who are well off and can afford to help to a greater degree than they were. Furthermore, they'd be willing. The friend said they should get together on a conference call and see if there was something they could work out: he needs to get this hook out of him. Her brother refused. And so, sworn to secrecy herself she felt she could only watch as the situation played out. His brother's wife became accustomed to the monthly stipend and expected it each month.

He asked his married brother if he could see his wife's books for the business, so he could have an idea of where his money was going. His brother refused, saying his wife doesn't show her books to anyone, not even him. Lending brother couldn't bring himself to confront the wife directly and insist.

Tax time came, and his hit was huge. His sister asked if he could take a deduction for supporting a small business. He said he could have, but he'd been doing the taxes with their dad, and would have had to reveal "the arrangement". So he swallowed and paid the taxes on income that had only passed through his hands on the way to someone else. He could have sheltered that income, put it into a fund for retirement, made a down payment on a house. Nearly frenzied with frustration the friend urged him to come clean with their father, let him know what was going on, quit carrying this burden by himself. He said he couldn't do it.

The court case drug on. The defendants found ways to delay and delay. Each delay meant not only hardship to the family, but also to the brother who was keeping them afloat. There was a very real possibility that if the ruling went against the defendants they could appeal, and the case could be strung out for years.

The case ended in an out-of-court agreement, and the plaintiff, her brother, was awarded a settlement. Jubilant, he called the friend, his sister, to set up a three way call with their brother, to break the fabulous news. For a brief time while the call was being set up, the friend was alone on the line with the lending brother. He was in tears, as if he'd just been released from prison. "This means I can buy a house!"

The award was dispersed. The friend asked her brother if he had been paid back. He said no, in fact he was kind of unhappy because he'd thought he should be "closer to the top of the list" than he was. Disgusted, the friend said, "If they'd come to you with a check straightaway, that would be one thing. If they're going to delay like this you should ask for interest. What you had to pay in taxes, and the interest you could have gotten on that money was a big hit, and nobody should feel entitled to someone forgiving them that amount. Essentially you've had to pay to give them money! And I don't see that they're even acknowledging this!"

The friend is feeling very conflicted. In the first place her lending-brother is a sovereign adult, and is free to spend his money however he wishes, even if it's enabling their brother and sister-in-law. It is none of her business. To "rescue" him would be demeaning, would it not, and would also violate a confidence. A core part of the friend's self-identity is that she can be trusted, and will always keep confidence. On the other hand, it appears that her brother is constitutionally unable to refuse this pair, and hasn't she been complicit in his bleeding by keeping that confidence?

Something about this is deeply offensive to her. It has to do with appearances being not what they seem. It has to do with her brother and sister-in-law appearing as if they're not taking money from other brother, when they are.

It seems actually a classic dilemma, so I would guess it's been universally experienced. How have you experienced this...what did you do?...if you were the Friend, what would you want your friend to tell you?

Minor (petty) Dilemma/update at bottom

2010-02-14T08:45:00.000-08:00

I was a stinker, and I'm teetering on a guilty impulse to undo it, with no one the wiser.

It started as a good will gesture. Connor has snowboarding lessons today on Mt. Hood. This is his second in a series of 4. He and Gary leave the house early, and are gone well into the evening. So Gary decided he and the boys would fix a Valentine's dinner last night instead.

It was a very nice meal and left a very big mess. Which was still in the kitchen this morning when I got up after they departed.

I would have hoped that a Valentine's dinner surprise might include the follow-through of cleaning up as well. That seems it would round out the gift.

I dialed the cell phone. Connor answered. I asked if the dog had been fed and let outside to relieve himself. No. I asked him to tell his father that I was unhappy at having been left with a really dirty kitchen.

It's been a sore point anyway. Nothing that people with a healthy relationship and functional communication skills couldn't handle, but we're beyond that. I usually plan the meals, shop for them, cook. I do a lot of the clean-up as-I-go, but the division of labor is that he cleans up the dishes.

We don't eat terribly late, and there is a lot of time in the evening where he could put the dishes in the dishwasher. In the mornings I'm the first one up, and I like to have a free sink when I'm preparing lunches for school, and breakfasts. So it's been a recurring resentment when there's a sink full of dirty dishes to work around as I'm trying to do my job.

I think it's not even so much the presence of the dishes when I've requested respectfully that he clean them up (more than once) so I have a clear space to work in. The resentment comes from his not acknowledging that making his life easier is at the expense of making mine more difficult. He resents that it bothers me.

He and Connor are gone all day. If I leave the dishes for him I will be the one living with them.

My behavior was indefensible, though, to make Connor the conduit for communicating my displeasure. Classic selfish dysfunction, to have involved my child.

Gary: (I could hear him off the phone): "Tell her to do the dishes. It's no problem."

Me: "Yeah. No problem for him."

When we rang off I was tempted by a wicked thought. Let him deal with a mess in his workspace. I went downstairs and opened up his home office. I found a plastic box and loaded it with the dishes and pans and carried it down. Unloaded the box on his desk and floor--careful that the bottoms weren't wet so they could damage any paperwork.

The whole time I'm chiding myself a bit thinking, "This is more effort than it would be to just do them..." ..."Since our understanding is that one of us cooks and the other does dishes, isn't he within reason to have expected that I do the clean-up (even if this was supposedly a treat they were doing for me)?" ... "If the dinner was a gift for Valentine's, maybe my gift to him should be the Valentine's clean-up?" ..."You're making a lot more work for yourself if you relent and decide to cart all these dishes back upstairs and do them." ..."That's really childish, and it's not going to help things."

I guess that's the angel on my one shoulder. On the other is the devil remembering, "Tell HER to do the dishes. It's no problem (it's no problem, it's no problem, it's no problem)!" Rage rises when I consider my real grievance was again being dismissed, discounted, and minimized. If he'd said (to Connor so I could hear), "Yeah, it is kind of cold to leave her that big mess; tell her I'm really sorry" the dishes would still have been there, but I probably would have done them charitably. I would have been inclined to take the perspective that while a special dinner doesn't usually involve the consequences of cleanup to the recipient, I could make that my gift.

The dishes are there for now. Who will prevail, angel, or devil?

*********************************************************************************

Well, I split the difference. I left the dishes down there. When he and Connor got home they were in pretty high spirits and the mood was pleasant. Gary asked if I'd slept in and I replied I'd gotten up shortly after they left. There was a little silence as we both remembered my phone call, and he mentioned it first: "Oh yeah. You called...about the dishes..." (pleading tone) "I know you were bummed...but I'd made you dinner!" I said,"But I thought when you made a gift of dinner you didn't expect the recipient to clean it up. When I make you dinner for your birthday I don't expect you to have to clean it up." He said, "But no one gave me a Valentine's present." (Side note. I quit giving him valentines several years ago. Just as we're beyond give-and-take negotiations to resolve issues, so are we also beyond valentines. I've quit pretending. He's more about the form, or propriety of the event, so he'll keep up appearances. I don't bother. I wouldn't have cared if he'd not made a dinner. I don't expect it or particularly want it. But still, a gift is a gift.) I said, "If you'd said anything but, 'tell her to do them', if you'd said anything like you understood it was kind of unpleasant, I would have willingly done them and considered them my gift to you." Pause. "So I took them downstairs and put them in your office."

"WHAT??? "

"They're down in your office."

Feeling charitable, I even told him where to find the tote I'd used so he could bring them all up in one trip. (I heard him say to Connor and Scott, "She put the dishes in my office!" and they all laughed.) I let him bring them up, then I put the dishes, bowls, and silverware in the dishwasher. I told him he could do the pans and clean out the vegetable leavings still in the sink. And called it good.

Deadbeat mom

2010-02-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

Third time's a charm...and I may be beyond 3. I think the first time I got a call from Connor's school secretary I was in the bathtub at home. It rang 3 times, which is the threshold before it's sent to voice mail. Then a little while later it rang again.

I'm funny about a ringing phone. I just can't bring myself to run for one. I reason that answering machines have removed that obligation.

This has always been a sore spot between Gary and me. I think he believes that the person calling knows that I have chosen to not run for the phone, and has hurt feelings.

So my first strike was that day when I was in the bath and the phone rang and I didn't answer. That would be the day that Connor was actually feverish at school. Having called twice at my house (and by the time I was out of the tub I'd forgotten that the phone had rung and so had not checked for messages) the school secretary called Gary at work. He went and got Connor and brought him home.

Strike two was last year when I took the boys to a matinee after school. Connor bought two packages of Red Vines and ate them both. Late that night I woke to retching and a lake of red in front of the downstairs toilet (why can't they put it where it's supposed to go?). When it was time to get up he seemed fine, noisy and active as usual, so I sent him to school.

Later that day I got a call. He wasn't feeling well and would I come and get him?

As we were walking out to the car he said he'd told the school secretary that he'd thrown up in the wee hours and she exclaimed, "But you're supposed to wait 24 hrs after vomiting to return to school!"

Great. That's a qualifier for loser mom; sending my sick kid to school to infect everyone else.

Worse, now Connor knows that there's a 24 hr policy for a cough or a sneeze, and he can hold public humiliation over my head as leverage next time he doesn't feel like school.

There were a few other minor events that add to the impression: calls from the school lunchroom lady to tell me his lunch account is delinquent. The kid had the check--it was in his pack. He just kept forgetting to get it out and take it in to the lunchroom.

I think I put the final nail in the coffin on Tuesday.

Scott didn't have school at all Monday and Tuesday. The teachers were preparing their report cards or something like that. (I haven't seen a report card.) I'd made them appointments with their opthamologist months in advance for Tuesday. I had it on the calendar. Monday I was at Connor's school to read with one of his classmates, and I asked the school secretary if they needed written notice in advance of my coming to get him out of school early. She said I only needed to come and they'd call the classroom.

Tuesday morning as he walked out to the bus I told him that I'd be there to get him around 2:15. Then I set about to entertain Scott. I'd promised him if we culled some of the toys he no longer uses we could take them to a resale store and I'd give him whatever amount they bought them for. The toys had been in the van in boxes for months. We hadn't put the last row of seats in because there was no room. Gary had been complaining. Tuesday seemed like the day to finally get it taken care of.

Part of my reluctance was that I'd lost the print-out I'd made of consignment stores. Also, I dimly remembered that only one of those stores paid cash for items as opposed to in-store trade, but I couldn't remember its name. It's taken months to work up the motivation to re-invent the wheel and find the name and address of the store. I did that while I waited for Scott to wake up.

As I repacked the stuff and did an informal inventory I realized a great deal of the bulk was in VHS videos. I tried calling the store to see if they even accepted the cartridges and got their voice mail saying to call back during regular hours. I really didn't want to have to pack up these videocassettes if they weren't going to take them, so I wanted to talk to them first. Since Gary's working from home now I had to wait for him to get off the line. That delayed me another 20 minutes; when I reached them I spoke to a young woman who said they would take the movies.

So we were off. I took the dog too thinking we could make a loop and stop by the Petsmart and get his toenails clipped. I have clippers, but his nails are black, his feet sensitive, and once I drew blood. So I've lost my nerve and he's lost confidence in me.

Now there was a little bit of anxiety about taking the dog because he's been having diarrhea again. I took him to the vet right after the first of the year with the same problem--off his food, loose stools, general pitifulness. I feared the worst since the last dog that had gone off her food had had a fatal cancer. The vet pronounced him healthy but for an overgrowth of certain intestinal flora that had overwhelmed other intestinal flora. He gave me an anti-biotic and some pro-biotic powder, and we left the office $250 poorer. Within a few days he'd seemed healthy again. Then we switched his food to a cheaper Cost-co brand. Last week he went off his food again and the bowel stuff started again. He's controlled himself well and not had any accidents in the house, but I was nervous about the car. So I really hoped we wouldn't be too long in the resale shop.

We had 5 bags of stuff to schlep about a block. Scott was a pretty good sport about it. When we walked in the sales person asked if I'd been the one to call about the videos. She was so sorry but she had misspoken when she said they took them...they only take DVD's. A customer in the store said she thought another resale store close by might accept them. In the meantime the owner went through the bags, removed about a 15th of it and paid me $7. Back to the car we schlepped. I took the dog for a short walk just in case he was uncomfortable, then we drove over to the other place. They wanted 20 minutes to look through the bags we carried in. So Scott, who really doesn't like walks much, and the dog, who adores walks, took a little tour through that neighborhood. I'd briefly lived in a house close by when I first moved to Portland 30 years ago and took Scott by to see.

When we returned they had taken one item and gave me $3 for it.

Well, that was an hour and a half well spent. Hardly worth the gas, the time, and the trepidation about the dog's bowels. I schlepped the bags back out to the van and we set off for the Petsmart.

We left the freeway as the news came on. Admiral Mike Mullen was recommending an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell. The last thing I heard him say was that it was wrong to deny people the opportunity to serve their country on the basis of "who they are" when I saw a motorcycle cop ahead of me. He was traveling on a cross street from my left and his lights were on. By the time I saw him it was too late to slow down so he could pull out ahead of me. I was in the left hand lane so there wasn't any place to pull over so he could go around. It wasn't until I moved into a left hand turn lane for the Petsmart lot that I realized I was his prey. He followed me right in. Had clocked me going too fast in a 35 mph zone. I'm not in this area very often and hadn't seen the speed zone signs, and could swear I was at the same speed as the other cars around me. He told me my driving record was good, so maybe I could qualify for an online traffic school. If I did they would dismiss the ticket and it wouldn't go on my record, though I would have to pay some fee associated with taking the class. I have to go in to the municipal court in person to arrange it.

Got the mutt's nails trimmed. Home. Before going inside I let him wander a bit in our back yard in case he had to go, when my cell phone rang. I saw that it was the school calling and that it was nearly 3:00. I wondered if Connor was sick and tried to answer, hitting the hold button instead. Lost the call. Went inside and called the school. The secretary answered, and I asked if they'd just tried to call. She said that Connor was in the office, had been there for the past 45 minutes and was insisting that I was supposed to pick him up for some kind of doctor's appointment? When I gasped she said, "Did you forget?" What could I say, but "ohmygoshyes". She said, "Well, I scolded Connor. I told him that he's supposed to stay in class and we call him when you arrive, but he was so sure you were going to be here...and the trouble is, he missed his music class!" It was 2:50, the time that we were supposed to have been at the opthamologist's office, so I surrendered any possibility of making the appointment. Lamely I told her to tell him to just ride the bus home as usual. Then got on the phone to make my mea culpas to the dr.

The woman I spoke with was very kind and understanding, even without me telling her the whole story. She merely coded us as a canceled appointment, instead of a missed, which would have meant a fee. Then we rescheduled for a month hence.

But my reputation is sealed, I think. I am, and always will be a Deadbeat Mom. Or if nothing else, a poster child for the drawbacks of being a middle-aged mother.

And I still have to go to the municipal court and clean up the ticket.

Excerpts

2010-02-04T12:05:00.000-08:00

When I'm mulling over some "new" insights I'll frequently find I have visited these ideas before. This is an excerpt from my journal about 2 1/2 years ago, and seems pertinent to what I've been thinking and writing about lately.

7/22/07
Sun
1142

Interestingly I found an article online about a book called, “Mistakes Were Made—But Not By Me”. The author was interviewed. The topic was cognitive dissonance, and the defensive psychological maneuvers one makes to reduce internal conflict. What can explain someone pressing forward in the face of evidence against a course of action, once they’ve begun it.

I think this is exactly what I’ve been talking about when I consider doubting myself. Is something appearing in a certain way to me in order to reduce a conflict I have about it: is my brain selecting certain facts to support its own point of view, or to protect a choice I made earlier? Is it selecting facts that would cause me to not feel so bad about something I’ve lost, or selecting facts that give me reason to pursue something?

There’s a sense of being held between two poles, in a state of tension that’s almost unbearable: the sense of wanting what I can get from someone or something, but it beginning to look unlikely I will get it. How long do I hold out? I wonder if this is another of those places where no one else can go—like death. When I die, there will be no one there but me. In some of these situations of evaluating my behavior or possible behavior, there is a place where no one is there but me. A mistake I’ve made all my life is to act as if there IS somebody else there—someone whose prescription I should follow.

There’s a bigger story about seeing myself as ‘victim’ to someone else's mistaken feelings or conclusions. I see that there is a sort of drama component when talking to one person about some hurtful act another person did to me—I portray myself as ‘the reasonable one’ and the other as being inexplicably unreasonable. In my recent history I have that story going with Gary. I talk about it with someone else to receive reassurance that I’m not the crazy one, that my behaviors and responses ARE normal and reasonable and to bond with this other person over receiving those assurances.

I suppose there’s another approach to framing that though. Inexplicable things happen, people behave inexplicably, and we often feel hurt by it. Rather than talking being “just” a self-serving way of reassuring myself that I’m ‘right’ and someone else ‘wrong’, talking can also be a way of getting some insight into the principles and facts of the human condition that gave rise to the feelings in the first place. Bonding with the other person can be beyond getting assurance about being “right”—it can be the bonding process of working together to gain understandings about ideas.
Part of where this takes me is again wondering how we can possibly form relationships when this scrim of perceptual filters and ego-protections our brain manufactures is present. How can we evaluate anything that comes in through our senses, when the basis of its apprehension may be shifting. I suppose that’s a sort of quantum mechanics—the idea about what given facts we’ll select from any given moment to reinforce our reality and what emotional color that will have. That the facts we select may be influenced by what has happened just prior, or in a greater context, or by certain fears, desires…

In my past I’ve been upset at how the facts that make a certain behavior seem reasonable at the time seem to encourage a different behavior when I look back on it later. I’ve been frustrated by the fact that only certain facts were available to my awareness, even though time shows that other facts were present too, but I’d not distinguished them from the background. Perhaps this is witnessing how quantum mechanics works on this macro scale. Even though objects don’t behave this way, a flower becoming a vase and vice versa, the facts we select from DO. The conditions of our emotions and senses as the bedrock from which we select our facts are the elements of chance and randomness that is at the core of each subatomic particle…

So where does one go from THAT? The realization that quantum mechanics may be manifesting on this level in the choices we make and the basis from which we make our choices. Which are all fluid and may be present at any given moment, or not. It’s all at an incredibly complex level of interaction.

It seems that history, recent and more distant, might be like the force of gravity, which Einstein said is space warped by large-mass objects—we experience that as gravity. Perhaps history is what warps –what, perception? Is perception analogous to gravity, which really isn’t a downward sucking motion at all, but merely the warping of space by the mass of the earth. (So again, what the hell is space?)

So does that mean the fact that in recent (hypothetical) history Gary has said something hurtful have to warp my perception, which may be warped already in that direction by history a bit more distant but somewhat consistent. How does this work out, I guess I’m wondering, on a practical level? Is there a way I can be free of my perception, or be free of it warping in proximity to events/history?

“The United States is a country that believes in Belief” is something the author of the ‘Mistakes…’ book said. I think behind many of my questions is the question about whether there is a True Objective Reality against which things can be independently measured? (And if not, what? I guess it seems important that there be an outside True Belief rather than that we’re all just grabbing at straws to keep ourselves oriented—as we hurtle toward death? That whole notion of randomness, it seems like meaninglessness. And each of us humans that do more than just respond on a level of apparency is looking for meaning, I think. I think ultimate meaninglessness has been an existential question that’s troubled me all my life, even as a child. Does it make my search invalid, I guess is one question, if I just seize on something random to orient myself around? Like in a big flood, each of us caught in it are floating by, or trying to stay afloat, clutching our little pieces of jetsam and proclaiming they’re the One True Way. If indeed, I’ve not really latched on to a Larger Truth and am only spinning by on one of many pieces available to grab onto, does it somehow invalidate the piece that’s keeping me afloat?

And along those lines I’m reminded of a question I had earlier, which is, I’m giving myself permission to give myself over to this writing and musing, thinking that it’s leading Somewhere. I’m giving myself permission to spend what I’m spending on seeing Sharon in the faith that it’s leading Somewhere. Somewhere psychically better than Here, where I have more wherewithal to act effectively…to have more of Myself available to me and be able to live at a higher level of personal satisfaction.

What the fuck am I looking for? What the fuck am I trying to accomplish with therapy? How can I KNOW when it’s supposed to end? How can I know if I’m ‘just’ indulging myself at the expense of other pressing things I should be doing, or if I really AM on a path that has an agenda and a clear ending point.

Later:

And how can I really know? The path laid down by people who’ve come before us with the mythical archetypal stories of the hero’s journeys—maybe those aren’t so much a pathway to go down that someone’s discovered, but instead are just an attempt to find reason in life. Sharon’s work with me involves following the structure laid out in the myths: The myths are Everybody’s stories, or being far from Home and the experiences we have, often adverse, as we try to return Home. I’m pretty sure this is the template that a Jungian would use, which is what Sharon is. The particulars differ, but the template is that one is separated from Home (a universal) may wander lost for many years, realizes he/she is lost, and attempts to return home, having to take a dangerous Journey in order to do so. So perhaps my recent story could be of me having floundered lost for so many years, taking some false leads, but ultimately my path guiding me toward Home whether I realized it or not. Various nuggets of encouragement associated with various things (thoughts, events, interpretations of events, books, passages in magazines, conversations with people…) would encourage me that I was on a path I should be on. Finally I realize I am lost and have a vision of what Home is like. I get a good look at it, and then in order to get there I have to return to the perspective from eye level with the waves that are rising awful high. Or, I was on a hill that gave me some perspective, but then my path plunges into a dark and dangerous forest.

I suppose that person would despair sometimes and wonder if they’d REALLY seen that vision of Home, if it really existed, or if they were doomed to wander indefinitely in the dark. If Home had been a figment and if the fact they were in this forest at all proved something negative about their character.

I guess what I’m saying, is that I do have an expectation that this writing, this time to myself, this giving priority to this time, this therapy and this money being spent in therapy—this is leading Someplace. I’m not just treading water, even though right now it’s easy to believe I am. Fear that I’m deceiving myself in my hoping that treading water is not a permanent condition that will later appear as a blip in the overall scheme of things regardless of how little progress I see now. Fear that I’m telling myself that, but in actuality I AM in a dead end. A condition that will last forever because I’m not using my will power to lift myself out of it.

I guess that’s part of my question, is my very search, and if I’m going about it in the right way. I was raised in the tradition that humans are flawed (sinful) and that there is a True Way and that it is our will that keeps us adhering to this true way, and that it’s very difficult. So the strength of one’s will is shown by how closely they can adhere to the true way. I’ve sort of been tyrannized and castigated by this my whole life. And in opposition to it is this: the idea that inherent in humans, or maybe only some, is a wisdom that will guide one through the experiences one needs most. That adhering to the One True Way actually interferes with this process of moving toward wholeness and enlightenment. That it’s more organic, and authentic to listen to each experience as it happens free of judgment, and get what is needed from it. That point of view assumes that the Soul wants to grow in positive directions, is oriented in a direction of expansion. And odd the paradox that in expansion there is wholeness, where common sense would call it dis-integration.

So what IS my journey. And is the end point a place where I can still recognize my life, or does it reveal itself to my perception as meaningless ultimately?

At any given point am I where I’m supposed to be, or am I there through error, and worse, through continuing error? Such as, I’ve considered myself to be in a recovery period where I need to not volunteer, need to not be out doing outwardly useful things, need to be spending time in interior spaces. Now am I still here because it’s the right place to be? Or am I here because it’s habit and I’m waiting for a signal that never comes? A signal I’m in error in waiting for, because it’s unrealistic to expect that when I’m ready for the next move, I’ll KNOW it. I think that’s been the basic framework of what I’ve told myself about this period: That I’ll know when this inward time is coming to an end because the time will begin to weigh heavy on me, rather than seeming to vanish. That there will be a sense of knowing inside that it’s time to go.

So, then, to flesh out the template of a journey: Did my exile from ‘home’ begin when I was faced with the truth that my mother didn’t protect me and so had to turn away from that truth and thus had to turn away from me? And thus lived a life with a major blind spot because at a core level I couldn’t allow myself to see the truth of something? Yet I felt honor-bound to protect the truth (finding its manifestation in my behavior of doubting myself, or attributing being self-serving to myself and therefore feeling I couldn’t trust myself). I was tripped up by just how far a scale to take the truth. And I suppose that’s partly about how far I involve other people. Because I sense that there is a scale of the truth which is analogous to the molecular level of matter where we enter a realm of reality that’s its own universe. On the thought and mind level, there is a point where another person cannot exist and it is not accurate thinking to make basic decisions from this place from the point of view of another.

I keep trying to describe this. I keep having a sense where the components of our thoughts and emotions go deeper than the level where Other humans can contact them. In my case, I think that’s the place where I decide whether I’m doing right action or not in staying in this swimming hole, plunging the depths. Whether whatever ‘Other’ people would do really applies at such a level.

Early on I discovered that from the level where I experienced reality, present were many contradictory and uncomfortable emotions—uncomfortable in how they involved other people. If I’m responding to my high school sweetheart telling me he loves me by telling him that I love him too, yet I feel parts of myself that aren’t necessarily in agreement with that, am I ‘lying’ to him? And though I may feel uncomfortable, that I’m being dishonest by not telling him about the presence of these facts of those parts of myself, where is the place on the scale of reality he was coming from for confessing the stuff that comes from a sub-level of that scale?

My musings are telling me that though we largely interact with people, there is a place in our selves where we really can’t take another person and we’re on our own. And that I discovered that fairly early, maybe in that instance where I wasn’t sure what my mother meant when she and that lady asked me if I’d taken a toy, and so assumed they knew on that level too. Perhaps for the rest of my life I’ve been confused about what truth is at that level and I haven’t really been able to see—because at that time I couldn’t. Because it involved the truth that in that instance my mother hadn’t protected me which maybe my childish mind generalized to other and all situations. I suppose that part of what I’d tell myself would be that my mother hadn’t protected me because she knew I was ‘bad’, that even if I hadn’t stolen the toy I might as well have. I suppose I had to believe that I was flawed, because I couldn’t tolerate believing my mother was. Perhaps there is the seed of the self doubt that has been an intimate part of my life for as long as I can remember.So I always lived in fear of that flaw being exposed, and I always had to wait until someone made their truth explicit to me because I couldn’t trust my own judgment about their behavior. And I would choose to think that I was flawed when it came to any question between me and another person.

So perhaps that’s my separation from home, the sense of a flaw between me and mySelf, and the journey home is the examining its origins and the degree to which it’s invested in my life, how it’s affected my life by the way it’s affected how I experience events.

Another turn around the fractal

2010-01-29T11:32:00.000-08:00

In my last two posts I wrote about the beauty of experiencing the miraculous, the healing and peace which lie within us. I think that's what Lavender Luz was referring to when she referenced a Higher Self. I got to experience that in unexpected places, there are lenses through which we get a glimpse of that Self. They are also portals through which we connect with that Self.

I also learned that having this knowledge in my bones doesn't mean that I neglect anything in this life, the temporal, little me. I have to live with integrity at this level too, and that involves being true--true to myself, my feelings, my experience.

When I was 14 or so I read a book that I think was Harriet the Spy. I'm not certain if it's the same book, though. In this particular story a girl keeps a diary where she writes down her true feelings about the people in her world. The diary is found and people she'd had an unflattering opinion of were very angry with her. An adult in this girl's life--a relative? a teacher?--counseled her that to live in this world, we have to lie.

So I think that notion is out there, in general culture. American culture, at least.

In Scott Noelle's piece about sociality, he put it in a nutshell: "Quite often the real purpose of 'being social' is to protect others from their own small-mindedness. Such is the case when mothers are pressured to avoid nursing in public."

My father-in-law provided the latest demonstration. He yelled at my 8 year old son on Christmas Eve, for being too loud, after a solid day of his dog's barking and his yelling at her to be quiet. He is used to people tolerating behavior like that without comment. I've been shocked by the way he's treated other adults: his son, his ex-wife. I've seen him do it many times, but not directed at me. So I'd said nothing. But he crossed a line to do it in my home at my kid. I called him on it, though I gave him the courtesy he'd not given my son; I did it in private rather than in front of other people. I also considered very carefully before I sent him an email telling him what I'd seen him do, pointing out the irony of yelling at my kid for being too loud when he and his dog had both been nothing but loud. I stated the rule that in our house, when we want something we ask for it respectfully.

He's not "spoken" with me since. Clearly, my job was to carry the burden of unresolved anger in order to spare him knowledge of his own misbehavior. I decided I'd rather live with the discomfort of his not speaking with me to carrying the unresolved anger, and so let it settle where it belongs--on his shoulders. It's his, let him carry it.

In light of this incident, I now see things clearly that were clouded before. I live in a world where people want things of me; in this case my FIL wanted to be able to behave as he pleased in my home and have it tolerated without comment. Raised in a hypocritical world, sometimes my own well of feelings and emotions rebelled. I lived in a family that did not tolerate insubordination. It wasn't flexible enough to acknowledge the times it was unfair or unreasonable; to belong I had to swallow it. I was a compliant child, responsive to the threat of punishment and ostracization.

How does a child cope in a world where what is expected runs counter to his/her truth? I see now that my solution was to sow doubt about the legitimacy of that Truth. My solution was to blame myself. If my feelings ran counter to what was expected around me, there had to be something wrong with my feelings. So I had to question them, second-guess myself, demand a standard of 'proof' that was impossible to meet.

I see now that this was the best possible of solutions. It short-circuited the intolerable contradiction between what I knew to be true in my very soul, and what was expected to get along with others in the world. So I see that this is the pattern I’ve been living in. If I couldn’t just live in it happily, then I was going to have to live in it unhappily, but thinking there was something wrong with me for being unhappy. No one really cared if I was happy in it; just that I was compliant and didn’t cause any trouble for them…did my part of keeping their self-esteem intact by not contradicting them. I had great fear of not belonging.

It hasn't served me as an adult, though. However, as the example of my FIL shows, people are still expecting me to "protect them from their own small-mindedness." And there is still a threat of punishment.

My marriage has been a replication of this pattern. I stayed in it because of the possibility that the unworkable parts were my fault. My worst fear was that our conflicts were a result of a deep flaw in me that kept me from letting myself be happy.

Now I see that unhappiness is a natural result of living within an unworkable marriage. Furthermore, as I've separated my own conception of mySelf from the conception of the people around me, I see that being True inside is more important to me than avoiding disapproval. I would rather carry the burden of disapproval than the one of violating my own internal integrity.

Sometimes...

2010-01-21T12:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, things just come together so beautifully. Sitting in the front room with Toni and Marti and suddenly understanding what I've heard all along about creating our own reality was a very profound moment. It's very different from trying to alter your thoughts and "change your reality" through force of will. We didn't do it through will power, We did it through our receptivity, and our love, and we created a healing web that nourished all of us.

I had a dream last week, where I saw the strings, smoke, and mirrors of perception. In the dream I was receiving intuition about a situation that seemed unsafe, all on a barely conscious level. I saw the lens descend that told me I was just being neurotic, and having a self-serving agenda. This lens screened out what I had seen which had put me on alert, and I second-guessed myself. I saw the lens I was looking through, and how it changed how I viewed my available options.

This came at the same time I read a wonderful post my cousin Lori wrote about two weeks ago. She illustrated it with a fractal, which demonstrates that the Part is contained and subsumed within the Whole. She wrote: "I already am all that I seek." She linked to one of her earlier posts where she was discussing Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, with some other bloggers. In response to a question about suffering she described a temporal self, and a larger, profound Self which encompasses the temporal. As I read I realized what Toni, Marti, and I had done; in holding our lenses to the light, we had connected with our Larger Selves, which are in turn One.

I realize why I blog, and why I read others' blogs. In my own writing sometimes, or in something I read, I stumble across a bit of glass that gives me a glimpse of connection with my Higher Self.

But there is still the temporal me. That's right now following the contours and indentations of the fractal around the minutiae of worry about my son's adhd, gathering myself to do the things that set the wheels in motion to get divorced, and looking for work. And, I think one of the insights I have received is that I have to tend to all of my selves, and can't neglect the temporal in favor of the Infinite.

Broken bits of glass

2010-01-13T13:36:00.000-08:00

It came to me, when the three of us were sitting in the warmth of Toni's living room, that we view our lives, and our situations, through prisms.

It's an interesting relationship with reality. A long time ago I used to think of it crudely as 'positive thinking'. I understood that I was not to think 'negatively', because it would 'attract negativity' into my life. This resulted in some strange mental gymnastics as I attempted to manifest Positive through my thoughts. I experienced the concept as a matter of will power--trying to not want things too much because that was being 'attached' to the outcomes. If a promising relationship was going well, I'd be afraid, and then I was afraid because I was afraid. What I wanted was already doomed.

It was a strange back-door way of trying to control reality, and if that meant trying to control my perception of what happened in my life, I was going to give it my best shot. This kind of put me in a bind because if I didn't like what was happening in my life I'd worry that I was being too negative about it and failing to perceive it positively.

Marti and I had talked about Presence in the car on the way to Toni's. Her son's father, Marti's ex-husband, had died at Thanksgiving, and Marti had asked her son if he felt his father's Presence. "When you're dead, you're fucking dead." was his response.

In contrast Toni was receiving reassurances of her son's Presence everywhere: a song on the radio when she most needed to hear it; a number on his football jersey surfacing in unlooked-for places.

She said she took comfort in our presences. Indeed, it seemed there was a cocoon of grace around us as we talked and wept over her son. I felt a comfort in the presence of these long-time friends that went beyond the sum of our parts. Somehow we were all co-creators of a Moment in time where there is beauty in grief, where suffering is present but inexplicably more bearable. I suppose that's what's meant by "the peace that surpasseth all understanding".

We each picked up a broken shard of glass, and held it so the light could shine through it. And for a while, the vision we created was transcendent. If we can have moments like these, we can endure much.

But, these moments are so perishable. The light moves on, and we find we're holding a piece of broken glass, and the world that seemed magical in its depth seems flat again.

Perhaps this experience is what I was trying to achieve by will power when I was younger, and am still in the habit of doing--recoiling when I find myself 'attached' to an outcome. It certainly doesn't come through will power. It's capricious, and seems dependent on certain conditions. The light we were shining with Toni was magical--yet it could have easily been, "when you're dead you're fucking dead." It could have reduced Toni's experience of her beloved son's Presence to a series of coincidences. It occurs to me that perhaps her son died because he despaired. Perhaps his shard of glass revealed no hope--or perhaps the responsibility of our role in the vision created was too daunting. Perhaps the magical moments seemed too far apart, or worse, based on just wishful thinking.

I think I can see it a different way: that all around us are broken shards of glass. And at any moment we can create something transcendent. That can sustain me.

"The Future's Uncertain"...

2010-01-12T11:48:00.000-08:00

"...and the end is always near."

I always liked the rather dire portent of the old Doors song, "Roadhouse Blues". I have a feeling that Morrison, Manzarek, Densmore, and Krieger's conception of "the future" may have been more abstract than mine.

I have trouble seeing my future mere days, even hours, ahead of me. I mean this in terms of trying to make a decision that I think I'll be happiest in. And these aren't earthshaking decisions, many of them, such as whether or not to stay married. The example I'm thinking of right now is whether to volunteer for Scott's class on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. I honestly can't get a clear enough picture of myself in either scenario to guide my choice.

Is anyone else like this?

Already I have a history of ambivalence with volunteerism, in this case, at my kids' schools. I've written some posts about this. In a perfect world our schools would be so well resourced that I could blithely just let them do their job. However, I'm all too aware that our teachers carry a heavy burden and it's not really fair to take advantage of their altruism too long. I'm convinced I need to Do My Part, especially since the one year I gave myself permission to sit out volunteering Scott really suffered.

Last year I volunteered on two separate days: Mondays at Connor's school, and Wednesdays at Scott's. I wanted to consolidate to one day--Get It Over With. The theory is that the day is shot anyway, so I might as well limit the damage to just that one day. At Connor's school I go in about 12:30 to have one of the language arts students read to me. They're reading from a really interesting literature text, and frequently I'll finish the story later, at home, when Connor brings his books. When Scott moved into a different classroom this year I was pro-active and suggested Mondays to his new teacher. Some days he wouldn't need help, and when I was lucky those days coincided with days Connor's teacher didn't need help. Whee! The Trillium gig is from 10:30-11:45. It worked pretty well, because I could stop at my house on the way to Connor's school for lunch.

Sunday before returning from winter break I asked Rob if he needed help on Monday. He said he didn't think so; how about Tues?

Oh no. Can't do it. I've been ~~dying~~waiting for this week when they go back to school; I'd been living with this threat that my MIL might come to stay with us and I be her caregiver; and it was a very trying time-off anyway. I emailed him back and told him Tuesdays aren't good. Mondays are good. Then the week fell apart anyway, with our lice issues and Rob ill with something (maybe from his winter-break Baja trip? Jealous much?).

So, when I brought Scott to school yesterday we stopped by the nurse's desk for the lice check (clear!) and on to class where I asked if my help was needed. He said no, and asked if Tuesdays weren't good...the intermediate classes (there are 4 classrooms with grades 3-5) have begun a Tuesday/Wednesday program called "Math Cohorts." The kids are grouped in 4 groups, according to their abilities and experience. Scott's in Lindsey's group, would I be interested in helping her? He took me over to meet her where she eagerly snapped me up. She would love to have my help. I said I'd check my schedule and get back to her.

I've been worried about Scott's math abilities. Any math computation skills he has are very limited, and rote. He really doesn't think mathematically--doesn't seem to grasp the fundamentals. It would be best for him that I volunteer and get a clear idea of how he does in the classroom and what she sees.

So which day is best? I'm at Connor's school Mondays. Is it best to have a commitment-free day between--as a bit of a reward and rest? Do the volunteer-thing for Scott on Wednesday?

What complicates this is The Drive. Scott's school is 9 miles and about 20-25 minutes away, and a 1000' descent (and a river crossing). Between our house and his school is the Dojo, where I work off my membership by opening for the owners each day. Since Gary's now home all day I not only open, I usually just stay, since I'm not comfortable writing at home when he's around (I miss those days when he was at the office and the quiet house was mine). On days I volunteer at Scott's school I either make a brief detour on the way to open before I get Scott to school, and then hang out at a coffee shop in Scott's school's neighborhood, or I return to open the Dojo after I've dropped him. Since Scott loves his sleep, it usually works out that we don't leave early enough for me to open first so I've been taking Scott to school, backtracking to the Dojo. Then I write for about an hour, return to the school to volunteer, then either back to the dojo, up to the house, or up to Connor's school. There's still the final return trip to pick him up at the end of the day. It's not very elegant, and offends something inside of me.

It's a good thing I don't seem to need my Alone Time the way I once did.

Now I need to decide which day will work to my best peace-of-mind advantage.

Wednesdays have a further complication. I see my counselor, Sharon, at 5:50. Her office is a few miles further south from Scott's school. When I pick up Scott from school on Wednesdays I usually get him home just before 4:00. I then turn around and leave about 4:30, and drive nearly the same route past the school. If I leave later I get caught in some big traffic, oftentimes just trying to get down off our hill, which is a major bottleneck. I like to use the time left over from the drive in her waiting room, thinking about the week and what I'd like to talk with her about.

My problem is, I'm simply unable to create two visions of me volunteering--one on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday, and see myself in each...and see clearly which will be the least uncomfortable. I can't hold the two visions stable long enough to get a clear picture of which has the most advantage to my peace of mind. I've been exasperated by myself many times in the past where I've had a minor choice to make, made it, and then when I'm living with the consequences of that choice all of the details that would have made a difference had I realized them before now are obvious, and it's clearly obvious I should have chosen the other path. DAMN, I HATE THAT!

And to further exasperate myself, there is even a shorter-term vision to consider. I'm leaning toward Tuesdays, simply because there's one less zag on that day. Even if I've already said Tuesdays aren't good, they look better now. Next week however, will be a trifecta if I choose Tuesdays. Monday is Connor-volunteer day; Tuesday hypothetically Scott-day, Wed I have to take Gary to the airport in the morning. He's going to the Outdoor Recreation trade show in Salt Lake to do his thing as sales representative for the new company he's "working" for, as part partner and part employee. There's no longer a taxi courtesy of his old company...no longer is his airport parking covered. So the plan for that day was to take Scott to school, with Gary along as company (and a stop along the way to open the Dojo), then take Gary to the airport. Theoretically I could be back at Scott's school in time to volunteer, and the day would be shot anyway, so why not?

Peculiarly, I sense an answer, but it's certainly not coming from sounding out all the letters and piecing together a sentence before I extract meaning. There's a kind of certainty that what I need to do is tell Lyndsey that Tuesdays are better, but next week WEDNESDAY will be better. Since today is Tuesday and it's nearly 11:00, I won't be there today, or tomorrow. Next week I'll be there on Wed, since I'll be on that side of the river anyway, and coming back that direction, but from then on Tuesdays it is. This knowing is like looking at the shape of a sentence and getting its meaning, but not from the process of deciphering each individual word. I guess that's the difference between intuitive knowing, and conscious-brain knowing.

With any luck, in the future I can get Gary to take Scott to school on Tuesdays, and pick him up on Wednesdays.

Thanks. You've all been a great help.

My new full-time job

2010-01-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

De-lousing.

Between coming up with a strategy, going to the store, consulting with pharmacists,and researching online I've been doing little else today.

Connor was so upset that we were keeping Scott home that I decided I'd keep him home as well and subject him to the same treatment Scott was going to get (again). With product that might loosen the eggs. Just as well, since product flushed out some live bodies that had escaped detection when I'd run a prior search.

Makes me nervous about myself. I had Gary check me, once the day before, and once yesterday. He'd watched me combing Scott, so he knew what to look for. I looked his scalp over too and found nothing on him.

I've got a long queue of piled up sheets, blankets, and pillowcases. Bowls filled with boiling water, combs, and hair clips. And that's not mentioning the pile of clean stuff I haven't processed and put away yet.

I feel just plain Beat Up. Too tired to even get up and make myself a drink; something stiff and strong. Lavender Luz, will you come over and make me a mojito? Or Ailey, could you come make me a marguerita?

The week of the lice***

2010-01-08T07:20:00.000-08:00

But his hair's too pretty to shave

The effects of difficulty can be cumulative. I forget the efforts of the past 6 weeks when I consider how drained I feel, right this moment. I don't even feel equal to the decision of whether or not to wake Scott for his half day of school (Fridays). And I certainly don't feel equal to what the morning would require of me:

wake Scott; who was awake far too late last night (details follow)
shepherd him through the dressing process, returning several times to reawaken him (he loves his sleep)
listen to Scott and Connor bicker, intervene as necessary, while simultaneously urging them forward, while getting myself dressed, the dog fed and pottied--the morning juggling act
check for nits
try to leave early for school in order to open the dojo on the way so I can
go to breakfast with some long-ago co-workers who are nice enough but my duration at that job was very short and so I don't share much history with them but maybe I can keep up with the job market but isn't that a cynical reason to breakfast with these people who welcome me but I don't have much connection to...

Yesterday started fairly well. I'd found nits in Scott's hair, and so had done another treatment with a product called Lice MD. Since this was just before my appointment with Sharon I'd left the follow-through to Gary.

In fairness to Gary these things are really small, and similar in color to Scott's hair coloring, so they're easy to miss. There was nothing alive and moving on his head. I'm not sure Gary realized our city's school district has a no-nits policy. Neither did we realize the depths of our son's altruism.

So, when he was playing at school during morning recess, his buddy had come over and hugged him. In a fit of worry that he may have infected his friend he went and confided to his substitute teacher that he had had lice. So the teacher sent him to the school nurse, who found the nits and called me, around noon, to come and get him. I'd thought I'd gotten them all, and since I'd treated him I thought we were in the clear, and we probably were, except he called their attention to it.

I went and got him and spent the rest of the day playing needle in a haystack, literally. We'd take a break, and I'd check him again and find more where I'd thought were none. These things were too small, even for the nit comb to catch. Again I bundled up coats, pillows, bedding, clothing, and trundled them to the laundry. This is the 4th bed change since Sunday.

I did another check before bedtime and found a few more. So this made his sleep location a problem. He's been sleeping with us, in a king bed. I don't want to have to launder it yet again. I told him he'd have to sleep in"his" room, downstairs, with bunk beds. Instant dismay: the bed's not comfortable, he's scared, he doesn't want to be by himself. He wanted to sleep with Connor (whose bedding I'd just laundered; I also found nits on him, but nothing live.) in his double bed.

Last night's TV programming are the current seasons of "The Office" and"30 Rock". I'm a latter-day fan of The Office and the holidays have disrupted my viewing schedule. I was really looking forward to seeing it, but it was not to be. Every few moments Scott was yelling that he was scared, he'd heard a noise, he was crying and didn't I care?

I felt about as ground down and full of self-pity as I have in years. This was the perfect storm of frustration and weariness. I was missing most of the jokes on the program that Connor was laughing at and he looked at me questioningly. "I don't have a sense of humor right now, Connor."

I was downstairs talking with Scott again, when Gary went and talked to Connor. Connor agreed that this night he'd sleep in the same room, in the top bunk. "Keep the little guy company."

Scott was instantly relieved. Spindly arms reached for me and I pulled his little body close.

"Will you be the grandmother of my children?"

(chokes back a snort of laughter)..."Yes, Scott, I'll be the grandmother of your children."

Decision this morning: let him sleep; it's not worth the effort to get him to school for a half day. Skip breakfast.

***they're still totally worth it if they're the reason my MIL didn't come to stay...

In the "Can't Catch a Break" category

2010-01-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

LICE

That kind of changed the tenor of the evening. What was supposed to be a sedate bedtime turned to a frenzy of combing, parting, treating, hollering "hold your head still" (dammit), shampooing, bed-clothes-in-dryer-ing.

Gee, I sure hope I don't have it too.

Even more fervently I pray they let me bring him to school tomorrow. On what might possibly be my last day alone. Maybe the lice will scare her off.

Shakes aching head.

Signs

2010-01-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

I woke yesterday morning to the phone ringing at 7. I'd intended to get up at 6:15, but had shut the alarm off to close my eyes "for just a few more seconds."

It was Gary, to tell me to leave the cell phone home for the boys, since his mother had been rethinking her situation and might be wanting to be re-hospitalized after all. It might take hours.

I'm still not sure of the circumstances of her being discharged anyway, less than 12 hours after her fall, fracture, trip to the ER and hospital admission. Gary had said something when he brought her home about a possible option of staying in the hospital, but this was after they'd already left.. So, since she'd been discharged, to get readmitted that night would be an arduous process. However, a night at home seemed to have convinced her it would be easier to be somewhere where she could get 24 hour care: "She can't lift her nightgown to go to the bathroom. She has to wear this Depends thing and she can't do that herself. She has to have someone with her all the time."

So Gary wanted me to leave the phone so he could reach the boys if necessary. He said he didn't know how he was going to do it all.

I don't know whether the force that was shaped like "you-should-not-be-leaving-when-he-has-to-take-care-of-his-mother" originated from me, or him. He didn't ask me to not go, beyond implying it was too much for him to juggle her needs with the boys' in my absence. There was a kind of hint that it was wrong to leave the boys. This is a question I've had for years: if I feel the presence of pressure on my decision to act, is it "my guilty conscience" speaking, or am I feeling the influence of something external to me? And should I heed it?

Was I feeling the presence of an unspoken request in "she needs 24 hour care. She can't lift her nightgown"--stuff that he as a son doesn't really want to do and it's awkward and distasteful for them both, but a daughter-in-law could do it? Is the field being tipped toward me making the offer--"Here I am, Lord. Take me."? Or if I'm aware of such a force, does that mean it's the voice of my 'conscience'? Certainly they're telling me that there is a big problem, and if I was to offer, I could make life a lot easier for them. Especially since their 'problem' is within my skill-set.

And so I felt doubt. Leaving the boys wouldn't be an issue had she spent that night at our house. I began to feel doubtful about leaving them...it could be hours, even though a good portion of those hours would be with them asleep. But what about my need to go to Toni, and my perception that she needed to see Marti and I. This would be our first opportunity since the memorial; Christmas stuff had gotten in the way after the service, then freezing rain and icy roads in the week following. I felt a sense of being drawn toward her that was quiet, but persistent. Yes, she'd understand that an emergency with my MIL would prevent me, but that didn't diminish the sense that I needed to be there, in Washington, with her. A voice inside questioned that need--whispered shouldn't my mother-in-law's need take priority, was I not exaggerating the importance of seeing Toni...she and I had waited this long, why not wait another week? Was I overstating the need only to escape an obligation? What was "The Right Thing"?

It would have been really hard for me if Gary had straight-out asked me. But since he didn't I took the conversation at face value. I told him that I should take the cell with me--that it wouldn't do the boys any good to have it since they were going to be home anyway and we have our land line. I told him he should have his mother's cell phone with him so they could reach him if necessary, and he could call to check in on them. He said he didn't know her phone number. I said, "Well, she knows it, right?" "She's got it written down on a piece of paper somewhere." He didn't ask me to bring our cell phone over and I didn't offer.

We hung up, but my doubts didn't. Still, I proceeded to get ready; packed some hiking gear in case we would take a hike. Wrote the boys a note with cell phone numbers and left it outside their door. Fed, watered, medicated the dog. Considered again my course of action. If I didn't go to Washington, and stayed, would it really make a difference? He'd be within 15 or 20 minutes from home. Gary's mom is well acquainted with her health system. Yes, it's nice to have Gary with her, but if the boys did need him he'd be able to leave her there. She doesn't need him to negotiate the admittance process.

The phone rang and it was Toni. She wanted to know if we were coming. I assured her we were, and decided to take the call as a sign that this was what I should be doing.

I drove to Marti's, about 10 minutes away, to have breakfast, after which we'd leave together. I told myself that I would have time to change course if needed.

But as we ate, and I turned the car toward the highway, I felt no sense of fighting my way upstream, of swimming against a tide.

One week before David killed himself I'd been having breakfast with Marti. She said that the police had come to her door. Her ex-husband Sam, and the father of her 17 year old son, had been found dead in his apartment a few days after Thanksgiving. He did not leave a note, and the toxicology report is still pending, but she had no doubts he'd killed himself. They had been divorced for 15 years; his downward spiral had begun during their marriage and continued unabated after their split. He drank heavily and repeatedly failed to show up in his role of father. So his relationship with his son was complicated, to say the least.

It was while I was writing her an email a week later, to inquire after her son, that I received her message that Toni's son was dead by his own hand.

David's death has kind of eclipsed the other, but Marti and I had a chance to talk more about it on our long drive. She's worried about her son, who confided in her that he's very depressed. He's having trouble sleeping, he's in a dry spell creatively, he's struggling in keeping up the facade of normal life: school, his job. He's been a person who's had difficulty forming warm relationships, and his step-father despises him. The feeling is mutual.

She said she asked him if he thought his father might be with him. The answer: "When you're dead you're fucking dead. That's all there is to it." It occurred to me that I need to live my life with my sons so that if I did die, the thought of my continued presence to them would be a comfort, and welcome. Marti told me about a movie, the title I can't remember. It's about a 6 year old girl, who is in an automobile accident that breaks her arm and kills her mother. The movie is about the desperate attempts of this child to feel her mother's presence, trying to summon her. Marti broke down when she described a scene where this child is lying on her mother's grave, desperately digging with her little hands, sobbing. "And then, a woman appears behind her...and it is her mother, who said that the strength of her desire had made it possible for a brief return. And she held her, and they were together for only about 10 minutes, but this gave the girl the strength to go on and live her life." It makes me cry as I'm writing this--the poignancy--of being reunited with her beloved mother who she needs so much, only to have her pulled away again...and that having to be...enough. Marti expressed desire that there could be some way that a sense of presence of his father could comfort her son.

We cried together, 70 miles an hour down the highway. The imagery reminded me of that heartbreaking scene in "Dumbo",where the baby elephant is taken to see his mother one last time before she is carted off in shackles. This in turn reminded me of an interview I'd read on Fresh Air, on NPR, with Pete Docter, the director of "Up":

"Dumbo" is one of my favorites. It's just a simplicity, a wonderful simplicity to it. And as a kid, you know, I saw certain things about it, all the fun and, you know, pink elephants on parade and flying with the crows and things. And now looking back on it, it's got this added dimension to it as a parent that you know, when you have a baby and ma in the scene with the trunks, and they can't even see each other. They can just kind of hold trunks. I have yet to watch that without crying, you know.

In turn, this reminded me of thoughts I'd had about that movie. Something about Karl, and his grief about losing Ellie galvanized taking their home to their childhood dream: Paradise Falls, in Venezuela. And how he'd had an epiphany: a sign from Ellie that at some point love was no longer about transporting the house--he needed to transfer that love into action on behalf of a boy, a dog, a bird. His grief, and his honest experience of it, led him to a wholly new, transformed experience of love and joyous fulfillment that he'd thought was beyond him.

Marti remarked that it was curious that I'd taken Toni's phone call that morning as a sign that this was what we needed to be doing. She said that she would have taken it as a sign that Toni wanted to do something else, and didn't want us to come. However, for me, the conversation Marti and I had been having, and our total ease and comfort, was further confirmation that indeed we were doing what we were supposed to be doing.

I'm pausing, and trying to find words to describe the persistence of this rightness. Toni lives now in the home of the man she loved for 12 years, and ultimately left her 23 year marriage for. For the first time I heard the story of how they'd met...her family visiting a mutual friend's down the road, and ending up here in this house we were now sitting in. She had watched, anguished, as he went through 3 relationships in that time. She told how she'd driven to his house 6 years ago and declared herself to him; said she wanted to get her youngest child through high school first (she was a sophomore then), but she had set her sights on him. She watched him go through at least another relationship after that, dying inside.

I had not realized the force, duration, and persistence of this drive to be with him. It's an incredible story, and reminds me of my own drive, which persisted beyond logic, to be with her that day. The day was a perfect cradle, which held the three of us softly, held the space open for what needed to unfold. We lounged before the wood stove; every window revealing a scene of harmonius peace: the peeling bark of an aspen; the texture of the brushy needles of a ponderosa. Birds feeding; the sweeping vista of the Columbia River Gorge. It's a view that savages Toni now...she can see where her son died.

The day held the space for our relationships to midwife what needed to be said.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1354

Gary is here from his mother's and plans to stay there tonight. A home health physical therapist came to her house today. A social worker will come tomorrow. Last night was the second night that Gary stayed at her house; and at 8:30 he'd taken her to the emergency room. Her splint was causing her pain. They didn't get back to her house until after midnight. Then he was up at 4:30 am with her because she'd undone her new splint and they had to struggle with it. Everything, he said, is a struggle. Things that should take a few minutes become big problems that take an hour to resolve. They've fought several times. I asked if she's safe, home alone right now, and he said she's lying down.

He said depending on what her options are revealed to be by the social worker he may bring her here. I told him straight that if I've seemed distanced from this process, it's because I am. I told him that given the nature of our relationship, his and mine, and hers and mine, he cannot expect me to take care of her. I told him that he can tell her that we are getting a divorce if he wants to explain it to her. He said if he brings her here he wants me to provide an equal amount of help. He wants to set her up in our recliner chair in the front room, since our bed is too low for her, and the guest bedroom is downstairs. I said this doesn't make sense; we're up in the middle of the night sometimes to let the dog out. We get up early to get the boys ready for school. It doesn't make sense to have her parked in the middle of our family living space. I said that if he brings her here I will stay away during the hours that the boys are in school. I will not bathe her. And, I think it is a Really Bad Idea. I pointed out their struggles at 4 a.m. this morning, asked if he wants to bring this into the middle of our home.

If we had a different kind of relationship, him and me, and her and me, this would be a completely different story. My resistance to this is as logical as the number 4 following the number 3. Caring willingly for her would be the result of history and conditions that do not exist.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, this new wrinkle with my mother-in-law, and the questions it posed for me in visiting my friend. The answer was tuning in to internal guidance, which felt different, more subtle, than I'd expected.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We talked, Marti, and Toni and I, about David. Toni described a longing that reminded me of the movie Marti had told me about in the car. Little instances; a particular song David had liked coming on the radio at a time when she needed to hear it. Struggling to set a clock, frustrated and angry because the minutes digits were stuck on a certain number. Struggling and struggling with it, to glance up and see a photograph of her son in his high school football jersey--with that very number. Longing for him while on a drive, glancing up to see a junction with another highway, numbered his number. I cried out in recognition: "It's just like the movie Marti was telling me about! What you're experiencing is the equivalent of the little girl's mother appearing! This is the form it takes!" I pictured another dimension, a whole iceberg of a world, inserting itself gently into ours--the very tip manifesting as the team number for her son...a song on the radio.

And every moment, for me, confirmation, that where I was, with these two friends, was right where I needed to be. And it seems that we all needed to be there, together.

It's a relief to know I made the right choice.

Pit in my stomach/ updated below

2010-01-02T15:21:00.000-08:00

God help me.

I'd just gotten home from taking a diarrhetic dog to the vet and then grocery shopping to be informed by Gary that his mother had fallen (again) last night, and broken her arm (again). Only this time it's her left one and not the right, and it's her humerus, and not the forearm. She spent last night at the hospital, and he's going to get her and bring her here.

Here?

"She can sleep in the recliner chair in the front room" <my writing chair!> "because she can't use the stairs."

"She says we can still go to our dinner at our friends' tonight...she can be left alone that long."

"Gary, that doesn't make any sense. Her home is set up for her and is comfortable for her. it's all on one floor and she doesn't have any steps to get in! If she needs 24 hour care it makes more sense for you to go and stay with her at her house. She has everything there she needs."

But Gary's in full ride-to-the-rescue mode and nothing will do but to put his mom here, in the middle of our living room, where she'll be sleeping (hopefully, if any of us get any sleep at all tonight) when I'm trying to get up to leave in the morning to go see Toni. Toni's son died just before Christmas, and except for the memorial, freezing rain and company obligations have kept me from going to her.

"It's ridiculous, Gary. If I had a broken arm and was in pain, I'd want to be in my own home where I know where everything is, where I can watch TV if I want to , and where there are no noisy kids!"

Just when I thought I was done with boundary issues, here comes a really big test. Many is the time she's tried to turn me into her personal physical therapist. She is very dependent, but the polite fiction her self-image depends on is that she's very independent and no trouble at all. I can maintain the fiction for short bursts, but I'm depleted now after 2 weeks of the boys being home, and just thinking I was free after the company left. Her self esteem is very brittle, and when it cracks she's explosive. Now she's not at her best, because she'll be in pain, and I'm not at my best because I'm exhausted.

I have a bad feeling that the task of Making Her Comfortable is going to fall to me, since, after all, that was my professional bailiwick. But it's been 10 years + since I treated a patient, and she would have been one I would have cringed to see coming through the door.

One of the first tangible benefits of divorcing Gary will be that I am free of any daughter-in-law obligations to her. Clearly I've waited too long.

Wish me strength. I'd better go. I've got a bunch of unexpected work to do to get a spot ready to receive her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2210

Back from dinner at our friends'. Gary never made it there. He’d told me to go ahead with the boys, he'd meet us there, but I really didn’t think he’d be coming. He ended up taking her to her house, and I’m not sure if it was because I’d protested so much, or if it was because she ended up wanting it. He came home and got some of his stuff and went back to spend the night. I’m planning on, or I WAS planning to go see Toni finally tomorrow; the roads are finally clear and safe to travel. So I’m feeling uncomfortable with the decision in front of me. Basically I’m running out on Gary and leaving him with the dueling responsibility of the boys and his mom. I won’t be available, if I leave, to offer my suggestions for making her comfortable or setting her up with a system for getting up and down from chairs…plus if I leave when I was planning it means the boys will be alone in the house for a while; it means Gary has to come up here to get them or else bring her up here. I’ve left the boys alone in the house before for a couple hours; I’m planning on leaving here around 8 or 8:15, so they could be alone for a few hours. But now I’m uneasy…if something bad happened it would be sure to happen when I’m gone when I “should be helping my mother-in-law”. So maybe I should have been more sanguine about her coming here.

So I’m struggling a little because I know the ‘acceptable’ thing to do; I know the ‘expected’ thing to do.

It’s like years ago when I was visiting Denver and my great aunt Mil suddenly called my grandmother, her sister, and said she wanted them to come over. I was supposed to go to a friend’s for dinner, and then to another friend’s for the night. There was no other night I would have been able to see them. They didn’t ask me, my dad and grandmother, to go with them, and I felt like they wanted me to offer, but I didn’t. I’d just been over there earlier that day with my niece, and she (Aunt Mil) had seemed fine. When I asked my grandmother what was wrong, why she wanted them, she said she didn’t know, all she had said was she wanted them. Later my father talked about how hard it was to get her into the car to take her to the hospital…I could have done that. I never asked, but I’ll bet they were all disappointed in me for sticking with the plans I’d made and not canceling them without a second thought. So I could be there to help.

I don’t know if I really feel bad about that or not. I got to see two friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, and I had a satisfying time with each of them. Weigh that against sitting in an emergency room for however long it takes, and my presence wouldn’t have changed the outcome of that.

I could have made things easier for them; I guess I weighed that against whether or not they really needed me. I suppose if she had said she was lying on the floor when she called and she thought her hip was broken I’d have canceled my other plans…I guess I made a decision that it was something they could handle without me…if I’d felt my presence was necessary I would have stayed. I did feel my presence was necessary with my sister…

I stopped over there at my MIL's house, with the boys, on the way home from our friends'. She was asleep, under the influence of pain medication. Made a few suggestions to Gary about how to get up from one of the few chairs that might be suitable for her to sit in. Her place has really deteriorated since I saw it last; cluttered, dirty, bad smell. It's really not a good place for the boys to be in for an extended amount of time.

So now I have my friend Toni, who is bereaved, who I was planning to visit. And I have Gary, who I could help by staying home with the boys, or going over to MIL's and adding in my professional .02 as far as positioning her. I really want to see Toni. Basically, the sticking point I guess is that this adds some extra effort to Gary’s life to juggle his mother and juggle the boys. And they won’t like having to be over there all day, most likely, so if I choose to go to Washington that decision means some discomfort for them. Which probably means discomfort for Gary too. And I’m sure it’ll seem like his discomfort is my fault because my presence would have made things easier.

Oh my aching head.

Interesting

2009-12-29T11:03:00.000-08:00

Some odd synchronicities:

Last night, on the daily Simpsons rerun, was the episode where the TV anchor Kent Brockman used an obscenity on-air when Homer dumped hot coffee in his lap. We never heard the word, only saw the shocked expressions of the TV audience. I thought it was an interesting coincidence, given my oldest son's use of a word my father found so offensive.

Later I was glancing through this week's programing on The Diane Rehm show--one of my favorite sources of news analysis. This holiday week is all rebroadcasts, and yesterday's was an interview with the author of "Charlatan":

The bizarre story of "the goat gland man," John Brinkley, a marketing genius and medical fraud who amassed a fabulous fortune in the early twentieth century implanting thousands with goat testicles to restore sexual virility.

Guests

Pope Brock, journalist and author

The "goat gland man"??? GOAT BALLS????? When "balls" was the word from my son's mouth that upset my father so much?

Oh, that's too funny. I called Connor over to show him and we both howled.

My dad replied to the message I sent him. He persists in his belief that the word is so inherently bad that its use in his presence constitutes egregious disrespect. It is such a bad word that everyone should know it's bad, and therefore its use doesn't constitute an innocent mistake. That language is used in the locker room or with prostitutes not with people who love you and deserve your respect....Should you use that language when interviewing for a job? It is gutter talk and belongs in the gutter...Perhaps we agree to disagree, but I will continue to object to language like that when used in my presence. As bad as I am, I think I deserve more respect just because I am old if for no other reason.

My guess is that the nature of my reply dissatisfied him, where I explained it was probably my fault; I don't think it's such a bad word and don't really object to him using it, but Connor has learned something about being sensitive about his audience when he chooses a word.* The implication is that the word is not inherently evil, but is in the 'ear' of the receiver. That smacks of a kind of relativism, and I think that's where the real fight was.

I did try again, though. I said that all he would have had to do is say simply, "Connor, I really don't like that word and would rather you not use it around me." Connor would have most likely said, "OK, Grandpa. I'm sorry." And that would have been the end of it.

Truly, isn't what would warrant agonizing over all night and finally, reluctantly, a bit embarrassedly, approaching a child's parent be a scenario where the child knew the word was offensive, and used it anyway? To me, that's what would be worth losing sleep over--that would constitute disrespect, and downright meanness. And that would ignite my concern.

It's curious my dad couldn't seem to tell the difference.

He said he'd not heard the incident when my FIL yelled at Scott, but he said my mother told him about it and he was surprised. Dad said he received a message from my FIL apologizing and saying he regretted his behavior. Dad wanted to know if I'd heard from him.

Well, I had. FIL said he hadn't meant offense. He denied yelling, said Scott had been close to him, said he'd used the same level of loudness as Scott, and agreed with me that Scott hadn't heard him. He added he wouldn't be bringing the dog any more. I suppose this amounted to an apology in his world.

That constituted such an inaccurate minimization that I'd responded to say that Scott had been at the far end of the living room while FIL had been in the kitchen, so they were not in proximity, 'yelling' as a term was debatable, but his voice was certainly raised, and if Scott had not heard it the adults at the table had. I said I didn't mind the dog coming, but if we were going to treat her kindly than he'd have to do the same with my kids...that I have nothing against setting limits, but it has to be done respectfully: yelling at someone in the presence of others doesn't qualify as respect.

Interesting that he would make a much more detailed apology to my father than to Gary or myself; he's not responded to that last message of mine and I don't expect him to.

I wasn't asking for an apology anyway. I'd respect him more if he was to acknowledge the inconsistency between the level of indulgence he expects toward the noise his dog makes and snapping at my kid for having a loud voice, but an apology is beside the point.

Also interesting is the peculiar juxtaposition of dynamics. In the one case my older son meant no disrespect yet my father persisted in being offended...in the other my FIL did mean disrespect, but it fortunately didn't reach it's intended recipient. In the case where no harm was intended, my dad pushed beyond his usual reticence to say something, and in the case where harm was intended the implication was that since it fell short of it's target I should say nothing.

I ponder these things.

*I forgot to attribute the remark I made in my message to my dad yesterday about audience/generational sensitivity to a comment Palemother made in response to my Balls post. Thanks, Palemother--it really was helpful!

Taking action

2009-12-28T09:01:00.000-08:00

Glad you and Katie made it home safely. I hope it was with a minimum of aggravation. Bet you'll be glad to sleep in your own bed tonight.

Look, I need to say something about something that happened. On Christmas Eve you yelled at Scott and were very harsh because he was talking loudly in the front room. It shocked me, first because he didn't seem that loud to me, and second, because on and off we'd been listening to Kate barking all day, and you yelling at her to be quiet, and we'd been nothing but gracious and tolerant about it. No one yelled at Kate, no one asked you to take her out. And yet you spoke that way to an 8 year old boy who was excited about Christmas Eve finally arriving. He'd been awaiting that moment for months. Furthermore, he was in his own home.

I think you would feel offended too if we presumed to yell at Kate if we were in your home.

I decided to wait to say something so I could do it with some care. But the only thing that kept me from saying something right then and there was that it appeared Scott had not heard you. If he had been hurt by what you said I would have spoken up.

You would never talk to my dad, or me, the way you did Scott. I have nothing against setting limits, which is why I'm setting this one: a rule in our house is that if we want something we ask for it respectfully. I don't think yelling at someone in front of everyone qualifies.

I'm sending this with as much care and respect as I can,

Hi, Dad,

I'm glad you guys made it home ok. I hope it wasn't too much of an ordeal.

I'm sorry that Connor offended you on the way to the restaurant. If I'm understanding correctly what happened, he was telling a story and said something about being hit in the groin, only he used the slang that rhymes with 'walls'.

I suppose that incident is kind of my fault. I'm not really offended by the word. It's kind of like the word 'fart'. Some people consider it a bad word, other families don't. So I don't treat it like a forbidden word, like the 'f' word. They're allowed to use it. I have tried to work with Connor on being appropriate in terms of cultural and generational sensitivity and it looks like he had a tin ear last night. But I don't believe he meant any disrespect.

I have to say though, that if we lived in an ideal world, the person you would have approached would have been L. I can't say that he meant no disrespect when he yelled at Scott for being too loud after dinner on Christmas Eve. He was truly the one to be disappointed in: after more than 24 hours of listening to his dog barking, putting up with his dog being in the way as we moved around the house, and listening to him shout at her when she barked, he's yelling at my kid, in his own house, for being excited on Christmas Eve? And I didn't even feel that Scott was being that loud. And the only reason that I didn't say anything myself was that I don't think Scott heard him.

It's ok to disrespect a child, I guess. There's no way L. would have spoken to you that way, or me.

And the inconsistency between you feeling you had to tell Gary you were disappointed in him for not saying something to Connor, and L.'s being allowed to do what he did...well, I just don't get it. If I were to say something to L. about his behavior, no matter how I bent over backward to be polite, it would be considered to be unforgivably rude. I don't get that either.

And frankly, I don't think it's right.

love,
Ex

Balls (update below)

2009-12-27T10:02:00.000-08:00

I've disappeared into company-land; 5 guests arrived on the 23rd. Oh, wait. My father-in-law brought his dog. As far as he's concerned the dog is a person, so I have to say 6 guests arrived on the 23rd.

This morning 5 of the guests departed. My niece doesn't fly out til later this afternoon.

The house is ringing with the silence. The boys and my niece are still asleep. Bliss.

I came up the stairs and went into the kitchen. My dad was standing at the coffee pot and had just begun a conversation with Gary. He stopped when I walked up. He said something like,"oh, nothing." I said, "Go ahead", and he said abruptly, "I want to talk to Gary." So I left.

But that didn't stop me from pausing on the steps to listen.

Dad told Gary that he was upset by something disrespectful Connor had said in the car last night. We'd driven in separate cars to a restaurant my MIL had taken us to, so I'd not heard it. I instantly feared the worst. There is a dynamic in the relationship between Gary and the boys that's really ugly and perhaps it surfaced to bite: something will happen that will frustrate the boys...Gary makes a remark or takes action that doesn't soothe the roiled waters, but is a match to flame...the boys explode, swear, speak disrespectfully to Gary...call him stupid. I see this as a serious problem, and is going to get worse as they get older if he doesn't find a way to deal effectively with this.

Taking a walk with my niece in the woods the subject turned to how she would parent someday: "I'll just do as my dad did. Make them fear me early and then the rest is easy."

There is something to be said about parenting-thru-fear. It certainly reduces the potential for awkward moments. It makes for anxiety-free meals in restaurants. It means never having to be embarrassed by your children.

Fear can be effective. And it tends to be easy, and convenient. For people who advocate this as a method of parenting fear is synonymous with respect.

I've taken a risk in my own choices in parenting. I am big on respect, but I believe it is a two-way street. This means that if I want the respect of my children, then I have to earn it through demonstrating my credibility. This is a process that has begun at birth. It means that I have needed to invest my energy into attunement with them. I've gotten to know their cues, their signals. I then become their co-regulator, by making adjustments to keep them in internal equilibrium. I can do this through monitorring external conditions and knowing when they've had enough. When external conditions can't be adjusted I can do it through putting my energy beside them in empathy. When they were little it frequently meant I didn't have the luxury of shouting at them from across the room to get them to stop touching something fragile: it meant I had to follow them, and substitute another desirable object if they came under the sway of something forbidden. Eventually I didn't have to do that anymore when they began to develop their own empathy and understanding of others' precious objects. My job was/is to be their regulator until they developed the maturity to do it on their own.

It takes a lot longer, and a lot more effort than fear to parent this way. But I think it pays off in that their respect for me goes well beyond fearing what I'll do to them if they step out of line.

Gary got it about not using fear of punishment as a parenting tool. But he did not get it that he needed to replace fear with something stronger and more enduring. Over and over he'd miss their cues, fail to see that they were becoming overloaded, and then blame them when they acted out, which would stoke the fire even hotter. Then they'd call him names or worse. I've told him that it really worries me that these conditions are present, and while he'll admit it's a problem with potential for some real trouble down the road, he persists in avoiding learning how to deal with it more effectively.

The boys do not call me names, and in general are respectful of adult authority. They don't call other adults names.

I feared Connor had lost control and had been blatantly disrespectful to Gary in front of my parents.

I heard my father say, "I was...really shocked when Connor said that, and I was disappointed in you for not saying something to him and I was disappointed in myself for not saying something." Gary said, "Yeah. I kind of cringed when he said it." Dad: "Oh, it about doubled me over. I thought about it all night."

I continued down the stairs, thinking about this. In general, my father is not the type to tell someone if something bothers him, and he's very offended if someone tells him that something he's said or done bothers them, so it must have been pretty egregious for him to get this exercised.

Shortly after I had Gary alone and so I asked him what Connor had said. Gary said Connor had mentioned having been "hit in the balls." That's it?????

OK, so let's back up 4 days to the 23rd when my FIL arrives with his dog, Katie. This dog is wife, girlfriend, sister to him. He can't refuse her anything, so she looks like a grotesque barrel on sticks, with a little tiny head. The morning they were to arrive he sent a message saying the day before she'd rolled in some dead salmon near a stream. He'd bathed her, he said, "but the aroma still lingers". No qualms about bringing her into our home. No qualms about letting her lay on our sofas, because it meant she wasn't hogging the bed he slept in. In fact, he gushed about "what a good girl she is, sleeping on the sofa so I could sleep all night."

Once in our home she barked whenever our dog went near my FIL (jealous), and so he asked us to take him out of the room. She parked herself in walkways where I was trying to cook so everyone was continuously having to step around her and barked at no provocation at all. Then he'd shout at her.

I woke the next morning, Christmas Eve and lay considering the situation. Four days stretched endlessly ahead, and I thought I'd approach it as a game. This was the hand I've been dealt. I'm internally weighed down by the death of my friends' son. There are nine people in my house, and an extra dog. The adults, with the exception of my niece, brother, and partly my father, are very self-centered. One of the children is hyperactive. My MIL, who is also highly anxious and self-centered is going to be part of the mix. I have 3 major meals to fix, and though I've been pre-cooking and preparing for days now, my organizational skills are so faulty I'm not sure how to coordinate it all. I'm not sure if I've planned sufficiently. How am I going to play this hand?

The fact that this is the last time I'm doing this was my ace in the hole.

Somehow Christmas Eve dinner tumbled together perfectly and it was a marvelous meal. The boys, particularly Scott, having waited 365 days for this moment were deliriously happy and playing together in the front room, adjacent to our dining area. The adults were at the table and my FIL rinsing dishes in the kitchen. The noise level was high in general from so many people all talking.

Suddenly, FIL shouted from the kitchen, "Scott! Stop that shouting! We can hear what you are saying without you having to yell!!!"

I was stunned, and then furious. We had been listening to his dog bark, and him yell at his dog all that day from the moment they arrived the day before, with good grace and no complaint, and now he's telling my little boy he's too loud, in his own home, on Christmas Eve?

What's even more bizarre is that it would be considered rude for me to say something to him about trespassing some boundaries, and setting others: if Scott's on his lap and shouting in his face, he has every right to say something. If Scott's in his home and shouting, he has a right to say something. If Scott's in our home, and we're not reprimanding him, he has no right. Yet, my father feels free to confront my husband about what he saw as a lapse in his parenting, because my boy said the word "balls?" He lost sleep over it?

There are so many things wrong with this picture it makes my head spin.

I really thought I was going to say something to FIL. I told Gary he needed to say something to him, but I know he won't. There were a few minutes I had alone with FIL when I was doing some dishes and I could have said it then. Was it merely the force of socialization that stayed my tongue?

I didn't speak because...I didn't feel compelled to, in that moment. I don't know if it was cowardice, or maybe it was wisdom about timing. Maybe I flatter myself. Perhaps it was knowing that he would see himself victimized if I did. His feelings would be hurt, for telling him that his actions had hurt my boy's feelings. How ironic is that? Perhaps it's just the pointlessness. If he's the kind of person who would yell at an 8 year old on Christmas Eve for being too loud in a loud house, he's not the kind of person who would get it anyway.

He'd demonstrated a classic illustration of people living in glass houses, throwing stones.

Interesting that my father would feel moved to do something beyond his comfort level, talk to Gary about something Connor said, yet feel no compunction whatsoever to speak with FIL about his--to me--far worse behavior.

I'm so glad they're gone I can hardly stand it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I asked Connor about what happened in the car. He said he'd been explaining to my mom and dad why he didn't want to ride with his other grandfather in his truck to the restaurant: The Dog rides with him in the front seat, but is jealous of the space by the window. As my son explained to my parents, "she steps on my balls."

I realized I left out an important fact about my FIL yelling at Scott. Scott had not appeared to have heard him. I didn't see a change in Scott's face, or his play. As I said, the noise level was high anyway; and FIL was in the kitchen while the boys were at the far end of the living room. I think his voice didn't rise above the general din. I asked Connor later if he'd heard what Grandpa said, and he said he had not. I suppose that was part of why I refrained from saying something in that moment.

Memorial

2009-12-20T19:28:00.000-08:00

It was an informal service in a winery, on a gray and foggy Friday. After all the ice of the prior week the parking lot was sodden and puddled. My shoes were soaked by the time I got to the entrance after parking the car, and an hour later the seam with the sole split. A dispirited day.

Many of the photographs taken over the years of David's life, many that I recognized, had been enlarged to poster size and ringed the meeting room. Someone had taken great care to exhibit his accomplishments: his art, wood and iron working, images of good times with friends. He was an accomplished athlete, and his uniforms from the various sports he played were hung.

I'd wondered to myself, when the roads were frozen and I couldn't get there, if the community was taking care of Greg and Toni. Ah, but they were. If my friends could not have their son back, then the town strove to give them the next best...a soft place to fall. Local restaurants donated the food for the memorial. Neighbors set up the displays, hung the posters, prepared and set out the food. Members of David's posse were like 4 guardian angels. One of them facilitated the service, soliciting stories and making sure any one who wanted to speak received the microphone. They were so tender to Greg and Toni, and to each other.

There were at least 200 people there. Former teachers, parents of friends, and many, many friends.

He was such a beautiful young man, and so loved. How I wish we could have been celebrating his marriage instead. The gauze between a wedding and a funeral seems so flimsy.

A meditation on planet grief:

In our space ship we have many destinations, and some we want to avoid at all costs. We give a wide berth to black holes, certain asteroids, comets. And sometimes, we find ourselves caught in a gravitational field we are not strong enough to escape, and we're inexorably pulled. We crash. The worst we've feared has happened, and we're broken on planet grief. The laws of physics that govern the very movements of our bodies, the cement-thick atmosphere we breathe, crush us and we gasp, nearly wishing we'd not survived the impact. We sink, deeply below the surface and we say goodbye to the people we once were.

The miracle is, we are still alive, and in searing pain, but oddly, there is comfort to be found here too. There is kindness here, and even terrible beauty and joy. In our deepest anguish, there are moments of tender solace in the gaze of someone who's been there, in a moment of humor that can unexpectedly lift the spirits. Loss transports us to a world where we would never go if we could choose. We're chewed and swallowed by it and perhaps some of the anguish is in exchanging our old context, our former lives, for our new. Perhaps this is the purpose of a funeral, or memorial. When done ideally, it sets the precedent--to demonstrate that this new world cuts like knives, and yet beauty and love can be found, and maybe can get us through. In days of despair we lose sight of this, but sometimes we have glimpses of hope.

I thought some more about my doubts about intimacy with my friends, not just Greg and Toni, but Marti, Mindy, Kathy. I'd tried to locate the feeling inside of love for them and felt dismay that the 'feeling' was elusive. I understand now it's because there's a difference between love which is the drawing-toward and love that is the already-entwined. The tangible feeling of attraction is merely sensing the pull of another's gravitational field. Once there, we live on this planet with love a background force...everything we do is in relation to it but we often don't experience it as a force outside of ourselves. I was trying to locate the 'attraction' feeling. My friends and I are 30 years beyond that.

There is comfort in that conclusion.

And so I will incline my love toward Greg, Toni, and their daughter.

Flat

2009-12-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

The roads have been very bad in the Pacific Northwest, and so I've not been able to get to my friend, David's mother. It's supposed to warm up, melt the ice in the gorge, hopefully in time for the memorial on Friday.

David's death has revealed to me some fissures in the fabric of my community.

I approach the topic with trepidation, because it seems wrong, in a way, to even think about the ways this effects ...me. I was not a cherished adult in his life--I have no right, if I'm not devastated as in the loss of a Beloved, to even consider myself affected. It seems presumptuous, sacrilegious. How dare I profane their grief.

Yet I feel flat.

I wrote earlier today: "It’s funny how far the ripples reach, how it affects people he probably didn’t even know exist."

There are the primary affected: those who loved him dearly, felt responsible for him and feel the burden of responsibility now. And there are those of us, or perhaps I shouldn't speak for anyone else. There is me, who doesn't know him well enough to grieve honestly for his own sake, but grieves for the anguish of his parents. And has to confront the question of how close I am to them really, and indeed to any of my friends. What is love, what is intimacy? I try to locate a discreet sensation inside and it eludes me.

This is complicated by the fact that in coming to terms with my unhappy marriage and what I'm going to do about it, I've largely isolated myself. The time I've had to myself with the kids in school I've guarded jealously, and surrendered grudgingly while I wrote, and thought. Any claims on my time have felt like overwhelming demands. I've gone through the motions with people when I've had to, but usually I'm just waiting until I can be alone again. In general my history with friends is a sort of credit for closeness, but what is there to back it up?

And do I really care?

That's what I mean by flat. Rudderless, disoriented. Aimless. Even thinking about thinking is hard.

I feel guilty about this eddy my friends' grief has swirled me into. It seems selfish and trivial in comparison to the raw suffering that is their lives right now and for the future.

Perhaps that explains that peculiar tendency toward distance I experienced when I received word.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There's a hidden challenge in the fact of a close someone's suicide. My guess is that as it is causing me to examine what constitutes close friendships, his family may be examining what it means to choose to live. Although theoretically the doorway out of this life is in our hands, most of us live with the perception that it is barred and inaccessible. David's death leaves the door ajar, especially for those who are in so much pain at his passing through it. Years ago my friend Marti and I watched a movie called "Night Mother" with Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek. It was devastating; a young woman announces her intentions to her mother and the mother spends the whole night trying to talk her out of it. If David's family could have argued with him, they could have asked, perhaps, what about them? If he can pass through that exit, what would he feel about them doing the same? Perhaps he was in so much pain he would have been beyond that care reaching and influencing him. Perhaps he would have turned up his hands and said, "no. I wouldn't want you to go this way. But I'm hurting so soo much. And I'm asking you, please pay this price for me to have peace. Your pain will purchase my freedom. Please?"

Irreconcilables

2009-12-12T12:53:00.000-08:00

There are things I'm unable to reconcile.

Around the world hundreds millions of people live in the most wretched of conditions. I surfed to do some fact checking and found a UN report from 2003 that said 25,000 people in the world die each day of hunger. Somewhere, millions of people live in constant fear of violence and are forced to choose between being monsters in order to survive, or die.

Living with this knowledge requires some interesting machinations. One is to not think about it. There are various ways to 'not think about' it: literally not allow it to cross one's mind, or if it does, to keep it firmly in the realm of abstraction, like watching an engaging movie, or reading a heartrending book.

Other people can't casually dismiss inequity and resort to other means to rationalize. We quote Jesus and say there will be poor always. We believe that we have the privilege of our security because we lived well in a prior life, as a matter of luck, or because of some virtue we possess in this life. If we believe that god rewards good behavior, then the converse is that he punishes bad; therefore people who are in bad circumstances must have done something bad. Some people are just glad that it's someone else, not them, and choose to not question further.

There is a schism between the given that everyone deserves to have enough good food to eat, warm dry shelter, clean water, and the fact that the majority of the world's population wants for these things. I really cannot enjoy my comfort the way I would if I knew that a decent standard of living was accessible to all. This is a discrepancy I just can't reconcile, yet must live with.

The worst has happened to my friend Toni. She got the news Thursday afternoon, and it was conveyed to me through our mutual friend, Marti Friday evening.

I've known them since 1982. They were part of a circle of friends I met in my climbing days, through my then boyfriend Charlie (When we broke up, by default, I got the friends. I feel grateful for that.). At the time I'd thought this would be my community forever. Yet so much of our lives were in flux...for me relationships came and went until I met Gary in 1989, but I stayed in touch with this group, mainly through the women. We went to each other's weddings: Kathy & Michael and Toni & Greg the same year, after years of co-habitation, then Marti & Sam. Mindy & Steve had already been married a few years when I came into the mix. We staggered the births of our children, which was foolish, because it meant we weren't much support to each other. When Mindy and Steve had Alec, I had no idea what it meant to be a new mother and wouldn't for another 13 years. By the time Toni and Greg had their son, Alec was nearly 2 and at a stage that wasn't compatible with an infant. It was years later before Marti and Sam had their son, and I was the very last to have children. I benefited, I think, because these women had grown wise in what it meant to have a newborn, and able to be tender to me in a way I had not been with them. They went through their early mothering years in relative isolation.

Parenthood changed the things we did and the amount of time we spent together. Toni and her now ex-husband Greg moved 2 hours up the Columbia River Gorge 17 or 18 years ago when their children were 6 and 3. I moved on to other climbing and skiing circles, eventually ending up with Gary. Marti and I started a tradition of breakfast every Friday morning, which endured until I moved to St. Louis. We resumed when I returned 5 years later, modifying it to every-other week, and to accommodate the restrictions of Gary's lost job. The women of the group would sporadically see each other. We've made an effort to meet regularly for dinner, every other month.

I was not a part of an extended circle of adults that was a constant in the lives of any of these children, now grown. I wasn't a surrogate parent to these children. Greg and Toni formed friendships in the small community they moved to, where their two children went to school; did these friendships serve the function of extended family?

In The Oregonian this morning:

A man's body was found near railroad tracks west of (a city) on Thursday, officials said Friday.Union Pacific Railroad workers on a westbound train spotted the body at about 10:15 a.m., said a detective of the County Emergency Services in a news release. The Sheriff's Office deputies located the body of a white male, 20 to 30 years old, lying close to the tracks in an isolated area west of the city near the Columbia River. An autopsy is scheduled for Friday, the detective said. The man's identity is being withheld pending notification of his family.

The next of kin have been notified. They have the notes. The man is the son of my friends Greg and Toni, dead by his own hand on his 24th birthday.

I'm looking at the weather. It's not quite 7 am, and we had freezing rain yesterday. The main highway along the gorge was closed yesterday due to 'extreme icy conditions'. The state route on the other side of the river is open. It's 26 degrees and I'm not sure I can get up my driveway. In a little while I'll call Marti and see what she thinks about our ability to get down our hill (she lives up on the ridge too, about 9 miles east of me. She has 4wd, and we were going to take her car, assuming I can even get to her house). Our plan is to go, to take some simple appetizer food the family can set out for people who come to visit, make ourselves available for errands, to abide.

This situation exposes how far we've allowed our intimacy to drift. I realize I don't know the things an intimate should know. If I had been part of the extended family circle that raised their David, there would be no question. I would have received the news nearly the moment they did, and I would probably be there right now. But I don't even know if they have people there with that kind of familial urgency, amongst their friends and neighbors in that town. If they do, have they already been inundated with food, and with people? I've known Toni nearly 30 years, and Marti has known her longer. But David I hardly knew at all as a young adult.

I'm also dismayed with how easily I slip into considering this tragedy with the same rationalization I use to stay sane when I put food in my mouth while knowing there are hundreds of millions of people who have none. It's like a gravitational pull, the inclination to stay remote. I'm caught between two gravitational pulls, the one of friendship which has cooled from lack of attention, leaving me vulnerable to the pull of distance.

But at this very moment, as I sit here, with my sons safe downstairs (for how long? The death of David merely underscores the fragility of safety), my friends are shattered under the weight of loss that squeezes the air out of their lungs. They've entered a new universe, a new gravitational field, which is organized around their son's suicide. Its field is relentless, and crushing. Every breath they take pulls it in. Every exhale is a sob, even when they're cried out.

Around the world a mother cries over her hungry, dying child. I try to not think about it as I prepare the meal for my family. It's discomfiting to recognize the same impulse to use the same strategy as I think of my friends 80 miles away.

I'm not a stranger to grief. I do not want to think of myself as someone who runs and hides when someone is devastated, the ways strangers to grief often might. This is grief of a different order, though, than losing my sister.

While searching for Mrs. Spit's post on Abiding I found a post on Glow In the Woods on how to support a babylost mother. While searching Mrs. Spit's site I also found this:

If grief is not the same, I find myself wondering, to what extent can others participate in our grief, and to what extent do we grieve only on our own? And how do we share and recognize the grief of others? How do I recognize the sadness of friends, of family, of our church? I am thankful that others miss Gabriel, I am thankful that he was a child of a greater community of friends and believers, not merely an accomplishment of mine and Mr. Spit's. But how does this actually play out in real life. What does it mean to grieve as a community or a family? Is it an act we do separately, while in the same space, or is it something that builds and ties and binds us to one another, and helps us each become more fully human?

How do I respect the grief of others, at their tragedies, and abide with them in their sorrow. To join in the place of grieving and give my physical presence to them, so that I may be with them as they grieve. --Mrs. Spit

These thoughts will go with me, as we go to be with our friend.

************************************************************************************

The roads are still closed, and very bad where Toni lives. The weather is supposed to begin to warm today. Perhaps the roads will be safe Monday. Marti can't take any more days off work; she maxed her time off when she was moving her parents from Idaho. I'll go by myself, tomorrow.

Tethered

2009-12-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

"...while he moved forward violently, he was immobile, he was hurtling round a fixed point." Ian McEwan, the child in time

I dreamt the other night that I was with my SIL. We were preparing food to take to a gathering. A most beautiful, exultant song was playing and my very being pulsed to it. Every atom of me throbbed. And then my SIL's voice cut through: "I'm glad you are having such a good time, but do you think you could (do such and such instead)..." Instantly the music ground to a halt, like one of those special effects like a turntable needle scraping along a vinyl record.

I blinked and looked at her. Her face was bland as her words. Yet the music had stopped, it had been sucked right out of the room. I didn't feel badly, though I understood I was meant to. Instead I was interested and curious, and that's what I woke with. I laid there in that quasi-awake, quasi-asleep place and pondered a bit over that.

I was with the mechanics of the maneuver, and the wonder of my response to it. In thinking about what she said I considered the contrast between the words and the tone. She clearly was not glad at my happiness, and instead experienced it either as an inconvenience to herself, or something that was a selfish indulgence on my part at her expense. It's not an uncommon way of expressing displeasure...I may use this device sometimes myself when I'm trying to get the kids out the door and they're absorbed in something else. Present in the dream interaction was a strong sense of unspoken 'rules'. I was to know she was unhappy, but though I was to change my behavior, I was not to let on that I knew she was unhappy. I was to register her remark as an innocuous observation, even as I was to do something to satisfy her, but not let on that she'd been dissatisfied.

Again, that's a dynamic that's familiar. I've seen it in action all my life; it's a shaming device...meant to influence the behavior of someone else. All my life I have responded to it with shame--experienced it as a stinging. In the dream I did not, and as I lay there I considered that.

Then there was the matter of the melody. It kept playing in my head too, a lilting, cajun-type fiddle lead. I enjoyed just listening to it and recapturing the feeling it evoked. It was tantalizingly familiar, and then it came to me. Though altered to a cajun arrangement, the intervals were that of the old Tommy James song, "Dragging the Line": "Loving a free and feeling spirit, hugging a tree when you get near it, digging the snow and the rain and the bright sunshine...dragging the line". Funny, how the lyric, "Dragging the line" sounds more like a dirge than an affirmation of freedom. A paradox.

I've been having dreams that seem to have a theme of a glass ceiling. In one I had an aspiration to go high, to a high point of a city. But the vehicle I chose, a taxi and driver, took me low. In another, I'm a Transformer, blue, soaring, powerful. And I'm hamstrung by power lines. I walk along a path I think is going to a destination, and at the last moment it turns, back toward where I came from.

This week my cousin Sheri pulled the Ace of Cups Tarot card on her blog, Wild Women of the Universe. She actually pulled it twice. It's a card of abundance, of transcendent joy. And yet I feel myself pressed against this invisible barrier. And I experience light being bent to conform to some sort of gravitational pull I don't understand.

It was this gravity I wanted to transcend the other night when Scott was so distraught. I suspect he needed me to transcend it too, to show him convincingly that his well-being could come from another avenue than my anger with his brother. Somehow, though, I found myself pressed against curved glass, my movements directed on a well-circumscribed path, away from the transcendence I sought for both of us. I could not get through to the other side.

Since Sheri had already drawn the Ace of Cups this week, she pulled another for clarity, and got The Moon, reversed. She said it's a card of "deeper understandings of the forces at work", the hidden being revealed through the channels of intuition.

I long for this.

Does perfect bewilderment and frustration count? (or, No God Moments For Me) Updated Below

2009-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

Just in case it (perfect bewilderment and frustration) doesn't (count), I won't post the Perfect Moment Mondays emblem.

I'm assuming the headache is menopausal. The hot flashes are a clue. Some days I just wake up with a headache that I'm resigned to having in the background all day. Now I'm waking in the night with the headache and the desperate sensation of too much heat. I remove the blanket and sheet, wait for the headache to subside enough to sleep again, and then wake shortly after, cold.

So this morning was a resigned-to-a-headache morning, on the same day that Gary's going down to the bay area to meet a guy he's hoping to finalize employment with. I took him to the airport about 11:30 and returned home.

Scott and Connor have reached a revolting development in their relationship. They are two unstable elements and under certain conditions come together with volatility (sudden explosions) and unpleasant byproducts (noise, name-calling). They're like ammonia and chlorine bleach and once they get going it's as impossible to separate the byproducts back into their component atoms. This makes it very difficult to find a peaceful resolution to the various conflicts that sprout.

A typical interaction: something happens, usually the initiating event is missed by one of the adults. Sometimes they're playing and one of them gets hurt. Sometimes Scott is being hyperactive, which annoys Connor. Sometimes Scott says something innocent and Connor responds with uncalled-for scorn. Whichever adult is present will usually start with whoever's behavior is obvious, "Connor, keep your hands to yourself!" Scott: "YEAH, Connor!" Connor: "Shut up, you big fatso!" Scott: "Yeah, well you're a.....!" And while the adult is trying to put a stop to that the child not being addressed in that particular moment is making faces at the other one behind the adult's back so that the child being addressed is becoming more inflamed, setting off the nuclear chain once more. Jesus, sometimes I hate children.

Scott was hyperactive tonight and went downstairs. I heard Connor saying, "Stop, Scott...Just stop, would you? Would you quit, I'm getting really mad at you!" I went downstairs to tell Scott it was time to come upstairs if he couldn't be in the same room peacefully with Connor, but not before Connor called him an 'asshole' and "hurt my feelings."

The really curious thing about this was the irrationality. Even by a kid's standards of behavior this was irrational. Scott's fury stemmed from the fact that I'd gone to get him with a severe affect; he felt I was angry with him and not his brother. Repeatedly he demanded that I get angry and direct that anger at Connor. And the more I wasn't doing it the angrier he got.

This is the thing about kids that stumps me. There was no way I could reach him to explain (though I tried) that not only can I not get angry at will, and at the behest of someone else, but it had sure sounded like Connor had asked him nicely enough to stop. He only got angrier.

The fury and tantrum went on long enough that I had time to remember a sequence that my cousin Lori described in an episode of her own child's anger:

1. Calm, center, open. Breathe, and be aware of my breathing.
2. Listen. Let her do most of the talking.
3. Assess. What is she really saying or asking?
4. Trade places. What might this look like, feel like, to her?
5. Abide. Give her space to feel her feelings.
6. Speak. Equal parts head and heart

Similarly I remembered a post by Mary P. Jones about difficult moments with children called "The God Moment"

I at least thought about being mindful in this tricky parenting moment. It was hard to listen above my own clamor for this to all just go away: oh, my aching head. What the hell do I do with his demand that I feel something I didn't feel? I talked to him about understanding that it had felt unfair to him that I had seemed angry with him when I came to get him, and that he felt Connor deserved my anger too. I told him that I knew it must feel terrible inside his body. I told him I knew how awful it felt to be so angry and feel it trapped inside his skin. But he could not release that demand and I could not get to the place inside where I could find the words to help him release it. (Did I fail in being empathetic? I was sincere, I do know it feels awful, but how much of this empathy was just an effort to get him to shut up? Could he sense it?) He wanted to go talk with Connor, and he wanted nothing less than my righteous indignation on his behalf.

Since he kept pressing and no inspiration came from God I had to be explicit. I looked him in the eye and said with finality "I can't be angry on demand. And I'm not angry with Connor." {anguished and angry wailing} "Now we can go downstairs and talk to him, but we have to have rules. I'll explain the rules to him too. You have to take turns, you can't shout at each other, and you can't call each other names."

I took down from the bulletin board his classroom's template for conflict resolution and we went downstairs after I briefed Connor on The Rules. I let Scott start, and another testament to kid irrationality was that his and Connor's versions of what happened pretty much matched up: Scott wanted to roughhouse with Connor; Connor said no because he figured it would lead to trouble; Scott started taunting and making fun of him to try to goad him into tackling him. On some level he knew that he had provoked this particular fight. Clearly the heart of this was between Scott and me, not Scott and Connor.

A bright spot in all this was that the conflict resolution model kept the discussion fairly even and they responded when I'd assert The Rules if they started to get heated. When I asked Scott to repeat back what Connor had said he objected on reasonable grounds: Connor was first supposed to repeat back what Scott had said. So apparently this conflict resolution stuff they're practicing in school is sinking in, at least the procedural stuff. Maybe there's hope.

And I guess that has to be enough of a God moment for tonight. We went upstairs and had a relatively peaceful dinner.

An hour later Scott wanted a bath, and me to read to him while he was in the tub. When I came in with the book he glared at me and said, "I'm still mad at you and I still want you to get mad at Connor!"

Perfectly tough night.

*************************************************************************************

Update 12/7/09

Thinking about Mrs. Spit's comment to the original post made me think some more about last night, and the curious nature of Scott's and my conflict.

In retrospect, it was like a Zen koan, and I may have been on the right track, but somehow didn't go far enough. I certainly can't say I'm there today. I think the God Moment I'd like to have realized is the one Mary and Lavender wrote about where the conflict dissolved in the meeting of the two hearts. This would have been infinitely more satisfactory to me, and I suspect to Scott, too. In fact, Scott was counting on me to find a way to resolve us into that uniting of our hearts.

To his mind the only way he could get there was if I was angry at Connor. Where I was on the right track was in knowing that there had to be something deeper Scott was yearning for. I knew he longed to know that I felt his pain, he wanted to feel connected to me. He was telling me that his sense of fairness demanded that I be angry with Connor. For him this was the only way union could be achieved.

And I was stuck on the fact that I did not feel angry with Connor, and that in this case Scott had provoked Connor. So even if I could somehow jinn up the feelings at will, they wouldn't have been truthful. And for the life of me I could not find the way between, where I could give him the feeling that he needed, without walking through a door that felt fraudulent to me.

And I suppose one of the barriers to resolution for me was my frustration with my helplessness in resolving his need, his demand, with reality. And because I was frustrated I was irritated and I could not connect with my compassion for him. So even though I had a sense that it wasn't so much my anger with Connor he wanted, but my compassion, my own desire that this strange paradoxical puzzle go away seemed to motivate my words. The words were correct, but the feeling beneath them was not deep enough.

How do I get beyond that barrier of my own desire that a conflict end for the sake of my own comfort?

Shift

2009-12-03T10:41:00.000-08:00

I've just passed my blogoversary, the second one, on November 26. And I realize that in the past couple of weeks, the premise of my blog has shifted.

I began with a decision before me that I decided to blog my way through. My decision was whether or not to stay in a marriage for the sake of staying married.

This was a more complicated path than I realized at the beginning. There were a number of tasks I needed to work my way through first.

One was to get some clarity on whether or not the unhappiness in our marriage was due to some fault in me. I needed to satisfy myself as to whether I was generous enough, reacting too much, expecting too much. Could I change something in myself in order to remain in this marriage in a way that made a generative atmosphere for my sons?

I also needed to know if staying, or leaving, would do more harm to my boys.

I needed lots of time, and thousands of pages of writing to really look at those questions.

My cousin Sheri over at Wild Women of the Universe pulled The Star as the Tarot card for Thursday. She pulled it for another of her commenters, Quiet Dreams, but it could have been for me as well:

The renewal indicated with The Star card is one of re-discovering who you REALLY are, dropping any facades or roles that you have been filling and carefully shedding the parts of you that now seem "fake" or "put on." It's not that you were intentionally doing this to fool people (even though at times you may have even fooled yourself -- temporarily), it was more a function of upbringing, old beliefs and survival.

The reflections of my past two years have revealed the function of "upbringing, old beliefs, and survival." In responding, Quiet Dreams could also have been speaking for me:

Definitely. In the house I grew up in, there were very strict ideas about what it meant to be "good." I have been learning to expand my definitions for a while now and learn that those "survival" days are over.

This blog has officially changed from being about a decision whether or not to divorce, to a blog about the process of divorce.

My vision for the process:

We can do it amicably. We can do it without lawyers so we can minimize the hit to our resources.

The boys remain in their house, with Gary and I rotating in and out on a weekly shared-custody schedule. Hopefully we can be amicable enough that we can buy or rent another place and share that.

I'll need to find work. The nature of, the hours of, are yet to be determined.

It's strange to be in this latency period, where the decision has been made and the basics agreed to, but its implementation is still ahead.

I've been thinking a lot about a movie that I watched with the boys over Thanksgiving, called "Rudy". It's based on a true story, and though not all the movie elements hew to the factual history of this man, the essentials do. From childhood he had a dream of playing football for Notre Dame, even though he was small and light. His grades weren't great in high school, certainly not for admission to Notre Dame. Four years after graduating from high school he's working in the steel mill his father works in when his best friend is killed. This galvanizes him to live his dream and he leaves for South Bend Indiana after the funeral. The strength of his desire persuades a priest to admit him to Holy Cross, the junior college in the same town. If he has the grades, maybe he can transfer to Notre Dame. Over 2 years he applies 3 times and isn't accepted. He discovers he has dyslexia, which was the cause of his poor grades in high school. On his fourth try he is accepted, and then bends himself to the task of being a 'walk-on' player for the football team. For two years his function on the team is to be a stand-in for opposing teams to help get the players ready. Finally, for the last home game of his senior year he is allowed to dress with the team, and is even put on the field for a play.

I've wondered for the past week or since watching the movie at what sustained Rudy's desire for all those years and set-backs. What would keep him connected to that reality he finally realized? (Even though in truth he had to scale it back: his dream had been bigger. He'd wanted to be an active playing member of the team. However, there is no denying that what he achieved is impressive indeed--he was on the team for 2 years, in addition to being a graduate from Notre Dame.)

He had a Star that he followed and kept him connected to a reality that everyone, even his own family, told him was impossible to achieve.

I have a Star too. Mine is less clearly defined than Rudy's, but I think, like him, has been guiding me since childhood.

Another perfect moment and I can't wait until next week to tell it

2009-11-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

Last night I sent an email to Scott's teacher Rob to see if he wanted any help from me today. It wasn't the most sincere offer, since I was going to be helping out at Connor's school too, and it's the first day they're back at school after a week long break, y'know?

So it wasn't the most perfect moment when I found the reply, "Sure."

Sigh. So that meant dropping Scott, driving 10 minutes back to the dojo to open, writing for about a half hour, then driving back to the school.

Rob had an activity in mind. First, he passed out the master list for each child--the results of the goal-setting conference just prior to the Thanksgiving break. There is an "Independence" goal, a "Community" goal, and a "Fluency" goal. The fluency goals seem to correspond with the traditional academic-type skills, such as mathematics. First the kids were asked to recopy their fluency goal from Rob's master sheet onto their own worksheet.

I walked around the room and saw all kinds of fluency goals. Some children wanted to work on their math with a goal of getting to do middle-school math. Some wanted to publish stories. Some wanted to improve their typing.

Once the copying into their own handwriting was done, Rob numbered the children 'ones' and 'twos' and had the 'ones' sit on the table facing out while the 'twos' stood and faced them. They were to take about 30 seconds and share their goal with each other, with two tasks in mind. They were to notice if the other person's goal was similar to theirs, and write it down in a space they had on their worksheet. They were also to let the other person know if they thought they might have skills that would help the other person meet their objective. There was a place on the worksheet for that too. Then the 'twos' were to move on to the next sitting person. One sitting girl raised her hand: "How will I know if there's someone who's sitting who can help me or has a similar goal?" "Good question. The sitting people will have a chance later to talk to each other, as will the standing."

Rob carefully structured the process, telling them when it was time for the standing children to move on. Presently everyone had spoken to each other. A number of names had appeared on their worksheets--people with similar goals; people who had skills who could help others meet their goals. When it was time for the sitting group and the standing group to share amongst themselves Rob told them they would have to be self-directed. He pulled back and let the kids structure this themselves. It was very orderly, and fairly quiet.

As they were doing this Rob was writing on the board. He had them close their eyes and imagine themselves beginning work on the goal on their page. He wanted them to picture what this process would look like...how it would sound...what it would feel like. When it was time for them to open their eyes he had them write it down on the worksheet--how it would look, sound, feel. I walked around the room looking at what children were writing and drawing. One boy's writing I couldn't quite read and so I asked him. He'd written, "I feel frustrated".

Rob picked right up on this. He said, "As some of you are imagining working on your goals you may find you feel sad, or mad. When that happens, see if you can imagine what you might do to help those feelings. Maybe that might mean imagining yourself in a quiet place. Maybe it means going to one of the people whose names you have on the list as resources. And if you don't have a name under resources, I want you to put one. Mine. R-O-B. I'm a resource for you too."

I remembered back when we went to Scott's IEP meeting. I'd worried because I saw how intensively this classroom is based on reading: when the kids come in there are instructions on the board for them to read and follow. I'd worried that Scott was being left behind, left out. I was afraid that there might be a nice lofty goal that the younger children ask the older ones for help, that doesn't happen in practice. I was afraid the older children might scorn the younger for not knowing what to do. I feared Scott wouldn't understand the algorithm Rob had diagrammed on the board for getting help. I was afraid he'd be adrift. I'd confided this fear, and Rob had reassured me that this was a skill that took time to develop, identifying resources and using them, and that he did not leave this skill up to chance.

Today I saw that Rob was true to his word. Every step today was laying down a fundamental of learning, of learning-to-learn. The goals from conferencing weren't just an abstraction, they were anchored not just in today's tasks, but also in the mind's eye. Not only was each child being asked to focus on what they'd already stated was a goal of theirs, with their parents, but they were learning how to find resources to help them accomplish them.

I am so damned impressed.

Perfect moments Monday--Building a paper jet engine

2009-11-29T22:29:00.000-08:00

Scott's latest obsession is acid, and what he calls, "stomach acid". He wants to know if stomach acid can 'eat' metal, indeed if it could 'eat' a person! He asked if we could go online and find any video of something being dissolved in acid.

It was more difficult than one would think. I had trouble coming up with narrowly defined-enough search terms. I found lots of definitions of 'acid' that were too complicated for me to understand, let alone explain to him: things about substances that give up an extra hydrogen, or raise the pH of a substance. And I found way too much stuff about LSD. But our search wasn't in vain. Presently we found on youtube a series called "Do Try This At Home". Mr. G has a series of science experiments that can be done with ordinary household items.

Scott wanted to try some immediately, but I was making a dish ahead for Thanksgiving. The computer is in the kitchen, but I got so busy with my task that I didn't notice him for a while. When I looked up again he'd gotten a piece of paper, a scissors, and a lighter. ("Hey! Where did you find that?!" "In Dad's office.") They were laid out just the way Mr. G had them in the video. He was absorbed in following along the step-by-step instructions on the screen. He would let the video run, pause it, and fold the paper. It appeared he'd gotten to a fairly advanced stage of folding when he got stuck. I was so impressed with this I decided to help him.

He wanted to start again, and so went and got another piece of paper. I flattened out the one he'd had and used it. He really had finished about 90% of it, and the part where he'd gotten stuck was tricky for me too. It was kind of hard to see, but there was a place where two flaps were tucked into two pockets made by a certain sequence of folds.

By golly, we inflated the little dirigibles and filled them with fumes from the lighter, then lit them and pop! They shot across the room! Way cool.

The perfection for me is in seeing his curiosity, his initiative, his patience and perseverance in pursuing this project. "I'm a scientist, Mom!"

Definitely a Little Professor.

Addendum to Thankful (breastfeeding ment)

2009-11-27T14:48:00.000-08:00

I was appreciating the comments in response in my post below, and I had a bit more clarity about the dilemma I faced then.

At 12 weeks my baby was showing incredible heart. He was clinging by his little fingernails--barely holding on going 9 hour stretches without nursing, to be relieved when I came to pick him up. Then he'd nurse through the night. This was his solution, and it must have cost him in plenty of discomfort, yet he did not give in and take the bottle.

Those who said I should withhold nursing and present only a bottle seemed oblivious to his courage. He must have already been at the brink; anyone who would expect his mother to be the one to shred his last bit of resistance and sweep him over the edge had no idea what a betrayal this would be.

I think there are many unseen moments of courage around us each day--people who are expected to do the impossible and are casually despised when they cannot. I think about the courage it takes for people who work three jobs and find themselves dismissed as 'lazy' when they use food stamps in a check-out. It's so easy to gloss over what it takes for someone to do as they do. Sometimes it's all too easy to be heartless and to not even realize it.

Thankful (breastfeeding mentioned)

2009-11-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

Pam, of Portland's LaLeche League, this is for you.

Connor, my oldest, was 10 weeks old and I was beginning to panic. In two weeks I was going to have to return to work, and he was not taking a bottle.

I'd waited to introduce the bottle until he was about 6 weeks old, heeding the advice about nipple confusion. I'd followed the tips of taking a walk and having Gary give him a bottle in my absence. The theory was that if I was anywhere near he'd be able to smell my presence and the bottle would be rejected.

Gary tried, my MIL tried, my friend Monica tried, a whole host of friends tried. Walking past the house I could hear him wailing.

I threw prevailing wisdom to the winds and tried myself. Nope.

At 11 weeks I felt compelled to confess to the woman I'd lined up for day care. She was understanding; said her own child had refused the bottle.

I'd cut my work schedule way back. I arranged it so I would work a two day stretch, have three days off, then work four in a row, then back to two days. This meant working every other weekend when Gary could be the caregiver. Therefore, Connor would only be in daycare two days a week.

I think I believed a miracle would occur and he'd be feeding from a bottle before he was 12 weeks old.

He didn't.

My first day back at work he woke in a particularly smiley mood. It just about killed me when I turned him over to Petra. When I called a few hours later my heart sank to hear his cries in the background. She said she was trying to work with him. I called an hour later and she said that wrapped in my shirt he'd taken a full bottle. I rejoiced and relaxed.

He never took a bottle again.

At week 8 Petra told me she couldn't take it any more. Honestly, I couldn't either. He was going 9 hours without food, sometimes longer if he didn't happen to be hungry just before I took him to her house.

I went to my bosses and told them I had a problem. I told them I'd lost my day care and why, and said that while he wasn't feeding from a bottle I'd probably lose any other day care as well. I asked for another month, maybe two, off until he was old enough that he could take my milk from a cup. They said they could not give me any more time. They implied that if I withheld nursing long enough he'd "figure it out."

This left me two options. Force him to take a bottle by withholding nursing long enough, or quit my job. I'd worked for this group for 17 years.

Just as my parents had not lived in a cultural context that made it possible to co-sleep with their infant, or feed on demand, it seemed inconceivable to me to give up thousands of dollars of income because my baby wouldn't accept anything but my breast. At the time I was the sole source of income and insurance benefits for our family, because Gary was in business for himself. His business was supporting itself, but I was paying the mortgage, and the bills. Losing my income meant living out of our savings, and it meant forfeiting the matching benefit my company would pay into my retirement: the contract stated I had to be working until December 30 to receive the match. It was late November, so I was missing the match by about 6 weeks.

There was nothing in my experience that would make that course of action make sense, but neither could I withhold from my baby what he loved so much. He was already going without eating for nine hours straight, and then when I come for him I'm to deny him? I was anguished, and talked to my Laleche leader, Pam.

She mused, "It's funny how there's all kind of support for taking out a loan for a house, or for a car, but we never think of taking a loan for a baby."

Those simple words provided the perspective I needed. I knew that my baby was not going to have to be the one to give because he was the weakest link in the chain. What was important was to honor his very impressive will, not overpower it. I went in to work the next day and gave notice.

It still makes me weak in the knees to think of how close I came to doing what would have broken my child's heart, and would have done great damage to my vulnerable conception of myself as a mother.

I'll be forever thankful for those chance words at just the right time that gave me the support I needed to make the right choice.

Thank you, Pam.

Karl and Ellie

2009-11-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

Six months after its release, I finally saw the movie "Up". It was part of a 10-picture series that our local theater runs as a benefit for our schools. The boys and Gary had seen it closer to its release date, and confidently predicted I'd like it.

"Will I cry?"

"Yeah, probably."

I was crying in the first 10 minutes. So quickly, and deftly, the movie's makers sketched in the essential details: a shy, retiring, idealistic boy with a longing for adventure finding his kindred spirit in a girl who appears to be his opposite: effusive, expansive, enthusiastic. She saw something in him she liked and didn't hesitate in declaring it. Her dream was big...to adventure, to plant her clubhouse at the brink of Paradise Falls in Venezuela. The sunshine of her love warms him and he blooms. At the church where they marry, volumes are implied by who comes. Her side of the sanctuary is filled with lively, vital, joyous souls; his side is largely vacant, with a few dour, dressed-in-black, severe looking people.

The most touching part of this movie is the way their love is communicated as they age, as is the poignancy when she dies and leaves him alone. You feel the loss keenly; the vacancy in this man's soul as he continues to live after the center of his life is gone.

His love for her inspires a big adventure--to fulfill her dream. And it is that quest which brings him in alignment with the possibility of more love, and a fullness he'd not imagined was possible for himself. The movie left me sobbing, because it is the most beautiful film I've ever seen.

Gary wants to show this film at Christmas. We're doing Christmas at my house again this year. My parents are driving up with my brother, my niece will fly up from Southern California, my father-in-law will drive down from the foothills of the Washington Cascades (with his unruly Vizsla hound Katie to be terrorized by my demonic cat), and my MIL who lives locally, will be here.

I'd hoped to not have to go through another hosting holiday of pretending. Two years ago the prospect filled me with despair. This year is different, because I know it is the last.

"Up" is a curious choice of a family Christmas movie, in a way. Gary's parents are divorced and have been since he was 8. Gary's dad has since been married three times. His last marriage, which was in the same year as Gary's and mine, ended within that year. Katie-the-hound is the legacy of that; she is the object of his affections now. Gary's mother never remarried, or as far as I know, even had any romantic relationships with a man. My parents have been married for over 50 years. I suspect what has held their marriage together is my father's super-ego sense of duty: you stay married because you're supposed to. You love because you're supposed to, through will-power. I can't tolerate the presence of them together for very long; there is such tension, disappointment, latent hostility radiating from them. The love portrayed in this film is very different from will-power love. The love in this film warms everyone around. It's a very simple love, and its light reveals the holes in the fabric of Gary's and my marriage.

I can use it as a parable, as a tangible. One knows authenticity when one sees it. If my sons aren't consciously asking themselves, I'm sure they feel the contrast between the warmth created between this couple, and the atmosphere between their parents. It can be a jumping off point: We have failed to create this. We have failed at developing what it takes to create this, and it is time to stop pretending. It is a failure within us (and creates a toxic atmosphere. You deserve so much better--I probably won’t say this last bit because it implies they are somehow responsible. I want to avoid that.).

Gary walked by me last night, after we'd been home a while, to say, "You deserve to have that kind of love." I said, "So do you."

Was it an unidealized love? Some might point out that you never were shown them quarreling. Isn't that idealized?

A long time ago I read Harville Hendrix's book, "Getting the Love You Want". He posed the theory of the Imago in relationships. Growing up has left injuries, and the issues that we need to heal draw us to the person who can call them forth for healing. That's where the spark of attraction lies. The introvert is beguiled by the extrovert's ability to express himself, the ease with which he makes decisions. The introvert calls to the extrovert's latent deep, reflective side. At the beginning they seem perfectly complementary, perfect for each other. It is later that disillusionment sets in, and the introvert wonders what she ever saw in the loud-mouthed shallow person she's married to. The introvert seems moody, distant, judgmental to the extrovert. When we are at first bewitched by attraction, magical thinking makes us forget that 'complementary' may involve opposition. Opposition threatens unity.

The potential for true growth, both individual, and as a couple, lies in reconciling this conflict.

If we can't have perfect unity we might attempt to cheat in order to get it We might cheat by attempting to deny our own desires, or by denying the Other's. We try to force unity by closing our eyes to any feelings that seem to threaten unity. And this is not sustainable.

We can't expect to have perfect, unbroken unity. It doesn't happen in this world. But the next best thing I think is actually better than unbroken unity. And that is the mechanism of repair, the glue of reconciliation.

Mrs. Spit wrote a beautiful post some weeks ago about loss, about loss breaking us, and about healing. She spoke of holding a fragile glass in her hand, of seeing where the colors run together, tracing the seams. Her post is called, Art Glass. The glass, the globe, she was describing, is grief, the more beautiful for its "fault lines". Can relationship, and conflict also be the stuff of Art Glass--unity-shattered a kind of loss, but the healing generating a beauty that far surpasses unblemished wholeness?

Perhaps this is what Karl and Ellie had, and this is what kept the light shining within their cracked and imperfect, unidealized love. The movie's makers didn't show us the how, but we can assume they had conflict because of their very different backgrounds. And the love that radiated from them didn't have any taint of unwilling surrender--peace-at-any-price.

Gary and I have never found a way to reconcile our styles. I see now that marriage to him was the logical outcome of where I came from. I came from a family where unity was prized, which meant that any feelings that ran against that unity were seen as threatening and were expected to be suppressed. Failure to self-suppress would result in someone else suppressing them, through shame, or punishment. Family unity was even more important than Telling the Truth.
The glass is not permitted to break, because there is no faith in healing. That would make sense, since the skills for healing were never developed.

Marrying Gary merely perpetuated that pattern.

Perfect Moment Monday--Ho Ho Ho (with apologies to Bob Dylan fans)

2009-11-16T11:20:00.000-08:00

Lori's Perfect Moments Monday post had me laughing vicariously, and then reminded me of my own Perfect Moment.

Prelude:

Years ago, when Gary and I had been married a few years but hadn't had kids yet we went on a ski trip to the Tetons. One of our compatriots, Rich, had family who had a cabin outside of Driggs, Idaho. His cousin Peter was living there and so we invaded for about a week. We'd ski hard during the day and come home to eat, drink, and listen to music. Peter was a huge Bob Dylan, as well as Van Morrison fan.

I don't remember who Dylan was paired with in the piece Peter put on for our listening experience. It may have been Tom Petty. It may have been Van Morrison. It may have been a duo; perhaps a trio. It was some unusual combination of vocal superstars, and some were already singing when abruptly Dylan's voice chimed in. It was so jarring, and so out of the character the other voices had established that it struck me as funny and I was doubled over with laughter. I don't know if I kicked off the general hysteria, or if it struck the others as funny too, but we were all laughing. Except Peter. He said, "I'll never forgive you for that", to me.

Fast-forward to the present:

Earlier in the week I'd heard a review of Bob Dylan's Christmas album, and it came up at dinner. The review had included a few cuts from the album and I too wondered if this was done farcically, or as a serious effort. I mean, Bob Dylan singing Christmas hymns ala Andy Williams? Seemed pretty cheesy to me. Gary was sure it was a serious effort. "Come on, Gary! Pa Rum Pa Pum Pum? ??"

The boys demanded that I look for it on Youtube and play it. I couldn't find it on Youtube, but I did find a sampling on AmazonUK. The first piece I played was "Do You Hear What I Hear?" As Dylan's voice faded into white noise on the high note, we totally lost it. We surrendered to laughter, tears rolling down our cheeks, feet stomping the floor. The boys were up and dancing, flinging themselves into the furniture. There was joy to be had at each of the 12 offerings, but was it what Dylan intended?

(By the way, I think the best of the songs was "Must Be Santa", mainly because of the inspired accordian playing by Los Lobos' David Hidalgo.)

Ho Ho Ho, Ha Ha Ha indeed.

Peter, if you're reading this, I realize I'll never be redeemed.

But it was indeed a perfect, priceless moment

Transitions, or word made flesh

2009-11-13T10:26:00.000-08:00

One of the features of temperament is the ease with which one negotiates transitions.

I suppose progress can be defined as a sort of transition, or series of them.

I often find it interesting, and satisfying, to look back over the course of a week or month or more and see events that had appeared to be isolated at the time reveal a progression.

I've often noticed a beautiful symbiosis between my own inner growth and my quest to observe, define, and meet Scott's needs. It is no accident that when I returned to therapy with Sharon nearly 3 years ago after a 14 years' long absence, that it was with a dream about Scott. Periodically I've had to defend therapy to Gary, and the most compelling evidence in its favor has always been in front of me. I only saw it after we had the IEP meeting.

Years ago I had a dream. In it I'd planted seeds, and kept digging them up to see if they were sprouting roots yet.

Everything I have done in therapy, every insight I've received, has been what has enabled me to get Scott to where he most needs to be. Traditional education gauges progress by periodically pulling up the seeds and measuring the length of the root. Many seeds are hardy enough to tolerate this. My Scott is not. He requires lots of undisturbed time, and secret places for his learning to form. As do I.

I've been struck before by the correlation between meeting Scott's needs, and my own. It occurred to me to wonder if that was not true for Connor as well. Almost in answer academic issues begin to arise for him.

There is a transition he is being 'asked' to make; in fact, he's expected to have made it already. Rather than have assignments given to him, he is expected to take responsibility for them, reach out for them, pull them toward him. If he has performed poorly on a test, he is expected to seek out the instructor to find out what he did wrong, and to initiate its correction. He's expected to take responsibility for coordinating, planning, pacing himself in performing multiple tasks, over a stretch of time, and he is expected to keep track of this. The basis for all of this is writing in his planner, which he is very reluctant to do.

I notice there is a peculiar barrier that maybe other people aren't cognizant of. I sense a resistance between the world of idea, and transforming it into the world of action. It's a birth of sorts, making concepts manifest. It's like a wall for me, and I wonder if it's something similar he's up against but unable to articulate.

Tuesday night Gary and I went to see Margaret, the new practitioner we're going to have follow Scott's adhd. She has been focusing on our marriage, as it is the ground in which she'll be treating Scott. The first two times we saw her and the subject of divorce came up Gary shut down completely. I could feel his spirit withdraw. Tuesday night for the first time he engaged. She wants to see us again, just the two of us, one more time before she sees Scott again. She wants us each to bring a "bucket list" of things to do before we die, a sketch of what our lives will look like after divorce, and for me, a plan for employment.

It's big that Gary has transitioned from keeping his head in the sand and avoiding the subject, to signaling his willingness to be a cooperative partner in making this as gentle for the boys as possible.

I felt overwhelmed. I have a hard time with bucket lists, and trying to imagine various scenarios and what life will be like within each of them. I understand now that this is a similar reluctance that Connor is experiencing within new expectations at school. Divorce has been in the world of idea for me for years now, and in the world of intention for less than a year. I am experiencing the resistance I usually experience in taking something to the next level.

Qualified Warm-and-Fuzzy; update to Let-Him-Fail

2009-11-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

REcap:

On Thursday I sent an email to Connor's principal asking:

Is it reasonable to ask that a teacher let me know before 8 weeks into a term that he is failing a subject

Is it reasonable to request that teachers post their assignments and test dates so I can help my child meet his obligations

Is "sink or swim", or "let him fail" an appropriate approach at this age where he's not intrinsically motivated by the topic and doesn't care if he fails?

That afternoon Connor got off his bus without an assignment he was supposed to have brought home the day before. "Get in the car, we're going to the school to get it." Wailing and gnashing of teeth.

When we walked into the building Ben, the principal, was at the top of the steps preparing to leave. But he seemed delighted to see us and spontaneously invited us into his office for "a chat". Connor went to get the assignment from his teacher while Ben and I got started.

He began to respond to my questions in the email, saying that "contractually, teachers are only required to report at midterm". He quickly added that he thought this was "lame." Before we could get to the substance of my questions Connor returned, and the rest of the conversation was between the two of them.

I like Ben. I think he gets kids, boys at least. I think his manner is respectful, and he is a person who can exude a "yes" vibe, even with a "no" message. I appreciated what he was telling Connor, even if Connor, with a 12-year-old's perspective, could not. Ben understood that much of what he was saying to Connor about choices he's making now affecting his future is lost on him. I liked the way he said it though.

When we left the school I felt better, but not entirely at ease. As I tried to pinpoint my disquiet I realized I'd come away without direct answers to my original three questions.

Subj; Thanks Ben

First:

The Future is definitely too precious to be trusted to the young! It is so hard to talk to a child from adult perspective, and knowing how child-perspective is receiving it ("blah blah blah"), but having to say it anyway. What a gulf.

Second:

I get the sense that "let him fail" isn't quite your philosophy?

Thank you again.
Excavator

Reply:

Excavator,

The future has to be trusted to the young. We just have to give them a whole lot of support before they take off and spread their wings. The hard part for me is knowing how many blah blah conversations it takes to turn into genuine understanding. It is so different for each kid, and that is great., but it can be tremendously frustrating when they don't see the answer that is right there in front of them. You guys are doing the right thing by keeping him going in the right direction. The alternative is uglier than the discomfort caused by pushing them.

Let them fall is not in my bag of tricks. I am for supporting them in being successful, while balancing that with gradual release of responsibility. Turning more and more over to Connor is the right thing to do, the question is how much support he needs before he takes over the show completely.

Thanks for working so hard to make Connor successful.

Ben

I was still bothered...does the "contractual agreement" mean that the answer to my first two questions is no, even if he said the "contractual agreement" is "lame?"

Subj: Recap
To: Ben Principal

I was thinking a little more about our conversation on Thursday, and just wanted to recap it a bit to make sure I'm understanding a few points correctly.

I think we're in agreement that time management is an emerging skill in middle school that is not fully in Connor's mastery yet. In addition to learning math, science, Spanish, he is learning how to keep track of his obligations and pace himself appropriately to do that. He is learning a process, as well as content.

I think the type of thinking this requires doesn't come naturally to him and he'd rather avoid it. I can sympathize, because organization is not my strength either...I can easily get muddled, overwhelmed, and lose track of things.

He's better at this skill than last year, but still requires assistance in managing it. I'm willing to give him that assistance (I don't particularly like it, because, as I said, it's a weakness of mine, but he needs to be properly supported as he develops this skill he'll need for the rest of his life).

To give him that assistance I've had to ask for the assistance of the teachers. I'm very aware that they have a lot of demands on their time, and I've had a feeling that they may feel my requests are excessive. This is why I asked you if it was reasonable to ask if they post their assignments and tests. Otherwise, I feel like I'm dealing with a moving target, if I don't have a clear idea of what Connor needs to do. You and I were just beginning to touch on this subject when Connor came in and the conversation shifted. But what I thought I heard you say is that contractually, the teachers are only required to report on a child's progress (or lack) at midterm. That tells me that it is not contractually “reasonable” to ask for more than this, or to ask you to ask them. Only being required to report at midterm leaves a pretty big gap and I’d hope that a teacher would want to let a parent know there’s a problem well before their contract mandates them to. This wasn’t the case with Ms. Spanish Teacher, or with Mr. Humanities Teacher last year.

My hope is that bolstered by this talk with you, I can work on the Connor end of things. He really is responsive to talks like this, and hopefully we have some momentum. It seems the key element is getting him to record his assignments in his planner. If I can get him to consistently do that piece that’ll help me with having solid knowledge of what he needs to do. And at least tools like Engrade give me a heads-up sooner if things aren’t going well. Hopefully I can build a strategy around this that will resolve this so I don’t need to come back to you.

Excavator

Reply:

Excavator,

I agree that Connor seems to be struggling with the organizational aspect of managing his homework without assistance. I think you have taken a good angle in making him check in with you. I think that holding a high standard for him is a good idea, and he will eventually either get it from practicing, or stop fighting it. I am not sure which is the case for Connor, but it is probably a touch of both, as it sounds like the routine is well established both at home and at school, but has not taken on significance to him without extrinsic motivation. In the end he will benefit from having to tackle this issue now, as it is a whole lot harder to have to deal with it in high school or college.

I understand your feelings on being in the dark about student performance. The contract states some base requirements. We have tried hard to go way above that to help communication with parents about grades. I get that you feel that communication did not work for you in the past. It is well within your right to request from a teacher an update on homework and performance in class. I think that at times it can seem like enabling behavior to put it on the teachers. I don't get that impression from what you are saying, just that you need to be on the same page so that you can make sure that Connor is following through on his end. We will try to do our best to support your efforts to help Connor.

I will be checking in with him weekly. I think that knowing we are all looking over his shoulder to make sure he is being successful will help increase his level of work completion. I would put some of this back on Connor. I would let him know what your expectations are and work with him to see what would feel for him like constructive support. He may come up with nothing new, but at least he would feel like you are listening to him. It is a tricky balance with kids his age, as they think a whole lot less of the importance of good study habits than they need to.

Regards,
Ben

Enabling?

I get that you feel that communication did not work for you in the past. It is well within your right to request from a teacher an update on homework and performance in class.

I do not feel that communication did not work for me in the past, it didn't.

I think that I understand now that the odd feeling that we're talking past each other means an indirect answer to my immediate questions. No, I am not reasonable in expecting that a teacher initiate discussion with me if my child isn't doing the work. I can ask for updates periodically, and so that is what I will need to do. Next week is parent-teacher conferences, and I'll see if we can agree on a process for doing this.

In effect, no, it is not reasonable to ask that the teachers post their tests and assignments consistently. They believe they shouldn't have to and that the child should just write it down in their planner each day. I can see the reasoning behind that, a sort of 'tough love' philosophy. So that makes my job a little harder, but I can work around it. Connor was failing Spanish before his teacher signed up with Engrade. Now that she's posting his performance I won't be surprised again. Besides posting performance results, oft-times there are hints of pending assignments. This isn't as solid an information base as teachers posting homework, but it's a source.

Most important is going to be focusing on Connor writing down his assignments each day in class. I've told him that this piece is the responsibility that is solely within his control, and I will be checking his planner each day. I will help him with figuring out what to do with that information--planning, coordinating, and pacing himself toward its accomplishment.

So hopefully we can work around the teacher reluctance with the tools we have. Hopefully I'll have a cooperative, if not altogether willing or enthusiastic partner in Connor.

And I'm glad that let him fail is not in Ben's "bag of tricks".

Let him fail? or, lest I get too complacent about Connor

2009-11-05T12:51:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges of having my kids in school is that it requires a certain overarching organizational skill that I don't have. Since Connor has started middle school last year, my limitations in this area have been painfully evident.

Middle school requires much more initiative in taking responsibility than Connor exhibits at this point. His obligations go beyond doing the work, to tracking the work. This involves recording assignments and making a plan for pacing himself and prioritizing. Sometimes his weakness involves understanding what needs to be done. Sometimes it means he fails to record the assignment. Sometimes it means he fails to bring home progress notes and worksheets.

This has meant that I've needed to exert myself to get a meta-sense of what his assignments are so that I can backstop him. This also means I need help from the teachers, and I'm finding there's a curious reluctance.

I can't blame their reluctance I guess. I'm reluctant myself. As I said organization is not my strength and sometimes I feel bedeviled by trying to parse out the details of his obligations. And I'm not clear if it is reasonable that I ask that the teachers stay current with their blogs and posting their assignments. I've gotten the impression that they believe the child should be responsible for recording what they need to do in their planners and the blog is only a last resort (which means they may or may not post). However, I've noticed that Connor seems to do best in the classes where the teachers stay current and consistent in posting on the blogs.

This year is definitely better than last. He understands better what he needs to do. Technology helps as well. This year there's an internet innovation called Engrade where teachers record the results of his efforts. So I have a more real-time gauge of how he's doing. Last year in his social studies I had a miserable time with a teacher who didn't post his assignments or tests, didn't send home progress notes, and I was surprised by a failing grade at mid term. Then a lot of time was lost in his not responding to me about what Connor needed to do to bring this up. I was adamant this not happen again this year, since the same middle school team is in place. Engrade has helped me stay up-to-date with this particular classroom, and this particular teacher (who still doesn't post on the provided calendar the homework assignments and the dates of tests/quizzes).

Spanish was another problematic course last year, and so I introduced myself to his new Spanish teacher at Back to School Night in late September. She assured me that Connor had been focused and attentive in class. Then last week he brought home an access code that told me she was now recording on Engrade. I looked her up and saw that he's failing Spanish. It's 8 weeks into the trimester and I'm only finding out now.

Upon contacting her I find that he's continuing to be focused in class, but he's not turning in his homework. No, she won't accept his missing assignments. The best he can do is start doing the homework now. Even if he does perfectly from here on in he's probably going to get a low grade this trimester.

I checked her blog. There were no current assignments posted for the past 3 weeks. I emailed her and told her if she doesn't accept late assignments, could she let me know on the front end what his assignments are so that I can help him stay on track in doing them?

Unfortunately, I will not be able to tell you "on the front end" what his assignments are. Connor must take responsibility for his own homework completion. This includes writing his assignments in his agenda and completing them on time. This is basic organization that must be learned before he moves on to high school and college. We would be cheating Connor if we let you be his assistant - he must learn to do it for himself.

When I look at this and consider the implications this seems to be influenced by a philosophy of responsibility that doesn't leave many options. She seems to be a mouthpiece of this, saying, there is a basic organizational skill that Connor should be doing. He's not doing it. If I help him with it, or if you help him with it, he'll never learn it, even though he obviously hasn't learned it yet. If you help him you are enabling him by keeping him from experiencing the consequences of his lack of responsibility. He should fail, and experience the consequences of his failure. Then he'll be motivated to take responsibility next time.

This is an overt articulation of what I've sensed before as teacher reluctance when I notice that they haven't posted an assignment. But what if a child isn't intrinsically motivated by a love of the Spanish language to do well? What if he's only taking it because it's required? What if he doesn't care if he fails? If he fails because he doesn't care, does that motivate him to care and succeed next time? Is it appropriate parenting to let him hitch-hike on my caring, particularly if he's responsive when I know the assignments and influence him to do them? Or is it better to parent by punishing failure retrospectively? Does that motivate him to do better?

I sent the principal an email with three basic questions:

Is it reasonable for me to expect that a teacher inform me sooner if Connor is not doing his work?

Is it reasonable for me to request that the teachers post their assignments and tests so that I can backstop Conrad in keeping track of what his obligations are?

Is it appropriate to let him experience the consequences of his failure to organize—a failed grade in Spanish (and Humanities)? Certainly it would make life easier for me if I didn’t have to help him track this. Is there value in letting him fail in this sink or swim approach, at this age?

Any comments from you middle school parents or educators out there?