The Gift, part 2, and Facing shame--or, a post about Nothing

It's just short of 9:00, and I've come in to a beautiful space that is perfectly quiet.

This is the post I intended to write yesterday. I was going to write about being in the Writer's Dojo, and my perfect gratitude toward K.

Well, I guess this isn't the post I intended to write yesterday either. I took a big detour to get here, and thought I'd write about the trip.

In a way, this blog reminds me of an episode of Seinfeld's TV show, the one where he asserted that his show was about "Nothing". "Nothing" has been a problematic place for me, because where most people I know really see nothing, I experience a whole lot of 'Somethings'. This post is about that.



I think I'm going to let my diary entry speak for itself:

6/1/09
Mon Way too Fucking Late, after 10:30

God. Damn. It.

On top of irritated I feel a little awkward too, but I lost some precious time waiting for someone to open up the dojo. No one was available the first time I called; there was no sign in the door, second time I called Jeff answered and may still be in New York for all I know; said Jewell, his SIL was supposed to have opened. I’d gotten here early anyway, and so sat around for about an hour, having forgotten a book to read and my battery nearly dead in the laptop so I couldn’t write while sitting in the car. And here I have a check ready to be filled out to them, and I’m having some doubts. This happened last week too and I thought it was just a one time thing with Jeff gone to New York (I’d thought it was just the weekend) and I could understand that his wife, single-parenting, might have gotten behind.

But, we have an agreement. They’ve agreed they’re open at 10, which is bad enough for me because I’m really ready to write by nine. So I’m pissed about the amount of unproductive time—the time just wasted—precious, precious alone time.

So I remembered Jewell as having been really chatty the time I was here before, and she was going to let me in “in just a few seconds” after I talked to Jeff (“Sorry about that”). She came in a long 5 minutes. We talked a little as she let me in; she knows about Gary’s being laid off, but I had it in my mind that I’d lost time already and didn’t want to waste more in any more chatter than necessary. So I didn’t linger in the foyer. I was just sort of focused on getting over here to write and so thanked Jewell and kind of assumed she was leaving too, and so said, “Good-bye”. She kind of laughed a little and said, “Bye”, back, and then I realized that I may have been a bit brusque, and even dismissive. Like I was dismissing her. That’s the awkward part.

I was going to gripe a bit about wasting time writing about this, as well as sending a message to Jeffrey to tell him that I had found it difficult to wait this morning and I’d appreciate their keeping their hours. (So I feel like I’ve taken care of that.)

Hi, Jeff,

Are you still in New York?

To clear the air, it was difficult to wait past the agreed-on opening time this morning. My solitary/writing time is dear to me and I want to make the most of it when the kids are in school, especially since this is their last 2 weeks. Ordinarily I'd be writing by 9, and I've conceded that hour because I really do like the dojo's atmosphere. Of course, that's not your problem and I've accepted the dojo hours as part of the terms of use. I do think it's fair to ask that I be able to count on knowing when you're open.

The prompt 10:00 opening won't be as much of an issue once school is out, since I'll no longer be taking my child to school over on this side. But I'd like to make the most of this coming next 2 weeks to get as much uninterrupted writing in as possible, since I'm facing famine. A friend has gifted me the money for a full membership for June, with enough left over to pay most of the reduced membership for July. Probably the bulk of the month of June's use of that full membership will be in this first 2 weeks. And I sure don't want to be spending the front end waiting outside, because my back end is finite: I must leave by 3:00 or earlier to pick up my children.

About last week, I didn't have a problem with Rachel opening a little later. I understand that when 'single-parenting' it can be difficult to anticipate the extra time a toddler needs--I know that by experience.

Anyway, I did feel tense this morning, and I imagine you sensed that in our phone call. It seemed like a good idea to call it out, acknowledge it, and move on. No hard feelings on this end...

Debora

PS--I put the check for this month's full and next month's partial membership in the drawer.

1209

I started to write a blog post about that; I’d had this sense inside that in dealing with the tensions and the ways it can complicate relationships with others there might be something. One of those universally experienced-but-hiding-in-plain-sight experiences of the tension I felt while waiting, knowing I felt angry as time slipped away, the awkwardness of speaking (finally) with Jeffrey in a civil tone and while wondering if that was being passive aggressive—yet not really accepting his apology. It’s not that his apology was flip or anything, but neither did it recognize that it must have been difficult. He did allow that Rachel said it had happened last week too, and said, “Sorry” again. I just said, “OK”—by way of acknowledging his apology, but not being quite of a mind to absolve him. When I’d consider seeing him in the future, there was this feeling of possible elephant-in-a-roomish-ness: The sense that the difficulty really hadn’t been cleaned up, and possibly swept under a rug. That without my absolution, we really weren’t resolved—a sense that sense of incompletion would hang between us.

And more subtly, there was a sort of haunting feeling that this awareness of elephant-in-room was because of a flaw in me. Shouldn’t I have prepared for the possibility they might be late, since they were last week? Was I too quick to assume that last week was a special case (Jeff in New York, Rachel single-parenting a toddler) and it wouldn’t happen again today? Was I being too anal-retentive to expect that someone be here at or before the published hours time? Wasn’t I foolish to have forgotten my book? Shouldn’t I have prepared by having the AC adapter for the car in the car to charge my computer’s battery which has a shorter and shorter life? I think all of this would have been what contributed to an elephant-in-room feel maybe a year ago.

I wasn't afraid of it this time.

I didn't feel fear but I definitely felt tense. I stayed true to that feeling and didn’t precipitately and inauthentically resolve that tension with Jeff by telling him it was ok. I tolerated the tension and allowed it to stand. As I did with Jewell when she arrived and said she was sorry. A consequence of it was that I was so focused on getting to work that I may have prematurely cut short the usual social niceties period.

I would have worried about that too. And I do still wonder if I should discharge having possibly passed some of my tension on to her by going down and telling her I hadn’t meant to ‘dismiss’ her. Her laugh when I did had seemed like an acknowledgment of receiving something from me, and an attempt to soften it. I think part of the trickiness about that is that whole issue of shame. I suppose, in an over-simplified way of thinking, there was ‘shame’ in her having been so late and keeping me waiting. (And, potentially, shame in me for having not brought the resources to cope better with a possible waiting period as I’d experienced last week) (shame in me for being ‘nit-picky’ about wanting them here at 10, at the LATEST) If shame is present, it seems the cultural nicety is to discharge it by absolving it, however falsely. Being polite to someone is to absolve them from shame by absorbing the effects of their actions into one self and not letting on that something they’ve done has cost you. Betrayal of knowledge-of-shame is cause for acute embarrassment for both parties. I leaked, perhaps, awareness-of-shame when I dismissed Jewell. My clue is her small laugh when she answered, “Bye Bye”. My inclination is to go see her before leaving and say, “Oops—I made a mistake in saying goodbye to you, perhaps when you hadn’t been planning to leave yet. I was just focused on my work and assumed you were leaving too.”

What’s problematic is this then obliquely acknowledges shame.

[Much of my life, I’ve been ashamed when I notice someone else’s shame. I’ve tried to keep it from my awareness, because to even admit it to myself has seemed like something to be ashamed of. Of course, then I’m magnetized to it and it seems to be an elephant in a room. Then I’m left wondering if I have cause for shame because this has become a “bigger deal than necessary” (“I don’t even notice these things!”) (“Just forget about it!”) (“Get over it!”) When the elephant is in the room then I feel it grow because I feel like I’m lying in not acknowledging it. In fact, it seems to keep growing to me, because the bigger it gets, the more draining it is to deny. And a lot of people will just insist that there’s nothing there, and what’s wrong with me for seeing/feeling it? (“Too sensitive”)]

Breaking that chain of thought, because Jeff just came in with his daughter. Well, he looked me straight in the eyes, thanked me for my email, said it was “Awesome”, and showed me the code for the building so I can come in at nine. WOW. He said that communication is very important to him and he really appreciated my frankness. {As I re-read this and relive the moment I just remembered that my cousin hosts "Perfect Moment Mondays." Well, that was mine.}

So, here I worked through a process, saw it all the way through, and didn’t get hung up in the awkward feelings/elephant in room stage—and even got a bit of a reward. DAMN!

Now, to Jewell in just a few.

I went and finished a blog post about K giving me the gift. I’d meant it to be just an introduction to a larger post about…posting. How I’d wanted to be writing about anything but feeling frustrated at having to wait outside the dojo. Then realized that in the nothing was a whole lot of something that might be some of that ‘stuff’ that’s common in human experience but never talked about. Something people think and don’t say, which I think is a goldmine for writing topics. I got bogged down in writing the preliminaries and realized I’d need to break it down into two parts.

Back to Jewell. I’ve resolved, fully, and completely, with no residuals, with Jeff. Do I need to with Jewell, or is the nature of whatever may have happened between us so ethereal it should instead be let alone?

In light of the ‘shame’ thing I was exploring above, in acknowledging my own ‘shame’ in possibly being rude do I merely highlight her shame for having come so late? (And is that really her shame? Did circumstances make it LOOK like her shame, and make her wear the consequences in terms of my briskness with her?) And does this lead to the awkwardness of a situation where she denies the shame, and that’s my cue to deny it too because it’s a breach that I brought it up and reminded her of it, and so I have some shame about that? And then we get into that cycle of compounding awkwardness?

That reminds me of Mother's Day, with Darlene. I mischaracterized her intentions when she took the lint brush from me and felt some shame about that, as well as the shame of having revealed what I was ready to believe about her. So I felt some tension surrounding that. I’d decided to resolve it by acknowledging my ‘shame’ or responsibility in the thing, if for nothing else than my own sense of integrity. The complication is, that in doing this I reveal several things: the fact that I thought it was a reasonable possibility that she was about to give me a lengthy tutorial on using the brush—that is, she’s a person who would do that…that she’d received some of the tension I’d discharged and all it implies, the underlying negative tension between us—that there was some shame in her that had caused me to reveal impatience. The possibility that she deserves some impatience, which is a heavy shame too.

What was clear was that in bringing it up she wanted to deny it, all of it. Including the possibility that she even noticed it…the possibility that she might not be ‘above’ being petty in noticing (assuming that noticing attention being called to someone’s shame is petty).

What a weird dance we do to avoid shame.

In the case of Darlene, I experienced the sound one hand clapping. In the case of Jeffrey, it was two hands, connecting solidly and ringingly together. I solidly feel the difference, and exult in it.

Now, part of the problem of going and owning this to Jewell is that there’s another ‘shame’ implied: my ‘goodbye’ did feel like a dismissal, and a barely polite one to her, and that she ‘meekly’ left. If I say, “You know what? I may have said goodbye before you were ready to leave,” it implies that if she left when she wasn’t ready, then she WAS being dismissed and meekly complying…another kind of acknowledgment of shame.

I was just inspired to do a little online research about Face, and face-saving. This is really interesting stuff, and for whatever reason I’ve always been very susceptible to it. It certainly seems that 'shame', embarrassment, and 'losing Face' are all part of the human condition with each culture having its own vocabulary, ritual, and dance surrounding the experience.

K, look what's come of your gift already! A great start to June for me. Thank you again.

The Gift, part 1, or a Confession

This post is dedicated to my dear friend K.

She's an online friend, from at least 5 years back, when we both posted on a parenting-after-40 bulletin board. I've noticed that she's always kept her name private online, so for now I'll address her as K. After corresponding on the boards for a while we took our friendship out of the public forum and began emailing each other privately.

She, my counselor, and my cousin are the trio that encouraged me to think of myself as a writer and to expand beyond private diary musings. My cousin introduced me to blogging and encouraged me to create one; it was K who asked if I had one, saying she'd enjoy reading it.

It's been a pleasure for me to write it.

Last month Sharon was going to be away and miss one of our sessions. I decided to use the time anyway and look into an alternative place to go. I remembered a place that had opened a year ago, The Writer's Dojo. Through Gary I have a bit of an obscure connection to it. Jewel is a woman contracted by Nike to teach Mandarin to the traveling employees, which once-upon-a-time included him. Her husband has a martial arts studio in North Portland. His brother created the Writer's Dojo in a separate building on the property. I decided to look into it. I bought a limited-use membership which entitled me to 4 visits, then a $10 fee per visit.

Ten days ago Gary lost his job, and today construction is to start on our house, building a garage. In 2 weeks the kids are out of school.

Upon return from the misadventure I found a message from K telling me she'd sent a check to cover full, unlimited-use membership for the month of June. She said I'd need it, with Gary home full-time, the construction chaos, and the looming kids-at-home-all-day.

Something inside me goes quiet and still whenever I think of that. I don't know what to call it, but gratitude is a start. What an amazing, loving gift.

That, is Something.

I started looking for K's check in the mail last Tuesday. I didn't find it Wednesday, either, or Thurs. I attributed it to the Monday holiday, but was aware it was taking a while, since she'd indicated she'd hurried a bit to get it into the mail ahead of the three-day-weekend. Thursday afternoon Connor came home from school, asking me if I still had his progress-note envelope. Periodically he brings it home for my signature to prove I've been reading his progress notes. I'd found it loose in his pack with a bunch of other papers and asked him if I was supposed to sign it. He said no, and I put it into recycling. Now he said he needed it. Signed.

So I took a bench in to our pantry and sat down before the bins, sifting through. I found a lot of junk mail, some discards from Gary's office ...and, an envelope addressed to me with K on the return address. It was post-marked May 23rd. Gary still swears he never touched it, and I can only guess that it had gotten stuck somehow on the bottom of some of the junk mail he tossed. I never did find Connor's envelope, but I'm glad I went to look for it. I thought of telling K the story, but then decided against it because I'd seem so irresponsible.

Not only had she gifted me a full membership for June, there was enough there to pay most of a reduced membership for July.

Gary and I have a joint account in a credit union I was planning on depositing the funds into, but it's on the side of town where I don't usually go. And now Gary doesn't either. I'd had an idea that maybe I'd get over there on the weekend, and decided to not carry the check with me.

I knew I would be using the Dojo Monday, which would be June 1, the day the membership is due. A branch of our bank that has our funds for day-to-day operations is just down the street from the Dojo, so I thought I'd just deposit it there and write a check on that account. I was in the neighborhood yesterday grocery shopping and stopped by that branch. I walked up to the machine and reached into my wallet for the check...and it wasn't there. Someone else had walked up behind to use the machine, so I went back to my car to mount a search. Went through all the cards and pockets in my wallet. Looked in the body of my purse. Searched my memory. I could see myself in memory having removed her check from the envelope, folded it into quarters, and slipping it into my wallet. Where has my wallet been? Could the check have fallen out into something else (didn't want to think of it falling out NOT into something else)? When I'd driven for the field trip Tuesday to the pool I'd had my wallet in my swim bag--could it be there? Uh, oh, no. I hadn't had the check by then; it was still sojourning in recycle.

What about my computer bag then? Could it be in there? Most likely not; I'd used it Wednesday and hadn't held the check in my hand until Thursday.

Oh shit oh shit.

I pictured myself emailing K, in shame, to tell her she should put a stop on the check. Telling her I was so sorry. Glad I hadn't told her about the recycling episode, because this would really seal my fate of being a screw-up in her eyes.

Then it occurred to me. Maybe I hadn't removed it from the envelope at all. Maybe I'd started to and only thought I remembered it. Maybe I'd put it in the window in the hallway where I keep my sunglasses, grocery store coupons...kind of a mini staging-area for departures. I thought I had a memory of myself, now, doing just that: starting to remove it from the envelope to put in my wallet, deciding against it until I knew I would be going by that bank, putting it, in the envelope, on the sill.

More lighthearted, I went and did the grocery shopping. Looked eagerly on the window sill upon arriving home, and it wasn't there. Crestfallen, I asked Gary if he'd seen it. Maybe it had blown off the sill onto the floor and he'd picked it up and put it in a more secure location? He said, "I haven't touched it. I've never touched it."

Just in case, I checked the swim suit bag. I checked the computer bag. More randomly than anything else I opened a small drawer on a small chest where I keep my computer next to my writing chair. There it was! My memory, better late than never, helpfully supplied the image of myself deciding that the window sill was too vulnerable to cross-breezes, removing it from there and putting it in this little drawer.

Needless to say I deposited it that evening, and wrote a check of my own on it for the Dojo membership, where it resides now, in the Dojo drawer.

Heart-felt thank-you, K. And love.

P.S. K really should keep a blog, herself. She's a wonderful writer.

The Particulars

My main motivation for agreeing to go on this trip was I thought it important to have some shared adventures with the boys. The lure of alone time has caused me to exempt myself from other trips. This time it felt important that I go with them. Additionally, given Scott's general disregard for his own self-preservation, it seemed necessary to have more than one adult.

Gary took Scott to school Friday morning, leaving around 8. This gave me an unexpected quiet-time bonus because Connor was in outdoor school--I didn't have to wait on his bus in order to have writing time. I did some writing, and decided to pack trip stuff for the boys and get some laundry done. Basically it took the rest of the day and evening; I was up early the next morning, moving constantly, to consolidate clothing, equipment, camping gear, food, ice chests. As I watched the pile grow my doubts also grew concerning how this could all be packed into an 8x13' raft and still leave room for 2 adults, 2 kids, and a 75# black lab.

At 2:00 I got a call from Connor's school: the sixth grade had returned from camp and he was waiting to be picked up. I considered letting him ride the school bus home, but ruled it out when I realized he'd have trouble getting all of his luggage on the bus and would probably lose something. Probably something needed for the raft trip.

"Raft trip! No, I don't want to go! I just got back. Our band needs to practice! For the talent show! We were going to practice every day this weekend! I don't want to go!!!" Entirely predictable it was...and so it began.

Gary had revised our original departure time on Saturday at around noon or 1 to 9:30. We actually made that goal; everything in the van and trailer. A problem had become apparent the night before, too late to get it fixed: left taillight out on the van; right blinker light out on the trailer. "Gary. That's really not optional. There will be a lot of traffic on the interstate and people need to be able to see you signal." "We'll just not make right turns."

The drive was beautiful, the only hitch being the gas fill-up at a truck stop that was mobbed and plugged by hungry hungry RV's and SUV's. People boxed in. It took a half hour to get gas. Once on the road again we traveled unhindered...until...we'd turned down a country road that seemed a straighter shot to our put-in (Twickenham. Twickenham!). Gary driving, since I don't do trailers. I'd suggested that we stop and Gary look at the map at the town of Fossil, since that's where several roads converged; each of which might be a possible route. Gary had rafted this stretch of the river before, and so knew that there were some ambiguities in the direction here. I was navigating from an atlas that shows the back roads in great detail (but not whether or not they were private!). Gary did not stop, and turned down the Shaniko-Fossil Hwy that had seemed to my eye to be the most direct route. So we were maybe a mile down this road when Gary started remarking at all the "cow poop" in the road. "Look at that! Where's all this coming from?" Presently the answer was revealed: blocking the road ahead of us was a cattle drive with at least 50 cows and calves trying to run every which way and horses and riders trying to keep them together and moving in the general direction we were going. So there we were, proceeding at cattle-drive pace, the buckaroos simultaneously trying to move them forward, bring strays into line, keep a path clear for cars. One shouted into the window of the car ahead of us, "If you hug the bumper of the car ahead of you, it'll make things easier," so Gary closed the distance between us too.

Surprisingly, the kids didn't see this as an impediment at all. They were completely thrilled. This was a high point, and they may still consider it a high point of the entire 3 days. We let them unclip from the seat belts and Scott put his head through the sun roof. He was delighted to see a calf nursing its mother, even as the mother walked slowly forward. Both boys kept squealing about how cute they were. Suddenly a rectum loomed at Gary's open window. His impulse was to smack the buttocks but I warned him that it might projectiley poop. After about 20 minutes we made our way to the head of the pack and were free to move at more speed. I saw that we reached a junction with Cottonwood Road that could take us to Twickenham. It was a dirt road, and I didn't see it before it was too late to slow down and take it. No matter. It appeared we could go just a short stretch forward to Pine Creek Road that would junction with Dry Hollow Road that would take us where we wanted to go.

The atlas doesn't distinguish between dirt and paved roads, and I'd thought maybe the road we'd join would be paved. So I was watching for a junction that never came, and presently we arrived...in Clarno--our take-out 33miles downriver from our put-in! So we turned around, found the Pine Creek (dirt) Road that was supposed to take us to put-in, and followed it to...a "private road" sign. It was unmistakably the road we wanted, but the sign was unequivocal: "NO Trespassing". So we continued further, back toward Fossil and yet another spur road that would go to Twickenham. We had just passed it ("Private Road, No Trespassing"), were baffled, and saw, up ahead...the same cattle drive! We'd gone counter-clockwise in a large circle and now were meeting them again on the Shaniko-Fossil Hwy. We asked the cowboys about the roads and were told: "Nope. Can't get there from here. You've got to take the hwy back into Fossil, then take the Hwy 19 to the first right at the top of the grade, just short of the rest area, and that's your road to Twickenham." Then they asked Gary if he would mind going into the pond after a stray calf. The riders were wearing chaps and didn't want to wade into it. So Gary, bless his heart, went in after it, snapping the strap on his worn out sandal, nearly falling in. Of course, the kids were delighted. Our camera was inaccessible so the rancher snapped a couple pictures. Gave me the name of their ranch and said I could find them on the web and email them; they'd send a picture. And they still wouldn't let us take one of the private roads.

Back to Fossil we drove where Gary wanted to call Donna. She was coordinating shuttling our car from put-in to take-out so it would be waiting for us when we were finished. We were so late he was afraid she'd think we weren't coming after all. My cell phone didn't work, so we pulled in to a pay phone outside of a ma & pa general store. A bargain at .10, but no bargain at all since it didn't work either. I tried the door of the grocery as the boys danced the full-bladder waltz ("please, Mom, I have to go to the bathroom!" "Can I just do it here?"). Locked. Gary saw a bank down the street where he thought I could go in and use their phone: "They probably even know her." It was closed, so I went across the street to a restaurant that looked open. I asked if any of them knew Donna and they turned and pointed at her in a booth. She was very pleasant; we were lucky to run in to her since she was on the road most of the time. (And the boys finally got to use a bathroom.)

It was 5:00 when we pulled into the put-in parking area. Incredible. It's really only about a 3 hour journey from Portland and we'd even left when we expected to. We'd thought to be on the river by 3 at the latest. We'd endured Scott's, "are we there yet are we there yet are we there yet?" since about hour 2, and we'd kept answering, "almost almost almost" because we thought we were "almost" there. So his patience resources were already stretched, and we still had to unload the car and load the boat.

Gary went to look at the steep rocky road down to the river while I filled in the registration form. When he came back I looked hard at him: "This says it's mandatory to have a human waste disposal system". "Well, I found a bucket, but I couldn't find a lid." "A bucket? Gary...this is starting to not seem very well-thought-out". I walked down to the boys and dog, to keep any of them from getting run over when he brought the van & trailer down.

Well, he was right; he did get the camping gear all into the boat. We had to jettison the camping table, but that was about all. The boys, dog, and I were squeezed into the small bow area. I'd expected the dog would eagerly embrace this adventure, but he had to be bodily forced into the raft where he laid, trembling, taking up all the room on the bench, and panting miserably. It was 7:00 pm as we pushed off, but I was heartened by the fact that the sun was still reasonably high in the sky. And the river was running high and swift, so we covered river miles quickly. The kids' patience was rewarded by the first of the class II rapids where one of the standing waves splashed them thoroughly. It was nearing dark as we drifted past campsite after campsite--all taken. Finally we found a little forlorn place, not one of the choicer spots because the bank was steep for toting our camping stuff, but we were glad to find it. It was totally dark by the time the tent was up (it was about 8:45 when we got off the river), and we made a cold meal on snack food.

I awakened frequently in the night and realized next morning it was because my personal air mattress had deflated. There was some peculiarity about the valve and it kept releasing air. It still wasn't too bad a sleep. (I contemplated giving that mattress to Connor next night. He probably wouldn't notice the difference.) We needed to get some mileage to make up for the late start the day before, yet it seemed to take forever to cook and eat breakfast and clean it up. The boys lost interest in the site shortly after breakfast and we had a lot of toothpaste to get back into the tube. The boys went down to the river, with Scott protesting when I insisted he wear a life vest. Gary charged Connor with watching Scott, and I objected. As Scott cannot be trusted with his own safety, neither is Connor mature enough to assume responsibility for the safety of a younger, hyperactive child. So my attention was divided between packing and monitoring the boys. We had to have been the last party putting in that day, which seemed ominous in terms of choosing campsites that night.

The float down to the second of the class II rapids was slower than the day before. The river widened, and the water seemed flatter. Gary had more rowing to do. The rapids is called Burnt Ranch after a homestead there that burned. There was a beach just upstream , and we got out to look at it. Because the water was running high it was necessary; the current there flows directly into a steep rock cliff. Scott was already in a foul mood, prohibited from throwing rocks in the water because of the people fishing.

Honest to God, I swore I wasn't taking another of these trips until such time that they are old enough that I can be saying more than, "Stop that", "no", "keep your voice down," "QUIT", "put your life vest on, NOW", "get out of the water", "no"... Similarly I don't want to take another of these trips until they are old enough that I can relax my radar a little.

It's interesting about Gary. Despite nearly 20 years together this is only the second time I've rafted with him. He has a high degree of confidence in his skill that I don't entirely trust. I've had a great deal of experience in mountaineering and back-country skiing with him, and I totally trust his ability to navigate. He has a real gift for being able to look at a topo map and easily locate where we are and where we need to go. His translation skills from features around us to lines on the map and vice versa are impressive. He has an amazing memory for landmarks that he's only seen in the abstract and does not get disoriented. In the rafting context the circumstances of getting such a ridiculously late start, the toilet requirement and lights on the trailer/van being finessed, missing some signs that clearly said he needed to be in another lane and then having to suddenly switch did not lend to a feeling of solid faith on my part. The raft had leaks in the thwarts under the benches which were deflating; there were at least two leaks in the bottom. We needed to bail nearly continuously. All this made it difficult to suspend my disbelief that hyper-vigilance was necessary to compensate for glaring weaknesses in the fail-safe mechanism.

Other than getting the camera wet and so putting it out of commission for the rest of the trip, Gary had no problem maneuvering the rapid. And we proceeded to float through some amazing scenery. Unfortunately, scenery is not enough stimulation for the boys. I didn't have the heart to tell them that this was the last real rapid for the rest of the 33 mile or so journey. We were maybe 10 miles into the trip.

I'd hoped we'd get off the river with plenty of daylight left to set up our camp. The boaters who'd floated by as we packed up that morning had long since encamped themselves along a number of available sites on public land. Whenever we'd spot a promising looking place we'd find a raft or tent already set up. There was a place at the tail end of a long beach that we probably could have made work, but there was a huge party just a little upstream of us with dogs that were barking hysterically. Decided we'd look a little further. Thought we'd found a spot. The current was moving swiftly there and began to sweep us below it, despite Gary's forceful rowing. We were drawn into some weeds. The boys jumped out to hang on the perimeter line and realized it was deep enough there they couldn't touch bottom. Gary kept pulling the oars and I jumped out of the bow with the tie line. Managed to find my footing and haul the raft upstream and out of the willows. In the meantime the boys had gotten behind the oarlocks, completely in Gary's way. I lost sight of them for a moment, and then to my gratification heard Connor say, "Hold on. I don't want you to get lost" to Scott. Maybe he loves him after all.

But we didn't love the site. It was too muddy and plain unsuitable, so to the boys' (loud) dismay got back on the river. Now they were cold, for having been in the river, and were complaining about that. They saw no connection between the fact that they'd insisted on being able to go in the water and their resulting discomfort. Their dry clothes were locked away in dry bags and there was nothing to do but tolerate it. Which they didn't do gladly. Downstream, river right, we could see the river bend, and we could see what looked like a flat area on a small bluff above the water. It looked like it wouldn't be too far to cart the camping stuff up, and it was a pretty spectacular spot. It looked too good to be true, someone had to have taken it, but there didn't appear to be a boat beached in front of it or any tent shapes.

Well, it was too good to be true. We saw the fence just upstream of the flat. It was private land. This was a real let-down for the boys, but then one of them spotted a small beach on river left. We were already being carried past it, but Gary pulled hard and we managed to slip in.

It was a camp, a small site, probably only known to locals. It wasn't scrupulously clean, the way the BLM camps were. It was at the mouth of a natural dry canyon that we could have hiked into had we more time. I did walk back a little way looking for a screening bush and found a toilet paper grave. Most of it decomposed and long dried out. Not quite like finding a fresh batch, but still. I suppose it's positive that whoever used this camp had had a designated toilet.

The whole canyon was a graveyard, I picked up lots of teeny-tiny bleached-white bones; little vertebrae, ribs, forearm bones. It was interesting to look at the surfaces and the bumps, or processes, where tendons are anchored, the articulating surfaces for the joints. The mammalian skeleton is a basic template, with various adaptations for whatever family an organism happens to belong. They were such beautiful little bones, miniaturized and corresponding to our own.

So we had a camp. I had reservations because of the toilet paper grave up-canyon and a fire-ring that had some sort of rusty metal within, but the boys were ecstatic. They were just glad to stop and get into dry clothing. This time we did have the daylight in setting up our tent and bedding, stove and 'kitchen'.

I also wasn't crazy about being across the river from a ranch. The fields were unnaturally green and we could see the irrigation equipment. At least they didn't have the pump running. Next morning we had a number of halloos from rafters drifting by and a few remarked admiringly on our camp. So I looked at it with new eyes...yeah, it had its charms. Private and quiet, for one.

There really wasn't any rush in getting packed up since we'd only jam-up at the take out as other rafters arrived. In fact, it made sense to let the others go ahead. One raft with a couple of kids about Connor's age went by and the oarsman commented on our camp. Made a joke about the packing job we were doing. "We're the Beverly Hillbillies" I said. Ten or so yards downstream he asked if we were missing our bilge-pump. He'd spotted one in a little open spot against the shore. Gak! At the rate we took on water we couldn't do without that. A quick glance in our boat confirmed it must be ours, so I ran along the bank to get it from one of the boys who'd jumped out. I thanked them, and said, "We really are the Beverly Hillbillies."

The principle that it's always a good idea to be pleasant with strangers was borne out a couple hours later. We'd kind of drifted in tandem with them and this other guy who was sitting perched up high on a raft he was rowing solo. I'd noticed him because it seemed he was reading a book (it was the river guide book). Gary and I were talking, and suddenly he said, "Gary?" We stared at him, without recognition and he said, "Adam". Adam! He's the architect who'd drawn the plans for the remodel of our old house, the first one I'd owned. (We'd added an upper floor and enlarged the kitchen). I hadn't seen him since...sadly, a funeral within a few days of 9-11. So it turns out the rafters who'd rescued our pump were his brother and nephew, and a guy close by in an inflatable kayak was cousin to a mutual friend of ours. Cousin was the father of the other boy. Sure would have been awkward had the encounter with his brother been of a different nature. So that was a nice surprise. I was anxious about Scott, though, who was thoroughly sick of the trip and was loudly meow-ing "The Star Spangled Banner" to Connor's great annoyance. It made it very difficult to hear sometimes. Then he got into a fixation where he wanted to kiss me, over, and over. I finally said no more, and then it became his mission to get 'just one more."

We got caught up some with Adam, and then parted when they decided to stop for lunch.

It was a very long, slow stretch of river, and we were very ready when we saw the landmark for the take-out--the Clarno bridge. The take-out is extremely small--only about two rafts can fit on the little ramp at a time. Not being a rafter myself, I still gathered that there's some sort of "code" that you don't keep other rafters waiting, so there was a frantic flurry of activity to get out, unpack, clear the way. Gary brought the van and trailer down, and for a while I tied the dog to it. My attention was always distracted by Scott--Scott-in-a-parking-lot. And then rafters behind us began arriving. This kicked our pace into hyperdrive--got the boys in the van and commenced to depart-- all with that feeling of disorganization and possibly something important forgotten. Gary put it into gear and we began to pull away, just as a dog began to squeal. Gary slammed on the brakes and I leaped out, fully expecting to see a dog crushed under our wheels. Another possible scenario was that we'd forgotten to untie our dog from the trailer and had been dragging him. Neither was true (whew!). A woman had tied her own dog which objected to being left and had chosen the moment we began to drive forward to howl piercingly.

An uneventful drive home to a huge job unpacking, cleaning up, and putting away.

The best part for the boys?

The cattle drive.

Reflections from the raft trip

The John Day River is America's longest free-flowing river--no dams whatsoever. Its origin is in Eastern Oregon in the Strawberry Mountain Range. It drains 8,100 square miles of land, and it's source is mainly snow melt. So it's cold.

It was flowing high and swiftly. The section we ran is really more of a float than a run, with two class II rapids.

More on the particulars of the trip later, perhaps. I'm thinking about Scott right now, and the implications of his behavior on this trip for more aggressive rivers.

Late last year after his IEP meeting I made the decision to try medication with him. He's on the lowest dosage of a ritalin-type drug. And it has helped his self-control and focus; I would put him in the camp of children for whom ritalin is a benefit. I generally don't give him medication on weekends, and didn't think it would be necessary for this trip. In the last frantic minutes before departure I'd decided to bring it along as a just -in -case, but got distracted by something else and forgot to get it.

Gary was right--he could fit camping gear for 2 nights for 4 people (sans camping table) + 75# dog in an 8' x 13' raft, but it wasn't pretty. It wasn't roomy either, and there was a lot of slack time in a small space with two children who could care less about scenery, one of them with ADHD.

I could really see a marked difference in Scott without medication. He seemed much younger, even in speech tones--more like a 5 year-old than a nearly 8 yr-old. His self-control deteriorated markedly. This would cause behavior that inflamed Connor, who had just returned from a week-long outdoor school. That trip had been a disappointment, and he was bitterly disappointed by the prospect of another. He really seems to be a homebody type, and he'd looked forward to "band practice" with his friends for the school talent show in two weeks.

So, small confined space, lots of slack time, child with ADHD, and child with negatively predisposed attitude.

My cousin once sent me a link to Scott Noelle's website Enjoyparenting.com; the title explains it. I was impressed enough by the essay she called out that I got on his 'parenting thought-for-a-day' emailing list. His essays are generally short, but speak very much to the heart of things that are dear to mine.

A few days before we left he'd sent a thought about unconditionality which shed a whole different light on the subject. Frankly before reading his essay I'd considered the idea of 'unconditional love' as a kind of 'Should'--a bar to clear, a standard to reach. It was something I felt I failed at whenever I'd feel irritated at my children's behavior. I'd been under the impression that unconditional love means NOT being upset at some kind of immature behavior that causes me grief or extra work. Here is Noelle's definition that turned that belief around:

Unconditionality is a state of mind in which you are willing to allow well-being into your experience... NO MATTER WHAT

I suddenly realized that I had preconditions for my own sense of well-being that had been hiding in plain sight. Well-being was conditioned upon either the presence or absence of certain sensations within my body. Certain elements tell me whether or not my inner state is, say, irritable. Generally I called well-being absence of such elements. Therefore if I felt those sensations I believed I was unhappy. So I was entitled to be unhappy because the preconditions for unhappiness were being satisfied. Now I understand that those feelings, ANY feelings can be part of my soul's general condition--yet not a determinant of my well-being. That's what unconditionality means. I can be unhappy, angry, irritable, whatever, and still have well-being too. This is an amazing insight for me. I don't have to be unhappy because I'm unhappy!

And this muscle received a real work-out on the trip. I hope it gets stronger; right now it aches a bit. It did get me through many uncomfortable moments--knowing I could hate how I felt sometimes and still be ok.

I need to find a way to be a more effective mother of a child with ADHD. It is so easy to react to the behaviors on their surface apparency, and from within my own frame of reference. My own inner condition does not give rise to hyperactivity, and I assume that his inner condition is the same as mine. Therefore when he behaves the way he does, I think it must be perverse, because I experience in terms of my own inner universe. It occurs to me that perhaps within his frame of reference, his internal thresholds, he feels a much different kind of baseline. In his world, in his internal feeling environment, his behavior makes perfect sense. If I felt the same way in my world as he does in his, I would be behaving similarly. I'd probably have an extra engine fueling my behavior too, which is resentment from always being reprimanded and the focus of much negative feed-back from others. We all start our self-control marathons at zero, but children like him start saddled with a backpack full of bricks. They look just like us, so we can't understand the extra load they're under. Why can't they keep up?

This trip often took him far beyond his endurance. Even to an older child like Connor it seemed endless and boring, the long stretches it took to unload the boat to set up a camp, and then to break down and re-pack next morning.

On Sunday we pulled off the river to a BLM camp, just for a break. I wandered off to find some juniper thick enough to give me some, uh, privacy, and when I headed back toward the river Scott was howling as he was walking up the little trail. He'd wanted to stay down by the river and play; Gary had wanted to walk up to the camp. Scott can absolutely not be left alone on a river bank, especially with the level of impulsivity he was showing. I happened to be feeling generous and so said I'd go back down by the river with him. Where we'd beached the riverbed dropped steeply, so I suggested we walk over to a shallow little area with some willows and a shallow sub-channel. He could pick up mud and drop it to his heart's content and was quite happy there. Unbidden, he said that inside, he feels like he doesn't have "any control, and it scares me". I told him it is very powerful that he could tell the difference between knowing he is in control, and knowing when he isn't. I told him that my job is to find a way to be more patient. (And shortly thereafter became impatient with him when he found a little frog and could not stop picking it up--I was afraid it would get hurt, and to him it was irresistible.)

The delusion is that I require compliant behavior from him; when I don't get it I'm entitled to irritation. All the preconditions for irritation are met and none for well-being. I see that if his failure of self-control is the spoke in the wheel, my own failure of self-control and empathy is the empty space between. His failure is more obvious and so it's easy to lash out at him. It's easy to miss my co-failure.

We need to find ways to keep a family conversation going that doesn't single him out as peculiar (already Connor, in one of his own lapses of self-control, has used the fact of the ADHD against Scott), but promotes empathy and understanding.

He is not defiant. But the latency period between asking/requiring something of him and compliance is often much longer than I'm accustomed to. This could be life threatening on a raft trip. Immediate response is sometimes required in an unexpected situation. The urgent tone of voice that says: "Act-now!" that is usually sufficient to change someone's trajectory is not sufficient for Scott. At least when he's unmedicated. He was not in imminent physical danger on this trip--that's the nature of a leisurely float. Still, even seemingly benign circumstances can be deceiving. I realized this on a stretch where we'd allowed the boys to hang onto the perimeter rope on the raft and drift along beside it in the river. It was cold enough that they didn't do that for very long, and instead laid on the tubes with legs dangling. I saw willows ahead and realized this was shallow water and ordered them to pull their legs in. Connor complied immediately. I had to pull Scott into the boat. I realized how easily a leg trapped between rocks and boat could lever him over the side, to be ground under as the boat passed. It's a full loaded raft--and we would not be able to lift it off of him.

If a slow river was to be a trial before a more adventurous float, then we need another trial of a slow run with him medicated. If he is as slow to respond to verbal direction while medicated as he is without, then he just can't go on trickier runs.

"Severed" (TKvid2u)

My dear friend's husband Tony made this video and entered it in the Seattle short films contest. I hope he wins, and I hope he makes more.

Gary's job fell yesterday to the economic downturn and the 'restructuring' response by his company.

We've known since February that some kind of reconfiguring was in the works. I'd hoped it wouldn't be him, since his little group was making quite a bit of profit. They've decided that his job can be absorbed into the function of the factories that contract with them and so his coordination skills aren't necessary.

In the meantime we've refinanced the house to finance the building of the garage, and ground is supposed to be broken on June 1st.

Nothing like an element of suspense.

He'd planned a raft trip down a 40 mile stretch of the John Day River over the holiday. Other than the gas it takes to drive down and back, any restaurants we stop at on the road, and paying someone to drive the shuttle, it's not going to cost much and so he wants to go ahead with it. I've been non-committal, and I'm still tempted to let him take the boys and go without me. Particularly since my alone times at home have just been terminated along with his job.

Take a look at this raft, here. The two boys sat on the forward bench. Gary sat in the middle to row, and I sat on the back directly on the raft so I could jump out and push, if necessary. Does it look to you like there is room for camping gear for 2 nights (2 folding camp table/benches--one to cook on--coleman stove, pots and other cookgear, ice chest, food, tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, extra clothing, and a 75 lb DOG?

I might have to go along just to see.

How the world looks (part 2 of 2)

It may be more meaningful to read the post immediately below before reading this one.

I awaken, making the transition from sleep. My eyes open and I get reacquainted with the details of the room around and do a quick evaluation as to whether or not this is a school day—which background level of tension is called for?

It’s Mother’s Day. My whole being inside groans. Mother’s Day means Darlene. Mother’s Day means a long car trip since Gary has a restaurant in North Portland in mind. She lives on the west side. The restaurant Gary has in mind does not take reservations. It’s a tiny place that’s really kind of a take-out for bicyclists. He wants us to show up there at 11:00, on Mother’s Day, without reservations. I ask him if he remembers last year. Last year we picked her up and drove over to Elmer’s, to find a crowd spilling out into the parking lot and at least a 90 minute wait. We piled back into the car. Gary had failed to pack the stepstool his mother had used to get in the van, so she couldn’t get into the back seat. I surrendered mine. We drove to an I-HOP and were greeted by a similar crowd and wait. First, though, we had to drive through a maze of parking lots that led to a dead end, and wind our way back. Then we had to cross a busy street against a flow of edgy drivers, all looking for a place to take Mom. We may have checked out one more restaurant before she suggested a place that she likes for lunch. A little Italian restaurant, which we were able to walk right into and sit down. I told Gary he must have enjoyed last year’s scenario so much that he wanted to reprise it.

Darlene and I have a troubled history and I won’t go into it now. Suffice it to say that there is a nails-on-a-blackboard feeling that I have in her presence. Therefore I don’t like being around her. Whenever I do have to be around her I sense the prospect as a looming shadow, or a weight in my heart. Suffice it to say that long ago I resolved that she is the mother of my husband, grandmother of my children, and I will treat her with respect and courtesy befitting that. I don’t have to do more.

Thus there has been a tension that I’ve been aware of: that of the ideal (which is that there is mutual love and pleasure in each other’s company so that we drop by each other’s houses, we see each other often, invite her on family outings, to dinner), and the reality. This requires a certain amount of decision about how much effort to extend and fill that gap—the gap between love-and-pleasure-motivated frequent contact, and dutiful (infrequent) contact. To me it’s seemed glaring, and I’ve felt that a responsibility rested on me to close it. How far do I need to go to act ‘as if’—as if our contact is motivated by pleasure. As if the intrinsic emotional infrastructure is there that provides that motive force? I see now how troubled I have been by my reluctance; wondering if it means I'm stingy, selfish.

We arrive at her house. She walks through her attached garage to meet us. She has a sling on her right arm because last week she fell back on it and broke one of the forearm bones adjacent to her wrist. It’s still splinted; she’s supposed to have it casted this week. Gary’s clearing a space for her in one of the back captain’s chairs. She said she needs the stepstool. I tell Gary she needs it. She tells me that she’ll get it, and then says, “unless you want to”. She gives me detailed directions where to find it. When I return with the stool I hear the tail end of something Gary says, “Debora knows how to do it”.

“Debora knows how to do what?”

Gary: “Trust me.”

Feeling the prick of annoyance of having my question unanswered, but Darlene provides it. There is cat hair on her black sling and she wants me to clean it with a lint brush. I put out my hand to take it but have to wait while she shows me there is an arrow on it that points the direction to brush. I’m a frequent flier with lint brushes at home with two copious shedders, so I’m surprised that the brush doesn’t seem to pick up much—it just sort of smooths the hairs so they point in a uniform direction. She’s telling me that I can do it harder without hurting her. I pause to look at the brush; it’s two-sided. I wonder if maybe the other side has a finer nap in order to pick up more efficiently. As I start to verify this with my fingers she takes it from me and says, “Debora, you do it…” I am anticipating detailed instructions on how to brush with the arrow down, that I need to do it this way, and I anticipate it will be endless, and a waste of time, because I already know how to do it. I wasn’t hesitating because I didn’t know how. I’m reminded of my days in home health care when I’d ask an elderly person what the major cross streets were near their home and they’d give me a rambling set of instructions that I had to wait patiently through—sometimes still without getting the cross-streets! My kids are beginning to get a bit restless in the van. I raised my voice to preempt her, in theory to save her from having to waste her time giving me instructions, but mainly to spare me from having to listen to her and speed the process a bit. In the meantime she raises hers to preempt me and momentarily I feel that red flash of anger. That pulse is beneath our relationship, and I actually wondered if it was about to surface.

She just wanted to demonstrate how firmly I could apply the brush. And I felt a little ashamed because what she’d wanted was reasonable and I’d been ready to flare because of an assumption that wasn’t true. And it was only later that I realized that in demonstrating to me how to do it, she was doing it herself!

I brush. I put the stool down in position for her to climb in. I pull the seatbelt out for her so she can latch it with her left arm. I close her door. I take the stool and load it in the back.

She talks only to me on the trip over to the restaurant. She tends to do this in groups, cut one person out of the crowd and talk to them about something that the others aren’t a part of. The subject is her arm, the already multiple visits to the cast clinic. I’m preoccupied at my own chagrin at having nearly snapped at her. I’m thinking about it, wondering what set me off. I’m sorry because it was just barely on this side of disrespect. I decide an apology is in order, even while unsure. Wouldn’t an apology just call attention to the edge in my tone? Is it possible she hadn’t heard it? It still feels like an elephant in the room to me. I feel the weight. My memory brings the scenario back and I see that she may have misunderstood me. She took the brush from me while I was trying to verify a hypothesis. I see that it was somewhat disrespectful of her to have done this; I see that it is valid to want to preempt an unnecessary explanation. Still, my tone had bordered on rude and it seems appropriate to make it right.

We arrive at the restaurant to a crowd spilling out on the sidewalk. We disembark from the van and mill with the mill-ers while Gary checks the likelihood of getting a seat. I use this opportunity to put my hand on her shoulder and say that I’m sorry for the tone that I used when I was going to brush the cat hair off her sling. She smiles beautifically, saying, “Oh, Debora, don’t even think about it. Don’t be worried about it. I didn’t even notice. I don’t even notice things like that.”

A very gracious acceptance of my apology. Why do I feel so creepy? Why do I now feel an added heaviness on my heart that’s now two-pronged: my near flare-up, and my apology? I nod and smile to accept her acceptance, but I'm aware something inside me feels tight and uncomfortable as she assures me again that I shouldn’t worry. Upon further reflection I see that it's the asymmetry of her response that troubles me. I wasn't worried; I wasn't upset. Frankly the apology was more about me than her--more to make whole again my sense of personal integrity. Her response was appropriate to someone who seemed to be feeling tortured. Furthermore, the 'I don't even notice things like that' implies a certain belief that she's 'above' those concerns (and I'm not).

Gary comes back shortly to say it’s not going to work and we should get back in the van. I fetch the stool for her. Place it on the ground so she can climb in to her seat. I pull out the seatbelt for her so she can latch it. I close her door and stow the stool in back. I get back in. We drive, down into the heart of the little St. Johns neighborhood. There is a restaurant there which had anticipated the gentrification of this formerly working-class neighborhood. For the longest time St. Johns was flavored like the late 50’s and early 60’s and resisted the modern world. Some people who’d owned an extremely popular restaurant in a trendy district of town had sold the former and opened a new one in St. Johns. It’s generally a place with crowds milling on the sidewalks, and I’m thinking we’ll probably be turned away there too, if that’s Gary’s destination. “Does it look crowded?” asks Gary, even though he can see it as well as I, perhaps even better since it’s on the driver’s side of the road. I’m a little surprised to see there aren’t people on the sidewalk, but I can’t really see if people are standing inside. He’s showing no signs of stopping anyway, as he cruises into the downtown proper looking for another café that recently opened. Stopped at a stoplight, he wants me to get out and go see if they offer brunch. I get out as the light changes and wave them on. I go inside to a rather dark space with all the tables except two taken. I see they do have a limited sort of brunch menu, and the man there says he can put the two tables together. I walk out onto the sidewalk and presently Gary walks around the corner with a questioning look. I said, “They do have brunch and they’re putting a couple of tables together for us.” He said, “Do you think the John Street Café is better?”

It actually is the better of the restaurants in terms of the setting and atmosphere. However it was classic bird in hand worth 2 in the bush dilemma. To extricate ourselves from this cafe would have involved some effort—me to go in and say thanks anyway (because I’d thought the guy was putting together two tables for us), Gary back to the van, me back to the van, drive again because Darlene can’t walk that far, and then maybe by then the John St Café would be more crowded—the classic leave-one-situation-to-go-to-a-‘better’-only-to-find-the-spaces-taken-so-go-back-to-what-
-you-just-left-only-to-find-it’s-filled-up-while-you-were-gone. So I was feeling the scarcity anxiety, I think and the fear-of-being-foolish. Still, I kind of thought that breakfast with Darlene was going to be breakfast with Darlene regardless of where we went; I didn’t really want to pick up the responsibility for coming up with the best thing since this was mainly Gary’s gig anyway, and so I thought, let’s just stay here and get it over with. So I said we should stay where we were. Then went inside to wait while he got his mom and the boys. And then it turned out they hadn’t even put the tables together yet, and as I waited I was aware that there was still time to say thanks anyway and stop them from getting out of the car and try the other one. I decided this situation is a consequence of Gary's style of leaving to go to a restaurant at peak time on a peak day, and I didn’t want to take on rescuing it. The two tables together were pushed into a wall which was kind of weird too, because it meant we were oriented with one on each long end and three of us on one side facing the wall. Darlene took one of the end seats and I was beside her. So it turned out that it was mainly me and Darlene with her talking to me and the other 3 left out. And since I was sitting beside her I was the taking care of her-er.

Funny, the vestige of that fear of ironic timing thing—the imperative to choose correctly, right now; the certainty that whatever I’d pick would be wrong anyway. No matter what I picked I should have picked something else. It appeared that this was going to be the case. The coffee wasn’t very good, and it was a long wait before the food came. Scott got restless and so I took him for two rounds of the block. The relative quiet allowed me to feel the weight of the two interactions with her that troubled me. I also felt the weight of the feeling that I’d chosen poorly again. I'm aware of the presence of these forces. I realize that unpleasant as they are, there isn't the added twist of wondering what they mean about me. I also notice that it lowers the stakes tremendously in making choices. If I no longer need to defend against being a Person That I'm Not Supposed To Be (in this case someone who makes choices that end up with the least attractive outcomes) the situation is no longer charged. It honestly doesn't matter. The food arrived and it was delicious. I saw Darlene trying to push through her sausage with her fork in her left hand and asked if she needed some help to cut it up. She said she thought she could just cut it with her fork, so I turned and cut Scott’s food. As I turned to mine she said that hers was more difficult than she thought and could I cut up hers too? It was French toast, made from bread that had a fairly firm crust. She finally said she’d just use her hands to eat it and dip it into the syrup.

We finished and left. I fetched the stool for her to climb in. I pulled out the seatbelt for her to latch, and I closed her door. I stowed the stool in back.

Gary decided he’d drop me and the boys off at home and take his mother on home.

Yeah, the whole thing was kind of an exercise in discomfort, and I’m left with lingering discomfort. I have a tendency to assign the discomfort to me; assume it means I have failed in some way…or that something was wanted from me that I wasn’t providing, but ‘should’ be. I see that this is fear-driven...again I fear this is evidence in the Trial of Who I Am or Am Not Supposed To Be. And feeling uncomfortable about that. The hole of seeing that something is needed, and my offering to fill it would be gladly received, and that it’s obvious that there it is, key and lock, need and me, and so I SHOULD offer, and I don’t. It's a tension that I feel and so think the other person feels too—the elephant in the room. I tend to ‘blame’ it on my reluctance and worry about what that means about me, and so the pressure to relent and offer in order to prove something to myself. I see that I believe that the discomfort is my ‘conscience’ telling me to do it, that it is the right thing. I see that the voice I'd thought was my Conscience is really a tyrant. She's a tyrant in protective mode. She wants me to be the best person I can be, and doesn't believe I can do it if left to my own devices. She fears that the resistance in me is motivated by the characteristics of--yes, The Person That I'm Not Supposed To Be. She fears the resistance is 'evidence'. But that pushes up against my resistance. And so it goes. Somewhere in there comes that feeling that I’m somehow responsible for the whole situation and that I have to make ‘just the right’ choices. Or be a screw-up forever. The Person That I'm Not Supposed To Be.

We arrived at the house. I face a choice of how far to go to bridge the gap between ideal and reality. In a world motivated by love and good will I'd ask her inside. In the world motivated by love and good will I would get out and ask her if she wants to ride in the front seat for the rest of the journey home. I would get the footstool for her to facilitate this. Or, if she chose to remain in the back seat, I'd have her slider door open so that she's accessible for farewell hugs and kisses. I feel the pressure that this is the right thing to do. Instead, I stand in my own opened doorway, where I can see her and she me, and bid her a happy mother's day and goodbye. Pressured by Gary, Connor approaches opened front door, leans in and says goodbye. In the ideal world, the sliding door would be open and he'd reach in to hug her, and he'd want to. How far should I go to make the gap between ideal and reality less glaring?I feel the tension of this. I see that there are still unpleasant feelings. But I see that the unpleasant feelings are not totally mine. They belong to the field that is created between this woman and me. My actions and impulses have been motivated from the fear of what this means. I see now that there are certain people in whose presence certain feelings are a feature, an artifact. They are not my total responsibility, and I do not need to over-compensate for them.

Gary gets in to drive off so I close the passenger door. As the van pulls away I again call, "Happy Mother's Day" through the open window.

And I'm left to feel a bit hung over for the rest of the day. Being with her has me exposed to so many choices about what I choose to do for her; how far I go, and feeling exposed to a pressure that says it should be more. I write. I think. I reflect. I see that transformation doesn't mean I'm no longer subject to such feelings. The difference that makes the difference is in no longer worrying what it means, that it means something awful about me. That's funny, it seems like such a small adjustment. Yet shedding it sheds the entire Trial dynamic. And I'm free to choose from other motivations than trying to prove to myself that I'm not the worst that I've feared.

"First there is no mountain then there is no mountain then there is..."

How the world looked...(Part 1 of 2)

I awaken, making the transition from sleep. My eyes open and I get reacquainted with the details of the room around and do a quick evaluation as to whether or not this is a school day—which background level of tension is called for?

It’s Mother’s Day. My whole being inside groans. Mother’s Day means Darlene. Mother’s Day means a long car trip since Gary has a restaurant in North Portland in mind. She lives on the west side. The restaurant Gary has in mind does not take reservations. It’s a tiny place that’s really kind of a take-out for bicyclists. He wants us to show up there at 11:00, on Mother’s Day, without reservations. I ask him if he remembers last year. Last year we picked her up and drove over to Elmer’s, to find a crowd spilling out into the parking lot and at least a 90 minute wait. We piled back into the car. Gary had failed to pack the stepstool his mother had used to get in the van, so she couldn’t get into the back seat. I surrendered mine. We drove to an I-HOP and were greeted by a similar crowd and wait. First, though, we had to drive through a maze of parking lots that led to a dead end, and wind our way back. Then we had to cross a busy street against a flow of edgy drivers, all looking for a place to take Mom. We may have checked out one more restaurant before she suggested a place that she likes for lunch. A little Italian restaurant, which we were able to walk right into and sit down. I told Gary he must have enjoyed last year’s scenario so much that he wanted to reprise it.

Darlene and I have a troubled history and I won’t go into it now. Suffice it to say that there is a nails-on-a-blackboard feeling that I have in her presence. Therefore I don’t like being around her. Whenever I do have to be around her I sense the prospect as a looming shadow, or a weight in my heart. Suffice it to say that long ago I resolved that she is the mother of my husband, grandmother of my children, and I will treat her with respect and courtesy befitting that. I don’t have to do more.

Thus there has been a tension that I’ve been aware of: that of the ideal (which is that there is mutual love and pleasure in each other’s company so that we drop by each other’s houses, we see each other often, invite her on family outings, to dinner), and the reality. This requires a certain amount of decision about how much effort to extend and fill that gap—the gap between love-and-pleasure-motivated frequent contact, and dutiful (infrequent) contact. To me it’s seemed glaring, and I’ve felt that a responsibility rested on me to close it. How far do I need to go to act ‘as if’—as if our contact is motivated by pleasure. As if the intrinsic emotional infrastructure is there that provides that motive force?

We arrive at her house. She walks through her attached garage to meet us. She has a sling on her right arm because last week she fell back on it and broke one of the forearm bones adjacent to her wrist. It’s still splinted; she’s supposed to have it casted this week. Gary’s clearing a space for her in one of the back captain’s chairs. She said she needs the stepstool. I tell Gary she needs it. She tells me that she’ll get it, and then says, “unless you want to”. She gives me detailed directions where to find it. When I return with the stool I hear the tail end of something Gary says, “Debora knows how to do it”.

“Debora knows how to do what?”

Gary: “Trust me.”

Feeling the prick of annoyance of having my question unanswered, but Darlene provides it. There is cat hair on her black sling and she wants me to clean it with a lint brush. I put out my hand to take it but have to wait while she shows me there is an arrow on it that points the direction to brush. I’m a frequent flier with lint brushes at home with two copious shedders, so I’m surprised that the brush doesn’t seem to pick up much—it just sort of smooths the hairs so they point in a uniform direction. She’s telling me that I can do it harder without hurting her. I pause to look at the brush; it’s two-sided. I wonder if maybe the other side has a finer nap in order to pick up more efficiently. As I start to verify this with my fingers she takes it from me and says, “Debora, you do it…” I am anticipating detailed instructions on how to brush with the arrow down, that I need to do it this way, and I anticipate it will be endless, and a waste of time, because I already know how to do it. I wasn’t hesitating because I didn’t know how. I’m reminded of my days in home health care when I’d ask an elderly person what the major cross streets were near their home and they’d give me a rambling set of instructions that I had to wait patiently through—sometimes still without getting the cross-streets! My kids are beginning to get a bit restless in the van. I raised my voice to preempt her, in theory to save her from having to waste her time giving me instructions, but mainly to spare me from having to listen to her and speed the process a bit. In the meantime she raises hers to preempt me and momentarily I feel that red flash of anger. That pulse is beneath our relationship, and I actually wondered if it was about to surface.

She just wanted to demonstrate how firmly I could apply the brush. And I felt a little ashamed because what she’d wanted was reasonable and I’d been ready to flare because of an assumption that wasn’t true. And it was only later that I realized that in demonstrating to me how to do it, she was doing it herself!

I brush. I put the stool down in position for her to climb in. I pull the seatbelt out for her so she can latch it with her left arm. I close her door. I take the stool and load it in the back.

She talks only to me on the trip over to the restaurant. She tends to do this in groups, cut one person out of the crowd and talk to them about something that the others aren’t a part of. The subject is her arm, the already multiple visits to the cast clinic. I’m preoccupied at my own chagrin at having nearly snapped at her. I’m thinking about it, wondering what set me off. I’m sorry because it was just barely on this side of disrespect. I decide an apology is in order, even while unsure. Wouldn’t an apology just call attention to the edge in my tone? Is it possible she hadn’t heard it? It still feels like an elephant in the room to me.

We arrive at the restaurant to a crowd spilling out on the sidewalk. We disembark from the van and mill with the mill-ers while Gary checks the likelihood of getting a seat. I use this opportunity to put my hand on her shoulder and say that I’m sorry for the tone that I used when I was going to brush the cat hair off her sling. She smiles beautifically, saying, “Oh, Debora, don’t even think about it. Don’t be worried about it. I didn’t even notice. I don’t even notice things like that.”

A very gracious acceptance of my apology. Why do I feel so creepy? Why do I now feel an added heaviness on my heart that’s now two-pronged: my near flare-up, and my apology? I nod and smile to accept her acceptance, but something inside me feels tight and uncomfortable as she assures me again that I shouldn’t worry.

Gary comes back shortly to say it’s not going to work and we should get back in the van. I fetch the stool for her. Place it on the ground so she can climb in to her seat. I pull out the seatbelt for her so she can latch it. I close her door and stow the stool in back. I get back in. We drive, down into the heart of the little St. Johns neighborhood. There is a restaurant there which had anticipated the gentrification of this formerly working-class neighborhood. For the longest time St. Johns was flavored like the late 50’s and early 60’s and resisted the modern world. Some people who’d owned an extremely popular restaurant in a trendy district of town had sold the former and opened a new one in St. Johns. It’s generally a place with crowds milling on the sidewalks, and I’m thinking we’ll probably be turned away there too, if that’s Gary’s destination. “Does it look crowded?” asks Gary, even though he can see it as well as I, perhaps even better since it’s on the driver’s side of the road. I’m a little surprised to see there aren’t people on the sidewalk, but I can’t really see if people are standing inside. He’s showing no signs of stopping anyway, as he cruises into the downtown proper looking for another café that recently opened. Stopped at a stoplight, he wants me to get out and go see if they offer brunch. I get out as the light changes and wave them on. I go inside to a rather dark space with all the tables except two taken. I see they do have a limited sort of brunch menu, and the man there says he can put the two tables together. I walk out onto the sidewalk and presently Gary walks around the corner with a questioning look. I said, “They do have brunch and they’re putting a couple of tables together for us.” He said, “Do you think the John Street Café is better?”

It actually is the better of the restaurants in terms of the setting and atmosphere. However it was classic bird in hand worth 2 in the bush dilemma. To extricate ourselves from this cafe would have involved some effort—me to go in and say thanks anyway (because I’d thought the guy was putting together two tables for us), Gary back to the van, me back to the van, drive again because Darlene can’t walk that far, and then maybe by then the John St Café would be more crowded—the classic leave-one-situation-to-go-to-a-‘better’-only-to-find-the-spaces-taken-so-go-back-to-what-
-you-just-left-only-to-find-it’s-filled-up-while-you-were-gone. So I was feeling the scarcity anxiety, I think and the fear-of-being-foolish. Still, I kind of thought that breakfast with Darlene was going to be breakfast with Darlene regardless of where we went; I didn’t really want to pick up the responsibility for coming up with the best thing since this was mainly Gary’s gig anyway, and so I thought, let’s just stay here and get it over with. So I said we should stay where we were. Then went inside to wait while he got his mom and the boys. And then it turned out they hadn’t even put the tables together yet, and as I waited I was aware that there was still time to say thanks anyway and stop them from getting out of the car and try the other one. I decided this situation is a consequence of Gary's style of leaving to go to a restaurant at peak time on a peak day, and I didn’t want to take on rescuing it. The two tables together were pushed into a wall which was kind of weird too, because it meant we were oriented with one on each long end and three of us on one side facing the wall. Darlene took one of the end seats and I was beside her. So it turned out that it was mainly me and Darlene with her talking to me and the other 3 left out. And since I was sitting beside her I was the taking care of her-er.

Funny, the vestige of that fear of ironic timing thing—the imperative to choose correctly, right now; the certainty that whatever I’d pick would be wrong anyway. No matter what I picked I should have picked something else. It appeared that this was going to be the case. The coffee wasn’t very good, and it was a long wait before the food came. Scott got restless and so I took him for two rounds of the block. The relative quiet allowed me to feel the weight of the two interactions with her that troubled me. I also felt the weight of the feeling that I’d chosen poorly again. The food arrived and it was delicious. I saw Darlene trying to push through her sausage with her fork in her left hand and asked if she needed some help to cut it up. She said she thought she could just cut it with her fork, so I turned and cut Scott’s food. As I turned to mine she said that hers was more difficult than she thought and could I cut up hers too? It was French toast, made from bread that had a fairly firm crust. She finally said she’d just use her hands to eat it and dip it into the syrup.

We finished and left. I fetched the stool for her to climb in. I pulled out the seatbelt for her to latch, and I closed her door. I stowed the stool in back.

Gary decided he’d drop me and the boys off at home and take his mother on home.

Yeah, the whole thing was kind of an exercise in discomfort, and I’m left with lingering discomfort. I have a tendency to assign the discomfort to me; assume it means I have failed in some way…or that something was wanted from me that I wasn’t providing, but ‘should’ be. And feeling uncomfortable about that. The hole of seeing that something is needed, and my offering to fill it would be gladly received, and that it’s obvious that there it is, key and lock, need and me, and so I SHOULD offer, and I don’t. It's a tension that I feel and so think the other person feels too—the elephant in the room. I tend to ‘blame’ it on my reluctance and worry about what that means about me, and so the pressure to relent and offer in order to prove something to myself. I see that I believe that the discomfort is my ‘conscience’ telling me to do it, that it is the right thing. But that pushes up against my resistance. And so it goes. Somewhere in there comes that feeling that I’m somehow responsible for the whole situation and that I have to make ‘just the right’ choices. Or be a screw-up forever.

We arrived at the house. I face a choice of how far to go to bridge the gap between ideal and reality. In a world motivated by love and good will I'd ask her inside. In the world motivated by love and good will I would get out and ask her if she wants to ride in the front seat for the rest of the journey home. I would get the footstool for her to facilitate this. Or, if she chose to remain in the back seat, I'd have her slider door open so that she's accessible for farewell hugs and kisses. I feel the pressure that this is the right thing to do. Instead, I stand in my own opened doorway, where I can see her and she me, and bid her a happy mother's day and goodbye. Pressured by Gary, Connor approaches opened front door, leans in and says goodbye. In the ideal world, the sliding door would be open and he'd reach in to hug her, and he'd want to. How far should I go to make the gap between ideal and reality less glaring?

Gary gets in to drive off so I close the passenger door. As the van pulls away I again call, "Happy Mother's Day" through the open window.

And I'm left to feel a bit hung over for the rest of the day. Being with her has me exposed to so many choices about what I choose to do for her; how far I go, and feeling exposed to a pressure that says it should be more.

Culmination of sorts

There is a Person That I'm Not Supposed To Be.

She is selfish.
She uses convenient rationalizations to avoid responsibility.
She keeps me from taking the action I need, and therefore could kill me.
She insists on thinking thoughts that I shouldn't think.
She's fat.
She's too sensitive.
She holds grudges.
She's weak.
She cares too much what others think of her.
She can't think on her feet, and so often fails when a witty come-back is called for.
She's too serious.
She's too literal-minded and rigid.
She doesn't have any self-discipline.
She can't get started.
She's pathetic.
Her timing is off.
She's paralyzed by fear and can't function.
She's spiteful.
She's delusional.
She forgets important bits of information at important times.
She misses important signs.
She makes lame excuses.
She's lazy.
She takes advantage of other people.

And that's all just for starters.

I suppose This Person That I'm Not Supposed To Be is someone I internalized through acculturation.

I suppose this is who the Jungians call The Shadow.


My life has been lived on the run from her. I've had a belief that there is someone inside me who is craven, and given half a chance will ruin everything I want. So I must outwit her. I must do what I can to prevent her from entering my consciousness. I must drown her out with 'positive affirmations.' I must drown her out with prayer. I must try to not get "too attached" to things I want, because the second I get "too attached"--the second I'm aware I'm attached-- I can't have the thing I want. I must put up a screen of white-noise, a sort of low level agitation, to mask her. This dynamic is the origin of the Trial, in which I am continually accused (by myself) of being her. The trouble is, that any evidence I come up with in my own defense is merely proof that I am rationalizing, and therefore am who I am not supposed to be.

Of course, forbidding myself to BE her, or insisting I be her opposite has only magnetized her to me more tightly. Such is the nature of prohibition.

So many of the feelings that encountered in the act of living become fraught. They become evidence of my guilt. It's not just the emotions I feel, but what they mean about me. They become evidence in the Trial. If what I want is in conflict with what someone else wants, it must mean that I am selfish, and therefore The Person That I'm Not Supposed To Be. It is impossible to think through a construct like this, and leaves a Shadow of Doubt as a sort of taint. Maybe I am who I'm not supposed to be. That very dynamic has been what has contracted the walls of the labyrinth around me, like a Chinese finger trap.

What an interesting journey this has been, to unwind this labyrinth. I hesitate to commit myself to saying, it is unwound. Perhaps this is merely a pause before another go-round. I'd like to hope though, that I am standing on the rim of the canyon I've just wound myself up out of, blinking in the sunlight, and contemplating a life without that dynamic. From now on my experience is just my experience, not evidence for the prosecution.

Emergence

I dreamed the other night:

Some sort of commune—sort of like the old Columbia Park. People without much money, including me.

I have a daughter who has disappeared. A family has helped me—one reminds me of a woman, Courtney, at Scott’s school. She & her husband live close to the water supply where people fetch their water. My daughter disappeared long ago. One day I’m approached by a little girl who says she has something to tell me. I’m getting the water, talking with the man. So I ask the girl to wait. She begins to cry. I walk with the man and see that they live on the edges of a large park that I’d not known was there. Rather dry and sparse, but on a sort of hillside.

The girl turns out to be a daughter I lost, probably while getting water long ago. I hadn’t recognized her but now I do with joy. This man has something to do with it? Seems glad.

I had an image that Ego is like a shark: needs to keep swimming in order to survive. It needs to feel itself positively engaged, usually by pushing or pulling against something. And it's profoundly uneasy at stillness.

Self-accusation has been my method for "moving forward". It is my equivalent of pushing, or pulling against something. I've not realized in my soul that I can also rest on the surface of the water--I can spread myself over it and allow it to hold me up. This is the empty space between the spokes, the silence between the notes.

As Lori said in the comments of my last post, Ego has a positive intent--to protect me, to help me to get what I want.

She also sent me a link to a brief article by an author/parenting coach named Scott Noelle. He described a process by which a desire becomes a 'should'. This is because of the influence of 'dominator culture' which frames everything in terms of 'right' or 'wrong'. This is not necessarily a problem when 'shoulds' are in alignment with our own goals and values anyway. It becomes problematic because it robs us of our freedom of choice. We have left the realm of Choosing and entered the prison of Must (or Must Not). (Humankind seems susceptible to this culture, and unfortunately has the tendency to create one-upmanship--"I'm doing what I 'should' better than you"--which creates food, parenting, religion, breast-feeding nazis).

I'm reading one of Martha Beck's books, The Four Day Win (End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace). She explains how the traditional weight-reduction diet is doomed to fail because of the spiraling dynamic it sets up within a person. Prohibition ("should/should-not") creates desire/compulsion. A dictator is created, along with an insurgency. A lapse (which is inevitable) strengthens the prohibition (as well as shame and self-loathing), and the intensity of the rebellion. Many of us spend our lives this way, in parallel versions expanded beyond the theater of weight.

Exposing the role of accusation and trial in my life to the light of day seems to have unlocked the doors to allow her, the lost 'daughter', to emerge. How interesting that I didn't recognize her at first. She had been gone for so long, it seems, that I'd habituated to missing her, so I didn't even register her absence any more.

I wonder if her emergence has anything to do with having seen the lawyer on Friday; if the other insights were preparing the ground and seeing the lawyer was a sort of trigger?

Someone is trying to kill me

I had a dream. I was in a white-water kayak and I was on a river. The river was swift, but did not contain rapids, at least not on the stretch I was supposed to boat. I was out ahead of my friends and swept right past the take-out. In my pleasure I'd ignored it. And ahead was a bend in the river and the roaring sound and a hint of white that told me there were standing waves. The next thing I know I'm on the bank, in a woods, and I'm having a head-slapping moment: "Oh yeah. I didn't make a plan for transporting the boat and myself back upriver! How could I have missed that!" That feeling is sharpened by the realization that I am keeping waiting people I was supposed to meet at the take-out, now upstream of me. I return to the boat, trying to work my way upriver by using the eddies, or areas of slack current adjacent to the bank. I see that I am in the midst of downed timber, floating alongside me. I have a vague feeling of alarm, and I can hear the voice of an old boyfriend saying "I don't do anything around logs."

The dream reminded me of kayaking trips. My mind was flooded with an image of me, in a boat, people waiting downstream of a tricky rapid to negotiate, and me, paralyzed with fear. Me, terrified of that first moment of commitment, because I'm not at all certain I have the skill to thread that needle, not get turned sideways and breeched, the force of the water bending the boat and breaking my legs. Or pinned underwater, knowing I'm beyond help and that I will feel the water flood my lungs when I can no longer resist the imperative to inhale. Worse, I'm afraid that my own fear will cause me to seize up and therefore fail to make the hair-trigger decisions that are required to be effectively responsive.

Not that I was ever in a situation that was quite so dramatically desperate. I'm afraid my over-active imagination is biased toward worst-case scenarios (which has worsened since having kids).

Still, I thought I'd examine that moment of recoil, where I feel myself on the brink of something and draw back in horror. For a split second I feel a ghost of the actual experience, of what something would feel like in my body--the moment I launch, of terror, the moment of surrender, the moment of knowing that this is my last.

All that was based on a belief that I couldn't count on myself. That in a moment where a split-second decision was required I'd be unable to deliver. Fearing fear itself, and fearing the self who fears.

Basically, I believed that self was trying to kill me. And I suddenly realized that in a way my life has been based on this belief that left to its own devices, my self would ruin everything I cherish, cause me to make bad choices, could never be happy and would make endless demands that would drive whatever I wanted away from me.

I tried to outwit her. I tried to subvert her with positive affirmations, with censoring "negative" thoughts, of censoring desire thoughts. I blamed her for everything from relationships that went badly to picking the slow line at the grocery store.

So who was trying to kill whom?

I realized as I mulled this over that the paralyzing fear at the top of a rapid was not an effort of a subversive self to keep me from functioning optimally. It was as loud and clear a message as possible that I didn't have the skills I needed to negotiate that problem. Rather than trying to kill me, she was mutinying against what she must have perceived as me trying to kill her.

oh

Baby step

Took one Friday. Now I wonder how long I'll hang out here.

"It's just preliminary" I kept telling myself. "This is just a consultation."

I told Gary I was going, and I told him the appointment time. I told him it was recommended that we come in together, but if he wished he could go on his own another time. He said he thought this was something he should attend with me. I told him that he needed to find a time in his schedule that would work for him and let me know so I could reschedule.

He did not, so I kept the appointment by myself on Friday.

I wonder how many people sit outside the door of a legal office, reflecting that they'd never imagined themselves walking through that door. I walked inside to a comfortable setting with shelves of books about low-conflict divorce, single parenting.

The lawyer I met with is an ex-litigator. He said he'd had his fill of court-mediated divorce and preferred this model instead. "This model" has a name called 'collaborative divorce' and it exists to help couples avoid going to court. Within the collaborative divorce model are 3 sub-models: kitchen table, mediation, attorney collaboration.

In 'kitchen table', the couple is handed paperwork, they come to their agreements on their own, fill out the forms and the firm shepherds the filing through the legal system. $3000.

Three thousand dollars? And that's the budget option? Man, filling out the legal forms and filing must be a really onerous task to make it worth paying someone $3,000 to do it for you.

So how much are the other two models?

The second model is where the couple negotiates through a mediator. The mediator is a neutral party and helps facilitate the conversation with the goal of "each person finding their own point of fairness" and getting those points together where they can be agreed upon.

He said that going the mediation route often ends up costing about as much as the collaborative model which is where each couple has legal representation and so there are four people in the room working out the terms. He gave a cost estimate of between $7 and $15,000.

Mediation ends up costing as much as legal representation because working through a mediator tends to be a very slow process.

But litigation can cost somewhere in the range of $30K and upward.

Who can afford to get a divorce? Legal separation costs the same; it can be converted to a divorce if done within 2 years after the separation; otherwise the process and expense are repeated.

As I mulled over all this later, it occurred to me that the expenses are incurred by the lawyers' hourly rate. Dave's rate is $275, and I'm not sure if it's the same if he's acting as mediator, or if he's acting as my (or Gary's) attorney. So the costs are proportional to the extent that a couple can stay focused on business and not meander into fighting and blaming--on attorney-paid time.

So, theoretically, in a perfect world, a couple could come to their agreements on their own, get and fill in and file the papers themselves, and it will only cost the $381 filing fee? So: $381 or $15,000+--your choice!

I walked away from the meeting with the contours and shape of the process a little less hazy. I also walked away with a slim but dense notebook with the paperwork needed for the kitchen table divorce. If nothing else that will help me see more clearly the minutiae of what needs to be settled between us.

Our 17th anniversary was Saturday.

Mother's boy

Shortly after writing my last sentence in yesterday's blog, I visited another. The post was about the author's brother and sister-in-law getting a divorce after 15 years of marriage and 3 children.

I felt a little shaky with my own (anonymously) public declaration; and reading the post reminded me that there's a whole community out there who is going to be affected by the ripples of going through with this.

I pictured myself going in to the offices, saying the words, "I want a divorce". Such cognitive dissonance; in my imagination I couldn't pair myself with those words.

It's just a preliminary consult. It's just seeing what the options are, and the legal framework--familiarizing myself with the contours of the process. A couple weeks ago I confided my anxiety about action vs inaction to Sharon. I've been telling the few people in real life who are privy to this that I've not taken action so far because 'I can't see my way forward', or, 'I'm waiting for a path to open up to give me some indication how to proceed.' Were those just excuses? I wondered. Sharon suggested that it's valid and important to be moving toward something, not just away-from. She suggested that I do something to satisfy the urge toward action, while being alert for guidance. In other words, do action and inaction together.

I felt comforted in the validation that I need to see the next step ahead of me before I take it. It freed me from the feeling that I was being cowardly in not moving yet...freed me from the sensation of being pushed from behind toward something I know I'm going to do anyway, but need to do according to my own signals and instincts.

Then I had a dream. In the dream a gun had come into our house and I didn't know how it had gotten there. It was on a table in the dining room. I'd already admonished Scott that he was not to touch it. I'd assumed that my saying would have the same effect as actual physical removal. Even in the dream there was an awareness that this was foolishness: the sight of something compelling for Scott would obliterate the memory of any flimsy verbal prohibitions. And sure enough, he was out in the yard with it, a loaded handgun. I felt myself cross that "That's IT" line. It was my "running out in the street" moment--sort of the classic justification of a parent being so freaked out by a child's headlong rush to the street that they express their fear and relief in physical punishment. Scott having disobeyed me and taking the gun was my "That's IT". I took him in the house and placed him on the bed and began to hit him. Only I couldn't. It was as if gravity curved, or there was a repellent magnetic charge around him. My blows merely fell to the sides of him. Or, if I did manage to penetrate the 'shield', by the time my hand reached his skin all the force had been bled out of it.

So is there any significance to having had this dream shortly after reaching a feeling of peace in not taking positive action? Something in our house is deadly dangerous for him, and by extension, all of us. Is that 'something' our marriage?

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So we're riding home in the car yesterday after I picked him up from school. "Mom, a 'teacher's pet' is when someone listens to their teacher and does what they ask, right?"

"Well, being respectful to your teacher isn't necessarily being a teacher's pet." (frantically trying to come up with the distinction: 'kiss-ass' is really not an appropriate explanation). "A teacher's pet is someone who's trying to get the teacher to like them--" (no, no, no. That's not it).

"So someone the teacher likes is a teacher's pet?"

(shit) (Will he understand the idea of 'manipulation?') "Well, someone who tries to get the teacher to like them by tattling on someone else, that's kind of being a teacher's pet."

"Mom?"

"Yes, Scott."

"What's a 'mother's boy'?"

(Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh)

"Well, it's a man who hasn't grown away from his mother yet..." (lame, lame)

"You mean he loves his mother?"

"Well" (floundering gracelessly), " it's more like he is still...connected...to his mother" and more such stumblings, trying to articulate, on the fly, the concepts of differentiation and appropriate level of need. "A man can love his mother and that doesn't mean he's a mother's boy."

"You mean he loves his mother too much?" (AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!)

"Well, maybe it means he needs his mother too much. You know, a baby needs his mother all the time, and then when he's one he doesn't need her so much; when he's 5 he doesn't need her as much, when he's 7, when he's 11, and when he's grown-up he doesn't need her anymore at all even though he still loves her. (God, please don't let me be implicitly saying that a boy who loves and needs his mother is a mother's boy!) "A mother's boy needs his mother like a baby needs his mother when he should be all grown up."

While still struggling to refine the abstract concept down into some words that are easily digested by a 7-yr-old, he signaled that the subject was closed: "I don't want to talk anymore."

God knows what I've planted, or fertilized in his mind. I just hope I didn't mess up too badly.