A reply to (sweet) Nicole

One of my commenters, Nicole, is lovely and wise beyond her years.  In response to this post, she said:

Having read your blog for a while now, I have seen you comment several times about the abundance of stuff Daniel has/purchases for himself and Milo and you feel a need to make room for these items. You have also shared with us several times your fears of having to take care of Daniel when he is older because he perhaps hasn’t taken good enough care of himself… I can see these are deep worries/problem areas for you. It seems to me you really want to have your space in many ways.You want to have physical space for your stuff. You want to have time for your interests/yourself because you worry about others not getting the chores done or the other things that need to be done while you are out, you worry they will then fall on you. (and they very well could fall on you). So, it sounds like you are looking for more support/help so that you have more time for yourself. Also, you want an old age that isn’t entirely burdened with the care of another so you can enjoy yourself. I think all these things are fair. I do not see you and Daniel in a poor light at all. I see you both as human, with your own strengths and weaknesses. I have had more than my share of relationship issues, so I know how these things go.

I read that, and didn’t like what was very accurately reflected back at me.  So this post is me thinking about it.

 I think these issues come up so often for me because they are what manifest when I am anxious about everything, or anything, else.  They are both real and not real that way.  Long periods of time go by without me feeling upset about them, and then suddenly they are the most important things in the world and have to be addressed RIGHT NOW.  So I am not sure it’s about the things themselves, but what they have in common with the other anxieties that I can’t name or manage so easily, or that I don’t think I can change.

When I look at this list, I see some concern with physical space and time, although I actually have a fair amount of time to myself.  But to me it reads like a huge cry that I want to give up responsibilities without giving up outcomes.  I want someone else to take care of things that I feel are really important, but that others don’t see as mattering at all  It’s not a shortage of time or space as much as an excess of responsibilities and I feel like they are just crushing me sometimes. And yet, letting go of them doesn’t seem like a possibility — surely these are very important things, otherwise why would I be so caught up in them?  Why would I have staked so much on them.  So I ask for help, but help doesn’t seem forthcoming, and then I’m caught, trapped, oppressed, in a real pickle.

 Right now, I am feeling suffocated by responsibilities.  There are so many things I have to get right, all at once, it seems.  Retirement accounts.  My own health — and I wrecked my back on Tuesday so I’m in pain, which never helps.  My work.  Parenting.  Wife-ing. Money — and I’m wrecking that, too, I feel.  Combating the kitchen mice.  Flossing properly so as not to disrupt my temporary crown on tooth 4 (tooth 4 so far costs twice as much as my first car).

Someone help me!  Someone give me a guarantee that I’m doing it right, that there is not some catastrophe lurking because I didn’t rebalance my 401K, because I don’t do cardio, because I just can’t get my spending under control.  Tell me I’m not a bad wife or a lazy worker.  Tell me I am doing it right.

And somehow, Milo having fewer shirts, and Daniel having fewer CDs is going to solve this existential crisis.  An orderly back counter will give me the peace I can’t find anywhere else.

And then there’s the matter of mortality.  I do worry about Daniel’s health, and the limits it will put on our life together.  His low energy already limits us a bit, although his vast imagination makes up for it.  But I could be the one felled by some disease, not him.  And he comes from people who live a remarkably long time despite no interest in eating salad or breaking a sweat.  Lately, I’ve been struck my the recognition of my own mortality and the brute realities of aging.  That is an unpleasant awakening, too.  My Daniel will die one day, probably before I do.  When I get angry about him neglecting his health, what I am really angry about is the fact that he will one day leave me forever by dying, and I can’t bear that.  I feel like I can’t love him fully because he’s going to break my heart that way, that is our unavoidable catastrophe.  Of course, the real catastrophe will be never having loved him fully because of my fear.

I think the meditation practice that I am starting is stirring up all of this anxiety and grasping and deep fear of something bad happening later because I let something go right now.  I am right in the big middle of some of my deep and very scary issues.  I am sometimes (most times?) flat out terrified about the future that I don’t know and can’t control.  Meditation is putting that right in front of me, but not yet giving me the tools to soothe it.

I hope that’s the explanation.  I would really prefer not to be in this existential crisis as a permanent condition.  I hope this is the dark-before-the-dharma phase.  Really.

Tonight I went to yoga, hoping it would relieve my aching and anxious-making back.  And I was feeling good and thinking, “I am going to change, I am going to try and change and be better.”  And then — thank God — I thought, “Um, no.  Change is happening around me and in and to and about me.  And maybe all this trying of mine is actually resisting that change because I’m scared of any change that I don’t control.  But that doesn’t work.  So I’m going to ride the change, or go with it, or embrace it.”

(“Yes,” I said, “isn’t it pretty to think so?”)

I would like this to happen.  I would like there to be change in myself, so I can embrace now, grasshopper like, and not deny the pleasures of today because I think it means I can thereby control tomorrow, like the ant.  I’d like to be a blend, an anthopper!  Happy today AND safe tomorrow.  I have never really wanted a tattoo (Jews like me don’t get tattoos, we believe it’s forbidden), but I really want one now.  I’d have an anthopper somewhere where I could see several times a day.   I am not going to “try” or “change.”  I want to be open to and available to the change that exists.  And I have no idea how that happens.

Thanks Nicole.

Bless this mess

Today I am thankful that Daniel wasn’t at home when I decided the the mess in our breakfast room was absolutely intolerable.  His not being home gave me time to 1) clear enough space to make the counter at least visible; 2) decide that this is not worth losing my cool over.

I feel it’s important to show you how bad the situation is or isn’t.  Below are three views of our breakfast area.

It’s a long, narrow space that was appended to the back of the kitchen during one of the many renovations that happened to our house before we bought it.  I’d guess this was added in 1985.  There’s a doorway and a window opening that links this to our kitchen.  The diner booth is on one side of the the doorway, and the long and cluttered counter is on the other.  The window opening connects this miserably crowded counter with a similar miserably crowded and piled up counter in our kitchen.  Milo uses the diner table as his “office” for school work.  But because the table is so crowded, he does his homework at our dining room table, which, if I wasn’t constantly vigilant, would also be piled with papers.  And yes, those are stacks of CDs.  We have CDs.  Still. Thousands.  I am not exaggerating.

So there it is.  And I’m posting this, not because you care, but because I want not to care.  For long stretches of time, I don’t care, in fact.  I go about my business and don’t think about it.  But every six weeks or so, I decide that the mess back there is worth a battle royale about household labor, respect for my wishes, the propriety and rightness of order, and why I am the ONLY one in the house who picks up a piece of paper, washes a dish, or folds an item of laundry.

Tonight was going to be one of those nights, but I decided, after some huffing and stomping, that it wasn’t really worth it.  Daniel had gone to synagogue because today is the anniversary of his father’s death and he wanted to say the requisite memorial prayers.  To confront him with my rant about the mess seemed ill advised at best, and actually callous.  I realize this is obvious, but one of my greatest failings as a wife is failing to take Daniel’s larger context into account.  (Of course, Daniel lives a life of full of Much More Important things, so if I only ever took his context into account, there would be no space for me.  I’m looking for the middle way.)

I also realized that going on a tear about the mess 1) doesn’t make me feel better and 2) doesn’t change anyone’s behavior for even a single second.  It just introduces bad feeling like a bad smell in the house.  So what’s the point?  The mess will be there.  Then we’ll clean up for Passover and there will be a small respite in the mess, and then it will pile up again, and I’ll get annoyed again, and that’s domestic life.

There is so much letting go to be done.  I get emails advising me on how to save money and better manage my time.  I know I need to exercise, to meditate, to do yoga, to maintain the clothes I have and use restraint in buying new ones (I blew my budget this weekend).  And I am under new financial constraints.  And there are meals to be cooked and a minimal amount of cleaning to do, and in the midst of it all I am supposed to be exquisitely attentive to Daniel’s moods and needs.  And I am failing at that completely.

All of these are good and reasonable things to do.  They really are.  Life seems to go better if one can do them.  But I can’t.  I just can’t, and trying to do them even at the most minimal level is making me miserable.

 

Obstacle as path

Last night Daniel and I continued fighting, and none of the things that I thought I could do, or thought I had learned, about behaving differently, about being open-hearted, about him or me in all our years mattered.  It was the same stupid fight we have — the fight about nothing (crumbs on the kitchen counter, the fact that I “remind” him too much) that apparently is the fight about everything.

I am so disappointed in myself.  I did everything wrong, or many things wrong.  I ruined his night and mine and much of the early part of the week by refusing to accept my wrongness.  I fought hard and ended up agreeing that he was right and I was wrong — more wrong than he knew.  But it wasted two hours that he needed for work and I needed for sleep and now everything feels wrecked and wretched.

When we fight like this, there is no compromise, no transcendence, no synthesis at the end in which he agrees to put dishes in the dish washer and I agree not to nag.  No, it has to be total victory for one side or the other.

I wish I hadn’t started it.  I also wish that when I presented my problem to him — “it feels like your rest on the weekends is at my expense” — he had said, “Yes, it is a problem you feel that way.  How can I help,” rather than telling me in exhausting detail with great force how wrong I am.  I had already conceded wrong.

In the long-ago and not-now-effective meditation workshop, we learned about obstacle as path.  Obstacles are not in our path, they are the path.  I want another path right now.

Naming is not fixing

Having recognized that my main conflict with Daniel is scarcity versus abundance is useful, but it’s not getting me out of the conflict, and that stinks.

Today, I came home from Budokon, all revved up and energized, and found Daniel still in bed (it was noon) idling on the iPad, and Milo searching for cheap toys on Amazon (just like I search, obsessively, for cheap shoes).  I’d been gone an hour, and in that time, my little household was in suspended animation.  No homework done, no instrument practice, no household chores advanced or completed.

This caused an incredible spike in anxiety for me and a realization.  Daniel’s abundance — laying in bed on a Sunday morning as people are wont to do — looks like my scarcity.  I believe that his abundance of time and relaxation is predicated on my scarcity of sleep and leisure, particularly on the weekend.  I realize that I had just come back from an hour’s workout, which counts as leisure.  But I couldn’t get it out of my mind that Daniel’s rest, and Milo’s, would mean more work for me later.  It’s the fable of the grasshopper and the ant, but they got married.  (I do appreciate that the Wikipedia page I’ve linked to gives all kind of complicating alternative versions that make the ant look at worst morally bankrupt and avaricious, and at best a total pain in the ass.)

And it often does.  Or I see many opportunities to define it that way. Daniel buys too many clothes for Milo — and I have to figure out how to make them fit in drawers and how to pack up last year’s excess for Goodwill.  Daniel buys too many books, CDs, DVDs (yes — I know, it’s all supposed to be on our laptops and iWhatevers by now) — and I figure out how to store, stack, and sacrifice counter space for them.  My biggest fear for the future is that because Daniel eats badly, doesn’t exercise, and generally neglects his health (abundance as indulgence and unwillingness to make an effort), my later years will be confined and circumscribed by caring for him.  Which I will do, and learn from, but I fear being unable to leave his side, to travel, to go away for a weekend of yoga, or to visit Milo if (when!) he lives elsewhere.

I see more zero-sum abundance than shared abundance.  That’s awful.

I don’t at the moment have any good insights about how to move forward or even about the possibility of thinking differently.  Daniel called me out on coming back home and immediately upending the peacefulness of the morning, and he was right, and I’m struggling with that — with my own limits and non-transcendence and non-learning.  Other things have transpired that make me pissed at Daniel, and so a path to a new idea is blocked at the moment.

I worry about us at times like this.  I worry very much about how we appear to you, readers.  This is temporary, but it’s ugly to look at a relationship, even just at the relationship in this moment, and realize that there is not much shared abundance.

In fact, writing this I realize that I am generally threatened by the abundance of others.  It’s why some other people’s second children, or third, throw me for a loop.  It’s why my sister in law scrambles my circuits so very much — I find her aggressive abundance absolutely terrifying.  I suppose it’s better that I know this about myself than that I not, but right now, again, I don’t have any kind of interesting take on it or feeling of repose or any sense that this is the work I have to do.  It just feels crummy.

 

Amour fou

I have a deep yearning for clunky, almost orthopedic lace-up sandals this year.  Who can explain the heart’s desires?

I fell completely in love, head over platform heels, with these:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But they cost $398.   I’m dangerously free-spending on shoes, but even I have my limits, so these won’t be mine.

I have long been enamored of these, which Amazon just restocked in my size.

 

I’ve seen these on a fashionable acquaintance, and these are not shoes that look clunky in the photo but sleek and lithe on the foot.  Nope, in person they look, if anything, even MORE orthopedic.  And yet, I still love them, and would buy them if they were $100 rather than $175 (Oh cruel e-commerce! These were available in my size this morning, but some other free-spender with niche taste has snagged them for herself.  I salute her.)

After I cleaned up 8 profuse dog accidents this weekend, I prevailed upon Daniel to buy me these.  It works out to $7 bucks per accident.  After accident #4, I would have quite gladly paid someone else much more to clean up.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s ridiculous for me to have these shoes.  I have a proliferation of sandals and they are all either 1) black; 2) brown; 3) platforms; or 4) wedges.  So of course I fell for a shoe that was all of those things at once.  If anything, I should have saved up for something trendy and tropical looking.  But I love them.

 

My Sheryl Sandberg moment (minus the billions)

Today I am thankful that I worked from home most of the day, mostly successfully.  Just about every senior and mid-level colleague of mine is across the country, several time zones away, at a big conference.  I should know more about why they are all there than I do.  So I wore jeans and spent most of the day working at home while someone fixed our landline phone.  (Yes, we still have one.)  I am doing a lot of writing, again, mostly successfully.  It feels wonderful.  And I’ve decided that more writing leads to more writing — at least in my present mindset.  Writing here doesn’t take away from writing for work, in fact the opposite. I am keeping myself open and the juices flowing.  Hmm.  This looks suspiciously like abundance over scarcity.

I may never write the post about all the lessons I learned in the year-long (slightly more), very challenging work project that I finished up a few weeks ago.  I may live them instead, which is also useful.  But one thing I do want to write about is my Sheryl Sandberg moment.

Throughout this project, my boss has made the big-deal, high profile, must-win-the-audience presentations.  That’s appropriate: he’s the major name in our field, and he’s who most audiences want to see.  Earlier this month, though, there was a pretty big event that my boss couldn’t attend, so I was the main presenter of our work.

It was tremendously freeing to travel without my boss.  I realized that in his absence, I was the carrier of his power and of our (considerable) institutional power.  And that meant that my audience’s default position was that I was correct.  Unless I said something flamingly stupid, my audience would assume I was correct.  That was a very cool feeling.

I also realized that I knew more about this project than anyone else.  I didn’t know more about our client than anyone else, but I did know more about our recommendations for the client, and the whole picture we were painting for the client.  That, too, was empowering. I was in control of the story (mostly…. but more on that in a minute).

And, finally, I realized that people don’t necessarily follow what a person says in a presentation.  They walk away with an impression — of confidence, intelligence, clarity or arrogance, insecurity, confusion.  But very few people are going to remember any statistic or detail.  They may remember two or three main points. Mostly they just remember whether they thought “that was good” or “that was a waste of time.”

And I decided to use all those realizations to my advantage.  So I ascended to the podium and gave pretty good presentation.  I had some rotten moments in Q&A when I completely flubbed a question that I knew was coming, AND flubbed a related follow-up, but I felt like the overall impression was that I was a person who knew what I was talking about and wasn’t trying to go beyond what I knew.

What I didn’t realize was that being a woman was itself a huge advantage for me in that situation.  After the presentation and Q&A, I mingled a little, which I rarely do, and women seemed to seek me out.  A very chic investment banker made a point of telling me she was impressed with the presentation.  Another woman who is really important in this community told me she was so glad to hear a woman speaking because that never happens (I believe her.  I was in a place that has a very traditional, conservative business culture, which is part of the reason that this place is falling apart.)  A darling 85-year-old philanthropist with false eyelashes as long as my pinkie finger said, “Oh my gosh, I just think you’re the smartest woman I’ve ever seen!”

I do a lot of work in places that have been battered economically over the past several decades.  The people in places can’t get over their losses, and they can’t see that their communities still have some economic strengths.  All they see is the loss.  I said to a group of women gathered around me, “This place is like a lot of professional women I see.  It can’t be forthright about acknowledging its assets.  It’s like a woman who keeps saying ‘Oh, I used to be thinner, I used to be prettier.'”  And in that moment, I felt like we had such a strong connection.

And I also realized that it was a powerful thing for me to notice about myself.  At the time, I thought that it just meant that I should put myself out there more, that I do have the ability to connect with people and that’s not nothing, and that I don’t have to apologize for what I lack.  But there’s something bigger and nicer that just emerged for me as I was writing this.  I’m starting to fear the future, and the loss of prettiness, and function, and strength, and memory, and energy and health, and people I love and possibility.   If I can tell rust belt cities that the future could be really great, even if it’s not the kind of great that the past was, and not the kind of great they once imagined, I can tell myself (and you, dear readers) the same thing.

(Really, the next post will be about shoes or something completely fluffy.)

The hard stuff

I’m not sure this is even a post.  It may be notes to myself.  I’m feeling incredibly averse to doing this — sitting here and typing and confronting the thing I can’t describe or don’t want to.  Which as always is a sign to keep going.

Friday night and most of yesterday, I was in a terrible mood.  I was feeling emotionally malnourished — that’s the gist of it.  I was physically tired and mentally tired as well, but mostly I was feeling emotionally malnourished.  Some of that is attributable to physical exhaustion and the mental weariness that comes from having worked really hard at writing at work over the past week.  But because of the meditation workshop last week, I am trying not to let that be the full explanation.  (It’s also not a practical explanation, even if it is correct, because I’m always going to be tired.)

I started thinking about how I was feeling and what was happening, and here is what I realized:

I think you have to earn happiness.  I realized this when I was feeling anxious and rushed while walking to synagogue with Milo.  I looked at a flower and recognized its loveliness, and thought (correctly): “This is being happy.  Seeing the beauty in this flower is what happiness comes down to, because everything else changes or fades or leaves.  Being happy about the flowers is something I can always have.”  Then I thought, “Wait, but that means ANYONE can have it — it’s not about how hard you work or how special you are.”

That, I am very sorry to say, was a revelation to me.  I have been two different religions, and I’ve got a tiny baby toe in the shallow end of the Buddhist pool with this meditation business, but at my very core, I am as Calvinist as they come.  My mind says that it — wealth, acclaim, health, happiness, peace, love, and understanding (what’s so funny?) –all must be earned, by dint of hard work and sacrifice and rectitude and right living.

Surprise!  The flowers don’t care what my LSAT score was, or what’s in my bank account, or how very damn hard I work to keep my house clean when no one but me seems to care but everyone benefits (or do they?).  Flowers are here for me, or not here for me.  Same with sky, breeze, tree, and strangers’ smiles.  Nothing at all earned.

I think I had a little breakdown at that realization.  If this can’t be earned, what I am working so very damn hard for?  What is my permanent state of monitoring and militarization getting me?  How am I special if I’m not working every minute at my specialness?  That’s a very destabilizing realization.  Eventually it will be freeing, and I will realize — really deeply inhabit — the fact that hard work is a good thing but whether I do or don’t, I am still special and precious and lovable.  There is an intrinsic me that is those things even if she is lazy, loses her job, eats Cheetos, and doesn’t leave the house for days on end.  I don’t believe that’s true, but I think that’s the truth I’m working towards.  I am not my hard-working-ness.  Again, I don’t believe it now, but it’s out there for me to believe.

And they kept coming, these destabilizing realizations!  When I got home from synagogue I went upstairs and sat down and just cried.  I was screaming inside my head for more love, more attention, more for ME ME ME ME ME ME, and it wasn’t coming.

I think that I have this emotional rain barrel that is nailed shut.  So no matter how much love rains down on me from Milo, Daniel, my parents, my extraordinary and exquisite friends, my colleagues, even God, that rain barrel isn’t getting filled.  Other barrels are getting filled, they are even overflowing, but this particular one isn’t getting filled, and sometimes I need exactly that one — none other will do.  (Another metaphor: this lacking thing is like a particular vitamin, like B12.  If you’re lacking in B12, getting more D, C, A, or calcium or iron won’t help.)

So my job is to pry off that lid and find a hose and fill up that well-self-beloved-ness barrel.  And oh my goodness I do not want to do that.  I want everyone else to fill it up for me.  I want Daniel to change so he fills it for me.  I want that not-baby to be real so she does.  I want my work or my tidy closet or my killer shoes or ANYTHING BUT ME to fill that up.  Because I don’t think I can fill it up.  Because I’m afraid that I might fill it up and still feel sad, lonely, vulnerable, and disappointed (that is assuredly true).  Because I’m tired and anxious and don’t want to have more work to do.

But this is one of those realizations that didn’t really leave me with much choice.  What happens next may be terrifying and destabilizing and disappointing, but the status quo isn’t tolerable, either.  I have to get into this anxiety and see if I can defuse it, like a bomb.  It might blow up.  But I think the fear of what might happen is worse that whatever will happen.  And I am betting that once I get a bit of this well-self-beloved-ness, I will be much less caught up in my own head, and less prone to screaming inside ME ME ME ME ME so much of the time, and better able to get out to others.

So I did another maitri meditation yesterday to get started.  My ailing father was the person I loved, and that was nice.  When I got to myself, being safe and being happy manifested themselves as forgiveness — forgiving myself for not getting pregnant, forgiving myself for being in a high-degree-of-difficulty marriage.  Writing this now, I realize that I’ve been mistaking self-congratulation for my accomplishments, and even appropriate appreciation of my accomplishments as well-self-belovedness.  Well-self-beloved happens when the laundry is not done, if the book isn’t written, if things are in chaos and it’s all my fault.  Again, not possible now, but it’s been named.

When I got to the difficult/challenge/enemy person, I chose Daniel because why not, and I forgave myself again for not loving him better.  And I realized that Daniel craves abundance and feels like everything is always scarce. And I do exactly the same thing, and we are really freaking each other out this way — we are anxiety amplifiers for each other.   (For me, a second child meant abundance but for him it meant scarcity, and thus I was driving towards satisfying this deep screaming need of mine, and he was feeling pushed and pushed and pushed right into the heart of one of his greatest anxieties.  Given that, we must really really love each other and be blessed because we made it through that time when our shared craving/anxiety was both amplified and irreconcilable.  I do love him.)

So the way I can better love Daniel is by manifesting abundance: there is enough money, there is enough time, there is enough sleep, and again there is enough time.  Super-duper completely not possible to do this now.  (Damn — I have a hell of a “to do later” list).  But maybe there is a moment of it that I can attain.

So for now, I’m thinking of finding abundance when I don’t think it exists.  I’m not “trying” to do this.  I like that I used the word “thinking” instead.  “Trying” gets me all wound up.  Weekends can be very anxious for me, because there is so much to be done (including relaxing and doing nothing) and the minutes fall through my fingers like balls of mercury.  Daniel and I were wound up like mad today at Target — Target is just a giant anxiety factory for me for some reason.  And the dog is having digestive trouble, and finding the zen in cleaning up after him (5 profuse accidents in 24 hours) is pretty hard.

But I did a really good thing — not of course that my value rests in doing good things.  I didn’t blame Daniel or Milo.  I realized I wanted an abundance of time, and that the only way that can happen is by an adjustment in my head, and I kind of made a partial adjustment and for a few seconds I felt better. And I can think of that again.

 

Poem for Wednesday

Today I am thankful for spring.  Really.  I grew up in a climate without much in the way of seasons.  This is the 17th spring I’ve had where I live now, and I always delight in it.  I used to resist.  It seemed so trite to like spring — spring is so easy.   I said I preferred the hard summer (in fact my favorite season, anywhere, is fall because I loved starting school and my birthday is in the fall). But really, I love spring.  It’s like loving puppies and pop songs (“Stronger” by Kelly Clarkson?  Oh yes I do love it.  Like tears-in-my-eyes-when-I-hear-it-love it)– it’s not cool, everybody does it, and that’s okay.

I do not love the transition to Daylight Savings Time, however.  I tried to find poems about DST, and settled for these two quite unsettling poems about clocks. Lifted, as usual, from the Poetry Foundation’s website:

In Time

BY GERALD STERN

As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them—

I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is

flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect

machine from 1948, at the latest,

and made of shining plastic with the numbers

sharp and clear and slightly magnified in

that heartbreaking post-war style, the cord

too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism

is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a

cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely

small and yet his tiny brain alert for

he is the one who will crow and not that broken

buzzing relic, though time is different now

and dawn is different too, you were up all night

and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting

to see what direction you should face and if

you were born in time or was it wasted and what

the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.

Source: Poetry (October 2001).

my dream about time

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

a woman unlike myself is running

down the long hall of a lifeless house

with too many windows which open on

a world she has no language for,

running and running until she reaches

at last the one and only door

which she pulls open to find each wall

is faced with clocks and as she watches

all of the clocks strike

                                             NO

Lucille Clifton, “my dream about time” from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 2000 by Lucille Clifton.  Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.

Source: The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions Ltd., 1988)

(that poem scares me.  I thought about not putting it in this post, but then felt I had to.  I put down what scares me. )

Here’s loving-kindness

I complain a lot about Daniel.  Most posts here talk about his shortcomings and the ways he is not what I would wish him to be.  But I just found out that over the weekend, he and my mother had formed a force-field of love around me, protecting me from a terrible fear about my dad.   (We believe the worst has been avoided — no need for you to be on edge.)

For well over a month, my dad has had a low-level fever and general feeling of malaise.  Antibiotics haven’t helped, rest hasn’t helped.  He’s gotten a little better, but not completely better.  My mom has kept me apprised of my dad’s progress or lack thereof, and she had told me that they were trying to see an infectious disease specialist at one of the big research hospitals in the state.  My mother’s sister works at the hospital and is utterly uninhibited about getting relatives in for the best care in the shortest amount of time, so it seemed like a reasonable step to take.  My mom is a paragon of reasonableness and the absence of drama.  She presented it as a no-drama thing, and I went along.

I didn’t know that, on Friday, she emailed Daniel and said that the doctors at the hospital were testing my dad for leukemia.  (Subsequent tests indicate that it’s very, very unlikely that he has leukemia.)

Why did she email Daniel?  Because my Daniel knows some of the best diagnosticians and cancer doctors at the best cancer care centers in the country.  Because Daniel has gotten beloved friends into clinical trials and into specialists offices and seen too many people through “cancer-land” (as he calls it).  My mom called Daniel because she needed him to deploy his expertise and his unwavering strength in times like these.  She needed to lean on someone, and he was there for her.  And his love for her is an extension of his love for me.

Apparently the two of them were emailing all weekend while I did a little yoga, some laundry, some meditation, some reading.  I worried about work, I worried about myself, I worried about money, but I didn’t think twice about whether my dad was really sick or not.  My mom asked Daniel not to tell me.  I think that was to preserve my calm, but perhaps hers, too.  I couldn’t have helped — I live too far away.   So there was no practical gain for her in telling me.  If she had told me, she’d have to worry about me and about my dad.  She didn’t want to have to parent me on this.  She needed to focus on her husband and herself.   I respect her for that.  My mom makes very clear-eyed emotional calculations.  She has a formidable amount of self-restraint, and a laser-like focus on the long game.

Today, my mom called to tell me that my dad was going to stay in the hospital tonight for tests and that they had done tests on Friday for leukemia (which she admitted was “pretty scary”), but that it appeared that  whatever he did have, it wasn’t that.

After my mom hung up, Daniel told me that she’d contacted him last week, and that he didn’t want to betray her confidence by telling me until now.

I am full of emotion.  At first, I kept saying to Daniel, “Oh you poor thing,” for having to bear that all weekend by himself.  I also feel so sorry and sad for my mom, for having to bear it all weekend.  She puts so much energy into suppressing drama that I worry that she doesn’t have a lot in reserve.  She has avoidance strength, not confrontation strength.  I can’t even imagine what my dad thought, or felt.

And now I feel like I was almost in a terrible car wreck and didn’t even know it at the time.  Or maybe I’m feeling a shadow of the things I was protected from this weekend.  Some people might be outraged at the secrecy and the implicit (explicit?) infantilization.  Maybe I’ll feel that, too, eventually.  But for now, I want to be heavily protected from my father’s mortality, and I was.  One day I will have to confront it.  Just not today.  Not today.

Internal invisible

I have spent the last hour and  a half not writing this post.  I unpainted my toe nails.  I showered and blew out my hair.  I considered whether to start a pot of chick peas for tomorrow night’s dinner.  I read my usual slate of blogs and clicked on more links than I normally do.  I am fighting the impulse right now to pop down to the basement and start another load of laundry.   So I need to write this post.

This morning I went to a three hour yoga and meditation workshop.  I signed up for this workshop in January, when I got an email alert that my favorite yoga teacher would be in town.  I didn’t read the description too carefully — I just made sure there was a Sunday session and signed up immediately.

The workshop started with meditation.  The teacher (not my favorite yoga teacher, but a special meditation teacher) walked us through a short mindfulness meditation, in which we focused on our breath and gently labelled all our thoughts “thinking” and got back to breath.  We probably meditated for about 10 minutes, and it felt like an hour.  It occurred to me that if I were ever in a situation in which I knew I had 5 minutes left to live, I would do mindfulness meditation because that 5 minutes would seem endless (that’s not really what I would do, but that was some of the “thinking” that was happening).  It was almost excruciating to concentrate like that.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the other women in the workshop (all women, save for one brave and flexible man) starting to wiggle and fidget.  I wiggled and fidgeted.   It was difficult, but bearable and instructive and I felt rather pleased with myself since meditation was one of my intentions for this year.

Then we turned to maitri or loving-kindness meditation.  Maitri meditation is a kind of 5×4 matrix.  In the practice I learned this morning, you start by thinking of someone that you love abundantly and unconditionally — or someone who loves you that way.  I thought of my beloved friend who blog readers know as “a sister.”  Then you go through the following litany of wishes, imagining what that might look like or is to that person:

• May you be safe (I imagined her and her family and her home and her car and her commuter train surrounded by a golden force field);
• May you be happy (I imagined her happy, which was very easy);
• May you be healthy (I imagined her running and playing soccer and I imagined calcium strengthening her bones and a strong heart)
• May you be at ease (I imagined her in a calm place, maybe a room with a clean white bed and green walls.)

Then you do the same for yourself, for someone about whom you feel neutral, then for an enemy or someone who is annoying you or challenging you, then for the whole world.

For the neutral person, I chose the woman sitting next to me, who had asked a question about how to do the meditation’s third step with someone you can’t forgive yet.  For the enemy, I imagined the acquaintance who is pregnant with her second child and who I would like never to see or hear about again.  And for the whole world I was kind of vague but thought of a variety of faces and people.

Here’s the upsetting thing.  When I turned to the second step, “May I be safe; May I be happy; May I be healthy; May I be at ease” I couldn’t see myself as any of those things.  My mental eye, usually so clear and imaginative, was staring into utter darkness.  I thought, “Oh, broken and busted up me,” and couldn’t get past it. I couldn’t imagine safe, or happy.  I imagined healthy well enough.  I couldn’t really imagine at ease, either.

This was news I didn’t want.  I didn’t want to know that I am empty inside to myself.  If you were to ask me, I’d say that I do feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease.  I’d say that I worry that I am too focused on myself and not nearly generous enough to Daniel because I need to make sure that I am comfortable and taken care of.  I’d say I was pretty good at self care.

But I realized that… that maybe I treat myself like a nurse treats a patient, not like a lover treats a beloved, or a parent treats a child, or a good person treats a dog.  I am well-fed, well-clothed (too well for my budget, sometimes), and well-enough-exercised.  But I may not be well-self-beloved (I bet there’s one crazy long word in German that gets that concept).

And here’s the problem with that.  Not being well-self-beloved is, I think, hindering my ability –almost completely blocking my ability — to be fully empathetic and present to Daniel.  I keep getting really upset that he’s not doing this filling-up for me and I see all his limitations, but really I’m asking him to do something that he can’t do for me.  He, by the way, does exactly the same thing with me.  His neediness is a reflection of his lack of WSB-ness.

Now, this is something I’m supposed to know.  It’s a cliche beyond cliche to say that you can’t love others without loving yourself.  But you know, you can get pretty far down the path of what looks and feels and tastes like love without being radically enamored of yourself in a healthy way.

So my new task is to be not blank to my own imagination.  I can always imagine disastrous things happening to me — that’s easy for me, I’m very good and well-practiced at it.  I have not ever cultivated the ability to imagine good or great things happening to me.  I am too terrified of disappointment to do that.  But the point is to cultivate an attitude toward myself, not to make promises of the future.  It’s still terrifying, though.  I am terrified at some level of imaging safety and happiness — what if it doesn’t look at all like what I have now?  (Happiness was supposed to be two kids, or more!) What do I do then?

But it appears that not trying to find out is in fact an absence of loving-kindness to myself.  What a terrible pity.  It’s time to take that risk.  It’s time to do the next kind of work in getting on with it.