Safety

8:00, maybe?

I use the Ink and Volt planner for work.  My friend recommended it, and I wish I felt as comfortable as he does using a professional blogs for a range of musings.  Brad Feld does that, too.   I think if you are a successful venture capitalist, you have a lot of latitude.

Each December the Ink & Volt guru sends out four worksheets, one per week, that people can use to prepare for the coming year.  I don’t pay enough attention to week 1 (looking back on successes), although I should because this was among the best years of my life.  I don’t particularly like week 2, which asks you to think about relationships and imagine the movie of your life and your legacy.  That’s probably a sign I should think harder about it.  I am just finishing several days of week 3, culminating in the theme for the year.

My theme is abundance.  As I was thinking about abundance, I associated it with expansiveness (not surprising), but also about safety.  This year I want to be safe, and I haven’t felt safe in years and years and years.  I might not even know what it really means or feels like, and I suspect I will cry for days when I find out.  But I don’t want to play it safe.  And I’m trying to work out in my head how being safe and playing it safe are opposites.  If I’m truly safe, if there’s a true place or feeling of safety and security and deep okay-ness, then I can be pretty far out there.  I can take bigger risks because not everything is riding on that outcome. I feel I’m explaining the obvious to myself.

My career is not what I would have hoped or predicted.  I look back at my 30s and most of my 40s and I see aching underperformance compared to what I know I can do now.  I was playing it safe, I was playing scared (how can those two mean the same thing?).  I would like to say that it was because I didn’t feel truly safe in my life.  Was that me, or my circumstances?  Both.  I think I have rarely felt completely safe, and a lot of my anxiety and choices derive from that.  I haven’t felt like I deserved safety and certainly didn’t feel like I could turn to others and ask them to help me feel safer.

This goes back a long long long way, to my childhood.  There was some economic anxiety when I was in elementary school through middle school and into high school (wow, that’s kind of a long time).  My parents were lovely and kind and every material need was provided for, and there were piano lessons and gymnastics lessons and plenty of good stuff, even during the anxious times.  But… but… there was a gap, a slippage, maybe, where safety should have been.  Maybe I felt safe, but only just, or it was only temporary, or I was always aware that safe was taking a whole lot of work.  Yes, that’s it.  I was safe, but safe was taking a lot of work and unsafe was always right over my shoulder so I had to work harder and harder and harder.  There was no room for slippage, no ability to let down my guard.  There was no slack.  Never ever any slack.  This is not at all what my parents thought they were giving me, but it’s what they gave me.  Poor loves.  The feeling didn’t come from them per se, or it wasn’t personal between them and me.  It was how they themselves felt, moving through the world.  No slack was how life was, or how they thought it was.  So passing on that feeling was just part of socializing me, like table manners (my table manners are not robust, my feeling of precariousness is quite robust).

There was a feeling of near scarcity.  We had enough, now, but we might not have enough later.  The opposite of abundance.

So I came into adulthood this way, and carried it along, and probably misread situations and thought there was no slack when there really was.  And then got into situations in which there actually wasn’t a lot of slack when there should have been a whole lot, and in which I was absolutely not safe or cared for.  And that’s just on the professional side.  Or maybe I misread safety as boredom because I didn’t know how to create, because I couldn’t answer the question, “What do you want to do?”  And home was not safe for me, even as I devoted my considerable (even abundant) energy to making it wondrously safe for Milo and safe for Daniel, who didn’t want the kind of safety I offered because, I suspect, it made him feel vulnerable.  I’ll never know.  Life is just twisted up and sad that way.

So, I just want to be safe, and gigantic, and abundant and expansive.  A very safe giant.  A safe, cozy, risk-taking giant.  At first thinking about being safe, and not knowing what it might feel like, made me cry.  Then I got on this giant wave and I’m feeling better.  I like the idea of being that giant.  It makes everything seem funny and possible.  I can put it on  a t-shirt.  Or find a doll-sized giant (that would be a miniature giant, and aren’t words super fun that way?) on Etsy and make it my mascot.  What, exactly, would a giant doll– not a gigantic doll, but a giant in doll form–look like?  Someone on Etsy has thought this through.  (A quick search for “giant doll” reveals that the collective Etsy needs to do more thinking.)

If I can make it play, I can do it.  I always thought unsafe was adjacent, but maybe super-safe is even closer now because it’s inside of me.  Now.

8:35

Magnificent

8:25

Things are still terrible.  On Friday, I was in tears at 9:20am in my office.  Usually tears, like drinking, wait till the end of the day. But “magnificent” has been in my head for a couple of days as a post title, and I’m sticking with it.

I am being magnificent, in my dire straits.  I am showing love. I am laughing. I am not crying all the time. I give and receive kindness. Whatever is on the other side of this awful awful time will be met by a really great me.

What’s also true: Daniel’s therapist has said that Daniel has suffered a trauma. True enough. I am going to be the person who leaves a person who has suffered a trauma. True enough. Maybe the trauma was our marriage. I come back to that. Maybe Daniel has been so unhappy all of these years because of our marriage. Maybe it was about me. Hah! That would be such an irony. Who will ever know the truth? I have written this before, but it shocks me again and again to realize that Daniel’s therapist (Dr. G) is not my ally. Dr. G. is not going to restore Daniel to me in mercy, great is his faithfulness (more hah. Daniel was never great on faithfulness). Dr. G. might confirm Daniel’s view that I am subpar, that I am the cause of his pain (I might be, by being his wife), that I am the shiny, brittle, heartless, self-serving bitch who left him after, or during, his trauma. I care enough to write it, but not much more than that, right now.

Here is what has happened. I thought Daniel and I were building a house, the house of our marriage. I kept wondering where the drafts were coming from, why the floors were tilting and walls were weeping. I became quite agitated to find and repair. And all the while, Daniel, intentionally or not, was blowing holes in the roof, introducing termites into the beams, and pouring acid onto the foundation (I’m not exactly sure how one would undermine a foundation. Faithlessly, I suppose).  And now Daniel, traumatized, says, “Dorothea, why is this house not warm and safe and dry? Why are you so wrong? What did you do? What happened?” Indeed, Daniel. What happened? I’m traumatized too, it’s just slower rolling and I’ve spent a lot more money getting to the root of it. A lot more money. And I cared to find out. Well, I cared to blame myself for years and years and years because realizing Daniel’s role was worse. Until it wasn’t.

Daniel should be married to a woman who cares nothing for cooking and laundry. Who goes to bed at 2am and sleeps till 10, and has nowhere to be till noon. I spent 3 hours in the kitchen today, cooking really nice things for lunches between now and Passover (I vastly overdid it on lentils, which I can’t eat during Passover. They’ll freeze.) I tried to show Daniel sympathy while carrying a load of towels, in my scruffy yoga clothes and desexed wool socks, hair limp and dirty.

AND I”M STILL FUCKING AWESOME AND SOMEONE IS GOING TO LOVE ME SO MUCH THAT WAY. SOMEONE IS GOING TO WANT TO EAT MY GOOD FOOD AND ADMIRE ME AND BUY ME WOOL SOCKS BECAUSE I LOVE THEM, AND FUCK ME ALL THE TIME.

I spent a couple days this week at my parents house, because a work trip took me to their city. I loved being with people I didn’t have to explain myself to. What’s weird is explaining my divorce aspirations to my Catholic mother. She’s cool with it. She asks what my plan is. I have no plan, other than the plan to divorce… eventually. First I need a steady income, and that is laughably and usefully far away.

Really, I need a miracle. I need a Deus ex Machina. I need a 3rd party intervention. I’m hustling as hard as I can here. Someone has to take the ball from me. So I keep showing up, ready whenever that person appears. Soon, please? I’m open tomorrow, for example. Tomorrow would be quite good. I’d clear my calendar, no problem. Even skip some workouts.

Wouldn’t it be great if I left Daniel and he immediately got better– stopped being depressed, lost weight, ate better, slept better, got out of bed in the morning, wrote like a demon and an angel at the same time –and everyone would love me? Including Daniel?

Here are my ethical challenges, in order of occurrence-to-me:

1. how can I stay, and tell Daniel I love him (which I do, I just don’t like him. He likes me, ish, but doesn’t love me), when I have zero wish to reconcile or continue to be his wife once we are both economically secure? Am I lying to him? This ethical problem is compounded if I have a period of unemployment during which he has to support me. Y’know, as if I am his wife or something. But it would be at least tacky, and possibly unethical for me to leave him once I got a job after 6 months on the marital dole, right? I’m finding that I don’t really super much care. I need to ask the rabbi.
2. (Because I am so good at this) how can I leave now that Daniel has told me he has suffered a trauma? I would literally be kicking him out of his house by forcing a sale to get my share of the marital assets. Wait, IT”S OUR HOUSE, MINE TOO. And if he can buy me out, I’d be delighted because I don’t want Milo to feel he’s lost his home, too. Another Deus ex Machina would be useful here, but I’m a monotheist. (Hah. I amuse myself)

Somebody is going to have to figure this out on my behalf, or at the very least (really, really the very least) shine a light on the path forward. I am getting as far as I can on my own.

Still, magnificent. Sometimes I find this situation interesting. I made it through three weeks of being out most nights, which is very hard for me, very limited workouts, and workouts are absolutely keeping me going, they are the gasoline for my engine of joy.  (Milo is the oil.  Meditation is the air. I don’t know more than that about engines.)  I spent 90 minutes touring a college campus with the (very very very young woman) to whom Daniel declared, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you… yes, yes, yes, yes, I love you” on Jan 1 of this year, and about whom he has lied to me since 2016 (there were texts he lied about, and a questionable receipt).  She’s a college student. I haven’t entirely processed that yet. I was radiant with happiness at my cousin’s wedding. People whose marriages have failed are perhaps more optimistic about the possibilities of marriage. We have high standards.

I want Daniel’s happiness as much as I want my own. The thing is, I have just started to want my own, ardently and uncompromisingly. And I have lost my patience with people — including myself!!  Mostly myself!! — who tell me it has to come later, or be eviscerated for someone else. Why is it zero sum? Why can’t we all just compromise a bit, so we are all happy enough. Daniel’s happiness can’t be built on my misery, nor can my darling Milo’s. I won’t do it. I’m a soldier now, but the tour of duty — yes! this is a tour of a duty, longer than I thought — will end.

Also, manifesto.

9:02

 

Lax

8:08

The luxury of waiting for someone else to make the next move turned to laxity and then (almost) lachrymosity. It turns out that when I am not moving the big rock up the steep hill, the rock succumbs to gravity and flattens and bruises me on the way down the slope.  I was insufficiently ambitious this week, and my mood reflects it. I’m on my second (heavily iced, in a small glass) bourbon.

So, writing again because I have goals. I make commitments. I can propel myself forward by sheer force of will. And because I find I do somewhat better emotionally when I write than when I don’t.

I miss someone to be vulnerable with. Daniel is not that person, and hasn’t been for a long time. Ironically (not the right word… tragically? Too strong. Sadly, yes, every minute of every day) Daniel has a greater tolerance for my vulnerability and fear about work than he ever has. I used to get so many lectures and corrections when I fussed or complained or expressed fear. Now, he is appropriately sympathetic and says things along the lines of, “Wow that sucks. It’s just like that.” But I can’t tell him the whole story. I can’t say, “I have to keep this job because being at my desk at work is so much nicer than being at home.” “I have to keep this job because if both of us are home all day, I will not have any respite from the distance between us nor from my desire to either close it or make it 100 times bigger.”

My shrink wants to see me 3 times a week now. I said yes. I have some money coming from my mother (“There is a condition,” she said, “You have to spend it only on yourself. So, buy a new dress, or go to yoga. But you have to spend it only on yourself.”  That reminds me of when I was in college, and my father sent me $100 to buy a new suit for a colossally important interview. He left me a photocopy of a note that my grandfather had sent my father, along with $20, when he (my father) was in college. “This will buy you a hamburger when you call home. But you have to call home.” My father and grandfather had so much more whimsy and wonder and delight to give the world than the world called forth from them. I don’t know if my grandfather suffered from it. When I knew him, he seemed wonderfully content with his life, and his adored and adoring wife. My grandparents would be so broken hearted at my own broken heart. They wouldn’t be able to comprehend what has happened to me. They would be unspeakably sad, so, so, so  sad. My grandmother might also be angry. My father has suffered greatly from having more to give the world than the world called forth, and my brother suffered because of my father and because the same thing is happening to him. I hope, when my brother has children, that he has only girls.)

So three times a week, even though I am only now coming to realize that I am not broken, except by circumstances. I am not inherently broken. I am broken hearted. There’s a difference. I’m worried about this. I don’t want to do more work on myself. It’s been five years of that — to excellent, extraordinary, unexpected effect. Massively worth it. But 3 times a week? On the couch, free associating? Really? That said, joy has been scarce, I’m sliding backwards, bruised and over-rolled, and I need help. Maybe this is help. Damn expensive, though.

Things seem both extremely possible and extremely impossible. I had lunch with a gentleman colleague today. For him, everything is possible. I found myself saying, repeatedly, “I can’t…” and he would say, “Why can’t you?” I didn’t have good answers.  This colleague founded a school for children in rough circumstances, so I am sure he has a lot of experience with people who say, “I can’t…” Under his influence and the excellent oolong tea, I fired off a few brave emails when I got back to the office. I bring up his gender because I do wonder if it’s a gender thing. This colleague is also exceptionally gifted. He is a maker of yes. I would like to be a yes-maker. (I can’t! Why can’t I?)

8:32

Larrapin

8:06

I’m not feeling particularly inspired, so let’s see what I can do with the title. My paternal grandmother had a wonderful way of speaking. She’s the only person I’ve heard say the word larrapin. (It’s in wordpress autocorrect). I thought it meant excellent generally, but apparently it’s specifically used for especially good food, Southern food, or country food. Definitely a regionalism. I miss her. Illness and age reduced her years before she died, so it’s been a long time since I experienced her grace and charm and wit.

I thought of larrapin because Ls, and I wanted to use it while I could. I’m feeling oddly relaxed. My business trip was intense and disappointing. It’s hard to get people to give me money, at least the six-figure sums I need quickly. And then the weekend was abysmal (I should use that word more often, as I have often felt at the edge of an abyss). But I had a strong rebound. Milo has been sick enough to stay home, but not sick enough to worry about, so that slowed everything down. I had the luxury of catching up on most of my email and tying up a lot of vexing loose ends.

I just made myself laugh by realizing that I’m relaxed because I feel like it’s someone else’s turn to make the next move. Someone else has to reply to my emails, or advance my work goal, or make things happen for me. I’m on the sidelines today, just helping out, pitching in where I can. I have declined an active role. Tomorrow I’ll probably shift, but it’s nice to know that this is possible, and that it feels like a tremendous luxury — which it is.

At home, well, whatever. Daniel apologized last night by phone (he was away on family business) for saying “Who could ever want to be married to you.” So that was very nice. He was in circumstances yesterday that always work to my advantage. I know what I mean by that. But it’s the same weird distance now that he’s home. I’m not bothered by it. I’m tired, buzzing a little on endorphins, and just too worn out by everything that’s happened to have the energy for change. So someone else will have to do it. But I still always have to unload the dishwasher.

8:16. meh

The door after another door

I love how WordPress has a simple icon and the word “Write” next to it at the top right of the screen.  Write — is it a suggestion, and invitation, a command?  I like it as a command right now.  If English had a distinctive imperative tense, we’d have the answer.

Without going into details, I am back to where I began this blog, in the following sense: there has been a terrifying, saddening rupture in my expectations of what the future will look like.  So, Write.  I wrote myself through the last rupture without knowing how important writing was.

Okay, a few details.  Daniel and I are NOT getting divorced, at least not now.  In fact, the thing that has happened might be the salvation of our marriage.  That is my hope.  For the foreseeable future, the family’s economic health depends on me and on our savings.  This is an unprecedented situation for me.  I might need to change jobs, trading love for security.  That’s what the spring will likely be about.

I am not feeling anything right now.  I can see the feelings, but am not feeling them.  I am opening up this space for when the feelings come.  Well, I am feeling dizzy, literally.  When I got out of bed at 5 to go to the bathroom, the room spun, and I fell hard against the side of the bed.  The spinning continued when I returned to bed, and it was intermittent throughout the morning.  The internet is of two (at least) minds whether vertigo can be stress induced.  During yoga class, it occurred to me to start writing again, and I recall having something urgent to say, a marker I wanted to lay down for myself, but I don’t remember it now.

There are some early intimations of fear.  I am terrified of having to do more, to work longer hours, to put more energy out into the world, to have more work of all kinds to do.  I can’t even talk to my beloved friends right now, although I am avidly emailing and texting, because I can’t release energy for conversation, for describing how I am doing, or how Daniel and Milo are doing.  Introverts in crisis: we need tea, a soft blanket, and Netflix.

That said, I have poured so much energy into a marriage that was not working, and that’s like pouring gasoline into a rusted-through tank.

I sound frenetic.  I don’t feel particularly frenetic, but I can see the frenzy.  I had hoped to be quieter and wise, almost vatic.  I will meet myself there.

Home

9:01

I grew up with Shawn Colvin.  Not literally.  But Fat City was released just at the start of graduate school, and it was one of the soundtracks of those years. She was singing what I wanted to feel and do.  And we had the same hair cut.  And she seemed cool, strong, insouciant– things I wanted to be but that seemed so far away.  Maybe the hair cut would fool people into thinking there were more essential similarities.

Cover Girl came out in 1994, just when I moved into my adult life.  Again, same haircut (slightly updated from the 1992 version), and a sense of optimism and energy.  And her covers were better than her originals (although looking back at the lyrics on Fat City melts my heart.)  In 1994, I now think wryly, I was trying to be a cover girl, too, trying to make other people’s material my own.  Someone who was perfect for in theory  was my date to see Shawn Colvin in concert– a mutual friend declared we were made for each other and I wanted to agree.  I was ready to close the deal on the rest of my life and end the terrible uncertainty of being 24.  He was a lovely kisser, and he broke it off with me after a few dates.  I cried at the restaurant when we saw an older couple in the parking lot (older, I reflect, might mean the age I am now), and wondered if anyone would stay with me long enough to get gray hair.

Very soon after that, Daniel and I kissed for the first time.  His hair was already, prematurely, gray.  Now mine is, more every day.  I’ve been back to that restaurant scores of times, and shed more tears in that parking lot.  Shawn and I drifted apart.  I liked A Few Small Repairs well enough, but didn’t keep up.

Tonight we went to the bookstore, which is also one of the last record stores in town, and Daniel bought me the newest Shawn Colvin, Uncovered.  It’s not very new — it was released in 2015.  More covers, and more layers of comfort.  Not just her voice, but songs I remember from when I was small (Baker Street, for example. It came out when I was 8.  I feel like I’ve known that song my whole life, but I never knew what it was called).

I’ve covered a lot of ground in this past month, and I’m not necessarily wanting to write it all down. But I’m wanting to write again.  I’m reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, who I adore (Human Voices.  Go read it right now.)  Penelope Fitzgerald published her first book, a biography, at age 60.  She wasn’t very nice some of the time, and I like reading about women like that.  Maybe if I get a haircut like hers…

I rarely listen to music anymore.  I frequently have headphones in my ears, because I’ve been feeling lonely and unsettled, and I believe that NPR was created to counter the ennui and unease of the haute bourgeoisie.  It turns out I’ve missed it.  And I’ve missed being comforted by Daniel.  This sounds like comfort and attention.

(that is one of my typical bad endings.  It’s late and I’m tired so I won’t try to fix it.  But I don’t like it. I don’t like the tone.  Too pat.  I’ll work on it.)

9:40 with distractions

Care less

8:51

I usually start with a title, but caesura doesn’t mean what I thought it meant, and I’m stalled.

My joy machinery needs repair, the wifi connection to wonder and delight is sporadic.  I am surrounded by people, and books, and work, and love, and tea, and wool socks and warm hats, and yet I imagine myself alone in a tent, out ahead of the rest and I’ve got some unspecified work to do, all by myself, for an unspecified time and an unspecified reason.  Last night, I dreamed I was stranded in Columbus Ohio, with Milo (Ohio and Milo, that’s a nice sort-of rhyme), and not sure why I was there or what the agenda was, and how we would get home, and nothing was urgent but nor was it settled.

The title just arrived.  There is insufficient care.  I wish I cared less and others, perhaps, cared more (except my dear sweet assistant, who is 4 feet 11 inches of perpetual anxiety and epic vocal fry.  I work her too hard and then wonder why she can’t lighten up.  But I am generous, so generous with compliments).  Cared more for me, and less about what I was doing, or rather not doing.

At work, I’ve just passed the point at which pent-up ability, native intelligence, new-found curiosity, and a lot of poorly remembered reading from the 1990s was sufficient.  Now I’m truly at the frontier of my own abilities to be nimble, careful, curious, present in the specific and yet capably monitoring the field — that bifocalism that leadership requires.  Surely it’s learnable, but at 46 learning hurts.  There’s no lubricity. Wait — wordpress isn’t objecting.  No way!  Lubricity is a word?!  Does it mean what I think it means?  Oh, no.  Not really.  In the neighborhood, but not the living room.  I meant there’s no juiciness in the joints, mental or physical. Just metal on metal and bone on bone.

I’m sure it will be great past this frontier.  But I’d hoped for more regular installments of joy along the way.  I remember how, after leaving school, I found it hard to describe my life to my parents.  The punctuation marks were so far between, not like tests and semesters.  This may say too much about my relationship with my parents.  We love each other a lot, it’s just non verbal.  We can talk about everything except what’s important.  But it’s our own language, and we know what we mean, and mean to each other.

And at home… oh, worn out, worn down, worn through (any more prepositions that go with worn?  worn in, yes, certainly.  worn away?  No, not yet. )  We love each other a lot, it’s just non … nonsensical? Well, yes, sometimes our relationship is nothing but nonsense, and not in the fun way.  Non-negotiable?  Yes, that too, except the negotiations about everything else seem endless, and I try to stop but sometimes I don’t know how else to fill the space and the expectation, and to get the simple information and space I need.  I write this time and time again, but Daniel is a resister by temperament, and in the current circumstances the resistance is relentless.  He is putting so much energy into doing so very little.  And I’m the one who brings balance to the force, happiness be damned.  I could care less, perhaps.  The thought amuses me.  If I care less, will someone else care more?

9:13.  Don’t love it.  Still too much inside my head.

Cooking against the apocalypse

2:26

I gave the speech I had to give last week, and it brought no particular sense of relief.  My visit to the city wasn’t satisfying to me at all.  I was brought in as The Expert, and I am not.  Rather, I’m a collector of questions and maker of connections between people who ask them and act on them.  But people prefer answers to questions, at least from people who come trailing my particular clouds of privilege and institutional credibility.  I knew I should resist, but didn’t have a good way to start, or didn’t believe in the questions enough.  So I came home disappointed and frustrated and false-feeling.  And, to be honest, a bit bruised in ego.  Part of me did want to be The Expert, and dazzle them with what I knew and what I could give them.  Then their questions quickly outstripped my knowledge and scrambled me; I stuck myself in an unsatisfying place between telling and listening.  I told more than I knew or responsibly should have.  I listened not nearly enough.  I’m so disappointed.

I could call a friend who knows what this is like and talk to her about it, but I’m scared to. I’m scared that she’ll draw more out of me than I want to give — she’s amazing and needy, and it shouldn’t surprise me that those two things go together.  I’m scared that she’ll find me fraudulent.  I’m scared she’ll turn loose her own collection of questions and I won’t have good answers.  I can decide to sit with this for a while, instead of not calling her, I’m just not calling her yet.  I think I’ll have to call her, but I have to catch my breath first.  She’s work, and I need rest.

I continue to be a stranger to rest. I spent Friday afternoon cooking against the apocalypse.   After watching the inauguration, I started on a potato kugel for Shabbat dinner, which is actually pretty easy because the food processor does the hard work.  Lots of clean-up, though.  Then I decided I really wanted lentil soup, so got that going but ended up putting in not enough water at the start and too much at the end, so the flavor is a little wan.  Then pureed some white beans with olive oil, dried sage, shallots and a few other herbs because I thought I should do something with the white beans sitting in the freezer.  That was great — shallots are vegetarian bacon, wonderful flavor bombs.   Then tahini brownies because Milo likes them and because I needed to be busy but not with my brain.  I defrosted one of the challahs from new year’s, too.  And made deviled eggs, because I do that every Shabbat.  It was marvelous, I must say, to have so much good, homemade warm food.  To unroll into richness like that.  My guys don’t care about my cooking, but I care a lot, and that’s enough.

Yesterday I took a long walk with lots and lots and lots of friends: Milo and I went to the march in our city.  Milo was comfortable among the pussy hats and uterus drawings, although the slogan “The Future is Female” hurt his feelings.  “It’s supposed to be about equality,” he said, with a mixture of righteousness and confusion.  He held my hand when we were in the crowds, but when we ran into two of his friends from school who appeared to be un-parented during the march, he pointedly ignored me. I know my job, so I kept silent and didn’t even smile too much at them.

I might neglect the laundry and take to bed for an hour.  Today has been more and more and more tending to the externals, the dog, the laundry, the breakfast cookies (Milo eats them 10 at a time).  I did yoga and bought lots of delicious, expensive, recondite teas.  Well, I believe that they will be delicious.  I know them to be expensive and recondite.  Yes, to bed now.

2:50

Falling short

8:52

I could, perhaps, stop this.  I could stop doing the thing I think I have to do next, and just sit and laugh and replenish myself.  Except… there are real deadlines, and real consequences.  The clothes I’m taking to a bat mitzvah in the suburbs will not arrange themselves into my overnight bag.  And not doing it now just means doing it later.  That’s the hard thing.  It’s not a matter of do or do not (“there is no try” … except of course there is, which is what this post is about).  It’s do now, or do later, and bear the burden of remembering and keeping between now and then so why not just do it now?  I struggle to balance the tax of doing and the tax of remembering.

I did not finish writing my speech, the speech I will give in one week.  It turns out that 6000 words is a big task for a week, or rather for the hours I gave to the task in this week.  So I’ll finish it on Monday instead of taking the holiday.  This disappoints me, but I saw it coming, a bit.  I spent extra time on my physical therapy exercises.  I chose, weirdly, to wash some makeup brushes before leaving for work.  I had no meetings on my schedule today, a completely wonderful and blank work day set aside entirely for writing, and I bruised it a bit at the start.

And once I got to work, I spent two hours on another project — hours I greatly enjoyed.  This other project is going to be a lot of fun, and will almost certainly be more important to the future of my work than the speech, or the article that I write out of the speech.  And it’s not as hard as those 6000 words.

The last 2500 words are harder going than the first 3500. I thought it would be otherwise, because I thought I was more confident in the latter material.  But I’m tired and finding myself to be just a bit auto-obstreperous.  I mean, obstreperous about my own professed goals.  Obstreperous about my tight control, my deadlines, my sense of order and duty.

Why do I have to control myself so much?  Oh here we go!  First and foremost, old habit and a houseload (yes, purposely echoes household) of conditioning.  Two houseloads, at least, and probably dozens.  The house I live in, the house I grew up in as the dutiful eldest daughter, the house Daniel grew up in as the privileged and adored son, the house my mother grew up in as the dutiful eldest daughter, the houses of my grandmothers and their mothers and….  I was taught at a young age that I needed to control myself.  That an uncontrolled me was dangerous to others and maybe not lovable.  My parents, especially my mother, weren’t trying to be ugly.  They were passing on the messages they themselves had learned and lived by.  They thought this was necessary.  Throw in boyfriends’ houses, too.  Throw in several houses of worship, both Catholic and Jewish, with deeply gendered rules and roles.

Throw in beloved Daniel.  Throw up my hands again and again and again at his manipulations and expectations and demands and sulks and instance after instance after instance of “do not” (or, to be literary, I would prefer not to)  I crave that resistance for myself, but the warp and woof of the household load is that only one of us can resist at a time.  This being not at all how Daniel sees it.  Daniel begs for me to join the resistance, by not resisting him and his pleas for stillness, for the utter lack of productive effort, for company while he sleeps, his feet heavy and confining on my lap while I… wile away the hours? No, while I wonder why Daniel believes himself to be so fascinating that even in sleep he is worthy of my undivided attention.

And maybe it would be different if I could fall into Shabbat as I usually do — a sprint through the cooking, and then done.  Resistance to rest is futile or and resistance to productive work is required.  I can get with that.  But no… This Shabbat is a marathon of sociability.  We love the family celebrating this Bat Mitzvah, we really do.  We love our friends who absconded to the suburbs and who we rarely see anymore, we really do.  What I really do not love is 25+ hours in which I am either asleep or surrounded by people and bright and chipper and charming and correct (in observance) and on.  And not asleep nearly enough.  Services, then speeches, then lunch, then a special women-only service so girls and women can read the Torah.  Opinions differ, but this synagogue follows  the mainstream interpretation that women can’t read the Torah in the presence of 10 or more men — a quorum for prayer.  Then more stuff and stuff and stuff.  No privacy, no nap, no mystery novel, no yoga stretches, no respite for the introvert.  I could try to walk around the block, but an ice storm is predicted.  An ice storm for pete’s sake (who was Pete, by the way?  St. Peter, maybe?  The first few Google hits are unsatisfying.)  Resistance is futile.  Crankiness is inevitable.

9:30, with some goofing off.

Again

9:37

My knees forgot how to work fluidly as I climbed up the stairs.  I laughed at this preview of things to come.  It’s funny for now.  It will be wretched when it’s an every day thing, and then it will get worse.

My grandmother is dying.  Not officially — there is no vigil, no named number of days. But she’s in the hospital again after another fall.  When she fell last spring, the resulting hospitalization triggered psychosis and paranoia, which is apparently not uncommon in the elderly.  For months she believed that “the society” was coming to kill her.  She never felt safe.  She didn’t always recognize her children, and sometimes thought that they were threats.  Eventually she got the right dosage of an anti-psychotic, stabilized, and was weaned off the medications.  She’s back on them now, preventively, during this hospitalization.  But she’s combative, and can’t be moved into a rehab center until she calms down.  Each day she’s in the hospital she weakens — as do all elderly people in the hospital.  And it doesn’t do anything good for her emotional state either.  So she’s in a place that will make her worse until she gets better enough to go to the place that will make her more better, a rehab center.

She has to go to rehab to regain confidence that she can stand up long enough to move from wheelchair to toilet. That’s the goal of rehab, a respite from sitting in her own waste.  The merest scrap of dignity.

I tell myself that all the yoga and walking and eating and climbing stairs and hard physical training will keep me from this fate in 50 years.  I ignore the fact that my grandmother was herself pretty active, physically and mentally, until she started falling and falling and falling.  She will die of gravity.

***

The “again” in the title was meant to indicate me being back at work, after more than a week off.  I’d like another week off, please.  A more restful one.  But I don’t get that.  What I have instead is: again the feeling of being shot out of cannon, which is kind of fun, the flying aspect, but loud and you land hard.  Again the feeling of accomplishing so much more in each day than I ever did before, and still having it not be quite enough.  The next three months will be ridiculous and barely tolerable.  They will make a mockery of intentions & challenges, although it is day 3 of no alcohol, and so far so good.  It makes me wonder if there’s more of a kick to my Bach’s Flower Essence sleep aid than I know.

And yet, I still feel myself being curious. I still notice myself noticing and wondering.  I had a whole new set of minor challenges or opportunities for awareness in my head when I got off the bus this evening.  One of them is: notice how I present myself.  I tend to lead with wackiness or weakness — the preferred self-preservation tool of the mid-1980s smart girl.  It’s not the mid-1980s.  I’m not a girl.  I don’t have to do that.  I can start by noticing how often I do that, and perhaps deciding not to keep doing it.  I may choose to be a little quieter about my interior state, at least out there.

***

I have a new way to think about the main character in my novel.  In movies, she’s the wife you see in the background, the one who gets left about 10 minutes in, as the husband embarks on the odyssey that becomes the subject of the movie.  What would happen if the camera lingered on her longer?  That’s the novel.

Okay fine, that’s also Colm Toibin’s oeuvre, that is in fact the whole damn point of Middlemarch and maybe no one needs me to write that.  But I might need me to write that.  There might be something I don’t know about her that needs finding out.

10:05