Dear young man

who was hurrying behind me on the subway escalator this morning, who stayed uncomfortably close behind, no matter how much I sped up, until I moved over to the right, where the slow people go (or stay), after which you deftly sped down the rest of the way, light as a young Fred Astaire, hurried but unworried:

I was burdened by things I was carrying, in my hands, on my shoulders, in my head.  Perhaps I was invisible in my obscuring winter gear, which was necessary at 7am, but foolishly out of date by 8:30 when you were on my heels.  And I am afraid of falling down the steep, dim, mechanical stairs with mean teeth.  I’ve always been a little afraid of falling down, haunted by a recurring dream of being stranded and terrified on fast, wide elevators that won’t let me go.  I fell on sidewalk ice a few days ago, a rude, brutal shove from mortality, and I can’t forget it.

One day, it might be you.  Unfashionable, invisible, burdened, and scared of falling, bruised already from old falls.  So please consider breaking your elegant pattering stride, and waiting while we gather ourselves and move to where the tepid and inconvenient people go (or stay).  And when one day it is you, we’ll be gracious and invite you to stay.

Almost Rosh Hashanah

Usually, I race into the holidays, and don’t stop to notice that I am in them until, well I am in them.  And I regret that, but that regret doesn’t usually last 48 weeks, which would be how long it would need to last to get me to prepare, mentally, spiritually, psychologically for the next year.  But this year, Tablet is running a “pre-pent” series.  Like so many things in this vein, it seems squirrelly and superficial, and like so many things in this vein, it is surprisingly useful and powerful — if for no other reason than every day I remind myself that the holidays are coming, whether or not I follow the recommended daily step. Also, I’ve been slowed down this week, feeling on the verge of sickness, and feeling myself wind down and turn inward.  (Sister: inward or inwards?  Other grammarians, weigh in!)

And perhaps most importantly, for the past several weeks (4? 5?) I’ve been meditating for 20 minutes a day, per this book.  The book sets out meditation as a pre-first step.  It’s going to take me a long time to move through the steps, but this meditation business is a great thing.  I don’t necessarily regret that, intentions aside, it has taken me such a long time to come to meditation.  I wasn’t ready, so it wasn’t happening.  But now I seem to be.  The effects are subtle, but at the same time very powerful.  Without meaning to, I am eating more slowly and savoring my food.  I think I’m drinking less.  When I was on a long-delayed flight that would get me home at 3am, after a long business trip, during a very stressful time, I focused on breath and found it almost intoxicating and sensual and very soothing — I had a very relaxing flight.  I’m able to manage my moods a little — not a lot, not all the time, but I can  sometimes get some space between myself and my anger or fear, and sometimes can let go of it.  Anger and fear usefully come back to give me more practice at observing and letting go.

Anyway, because of a combination of all of these things, when I started cooking Shabbat dinner tonight, I felt excited about the holidays, like I was getting ready to step into a period of genuine reflection, and not just travel and drama and stress.  I have a new book on meditation in the holidays, with the best title ever: “This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.”  My work calendar is more or  less cleared, or at least arranged to accommodate the holidays.  At least I think it is.  Events might prove otherwise.

I might not open my well-titled book.  I might find Rosh Hashanah completely unbearable.  It will be the first holiday since Daniel’s mother’s death, and my explorations of meditation and the intersection of Buddhism and Jewishness may be radically out of step with the vibe around me.  But for now, for right now, this feeling is giving me great comfort.  For right now, I am feeling really great that I am finding a path into Judaism that is totally not what Daniel would do, or what my own synagogue would recommend or perhaps even countenance.  I am not beating myself up about not preparing in a traditional way.  I am instead very grateful that I have found a way that speaks to me as I am now.  I am so grateful that I’m moving towards this with curiosity and eagerness, not duty.  It’s not a stretch, and I’ve always thought religion needed to be a big stretch and hard work, that opening one’s heart had to be like cracking open a safe.

I am in a strange and rare place of peace — maybe just for today, maybe for a few days.  I’m mentally turning away from work, for the holidays and out of deep exhaustion.  Stuff that would normally send me into a tizzy now seems just like another thing to observe and watch unfold.  I don’t want to exaggerate — I’m still prone to impatience with Milo and Daniel and their refusal to clean up after themselves.  I feel more anger and frustration than sympathy towards Daniel of late.  But I don’t have the energy to castigate myself about it.  That’s how I’m being now. I hope to be different later.  But perhaps not castigating myself is a way to wean myself from castigating (silently but ardently, in my head) Daniel.  It sounds self serving.  But maybe I need to serve myself a little.

So this is where I am, on the last Shabbat of 5773, and I wanted to come here to see what I think about it.  I wonder if I will recognize this place at the end of 5774.

 

Intentions check in 2012

In the opening days of this year, I wrote two posts about my intentions for 2012.  I did a check in post in February, and then forgot about the intentions until about 24 hours ago, when I realized, in the calm of my parents’ house, away from all my daily obligations and ceaseless motion, that intention setting seemed to work very well for me.  Of course, I have no idea right now what my intentions are for 2013, and I’m a little intimidated by the prospect of setting intentions now that I’ve seen how well 2012’s worked out — I worry about setting the wrong ones and missing opportunities.  But that is a worry for next week, a project for the flight home.

For now, I’m going to do what I rarely do, which is take stock of some good stuff and think about how it might have happened so that perhaps it can happen again. So here is my original list of intentions, and the follow up of how they manifested themselves throughout this year.

1. Don’t fight lucky strangers.  In other words, don’t get unmoored when someone else turns up pregnant.  This is still, forever, a long term project. Even a few weeks ago, I was very reluctant to have dinner with the woman who I wrote about in these posts.   This will always be a work in progress for me. I think I’m better able to weather these storms than last year — at least until another storm unmoors me.

2. Continue to be brave. I am being brave. I am writing a book (more on that below) and am being brave that way.  I am being brave in my relationship with Daniel, and blessedly it doesn’t feel so much like being brave, it feels more like doing what I want to do.  It’s nice to think that perhaps bravery is becoming a way of life.  The more I think about it, the more places I choose to see it, especially if I expand the definition to include things like being more self-directed about my time and money, and therefore taking an extra hour out of my work day to go to yoga, and taking control of long-delayed house expenditures and saving up the money to pay for them. That may not be what others call brave, but I’m (bravely?) defining it that way because it all seems to be of a piece.  (See also “take up space” below.)

3. Corollary to #2: Be present in what I have, and balance that with staying open and welcoming miracles. Well, this year has been more about the first part of that, being present in what I have.  I am skeptical and sore about miracles, and I’m okay with that.  I have enjoyed more paintings in the sky, more flowers, more deep breaths, more beautiful faces, more excellent food, more spontaneous pleasures than I have before. Lisa at Privilege wrote something about this yesterday (or so) that resonated: “But most any time I get melancholy I can startle myself into a tiny rapture by paying attention. I find my way forward most often via a conscious waiting for the sadness to pass through, and a parallel close observation of exactly what’s right there.”

4. Write a book. Yes! Yes I am writing a book.  I wrote 25,000 publishable words this year.  I wrote many many more unpublishable words, or words unpublishable in their current order.  But holy crumbs — that’s three really solid, well-footnoted, lucidly laid out chapters, plus most of the interviews done for the fourth.  My co-author has been much busier with other things and therefore less diligent, but I think we’ll have a book by May.  A book I said, a book!  I did not think I could do this.  I did not think this would happen. But it has, and it has because I made it happen.  I took control of my time, and I wrote paragraph after paragraph knowing that these weren’t the right paragraphs but I could only get to the right paragraphs by going through the wrong paragraphs.  I have learned an enormous amount. I have taught others an enormous amount.  I taught myself how to write a book.  I finally feel like I know how to work — after 18 years in the workforce.  I finally understand how to take the next steps, I finally can draw on all this stored up knowledge I’ve been gathering.  I could go on and on about this.  Writing this book this year has been a huge milestone for me, a tremendous step forward.  Hooray for me.

Someone read one of my chapters and asked “Is fiction in your future?”  I have ideas for 3 novels.  This writing stuff is pretty addictive. 

5. Meditate for 10-15 minutes a day at work.  Um no.  This didn’t work out.  I have a deep respect for meditation, and it does great things for me, but I am not open now to making it a regular practice in this way.  I don’t know why, but I recognize that I am not putting any energy into making it happen.

That said, I do a quick review/intention-setting/check-in every morning.  I read about it in a Yoga Journal article which isn’t available online, but the book from which the practice is taken is here.  This practice has had a profound effect on me.  I chose to focus on four intentions in it: forgiveness, compassion, fearlessness and prudence.  My marriage has improved beyond what I could have hoped, and I am certain it is because I am keeping forgiveness and compassion in my brain.  I don’t always practice it perfectly, and Daniel and I had some horrific fights this year, but I am getting beyond some old, bad stuff.  Daniel seems different to me, and maybe he’s got his own practice of some kind of thing going on, but I think the difference is me and my eyes to see him.

Sometime this year, Sister was telling me that her marriage just got itself to a better place, and I thought, “That is simply impossible, I can’t do that, we can’t do that.”  But we have, for now, and I believe it started when I started to do this very simple morning intention practice, which doesn’t even require me to sit up before I get out of bed.

6. Be harder on my body.  This has worked.  I am taking 3-4 yoga classes a week most weeks.  I tried other practices, even running again, but the answer to the limits of yoga was… more yoga!  Practicing alone isn’t the same as being in class with a great teacher.  And practicing several times a week is much more effective at keeping me open than practicing once a week.  I didn’t understand how much I was closing up between classes until I no longer had time to close up.  This is all yoga-speak here, but I had been practicing for almost 15 years without having a good understanding of my midline and how to pull in around it and use it for balance.  I couldn’t access my core very well, or open up my back, and now I can.  I can’t do all the dazzling poses, and that’s okay.  I can get so much more out of basic poses now.

7. Take up space.  This is happening as well, not necessarily because of conscious effort, but because of greater comfort with exercising force in the world in terms of my use of my time and my money — which are the force-making tools that are most readily accessible to me right now.

8. Move to France. In other words, buy more nice underwear.  Yes to that, although it’s been erratic.  I’ve also spent much more on accessories, and less on clothes (maybe — I haven’t done the math and am a bit scared to) this year than in the past and am loving how well it’s worked out.  This post is already overlong, so I won’t go into much detail, but I do feel like I’ve finally nailed down what I want to look like and am sticking to it.  (Short version: Like this — a revelation!, and like this.  Slightly longer version: Tomboy – 1/2 (JCrew/Preppy) + 2x French.)  To say nothing of a huge surge in skincare spending and experimentation.  (As the book writing has become more intense and stressful, I am almost compulsively buying new oils, unguents, and balms.)  It all feels very French to me!

9. Date again. (Daniel — go on dates with Daniel) Um, no.  Not yet.  We had a good run of parties and events throughout December, but I can’t pretend that this has been a success.

10. Let Daniel have his own feelings, even if they make me uncomfortable.  See 5, above.   I am probably not doing better at this, but it seems less pressing.  I am putting less stress and less anxiety on/into our marriage, so perhaps it’s easier to step back and let Daniel feel as he feels.  He just seems so much easier to live with of late, and I’m pretty sure he’s the same as ever, it’s just that I’m not making it harder.  I do find myself trying — often too late — to do things differently when we are having a version of our standard fights.

11.  Give money to Yoga Activist. Yes — as of about 10 days ago.  I got a solicitation email and realized that they had set up an automatic donation system, so I am giving them the bare minimum each month to be a “member.”  This was purely fortuitous, because I was steadfastly ignoring my calendar reminder.

12.  Learn to poach an egg.  I did this very early on, then realized that I prefer fried.

I wish all my dear readers (if I have any left) every merriment, happiness, and celebration.

 

A neat street

(With apologies to Mr. Plumbean)

When I walk the dog at night, I look into my neighbors’ uncurtained windows and see what’s on their TV screens.  It’s not really peeking if there aren’t curtains, right?  Tonight there were probably ten TVs tuned to the presidential debate, and only one to the baseball game.  I love that about where I live.

I saw this jack-o-lantern on the way home, and I love that, too.

Hello again

So.  Hello again.  I’ve been thinking about blogging.  I didn’t intend for that last post to be the end, but it did have a nice, round finality to it.  But now, sitting here after some three and a half months away, I realize that the point of the blog was that infertility and that particular loss would not have final word.

And I’ve been reading this book (the link is actually to the author’s TED talk — the book is a mighty hill to climb.  As my beloved Sister would say, you’ve got to really hate the Romans…) as research for the book I’m writing.  The book talks about all of the stuff that people are creating online for free and lifts up all this free creation as having moral and philosophical importance.  We are impelled by a need to create and share, whether for grand motives or base ones.  So, here I am again.

And what do I have to say after all these weeks?  Oh, not so much.  Only that, I do not look like this:

(Photo: New York Times)

But that is, I think, the direction in which I would like my look to go.  These shoes notwithstanding.

More and less

Today I am thankful for returning to this blog, however sporadically.  There is so much I could write about.  We have just returned from an amazing, amazing vacation, and vacations are always very refreshing for my relationship with Daniel.  For the first time in a long time, I didn’t perceive a chasm between the person I am on vacation and the person I am at home.  It was lovely not to feel the anxiety of wondering how I would incorporate the vacation me into the daily life me once I got back.  Of course there are small behaviors from vacation that I would like to carry over, but I didn’t feel as divided as I usually do.  I am very, very pleased about that.  I am deeply grateful that I am in a position to feel more myself to myself more of the time.  I feel generally like I am growing back into my capacities and optimism.  I’ve signed up for a language class — the kind of thing I never would have done a few months ago.  I would have deemed it impossible.  Now it seems not only possible but logical.

I’ve also started a new meditation practice in the morning, per the recommendations in June’s Yoga Journal magazine (no link, sadly. YJ is pretty protective of its content).  As always when I start some new form of meditation, a lot of anxiety comes up, but I’d rather know about it and face it than not (most of the time).

What brought me back to the blog was the itch of awareness that the anniversary week is coming up.  And the follow-on awareness that some of my anxiety is tied to that — this memory that comes to my body and psyche before it comes to my consciousness.  Yesterday, Daniel and I were talking and he was reflecting on some excellent and much longed-for developments that have happened in his professional life — a very big improvement that he’s been waiting for and fighting for for a decade.  And as he was sharing his happiness with me, I found myself feeling resentful and withdrawing.  I was upset that he’s getting what he has so longed for, that his life is approaching the possible perfection (that is the perfection that is possible in a life — the closest realization of the ideal that an imperfect world permits) while I feel mine never will.  There will always be this absence, this hole.

Later, during yoga class (restoratives — always a place where stuff will come up), I felt the purest and most intense sadness I’ve felt yet. Thankfully, it was very short, but it was unadulterated.  It wasn’t mixed with envy at what other women have, or resentment at Daniel, or unforgiveness, or comparisons.  It was just a deep sadness, and deep longing.  I was so sad that my second baby wasn’t here for all this good stuff.  I had wanted her to be born because I knew we would get to this good stuff — Daniel never had that faith.  Of course, one could argue, with the wisdom gained from several Star Trek episodes, that there’s no universe in which both this good stuff and that second baby exist simultaneously.  Changing one thing changes everything else.  But at that moment, I just missed that baby so damn much.  I just missed her.

So, in most ways, almost two years out, the pain of what didn’t happen, the pain of non-gain-that-feels-like-loss is much less, and the joy and fullness and depth of appreciation and human experience from what I have learned from this experience is huge.  But in other blessedly infrequent ways, it hurts even more. I am sad not only for what I am missing (and Daniel and Milo, too).  I am so very sad for what that baby who never was is missing.

Reply to all

Dear, dear wonderful commenters,

Thank you for your kind and reassuring words, your torrential rain of kindness when I was in a desert of my own making.  You don’t know how important it is to me to know you are there, and that you understand what I’m trying to do and that you support me all the way through it.  Even though I post very infrequently now, this blog means a lot to me because of all of you.

It’s now only 10 days since my spasm of shame and sadness, and things are much much better.  The things that I was extremely anxious about and busy with in my domestic life, which were sapping my reserves of resilience, were completed wonderfully and with much joy for all concerned.  I got through a business trip and some ridiculous work drama (ongoing, but I’m about to leave the country for 10 days, so I’m literally getting a lot of distance on it).

And most importantly, I’m working on forgiveness.  The events that upended me sparked a tremendous fight (row — that’s for you, Sister) with Daniel, in which he said, “You blame me.  You blame me because we didn’t have a second child.  You’ll never forgive me.”  At the time, mid-fight, I thought, “Of course I do, and of course I won’t because that’s what happened and I am correct.”  And then I realized that I needed to be able to forgive, even though I didn’t want to.  I didn’t think he deserved it, or had earned it (!) or that I could do it.  So I prayed about it.  Some people pray for forgiveness.  I prayed for the ability to forgive.

And I bought some books to support my intention.  I’m about a third of the way through this one, and have turned down dozens of pages because I found them important or moving.  I was so nervous about ordering books without seeing them first, because I was feeling vulnerable (I still am, or will, once I turn back to the subject).  But this book is very gentle.  I particularly like how it reassures the reader that whatever is hurting her really hurts.  It’s valid, even if it’s not as traumatic as what happened to some of the people whose stories are in the book. At one point, the authors write something like, “You were there, you know what you felt, and you know you were hurt.”  For someone like me, who suffers grievously from comparison poisoning, reading this was a balm.  The authors say what I knew intellectually but could never act on, which is that one forgives for one’s own benefit.  It’s a gift to oneself, not to the unforgiven person.  (It’s also that, but unforgiven people have a way of going about their merry, unforgiven way while the hurt people fume and stew.)

So things are better.  I’m tired and wrapped up in getting everything together before our trip abroad, during which I won’t be blogging.  But I wanted my dear, dear commenters to know how much you helped and how grateful I am.  You gave me steadiness when I couldn’t provide my own.

When the universe is in on the joke

(Only frenzied people do three posts in 7 hours.  I get that.)

Daniel and I went to a big lively cocktail party this evening.  The first person we said hello to was a friend we haven’t seen in years.  The first words out of his mouth: “Hey, how many kids do y’all have now?”

Even I, in my utterly crazed state, realize that this is funny.

I drank rather more than was wise at this cocktail party.

Un-everything

I want to un-publish, un-send, un-write, and un-feel all of that last post.  Other people’s happiness makes me sad?  I am ashamed.  I am also ashamed of where I am in my career, and ashamed that I am ashamed.  I want to write my way into a place where I can be sure you think well of me, and not poorly because of what I just wrote.

In short, I am in a giant spiral of freak-out.  Can you imagine what I’d be like if I hadn’t been doing yoga 3 days a week for the last month?  Daniel says he can tell I am in frenzy because of the way I walk from room to room (which makes it very hard to walk normally in his presence.  Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks comes to mind, but I’m too frenzied to pause to find the link.)

I will get through this.  The things that are really stressing me out are good things.  Nothing bad is happening to me or to anyone I love — in fact, there’s a surfeit of good things.  I’m just finding it challenging to manage the details of those good things.  I am starting to feel tugs of shame for not being able to manage the details of the good things, but that’s just gratuitous spinning into the freak-out, and I will resist.  I will find my center again.  I am grateful for this space and for your patience while I do that.

Trying to stand tall in a stiff wind

Warning: This is one of those yucky inside-my-mind posts in which I reveal my worst and smallest self.  I’m not erasing it because of my feelings about blogging honestly, but I’m not feeling good about it.  I ought not be blogging at work, but I can either think about this blog post and not work, or write this blog post and not work, and maybe if I do the latter, I can salvage more of the afternoon.

So… on Friday P, the woman I wrote about in this post,  delivered a lovely, perfect baby.  I started my career as a writer, wish I wrote more, and am struggling terribly to write a book that I believe will be widely ignored.  P’s first book won a major award.  I work on policy issues that I hope may make a difference.  She works on policy issues and her work has quite demonstrably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives.  When Daniel and I struggled to become pregnant, he resisted strongly because of his age — “I don’t want to be driving carpool when I’m 70!” he would say.  Her husband is roughly Daniel’s age, and although he’s not the sort to drive carpool, could be doing so at age 70 because he just couldn’t tell his wife no when she wanted a second child. 

I know that comparisons are rotten, but boy oh boy, the divergence here is challenging, very challenging indeed.  Every point at which I feel vulnerable, she looks very very strong — every single one.  I’m struggling.  I wish I weren’t, but I am.  I thought I was doing okay.  I had a good reckoning with myself this afternoon on the way to one of my sanity-saving lunchtime yoga classes.  I said to myself, “Okay, P’s life is not going to change to suit your emotional needs.  The only thing you can do is make your own life better.  You are in charge of that.  If you are bummed about writing, well, act.  If you want to write a great book, then make that happen.  That’s your field of action, so act.”

That’s great advice, right? And I gave myself other great advice too, this weekend and today, when I was sliding toward despair.  I thought, pitifully, “I don’t know where to start.”  And I answered myself: “Start from where you are.”  So Zen!  So meditative! So correct!

Then, just a few minutes ago, one of my closest friends just told me via email that his wife will have their 3rd child late this year.  (One of my other closest friends will have her second in the fall.  Thus, of the four friends I hold dearest in the universe, half are expecting.  All have or will have more than one child.) I expected this news, because I’d seen my friend and his wife a few months ago and thought something was up.  But my friend was lamenting how hard it is to get any work done, and how he’s trying to get a burst of writing completed before the new baby comes. 

And that is a hell of a stiff wind in which to keep my steady footing, dear readers.  Why?  Because I have neither the family I had dreamed of (although my family is a dream… Milo especially lately, and Daniel and I are getting there — terrible quarrels but some valuable reconciliations) nor the career I had hoped.  P looks to me to have both, which is to say, to have everything.  My dear friend has very clearly made a tradeoff, choking off some professional ambitions in order to have a robust family life in which he is very, very engaged, so he has one but not the other.  I feel like I’ve lost on both counts.  I can’t look at my career and say, “I’m am doing so well here, and it takes so much energy.  I couldn’t be such an ass-kicker, I couldn’t be flourishing so much here if I had the family I thought I would have, so it’s balanced out.”

That’s what’s got me wrapped around the axle here — the feeling that I’ve fallen short on both home and work fronts.  One I can’t do anything about at all.  The other I ostensibly should be able to correct, but just at the moment I’m feeling powerless to do so.  Work feels like a dead-end, a bog, a hole I can’t lift myself out of. 

It seemed better, when I started this post, to let the feelings of sadness and inadequacy out, to give them this semi-public airing.  I am ashamed to feel this way.  I have so much to be grateful for.  I had promised God I wouldn’t do this anymore.  (Long story — last week Milo was playing in such a way that he could easily, easily have been hit and killed by a car.  I wasn’t paying close enough attention.  I could have lost Milo, and it would have been my fault.  I thanked God vigorously that this didn’t happen, and told God that it was very clear to me that He had not forgotten or abandoned me, but was in fact taking excellent care of me.)

So this is just me being sad and small and ashamed, and wishing I could be big and generous — not just to others but even to my sad and small self.   My astrological sign (which I’m not supposed to care about) is Libra, and I am forever trying to balance the scales in situations in which it’s not at all appropriate or kind to myself or others.  Daniel is ferocious in trying to extirpate this bad habit of mine, which makes me even more ashamed and which makes it harder to work it out and eventually let go of it.  So I turn to my patient and trusted readers.  I am sorry, I am sad, I am ashamed.