Perception

9:11

I thought I had something to say… I think I feel better, physically, when I write, also when I exercise a lot.  I’ve had a stomach ache for days. I kept trying to tell myself it was purely physical, purely about the dietary whiplash of Passover, or too much chewing gum with  artificial sweetener, or harsh unfiltered water (which actually does hurt my stomach — I’m unusually sensitive to water).  But once I considered that it might be emotional, that my body might be having the very hard time that my mind refuses to acknowledge, then I felt better.

Sometimes pain just wants to be noticed and acknowledged, a delivery signed for, even if you don’t open the package just yet.  I suppose.

I am so fearful of feeling worse.  I am so fearful of the devastation I’m trying not to recognize.  My therapist (now a 3 day a week part of my life because if not now, really, when?) suggests that the devastation might not be so bad.  What has gotten into her these days?  Per my previous post, we are considering whether I’ve actually been quietly and unacknowledgedly (where’s the adverbial form when you need it?), devastated for years, and am just now… now that it’s fucking undeniable on these important and long-fragile fronts (I had typed most important, but most important is my relationship with Milo and with my body… so many parentheticals.  I’m baaack.).  Anyway, devastated for years and just now have the external wreckage to match the long-standing internal wreckage.  And am finding it’s both worse and not as bad as I thought.  Worse, in that my stomach hurts all the time, or did.  Worse in that… what if there is not another job that’s good, and not another life that is good.  Not as bad in that I can conceive that it’s not my fault, entirely, that sometimes things happen and all the good-behavior-as-incantation-and-magic-spell doesn’t ward it off.  Not as bad in that there is still breath and yoga and laughter and sleep and friends now more than ever.  Not as bad in that I see how strong I am, so I can also be weak.  Not even sure what I mean by that last part but it makes sense, even though it sounds like something you’d find on an inspirational pinterest board.

I had something else to say… not sure where it went.  I’ll come back tomorrow for it.  Good to write again, even badly.

9:25

Patience

3:02

I imagine that I am more fit, and more versatile-y fit than I am.  Yesterday’s yoga class — nothing fancy, standard-issue vinyasa, which I have largely replaced with pilates or core-based yoga — reminded me of my age.  I was out of breath and clumsy, then sore this morning.  Then today, I did a ropes course with Milo, and found it very hard.  I think of myself as more fit than most people — so who does these courses?  Maybe I’m not more fit than most people.  Maybe this is what it is to be 47 and doing the best I can, which will always mean falling just a little bit behind where I was last year, and well behind where I am in my mind (perpetually 27).

The rabbi was sympathetic, but not exactly comforting.  He keeps redefining the problem away from forgiveness.  “It’s just a word.  What you want is a different kind of relationship.”  My favorite: “Have you thought about demanding?”  Hah!  I have thought about demanding a lot.  I have not implemented demanding, for reasons I’ve written about.

Daniel isn’t really speaking to me, still.  Could I demand a response?  The last time I demanded something (that he unpack his suitcase six weeks after a trip “like an adult”), he ended up crying, almost threw something at me, said I was inadequate and asked, “Who could possibly want to be married to you?”  So, I’m not feeling very demand-driven.

Milo has a hard time being with both of us at the same time.  He’s tired of the fighting.  He wants us to be “not a f*cked up family.”  Could he demand it?  What would that look like?

Talking to the rabbi made me see more clearly how much power I’ve squandered, ceded, given away, ignored, declaimed.  What’s the reclamation process?  Is it staying patient (I figured I get there eventually) until Daniel decides I’m worth talking to?  What a terrible thing?  Living without waiting, I suppose.  Living like it doesn’t matter much to me one way or the other — how sad.  I love to talk to Daniel, when we really talk.

Do others fool themselves that divorce will improve their relationship?  That is my favorite fantasy right now.   It seems much more realistic than recovering goodness within the marriage. That is so sad.

3:13

Multitudes

8:54

As in, “I Contain Multitudes.” I’ve never read the poem, actually, and when I googled “I Contain Multitudes” the top hits were for a book about microbes in the human body, which is an excellent title for the subject.

What I do not contain is job security. The grant that I thought would turn everything around will, like the two other turn-everything-around grants before it, will come in small, or late, or not at all. It will not come in now, so I am much closer to the end of my run in the best job I have ever had, which is the best fit and brings out the best in me. I have an important call tomorrow — that call is really the last turn-everything-around possibility. And I’m probably going to stay up ridiculously late to watch the Oscars.

Last night, when I found out after Shabbat that the grant was not going to come through, I was angry. I was angry this morning at Daniel (various reasons, some justified: I thought he woke me up at 2am to move the dog from my bed to his. He denies this. He says he was just moved to kiss me when he came home. Sadly, he lacks this enthusiasm during, say, daylight hours.) But during yoga this morning, I stopped being angry because there’s no benefit, there’s no joy in it, and I need joy and joy and joy and joy. Something just happened, and something else will happen. I believe that I will have a job at the end of 2018. I believe that, if I have a period of unemployment, it will be manageable, even if it drains all my savings. It’s only money.

Today I got a pedicure with a friend, and she told me how much she earned at her old job, and what she earns now. I feel like we are sisters after this. It was a beautiful experience. She made me laugh till I almost cried (not when we talked about money, when we talked about Passover). I have her, and many other friends, so it’s going to be okay. It’s just information, just experience, just another step on the way to the next kind of thing.

So, I am weirdly happy. I was angry, then shut down, then happy. I’ll go through this cycle many more times. But now I’ll just be happy & watch the Oscars.

9:11

Later

(Ls are easy)

8:22

It got better. It always does, just not on demand. This time, it was yoga class that saved me, that took my mind enough away to escape the destructive loop it was in. Then I threw myself into cooking for Milo, who has a cold that he’s taking a little too seriously. He needs a break.

And I found a friend, who is herself divorcing, and talked to her. And I had an honest, excruciating conversation with Daniel, and he didn’t yell. He got snippy at the end, and he wasn’t kind, but he was honest and didn’t yell. I told him that this was a conversation between two people who were very hurt but had some kind of relationship going and wanted to go forward. He thought we already were those people.

I told my friend that Daniel and I are on different planets, and on our own planet, we are perfectly justified, and there is no bridge between our worlds. I’m reading Left Hand of Darkness now, hence the science fiction metaphor. She, bless her, suggested that it was a mistake to give Daniel his own planet. Ceding to Daniel’s narrative is always disastrous for me. The terrible feeling of all day yesterday, the crying, the worthlessness, that is a familiar feeling, although I’d escaped it for a while. That’s the feeling of trying to live in Daniel’s narrative. We might never agree. My narrative is the least-harm narrative.

As I suspected, Daniel believes that since our last big fight, the one where he told me I was inadequate and asked who could be married to me (but of course those statements don’t count because “obviously” he said them in anger, and that doesn’t count), since our last big fight I have been much better. After that fight, the careful reader will recall, I gave up on expecting anything at all from Daniel, and set myself to serving him. So that is “better.” In fairness (to him, not me) I did realize only then how soul-sick he is. I realize just now, writing this (which is why I write) that the flare up on Friday came when I told him that I did, in fact, expect things from him. That’s when it all went to hell and I thought of self harm.

This is all information. Daniel will be furious if he ever learns I am keeping a record. But it’s for myself, for the next time. A hedge against self harm. I think Daniel is trying, but he insists that the scrim of hatred was created by both of us because “It’s a marriage, and marriage is two people.” I can’t hear that, and he can’t hear otherwise. It’s a problem. He agreed in principle to go to counseling later. We’ll see. I need to remember that, to record that, too. He agreed in principle to go to counseling later. He doesn’t want divorce, that is clear. He might not want the same marriage I want.

8:33

First

3:30

Also, right now, failure.  Failure to rest.  I ironed and cooked instead.  I tried to have lunch with Daniel.  Well, we ate lunch next to each other at the same time, looking at the same newspaper (different sections).

First as in, me first.  As in first things first.  I want to start simple and small: feed myself before doing household chores.  Go to the bathroom or get water when I need to, regardless of where I am in any particular project.  A small thing… but try it.  It will feel like more of a change than you expect, if you are me.

First as in, feelings first.  And feeling them, not outworking them.  Feeling them even as I iron.  Feeling, for example, that I am so tired of only making a difference to Daniel in a negative way, never a positive one.  I can bring him down, but I never seem to be able to lift him up.  I can (always) err, but never excel.  Then questioning that feeling: is that a problem for him or for me?  Is it my fault?  (Oh, a post titled Fault.  That would be something.  It’s either all my fault or not one tiny bit my fault.  Daniel is the same.  And we cause each other untold suffering because of it, although I’m trying to tell my part.  The next post would be Fight.  It might be yet.)

False: what I just wrote sounds false to me, even though all the words are true.  I’m tired of constructing it that way.  That was how I thought of things before our crisis, but now I desperately (Fervently?) need the crisis to mean something and signal a change or release.  So what if I release myself, and say that I am good and bad, and Daniel’s reception of me is not the most relevant metric.  Oh, I so wish it were.  I wish I could measure myself positively in Daniel’s eyes.  I wish I trusted him enough.  I wish I didn’t have to trust myself.

Fallback: That’s what might doom us, is that our perceptions of our own selves vis a vis the other will never line up with the other’s.  He will never see me-to-him as I see me-to-him.  Is that a failing?  Is that even possible for anyone?  Can a person ever overcome subjectivity?  Hypothesis: no couple can ever achieve what I laid out. So the fall back (in a Fallen world) is trust and an effort to see it in the best light.  The fallback is generosity and gentle inquiry.

Failure: And we, Daniel and I, me and the man I love most and want to love more, we fail catastrophically at generosity and gentle inquiry.  My soul is crushed like an aluminum can at that realization, and the tears come.  I want this so much.  I promise I try to give it, except when I don’t.  Is is true that for some happy, blessed people, it’s natural, it’s like breathing, it’s like knowing right and left (which I don’t.  A big cost of divorce will be literally losing my orientation in the world when the rings leave my left hand.).  Or maybe, it’s something no one does beautifully, but people do often enough, and when it fails, there’s no catastrophe.

Daniel and I shrug when we should celebrate, and we explode when we should shrug.  And that is a very sad state of affairs for two people who had what I thought was a great love.  But maybe I was very very wrong about that.  The other couple I knew who I thought had a great love is divorced.  We all had great words, and great energy, but it’s not lasting.  And the couples I thought were settling look gorgeous and strong.

Falling: I am sad because I’ve been sending energy to Daniel and not getting much back.   I am falling back into trying, and being so sad when it doesn’t work and feeling like it’s because of my unworthiness.

When I was at yoga this morning, the burly, bearded substitute instructor adjusted my posture three times.  I’ve been practicing yoga for 20 years, so I don’t usually get hands-on adjustments: instructors tend to think I know what I’m doing, so they help people whose physical postures are less solid.  But he touched me on three occasions, pulling back my shoulders, kneading my sacrum down in child’s pose, adjusting my shoulders (again) and neck in shivasana.  It was a gift.  I thanked him after class, but didn’t ask why he treated me that way.  Was it a gift or a rescue?

3:56

Gratitude 2017

It’s possible that this blog will turn out to be a diary of being married to a man who didn’t want to be married to me, and nevertheless tried very very hard to fit himself into our marriage.  It’s possible.  And I say that with love towards him, and in recognition that he also has love for me. And, weirdly, I am deeply grateful that I can write it without fear or shame or an inner implosion.  (1)

I am grateful for my friends who are coming through for me in brilliant and true ways.  When I call around looking for them to condemn me, to tell me that Daniel’s analysis of me and our recent exchanges is correct, they refuse, with vigor.  The emails I’ve received, from near strangers, from moms-in-the-parking-lot friends, move and stabilize me at the same time. (2)

I am grateful for Spotify.  I came late (like a month ago) to the wonders of streaming music.  Damn! San Saba County is on spotify.  Poi Dog Pondering (no, they aren’t good but they are the soundtrack of a particular time) is on spotify, so I can always hear that one song I like.  I listened to Taylor Swift 1989 today on CD while I was cooking, because I’m a sucker for Welcome to New York and Blank Space, then a friend told me about Ryan Adams 1989, and I heard that on Spotify.  A digital cabinet of wonders is this thing!  Now listening to the “Songs to Sing in the Shower” playlist.  Oh hell yeah.  Journey and then the Proclaimers?  That, my friends, is happiness.  Daniel is not speaking to me much, so it’s glorious to have other sounds surrounding me.  I’m also grateful for my wireless sport earphones. (3, 4)

I am grateful for yoga, spinning, core strengthening, and foam rolling.  (5, 6, 7, 8)

I am grateful that, during this impossible time, my dreams are generally happy and soothing, even the ones about Daniel.  (9)

I am grateful that Milo is the epitome of awesome, and is taking excellent care of himself. He gets that from me (he gets lots of less good qualities from me, too) and I am weak-in-the-knees grateful that he sees it’s a good thing, not a selfish or bad thing.  (10, 11)

I am grateful that I was raised by frugal people and know how to be that way, and even to find it an interesting puzzle.  Of course, I might blow the budget on expensive skincare later on tonight, but I can measure it in terms of additional days of packed lunches and foregone shoes.  (12)

I am grateful for a beautiful day outside and the color of the leaves that have fallen in my neighborhood.  Yeah, I am really grateful for color outside. (13)

I am grateful for our dog, who is providing Daniel so much comfort right now.  (14)

I am grateful for tea, beer, and excellent chocolate. (15, 16, 17)

And, because I thought for a minute it was 2018, because I am getting really bad about knowing what year it is (2011? 2016? 2017) and because I’m thinking all the time about raising money to keep my job going for 2018, I have an 18th occasion for gratitude.  I am grateful for my capacity to love, which is bigger than I thought.  My feelings are coming back to me, slowly, and some of them are terrible, but right at this moment I feel a lot of love and I feel a lot of ability to love.

Oh, also grateful for a new dress.  I bought it for a special occasion, which was cancelled (cancelled is too gentle a word.  It was nullified, obliterated, erased, unmade, eradicated when everything went wrong). I say this only to justify the cost — this was a special dress for a special evening.  I’m going to wear it to Thanksgiving dinner with friends.

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.

Poem for Wednesday!!

8:56

So many sofas falling on me.  You’d think I’d take the hint and maybe sit down, or even recline.

But no.  When I arrived home near 7pm — admittedly after a spectacular yoga class — bearing 3 dozen donuts that Milo “needs” for school tomorrow, I was feeling the bitter tang of resentment at doing too much.  I said to myself, “I need to put myself first. I need to see myself putting myself first.  Therefore, a glass of red wine is in order” (I dropped out of my challenge to quit drinking for 30 days.  I stopped for 5 days, and very much enjoyed the stopping.  Then I stopped stopping, and I’m drinking again although much much less than before.  There’s only so much energy I can spend on resisting.  I’m very happy I did what I did.)

And then I made breakfast cookies for Milo.  And put away the laundry.  And sorted the mail.  And washed dishes.  And then, THEN, I decided I was worthy of my own attention and made myself dinner.  The same meal I’ve had each night since Sunday, because we never seem to have the right groceries for anything else.  Even as I was doing all these things I thought, why? Why is this more important than a hot meal for myself?  But the terrible momentum of doing and doing and doing was not to be stopped.

It does feel nice to eat without thinking about the next thing (and the next and the next and then next), to be done with chores before enjoying the pleasures of softly fried eggs and cheddar cheese and salsa in a tortilla, with that glass of red wine.  (I can keep a bottle of wine alive from Friday night to Wednesday, it turns out.  It’s all about vacuum stoppers, storing it in the fridge — even red, and not letting it breathe for a minute in the bottle, only in the glass.)  But there’s always a next thing.  I gin myself up.

Which reminds of a line in a poem that was read at my (first) wedding to Daniel.  (Have I explained that we married each other three times?  We did.  No divorces in between, just increasing entwining in escalating secular and religious legal systems.)

And it’s Wednesday, isn’t it?

The Continuous Life

Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

9:13

How it started

9:44

It started with sit-ups.

Not really.  Not precisely. Starts are often cumulative — an accretion of things too small in themselves to matter, but they gather and weigh and push.  Also it wasn’t sit-ups.  It was physical therapy exercises to strengthen my core, and physical therapists are perhaps the last ones to prescribe sit-ups for this purpose.  More truths that get in the way of economy of expression.  Now, especially, inelegant and inefficient truths seem important.  Truth seems important.  Precision and clarity in something small that doesn’t matter, so I’m in practice for things that are big and do matter.

So… it started with my stomach, my core.  A day after a colleague told me that other colleagues (unspecified) thought that I acted like a diva, like I had a sense of entitlement, and that the project I’d completed that had brought so much good (I thought) to my workplace was now toxic and we had to stop talking about it, I had my first appointment with a physical therapist.  I had nagging sciatic pain off and on for years, and in 2013 it was on a lot.  (Nagging pain is a cliche, except it’s the right one.) My yoga studio had an arrangement with a physical therapy practice, so I took up the offer of a free evaluation.  The physical therapist recommended core-strengthened exercises to start.  Maybe she recommends them most of her new clients.

I started core strengthening, doing my exercises diligently several times a week.  And as I got stronger literally at the core of my being, I got stronger in my spirit and I got serious as hell about changing my work situation.  I was doing psychotherapy, too, and of course that mattered enormously.  But the physical changes were grounding and motivating.

(pause to check Twitter for commentary on Obama speech)

My brain needed my body to be strong, to make progress every day towards being stronger, towards getting out of pain, to do small things, diligently, that would change a situation that I had accepted as normal.  My body made the metaphor.

And now I’m doing more, finally, after years of intentions.  I am explicit, when I leave the office at 5 or at 6 to go to a workout, that I have to do this with my body so that I can do what I need to do with my brain and spirit. I need to be brave and tireless. I need to do more than I can, and also decide to hold back when I want to because it’s best for me in this breath or this moment.

Why am I saying this?  Because Girl of a Certain Age asked for stories of reinvention, and I thought to myself, “It started with sit-ups.  Well, not really, not precisely…”

10:04

 

 

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