An hour, or just less than that, spent at the orthodontist’s office this morning. I carry with me Thomas Kohnstamm’s Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? which I enjoy maybe because it is so totally antithetical to McCarthy’s The Road, which I just finished. I respond to that memoir voice, which I sort of feel like I can see through a little, and still enjoy. And I picked it up because of how the first chapter is about the life he isn’t choosing, which has me musing on how difficult it is to compare lives and how I don’t even feel like the phrase opt out applies if you opted out before being on a particular career path, and I never got so far, but I like tracing out hypothetical trajectories. And then there is the interruption to my hypothetical trajectory, sitting next to me right now.
When my son sits next to me in the waiting room not reading or distracting himself in any of the ways I’ve come to expect, it feels rude to pull out my own book and read, but being in this public space where people can hear us and all, we’re also not really having a conversation. And I forget how rare it is for it to be just the two of us out, no four-year-old energy to be contained and channeled and directed. So there is room to wonder why waiting rooms make me think of anthropology. I have uncharitable thoughts about the two teenaged girls across from us making each other laugh, but with a self-absorbed meanness that I, a former teenaged girl, think only teenaged girls are capable of. I am not eavesdropping on anything specific, not consciously, anyway, a cell phoned conversation with one’s mother, and humor at the expense of others. Maybe it’s that they so clearly don’t care that anyone else is present or hearing them, maybe it’s that they do care and this is a performance of not caring. I realize of course that it’s a bravado (feels like it should be a feminine form, but bravada, alas is only a make of Oldsmobile, says our trusty search engine) the being unsure how to occupy space, and a vein of of rebellious, conspicuous will to occupy it boisterously — I’d prefer that for them, as an anonymous, beneficent observer, to self-conscious awkward and uncomfortable occupation of space, the teenaged girl feeling that lives on in me in glimpses of wishing to shrink, to be invisible.
I think about the man my son is well on his way to becoming. He sits next to me, a little stiff, arms folded across his chest. I realize he doesn’t have his phone out because the friends he is in unceasing contact with would all be in class, cell phones put away (well that at least is reassuring). He is harder for me to read by the day, but he seems a little too uncomfortable to be truly labelled as stoic right now. When I ask if he’s apprehensive about discomfort he assures me he isn’t. I want the crumbs of his inner life, hate having to search for the right questions. But he doesn’t flinch or pull away when I put an arm around his shoulders. So I am not embarrassing him, right?
How could I possibly gotten to this waiting room from the waiting room of the Czech pediatrician whom I would have to take a subway and two busses and then walk up a steep hill to see? That far-away waiting room where I felt so watched, so desperate to prove myself a good mother, playing in the toy-filled room, trying to distract the baby and myself from my apprehensions as we waited for the doctor to see us, checking the enormous diaper bag I’d carried to make sure I had the requisite spare diaper, spare outfit, the little state-issued spiral bound notebook in which all of his shots and weighings were recorded, my strapping American baby whose numbers were all off of the Czech charts… I was sure that other women’s well-packed diaper bags contained the secrets of the sort of organization and preparation that seemed so out of reach to me, the knowledge of what sort of snacks would appeal to a toddler and not be too messy, the knowledge that allowed them to appear in public looking put-together, hair in something other than a desperate ponytail, clothes something other than ill-fitting early-maternity clothes because the other clothes I still had in my closet from before no longer fit, and clothes shopping where not just the language but also the sizing were foreign, incomprehenible was just one intimidation too many.
No, I am here with my almost-teenaged son who hates missing math because it is his favorite subject, the one he sees as most useful in the career he wants one day as a video game designer/programmer. I tease, don’t you want to be a philosopher or ‘cellist and starve honestly, and his answer is an earnest, “I am never going to stop playing the ‘cello.” How can I feel this tender towards another human being on so many levels? People with children one, two and three years older than him like to tell me how hard life with a teenager is, and I am sure I was no picnic. So it feels like it would be hubris to say, “No, you don’t know my son, the combination of analytical mind and deep moral reasoning, the earnestness and the sense of humor we share… and yeah, that whole breaking away thing may obscure those things a little, but they aren’t going to go away, I am going to continue perceiving them!” But secretly? I believe that regardless of the challenges, it’s this privilege to get to watch the man emerging from the baby I once held, however much access I am allowed.
When I think about the man he is becoming, I realize that ‘cellist or video game designer doesn’t make any difference at all, that what I want most for him is compassionate self-awareness, being relaxed and comfortable in the space he occupies while aware of the impact he has on others. I want him to be authentic, even if that means he is a little vulnerable, for there to be at least a few people with whom he can drop all of stoic guardedness I can see him starting to develop. It’s a ping of realization that I want for him a little more of all the things I want for myself, that this was the truth in The Road that I was responding to, the carrying of a flame, an adherence to a moral code undiminished by adult compromise or pragmatism. I want by some miracle of Lamarckian evolution to pass on to him the progress I have made — not to deprive him of character building struggles or anything, just I fear that the great manly code where all of these great, uniquely him things are hidden beneath layers of armor is a form of scarring. My father used to quote this thing about there being no life without growth, no growth without struggle, no struggle without pain. But my kids have taught me that you can grow through play and exploration, that frustration doesn’t have to be deep pain.
After I hit “send to weblog” on my blog composing window, I have to walk away from the computer, find something else to do, so I don’t start hitting refresh on the stats page, “get new mail” in the email program as if waiting for confirmation from the universe that I exist.
How do I handle my Crazy Mind reaction to comments, getting them, or not getting them, not knowing what it means either way? On the vulnerable days, they mean so much more than I think I ought to let them mean, that I consider not having comments at all, so that I don’t interpret not getting a comment as confirmation of my worst thoughts. On the other hand, the pay-off for being vulnerable that way is that the conversation that sometimes happens in the comments section is the best part of having a blog.
Some of it is, I think, the problem of not being able to see myself clearly. I end up relying on those around me for feedback. I started to say that being unable to see yourself is like the frustration of a movie shot entirely in POV, then it occurred to me that what I am trying to do is more like trying to reconstruct the plot of a movie from a video made of audience reaction, a wave of collective horror, sweeping across faces, followed by some resolution and relaxation, gentle laughter. Well, except for that guy over there squirming uncomfortably trying to figure out a tactful way to tell his date he needs to excuse himself for a minute, dinner isn’t agreeing with him, and that woman there poking at the bottom of her carton of popcorn, clearly miffed that whomever it is she was sharing the popcorn with mindlessly ate more than a fair share. Oh, and him! He’s trying to surreptitiously check text messages on his phone.
Maybe I mentioned before? I think I understand how I work but that hasn’t translated into being able to read others? I used to wish I could be mysterious and cool, with everyone trying to guess what I am thinking and feeling, or I’d have settled for inscrutable, even, and instead I have this sense that I am not only utterly transparent, but that I broadcast my feelings so clearly that people blocks away pretty much know what is going on with me. On the other hand, I think I often need a bit of processing time before I can talk about my feelings, I have to have a chance to accept those feelings and trace out implications and then, maybe, when the words are in my head I can start to have a conversation.
I loved when a friend described her son as coming home from school and explaining that he just needed to watch television a little because he had had too much time looking at faces that day — yes! I know exactly what that feels like, and I think this is how my parents would describe me as far back as after a day of preschool, even if I could never put it quite so eloquently. In fact, I think this ancient horrible feeling of having to work so hard to decode the non-verbal language going on in social situations combined with this feeling of transparency to constitute this introverted condition of just wanting some time off from faces. For how many years was the wish I was unable to articulate that I could somehow control how people perceived me!
Maybe there is something to the idea of risk and pay-off. Even in writing, I don’t have control about how I am perceived. But the tension between being hungry for attention and the hot-cheeked desire for invisibility finally lands with knowing that trust is its own reward. Trying to put enough of myself into the truest words I can, I find that I can hold this fragment just far enough out that, by straining my neck and twisting my head, I can catch a glimpse of who I am at this moment. And putting myself out there has again and again given me the confirmation I need, even if it’s not from anywhere I might have expected it, that I am not alone.
I swear by My life! Nothing save that which profiteth them can befall My loved ones. To this testifieth the Pen of God, the Most Powerful, the All-Glorious, the Best-Beloved.” — Bahá’u'lláh
The fragment is on my lips at six a.m. when I wake from a nightmare of trying to defend my children from these enormous, ferocious bears that have snuck into our house. I repeat it until I am calm, then run around checking doors, run out to the studio to turn off heaters I realized must have been left on after a violin lesson yesterday, just in case my subconscious was sending me a nightmare to alert me to something actually wrong in the real world.
Then I lie back down, my heart racing, and the empty spot where my husband isn’t is taking up too much of the bed. I am wrestling the knowledge that if I go back to sleep, I’ll have to go through the painful process of waking up again in just another hour against the fact that I’ve only had five hours sleep and will be barely functional today as it is.
Nothing save that which profiteth them… Slowly I inventory of the last twenty-four hours, trying to assess if I really am okay. The violin and viola lessons yesterday afternoon were disjointed, uncomfortable, the boys not responding to our violin teacher. He showed up twenty minutes late and was obviously a little frustrated with them, and I am powerless to smooth it, fix it. Some days are like that. Mostly, the lessons are still really good, I think. I try not to go into spirals of judging my own judgment.
Also, yesterday was the Back Fence PDX event — my amazing friend Timothea came and watched the kids so I could go, even though it was a huge disruption for her kids, a four-year-old and almost two-year-old who are normally at home in bed in their own beds at seven — they were still awake at eleven when I got home. I feel such guilt, it is so difficult sometimes, to accept even lovingly offered help, and to know that I probably pushed it staying until the end of the event, later than I thought I was going to be. And I was so glad to go and sit next to my friend Sarah, who told her story with this lovely combination of poise and conviction and vulnerability.
In the minutes before I saw Sarah, there was a moment of panic, a weirdness of being in a room crowded full of people I recognized from Twitter, but feeling so like a nobody, people looking past and through me, that vertiginous feeling of everybody but me belonging safely in a group while I stand bewildered, outside. And, honestly, there are lots of groups where I am fine being a nobody, I quite happily accept having done nothing to attract anyone’s notice (um, that’s not me trying not be noticed at the PTA meeting, uh-uh.) But Tweeps? who I confidently banter with all day long on-line, bare my soul to by blog? I shouldn’t feel like a nobody with them.
Oh, writing this now I distract myself, make the phone calls I had put off making, answer emails, do anything but face how melodramatic I can make five minutes of discomfort sound. It was uncomfortable, but it wasn’t bad.
Maybe I was armored, a little. Squirming during the violin lesson that hadn’t gone well, I’d found on the desk in the studio a stack of old papers I’d written for a seminar where the professor would return them with notes with lines like “I turned to your essay and found myself thrilled, just thrilled by your clarity, by the precision, the rich economy of your language” or “This is exceptional. It radiates with intelligence, kindness, and the courage to adventure. What a delight to read!” “This is as wonderful a ramble as I’ve ever read in the General Honors Program! What a joy!”"Thank you for making my morning so much fun” all of which it probably wouldn’t be healthy for me to pick up and look at more than every few years. And I find it doesn’t matter that he might have been, must have been writing such enthusiastic responses to all of his students, he made me feel like my own glow mattered.
I read Charlotte’s Web with the boys and wonder at the way her final web extolls Wilbur as “humble.” That’s not a virtue you hear so much about, what kind of self promotion is it? Don’t we need to worry for Wilbur’s, um, self-esteem.
Nothing save that which proftiteth them can befall My loved ones. You can go into these situations where you are a nobody, nobody recognizes you, nobody lines up to talk to you, you didn’t come with anyone to keep you safe and insulated, and you can whisper to yourself “they just don’t know who I am yet, but, someday! they’re going to kick themselves for not having taken advantage of the opportunity to talk to me.” Or you can flail about, who am I, anyway? Raven’s wife, Sarah’s friend, writer of a blog that takes itself far too seriously. But there’s a middle path, too, you can be okay with the feeling of being nobody because you suspect that most people feel that way from time to time in various situations and that it actually has nothing to do with your, ahem, value or worth.
I am a homebody. I am most comfortable at home. I liked going out dancing before I married a non-dancer, and I love the immersion of the movie theater, but mostly, my house has the comforts I like most, and being here, in conversation with a couple of interesting people or laughing with people I love, are my best experiences. Still, I know that the kids need more stimulation sometimes, and I push myself to go zoos and science museums, and playdates. I challenge myself to go to other events that may be less comfortable because there is so often a pay-off in terms of confidence and being glad I got out. But when I say “I’m nobody” I come dangerously close to the aggrandizing invocation of the ultimate goddess of homebodies.
Being a nobody doesn’t change how lovely each of my boys is, taken in turn, perhaps examining the still profile as he sleeps. It doesn’t change the lovely balance they provide to each other, or the sweetness of the moments when I realize they take care of each other, each in his own way.
Nothing save that which profiteth them… Bear dreams bring up this post of the unreliable narrator’s where a dreamt bear is the maternal instinct, but also Aodán’s recurring dream years ago as he tried to adjust to kindergarten, a dream that he was a bear cub in a class full of kids who were frightened of him, and he was trying to disguise himself as just another kid. The dream made perfect sense with his feeling just so different from the other kids, and having to tame his own little boy nature in order to make it through the long days of sitting still, controlling himself, following all new rules. In my bear dream I am confronted with how I hate being solely responsible for all the locking up and checking smoke alarms, and making sure there’s nobody hiding in the basement before I can go to sleep, irrational, sitting bolt upright as the house creaks and settles in the night. I feel like a wall of one trying to look outward and guard against external threats while simultaneously looking inward to comfort, reassure and encourage my children, the world is safe, you are safe, sleep sweetly.
But I am doing okay, even exhausted and semi-functional (twenty-eight hours until Raven’s plane lands). I find that I get to the middle point, neither independent and aloof, nor hopelessly, helplessly dependent, but interdependent — grateful at the friends that reach out generously when I am struggling. I reach that middle road with nobody-ness. I don’t need to write to get people’s attention, nor to prove that I am somebody, but I know that it’s possible somebody else will struggle with the feeling of being nobody and remember this and it might be a small consolation.
And then, my somebody-ness doesn’t come from the ancient notes on papers written from another life, doesn’t come from recognition or friendship, or even from my kids. Jenny and I on the phone talk about how there’s a secret perverse thrill at the idea of a society-wide economic collapse and having to discard materialism and live by deeper values, even though it’s not like you’d really wish for it to happen. In the five minutes of discomfort of being nobody, feeling a little disgraced in fortune and men’s eyes and beweeping outcast states, there was, maybe, a parallel thrill, that I could be nobody, humble and glorious, and be okay. That nothing, save that which profiteth them can befall the loved ones of God, that is, any one of us of His creation.
You know what I hate? I hate it when you mess up in some way and you’re apologizing and the other person says out loud, “No, no, it’s fine,” or “Don’t worry, stuff happens,” but you notice their lips are still pursed a little or maybe they are just a little chillier than usual and you could be projecting, of course, but you still wonder. Is there some unspoken code you’re trespassing on? Are you expected to continue deploring your own behavior? And it’s all that unspoken stuff. The ambiguity kills me. The knowing that to press could only make it worse kills me more.
Some days I should not be allowed to leave the house. Or go online. Or answer the phone. My husband calls from Spain, and it’s not just the time zones, separating us, it’s reality zones. I’m in the middle of afternoon franticity of multitasking, the phone ringing while I practice with the five year old and I cannot tell from the caller i.d. the international call from the automated political campaigning call, and there are still so many things that must be done before the kids go to bed. Worse, I’ve just been struck with a problem I cannot solve by myself, a password I don’t have. Where he is, it’s 2 am, and he just needs to hear my voice before falling asleep. And we both recognize the collision happening, but neither of us can fix it.
What kills me is that I think my endless introspection, the toppling stacks of notebooks, the navel gazing, has given me, at least, a pretty good understanding of myself, of how I work, and thus a good guess about how people generally work (because I am not that special!) but it has not translated into any strong ability to read other people. Watching movies I miss the significance of nonverbal gestures, this character dropping her purse to tell you that character is dead, and I’m grateful Raven catches this stuff and will catch me up on the nuances patiently. So in my own life, I am compelled to ask questions, to clarify, to check and doublecheck my readings and interpretations. Simple, direct communication — it seems like it should be so easy, and the knots I get in when it isn’t! And that’s when I start getting locked in my head, with the self-consciousness and endless replays of situations I should have handled better.
So the hearing voices? I sort of just take for granted. Not in an auditory hallucination way, but, for a certain kind of thought, words are just the unit of thought, their currency. Still I was reminded when my friend Patrick wrote about his own voices that hearing voices is one of the classic signs of the crazies. I don’t think that all thought is words — when I am adjusting a muscle to change the tone of the viola, putting words on the process is as an after-the-fact approximation, and I think sometimes I have emotional responses that come long before I have the words for them. But for the thought that talks about itself, words are it.
External world, I know, words aren’t so much the unit of the thought as the unit of communication. And because the “voices” in my head are the coalescing of a stream of words, I wonder if they don’t start becoming different parts of the self talking one to the other. Because as soon as one of the voices has staked a position, up pops an interlocutor in an opposing one, like a good little Socratic cipher.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways the self gets divided, probably inspired in part by Jonathon Haidt’s chapter on “The Divided Self” in The Happiness Hypothesis. I tseems historical to divide up the self, to go back to Plato’s, charioteer metaphor in the Phaedrus, or refer to Freud. Haidt draws up four classic divisions — mind versus body, left brain versus right brain, the evolutionarily new brain versus the older, primitive brain. and the controlled functions of the brain versus the more automatic. Which makes me wish for a more comprehensive list of the ways I divide myself –
• the emotional versus the rational
• the mother versus the child
• the critic versus the creator
• what I should do versus what I am resigned to knowing I will actually do
• the fatalist versus the optimist
• the person I could have become had X happened versus who I am now
And of course, such a list cannot be comprehensive. It’s all about the opposition, that the position staked invites a polarity. The critic doesn’t arise to meet the child (though that thought entertains me!). It reminds me of my two youngest kids playing opposites — they always start out with simple adjectives, obvious ones, old and new, high and low, short and tall. Then the colors sneak in, which you can manage from a color wheel schema. But inevitably an older brother will ask a noun, and we learn that the opposite of tree is grass, or of Mom is Dad. Of lightbulb is fish.
Sighing, a little, my self is not so much divided right now as fractured, using the computer at the dining table in order to be present with my still a month shy of six-year-old while he writes a story for his homework without hovering hawk-like over each labored word, until my own frustration and boredom makes the whole exercise impossible. My attention goes back and forth between notes I’d jotted on a potential blog entry during a cello lesson, and his paper, reminding him “Capitalize the first letter of the sentence, sweetie.” How much do I correct and fix? He’s supposed to underline subjects and predicates, words he has apparently never heard before. I waver between annoyance that homework has to be so much teaching rather than reinforcement, and thinking that I’m probably the most qualified person to teach him, anyway, being tuned into how much frustration he can take, how much encouragement he needs, what he understands or not. If I don’t sit here, he is incapable of sitting and keeping at it, and his first draft was one very long string of subjects and predicates linked by “so”s and “then”s.
I watch the clock, relentless moving forward, as clocks will, realizing that if I still want to practice with the four of them and get one to a birthday party and get something on the table for dinner that is not just a microwaved frozen meal, I am going to have to step it up. The accumulation of the million tiny choices that have to carry us through the afternoon, the awareness of the choosing after choosing in a string, might be the form of grace I need, if I could break the paralysis of feeling frustrated and hopeless. I am already in a small agony from having been unable to get us all out the door to the Sunday school that they go to each week (letting down people who count on us being there!) but they were fighting, and I was embarrassingly overwhelmed. Six more days until Raven is home. Hit publish, knowing that I didn’t perfectly capture the crystalline completeness of the thought that this blog entry was born from, but maybe this is more truthful? The tensions between voices and selves and roles just something I keep having to learn to manage.
It’s just that if I go even a little long between postings, then there’s this building pressure that I must make up for it by writing something at least marginally better, making it even harder to write again. Only I feel like I spent September in soul-scraping mode, and while it’s cheaper than therapy, a little goes a long way.
So let’s see if we can just go a little lighter this morning, maybe even entertaining. Or since many of those who I know are reading are those who I could, ostensibly, if I were a picking up the phone and calling kind of person, pick up the phone and call, I could pretend you have called me, and you have politely asked how I am doing, even though I was the one initiating the call, and really, I want to hear how YOU are doing.
The funny thing is… (oh, how has “the thing is” construction crept so steadily into my writing? I am annoyed by it this morning, but also suspect it’s about wanting to sidle up, crabwise next to want I want write about rather than diving right in). Trying again.
When I don’t blog, this little narrator voice starts trying to crop the experience flowing by for a blog entry. Good days, he sounds like the stage manager in Our Town. Bad days he sounds like the announcer in a toothpaste commercial. Freaky days, he sounds like David Attenborough doing a nature documentary.
The narrator voice would have you know, that having failed to master programming the fancy digital thermostat, I dress like a bag lady in the mornings to write morning pages in my chilly house, layers of pajamas. Also, I adorn my fingers with a silly number of rings, entertaining/distracting myself instead of getting uncomfortable trying to unearth deep truths while writing. And I listen to the Jacques Loussier Trio version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations louder than strictly necessary.
Raven is flying Austin today. He’ll be back tomorrow night, but Saturday morning will be flying across the Atlantic for some assortment of conferences and meetings in London and Spain that he has explained to me, but, that I am afraid I processed only partially, requiring sometimes diagrams. Sometimes the art of marriage seems to involve listening and absorbing the information you truly need, and providing the appearance of listening for the information your partner mostly needs to process out loud. And sometimes the art of marriage means not giving your partner a pop quiz on what it was you’ve been telling him for the last thirty minutes. What Raven’s flying out of town means to the person who calls to ask how I am is that I notice a tendency towards irritability wondering how I am going to manage until he returns next Friday. And I would advise someone else facing the week of solo parenting to do a little preparation work, have meals planned, treats and movies lined up as small rewards for each day gotten through, but, honestly, I am taking my life more or less hour by hour and day by day right now.
I might also take the opportunity of having you on the phone to whine about the cold that has flattened me for the last week, and express my great surprise that snorting Zicam no-drip liquid nasal gel has provided a measure of relief, which is a little startling considering my reluctance to put anything in my nose. (And: haven’t lost my sense of smell yet!) (now wandering around looking for things to sniff just to make sure).
Lovely thing about the cold was feeling excused to rediscover the joys of reading — Raven and I each raced through Ken Grimwood’s Replay in less than twenty-four hours, which is unusual. And I’m three quarters of the way through Sittenfeld’s American Wife which I mostly picked up because I loved Prep. Only, I am surprised to realize that reading this has given me a sliver of sympathy for a president whose administration has seemed to be disaster compounded on disaster. Or at least sympathy for his wife, whom I know feel compelled to think of as a real person carrying the weight of being a symbol of all sorts of things. Also, having slowly and carefully, often wincingly, made my way through interview after interview after glowing memorial to David Foster Wallace, I’m glancing, sidelong, at Infinite Jest wondering if I have really been missing something. But reluctant to plunge deeply right now since I’ve gone and committed myself publicly to doing NaNoWriMo again this year and probably won’t read at all during November. (Hmm, went to the library website trying to figure out what I had just finished reading so that I was free to start the Grimwood Friday, and you have to opt in to have a record of what you have been reading. Yay privacy rights! Boo holey memory!)
Yesterday Rainer and I raced a series of short sprints on our walk to pick up his brothers from school. And in this state of un-self-consciously addressing him, being completely there with him as we carefully each of us avoided winning and beating the other by more than inches so we could again and again declare a triumphant tie, I caught the eye of a woman walking in the other direction on the other side of the street smiling at us, and had this freaky momentary realization that to a certain degree Rainer is, if not a stranger to me, inevitably becoming someone who is a stranger to me. Not that we’re going to end our acquaintance or anything, but you hear about adults talking about their inner five year olds, and it occurred to me that as he races ahead of me on the sidewalk, on this trajectory to becoming someone completely unknown to me right now, he contains within him the thirty-five year old he will one day be, as strange to me as the unknown person smiling at me from across the street. I of course didn’t have more than a second to think like this because I had to race to get to the corner before he ran in front of a car or something, but I was thrown, for a second at how motherhood can be so completely consuming, and still, not enough.
Oh, I had a picture to append here, only the only way I know to reliably get it the size I want for my blog is emailing it to myself as a small file from iPhoto, and attempting to do so I have realized I cannot receive email on my poor little MacBook Air, which is, no doubt, the first manifestation of the household’s response to Raven’s absence wherein random things mysteriously stop working (we still don’t have electricity if half the outlets in my kitchen despite repeated flippings of switches in the fuse box, all of which happened the last time he went out of town). I try not to bewail my helplessness nor berate my own dependency, we have specialized in our marriage because it’s more efficient. Except when it’s not.
So I end here, gracelessly, as I might have to if we were on the phone, my son’s forbearance finally used up for the morning, but promising not to go too long before we talk again.
Oh, I love the realization that occasionally comes, that this being my blog, I get to set the rules. So I can say that I had a darker moment last week, and leave it at that, because it isn’t something to be worked out in the blog, and it’s incidental to the fact that faster than you can say “Pisces out of water” what wasn’t okay flipped and became okay, and that that is what is more interesting to me.
Dark moments tend to be sort of generic in the blend of insecurity and frustration and powerlessness and fear and anger that sort of amorphously switch into each other whenever I try to nail the feeling down, whatever factor or combination of factors is bringing it on for me. And so it isn’t surprising that what can turn it around tends to be a reminder of my powers. I spent some of the time that was hard reorganizing my closet, tossing clothes that have gotten too tight (repeating to myself, the clothes are supposed to fit me, not the other way round) and the process was not, by any stretch of the imagination or the waistband, fun, and still, last night I was putting my laundry away and felt this tiny ping of joy at the order in the closet, a small refuge (all mine!) in a chaotic house, with an array of the clothes that fit, feel good, express something I like about who I am, like armor. My closet is where I begin and (because of the laundry hamper inside it) end my clothes-wearing day, and so it’s a frame on all the things I have to do that seem challenging to me. And it’s not anything fancy, my clothes tend toward comfort and functionality and not requiring a lot of thought, and my closet is tiny, tucked into a sloping attic roof. But I think my sister and I both picked up as small children on my mother cleaning and rearranging when stressed, because we have remarked that we both have the tendency to do it, and in the end it is something that works for me.
The radio picked up on the dark mood and kept playing stories like this one about how we look for patterns when things feel beyond our control, even finding images in random marks. What I found most interesting in the story was the idea that asking people to talk about a personal value shifted the balance in their feeling of powerlessness and made them less likely to pick out images in random patterns. In some ways that is sort of frightening, right? that holding beliefs makes you feel powerful? It makes me worry that we’ll all end up fundamentalists, unwilling to question any of our own beliefs because it feels so good to be empowered. What is more annoying than somebody with different beliefs from my own that are all impenetrable and unshakable? And yet, I dance around my beliefs, measure them against each other, include in them as much respect as I can muster for other beliefs, and still they feel like a source of power, like my closet. And when I write that, it surprises me, metaphor-melder that I am, how I like the resonance of my closet as a set of beliefs. That it doesn’t go out and solve my problems for me, that it requires maintenance and adjustment, making sure everything still fits. And so it’s weird that ordering my closet was a sort of sympathetic magic, getting me to re-center on what I do value. (Begging off on the conflation of “values” and “beliefs” and the degree of choice in both of them?)
So I feel grounded again in listening to music that makes me feel good, in being able to listen sympathetically as a friend goes through a list of things overwhelming her and being able to hold and soothe her child at least long enough for her to get lunch. And it occurs to me that I feel powerful not because I believe in/value compassion or generosity but because I occasionally am privileged enough to get to be the agent of those things.
I don’t know how to even start this particular post. I hate suggesting that more than one or two people even follow the blog closely enough to notice my absence lately, and worse, honesty compells me not to pretend like not blogging is not an admittedly perverse cry (or not a cry, but maybe a very soft whimper?) for attention (did I put in enough negatives there to make it tricky to parse?) or to fail to acknowledge that getting messages asking if I am okay is just a little gratifying, (even as I am horror-stricken at the idea of inflicting worry on anyone) and at the same time I think being unable to publicly write, specifically, being unable to write about myself, comes from being a little sick of myself, a fear of blogging and social networking being deeply narcissistic, reinforcing self-absorption. There are other factors, of course. The household has been a little disrupted by Raven’s big moment, which wasn’t mine to write about, and has meant all sorts of disruption of routines that have left me busy trying to be celebratory and supportive, but also trying to keep things normal-ish for the kids.
I am okay, it turns out. Not blogging has somehow translated into morning pages that are filled with what I need to write, the insights I need to get back to myself — which actual feelings are masquerading as other feelings, and how I had gotten out of touch with the powers I actually have and started feeling powerless. But there’s still the awkwardness of moving, in my head, at least, from not blogging, back to blogging.
Jenny, resorting to reading the ancient archives in the absence of new blog posts, noticed that the blog started not long after I started morning pages (and Aodán was six! which means that for nearly half his life, my life has been organized around finding time to write — moreover, it’s been there for nearly the whole of Søren and Rainer’s lives). It isn’t a coincidence (I mean about the morning pages, not so much about the kids). I think that as important as it is to have an uncensored, unfiltered place where I write until I know what I am thinking and feeling, which would probably be too tedious for another person to endure, it’s as important to me to put ideas out to be tested and responded to, to have a reality check, to not let a private journal be the primary relationship in my life.
Jenny also kindly points out that the blogging is a way to connect, a widening circle and not the black hole it had felt like. Even as I cringe re-reading what I have written, wondering if I make too big a deal of my own not writing for ten days, die admitting that I like attention, feel absolutely graceless that this should be so about ME, wondering what right I have to go on about myself so, my brain makes up a fable of the kettle and the pot finally getting past name-calling and forming a support group of two. I am trying to write honestly about what I go through, not because the I experiencing it is so important, but because I believe that the recognitions and resonances we experience are sacred. That they are confirmations that we can be sunlight to each other, penetrating the labyrinths of self-consciousness that some of us are prone to wondering in blindly, that we can shatter each other’s loneliness only by being honest.
I get seduced into believing that it is easier to conquer my own needs than to acknowledge and communicate them. More, I am a terrible judge of what I need. I tend to bounce between of extremes of “the only things we really need are food and water and air” and, like a four year old who has just discovered the power of the word, whining “But I NEEEEED it!” about everything I want. I try to figure out what qualifies as a (valid) need by guessing from what I can see of the exterior lives of others, cultural expectations and norms, and the reading of prescriptive self-help-y books of which I am otherwise quite skeptical. Lately I devour readings and TED talks on positive psychology, behavioral economics, anthropology, philosophy that hint at there being some science of a “best way to live.” When maybe what I am really looking for is a science of being Mara; that instead of being hung up on defining needs, I could be a bit empirical, what are my objectives, and what conditions are most conducive to those objectives. And that sounds perhaps terribly elementary, but compared to the knots I have tied myself into about the gaps between what I apparently am feeling and what I should be feeling, elementary is okay.
Oh, I want to end this not on me, but with something transcendent and beautiful, sunlight on leaves ornamented with raindrops, the right song for the afternoon for me (Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, as a matter of fact).
