I was watching a movie and also in the film, and the plot was this: an American family traveling in Syria lost stopped for lunch in a small town. When it was time to go, their son, 6, hid behind a door and could not be found. The family had to leave him behind and was not reunited with him until 8 years later. When the family finally recovered him, and only then, they realized how terribly he had suffered. He assailed them over and over again with the cry,"Why did you leave me here? Why didn't you come back for me?" And they had no answer.
I had then to re-live this dream in the role of the sister of the boy left behind. Like all dreams, the narrative began incongruously, with me lying in the office of a professor who had died of cancer, I was on a beg, exhausted, hung over, mostly just emotionally devastated because of my recent breakup. Other lecturers came and went. Finally I, not one of them, but of a higher rank yet not performing well, departed as well. The room was a shrine of sorts to old Vassar college dorm rooms.
In the dream we were three, sometimes more. But we had come into Syria stupidly--knowing full well that it was too dangerous for Americans, but the driver of the car, a man, insisted on going. The young boy, in the backseat, was also a daredevil and wanted to do what the man did. So we raced into Syria and I tried to duck down in the backseat because I, with my blond hair, looked too obviously American. We were supposed to turn around and go back to Egypt, where we would be safer. I pleaded with the man to return across the border, to leave this dangerous place, which was not only Syria but also Pakistan. But he would not listen to me. I knew that, if we stopped, the boy would hide and we would not be able to find him, and we would leave and he would suffer. But our fate seemed to be governed from some other source, the narrative of the film, and there was no changing it. I wanted to stop watching this film, to get out of that story, but could not. So we stopped, and now there were two children and I was one of them, the sister. But i was also the mother, who gripped the boy's body fiercely. He, a daredevil, reckless, twisted and pulled away from her, but she would not let him go. "Over my dead body," she said. And so the dream continued and I awakened, as it were, in the mind of the sister. The family had stopped in the town, even though the mother, I, when I was she, had sworn to prevent it. I was now the sister looking at the boy in the car, and the mother was gone. The boy got out of the car. There was no stopping him. He disappeared in the warren of streets, which were filled with Arabs and Jews going about their business and chanting and praying and laughing and playing even though the air was full of war and death and danger. The boy disappeared and I searched for him, looking behind every door. The family had to leave because another man, an innpatient man, dark-haired like everyone in the family except for me, insisted upon it. The father promised to stay behind and search while the family traveled to safety. But I knew that he would not find the child, that the child would suffer, and reproach us all for leaving him behind. Yet it was also his fault, the child's fault, that he had stubbornly hidden and refused to answer when his family called for him. The dream did not conclude. It was extremely painful to be reliving this narrative, to be watching it and experiencing it. But even in the dream I consoled myself with the knowledge that the boy would be found again, that all would, in a way, be well, even though he and his family would never again be the same. Everyone had been terribly hurt.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Dear You
As in "just your old boyfriend" on the phone tonight. What a surprise to hear you say that.
Because, honestly, I would so love to think of you that way, as my old boyfriend, boyfriend for life, and all that.
But I've been trying to steel myself against such thoughts lately. I have been feeling such a heaviness of heart, a deflated, leaden sense of my body dragging along. It's such a different feeling from the lightness of step and strahlende, or shining, glow I've been experiencing these last few months. The change has been quite a shock to the system.
I am practicing honesty, which is hard for me. I find it difficult to speak the truth because it is often so hard to know what the truth is.
What is currently clouding my mind is this last weekend, when you, as I understand it, changed. Literally, this is how it was for me. I went to sleep with you all in love one night, and woke up the next morning to a completely different person.
The person I had gone to bed with was the man who had, from the very beginning, told me how much he liked me, who said he wanted to see where this relationship would go, and that he hoped it would last forever. Who said that I was beautiful, lovable, wonderful, so wonderful that he thought, even hoped, that he could pledge himself to me for the rest of his life. This was a man who, every morning that I spent with him, gazed at me with wonder and tole me that I was beautiful, who loved the way I touched and caressed him, who understood, intuitively, cognitively, rationally, in his gut, that I loved him and loved loving him, touching him, holding him, being a source of comfort and joy for him, because he was a source of comfort and joy for me. The man I fell asleep with knew that he loved me and that I loved him. When I awoke, I thought that you were still that man.
The man I woke up to told me that he no longer felt sure that he loved me, that he was upset with me for talking about our relationship, who blamed me for making everything so "dramatic," who insisted that he had told me that he needed not to talk about , or, I guess, even feel, the intensity of our passion for one another, because it frightened him, and who seemed to be angry with me for having disobeyed this request not to talk about our passionate feelings, which I hadn't heard quite in those terms.
Yes, of course, it was going very fast. Yes, yes, we had talked about how scary that was, how we were both frightened. But the man I fallen asleep with had also said, many times over, long before I was able to say the same, that he was jumping in with both feet. Indeed, it was YOU who said this, who convinced me that, because you were so confident in your feelings for me, that it would be okay, safe, for me to contemplate jumping in with two feet as well.
But as soon as I did, and then confessed to you how scared I felt, how I worried that I would love you more than you would love me, you backed away. You said you didn't want, that in fact you couldn't allow, "pressure," and that if I needed more than you could give me, which was nothing, not even reassurance, even though you knew that I needed it, if I couldn't wait for you (for what? for you to turn back into the person you had been? for you to figure out how to knit together your apparently now much more frightened, freaked-out self with your much more confident, daring self of before?), that then it would be over.
So the law you laid down was, as it seemed to me, "as long as you don't need anything from me, and can wait for me for some indefinite period of time to decide whether or not I was telling you the truth when I said I loved you and wanted to be with you for the rest of my life, then I will hang in there for you. But don't expect anything from me. Don't expect to talk to me at night when I am tired. Don't expect me to explain myself to you. Just wait."
But for what am I waiting?
What do you want?
I feel tricked. Was it just sex? Did you say all those things becuase you wanted to get laid? Or because you wanted to see how far you get me to go?
I used to feel so safe with you. You seemed to me not exactly "steady" but truthful, honest. And so when you said things like, " I love you and I will always love you," I believed you. I honestly don't know what to think now. Were you lying? were you carried away? Did you mean it but change your mind? Did you just get really scared?
I'm going to go with really scared. That is, and forgive the pop psychological analysis...you have never been loved by someone like me. Someone who is at once super-strong, intelligent, sexy, charismatic, financially secure (more or less) and super-weak, insecure, broken-hearted, in terrible need of being loved.
You say I am still lovable with all my needs, but that you think you might not be able to love me as much as I want and need to be loved. This totally pisses me off. Why? Because, who the fuck are you to decide how much I want and need to be loved by another person? I have a very good sense of what someone can give me, and what I need to give myself.
What I know someone (perhaps not you) can give me, and what I need, is a kind of unconditional love, acceptance, a sense of wonder, admiration, cherishing, and desire that rarely quits (it's okay if that wonderful person whom I love and who loves me falls asleep on me sometimes). I had hoped that you were going to hang in there long enough for me to figure out if my gut feeling about you was right.
It's really depressing now to think that I was wrong. That my gut feeling, which indicated that I could trust you, was completely off-base. It was, wasn't it?
You keep telling me, "I'm not as steady as you think." But when did I ever say that I needed you to be steady all the time? I don't want to be the only volatile, the only weak one. I would hate that. So I don't know what kind of excuse your not being able to be "steady" is. Excuse for what? For not being able to honor what you told me earlier? For being inconstant to yourself?
At least I have been constant. I have told you that I loved you. I have meant it and still do. I have not changed my mind. There have been times when I have needed some time apart from you, to gather myself together (you send me so, you know? I just get the sense that I'm losing myself, I can think of no one but you, of your body, your smell, your eyes, your feet, whatever, you, all of you). And this is how I felt about you the first night and how I feel about you now. Except that now I know you a little more.
I used to think, or, rather, my impression of you was that you were a really decent, constant person, a man of honor, as it were, an admirable man. You did not strike me as someone who would take advantage of a woman for sex, or for "trophy" showing, or something like that.
But now, after the President's reception, now that everyone has seen me---maybe that is all that you needed in the first place. And it doesn't bother you that I spilled wine, drunkenly, on the president because you plan to move on.
So, I'm feeling rejected, and tricked, taken in, and hurt, and, mostly very sad. But what good does it do to tell you that I love you?
I am not sure that I do anymore, actually. Not after this. How could I love someone who says he knows that I need reassurance but can't give it to me? Or someone who says, after his dog has turned on me, viciously, that he and that dog are the same person? Or, who, after telling me over and over again how much he loves me, and convincing me that I can trust him, suddenly tells me that he is not "steady," not reliable, not trustworthy? What would I possibly find loveable about someone who is willing to play so causually with my heart?
I don't know if these statements about you are accurate or not. You haven't been willing to talk to me about these issues, and so I have only had my ruminations. I would like to know what and how you are thinking about these issues, and feel that I have a right to know. I have given so much of myself to you, after all.
I am prepared to continue on with you, but only if the channels of communication become unclogged. It made some sense over the weekend to stop talking about difficulty.. to stop talking altogether and have fun together, simply. And I did have fun with you. I really did. But I never felt comfortable again, after you told me you wanted me to leave. For fleeting seconds I would feel safe, and then I would worry again. I tried to go along with it, to accept that uncertainty as part of a new relationship, but then it seemed to me as though we were in a boat and I was doing all the rowing--I was telling you about how wonderful the hair on your chest or your back was, and you and you were moving on into the abtract world of capital generation. (I am so tired now tat I am falling asleep at the key bordl I hope you and can talk soon.
Because, honestly, I would so love to think of you that way, as my old boyfriend, boyfriend for life, and all that.
But I've been trying to steel myself against such thoughts lately. I have been feeling such a heaviness of heart, a deflated, leaden sense of my body dragging along. It's such a different feeling from the lightness of step and strahlende, or shining, glow I've been experiencing these last few months. The change has been quite a shock to the system.
I am practicing honesty, which is hard for me. I find it difficult to speak the truth because it is often so hard to know what the truth is.
What is currently clouding my mind is this last weekend, when you, as I understand it, changed. Literally, this is how it was for me. I went to sleep with you all in love one night, and woke up the next morning to a completely different person.
The person I had gone to bed with was the man who had, from the very beginning, told me how much he liked me, who said he wanted to see where this relationship would go, and that he hoped it would last forever. Who said that I was beautiful, lovable, wonderful, so wonderful that he thought, even hoped, that he could pledge himself to me for the rest of his life. This was a man who, every morning that I spent with him, gazed at me with wonder and tole me that I was beautiful, who loved the way I touched and caressed him, who understood, intuitively, cognitively, rationally, in his gut, that I loved him and loved loving him, touching him, holding him, being a source of comfort and joy for him, because he was a source of comfort and joy for me. The man I fell asleep with knew that he loved me and that I loved him. When I awoke, I thought that you were still that man.
The man I woke up to told me that he no longer felt sure that he loved me, that he was upset with me for talking about our relationship, who blamed me for making everything so "dramatic," who insisted that he had told me that he needed not to talk about , or, I guess, even feel, the intensity of our passion for one another, because it frightened him, and who seemed to be angry with me for having disobeyed this request not to talk about our passionate feelings, which I hadn't heard quite in those terms.
Yes, of course, it was going very fast. Yes, yes, we had talked about how scary that was, how we were both frightened. But the man I fallen asleep with had also said, many times over, long before I was able to say the same, that he was jumping in with both feet. Indeed, it was YOU who said this, who convinced me that, because you were so confident in your feelings for me, that it would be okay, safe, for me to contemplate jumping in with two feet as well.
But as soon as I did, and then confessed to you how scared I felt, how I worried that I would love you more than you would love me, you backed away. You said you didn't want, that in fact you couldn't allow, "pressure," and that if I needed more than you could give me, which was nothing, not even reassurance, even though you knew that I needed it, if I couldn't wait for you (for what? for you to turn back into the person you had been? for you to figure out how to knit together your apparently now much more frightened, freaked-out self with your much more confident, daring self of before?), that then it would be over.
So the law you laid down was, as it seemed to me, "as long as you don't need anything from me, and can wait for me for some indefinite period of time to decide whether or not I was telling you the truth when I said I loved you and wanted to be with you for the rest of my life, then I will hang in there for you. But don't expect anything from me. Don't expect to talk to me at night when I am tired. Don't expect me to explain myself to you. Just wait."
But for what am I waiting?
What do you want?
I feel tricked. Was it just sex? Did you say all those things becuase you wanted to get laid? Or because you wanted to see how far you get me to go?
I used to feel so safe with you. You seemed to me not exactly "steady" but truthful, honest. And so when you said things like, " I love you and I will always love you," I believed you. I honestly don't know what to think now. Were you lying? were you carried away? Did you mean it but change your mind? Did you just get really scared?
I'm going to go with really scared. That is, and forgive the pop psychological analysis...you have never been loved by someone like me. Someone who is at once super-strong, intelligent, sexy, charismatic, financially secure (more or less) and super-weak, insecure, broken-hearted, in terrible need of being loved.
You say I am still lovable with all my needs, but that you think you might not be able to love me as much as I want and need to be loved. This totally pisses me off. Why? Because, who the fuck are you to decide how much I want and need to be loved by another person? I have a very good sense of what someone can give me, and what I need to give myself.
What I know someone (perhaps not you) can give me, and what I need, is a kind of unconditional love, acceptance, a sense of wonder, admiration, cherishing, and desire that rarely quits (it's okay if that wonderful person whom I love and who loves me falls asleep on me sometimes). I had hoped that you were going to hang in there long enough for me to figure out if my gut feeling about you was right.
It's really depressing now to think that I was wrong. That my gut feeling, which indicated that I could trust you, was completely off-base. It was, wasn't it?
You keep telling me, "I'm not as steady as you think." But when did I ever say that I needed you to be steady all the time? I don't want to be the only volatile, the only weak one. I would hate that. So I don't know what kind of excuse your not being able to be "steady" is. Excuse for what? For not being able to honor what you told me earlier? For being inconstant to yourself?
At least I have been constant. I have told you that I loved you. I have meant it and still do. I have not changed my mind. There have been times when I have needed some time apart from you, to gather myself together (you send me so, you know? I just get the sense that I'm losing myself, I can think of no one but you, of your body, your smell, your eyes, your feet, whatever, you, all of you). And this is how I felt about you the first night and how I feel about you now. Except that now I know you a little more.
I used to think, or, rather, my impression of you was that you were a really decent, constant person, a man of honor, as it were, an admirable man. You did not strike me as someone who would take advantage of a woman for sex, or for "trophy" showing, or something like that.
But now, after the President's reception, now that everyone has seen me---maybe that is all that you needed in the first place. And it doesn't bother you that I spilled wine, drunkenly, on the president because you plan to move on.
So, I'm feeling rejected, and tricked, taken in, and hurt, and, mostly very sad. But what good does it do to tell you that I love you?
I am not sure that I do anymore, actually. Not after this. How could I love someone who says he knows that I need reassurance but can't give it to me? Or someone who says, after his dog has turned on me, viciously, that he and that dog are the same person? Or, who, after telling me over and over again how much he loves me, and convincing me that I can trust him, suddenly tells me that he is not "steady," not reliable, not trustworthy? What would I possibly find loveable about someone who is willing to play so causually with my heart?
I don't know if these statements about you are accurate or not. You haven't been willing to talk to me about these issues, and so I have only had my ruminations. I would like to know what and how you are thinking about these issues, and feel that I have a right to know. I have given so much of myself to you, after all.
I am prepared to continue on with you, but only if the channels of communication become unclogged. It made some sense over the weekend to stop talking about difficulty.. to stop talking altogether and have fun together, simply. And I did have fun with you. I really did. But I never felt comfortable again, after you told me you wanted me to leave. For fleeting seconds I would feel safe, and then I would worry again. I tried to go along with it, to accept that uncertainty as part of a new relationship, but then it seemed to me as though we were in a boat and I was doing all the rowing--I was telling you about how wonderful the hair on your chest or your back was, and you and you were moving on into the abtract world of capital generation. (I am so tired now tat I am falling asleep at the key bordl I hope you and can talk soon.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
The Need
I was trying to tell myself over the weekend, which was, in fact, pleasant and excruciating, that I was not THE NEED, that THE NEED overtakes me at times. Does this make sense at all?
Does it make sense to regard a time spent as both pleasant and excruciating? When in fact the excruciating was just a dread, a clamping down on myself, a supression, a denial of what I needed, which was reassurance, and love, and support. But I had to shut it all down because he said that he didn't want to have any more "drama," any more conversations about our relationship, or the fact that we've moved too fast...
I am not the only one who propelled this relationship along at warp-speed. He pushed it as much and as quickly and as intensly as I did. And now he says he's afraid --that I'll leave him, that he'll leave me---he doesn't know which.
So I finally left. With a heavy heart. And last night he called but didn't have the energy to talk to me about this for very long. That hurt, too. What hurt the most was when he said that he knew I needed reassurance but that he couldn't give it to me now.
He also said that he "wanted this to work out," which used to mean--work out for the rest of his life (that's what he said when he was "smitten" with me)--but now I don't know what it means.
I know that I shouldn't be doing this. And that it's useless to speak of shoulds and shouldn'ts.
It would be useful to learn to speak the truth every time.
THe truth is: I have fallen in love with him. I want him to continue to feel that he is in love with me. I want his passions, his gestures, his words, his eyes, to have been telling me something real, something lasting.
I do not want to be used for sex, for good feelings, for bolstering up after a difficult break-up, to be the rebound girl.
I sense myself needing him, wanting him to reassure him, needing him to love me.
I feel as though I NEED him to love me but that is silly. I don't need HIM to love me.
I hate this feeling of being in need, of wanting more from him than he thinks/feels he can give to me. I hate this imbalance.
It is bad for me. It keeps me unstable. I do not find this a helpful situation. Feeling unstable, feeling desire and longing for someone who is "not sure" whether or not he feels desire and longing for me, or "not sure" whether his desire and longing for me is sufficient, who claims to feel inadequate to me, to my desire...
I have been here before. I know that in the past this situation, this feeling of disempowerment, of need, of dependency, of thinking all the time about what we said to each other last, of feeling an urgent need to settle this "problem," of feeling unloved, basically, unwanted, no longer desired very much...
this feeling of having been taken in, fooled, tricked, seduced...for sex, for beauty, for whatever he thinks he got from me...
but also this feeling of not being sufficiently appreciated. At least with B.A. I felt appreciated, seen, admired--he saw talent, something special, unique in me and wanted me to develop myself, he believed in me--
this I don't feel with (what is his name, now? you see, it doesn't come to me immediately. I have only known him for two months. O, now it comes to me...S.H....but what does this tell me? That I am only needing a Someone? Not him in particular? Is this not just THE PATTERN that I follow? Do I know how to love on a different track? O I would like to find a way to love and be loved for ever and ever.) So. When i ask him, "what do you love about me?" he says, "I like it that you are smart, and sexy." That's about all he has to say. Not "I like it that you like nature and getting outdoors, and cooking, and making stuff, and that you are artistic and talented, and that you can sing well..." and so on. I can name all these specific things that I like about him. I'm complimenting him all the time, always shoring him up,.... and the more he doesn't shore me up, the more I offer to him, in the hope that he'll reciprocate. But he doesn't.
So it's clear, isn't it? This is not a helpful, supportive relationship for me. I deserve to feel appreciated and loved and supported. Even by someone I've only known for two months.
It is not going to help me finish my book, for example, to hang around with someone who makes me feel this unstable, this frightened, this unhappy.
For this is not happy. I am not happy. I am sad. And I feel hurt, wounded, rejected, dis-appreciated, dismissed.
Does it make sense to regard a time spent as both pleasant and excruciating? When in fact the excruciating was just a dread, a clamping down on myself, a supression, a denial of what I needed, which was reassurance, and love, and support. But I had to shut it all down because he said that he didn't want to have any more "drama," any more conversations about our relationship, or the fact that we've moved too fast...
I am not the only one who propelled this relationship along at warp-speed. He pushed it as much and as quickly and as intensly as I did. And now he says he's afraid --that I'll leave him, that he'll leave me---he doesn't know which.
So I finally left. With a heavy heart. And last night he called but didn't have the energy to talk to me about this for very long. That hurt, too. What hurt the most was when he said that he knew I needed reassurance but that he couldn't give it to me now.
He also said that he "wanted this to work out," which used to mean--work out for the rest of his life (that's what he said when he was "smitten" with me)--but now I don't know what it means.
I know that I shouldn't be doing this. And that it's useless to speak of shoulds and shouldn'ts.
It would be useful to learn to speak the truth every time.
THe truth is: I have fallen in love with him. I want him to continue to feel that he is in love with me. I want his passions, his gestures, his words, his eyes, to have been telling me something real, something lasting.
I do not want to be used for sex, for good feelings, for bolstering up after a difficult break-up, to be the rebound girl.
I sense myself needing him, wanting him to reassure him, needing him to love me.
I feel as though I NEED him to love me but that is silly. I don't need HIM to love me.
I hate this feeling of being in need, of wanting more from him than he thinks/feels he can give to me. I hate this imbalance.
It is bad for me. It keeps me unstable. I do not find this a helpful situation. Feeling unstable, feeling desire and longing for someone who is "not sure" whether or not he feels desire and longing for me, or "not sure" whether his desire and longing for me is sufficient, who claims to feel inadequate to me, to my desire...
I have been here before. I know that in the past this situation, this feeling of disempowerment, of need, of dependency, of thinking all the time about what we said to each other last, of feeling an urgent need to settle this "problem," of feeling unloved, basically, unwanted, no longer desired very much...
this feeling of having been taken in, fooled, tricked, seduced...for sex, for beauty, for whatever he thinks he got from me...
but also this feeling of not being sufficiently appreciated. At least with B.A. I felt appreciated, seen, admired--he saw talent, something special, unique in me and wanted me to develop myself, he believed in me--
this I don't feel with (what is his name, now? you see, it doesn't come to me immediately. I have only known him for two months. O, now it comes to me...S.H....but what does this tell me? That I am only needing a Someone? Not him in particular? Is this not just THE PATTERN that I follow? Do I know how to love on a different track? O I would like to find a way to love and be loved for ever and ever.) So. When i ask him, "what do you love about me?" he says, "I like it that you are smart, and sexy." That's about all he has to say. Not "I like it that you like nature and getting outdoors, and cooking, and making stuff, and that you are artistic and talented, and that you can sing well..." and so on. I can name all these specific things that I like about him. I'm complimenting him all the time, always shoring him up,.... and the more he doesn't shore me up, the more I offer to him, in the hope that he'll reciprocate. But he doesn't.
So it's clear, isn't it? This is not a helpful, supportive relationship for me. I deserve to feel appreciated and loved and supported. Even by someone I've only known for two months.
It is not going to help me finish my book, for example, to hang around with someone who makes me feel this unstable, this frightened, this unhappy.
For this is not happy. I am not happy. I am sad. And I feel hurt, wounded, rejected, dis-appreciated, dismissed.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Fasting
Day 2 of no food. It's painful, yes, but only at times. And I'm thinking about the millions of people in the world who suffer this emptiness, this growing dizziness, every single day.
It also occurs to me that I'm practicing an old religious custom, of fasting during Ramadan, for one's sins, I suppose. I don't believe in God, or religion, or original sin. But I do guess I feel that I've got plenty to atone for.
Fasting is a kind of cleansing, after all.
It also occurs to me that I'm practicing an old religious custom, of fasting during Ramadan, for one's sins, I suppose. I don't believe in God, or religion, or original sin. But I do guess I feel that I've got plenty to atone for.
Fasting is a kind of cleansing, after all.
The last time I saw him, December 2006
The guard at the gate said "the Mrs." didn’t want any one to come in while they were gone, but that they had just gotten home. So she let us in and we drove up through olive trees and mansions, the night darkening around us. There were two mercedes aging in the driveway, the others inside the garage. And blocking the way, a big white a van, loaded with suitcases and shopping bags, what looked like a month’s luggage They had been gone a night. She appeared in a green fur, Christmas-tree shaped, and something red was blinking on her lapel. The Female Elvis. With the broad band of hot pink in her hair, diamonds weighing down her chest and arms and ears. She complained about her neck hurting a lot and was continually draping a grimy pad that she heated up in the microwave around it. Wouldn’t take the necklaces off, though. Hi, I called drearily as I climbed out of the car. She started in immediately. “O we had so much trouble getting home! It took us two hours to leave the spa; we had to sit in the van, and the traffic was a nightmare, and your father is so slow and difficult, you know, and wouldn’t cooperate, and we thought you were coming earlier: your father said you were coming for brunch and he sat there and waited all morning. I said, they’d call the room. But you never did. And then it took us so long to get out of there. And I’ve bought Christmas presents and your father is so much work....” Well, we’re here now,” I interrupted. You have to interrupt her because she doesn’t stop on her own. She never asks questions. She only responds to ones she imagines you’ve asked, endlessly. Drives my father crazy. The dogs were barking furiously when we came in, as usual. My father was lying on the couch, watching t.v., as usual. He was grumpy and tired. “I thought you were coming for brunch.” “We were waiting for you to come home.” We’d been waiting all afternoon, in fact, because he had given me the impression that she didn’t want us to barge in on their “Christmas weekend.” She doesn’t like me. Hasn’t, ever.
In the beginning, after the stroke, when we thought he was dying and we thought she was going to take everything, I was the one who took away her credit cards. Probably an overreaction. I see that now, but the lawyers said to and we didn’t know her. She was so strange. And later, when he realized he’d made a mistake, I was the one who discovered that she’d been embezzling. Over 100,000 stashed in private accounts. He started divorce proceedings; I drove him to the lawyers. It was going to be hard to make peace with her after that. The irony, of course, is that he ended up staying married while my husband and I split up. The weekend I ended up having to go down to Santa Barbara because he “needed me” and was fed up with her was the same weekend that M. and I had taken to try to rediscover the roots of our love for one another in Berkeley. They ran deep, those roots; they ran right out of sight down in the dark ground. We couldn’t see them. I abandoned my husband and child and flew to my father’s rescue. I drove him to the lawyer, helped him put new locks on the house, endured her screaming. We went out to lunch near his old office and talked about who he could date, which was no one. He was an invalid now, unable to walk without a cane or drive or see or think clearly. Half his face had fallen into a permanent frown. The rest of it fell afterwards. He was no longer the handsome 57-year old successful surgeon with a yacht and a ski lodge in a flashy resort, the man he had been when she came along. When asked why he married her, he said he didn’t know that she talked so much. How could he not have noticed? They were married six months and then he was struck. My mother had been dead not two years.
But this was all long ago. It was night and I was arriving at my father’s house with yet another man I loved but couldn’t hold onto. “You remember C.,” I said, putting him between her and me, like a shield. “O yes!” I think she smiled her prettiest smile, her princess smile. “I have presents for you,” I said. The driver had finished carrying in the last of the bags. C. escaped to move the car. My father hauled himself onto his good leg and the lame leg and made his slow and painful way across the room. He didn’t look at me. I turned to her and said, again, “I brought you Christmas presents.” She disappeared into the kitchen. My father passed into his study and closed the door. The dogs, who bite, yelped and pawed at the door of the bedroom. I stood in the hallway, uncertainly holding the big pink boxes I had brought, waiting. I stood there for a long time, it seemed. Finally I put the boxes down on the ground, near the long line of bags that had been brought in, and knocked on my father’s office door.
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Thursday, December 14, 2006
Santa Barbara
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In the beginning, after the stroke, when we thought he was dying and we thought she was going to take everything, I was the one who took away her credit cards. Probably an overreaction. I see that now, but the lawyers said to and we didn’t know her. She was so strange. And later, when he realized he’d made a mistake, I was the one who discovered that she’d been embezzling. Over 100,000 stashed in private accounts. He started divorce proceedings; I drove him to the lawyers. It was going to be hard to make peace with her after that. The irony, of course, is that he ended up staying married while my husband and I split up. The weekend I ended up having to go down to Santa Barbara because he “needed me” and was fed up with her was the same weekend that M. and I had taken to try to rediscover the roots of our love for one another in Berkeley. They ran deep, those roots; they ran right out of sight down in the dark ground. We couldn’t see them. I abandoned my husband and child and flew to my father’s rescue. I drove him to the lawyer, helped him put new locks on the house, endured her screaming. We went out to lunch near his old office and talked about who he could date, which was no one. He was an invalid now, unable to walk without a cane or drive or see or think clearly. Half his face had fallen into a permanent frown. The rest of it fell afterwards. He was no longer the handsome 57-year old successful surgeon with a yacht and a ski lodge in a flashy resort, the man he had been when she came along. When asked why he married her, he said he didn’t know that she talked so much. How could he not have noticed? They were married six months and then he was struck. My mother had been dead not two years.
But this was all long ago. It was night and I was arriving at my father’s house with yet another man I loved but couldn’t hold onto. “You remember C.,” I said, putting him between her and me, like a shield. “O yes!” I think she smiled her prettiest smile, her princess smile. “I have presents for you,” I said. The driver had finished carrying in the last of the bags. C. escaped to move the car. My father hauled himself onto his good leg and the lame leg and made his slow and painful way across the room. He didn’t look at me. I turned to her and said, again, “I brought you Christmas presents.” She disappeared into the kitchen. My father passed into his study and closed the door. The dogs, who bite, yelped and pawed at the door of the bedroom. I stood in the hallway, uncertainly holding the big pink boxes I had brought, waiting. I stood there for a long time, it seemed. Finally I put the boxes down on the ground, near the long line of bags that had been brought in, and knocked on my father’s office door.
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Thursday, December 14, 2006
Santa Barbara
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Friday, July 20, 2007
Choices
Today I had this fantasy/vision of me moving to SB and working for abortion rights, lobbying for Planned Parenthood and living with you and being really, really happy. I will also admit that my vision has in it something like my house there in SB. I have a really nice house here.
There's a job at Westmont College that I can and will apply for. I'm actually over-qualified for it, and that could be a problem. I will have to somehow tell them or convince them that I am not as scary as I will look to some of them. Weird, isn't it? But there's this huge division between teaching and research jobs, and I have a research job, and people at teaching colleges are usually intimidated by people like me, because they think I'm going to come in and lord it over them. It's actually hard to explain the dynamic of the academic world to outsiders. We're as snobbish and arrogant and power-hunger as anyone.
So, I was listening to NPR "NOW" during my run this evening and thinking:
that I'd really like to something to protect women's choice। I mean, i had three abortions... or maybe just two। I can't remember. I was extremely young and obviously very fertile (still am, goddammit) and I have no regrets. There's a new campaign in the anti-choice movement to convince people that abortion causes depression, which is the most ridiculous thing. Have you seen the film or read the book, THE HANDMAID'S TALE? Great movie. Better book. I'm teaching it next semester (this is why I love my job). At any rate, the new campaign is religious and aimed at convincing women and policy makers that having abortions harms women's health because women feel so guilty about having done it. The truth is that the people behind this campaign are the ones making women feel guilty. The reason they had the operation in the first place is because they were depressed, indigent, drug-abusing, alcoholic, what-have-you, and totally unprepared to bring children into the world.
सो, टुडे ई wa
I get actually quite exercised about this. Because I'm so glad I was able to have those abortions, because I believe so strongly in women's ability to make decisions for themselves, and am so virilently opposed to people who want to take that agency away from women.
Plus now these anti-choice people are trying, and succeeding, in making women feel really bad about themselves for having had the abortions. They're convincing women, a la The Handmaid's Tale, that they are murderers. They've broken these already quite damaged women down not because they want to help them, but rather because they want to use them to push their political agenda, which would take away from women the control over their bodies which, to me, is fundamental, basic.
There are eight states now in which there is legistation for FORCE women to view ultrasounds of the fetuses that they want to abort. Most women would of course look and say, FINE. Let's just get if over with . But the distress caused by this action. And isn't it ironic that the very same people who claim to be protecting babies are against national health insurance for children, against economic programs to help the indigent, to help children living in poverty.
As I said, I get quite exercised about this.
And I have this fantasy of living in SB, with my dearest friend, a physician, and working for women's health and freedom.
Doesn't that sound great? Women's Health and Freedom? These awful anti-choice people claim to be working for women's health. But they could never convince people that they're working for women's freedom. That's what they ultimately oppose.
There's a job at Westmont College that I can and will apply for. I'm actually over-qualified for it, and that could be a problem. I will have to somehow tell them or convince them that I am not as scary as I will look to some of them. Weird, isn't it? But there's this huge division between teaching and research jobs, and I have a research job, and people at teaching colleges are usually intimidated by people like me, because they think I'm going to come in and lord it over them. It's actually hard to explain the dynamic of the academic world to outsiders. We're as snobbish and arrogant and power-hunger as anyone.
So, I was listening to NPR "NOW" during my run this evening and thinking:
that I'd really like to something to protect women's choice। I mean, i had three abortions... or maybe just two। I can't remember. I was extremely young and obviously very fertile (still am, goddammit) and I have no regrets. There's a new campaign in the anti-choice movement to convince people that abortion causes depression, which is the most ridiculous thing. Have you seen the film or read the book, THE HANDMAID'S TALE? Great movie. Better book. I'm teaching it next semester (this is why I love my job). At any rate, the new campaign is religious and aimed at convincing women and policy makers that having abortions harms women's health because women feel so guilty about having done it. The truth is that the people behind this campaign are the ones making women feel guilty. The reason they had the operation in the first place is because they were depressed, indigent, drug-abusing, alcoholic, what-have-you, and totally unprepared to bring children into the world.
सो, टुडे ई wa
I get actually quite exercised about this. Because I'm so glad I was able to have those abortions, because I believe so strongly in women's ability to make decisions for themselves, and am so virilently opposed to people who want to take that agency away from women.
Plus now these anti-choice people are trying, and succeeding, in making women feel really bad about themselves for having had the abortions. They're convincing women, a la The Handmaid's Tale, that they are murderers. They've broken these already quite damaged women down not because they want to help them, but rather because they want to use them to push their political agenda, which would take away from women the control over their bodies which, to me, is fundamental, basic.
There are eight states now in which there is legistation for FORCE women to view ultrasounds of the fetuses that they want to abort. Most women would of course look and say, FINE. Let's just get if over with . But the distress caused by this action. And isn't it ironic that the very same people who claim to be protecting babies are against national health insurance for children, against economic programs to help the indigent, to help children living in poverty.
As I said, I get quite exercised about this.
And I have this fantasy of living in SB, with my dearest friend, a physician, and working for women's health and freedom.
Doesn't that sound great? Women's Health and Freedom? These awful anti-choice people claim to be working for women's health. But they could never convince people that they're working for women's freedom. That's what they ultimately oppose.
Monday, July 16, 2007
My father
I must say that the great freedom of this blog so far derives from my belief that no one is reading it and that no one ever will. So why write into the ethernet, publishing my thoughts as opposed to simply recording them in silence? We are all looking for audiences.
And that is the theme of tonight's post. My desire for an audience from my father, for attention which I never received and which, according to Freud as well as to my brilliant therapist, accounts for the symptoms that I'm suffering from now.
I went into a kind of daze in CA, going through my father's office and files and things. Everything he had touched in the last fifteen years, and many things he hadn't touched--the walls, the ceiling, the photographs, in there was covered in sticky, yellow, nicotine grime. (Years of smoking four or five packs a day. And to think that it took so long for him to kill himself. He survived for a week after we took him off life support. The man's brain was dead, but the stem remained and the heart pumped away, the lungs rose and fell, for days, until he finally died of dehydration. Like a plant.
But let's not go there just now. )
I discovered all sorts of wonderful things about my now newly wonderful father. That he loved roses, that he was funny and beloved in the hospital; that he was a GREAT MAN. The daze I went into was an infantile rage. How do you separate infantile rage from adult rage, especially when it concerns your father? Do you write careful poems about his painful and often hideous bodily decay, as Sharon Olds has done? I don't know. It's a problem.
But after the week of being very sensible and rational and measured and enduring---after making that damned arrangement with his widow and agreeing to give her much more than she deserved, some part of me began to fall in love, again, with my father. Or to ressurect the old, never-to-be-killed, aparently, vegetable part of my heart and brain that idealizes, even idolizes, my father, the perfect one. And there I was going through his account books, which were treasures to me because, after all, I was there to finish them, to close them. And finding out from S.M. that he loved roses and raised them, nurtured them (as he never nurtued me, but I wasn't thinking this at the time). And discovering his records, Tristan and Isolde, Tannhäuser, dark, passionate, romantic music, and his books on sailing, and his scuba equipment. I found out that he pioneered Sports Medicine. That sports medicine wasn't even a concept before my father started to work on athletes--back in the 1960s, in Germany, and that he was incredibly talented, smarter and funnier and more interesting than I had ever known.
And I was feeling a great deal of anger and rage not just because this woman had come in and taken my father away from me, had filled his head with poisonous messages about his children (that he was all too willing to believe, face it), and making it so hard for me to see him--but also because she had been so incredibly cruel, truly evil in her selfishness and manipulation and hostility for all those years, for fifteen years. I blamed her for taking away my father and for causing me an incredible amount of pain. I wasn't thinking about the fact that he had chosen her, but rather was rescuring him, as always, by convincing myself that she had manipulated him, had tricked him when he was down. And even though this is true, true that she really did take advantage of him at his weakest moment, when he was devastated not just by the death of the love of his life, but also by the loss of his professional power due to alcoholism. She got to him. But still, he might have been able to see through her.
What is true, what was clear to me at the time he married her and what eluded me when I was out there, is the fact that she mirrored all of his uglinesss, all of his faults, and none of his complex virtues. He was talented and wealthy and successfull and intelligent and well-educated; she was talentless and unsuccessful and dim. She, like him, knew nothing about intimacy in a loving relationship. She did not know how to be generous, caring, nurturing, magnamimous. She cared about money, getting it and spending it. She cared about looking rich and important. She cared about being able to look down on people who didn't have money; she was racist and sexist and classist. As he was. She was perhaps even more attached to things, more miserly and ragged in her heart than he was. She had no compassion or empathy for others in need. She had never developed the part of her mind and heart that makes it possible for people to understand and listen to other people. And neither did he. They were, both of them, extremely damaged and extremely unhappy, tied together through weaknesses and insecurities.
My father loved my mother. Did he ever figure out why, in the end, after his miserable marriage to a selfish woman who wouldn't allow him to share her bed, who refused to bathe him or attend to his most urgent and basic bodily needs in his illness, who allowed him to wallow in filth, who never once took him to the doctor or dentist, who threw temper tantrums until she got what she demanded--diamonds, furs, sports cars that were too small to fit his wheelchair into-, who kept three vicious and unhousebroken dogs in the house, whose incessant barking and pissing and shitting drove him crazy, who could not have a conversation but could only talk endlessly, shifting from one self-pitying topic to another, who dressed herself in tiaras and furs on even the hottest days, who spent whole days and thousands and thousands of dollars ordering useless items from Q.V.C., the television shopping channel, who was so lazy, that she refused to pack her own suitcases and who, rather than go up one flight of stairs to get the suitcases they owned, would buy new suitcases for every single trip they went on. They must have had 40 or 50 sets of luggage. And he paid for it all because he was tired, and sick, and sunk into depression, and because he couldn't be bothered to have it out with her, because she was such a bully and a screamer and a wailer and ultimately, truly, the coldest-hearted woman I have ever met. He simply couldn't stand her.
So he gave into her. And I started to get caught up in the details of it all--the $10,000 she stole from our bank account during days after he died; the whole houseful of furniture and dishes and rugs, down even to the very hoses on the garden wall, that she dragged off with her to her million dollar condo, all the while claiming to be destitute; the $250,000 earrings she bullied out of him shortly before he died; the three Mercedes convertibles she forced him to put in her name--I started to think that this was all her doing, that he was just an innocent, disabled old man who had been badly wronged.
And I lost perspective for a while. I got caught up in my desire to punish her. The furies got into my hair and my heart (the furies, those ancient household gods) and I stopped acting as trustee and protector of my brother and sister and began to think in terms of vengence and retribution. I stopped thinking rationally, but only for a little while. It takes a great deal of self-control to prevent oneself from being taken over by hatred, which always destroys not the hated one but rather the self. Fortunately for all of us I came to my senses again (with some help from my lawyer) and accepted that we had won, in the long run. What remains must be shepherded, not squandered in court.
It is tomorrow and I am sober while she is still ugly.
The impossible situation I confine myself in as long as I regard him as the ultimate love object--this man who never really showed me love, who never gently and lovingly made it clear that he was my father, married happily to my mother, and therefore who never made it possible for me to divert my libido from him to other, more appropriate targets.
Flash of insight: What is true is that it is no longer his responsibility. It's mine. I have to make the break, recognize his unsuitability. I have to stop looking for him in the world, stop regarding him as the best object of my desire, and find other, better objects in men who can actually love me, whose love for me I can accept and cherish.
It's so cliché. I have to learn to be able to experience intimacy, to be able to trust in myself enough to know that I am loveable so that I can receive and treasure intimate love when it comes my way. To stop choosing men who remind me of Daddy: distant, withholding, withdrawn, emotionally immature men, men like I.B. and C.Y.
So much to learn. So little time.
And that is the theme of tonight's post. My desire for an audience from my father, for attention which I never received and which, according to Freud as well as to my brilliant therapist, accounts for the symptoms that I'm suffering from now.
I went into a kind of daze in CA, going through my father's office and files and things. Everything he had touched in the last fifteen years, and many things he hadn't touched--the walls, the ceiling, the photographs, in there was covered in sticky, yellow, nicotine grime. (Years of smoking four or five packs a day. And to think that it took so long for him to kill himself. He survived for a week after we took him off life support. The man's brain was dead, but the stem remained and the heart pumped away, the lungs rose and fell, for days, until he finally died of dehydration. Like a plant.
But let's not go there just now. )
I discovered all sorts of wonderful things about my now newly wonderful father. That he loved roses, that he was funny and beloved in the hospital; that he was a GREAT MAN. The daze I went into was an infantile rage. How do you separate infantile rage from adult rage, especially when it concerns your father? Do you write careful poems about his painful and often hideous bodily decay, as Sharon Olds has done? I don't know. It's a problem.
But after the week of being very sensible and rational and measured and enduring---after making that damned arrangement with his widow and agreeing to give her much more than she deserved, some part of me began to fall in love, again, with my father. Or to ressurect the old, never-to-be-killed, aparently, vegetable part of my heart and brain that idealizes, even idolizes, my father, the perfect one. And there I was going through his account books, which were treasures to me because, after all, I was there to finish them, to close them. And finding out from S.M. that he loved roses and raised them, nurtured them (as he never nurtued me, but I wasn't thinking this at the time). And discovering his records, Tristan and Isolde, Tannhäuser, dark, passionate, romantic music, and his books on sailing, and his scuba equipment. I found out that he pioneered Sports Medicine. That sports medicine wasn't even a concept before my father started to work on athletes--back in the 1960s, in Germany, and that he was incredibly talented, smarter and funnier and more interesting than I had ever known.
And I was feeling a great deal of anger and rage not just because this woman had come in and taken my father away from me, had filled his head with poisonous messages about his children (that he was all too willing to believe, face it), and making it so hard for me to see him--but also because she had been so incredibly cruel, truly evil in her selfishness and manipulation and hostility for all those years, for fifteen years. I blamed her for taking away my father and for causing me an incredible amount of pain. I wasn't thinking about the fact that he had chosen her, but rather was rescuring him, as always, by convincing myself that she had manipulated him, had tricked him when he was down. And even though this is true, true that she really did take advantage of him at his weakest moment, when he was devastated not just by the death of the love of his life, but also by the loss of his professional power due to alcoholism. She got to him. But still, he might have been able to see through her.
What is true, what was clear to me at the time he married her and what eluded me when I was out there, is the fact that she mirrored all of his uglinesss, all of his faults, and none of his complex virtues. He was talented and wealthy and successfull and intelligent and well-educated; she was talentless and unsuccessful and dim. She, like him, knew nothing about intimacy in a loving relationship. She did not know how to be generous, caring, nurturing, magnamimous. She cared about money, getting it and spending it. She cared about looking rich and important. She cared about being able to look down on people who didn't have money; she was racist and sexist and classist. As he was. She was perhaps even more attached to things, more miserly and ragged in her heart than he was. She had no compassion or empathy for others in need. She had never developed the part of her mind and heart that makes it possible for people to understand and listen to other people. And neither did he. They were, both of them, extremely damaged and extremely unhappy, tied together through weaknesses and insecurities.
My father loved my mother. Did he ever figure out why, in the end, after his miserable marriage to a selfish woman who wouldn't allow him to share her bed, who refused to bathe him or attend to his most urgent and basic bodily needs in his illness, who allowed him to wallow in filth, who never once took him to the doctor or dentist, who threw temper tantrums until she got what she demanded--diamonds, furs, sports cars that were too small to fit his wheelchair into-, who kept three vicious and unhousebroken dogs in the house, whose incessant barking and pissing and shitting drove him crazy, who could not have a conversation but could only talk endlessly, shifting from one self-pitying topic to another, who dressed herself in tiaras and furs on even the hottest days, who spent whole days and thousands and thousands of dollars ordering useless items from Q.V.C., the television shopping channel, who was so lazy, that she refused to pack her own suitcases and who, rather than go up one flight of stairs to get the suitcases they owned, would buy new suitcases for every single trip they went on. They must have had 40 or 50 sets of luggage. And he paid for it all because he was tired, and sick, and sunk into depression, and because he couldn't be bothered to have it out with her, because she was such a bully and a screamer and a wailer and ultimately, truly, the coldest-hearted woman I have ever met. He simply couldn't stand her.
So he gave into her. And I started to get caught up in the details of it all--the $10,000 she stole from our bank account during days after he died; the whole houseful of furniture and dishes and rugs, down even to the very hoses on the garden wall, that she dragged off with her to her million dollar condo, all the while claiming to be destitute; the $250,000 earrings she bullied out of him shortly before he died; the three Mercedes convertibles she forced him to put in her name--I started to think that this was all her doing, that he was just an innocent, disabled old man who had been badly wronged.
And I lost perspective for a while. I got caught up in my desire to punish her. The furies got into my hair and my heart (the furies, those ancient household gods) and I stopped acting as trustee and protector of my brother and sister and began to think in terms of vengence and retribution. I stopped thinking rationally, but only for a little while. It takes a great deal of self-control to prevent oneself from being taken over by hatred, which always destroys not the hated one but rather the self. Fortunately for all of us I came to my senses again (with some help from my lawyer) and accepted that we had won, in the long run. What remains must be shepherded, not squandered in court.
It is tomorrow and I am sober while she is still ugly.
The impossible situation I confine myself in as long as I regard him as the ultimate love object--this man who never really showed me love, who never gently and lovingly made it clear that he was my father, married happily to my mother, and therefore who never made it possible for me to divert my libido from him to other, more appropriate targets.
Flash of insight: What is true is that it is no longer his responsibility. It's mine. I have to make the break, recognize his unsuitability. I have to stop looking for him in the world, stop regarding him as the best object of my desire, and find other, better objects in men who can actually love me, whose love for me I can accept and cherish.
It's so cliché. I have to learn to be able to experience intimacy, to be able to trust in myself enough to know that I am loveable so that I can receive and treasure intimate love when it comes my way. To stop choosing men who remind me of Daddy: distant, withholding, withdrawn, emotionally immature men, men like I.B. and C.Y.
So much to learn. So little time.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Viva Bastille Day
So last night I went out on a match date with a professor from a different discipline who works in a different city. He was a lot better looking than in the photos, quite nervous at first. I wasn't really in the mood but wanted to get my mind of C.F. and CA. Maybe I just got used to talking to him every day, to being able to meet him for a drink down by the beach, but now I find myself longing for him almost every minute of the day. Dependent behavior. I think that's what it is. If there are automatic thoughts there must also be automatic emotional responses to distress. And I'm in a lot of distress. I miss my father a lot. I'm dreaming about him, processing the last fifteen years, the last forty-seven.
At any rate. I don't exactly remember when or where it was that I decided I wanted to sleep with him...at the restaurant? the car? on the way to my house after he graciously offered to put my bike in his car and take me home? Is my bike here? Did I unlock it? I don't remember. I sort of remember telling him, "you should stay here," but not where or when I said that. I remember wanting him and having him in my bed last night. I remember him getting up at 5 to go to the airport, and I remember thinking, "what a fantastic body he has," and going downstairs to make him a cup of tea for the drive. I remember coming home and shouting up the stairs to B.N., "I'm back." I remember taking the tampon out and deciding I didn't need to tell him I was having my period because I'm 47 now and am no longer embarrassed about the natural processes of my body. I am hoping the rest of this evening will return to my memory soon.
I don't feel at all ashamed or guilty or stupid or dumb. I'm not punishing myself, as I used to do in the past when this sort of thing happened. I almost never feel sexual any more, and have spent so much time lately recoiling from men who desire me. It's just such an unusual thing to feel this kind of straightforward sexual desire that I'm glad I could have and enjoy it. He was, is, a perfectly nice person. I even felt a little sorry for him for having gone so long without sex. That is to say, some part of me was just being generous, while another part of me was just going for it. And I'm glad I did. In the kitchen, kissing me just before he left, he said, "You can still back out of this." "So can you," I said.
Now to go downstairs to find out about that bike. And to see about some breakfast for that son of mine, who would remain upstairs in his lair with the t.v. and his computer and his great-great-grandfather's zither all weekend if he could.
And, of course, to figure out what the hell I was doing and why. Or not.
At any rate. I don't exactly remember when or where it was that I decided I wanted to sleep with him...at the restaurant? the car? on the way to my house after he graciously offered to put my bike in his car and take me home? Is my bike here? Did I unlock it? I don't remember. I sort of remember telling him, "you should stay here," but not where or when I said that. I remember wanting him and having him in my bed last night. I remember him getting up at 5 to go to the airport, and I remember thinking, "what a fantastic body he has," and going downstairs to make him a cup of tea for the drive. I remember coming home and shouting up the stairs to B.N., "I'm back." I remember taking the tampon out and deciding I didn't need to tell him I was having my period because I'm 47 now and am no longer embarrassed about the natural processes of my body. I am hoping the rest of this evening will return to my memory soon.
I don't feel at all ashamed or guilty or stupid or dumb. I'm not punishing myself, as I used to do in the past when this sort of thing happened. I almost never feel sexual any more, and have spent so much time lately recoiling from men who desire me. It's just such an unusual thing to feel this kind of straightforward sexual desire that I'm glad I could have and enjoy it. He was, is, a perfectly nice person. I even felt a little sorry for him for having gone so long without sex. That is to say, some part of me was just being generous, while another part of me was just going for it. And I'm glad I did. In the kitchen, kissing me just before he left, he said, "You can still back out of this." "So can you," I said.
Now to go downstairs to find out about that bike. And to see about some breakfast for that son of mine, who would remain upstairs in his lair with the t.v. and his computer and his great-great-grandfather's zither all weekend if he could.
And, of course, to figure out what the hell I was doing and why. Or not.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Back East
I haven't been able to write. It's the old problem of having so much to say that I can't decide where to begin and even the idea of starting stops me from doing so. But one has to begin somewhere.
I'm not taking care of myself. I'm not sleeping enough, drinking (just a little) too much, and getting too little exercise. I feel like shit.
But that has partly to do with the fact that I just saw my ex-boyfriend, B.A., who very kindly came by to lend my son a bike for the weekend. Decent of him. And yet he didn't fail to take the opportunity to put me down, if ever-so-subtly. Perhaps he's just an insensitive oaf. He saw the Persian rugs I'm airing out on my front porch--the ones that came from my father's house that smell like dog shit and piss and cigarettes and whiskey--and said: "It looks like a bordello out here." And inside, looking at the dining table and chairs, he said "very baroque," which, from him, means, "hideous." "It's the furniture I grew up with," I mumbled.
It would have been nice had he said something positive. I think my house looks a lot better, after all, with real leather and real wood furnishings instead of the odd, dirty pieces I've pulled out of the trash over the years. And then there was the heaviness in his gaze, the accusing look of the wounded, the hurt, that bears down on me. He intends me to feel guilty and I do. But I can't carry this burden. It's not as though I decided not to be madly in love with him. I'm just not.
And then on the front porch, as he was leaving, I asked him about O, his daughter, and he went on and on, as he does, about her camp not being "challenging" enough. Not that she was complaining, or even aware of any problem. She liked it. But he didn't think the counselors were teaching her enough. He's picking up the slack by drilling her in math. "She's only average in math, and that's not good enough. We've come up one level, and if we can come up two more she'll be sufficient for third grade." Sufficient for third grade means, above average. What a remarkably compliant little girl, I thought to myself. In the past, I would have said something like "Boy, you sure put a lot of pressure on her." But this time I concentrated on trying not to betray how this discourse made me feel: not only sorry for her having to live up to his expectations, but also sorry for inadequate self. I never drilled B.N. in math, for example.
Not that he would have gone along with it. There would have been wailing and gnashing of teeth. She's much more obedient and easy-going than my son ever was. Perhaps I have failed him, I thought. As I so often did when talking to B.A.
The problem with B.A. is that he seemed always to leave me feeling rather bad about myself and somewhat overridden, as though he had gone over me with a backhoe and then dug a pit in the earth to show me where I'll end up if I don't improve. Clearly my own insecurities kick in to support these thoughts, but there is also something in him that needs everyone around him to push themselves more than they do. I suspect this drive comes from his parents, who were never satisfied with him, and is now internalized as a stern, dark voice continually finding fault in himself and projecting its perenially unsatisfied gaze onto all around.
Oy. What a relief it was to let him walk away, even though a leaden cloud of guilt and self-doubt lingered over me in his wake. At least I was able to see it and to record my response. At least I was able to understand why I needed to break it off.
I'm not taking care of myself. I'm not sleeping enough, drinking (just a little) too much, and getting too little exercise. I feel like shit.
But that has partly to do with the fact that I just saw my ex-boyfriend, B.A., who very kindly came by to lend my son a bike for the weekend. Decent of him. And yet he didn't fail to take the opportunity to put me down, if ever-so-subtly. Perhaps he's just an insensitive oaf. He saw the Persian rugs I'm airing out on my front porch--the ones that came from my father's house that smell like dog shit and piss and cigarettes and whiskey--and said: "It looks like a bordello out here." And inside, looking at the dining table and chairs, he said "very baroque," which, from him, means, "hideous." "It's the furniture I grew up with," I mumbled.
It would have been nice had he said something positive. I think my house looks a lot better, after all, with real leather and real wood furnishings instead of the odd, dirty pieces I've pulled out of the trash over the years. And then there was the heaviness in his gaze, the accusing look of the wounded, the hurt, that bears down on me. He intends me to feel guilty and I do. But I can't carry this burden. It's not as though I decided not to be madly in love with him. I'm just not.
And then on the front porch, as he was leaving, I asked him about O, his daughter, and he went on and on, as he does, about her camp not being "challenging" enough. Not that she was complaining, or even aware of any problem. She liked it. But he didn't think the counselors were teaching her enough. He's picking up the slack by drilling her in math. "She's only average in math, and that's not good enough. We've come up one level, and if we can come up two more she'll be sufficient for third grade." Sufficient for third grade means, above average. What a remarkably compliant little girl, I thought to myself. In the past, I would have said something like "Boy, you sure put a lot of pressure on her." But this time I concentrated on trying not to betray how this discourse made me feel: not only sorry for her having to live up to his expectations, but also sorry for inadequate self. I never drilled B.N. in math, for example.
Not that he would have gone along with it. There would have been wailing and gnashing of teeth. She's much more obedient and easy-going than my son ever was. Perhaps I have failed him, I thought. As I so often did when talking to B.A.
The problem with B.A. is that he seemed always to leave me feeling rather bad about myself and somewhat overridden, as though he had gone over me with a backhoe and then dug a pit in the earth to show me where I'll end up if I don't improve. Clearly my own insecurities kick in to support these thoughts, but there is also something in him that needs everyone around him to push themselves more than they do. I suspect this drive comes from his parents, who were never satisfied with him, and is now internalized as a stern, dark voice continually finding fault in himself and projecting its perenially unsatisfied gaze onto all around.
Oy. What a relief it was to let him walk away, even though a leaden cloud of guilt and self-doubt lingered over me in his wake. At least I was able to see it and to record my response. At least I was able to understand why I needed to break it off.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
That didn't last long. It was good for a couple of days. I was happy to see him, happy to find that the man I'm dating is, well, upstanding. Reliable, very intelligent, knowledgeable about world and national politics, interesting. And then the argument.
It basically boils down to two comments that seem representative to me of what is wrong: "it's a good thing we aren't recording this conversation, because what you just said was really dumb;" and, many hours later, "we should be recording this conversation because if you heard it you would see that what you just said is completely without merit."
What bothered me was not whether or not what I had said was correct or appropriate (it was); but rather that he should put it this way. It bothered me that he could put me down, even in jest, and that he would refuse to see that what he had said was hurtful or demeaning, and therefore refuse to apologize.
When I said, "you just said that I was stupid," he equivocated. "Dumb does not mean the same thing as stupid." I was supposed to understand, in other words, that he had actually said something rather affectionate. We were talking about the beauty of Bill Evan's piano playing and the simplicity of the musical line. "It's not like he's Ashkenazy," I said.
That was the dumb statement--he told me more than once that what I had said was one of the "dumbest things" that I had ever said. We argued about this for a good five to ten minutes before he understood that I was talking about the Russian conductor and composer. Apparently he had never heard of Vladimir Ashkenazy (which I found hard to believe, since he himself is such a great pianist, althogh he mainly plays jazz).
He thought I had said that Evans was not a German Jew. Why this would make any kind of sense in the context of our conversation still baffles me, but never mind. When I explained to him who Ashkenazy was, he actually tried to get me to believe that I had mispronounced his name... "I think it's actually pronounced, "Aszzz-kenazi." He's telling me how to pronounce the name of someone he's never heard of.
In short, he could not admit that he had been wrong. First, he could not admit that he had said something insulting. Second, he could not admit that I knew what I was talking about. He certainly could not apologize.
Still, I laughed about this. "Boy, would I love to have a recording of the ten minutes when you thought I was talking about Jews and I thought we were talking about classical music!"
The second statement arose much later, when we were in bed. I had been having trouble sleeping for most of the night, because he likes to snuggle in a way that leaves me very little room. I had been feeling somewhat suffocated, but had finally given up trying to stretch out, and settled down onto his shoulder. He said said, "I still love you, even though you moved." This bugged me because the moment seemed, actually, rather tender and it would have been nice if he could have acknowledged it straightforwardly. I didn't say anything but frowned in the dark. Then he asked, "Are you happy?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Well, why would you say that? Why would you put it that way? You love me even though I did something you didn't like. It seems that you can't just make a directly positive statement of love. You always say it in a back-handed sort of way." It is as though he's hedging his bets. If he's going to take the risk of expressing feelings like love, which may or may not be rejected by me, then he's going to cover himself by expressing disatisfaction with me.
Instead of considering my complaint, he deflected it. "I have told you I love you three times in the last minute."
"No, you haven't."
"Yes."
"I didn't hear anything. I don't believe you! You're deflecting again--turning the conversation away from what the hard issue. You're not taking what I have to say seriously. You're always right, I'm never right."
"Too bad we're not recording this conversation, because then you'd see that what you just said is completely without merit."
Completely without merit?
Couldn't he have said it a different way? Couldn't he have said, "you're wrong about this particular point," or, "you didn't hear me" or, "I'm sorry you didn't hear what I said earlier," or "Let me think about that. Do I have trouble expressing feelings of love in a straightforward manner?" Couldn't he have thought about what had prompted me to say that in the first place? Couldn't he have given me the dignity of having a reason for making this statement, which was made in response to a pattern I had noticed, an analysis of a series of statements? It seemed to me that he was condescending, insulting me again instead of considering the 'merit' of what I had to say. He was dismissing what I said this time not only as meaningless, ungrounded, foolish.
I don't quite remember the rest--I objected to this particular put-down, I was disgruntled. I said I was going upstairs to sleep. He complained. I said that he was taking up the entire bed. He said, "why didn't you ask me to move over." I explained that I had made this request numerous times through the evening, but that he had ignored it. He said, "I like to be close to you." I don't remember. I know I said, "You just don't get it, do you?" in response to what felt to me like another instance of deflection, of not listening to me...
He got up, put on his clothes, and left. I let him go.
It's just not working. When we kiss, I want to pull away. I am always the one to break it first--and it almost always feels as though I'm drowning, suffocating, as though I can't stand another second of his tongue in my mouth. It feels all wrong.
It basically boils down to two comments that seem representative to me of what is wrong: "it's a good thing we aren't recording this conversation, because what you just said was really dumb;" and, many hours later, "we should be recording this conversation because if you heard it you would see that what you just said is completely without merit."
What bothered me was not whether or not what I had said was correct or appropriate (it was); but rather that he should put it this way. It bothered me that he could put me down, even in jest, and that he would refuse to see that what he had said was hurtful or demeaning, and therefore refuse to apologize.
When I said, "you just said that I was stupid," he equivocated. "Dumb does not mean the same thing as stupid." I was supposed to understand, in other words, that he had actually said something rather affectionate. We were talking about the beauty of Bill Evan's piano playing and the simplicity of the musical line. "It's not like he's Ashkenazy," I said.
That was the dumb statement--he told me more than once that what I had said was one of the "dumbest things" that I had ever said. We argued about this for a good five to ten minutes before he understood that I was talking about the Russian conductor and composer. Apparently he had never heard of Vladimir Ashkenazy (which I found hard to believe, since he himself is such a great pianist, althogh he mainly plays jazz).He thought I had said that Evans was not a German Jew. Why this would make any kind of sense in the context of our conversation still baffles me, but never mind. When I explained to him who Ashkenazy was, he actually tried to get me to believe that I had mispronounced his name... "I think it's actually pronounced, "Aszzz-kenazi." He's telling me how to pronounce the name of someone he's never heard of.
In short, he could not admit that he had been wrong. First, he could not admit that he had said something insulting. Second, he could not admit that I knew what I was talking about. He certainly could not apologize.
Still, I laughed about this. "Boy, would I love to have a recording of the ten minutes when you thought I was talking about Jews and I thought we were talking about classical music!"
The second statement arose much later, when we were in bed. I had been having trouble sleeping for most of the night, because he likes to snuggle in a way that leaves me very little room. I had been feeling somewhat suffocated, but had finally given up trying to stretch out, and settled down onto his shoulder. He said said, "I still love you, even though you moved." This bugged me because the moment seemed, actually, rather tender and it would have been nice if he could have acknowledged it straightforwardly. I didn't say anything but frowned in the dark. Then he asked, "Are you happy?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Well, why would you say that? Why would you put it that way? You love me even though I did something you didn't like. It seems that you can't just make a directly positive statement of love. You always say it in a back-handed sort of way." It is as though he's hedging his bets. If he's going to take the risk of expressing feelings like love, which may or may not be rejected by me, then he's going to cover himself by expressing disatisfaction with me.
Instead of considering my complaint, he deflected it. "I have told you I love you three times in the last minute."
"No, you haven't."
"Yes."
"I didn't hear anything. I don't believe you! You're deflecting again--turning the conversation away from what the hard issue. You're not taking what I have to say seriously. You're always right, I'm never right."
"Too bad we're not recording this conversation, because then you'd see that what you just said is completely without merit."
Completely without merit?
Couldn't he have said it a different way? Couldn't he have said, "you're wrong about this particular point," or, "you didn't hear me" or, "I'm sorry you didn't hear what I said earlier," or "Let me think about that. Do I have trouble expressing feelings of love in a straightforward manner?" Couldn't he have thought about what had prompted me to say that in the first place? Couldn't he have given me the dignity of having a reason for making this statement, which was made in response to a pattern I had noticed, an analysis of a series of statements? It seemed to me that he was condescending, insulting me again instead of considering the 'merit' of what I had to say. He was dismissing what I said this time not only as meaningless, ungrounded, foolish.
I don't quite remember the rest--I objected to this particular put-down, I was disgruntled. I said I was going upstairs to sleep. He complained. I said that he was taking up the entire bed. He said, "why didn't you ask me to move over." I explained that I had made this request numerous times through the evening, but that he had ignored it. He said, "I like to be close to you." I don't remember. I know I said, "You just don't get it, do you?" in response to what felt to me like another instance of deflection, of not listening to me...
He got up, put on his clothes, and left. I let him go.
It's just not working. When we kiss, I want to pull away. I am always the one to break it first--and it almost always feels as though I'm drowning, suffocating, as though I can't stand another second of his tongue in my mouth. It feels all wrong.
Monday, May 14, 2007
He's back. It's so strange. I spent the entire weekend gearing up to break it off, and then I saw him coming down the escalator and realized: I love this man.
I love his hair, his wrinkles, his funny face, his nose, his legs, his too-much-talking. He's a good person. I respect him. I spent the night in his arms feeling safe, loved, happy.
Oy.
I love his hair, his wrinkles, his funny face, his nose, his legs, his too-much-talking. He's a good person. I respect him. I spent the night in his arms feeling safe, loved, happy.
Oy.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
On my father
Just now, coming up the stairs, I looked, as I always do, at my father's formal portrait. He must be younger than I am there, and everyone who sees it comments on how handsome he was. I don't see it, that beauty. I try to but can't. I see my father. This time was no different, only looking reminded me of a dream that I had last night, in which I promised myself that, the next time I was that portrait, that I would thank him
In the dream I was recounting to my father something that really happened yesterday. I asked a friend, who made a great fortune in the stock market, to help me prepare for my meeting with the bank officials and the lawyer. My father amassed a fairly substantial amount in his IRA and I had very little understanding of how to read it, so I asked him to help me decode it. He kept saying, over and over, "your father was a brilliant investor," and "you owe your father a great debt," and "he really took care of you." None of this, of course, was terribly unfamiliar to me. Indeed, the paradox of my life is that my father regularly flaunted his wealth and emphasized the debt I owed him, although he never managed, really, to make me feel as though he had "taken care of me," not in my heart or spirit, after all. He may have made a bunch of money, which I enjoyed when I was still living as part of his household, but he has not helped me, neither financially nor emotionally, since I finished graduate school.
I long ago stopped asking him for money because whatever he gave came with an enormous cost, not the least of which was his disapproval. If I couldn't make it on my own, there was something wrong with me. Of course I still believe that, and I do make it, barely.
My father was far more interested in amassing than in sharing what he made. He was both a miser and a conspicuous consumer. What his wife got from him--the diamonds, the three mercedes convertibles, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit---she obtained by demanding and withholding and throwing temper tantrums disguised as breakdowns. And you can be sure he punished her, passively, for every cent he spent. But she was impervious to this degredation, a whore at heart, and if the golden-hearted sort, then the cold, dead metal kind. .
He didn't do this to her. His heart was, finally, far more alive, more capable of loving than hers ever was or will be. Some people are entirely ruined because they have gone their entire lives without any comfort, and because they haven't got enough grace within them to remain inwardly and outwardly kind. My father, at least, had my mother for thirty-five years. The seed she planted in his heart, and in ours, kept him human.
As long as my father was alive, I imagined that somehow, against all evidence, we could have a relationship that was not principally premised on money, and that he would somehow see, finally, that I loved him not for his money, but rather in spite of it. I could not therefore imagine ever praising him, ever finding a way to tell him, openly, that I admired him for his fantastic ability to generate money.
I am therefore uncomfortable and slightly flumoxed, as he knew I would be, to find myself the executor of this enormous estate. I never learned how to understand money because I never had any. He knew that I would not squander the it, that I would protect it through probate and divide it fairly. It was a great compliment.
At any rate, last night I dreamed that I was telling my father about what my friend had said, and that I was thanking him, genuinely, for all he had given to me. I was praising him for his brilliance, for his miraculous financial acumen and fertility--I am, after all, writing about book about this very thing: about making relations between fathers and daughters, particularly between the Father-God and writing daughters, as relationships of debt that are paid off, with interest, when the daughter learns to generate as prodigiously as her father. She never reaches this goal, of course, so she remains in the positition of needing to pay, to thank, continuously to pay the debt with gratitude for having been given the potential to pay in the first place.
If you thank someone who has departed this life in your dreams, does it count?
In the dream I was recounting to my father something that really happened yesterday. I asked a friend, who made a great fortune in the stock market, to help me prepare for my meeting with the bank officials and the lawyer. My father amassed a fairly substantial amount in his IRA and I had very little understanding of how to read it, so I asked him to help me decode it. He kept saying, over and over, "your father was a brilliant investor," and "you owe your father a great debt," and "he really took care of you." None of this, of course, was terribly unfamiliar to me. Indeed, the paradox of my life is that my father regularly flaunted his wealth and emphasized the debt I owed him, although he never managed, really, to make me feel as though he had "taken care of me," not in my heart or spirit, after all. He may have made a bunch of money, which I enjoyed when I was still living as part of his household, but he has not helped me, neither financially nor emotionally, since I finished graduate school.
I long ago stopped asking him for money because whatever he gave came with an enormous cost, not the least of which was his disapproval. If I couldn't make it on my own, there was something wrong with me. Of course I still believe that, and I do make it, barely.
My father was far more interested in amassing than in sharing what he made. He was both a miser and a conspicuous consumer. What his wife got from him--the diamonds, the three mercedes convertibles, the hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit---she obtained by demanding and withholding and throwing temper tantrums disguised as breakdowns. And you can be sure he punished her, passively, for every cent he spent. But she was impervious to this degredation, a whore at heart, and if the golden-hearted sort, then the cold, dead metal kind. .
He didn't do this to her. His heart was, finally, far more alive, more capable of loving than hers ever was or will be. Some people are entirely ruined because they have gone their entire lives without any comfort, and because they haven't got enough grace within them to remain inwardly and outwardly kind. My father, at least, had my mother for thirty-five years. The seed she planted in his heart, and in ours, kept him human.
As long as my father was alive, I imagined that somehow, against all evidence, we could have a relationship that was not principally premised on money, and that he would somehow see, finally, that I loved him not for his money, but rather in spite of it. I could not therefore imagine ever praising him, ever finding a way to tell him, openly, that I admired him for his fantastic ability to generate money.
I am therefore uncomfortable and slightly flumoxed, as he knew I would be, to find myself the executor of this enormous estate. I never learned how to understand money because I never had any. He knew that I would not squander the it, that I would protect it through probate and divide it fairly. It was a great compliment.
At any rate, last night I dreamed that I was telling my father about what my friend had said, and that I was thanking him, genuinely, for all he had given to me. I was praising him for his brilliance, for his miraculous financial acumen and fertility--I am, after all, writing about book about this very thing: about making relations between fathers and daughters, particularly between the Father-God and writing daughters, as relationships of debt that are paid off, with interest, when the daughter learns to generate as prodigiously as her father. She never reaches this goal, of course, so she remains in the positition of needing to pay, to thank, continuously to pay the debt with gratitude for having been given the potential to pay in the first place.
If you thank someone who has departed this life in your dreams, does it count?
Friday, May 11, 2007
Hungover. Out with a new person who claims, already, after one evening, to be madly in love. Serious red flag. It was fun. In a bar, after yoga, on very little food, I had two glasses of wine. He taught me to tango---very sexy. I love to dance, especially the tango. Not a good plan.
Yes, yes, I like him. But I'm not ready. I have to settle things, do this honestly. As honestly as possible.
It's not the right thing to do. Oy.
Yes, yes, I like him. But I'm not ready. I have to settle things, do this honestly. As honestly as possible.
It's not the right thing to do. Oy.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Nothing in particular went wrong yesterday, and yet, smack in the middle of it, as I was taking a series of letters having to do with my father's estate to the notary, the old, dark feeling, that heaviness at the bottom of my stomach, pulled me down again. I couldn't figure out what it was. Grief, merely? My mother and father are dead. I am now the Old One in the family.
I think it had to do with more than just me, though. I couldn't really explain it, because I love going to the notary, who is also a friendly Muslim butcher, cook, and grocer who runs a little place near the university where you can get fresh lamb or goat stew. His wife runs the cash register, which is pile high with sweets like sesame cakes and date- and fig-cookies. His sons cut the animals, which are skinned and hanging from hooks in the back, deliver, clean up, hang around. It always smells incredibly good in there, and its usually busy with regulars.
It feels like America because it's so Mom and Pop with the tiny, messy office where the father takes you to sign the documents; and it feels like the Middle East because of everything else. And when I'm in there I think--these are the kinds of people who are dying, every day, in Iraq. I also think about the soldiers, our children, the age of my youngest students, dying over there, three a day.
Yeah. Keep fighting, John Murtha.
I was telling this to a guy I went out with last night. A friend, a colleague. A really nice man, to whom I've been attracted for about six years, I guess. I'm not interested, not really. First of all, he's about 15 years younger than I am. Second of all, he's in my department, if only for a short while longer, before he goes out on the market and gets a job in some remote state. And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, he and I are both involved with other people.
He has a lot of friends in the department. I am trying to get out more, to propel myself into the world. I go for days without speaking to anyone except for the people in my yoga classes. And that's hardly a genuine social encounter. It's a few brief words on the elevator going up, going down. A "sorry" when you brush someone's hand and a "namaste" at the end of class. Actually, it's a lot. I shouldn't complain. There is also the good feeling of community that comes during Sivasana, when we're all meditating together.
And there are the cats, Big Cat and Little Cat, who greet me when I return to the house, swim around my feet at breakfast time, and skulk at the garage as I'm pulling out for the day.
The good thing about last night was that I made--I hope--a new friend. The bad thing--I drank three glasses of wine and ate, what...gluttenously, two bowls of cereal (I had to think to remember) while watching Lost on T.V.
I had worked hard, though---really hard at the library and I'm excited about the paper I'm finishing. Something that should have been published eons ago. But it's taken me all this time--and I don't exactly know why, or whether, had I not come through this long depression, I would have come to its meaning before now. It is not really important to ask about what might have happened. The important thing is that this is happening. The brain--when not drowning in alcohol--is functioning.
I'm also painting. My boyfriend (last night I dreamt that I was embarrassed by him, that I was introducing him sheepishly as 'the man I'm dating") has been gone for over a week and I don't really miss him. I love sleeping alone. I love not having to kiss him or explain why I don't want to have sex. I have started a painting, a self portrait, a nude. The colors of the background are all wrong but it is coming in.
Not unlike the paper I'm finishing. I can tell...I'm growing...and there is promise, like the little buds, the first buds ever, on the ....bush in my back yard, the one that has, year after year after year, put forth only leaves, no flowers.. There is potential for beauty here. But it will not be easy to give him up.
I was talking about this with R last night. He said, basically, "It's in his kiss," you know, that wonderful song? What he actually said was, "if they can't kiss, it's a deal breaker." And it's true.
I only ENDURE the kisses of The Man I'm Dating. I've tried to give him pointers. My friend last night said he thought it was inherent. And I found myself thinking about what it would be like to kiss him, and feeling fairly certain that it would be wonderful. Then I arduously pushed the idea from my mind. Truth is, I don't want to be unfaithful, or break up. I like his friendship. I worry about how I'll get on without it.
I miss my son. As ever. As ever and ever and ever.
It doesn't really get easier. Last night we saw a Bosnian film about a woman living with her daughter, the spawn of one of multiple war-rapes. And even though I know, from experience, how terrible it is to be raped...and could see how hard her life was, how lonely, how penurious...still I envied her. She, after all, got to sit down every night with the person she loves most in the world.
Here is the inspiring thought of the day, which came to me while I was still waking up. and petting Little Cat, who is jet black. Actually this came to me last night, while talking with R, my friend, who is also black. We Americans, we the people of this continent, who have been living with each other for three of four hundred years now, especially those of us whose ancestors come from the same general areas--we're like the Palestinians and the Jews.
We're basically the same people and we have more in common with each other, in blood and culture and understanding, than we do with people from, say, Asia...we are the same people. And yet we go around acting as though we're completely different from one another. Those of us who think at all know full well that it's an artificial construction, race, a preposterous category that is real in the mind only. Chromosonally, surely we are more alike one another, having intermarried with one another, lived with one another for all thesee years, than we are with millions of other people, who are also just people, all descended from the first people on the planet, whom, if we were to see them, we would call animals.
I think it had to do with more than just me, though. I couldn't really explain it, because I love going to the notary, who is also a friendly Muslim butcher, cook, and grocer who runs a little place near the university where you can get fresh lamb or goat stew. His wife runs the cash register, which is pile high with sweets like sesame cakes and date- and fig-cookies. His sons cut the animals, which are skinned and hanging from hooks in the back, deliver, clean up, hang around. It always smells incredibly good in there, and its usually busy with regulars.
It feels like America because it's so Mom and Pop with the tiny, messy office where the father takes you to sign the documents; and it feels like the Middle East because of everything else. And when I'm in there I think--these are the kinds of people who are dying, every day, in Iraq. I also think about the soldiers, our children, the age of my youngest students, dying over there, three a day.
Yeah. Keep fighting, John Murtha.
I was telling this to a guy I went out with last night. A friend, a colleague. A really nice man, to whom I've been attracted for about six years, I guess. I'm not interested, not really. First of all, he's about 15 years younger than I am. Second of all, he's in my department, if only for a short while longer, before he goes out on the market and gets a job in some remote state. And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, he and I are both involved with other people.
He has a lot of friends in the department. I am trying to get out more, to propel myself into the world. I go for days without speaking to anyone except for the people in my yoga classes. And that's hardly a genuine social encounter. It's a few brief words on the elevator going up, going down. A "sorry" when you brush someone's hand and a "namaste" at the end of class. Actually, it's a lot. I shouldn't complain. There is also the good feeling of community that comes during Sivasana, when we're all meditating together.
And there are the cats, Big Cat and Little Cat, who greet me when I return to the house, swim around my feet at breakfast time, and skulk at the garage as I'm pulling out for the day.
The good thing about last night was that I made--I hope--a new friend. The bad thing--I drank three glasses of wine and ate, what...gluttenously, two bowls of cereal (I had to think to remember) while watching Lost on T.V.
I had worked hard, though---really hard at the library and I'm excited about the paper I'm finishing. Something that should have been published eons ago. But it's taken me all this time--and I don't exactly know why, or whether, had I not come through this long depression, I would have come to its meaning before now. It is not really important to ask about what might have happened. The important thing is that this is happening. The brain--when not drowning in alcohol--is functioning.
I'm also painting. My boyfriend (last night I dreamt that I was embarrassed by him, that I was introducing him sheepishly as 'the man I'm dating") has been gone for over a week and I don't really miss him. I love sleeping alone. I love not having to kiss him or explain why I don't want to have sex. I have started a painting, a self portrait, a nude. The colors of the background are all wrong but it is coming in.
Not unlike the paper I'm finishing. I can tell...I'm growing...and there is promise, like the little buds, the first buds ever, on the ....bush in my back yard, the one that has, year after year after year, put forth only leaves, no flowers.. There is potential for beauty here. But it will not be easy to give him up.
I was talking about this with R last night. He said, basically, "It's in his kiss," you know, that wonderful song? What he actually said was, "if they can't kiss, it's a deal breaker." And it's true.
I only ENDURE the kisses of The Man I'm Dating. I've tried to give him pointers. My friend last night said he thought it was inherent. And I found myself thinking about what it would be like to kiss him, and feeling fairly certain that it would be wonderful. Then I arduously pushed the idea from my mind. Truth is, I don't want to be unfaithful, or break up. I like his friendship. I worry about how I'll get on without it.
I miss my son. As ever. As ever and ever and ever.
It doesn't really get easier. Last night we saw a Bosnian film about a woman living with her daughter, the spawn of one of multiple war-rapes. And even though I know, from experience, how terrible it is to be raped...and could see how hard her life was, how lonely, how penurious...still I envied her. She, after all, got to sit down every night with the person she loves most in the world.
Here is the inspiring thought of the day, which came to me while I was still waking up. and petting Little Cat, who is jet black. Actually this came to me last night, while talking with R, my friend, who is also black. We Americans, we the people of this continent, who have been living with each other for three of four hundred years now, especially those of us whose ancestors come from the same general areas--we're like the Palestinians and the Jews.
We're basically the same people and we have more in common with each other, in blood and culture and understanding, than we do with people from, say, Asia...we are the same people. And yet we go around acting as though we're completely different from one another. Those of us who think at all know full well that it's an artificial construction, race, a preposterous category that is real in the mind only. Chromosonally, surely we are more alike one another, having intermarried with one another, lived with one another for all thesee years, than we are with millions of other people, who are also just people, all descended from the first people on the planet, whom, if we were to see them, we would call animals.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Happy Birthday
So it was my son's 16th birthday last week. We had a plan, in place for over a month, to go out to dinner together. We were both looking forward to it. The day before the big day, I made a reservation at a hotel in his town. I called him the morning of his birthday, to wish many happy returns and to tell him how excited I was about coming down. This was his response:
"Uh,.....choke." Exactly his words.
"What?" I asked.
"Uh...my uh dad and K (his stepmother) are having a kind of party for me tonight."
"Oh." I said, not getting it. "Oh!" again, I said, starting to get it, and then a very meaningful "Oooh!!!! " A balloon letting the last of its air escape.
Maternal care kicked irritation that was beginning to take over my brain out of my voice, which brightened, slightly strained...."Not a problem! I'll come tomorrow!" I didn't want him to feel caught, as he always does, in the middle of parents who can't seem to communicate with one another, to show common courtesy. I hadn't told his father (who, apparently, expected to be asked....) what our plans were. I assumed that B would let him know, but that was asking B to do something that, if you understood the situation, was really too hard for me. My bad.
But of course I wasn't invited to the party, either.
So. Care for my son, love, really, temporarily overruled anger, but then irritation flared up every so slightly in my next question: "Did you tell your dad that we had a plan?" "Yes." "When?" "This morning." "Oh." Another balloon deflating. "What did he say?" "He said he didn't want to cause me any trouble..."
For the moment I was willing to give his father the benefit of the doubt--he meant well, as I did, but he was there and I was here and he had geographical dominance. What could I do but bow out gracefully?
"So," I said, "I will come down but I am not sure that I can undo tonight's reservation. And if not then I'll come tonight and stay over and we'll do something tomorrow." No point in forcing Brendan to make a painful choice, as his father did, on his birthday of all days. I didn't want him to feel more awkward and miserable than he already did. His father should have bowed out. Would have, had he been more gracious.
I long ago learned that, in this relationship with my beloved, my only child, there was no winning, no keeping score, no battle to be won with his father. Even though it often felt like a battle. Even if I had, again and again and again, to bend and give in, that this would be the way to survive. I had to be like the willow in the wind, whose roots hold firmly in the ground, who, even after bending down to the ground, rises up again and again and again.
In times of greatest struggle, I have looked to the Tao te Ching, as translated by Stephen Mitchell. It is the best guide to life I know. Consider verse 76:
or verse 78:
My therapist's words remind me: "Let go of shoulds" and "trys". When you say "I will try" or "I should" you have distancing yourself from the task, you are giving yourself permission not to do it. Say "I will; I have done" Perhaps the Tao would say, don't make any promises.
So I won't. But I did just order Ursula K. LeGuin's translation, which I am eager to read and compare to Mitchell's.
I was telling you about what happened. This is the task I have set for myself this morning.
So, B went off to school and I changed my hotel reservation to the following night. That evening I got a phone call from him.
"So at school today I got high with C and it really messed me up and my dad could tell at dinner and he yelled at me and got really mad and now everything is ruined."
"What did you take?" (First question--a question, you might be interested to know, that his father never bothered to ask him).
"Something that is supposed to stop motion sickness."
"What? Why did you do that?"
"I don't know. I was with C. and it was my birthday and I just wanted to do something that would be like escaping from responsiblity for a little while."
"What did it do to you?"
"At first it made me really awake and buzzed and it was terrible. Then it made me really, really tired. I didn't think it would this long. It ruined the entire day. At dinner, F [his 2-year old sister, adopted] kept asking, "B what's wrong? What's wrong, B?"
"Okay. so, what did your father do?"
"He just got really really mad and said I had pissed all over the table and my birthday. I went to my room and he came down and yelled some more. He said he was really embarrassed and ashamed and really angry. And now he won't talk to me."
My ex's temper is frightening, irrational, all-destroying. I had hoped that he had mellowed out over the years, but that was foolish of me. Most of the time he is a nice guy, smart, funny, caring, affectionate. But he lets things that bother him build up in him, he doesn't know how to be forthright and talk about stuff that upsets him at the time...the anger builds and builds and builds, and then it explodes. Like a Volcano. One minute he's Dr. Jekyll, witty, charming, rational, and the next minute--you never know what will set him off--he's turned into Mr. Hyde, hideous, hulking and towering even taller than his six feet five inches over your head, shouting, banging, storming, throwing. He can manage it briefly--I imagine he did as he sent B to his room--but then when it unleashes, it overwhelms him and everyone in his path. After a wild, nasty outburst of profanity and personal insults calculated to shame, to belittle, to hurt--he storms off and punishes further with the silent treatment. He'll slam the door, turn away, and refuse to acknowledge his victim. And the worst of it--he feels entirely justified in behaving this way. He believes that whatever provokes his anger deserves what comes, and that people who have crossed him have committed moral crimes that need to be punished. He is judge, jury, and executioner. He will persistently hold to this rigid position for weeks, months, years, at times. And you won't even know he's doing it--because he hides it under a mask of Dr. Jekyll-like calm, reason, and charismatic humor.
So, I told B. that I was very sorry that this had happened to him, that I thought his father had overreacted, and that his behavior was reprehensible.
What I didn't say to him was--why didn't your father bother to find out what you had taken? I got an email the next day, in which M, my ex, reported that B. was "wasted---probably on LSD or shrooms..." a complete fabrication, and not at all in keeping with the fairly rational, although very miserable B. I had spoken to just after this event. If indeed B. had looked as bad as his father reported, then, had I been there, I would have determined what he was on and taken action from there. What if it had been life-threatening? What if B. had gone into some sort of medically dangerous state? Screaming at him and refusing to speak to him seemed like the worst possible response.
And hardly the way to encourage B. to trust him, or to convince him not to experiment with drugs of any kinds.
I asked him how he was feeling now. Sleepy, he said. 'So, find a book to take your mind off painful thoughts and try to let yourself fall asleep. Tomorrow's another day. I'll come down and we'll go out for a nice dinner."
So. The next day I called while on my way down to visit him--and he told me that he was okay but that his father was still not speaking to him. Worse, his father had ripped his birthday card in half and left it on his birthday cake.
A very mature response, wouldn't you say?
I picked him up from school. He looked incredibly handsome, as so often these days. He cuts his own hair in a rather interesting, neither long nor short fashion, and today it was brownish. Sometimes it's green or blue. He's also very tall--over 6' 2'', broad-shouldered and very thin.
He wanted to go down to the local teen gathering spot--a starbuck's in a nice strip mall--to meet some friends of his. he wanted me to me them, and for them to meet me. I was flattered. So we went, and had ice cream while sitting outside. He told me the whole story--and also said that he didn't want to go home that night. That he felt so alieanated and angry with his dad that he felt like staying out all night with his friends and not telling him where he was. An understandable desire which I didn't contradict. I was in listening mode, not governing mode. When his friends arrived I remained in listening, non-judgemental mode, trying to draw them out, trying to hear them, to understand them. It was fun. I like them.
Later that evening, as we were walking around the city together, he told me that he was never going to do that again--and I said that his father, had he been rational, would not have exploded but would rather have told him that he was worried about him and that he didn't want him messing around with stupid substances because he loved him. And I also encouraged him to avoid making a bad situation worse by following through on his plan to stay out all night.
Of course I offered to let him stay with me--"You saw how cool my room is. We could sit on the couch and watch DVDs (the hotel had a huge collection, free) and eat popcorn and candy.." He was tempted, he said, but really wanted to see his friends--the ones we had met earlier. I understood. So, with some prodding from me, he called his father and said he would be coming home at around 11.30--and that he was with me...
We had a beautiful dinner at a nice restaruant===we ate outside in a part of town that neither of us had ever been to before. I let him direct the conversation. We talked about his dad, his family, his friends, the girl he loves in vain...his friends. It was one of the best conversations we've ever had. We laughed, we mused, we reminisced about our travels in Poland last year. He talked about how beautiful the girls were...it was light and healthy and clean and good. I gazed at him with love and admiration and delight in his being. I could not have been happier with anyone else, in any other place. It was perfect. Curious thing about giving to someone you love--the more you give, the more love within you seem to have. As though the well fills itself by exhausting itself.
I'm sure his father would love to have such a dinner with his son. If only he could.
That night I left him at his friend's house--they were going to watch some silly horror film they had all seen a hundred times together--and he promised to call me when he was ready to go home. I was going to come to drive him if he needed a ride. But he got one with his friend's dad. He was so happy--our conversation, our time together had so bouyed him, had so clearly shored up his faith in himself--that he was giddy on the phone, talking to his friend. He was a child again, and happy, and safe.
A few hours later he called me from his house. Still safe. At home, where he belonged. He was going to go to bed. He told me that he loved me and that it had been really good to see me. I felt very close to him.
"Uh,.....choke." Exactly his words.
"What?" I asked.
"Uh...my uh dad and K (his stepmother) are having a kind of party for me tonight."
"Oh." I said, not getting it. "Oh!" again, I said, starting to get it, and then a very meaningful "Oooh!!!! " A balloon letting the last of its air escape.
Maternal care kicked irritation that was beginning to take over my brain out of my voice, which brightened, slightly strained...."Not a problem! I'll come tomorrow!" I didn't want him to feel caught, as he always does, in the middle of parents who can't seem to communicate with one another, to show common courtesy. I hadn't told his father (who, apparently, expected to be asked....) what our plans were. I assumed that B would let him know, but that was asking B to do something that, if you understood the situation, was really too hard for me. My bad.
But of course I wasn't invited to the party, either.
So. Care for my son, love, really, temporarily overruled anger, but then irritation flared up every so slightly in my next question: "Did you tell your dad that we had a plan?" "Yes." "When?" "This morning." "Oh." Another balloon deflating. "What did he say?" "He said he didn't want to cause me any trouble..."
For the moment I was willing to give his father the benefit of the doubt--he meant well, as I did, but he was there and I was here and he had geographical dominance. What could I do but bow out gracefully?
"So," I said, "I will come down but I am not sure that I can undo tonight's reservation. And if not then I'll come tonight and stay over and we'll do something tomorrow." No point in forcing Brendan to make a painful choice, as his father did, on his birthday of all days. I didn't want him to feel more awkward and miserable than he already did. His father should have bowed out. Would have, had he been more gracious.
I long ago learned that, in this relationship with my beloved, my only child, there was no winning, no keeping score, no battle to be won with his father. Even though it often felt like a battle. Even if I had, again and again and again, to bend and give in, that this would be the way to survive. I had to be like the willow in the wind, whose roots hold firmly in the ground, who, even after bending down to the ground, rises up again and again and again.
In times of greatest struggle, I have looked to the Tao te Ching, as translated by Stephen Mitchell. It is the best guide to life I know. Consider verse 76:
Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.
or verse 78:
Nothing in the worldI should carry the Tao around with me. I should send a copy to my son. Reverse that. Strike it.
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.
The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.
Therefore the Master remains
serene in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter her heart.
Because she has given up helping,
She is her peopl's greatest help.
True words seem paradoxical.
My therapist's words remind me: "Let go of shoulds" and "trys". When you say "I will try" or "I should" you have distancing yourself from the task, you are giving yourself permission not to do it. Say "I will; I have done" Perhaps the Tao would say, don't make any promises.
So I won't. But I did just order Ursula K. LeGuin's translation, which I am eager to read and compare to Mitchell's.
I was telling you about what happened. This is the task I have set for myself this morning.
So, B went off to school and I changed my hotel reservation to the following night. That evening I got a phone call from him.
"So at school today I got high with C and it really messed me up and my dad could tell at dinner and he yelled at me and got really mad and now everything is ruined."
"What did you take?" (First question--a question, you might be interested to know, that his father never bothered to ask him).
"Something that is supposed to stop motion sickness."
"What? Why did you do that?"
"I don't know. I was with C. and it was my birthday and I just wanted to do something that would be like escaping from responsiblity for a little while."
"What did it do to you?"
"At first it made me really awake and buzzed and it was terrible. Then it made me really, really tired. I didn't think it would this long. It ruined the entire day. At dinner, F [his 2-year old sister, adopted] kept asking, "B what's wrong? What's wrong, B?"
"Okay. so, what did your father do?"
"He just got really really mad and said I had pissed all over the table and my birthday. I went to my room and he came down and yelled some more. He said he was really embarrassed and ashamed and really angry. And now he won't talk to me."
My ex's temper is frightening, irrational, all-destroying. I had hoped that he had mellowed out over the years, but that was foolish of me. Most of the time he is a nice guy, smart, funny, caring, affectionate. But he lets things that bother him build up in him, he doesn't know how to be forthright and talk about stuff that upsets him at the time...the anger builds and builds and builds, and then it explodes. Like a Volcano. One minute he's Dr. Jekyll, witty, charming, rational, and the next minute--you never know what will set him off--he's turned into Mr. Hyde, hideous, hulking and towering even taller than his six feet five inches over your head, shouting, banging, storming, throwing. He can manage it briefly--I imagine he did as he sent B to his room--but then when it unleashes, it overwhelms him and everyone in his path. After a wild, nasty outburst of profanity and personal insults calculated to shame, to belittle, to hurt--he storms off and punishes further with the silent treatment. He'll slam the door, turn away, and refuse to acknowledge his victim. And the worst of it--he feels entirely justified in behaving this way. He believes that whatever provokes his anger deserves what comes, and that people who have crossed him have committed moral crimes that need to be punished. He is judge, jury, and executioner. He will persistently hold to this rigid position for weeks, months, years, at times. And you won't even know he's doing it--because he hides it under a mask of Dr. Jekyll-like calm, reason, and charismatic humor.
So, I told B. that I was very sorry that this had happened to him, that I thought his father had overreacted, and that his behavior was reprehensible.
What I didn't say to him was--why didn't your father bother to find out what you had taken? I got an email the next day, in which M, my ex, reported that B. was "wasted---probably on LSD or shrooms..." a complete fabrication, and not at all in keeping with the fairly rational, although very miserable B. I had spoken to just after this event. If indeed B. had looked as bad as his father reported, then, had I been there, I would have determined what he was on and taken action from there. What if it had been life-threatening? What if B. had gone into some sort of medically dangerous state? Screaming at him and refusing to speak to him seemed like the worst possible response.
And hardly the way to encourage B. to trust him, or to convince him not to experiment with drugs of any kinds.
I asked him how he was feeling now. Sleepy, he said. 'So, find a book to take your mind off painful thoughts and try to let yourself fall asleep. Tomorrow's another day. I'll come down and we'll go out for a nice dinner."
So. The next day I called while on my way down to visit him--and he told me that he was okay but that his father was still not speaking to him. Worse, his father had ripped his birthday card in half and left it on his birthday cake.
A very mature response, wouldn't you say?
I picked him up from school. He looked incredibly handsome, as so often these days. He cuts his own hair in a rather interesting, neither long nor short fashion, and today it was brownish. Sometimes it's green or blue. He's also very tall--over 6' 2'', broad-shouldered and very thin.
He wanted to go down to the local teen gathering spot--a starbuck's in a nice strip mall--to meet some friends of his. he wanted me to me them, and for them to meet me. I was flattered. So we went, and had ice cream while sitting outside. He told me the whole story--and also said that he didn't want to go home that night. That he felt so alieanated and angry with his dad that he felt like staying out all night with his friends and not telling him where he was. An understandable desire which I didn't contradict. I was in listening mode, not governing mode. When his friends arrived I remained in listening, non-judgemental mode, trying to draw them out, trying to hear them, to understand them. It was fun. I like them.
Later that evening, as we were walking around the city together, he told me that he was never going to do that again--and I said that his father, had he been rational, would not have exploded but would rather have told him that he was worried about him and that he didn't want him messing around with stupid substances because he loved him. And I also encouraged him to avoid making a bad situation worse by following through on his plan to stay out all night.
Of course I offered to let him stay with me--"You saw how cool my room is. We could sit on the couch and watch DVDs (the hotel had a huge collection, free) and eat popcorn and candy.." He was tempted, he said, but really wanted to see his friends--the ones we had met earlier. I understood. So, with some prodding from me, he called his father and said he would be coming home at around 11.30--and that he was with me...
We had a beautiful dinner at a nice restaruant===we ate outside in a part of town that neither of us had ever been to before. I let him direct the conversation. We talked about his dad, his family, his friends, the girl he loves in vain...his friends. It was one of the best conversations we've ever had. We laughed, we mused, we reminisced about our travels in Poland last year. He talked about how beautiful the girls were...it was light and healthy and clean and good. I gazed at him with love and admiration and delight in his being. I could not have been happier with anyone else, in any other place. It was perfect. Curious thing about giving to someone you love--the more you give, the more love within you seem to have. As though the well fills itself by exhausting itself.
I'm sure his father would love to have such a dinner with his son. If only he could.
That night I left him at his friend's house--they were going to watch some silly horror film they had all seen a hundred times together--and he promised to call me when he was ready to go home. I was going to come to drive him if he needed a ride. But he got one with his friend's dad. He was so happy--our conversation, our time together had so bouyed him, had so clearly shored up his faith in himself--that he was giddy on the phone, talking to his friend. He was a child again, and happy, and safe.
A few hours later he called me from his house. Still safe. At home, where he belonged. He was going to go to bed. He told me that he loved me and that it had been really good to see me. I felt very close to him.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Oy.
So, I went back to him. I convinced myself that I would be better off with him than without him. But I am not so sure now. He's in China. I miss him, yes, but...not very much. Not as much as I thought I would. Actually, I did miss him at first. But then he called and I blurted out all the stories I thought I needed to tell him.Then I stopped, and waited for him to say the comforting words that I was certain he had to tell me. But they didn't come. There was silence. And then he started to tell me about his travels and so forth. And he complained that he hasn't been able to speak to me every single day since he's been gone.
Today there were two messages from him on my cell phone. In both of them he complains that it is hard to get hold of me. And he sounds irritated. I actually feel harrassed. Or suffocated. If you are feeling suffocated by someone who is in CHINA, for god's sake... I want to tell him, and will tell him: Look, B., you're in CHINA. Enjoy the experience! Don't be so tied to me! Let go a little, have a life! Give me some space. I'm actually feeling the need to get some space from someone who is in China. All because I don't happen to carry my cell phone with me 24 hours a day.
Not good, not good.
there is more to tell, but not now.
Today there were two messages from him on my cell phone. In both of them he complains that it is hard to get hold of me. And he sounds irritated. I actually feel harrassed. Or suffocated. If you are feeling suffocated by someone who is in CHINA, for god's sake... I want to tell him, and will tell him: Look, B., you're in CHINA. Enjoy the experience! Don't be so tied to me! Let go a little, have a life! Give me some space. I'm actually feeling the need to get some space from someone who is in China. All because I don't happen to carry my cell phone with me 24 hours a day.
Not good, not good.
there is more to tell, but not now.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Sunday blues
It's raining again and it's cold. I got up early and put on my yoga clothes, full of good intentions. But then I made the mistake of eating breakfast. And while sitting in my cold dining room, reading the paper, I got so down that I could hardly hold my head up. Obviously, a good, hard workout would have gotten my blood moving, but I had just eaten three bowls of cereal, and this after swearing to my self that I wouldn't. What is wrong with me? Where is my self-control? Yoga requires an empty stomach. I felt sick just thinking about the heavy, mushy mess in my gut getting in the way of twists and coming back my up esophagus in downward dog. So did I go? Did I head out into the freezing rain, open up the (non-electrified) garage doors, try to avoid the waterfall that comes through the broken gutter on the right side of the garage, and pull the car out? No I did not. I went back to bed.
I'm grieving again, damn it. I just broke up with...god, I have no idea how many boyfriends I have had since I got divorced, and no desire to count them. Another one down the tubes. It seemed like the right thing to do. He was devoted to me, intelligent, attractive, fit, politically savvy, succesful, and reasonably well-off. Good with money. But he was also domineering, egotistical, insensitive, and often boring. Perhaps that was the worst of it. Talking to him was almost never a pleasure. Indeed, it was usually an exercise in stifled frustration and repressed rage, because he has the habit of saying whatever comes into his head. He's a digressive talker--the sort of person who begins a story and then inserts all kinds of somewhat related but utterly uninteresting information, asides, statistics, on the way. It's not unlike hearing a scholarly book with lots of footnotes reading itself out loud, with all the footnotes interrupting the main flow of the narrative. I like footnotes. I use them. I understand this kind of thinking; I can follow the progression, but I don't enjoy it during conversations. In fact, conversation--that word of manifold meanings--was the principle issue over which we finally broke. We couldn't HAVE a conversation because generally he did all of the talking. Or, rather, I would say something, and then he would lecture on it for a few mintues, while I listened. And I would impatiently wait for him to finish, because usually he had gotten onto a rant based on an assumption that he had snapped to without actually asking me any questions, and he was usually way off base. But contradicting and correcting him was difficult, because he, like a bulldog, would tenaciously hold on to whatever his original idea was, and would defend it to the death, seemingly. Only later, after he had come out of the bull-dog lock, could he reassess. But then he would still pugnanciously hold to the basic outlines of the stance.
The weird thing is, I often find myself listening instead of talking because I get so depressed, so sunk into lassitude and dejection that I literally lose the energy to speak. But men tell me that I'm actually rather intimidatingly articulate and strong. The don't perceive the shattered inside self that I feel, the part of me that crawls into bed, that curls into a ball in the corner and falls, headlong, into the void. They think I can "take it" because I guess when I'm "up," as opposed to "down," I put up a pretty good fight. And I fight as tenanciously as they do because I'm threatened, as they are. It's hard for me to back down and say I was wrong. If I admit that I messed up, then, I'm afraid, my entire self-structure will crumble.
It was like this with M., my ex-husband, still the great love of my life. Indeed, all the men in my life, the men I have loved, have all had the gift of gab. And they have all talked over me, beaten me into the ground with discourse--I seem not to be able to fall for someone who I don't suspect can beat me at my game, a man whose rhetorical skills are greater than my own--men who dominate me verbally, in fact. I'm attracted like the moth to the flame that singes me. In this case, the case of B., I appear to have been impressed by sheer volubility, the rhetorical energy that powered his talking, but not so much by what he had to say. In the case of all three---no, if we count I., there are four men whom I have loved a lot in the last 30 years-- I ended up having to leave each one of them, I thought, because they beat me up with banter. Not one of them was particularly good at asking questions, or especially introspective.
And so here I am on a rainy, dark Sunday afternoon, back in bed, where I'm looking for solace in sleep, because sleep heals the hurt in the mind that is conscious of what I have lost, and sad for what I still haven't found. I am still alone. My mother and father are dead. My sister and brother live thousands of miles away. Not that they're any comfort. They're far more abusive, verbally, than any of my boyfriends. There's a reason I picked these guys.
But there's got to be a way to break the trend, to free myself. And the first step is facing the world without the crutch of someone who thinks I'm a pain in the ass but who puts up with me anyways, who loves me the way my family did--for no reason they could articulate, but rather out of some incomprehensible force of nature. I think my sister and brother, taught by my parents, believe that love is almost instinctual--like an urge or primitive bond between people related by the blood. We don't like you but we love you, they say quite often. We think you suck but we love you because you're our sister. Don't they know that "love refines/The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat/ In Reason, and is judicious" (P.L. 6.689-91)? As Adam says to Eve, conversation is
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksom toile, but to delight
He made us, and delight to Reason joyn'd. (P.L. 9.238-243)
Love is reasonable, after all, it is not a brutish, low response of the body alone, but rather an activity of the heart and mind. Even animals choose whom they love, and love best where best treated. But we are not dogs, not children who cling to the hand that beats them if it also feeds and shelters them.
Adult love, genuine love, grows out of an autonomous spirit that is capable of evaluating and the other in all his or her otherness, as an independent life upon which one does not depend for existence, but rather as a "meet help" an equal (okay, so we've transcended Milton, now, alright?) whose delightful conversation refreshes the spirit, the body, and the mind, someone with whom one finally no longer feels so terribly alone in this world, this universe.
I know this and writing about it, dwelling rationally with these thoughts, is helpful to me. It makes it possible for me to get up, at last, and get on with what there is left of the day. But I will move through time with a sense of loss, and regret. The illusion of companionship, after all, is often very persuasive, and one so badly needs company. I liked pretending that I had found my mate, that at last I would no longer feel alone.
We are bombarded with cultural messages that urge us to think that true and lasting fulfillment in life, that blissful feeling of harmonious togetherness that we all yearn for, comes principally and perhaps only through heterosexual love. But there are, there must be, many other ways to experience life as meaningful and fulfilling. There is, after all, my still unfinished and neglected self to unfold, to spin out in its own form, unrestricted by the needs or determinations of an other...there is the inner voice I hear, that whipsers "you have paintings and books inside of you...and you need to give yourself time to bring them forth." Every day I read about suffering people whose lives I want to improve.
I'm grieving again, damn it. I just broke up with...god, I have no idea how many boyfriends I have had since I got divorced, and no desire to count them. Another one down the tubes. It seemed like the right thing to do. He was devoted to me, intelligent, attractive, fit, politically savvy, succesful, and reasonably well-off. Good with money. But he was also domineering, egotistical, insensitive, and often boring. Perhaps that was the worst of it. Talking to him was almost never a pleasure. Indeed, it was usually an exercise in stifled frustration and repressed rage, because he has the habit of saying whatever comes into his head. He's a digressive talker--the sort of person who begins a story and then inserts all kinds of somewhat related but utterly uninteresting information, asides, statistics, on the way. It's not unlike hearing a scholarly book with lots of footnotes reading itself out loud, with all the footnotes interrupting the main flow of the narrative. I like footnotes. I use them. I understand this kind of thinking; I can follow the progression, but I don't enjoy it during conversations. In fact, conversation--that word of manifold meanings--was the principle issue over which we finally broke. We couldn't HAVE a conversation because generally he did all of the talking. Or, rather, I would say something, and then he would lecture on it for a few mintues, while I listened. And I would impatiently wait for him to finish, because usually he had gotten onto a rant based on an assumption that he had snapped to without actually asking me any questions, and he was usually way off base. But contradicting and correcting him was difficult, because he, like a bulldog, would tenaciously hold on to whatever his original idea was, and would defend it to the death, seemingly. Only later, after he had come out of the bull-dog lock, could he reassess. But then he would still pugnanciously hold to the basic outlines of the stance.
The weird thing is, I often find myself listening instead of talking because I get so depressed, so sunk into lassitude and dejection that I literally lose the energy to speak. But men tell me that I'm actually rather intimidatingly articulate and strong. The don't perceive the shattered inside self that I feel, the part of me that crawls into bed, that curls into a ball in the corner and falls, headlong, into the void. They think I can "take it" because I guess when I'm "up," as opposed to "down," I put up a pretty good fight. And I fight as tenanciously as they do because I'm threatened, as they are. It's hard for me to back down and say I was wrong. If I admit that I messed up, then, I'm afraid, my entire self-structure will crumble.
It was like this with M., my ex-husband, still the great love of my life. Indeed, all the men in my life, the men I have loved, have all had the gift of gab. And they have all talked over me, beaten me into the ground with discourse--I seem not to be able to fall for someone who I don't suspect can beat me at my game, a man whose rhetorical skills are greater than my own--men who dominate me verbally, in fact. I'm attracted like the moth to the flame that singes me. In this case, the case of B., I appear to have been impressed by sheer volubility, the rhetorical energy that powered his talking, but not so much by what he had to say. In the case of all three---no, if we count I., there are four men whom I have loved a lot in the last 30 years-- I ended up having to leave each one of them, I thought, because they beat me up with banter. Not one of them was particularly good at asking questions, or especially introspective.
And so here I am on a rainy, dark Sunday afternoon, back in bed, where I'm looking for solace in sleep, because sleep heals the hurt in the mind that is conscious of what I have lost, and sad for what I still haven't found. I am still alone. My mother and father are dead. My sister and brother live thousands of miles away. Not that they're any comfort. They're far more abusive, verbally, than any of my boyfriends. There's a reason I picked these guys.
But there's got to be a way to break the trend, to free myself. And the first step is facing the world without the crutch of someone who thinks I'm a pain in the ass but who puts up with me anyways, who loves me the way my family did--for no reason they could articulate, but rather out of some incomprehensible force of nature. I think my sister and brother, taught by my parents, believe that love is almost instinctual--like an urge or primitive bond between people related by the blood. We don't like you but we love you, they say quite often. We think you suck but we love you because you're our sister. Don't they know that "love refines/The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat/ In Reason, and is judicious" (P.L. 6.689-91)? As Adam says to Eve, conversation is
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksom toile, but to delight
He made us, and delight to Reason joyn'd. (P.L. 9.238-243)
Love is reasonable, after all, it is not a brutish, low response of the body alone, but rather an activity of the heart and mind. Even animals choose whom they love, and love best where best treated. But we are not dogs, not children who cling to the hand that beats them if it also feeds and shelters them.
Adult love, genuine love, grows out of an autonomous spirit that is capable of evaluating and the other in all his or her otherness, as an independent life upon which one does not depend for existence, but rather as a "meet help" an equal (okay, so we've transcended Milton, now, alright?) whose delightful conversation refreshes the spirit, the body, and the mind, someone with whom one finally no longer feels so terribly alone in this world, this universe.
I know this and writing about it, dwelling rationally with these thoughts, is helpful to me. It makes it possible for me to get up, at last, and get on with what there is left of the day. But I will move through time with a sense of loss, and regret. The illusion of companionship, after all, is often very persuasive, and one so badly needs company. I liked pretending that I had found my mate, that at last I would no longer feel alone.
We are bombarded with cultural messages that urge us to think that true and lasting fulfillment in life, that blissful feeling of harmonious togetherness that we all yearn for, comes principally and perhaps only through heterosexual love. But there are, there must be, many other ways to experience life as meaningful and fulfilling. There is, after all, my still unfinished and neglected self to unfold, to spin out in its own form, unrestricted by the needs or determinations of an other...there is the inner voice I hear, that whipsers "you have paintings and books inside of you...and you need to give yourself time to bring them forth." Every day I read about suffering people whose lives I want to improve.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Once again
Today my therapist and I talked about my inability to trust anyone. Not exactly. We talked about my trouble trusting men; we didn't even begin to consider the trouble I have trusting women. Although she must know, after nearly two years with me, that I'm still learning to have faith in her.
I don't trust anyone. Not a soul. I don't trust my brother, my sister, my uncles or aunts. I don't trust my cousins, my boyfriend, my friends. I learned early on not to trust my parents, although it didn't stop me from hoping that they would change, that one day they might actually love me. Of course they did, in their own way, love me, but not so that I actually could tell, or so that I could actually feel loved, down to my core solidly good and lovable. Funnily enough, in death they have become quite reliable, quite wonderfully unable to disappoint me.
Certainly I am not the only one with suffering from this dearth of love and excess of frustrated longing. And my problems seem so trivial in comparison with what so many others.
I spent most of the day learning about our wonderful war in Iraq, all in preparation for class tomorrow with a group of students who found almost nothing positive to say about last week's book, the play based on Rachel Corrie's journal. These kids seem to care far more about the grade they're going to get than about the number of people who lost their lives in stupid bloodshed today. It would be such a comfort to know that at least one of them took the time to read the papers today, to learn that at least one of them gives a damn that we're now estimating 100 deaths a day in the country we've "liberated." It would be nice to be able to trust my students to give a damn. This morning's Times reports,
I think I will try to do something positive and get to bed a few minutes before midnight. Up at 6.30 again tomorrow.
I don't trust anyone. Not a soul. I don't trust my brother, my sister, my uncles or aunts. I don't trust my cousins, my boyfriend, my friends. I learned early on not to trust my parents, although it didn't stop me from hoping that they would change, that one day they might actually love me. Of course they did, in their own way, love me, but not so that I actually could tell, or so that I could actually feel loved, down to my core solidly good and lovable. Funnily enough, in death they have become quite reliable, quite wonderfully unable to disappoint me.
Certainly I am not the only one with suffering from this dearth of love and excess of frustrated longing. And my problems seem so trivial in comparison with what so many others.
I spent most of the day learning about our wonderful war in Iraq, all in preparation for class tomorrow with a group of students who found almost nothing positive to say about last week's book, the play based on Rachel Corrie's journal. These kids seem to care far more about the grade they're going to get than about the number of people who lost their lives in stupid bloodshed today. It would be such a comfort to know that at least one of them took the time to read the papers today, to learn that at least one of them gives a damn that we're now estimating 100 deaths a day in the country we've "liberated." It would be nice to be able to trust my students to give a damn. This morning's Times reports,
The Iraqi government and the American military refuse to release overall civilian casualty numbers; both give numbers only for a few categories of deaths, making it difficult to get an overall picture. One of the last official reports on civilian casualties came in January from the United Nations, which, citing morgue and hospital statistics, said at least 34,452 Iraqis were killed last year, or an average of nearly 100 per day.
I think I will try to do something positive and get to bed a few minutes before midnight. Up at 6.30 again tomorrow.
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