Things are being purged from my mother’s house, sometimes leaving a trail as they go.
This was lying in her driveway April Fool’s morning. I don’t know what it originally belonged to. A game? A secret message kit from Lou Reed? A divining tool?
I hope this word isn’t falling from the trees.
After teasing us with several summery days, snow and hard frost decided to try and pin spring back down. It can’t last. The hyacinth have already pushed through.
I feel like pushing through, too.
My son is becoming a more private person, so I’ve been rethinking this space and what I can write in it. I’m not exactly sure I have it figured out, but I think I’m ready to try.
I miss writing as a daily practice.
And if it doesn’t work out, then… April Fools.
I saw a yellow bumper sticker the other morning. It said, in friendly blue lettering:
“You don’t have to believe everything you think”
I don’t have any tattoos, but I might consider permanently inking that phrase across my forearm.
I like thinking. I do a lot of it. Usually too much, although, periodically, not enough. There have been plenty of times when thinking has served me well. Believing certain things that I think, on the other hand, has been the source of a lot of pain.
When you frequently sit in rooms where family members of alcoholics and addicts are struggling with their particular realities, the pitfalls of believing everything you think become much more vivid. We think we can help people, even if those people haven’t shown any interest in, or have even responded angrily to, our offers to help. We think our marriages, our childhoods, our children, our children’s teachers, our jobs, our coworkers, our lives are supposed to be as we imagined – what we thought they should be – instead of what they are.
I thought that marriage meant that I was supposed to feel loved by another person and that it was understood that such an endeavor is worth the work and times of discomfort that likely takes. I thought I was supposed to have more than one child. I thought that having a child would motivate the other person to be a better person, because that is undoubtedly what it did for me. I thought that respect would mean the same thing to the other person as it does to me. I thought our idea of a “good person” would be the same. I thought that love would mean the same thing to the other person as it means to me. I thought.
When these are the kinds of things that you think, and what you think is not your life, or even close to your life, life gets ouchy.
A year ago, I sat in a counselor’s office, and she said something that confounded me:
“Addiction can be your greatest teacher.”
At first, that pissed me off. Addiction is a sneaky, mean, lying, controlling bastard. Addiction is a villain and I am a moral, loving, hard-working, good girl. Addiction messes I up everything I was supposed to have and enjoy in this life. Or so I thought.
I essentially let go of drinking years ago in support of another person. Or so I thought. I’m not an alcoholic, so it wasn’t hard. When I miss it, I have a nice glass of wine. It can be months before I want another glass.
My decision had little or no bearing on the other person’s path of recovery. But my quitting has taught me that I prefer a life of rarely drinking. I’ve learned that I prefer the feeling of being in my body, the challenge of overcoming my own shyness without liquid help (probably the biggest reason I ever drank in social settings to begin with) and the rewards of settling into my difficult feelings instead of trying to control them. Addicts and I have this in common, we just go about it differently. I’ve tried to intellectualize my feelings into neat compartments while an addict may be more inclined to escape from or obliterate feelings with substances.
Living within spitting distance of addiction has forced me to try and look at people more openly and compassionately as they are instead of what I think they should be, beginning with myself. I am smart about things I never wanted to be smart about, and more aware of how naïve I am about most things. That makes me so common, so wonderfully human, so fundamentally like everyone I meet, addicts included. It has cracked my universe wide open.
I am a moral, loving, hard-working, good girl. And addiction really is a sneaky, mean, lying, controlling bastard that has tried, more than once, to convince me that everyone is really a sneaky, mean, lying bastard at heart, including me. He hunts for our weaknesses and exploits them, grinds into them until feeling itself just hurts, he fuels our cynicism and erodes our faith in anything or anyone. The more persecuted and victimized an addict feels, the more the addiction can thrive. That’s how addiction gets all of us – addicts and the people who love them – to do his bidding.
The moment I stopped thinking of addiction as a dictator or persecutor or something unilaterally “bad” and started looking at the weaknesses it has exposed in me was the moment I felt something new – maybe a genuine self-respect – begin to take root. When I change the word addiction to death, to job loss, to illness, to bad government, I find the same thing applies.
If I hadn’t been exposed to addiction, I might have cruised through life thinking that it was possible to manage or change other people according to the way I think things should be. What a gift it has been to try and dump that kind of thinking and focus on what I can change, like the way I respond to difficult times and situations, instead.
At least that’s how I’m thinking about things today.
Listen to “Thinking” by Steve Forbert
Declan has begun to read aloud like John Lithgow… with purpose and emphasis and drama.
It’s the best sound in the whole entire world, next to his laugh.
The other day in school he was asked to write down words that he knows. He has read it to me several times, proud of the way that changing his emphasis can make it so different:
Version #1
Map cat in.
No, mom!
Dad mad.
Man can.
Pan.
Wow!
Glad Declan.
Version #2
Map.
Cat in.
No mom.
Dad madman.
Can. Pan.
Wow. Glad?
Declan.
You get the idea…
Someday I’ll write a real post again. For now, life, Kindergarten and work have me on the run.
Last February, I was nervous about what the Year of the Tiger might have in store for me. Truthfully, I could not have imagined the half of it.
Tigers are fierce, with teeth and jaws powerful enough to shear away the toughest of hides. They can shred what you think you know, rendering it unrecognizable. (I just finished reading a long book about predators to my son last night. The tiger and its long teeth grace the cover, so I’m well in touch with the food chain today.)
I wanted that big cat in my corner to protect me from fire, thieves and ghosts.
But he didn’t, which made certain days, certain weeks, feel impossible to get through.
Or he did. He brought me so much closer to all of my fears, fundamentally shifting the way I respond to the things that scald old hurts, the unknowable and the unknown. He shook me by the neck to get me to realize certain things are possible, like the ability to be in the middle of a bad day or moment, surrender to it, then take it in a different direction.
The embrace of the rabbit, while iron this time around, is said to be much softer. I can’t help but hope that is so, but the tiger has definitely made me reluctant to get comfortable, and I think that’s handy.
This is the first day of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. The things we do on this and the coming days is said to reflect what we will do for the rest of the year. I’m trying to be faithful and hopeful today. I did my Dharma practice. I went to the gym. I’m writing. I’m helping out at with a project at my son’s school. I’m working on the seventh step in Al-Anon. I’m thinking about distant solar systems and extra-long words. I’m making some plans for work and friendships. I’m enjoying my child as much as ever. I’m praying for people I care about who are facing difficulties — in my life, in Egypt and the habitable zones of the stars that Kepler is watching. I’m trying to take my time with things, like walking across all of these icy sidewalks.
I hope you do something that you love today.
Happy New Year.
There are things in this world you aren’t likely to know until you start spending your time on some kind of aerobic machinery in front of a bank of 8-10 televisions, each one tuned to a different station.
For example:
1. It’s possible that the bearded dude from “Taxmasters” law firm does not have a movable spine. His eyes move as he speaks, but it’s a little like watching a marble carving of a person that’s been set into one side of a fireplace or the other, depending on which way he’s fixed on the camera in any given commercial. It’s strange, bearded and unnatural.
2.It is possible to work out regularly and feel good while paying more attention to the way your body is changing for the better than whether or not you are losing weight.
3. The appeal of Dr. Oz is obvious, even if you watch him without any sound. His headlines convince you that he has the answers to virtually any health and wellness question. Then, just as you think about turning away, you see him dancing in a segment called “New Year, New Rear” and you realize that when he’s not busy saving your life, he’s busy being kind of hot in more than his usual “I care about your emotional and physical health, even while I’m busy having this made-for-TV bone structure” way.
4. A large number of people who achieve their 15 minutes of fame on morning television do so simply by being absolutely, unapologetically spastic. It’s enough to make you think that this “Tressant Supreme” ad, featuring Kelly Ripa, really isn’t so far from the truth.
5. Somewhere out there, there is allegedly a “Soul Train Workout.” I have looked, and so far it eludes me, but just knowing that it could exist gives me a new faith in humanity. In the meantime, I’ll just have to practice the Soul Train line at home with headphones, because who wouldn’t want to do this?
Soul Train line – Aretha Franklin, “Rock Steady”
6. Most of all, there is a point when you start going to the gym (or doing whatever exercise thing you do) religiously, and you bypass the crankiness and soreness it brings about and begin to feel good. Instead of stressing out about whether or not you have time for a workout, you realize that without that workout, stress will continue to leech your time and your self-esteem and your sleep.
I was all set to do laundry on New Year’s Day. The baskets were loaded, the darks picked clean of stray white socks. Then I happened upon the superstition that if you do the wash on the first of the year, you may “wash away a loved one” in the process. I slow-cooked my pork and sauerkraut and waited for January 2.
Five people I knew passed in 2010. One man held me as a baby. One death ushered me into 40. Three more friends, acquaintances, members of my extended community, were gone in a grim flipbook of months or moments.
I make weekly visits to a woman who put her hand over my heart and lifted me last year, who has comforted me with Kleenex and new community and wise words like “go home and read everything you can about acceptance.” Now she is on a twisting journey through metastasized stage four pancreatic cancer and even when I see her under the auspices of showing up to help her, it’s me who gets the help.
I take her food stamp card out to pick up sockeye salmon, orange juice and grits. I walk her granddaughter into a doctor’s office where I am met with a raft of love and prayers and good wishes to take back to the little apartment she so loves because it is surrounded by trees and the walls are increasingly papered with get well cards. I learn how little a person can have and still give and give and light up the lives of other people. I relearn the importance of waking up early, holding my son’s face in my hands and telling him how grateful I am that his face is the first one I laid eyes on in 2011. As much as I want to shed the chaos and pain of the past year’s trail of loss, I also want to stay here, present in what it’s given me, for as long as I am.
I’m learning more than I ever imagined at my age about many ways that people get sick. About many ways that people die. About Jedi nutrition tricks, magical thinking and cold, dark, depressed spaces. I’m stretched thin along the hair’s distance between life and death, between health and a hard diagnosis.
In the days before 2010 expired, I found out there are other people I care about who are now doing their own dances with cancer. After learning her own fate, one gave me a strong symbol of her faith for Christmas, a bit of protection, a message that in the midst of fracturing family, certain things are not lost. I’m wondering if it’s time to lose a few inches of hair again and offer it to cancer.
I couldn’t do the laundry on New Year’s Day. But not exactly because I am afraid of losing another person. I know that I will, and whether that happens in 2011 or 2021 is not in my hands. But there is not one thing, not one person, not one stain from the experiences of this (or any) tour around the sun that I want to see cleansed from my life.
The Electric Company took me to lunch.
By the Electric Company I mean American Electric Power. And by me I mean to say myself, along with several other Ohio bloggers. And by lunch I mean the ever-outstanding Alana’s Food & Wine, which the powers that be specifically chose because of its locally-sourced menu.
I’m now looking forward to the day when, instead of tracking the number of power stars we’ve obtained on Super Mario Galaxy, my son and I can track a more important statistic – the exact amount of electricity we use on every circuit in the house.
Caveat: I am being compensated or blogging about this and my time. The opinions expressed, like anything I write here, are exclusively mine.
Anyway… California’s ongoing struggles with power consumption have clearly given utility companies in large states like Ohio plenty of ideas about what it could face in the near future as its infrastructure ages and demand for a steady supply of juice keeps increasing.
If AEP is to avoid building another big fossil-fuel power plant and move toward greener energy sources, then a change in the way consumers use electricity is needed. The problem has been that most of us have little or no idea exactly how we use our electricity or which appliances suck up the most energy. Even if we have something like a programmable thermostat to control our air conditioning, we may or may not have any idea how to use it.
In partnership with Silver Spring Networks, AEP is getting ready to pilot a “Smart Grid” program in northeast Columbus called “gridSMART.” In a nutshell, this technology gives consumers more power to see exactly where, when and how they are using electricity, and the option to save money by using that electricity differently.
In addition to a more itemized vision of our energy use, AEP plans to roll out optional pricing plans that give customers financial incentives to use less power at peak times in the summer (keeping a/c temps a little warmer in the afternoon, for example, doing laundry early in the morning or charging an electric car in the wee hours, for example). You will even be able to sign up to get rebates in return for using a Programmable Communicating Thermostat that allows AEP to automatically bump up your air conditioning a couple of degrees during an “event” – a time period in which the power grid has become overly taxed. (We were told that customers will be able to override this if they need to.)
Another advantage of the technology is that it will alert AEP about outages without our having to pick up the phone, which should help the company restore power more swiftly.
Of course, most of the city won’t have access to this new technology for a few years, but if end up somewhere where I can take advantage of it, you can bet that I, and the young statistician I live with, will use it.
I wrote this post after attending an informational luncheon on behalf of Silver Spring Networks and Mom Central Consulting and received a gift bag and gift card as a thank you for taking the time to participate.
Last night, my son told me he had something important to show me at school this morning. “A tree in the hallway,” he said, “with paper ornaments.”
That’s sweet, I thought. While we’re still new to Kindergarten, we’ve now been at this long enough for me to start to get jaded over the number of paper creations and writings that come home. I try to celebrate each one, but they do stack up. I readied myself to show excitement over his latest effort, but had a hard time getting to “important.”
This morning he was slow to wake, and slower to get ready. I nudged him along, reminding him that he wanted me to see this tree thing, and that things always start on the dot on Fridays when he has music class. He couldn’t decide what he wanted for breakfast. Then I had to help him with his shoes. He tossed his gloves onto the floor when he came home from school yesterday, so we ended up having to grab a mismatched pair after searching around for more wasted minutes.
The later we leave in the morning, the worse the traffic is bound to be. So I groused at him a bit in the car, and scolded that we wouldn’t be able to see the tree because it had been so hard to get him moving.
We arrived to school about one minute late. He insisted again that we needed to visit the tree, even if it made us late to music class.
I gave in. I crank a lot about timeliness – mostly because it tends to be a better start to the day for all of us when we’re there on time, not because I’m a paragon of promptness or because his teachers are cops. But when my son feels strongly about something, I try to let him have that if I can.
We walked to his classroom, where another parent opened the door and confirmed that all the kids were gone, expecting us to turn straight around. Instead, Declan grabbed my hand and pulled me urgently past the dad, then turned me toward this paper tree that had three or four ornaments on it.
“I was worried these would all be gone,” he said. “We need to take one so I can buy something for the children who don’t have any clothes or food or toys like we do for Christmas. They don’t have anything, mom.”
He picked an ornament that committed us to getting a soft toy for a one-and-a-half-year-old boy and seemed genuinely relieved when I stuffed it in my purse and said that we’d do that this weekend.
I felt Scroogey for needling him on the way to school, only to find out his urgent need for me to see this tree was to make sure that he could do do something kind.
Sometimes the universe swats you on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and gives you an an unexpected, after-school special-worthy moment. And I am grateful. I’m even looking forward to some Christmas shopping. And Hallmark be damned, I’m going to hug the stuffing out of my kid tonight.
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Ever since he was the whole universe when he was two, he has gotten progressively smaller and smaller.
He’s been planning to be the dejected, ex-planet Pluto since last Halloween, which gave me plenty of time to try to figure out how to make the costume, in spite of the fact that there’s not a lot of data out there about what Pluto truly looks like just yet.
We went for “dirty ice ball” and made the decision to anthropomorphize the former 9th planet much like this song did, even though, as a scientist, my son is actually quite at peace with Pluto being relegated to Kuiper Belt object. He tried to muster real righteous indignation for the camera, but felt a lot more comfortable with peevishness.
Motherhood has again taken me light years beyond anything I could have imagined. (I’m looking forward to the subatomic years.)
Happy Halloween & Viva Pluto!
