what came first
The memory loss, or the Meat Puppets?
I am forgetting everything. I am forgetting tasks at work. I am forgetting to tell people things. I forgot to leave shaky baby’s car seat at her school so my friend could take her home from school tonight. What an inconvenience for my friend! I pretty much throw my hands up. I never used to forget shit. One of the banners of righteous anger I used to wave in my husband’s face is that I never forget anything. NOTHING. Kids’ lunches, paying bills, social engagements– never. Nothing. So when was someone going to nurture me, remember for me, like I was doing for them?
So, here I am. It’s another message from the universe– just ease up, for Christ’s sake, it will be okay. There’s no way you will ever be able to remember it all, don’t be so hard on yourself. Or, if you can’t bring it to mind on demand, it’s probably because it’s completely fucking unimportant compared to the bigger fish you have to fry.
I used to know every ten digit phone number for every friend and loved one, often more than one per person, and just carry those around in my brain to call up at will. That’s no longer the case, you can bet. I know my mom’s just barely, my marrige counselor’s, my husband’s cell, and the eternal numbers for my best friend in library school and her mom’s. And that is it. Oh and my phone number from very, very early childhood– 229-3397. Right? That’s useful.
And I can’t remember the last names of people I see daily.
Who cares?
I don’t know why I have to quantify myself like this. Why can’t I just have pms, which is what I have?
But I hear those ugly words parents say to their children all around the globe and their children internalize– she’d forget her head if it wasn’t screwed on. I remember the words of friends when I in my preteen/tween/teen years growing up– you’re super smart, but you just don’t have any sense!
Oy, it drives me to drink. Let me go get a glass of wine. And turn on my Meat Puppets playlist.
And before someone who doesn’t know me goes judging… don’t tell me every thinking person doesn’t have these moments, especially every thinking mother. However embarassed I might be to be where I am and being honest about it, I know I’m not alone, so I’m not that embarassed. Sorry.
Where was I?
I also remember a particular epoch in my wine-soaked early twenties. I was telling my girlfriend about this really, really, really cool guy I lived next door to for a time, Dave. I know he thought he hit the jackpot, living next door to these two cute girls who always had a party on their front porch. He was one of the coolest dudes I had ever met and he was a wonderful combination of good values, good engineering student grades, and a little dash of bad boy within reasonable limits. He played guitar a little. He had huge brown eyes with thick black lashes. He was always trying to tell me about fractals, and Foucault’s Pendulum.
And the other day I was telling my friend about Dave, Dave of over fifteen years ago, because our book group is reading Foucault’s Pendulum now. And of course I picked the penniless musician and the redneck pothead mechanic/chef over Dave and never saw him again.
Or maybe Dave had a girlfriend and wasn’t strictly into me, that could be too. He was one of the dear, faceless many who got me home when I was too messed up to get myself home, one of the graces of God– you know, the there but fors go I? Well… all he had to do was carry me down his fire escape and up to the front door of my house. Still, I could have broken my skinny drunk little neck on those stairs, right? Or fallen asleep in my yard and fallen prey to who knew what.
Anyway, I was telling my friend about Dave trying to tell me about fractals and Foucault’s Pendulum. I told her I’m pretty sure I just looked deep between his thick black lashes into his big brown eyes and… glazed over. I probably nodded slowly, and then asked for another mason jar full of wine. The nice way to put it is, I was a party girl. I loved to dress up and entertain — such as entertaining is for impoverished college students with part time jobs.
In every arena of my life, I was coasting on being dumb and pretty and drunk.
Why can’t I do that now?
Because I’m almost forty, that’s why, I weigh 145 not 120, I’m too old for the flowing mane of my college days, I don’t live with my friend Missy any more so I can’t borrow her incredibly chic– I mean CHIC– clothes and pretend I am as wonderful as she is any more. Smoking isn’t something a cute bad girl does any more, it’s just cancer in a stick. I have to take care of my family and go to work each day so I can’t drink, and even if I could I don’t have a host of cool people to get drunk with like I did back then. Outside of a college campus, or over a certain age, people who get drunk regularly are just, well, they must not have anything to lose, you know? Or, the alcoholics in my neck of the woods just aren’t as cool– or just not as good at posing– as others I have encountered over the years. I have a home and a family which, as much as I bitch, I dearly, dearly love.
I guess I could coast again. It took me a while to get into the crisis of guilt and self loathing that led to easing up on the drinking, shacking up, working hard at my job, going back to grad school and getting a life. I could probably get back there, with just a bit of effort and rationalization.
But… if I was drunk all the time, or even very often, I would not have the energy to keep up this elaborate fiction that is my life. It’s not even a very good fiction. The reality– my forgetfulness, my anxiety attacks, my disordered thought patterns and existence and shaggy yard — peers through the thin spots and around the shaggy edges… but I still have to knock myself out to try to keep it together. Nothing but Gymboree clothes for shaky baby… big house and big car payment… smart cool hippie mommy friends… giving too much at work, at home, and to friends (I just accepted a nomination to run for vice presidency of a citywide organization, can you imagine that?)… healing school, vegan, yoga… but what would I be if, at 38, I just decided to revert to dozy, party girl me? I thought that ditzy, irresponsible little cutie was the fiction, that I would grow out of her some day and become successful, responsible and happy. But what if responsible, educated, bright, manager, mentor, mother, hausfrau is the real fiction?
Bears thinking about, I guess. Putting aside the fiction is always a good idea. If one can just figure out which is which.
If you see it closer then the finer points will show…Not too much more, too much more/Not too much more, too much more.
I have some time before bed and I have no idea what I even want to do. What’s my passion? My passion is overeating and smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap merlot.
But it’s time to rescue shaky baby from an evening made up exclusively of watching Noggin– noggin is late night now, isn’t that cool? Now I can ignore her at night as well as all day!
The Meat Puppets helps a lot.
You are my daughter.
Maybe we got something to talk about…
superconnected
My other mania was making brightly colored tissue roses. I couldn’t stop for days after shaky baby’s party. I was working out the trauma of all the crafts we didn’t do at her party because I was so disorganized. But somehow shutup or I’ll stack you, accordion pleat you, wrap you with a chenille pipe cleaner, and fluff you doesn’t sound as funny as shutup or I’ll frost you.
“when you’re finished with the mop then you can stop
and look at what you’ve done the plateau’s clean,
no dirt to be seen and the work it took was fun
well the many hands began to scan around for the next
plateau some said it was greenland some said
mexico others decided it was nowhere except for
where they stood but those were all just guesses,
wouldn’t help you if they could”
Meat Puppets Plateau
I rediscovered the Meat Puppets because I was trying to explain to my husband that he looks like Curt Kirkwood when he just lets his hair get all long and raggy and goes unshaved. He really does, too. Kinda.
Staring at photos of longhaired, five o’clock shadowed Curt Kirkwood, preferably in a pink gingham dress, was my greatest comfort during a particularly uhappy moment in my romantic life twelve or so years ago. And at almost fifty he’s still pretty damn delicious. And he’s in Austin, where all good rockers go when they die (oh or Nashville, not sure which is better, Austin by a hair, though Steely Dan had been working out of Nashville for a while, and Bon Jovi’s there now right???). And lo and behold! They just put out a new album! And Curt is spewing his abrasive, probably aspbergers, nobody’s going to impose their agenda on me language– yum.
Anyway.
Top down is just not me.
For a long time I’ve been trying to get on top of my life by doing the Flylady thing– flylady.net, you know. I have tried so hard to impose easy, one-size-fits-all, brief, doable routines on my life that could be accomplished in a small amount of work each day, as opposed to either major disgusting house or major housework misery all day on a weekend day, which I just refuse to do, routines which would make it all come together with a minimum of misery, angst and resentment.
Don’t get me wrong– it has helped. A lot. I throw away a lot of crap, and then I no longer have to organize, put away, or dust it. I try to go by the handle everything once rule- go ahead and decide if it’s junk mail or important and file it, whether in the circular file or the important file, right away instead of having to touch it once when I get it out of the mail box and again weeks later when I finally get around to organizing the mail pile. I keep certain surfaces clear or easy to clear so that they can be easily and quickly disinfected often so I don’t have to get out the flamethrower because I haven’t cleaned them since last year. My house is in much better shape (at least I think it is???) than it was before Flylady.
But as a general rule, no matter how well it works, no matter how much sense it makes, top down is just not me.
There was a study in the late 70’s-early 80’s about programming styles of boys and girls using logo. In a nutshell, probably the nutshell of warped memory because I haven’t looked at the thing in twelve years, the study differentiated boys and girls like so. The boys decided what they wanted to do and then attempted to cram the reality of the programming language into the desired result– top down. The girls looked at the reality of the programming language and used that as a jumping off point to create from there– bottom up.
I see this in my life every day. Husbands relax after work (imposing desired result, regardless of reality all around them) while wives bust their asses, becoming resentful and too tired for sex, parenting, housecleaning, working full time (embracing external reality and starting at the bottom). As my brother says, men just don’t have that take on too much gene.
Managers strive to bring together reality and top down desired result, attempting to encapsulate and convey the desired outcome to staff, who relax and don’t concern themselves with the desired outcome because they aren’t paid to and they just want to deal with their own little fiefdom. My best friend’s husband keeps putting glass in the city recycle bin because it makes no sense to him that they don’t recycle glass. I don’t guess I’ll ever be a process engineer or computer programmer, but my husband can’t build a fire for shit or string a kite that will actually fly. I can, as I demonstrated beautifully on cold, clear, windy Easter night after his kite kept diving earthward and his knots popped off.
When I load the dishwasher the dishes almost always come out sparkling. My husband loads the dishwasher chock full, even though when he does that half the dishes come out dirty. He says, I refuse to be held hostage by my dishwasher.
Held hostage by your dishwasher?
How about tuned in to reality so that you can be effective, so that your kite will fly and your fire will burn?
Is my friend’s husband’s stubborn refusal to embrace the recycling reality a stupid refusal to see reality, or a thoughtful protest? I mean, it is truly wrong that our city does not recycle glass. I get that.
Some see at what is and ask why. Others see what isn’t and ask why not?
Or something.
This is a very, very basic difference. It would be unproductive to say one approach is better than the other. Even if bottom up is better (and I believe, know, that it is), never, ever the twain shall meet. I can knock my head against my husband’s reality all day long but it will only piss us both off– me because he isn’t doing it ’right’ and him because I am helping him and that pisses dudes off.
Sometimes top down is even useful. I find that at work, dealing with the folks I supervise, top down is sometimes needed or else anarchy will prevail. Anarchy isn’t such a bad thing… unless it is accompanied by people forgetting why we’re there and failing/just not bothering to serve the folks whose tax dollars pay our salaries. So, sometimes I do have to go all top down on ’em.
But at home…
It just came over me Monday when I was off and home alone.
This constant attempt to impose routine, and the consequent unhappiness because I can’t/don’t want to do it and so my life is still in disorder because I failed to tick off the items on my to do list, isn’t helping. It just isn’t.
I’m knocking my head against some basic realities.
I’m struggling to find the right simile or metaphor for this. I haven’t yet, sorry.
These realities are just not going anywhere. We have so much time and so much money. We have certain needs– food, sleep, shelter, transportation, paycheck, emotional and physical and social comforts. My husband sees things a certain way. All of these are realities I can knock my forehead against until it bleeds. I stretch and stretch, trying to manage both ends. At the front end I impose a top down strategy involving lots of proactive things like buying in bulk and routine– and still find myself stuck on the other end, out of money and out of energy, with needs unmet.
I can make running up the slide a way of life if I want to. And I have.
The endless to do list, the daily and weekly attempts to finally game the system, hit the sweet spot, make routine work for me, just wear me out and make me feel like a failure.
So it came to me Monday to try something different.
How about just being where I am and paying tender attention to that particular thing? How about setting down all the balls I am just barely managing to juggle — work, home, my own mental and physical health, parenting, marriage– and giving whatever single thing I am doing my full attention.
Instead of doing fifteen minutes in each room in the house, changing rooms each time the timer goes off, how about cleaning the kitchen for a while, as long as I want, and then going into my room and cleaning there as long as I want?
How about going to bed when I’m tired?
How about being off ADD meds which help me be supermom and just being scattered me for a while?
I gave this a shot Monday. I felt like I was in some kind of superconnected state. I say this because healing school work is the only thing I can compare it to. I was flowing through my day, and it was sweet. It made me nervous, like the first time without training wheels or water wings… but I am convinced of the essential rightness of it.
Those realities were still there… I could stop any time I wanted and try to claw my way up the flinty perpendicular bank of that flow– not enough time, not enough money, day slipping by, have to go back to work tomorrow, must be proactive, must impose routine, must go work on my budget and short and long range forecasts and plans, must accomplish this and this and this in order to create this outcome, must convince husband to save time and aggravation by finally succumbing to the reality of our dishwasher, or our dogs or child or… but why?
I might even make some progress scrambling up the bank. But all those loose ends would still be waving sweetly at me in the breeze– my failure at top down, my reality at bottom up… scrambling up the bank would probably just make my fingers bleed.
I thought, you know, this shit is all going to be there. Why don’t I just do what I want to do right now, and later I’ll probably want to do something else, and it will all get done, or it will still be there.
I didn’t check email. I didn’t budget. I didn’t create a list or calendar of things that must be done on or by certain days in order for my life to work out. I was just … there. I did some dishes. I folded some laundry. I did some writing. I printed some photos. I did some reading. I ate. I just was.
I’m not describing it very well. It really was a moment of zen, though. I haven’t had one this big since I read Haruki Murakami’s Windup Bird Chronicle. Not that I can remember anyway. It’s so funny how a truly useful paradigm shift just sneaks up on you slowly and silently.
One more listen to Plateau… who needs action when you’ve got words?
Good night!
ADD
add
Current mood: 
working
My stepson was eating his dinner and humming… humming… humming. We had all eaten separately so he was sitting at the table by himself. Humming. He wasn’t bothering anyone. It was just odd.
He hummed himself to sleep last night. At least I think humming was what he was doing. I wasn’t brave enough to bust in on him to find out.
I was doing dishes and I was thinking, that kid has ADD. He really does have ADD. I know I have it… we had doubts as to whether he had it and took him off his medicine. I freakin’ love my medicine. Maybe he has it after all.
I kept working. I was deep in thought. started humming Dinah Washington doing Cole Porter’s I Get a Kick Out of You.
Humming!
“Hyperactivity in ADHD adolescents can also take the form of finger drumming, restless legs, excessive humming/singing/whistling, and even object-drumming. ADHD teens often turn kitchen canisters and tables into drum sets.”
http://www.enotalone.com/article/4122.html
I also walk around whistling almost silently, as my Dad did. I don’t jiggle my legs any more cause I don’t like it, but he does. He’s a ball of nervous energy.
My husband and I were agreeing that kids have probably always been this way.
You know why kids didn’t act this way (bouncing, running, tumbling, popping up from their seats) as kids? Because their parents beat the shit out of them!
For me… medicine is great. I love it (who wouldn’t? it’s amphetamines!) and I experience significantly better quality of life. For the kids, though… I’d rather they not take drugs.
For them, and honestly for myself, I’d rather try to learn to work with our personalities and ‘lead from strength’ rather than think of it as a disorder and try to force all us square pegs into round holes.
My stepson, and my daughter, have very intense concentration when they are engaged in something they really value. They just don’t have it in them to handle mundane shit. I wonder where they get that. (?)
I sure would like to go the unschooling route, with both of them. Who knows what I might have accomplished if I could have started working with myself as I am, instead of how I was supposed to be, from childhood. And, to be fair, I wonder what kind of useless I might be if I hadn’t forced myself to study, get grades, and hold jobs all my life.
It’s all good, but knowing what I know (or think I know) now… we’ll see what the future holds for all of us.
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Currently listening : The Essential Dinah Washington: The Great Songs By Dinah Washington Release date: By 03 November, 1992 |
thank heaven for patricia evans and adderall.
dude! I got me some ADD meds!
I told the doc I was still depressed and I was willing to try anything. He was about to give me the same medicine I took before on top of my horse dose that made me feel so bad, and I was willing to try it again anyway because I’ve been feeling so emotionally poorly, when I said as an afterthought, can you test me for ADD? He said, there is no test. I said, well then how would you know? He said, you would have a history of irritability, distractability… I said if you ask my mother I believe she’d say that was true. When you invoke the mother, after all, it’s gospel. He looked like a light bulb went off in his brain. He said that in many cases if you treat the ADD the depression goes away, and that in women the distractability is often much worse than the traditional hyperactivity. Amphetamine for all! What a freaking relief. Now if we can try out an OCD med I’ll be in business [I've been having to drive back home check the stove lately].
Why am I so happy about getting ADD meds, when I was so unhappy about my stepson taking them? Because he is TEN. His liver and other bodily systems have got to last him a lot longer than mine have to last me. And because to me and I hope this isn’t wishful thinking his acting out is a result of needing his father, unresolved grief from his parents’ divorce, and the fact that his issues and his mom’s issues work on each other (and that new fiancee don’t help either). And because I want to observe him myself for a good long while, and get him evaluated if needed, and get his diet healthy if not completely free of sugar, dyes, dairy and white flour, before I allow him to pickle his brain with drugs.
I pray he’s not as miserable as I am, though… because if he is I am denying him something he really needs.
I on the other hand have to work, all day every day, in a regimented and toxic environment, parent, clean the house, try to have a life… I had to have drugs to maintain my rock n roll lifestyle. I don’t feel much different but it’s only been a few days. If anything I feel just marginally better.
What if, what if what if… what if this was the magic bullet that suddenly made me normal? Even as I was thinking that, the other day, I realized how diseased it is to think that a pill would make me normal. But what if… what if I’m not as miserable as I think I am and the ADD med (and/or an OCD med) helped me clear my head and just be where I am, instead of in about fifteen different exhausting states and scenarios at any given time?
Honestly, I’m a bit nervous taking so many meds. I am going to peel back on the anti-d this spring, and see how that goes.
I am reading (and LOVING) Skinny Bitch. I guess if I love that book I must be a bit sick, because it’s very mean. It really rakes the American diet over the coals, and it is just sickening. But it is just giving me a ‘girlfriend can we talk’ about things I really want to examine at this point in my life. I have now given up caffeine, and I put orange juice in my decaf constant comment instead of milk and sugar. I haven’t been able to completely quit smoking, but I don’t smoke in the morning until after I drop my children off at school, and the smoking window in my day is getting smaller and smaller.
As I incorporate lifestyle changes such as that, I will, I hope, also be improving my mental state. But I have my other foot in the camp that says that if you have it you have it, and saying that you can manage it with lifestyle is like saying you can manage a broken arm with lifestyle. It’s some of each I realize, and wellness is rooted in being willing to own it and take charge of it and take care of oneself. Meds, exercise, diet, family and social support, hobbies, job situation… they all contribute for better and for worse. It’s a continuum, with chaotic weather events at random places, and I just have to own it and go on. It’s a f*cking miracle I get as much done as I do.
In other news, we just got home from watching Night at the Museum. It was much more fun than I’d expected.
I wish someone would pay me to teach a course in which I explicate ‘books everyone should read because then the world would be a better place’. A Room of One’s Own is a key book on that list. Hell I’m a librarian. With a literature degree. And a vehement defender of marginalized groups. And I have years in the mental health field, both working in it and as a client. I have the credentials. I should just go ahead and offer it, and charge for it and see what kind of income I could pull down by starting my own secular humanism university. Okay I copyright that idea. It’s mine. I need that career. Nobody steal it. I’ll work it up.
But I welcome suggestions to add to the list.
Another is The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans. The sorts of thought patterns she describes– well, duh, we don’t call people names. We don’t interrupt them. We don’t scream at our children on any sort of a regular basis, preferably we don’t anyway. We don’t– xyz behaviors our parents tried to teach us. But when I read that book I am just stunned. So many things that pass for normal, at least in my house, my family of origin house as well as my current house, and in many of my friends’ homes (not you M!!!), are totally within the abusive pattern, so diseased, so damaging. It is unbelievable. I’ve become hyper sensitive to it, and I hear it EVERYWHERE, especially at my job. I hear it in the way some of my friends describe interactions with their husbands. It’s awful. I have been kind of depressed about it, that I’ve let this go on for so many years… that I’ve been on the receiving end and have just about bought into it, and that I’ve been on the giving end, and haven’t known it.
As devastating as that sounds, though… and it is… I am grateful that I know now so I can call it what it is and eliminate it. Luckily the book I’m reading, another one by Evans, gives some tools to replace those verbally abusive communication methods with. Cause if it didn’t… if we eliminated verbally abusive communication methods, we wouldn’t have a damn thing left to say. Even when we’re getting along we talk that way. No wonder our arguments are so horrible! Augh!
Also as devastating as that sounds, I am actually managing to have a bit of joy these days as well.
I am in the grip of Eloise Mania. I LOVE those books. I don’t know why. I LOVE them. They aren’t on the list of books everyone should read, but man I love to read them to my little girl. I have the Eloise movie too. I can’t wait to watch it with my girl. My stepson and husband might even like it. I’ve caught my husband listening and snickering when I’ve been reading the books out loud.
As I (hope I) become more focused, maybe some of this negative chatter in my head will die down and I can actually concentrate on just enjoying.
All right… that’s all for now. Thank heaven for Patricia Evans and Adderall.
