fling o’ rama
Having accepted congratulations for putting flylady to the side for a time, I just spent probably two hours throwing away crap in my attick hideaway.
It’s a big lovely room. That also means it’s got room for a LOT of crap.
It has been a horror since Christmas. Which was FOUR MONTHS AGO.
I can’t remember what the argument right around Christmas time was about, probably division of housekeeping labor (the fact that there is none, but we’ve settled that reasonably happily now), but I remember crying and telling my husband- – I think I’m going to start abbreviating his name CKK (Curt Kirkwood Kinda)– anyway I remember crying and saying ‘That room is ME!’
Sure, it was theatrical. But it was also true. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. Good old mommy, just throw it in her room, she’ll sort it out. Or, I am the only person in this house who can POSSIBLY take care of this. I’d better put it up in my study, on top of all the other crap nobody can possibly take care of but me. I’ll get to it some day.
Since Christmas this room has been at its absolute height of representing me, I’ll tell ya. It was full of globs of wrapping paper, shipping boxes, packing materials, gifts yet unwrapped, and just shit that the entire family figured I could somehow find a good place for. My healing table (like a massage table) had turned into a work surface/catchall/hidey hole for more shit. You could not see the floor in here.
Then, obscured behind Christmas, was all of my hoarded craft stuff. I have gotten so much better over the years, but… when it comes to crafts and paper products, I am a hoarder. I cannot, cannot cannot organize or let go of fabrics, old diaries/notebooks, items that need mending that I should really just THROW AWAY, unfinished craft projects, scrapbooking stuff… It’s a horror.
Everything I keep, you see, I have to organize.
This room represents me because it takes on everything, and everything never gets finished or processed. I just say, sure! And I take on another task, or pick up another item or commitment whether emotional or physical and figure I’ll get it sorted out somehow and then stow it in my room or in my consciousness until I can’t even think. It’s very sad.
I think of this when I’m in my office, too. I am a stickler about keeping public areas of my workplace clean– tables, dusting, bathrooms– but my office is a piled up mess. My file me pile takes up a table that is, I promise you, a square yard. I’m so busy taking care of my staff and my patrons that my office never gets clean.
I threw away and put away so much. I could just about vacuum up here now.
I have two attic storage areas. My back aches from stooping to come in and out of the mini doors to those dark, miserable little rooms. When I go in there I see all the crap I have still managed to hoard, for years and years and years through over a dozen moves.
I have thrown away so much at every stop, and still here I am. I have boxes and boxes of books, diaries, photos, fancy and expensive clothes that will never, ever, ever fit me again even if they were to be in style ever ever again, holiday decorations… to me that unwillingness to throw away symbolizes fear and denial.
If I could just throw (most of it) away, that would be the energy of a person who is ready to accept and embrace abundance. The more we accept or retain crap, the more we attract it. I believe that with all my heart.
When I shut the sweetly painted doors of my attic storage, I can try to pretend all that stuff isn’t there. But I know it is, and there is going to have to be a reckoning.
What book did I just read that in? “There will be a reckoning.” That echoes in my mind– I think it was kind of comic, but WHAT BOOK WAS IT?
Ah!! Wee Free Men. One of my girlfriends put me onto Terry Pratchett for my stepdaughter and I really liked that book meself. I need to go dig up the next one.
What do you think… is taking care of me first, even when it means that something for others will not get done, still best? We said at healing school that when we show up authentically– which includes setting boundaries and caring for ourselves first– it frees others to show up authentically. But what if I don’t get my goals met at work, or what if something doesn’t get done at home? What if?
This is at the very core of one of my greatest lifetasks, I believe. We just finished Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed in my women’s book group, and it’s such a witty, insightful book. The insight comes from the main character’s sense that she doesn’t deserve– anything. It traces back to her relationship with her dad, and impacts her dating choices as well as how she takes care of herself and creates incredible self blame and psychotic post partum depression when her baby experiences problems at birth. It is just ingrained in her that she doesn’t deserve these blessings. I think that’s the spiritual root of my miscarriage a few years ago. Somehow I didn’t deserve that blessing. I’m not saying it’s my ‘fault’– I’m saying I need somehow to get in touch with that essential worthiness that is in every single human being except, it seems, me. Somehow I’ve got to part that veil.
It’s actually a species of insane egomania… it brings everything back to oneself. If you’re religious, this conviction is a sinful denial of the nature of your loving higher power and it’s holding you back from your higher power’s ultimate plan of joy for you. If you’re not religious, well, this conviction is just– a species of insane egomania that’s holding you back from joy and growth.
But it is so easy to know intellectually that one has a problem with thinking they aren’t deserving, and another thing completely to say, oh, yes I am, and in fact if I care for myself I’ll be there for my family and friends and coworkers more than ever.
What if?
There’s no answer. It’s just something to think about.
And… I can reckon, I can shift my energy to the kind that accepts abundance, some other day. I’m just glad to be able to see the floor, and I’m hungry.
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!
Eat Pray Love and Penn and Teller’s Bullshit
eat pray love and penn and teller’s bullshit
I can’t believe I didn’t have a religion category for this blog before now. Crazy! I think about religion, and pray, all the time. What the hell, how did I avoid giving it a tag here all these two years I’ve been doing this blog?
Tell me spirit, what has not been done? I’ll rush out and do it… or are we doin’ it now? I’m so behind on my contemporary independent music. But this My Morning Jacket song just sticks so sweetly in my head, and it’s so right.
What I have on my mind is something I’ve been thinking about for a good month, but haven’t been able to sit down to write about it for various reasons. Tonight I’m so tired… but I’m going to try to knock it out quickly.
My women’s book group read a book called Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. There were so many transcendent moments, and so many laugh out loud moments. She writes in a clean, self deprecating style that, if you’re not careful, will slip the profound sweetness of her experiences right past you. She had me from the first sentence, where she is lying on the floor in her bathroom at two a.m. in a pool of tears and snot, bawling because she doesn’t want to be married any more. She doesn’t want babies… she is depressed… she has always looked outside of herself to figure out who she is and what she should do… she is at an all time lifetime low and she has no idea what to do with herself. Somehow, though, doors open and she travels to Italy to eat for three months, to India to an ashram to pray for three months, and to Bali to learn from an old medicine man and find balance.
I’m calling this a three meeting book. I have only been able to meet once, but there was a meeting about it before that, and we need to have one more because some of us still couldn’t make it and I know so many of us have so much more to say. We read Shirley McClaine’s Out on a Limb in January, too. With both of those books, I just want someone to tell me– is there or isn’t there? Within us, or outside of us? And I just want to share it with the girls as much as I can.
Then around that same time I watched one of my husband’s Penn and Teller Bullshit dvd’s with him. It was about the funeral industry, life after death, twelve stepping, and a wonderful trick on bottled water drinkers– they filled different fancy bottles from a hose in the back of a restaurant in LA, and had people saying all kinds of ridiculous shit about the different kinds of water that had supposedly come from raindrops collected in the rainforest or whatever.
So to sum up, Penn and Teller said you need to live now, and be cognizant of the bullshit you or your family will face from the funeral industry when you or they are vulnerable when a loved one dies, and if you are fortunate enough to be able to do so, call your mother.
They also said that the bad thing about twelve stepping was that it forces people to admit that they are unable to handle addiction or its effects alone and must call on a higher power to help them out. Now, is there anything wrong with that, really? Not for me to say. I think their beef was more that folks are forced to go to AA meetings and espouse some kind of religoius belief whether it’s right for them or not, when twelve stepping isn’t the be all to end all in recovering from addiction, their success rate is no higher than any other method, that such meetings reinforce one’s sense of one’s own inadequacy, weakness and helplessness which helps to create the addiction in the first place, and that the slogans and rules and sense that you can’t kick it alone and you must continue to come to meetings smack of cult.
I dunno… I kinda like my twelve step stuff. But the bit about how the power of positive change– or negative choices– resides firmly within oneself is pretty important to me, as well.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how much I turn outward to see if I am okay, look for reinforcement as to who I am and whether I am good enough or ’doing it right’. I bust my ass, throwing parties, cooking dinners, helping others, serving, in my career and in my family and in my social life. Am I okay? Dunno, let me look at my paycheck, or around my house, or ask my husband, or my best girlfriend, or my mother, or God, but God doesn’t usually answer (or does s/he? that was one of the discussion questions for Eat Pray Love, and I am just not sure, in the context of her story, or in real life.). The greatest source of my okayness is actually my daughter, and that has got to be fucked up. Or is it? I think the love of a parent or a truly loving caregiver for a child (or other helpless entity) is the closest we get to God in this world– and all of us have experienced it, whether as a child or as a parent, no matter how briefly or how it is manifested.
But I’m so drained. My happiness, or sense that I’m doing it right, come from things I have to work really hard for, things I never can get quite right, not from some certainty within me. I’m spread so thin, and while I haven’t had the breakdown or the opportunities Elizabeth Gilbert describes, I think I recognize her crisis as my own, and as one every thinking person must go through, and as the nature of coming of age in our society.
And I’m still working on that. Stay tuned.
Well, I don’t have the answer to is or isn’t, within or without, angels and heavenly fire or spaceships and aliens or– just ravings written down long long ago to try to get people to act right. I think a lot of thinking people don’t honestly know for sure, either. It’s not that I don’t worship, or find happiness… my garden, my child, vegan cooking, literature or art that touches me, certain friendships or moments with family… so many things are both idols and sources of true understanding of the goodness in this universe.
But I do, at least, have an answer when people push me to go to church.
My marriage counselor encouraged me to go to church on Easter. She turned the knife by telling me to take my baby– I’m a bad mother if I deny her that comfort. I tried saying my husband is a bit of an atheist, and she said, well you go, because it nourishes you. I tried saying, I hate church in this town because church is segregated and she said, well mine isn’t. Sigh.
I feel like such a dumbass, going only at Christmas and Easter, although I have to admit it did my heart good to go to the Unitarian church Christmas Eve this year. The message was right up my alley, if you’ve read my annual post about the true meaning of Christmas–every time a baby is born it is a holy night. But…
I didn’t have time to, or didn’t feel she had the time for me to, explain. Three years of healing school… many years more of study in various religious traditions, not to mention feminism, marxism, and historicism… I actually embrace my husband’s atheism, at least for him, although my spiritual life has had a bit more dimension than his… hell, the hand of God has reached down and literally touched me a time or two. It was unmistakable. But… healing school… Jewish and Sikh friends… Penn and Teller… But now I think– well I can’t explain my whole belief system right here and now. But at least for that case, I think I have a pat answer that will shut most people up.
Don’t get me wrong. I love church. I miss it. I am telling you, I can spout random scripture for any situation. But…
So here’s my pat answer.
I’m actually ordained to minister by the Estuary in Nashville. I am my own church. Sometimes I worship by doing yardwork. Sometimes I worship by being the best parent, librarian, or social activist I possibly can be. Sometimes I worship through delicious vegan cooking, or through tending to relationships. Sometimes I worship through my healing work or consumption of literature or through my own writing or through spiritual study.
I don’t have my liturgy and apologetics quite written down yet– but I am my own church and I am pretty solid in a lot of my beliefs. I am ordained. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And that’s a key part of my beliefs.
As my dear friend Annie Pearl said to me when we were both working in a terribly dysfunctional, abusive office (that’s not her real name, but I call her a pearl because she is just so amazing, one of my dearest mentors)– when you are a leader, it is just you and the lord. You can’t go giving your power away. You have to suck it up and stand up straight and do the work.
But it’s not just when you are a manager of a large agency or business. It is when you are trying to figure out what do do about your marriage. It is when you are suffering from loss, grief, illness, or paralytic anxiety. It is when you are biting your tongue when you are at your wit’s end with your child, or trying to figure out what do do with your life, or what you have done when it’s too late to change. It is just you and the lord. But really, it’s just you, and, well, you.
It’s just me. That’s not hubris talking. That’s humanity, humility, anxiety, and doing the best I can. That’s an open mind, an open heart, and some serious imperfections and knee jerk psychological defenses talking. I don’t know. But I do know it’s me, and me.
And I don’t need to go to church. Well, maybe I do, but not for that reason. I am my own church. And it’s just me and the Lord.
I am shaky
I don’t know why I turn to my ol’ blog just now.
I’ve started back to work. I’ve just finished my first week. It was fucking exhausting.
I am ever retreating into my attick room. My mom is here to care for my baby and stepson while I work. In her ’spare time’ she has painted this lovely space and pretty much singlehandedly rendered it livable and comfortable (if you don’t notice the discreet stack of boxes of cd’s, professional and personal papers, quilting, sewing, scrapbooking and other mess in the alcove where the desk is). There’s a bathroom up here (groovy white and gold ceramic tile, not so groovy, in fact downright horrid, pink and blue shell patterned wallpaper) and fuck the electricity bill, I want to hang out up here so let the air conditioner blow. This is where I will sleep, for now. It’s just too nice, peaceful.
My stepdaughter arrived today, beautiful and witty little girl. I sat her and my stepson and my husband down and gave the three kids (the baby stayed home with my mom) a talking to about our relationship and my and their jobs (What’s funny is that the stepkids kept breaking in with thoughts– respect, different needs, etc.– from the evidently identical talk they were given by their mother. The mother who uninvited my stepson to live with her. What’s that about? Is that what’s next for me? No, because I have my wonderful room, I can just disappear).
My husband will be the point man. I’ll help out if I can, and if they ask, and he and I will split cooking and such 50/50, but the days of laboriously insuring that they have clean clothes, a well rounded lunch in their little insulated bag, snack money, hygiene, all round nutrition and constructive activities are OVER. Ask Daddy.
All that to say… I have this beautiful room and in it is where I’ll be most of the time. I told the kids that this is KEEP OUT. I promise that if I am grouchy I will come up here and stay until I am happy and friendly again. Perhaps if I can use this room to keep my center, get my rest, retreat from the energy in my home… I will be a better stepmom and spouse, so much better that on the rare occasions when I do emerge we’ll all be glad. Still I resent having to retreat, you know? But I guess that’s about me. I can grieve it but I probably can’t blame it, at least not more than 50%.
My baby is singing in the tub. She does this wonderful operatic thing. Did I mention there’s a bath up here? I can blog and email and know she is safe and enjoying herself in her bath at the same time.
Reading Reader, I Married Him. Very cute little book. Sort of bubblegum literary, or high chick lit. I see that I need to read Middlemarch (again? I think) and Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence.
I’ve also been retreating into my healing school spirituality. I don’t manage to jack in to the spirit/energy world every day. By no means. But I am really enjoying the Energy Alerts posts from this site.
http://www.whatsuponplanetearth.com/latest.htm
(Check out her main page, lovely musick)
This week, this lady– snake oil saleslady? Who cares, really, right? –Assures me that the energy is cutting, slashing, killing the old and the new cannot wait for even one more minute, and that direct and purposeful communication is needed. Makes me feel a bit better about our supper conversation, and my sense of purpose at this time, I’ll tell ya.
I am so f-ing tired
It’s Thursday, that’s probably why. I know, it’s only Tuesday in terms of how many days I have worked this week, but I am sure my circadian rhythms are attuned to feel like shit by Thursday.
I came across another mommy blog today. She used the f word. I love mommies who are articulate and thinking, and also use the f word. I forget what hip thinking mom I was talking to recently who was, to my surprise, extolling the virtues of the f word [Jeez, was it actually my stepkids' mother? yikes!! surely not!]. Plus the content of her blog somewhat reassured me about the content of mine. But I digress.
I was bitching about working to my husband. I realize that many, many, *many* people work eight to five just like I do, and they are just fine. I don’t know why this is so hard for me, particularly, when millions of others manage it and manage to be happy.
Okay I do know why. If I were doing work I loved, or work with a particular set of rewards– self direction, authority to manage my time any way I pleased as long as my work was up to snuff, challenge, or, absent those items, a much bigger salary– it would be very different, I think. I’m pretty task oriented. I actually like to work.
What I absolutely am not is bean count oriented. I am also not well for all the game playing and backstabbing and house slaves/field slaves [my husband, ever willing to be politically incorrect, came up with that last, but I asked my coworkers, some of whom are African American, and they say it totally fits] bullshit that goes on at my office. I am trying so hard to have a good attitude, to remember that every moment is precious, that the dignity and value of the work are solely a reflection of the dignity and value of the person doing it (eek!).
Having learned through healing school that the things that rub us the worst wrong way are the things that will most illuminate our issues or illuminate what we need to integrate or heal, I am trying to be a good little soldier and show up with an attitude of gentle compassion, inquiry, and remaining present instead of f*cking hating every minute.
Hating every minute is a ‘defense’. I *think* it’s because my workplace f*king sucks, but it really has *nothing* to do with the external situation. It’s *really* something within me that I need to resolve because it is blocking me from experiencing my limitless, joyful, true essence. When we are in our essence, as our external environment changes, we simply experience a different kind of happiness.
Sheeeeit.
This is more of the same bitching that readers of my blog have heard time and time again. I just feel it’s worth saying again, since, well, that’s how I feel. And that’s part of the experience of being a mother, and a working mother, which is what I am, and what this blog is pretty much about. The blog’s seeming lack of direction is really, little did you know, a completely accurate and true reflection (except, of course, where the honesty I long to write with would unfortunately violate privacy or harm friendships and so I am muzzled from unleashing what would probably be some of my funniest, certainly my most savage, work, and isn’t savage what sells? Look at Lewis Black, right?) of the disjointed and sometimes discouraging (other times transcendent, I won’t deny it, but right now it’s discouraging, dammit) existence of a Gen X former hipster (in a nerdy kind of way) smart exhausted dingy [blonde in spite of the dye job] mom malcontent culture maven feminist addictive therapy junkie attachment parent government worker underemployed frustrated writer and rock star.
I am getting a slight goose for the better from AH Almaas’ Diamond Heart Series Book One, and an even bigger goose from Sera Beak’s Red Book. Because of M and W’s diligence, thought and generosity in picking it up for me [they had to chase down my wish list from my old blog-- now that is devotion!!! I'm as, or more, impressed by the hard work as I am by the gift!], I have decided to buy three more copies for three more dear friends who might enjoy it.
Earlier today I even considered that the Universe will certainly provide, just at the right time, just the space I need to pursue my healing career.
But now I’m just f*cking tired.
So… instead of being in bed reading, either smut or Red Book… instead of just catching the tail of the falling stars of my inspirations (as opposed to deciding almost reflexively that this is an absolutely stupid premise for a story and forgetting the thought almost immediately, which is what I usually do, and I am so mad at myself for that!) , instead of sleeping, I am, you guessed it! Blogging. Jeez!
I’ll go write a little on my neglected serialized novel blog. I had an idea today that I actually managed to bring home. I have *got* to get that f*cking voice recorder working, and more importantly, remember to use it.
So tired! Did I mention that? I can still get in bed by eight, if I want…
do you know how old I am?
Thirteen, right?
I’m blogging from my training. This is very bad… I should be in the final presentations of this week, paying attention… but I have to be out of here at elevenish… It’s a wash at this point anyway, isn’t it?
Do you remember that middle aged senator from somewhere out west (I think) whose diaries were released to the public or press in conjunction with some impropriety? He had written details about how he fixed his (doubtless thinning, oh the indignity!) hair and dressed for particular functions or meetings– and the impression he just knew he would make because he looked so darn hot.
I remember feeling so sorry for the old lech, because, as odious and womanly as he was, I, too, am that self absorbed.
Don’t you think that most of us have that Walter Mitty dialog running in our head most of the time? (Yes I am in fact a HUGE Thurber fan. He gave us some of the finest and funniest insight into a certain subset of the human condition and culture EVER.)
I think perhaps that the senator’s (or whatever he was) personality was such that he didn’t have the self awareness to be embarassed… but I would have been so mortified I would have absolutely died.
I was at healing school a weekend or so ago and one of my colleagues volunteered to go first for a grueling emotional class exercise involving exposing one’s own subtle and pathetic lies to oneself. She jumped right up, admitting that she loved attention. I could have kissed her! It’s not loving attention… it’s loving it and pretending — or not even being aware — that you do. Her humility is a beautiful thing, because underneath it is discernment, honesty, and compassion, three of the key– in fact perhaps *the three key* components for growth and healing.
It’s attention… but it’s also, for me, a sense of being tied in, or part of something. D’you see the subtle difference? Both are related to my neediness and self absorption I think.
Like, when I wake up in a big city hotel, and the big city day is getting started, and the feel of rush hour traffic is all around, and news is blasting from televisions throughout the facility, and people just seem to have places to go… I love it. I am essentially a country mouse. But when I’m in a congested urban area of a major city, I feel tiny and insignificant, yet I feel like I’m really part of something. I think it would just exhaust me to be part of something all the time… but for a while, as in DC this week or as in Boston last spring… it feels really, really cool.
To get back to my own particular Walter Mitty script, there’s a young librarian in this training who, every time he sees me, calls me by the name of the state where I work. You know… Georgia, or Virginia, or Alabama like the name of the wife in Zelda Fitzgerald’s semi autobiographical novel.
This boy is at least ten, if not fifteen, years younger than I am. He’s a cutie, one of those young men who seem eminently secure in themselves, mature, responsible and thoughtful and serious, yet have a great sense of irony and humor.
What I wonder, because of my self absorption, is would he be relating to me in this manner if he knew how old I am? What is it about me– the way I look or relate, or what is it about him– a general desire to relate to me personally, or a general desire to relate to everyone — both of which I think are kinda cool– that makes him heckle me so? [He also complimented my footwear... does he have a shoe fetish, or is he just gay?]
I like it, because it makes me feel like somebody. Does he think I’m a matron who needs some attention, or does he think I’m hot, or is he just a really friendly fellow… almost doesn’t matter because I like the attention. Although it would reflect wonderfully on this boy if he made it a habit to try to make people feel like somebody, wouldn’t it.
It’s really important to take interactions, and people, as they come, with a healthy combination of friendly interest and healthy lack of expectation. But I’m so needy that I have to think about all this stuff, spin out my Walter Mitty.
I’m just sayin. This is me. The internet is the new vehicle for all our narcissism. At least it’s out in the open now, eh? That’s got to be a healthier state of affairs.
Right?
