Summer Gratitude

Posted on September 7, 2014 by spiralwoman

Bash Bish falls, right in my backyard. Well, so to speak.

Summer when I was a child was a joy because I got to spend lots of time with my dad, stepmother, and sisters. As a mom, it meant time with my children – lazy hours of just being, digging, singing, or eating sun warmed garden veggies. As a teacher it was time to regroup, plan, and write. But even so, summer has never been my favorite season. Or even my second or third favorite.

But year after year, I wonder how I forget all there is to love about the summer. Here is my list of at least some of the things for which I am very grateful as the summer of 2014 winds to a close.

A chance to live under the same roof with my daughter for maybe the last time. Laughing with legs crossed and eyes streaming, watching the same stupid movies over again and not minding, playing a never ending game of gin rummy, walking to Bash Bish, finding any excuse to eat out, parallel play on our computers, cooking together, and all the rest.

Sisterhood in the tropics with the 9 St. Martin Chicklets, sweating and drinking and throwing Tarot in soft air, braless.
The sisterhood here represented by our cocktails.

Road trip to Virginia all on my own with a big fat book on CD and as many stops at Starbucks as I wanted.

Sorting books with Sandy McAdams at Daedalus Bookstore in Charlottesville, smearing book dust across a damp brow as I folded the cardboard lids closed (apparently not everyone can do that) and marking KEEP or GIVE AWAY in thick black Sharpie. It’s all about companionship with an old friend, and, well… books.
Best bookstore in the country — 100,000+ books. Daedalus in Charlottesville. An institution. Not an inch of wasted space.

Sitting under a vineyard’s pergola drinking a glass of wine with my friend Anne, falling into the familiarity of sisterhood with a string of days that did not make demands stretching out behind and ahead of us.
Genuine Virginia grapes at a genuine Virginia vineyard/winery.

A family weekend with my lovely son in Vermont. All four of us with 36 whole hours together. Time as a family was once commonplace and precious. Now it is rare and precious. We shopped for shoes. We drank iced coffee. We hung around and talked. I sat for hours with everyone as they fished lazily for bass and catfish in a huge “pond.” I counted far more blessings than fish that day.
First catch of the afternoon.

Middle Bass Island and hours of cards with a sister, a daughter, a niece, and cousins of several generations. We sat on big blankets looking out at the vastness of Lake Erie. Everyone’s legs and heads were bare. Trees overhead dappled us with August light and we sat until evening.
Lake Erie at sunset from the grove on Middle Bass Island.

Restaurants with outdoor seating, like The Greens, in my humble town.
Dinner on the porch at The Greens. The place to be at sunset.

Minor league baseball. This summer it was the Hudson Renegades playing at home against the Burlington Vermont Lake Monsters. Evening game. Falling light. Perfect.
One or two hot days when a beer – really cold – tasted so good.
Cincinnati — new home of my sister — and time spent with family I miss.
3 generations.
Early mornings in my plastic Adirondack chair in the middle of the yard, shaded by a giant pine, cat on lap, book in hand, coffee nearby. I think I posted a few too many photos of this situation on Facebook, but it was always just perfect.

As ever – endless lines of laundry hung to dry in the sun and breeze. This is maybe the main thing that keeps me living in the country.
The freedom to go to work at 10, leave for lunch, or work on Saturday but not on Monday.
Great music in small bars.
The Nolan sisters rocking out.
Late night TV marathons on Netflix with no thought of the consequences.
Fresh corn. Fresh greens. Fresh tomatoes. Fresh mint. And as much basil as I could ever want.

Summer always has its own rules, its own schedule, and its own vault where indiscretions and late night confessions can live out their lives. I am grateful for those days when the air and my skin don’t notice each other. It’s like being in a giant womb called the universe, only I get to have teeth, and my eyes open.

Thank you, summer.

For my Mother

Posted on May 12, 2014 by spiralwoman

My mother at the peak of her advertising career. Mid-1970s (she was in her mid-40s) before the decline into mental illness.

I wrote the following 9 years ago — one year after my mother’s death. Today on Mother’s Day I remember this account and offer it here.

For years I was steeled for her death. I never knew, when the phone rang, if it would be news that she had died, alone in some city, or if hers would be the voice I’d hear. Either the harsh accusations or the begging born of anguished paranoia. The urgent instructions to call this corporate giant or that estranged relative in order to vindicate her once and for all. Sometimes it was the kind of call that ran the gamut from invective, to sobbing desperation to sinuous manipulation. I was to drive 400 miles, tonight, and take her home to live with me, in her rightful place, because surely I owed her that. Didn’t I owe her my life? She never hesitated to remind me. And the gift of life meant I owed her everything she could demand of me, any sacrifice, my family, my job, my very self.

The manipulation-through-guilt was always hardest to take. I had spent most of my life, even as a tiny child, believing that her fate was somehow in my hands, and that any unhappiness, or dissatisfaction, or mere discomfort was somehow about me: my fault. If only I could do just the right thing I could fix it. I alone could keep her from falling into the subway’s path. I alone could keep her from loneliness late at night when her work was done. So, as an adult, I had to live day to day knowing that she was miserable beyond my own conception of misery, and that there was nothing I could do about it. The darkness in her mind made a reality that was almost too much for me to think about. Years of therapy eased me to the brink of understanding that I could not protect her, and harder yet to believe, that I never could. I certainly could not keep her alive when half the time I had no idea where she was. And besides, she was consumed by madness, totally lost in her own irrational maze, cluttered, it seemed, with doors she could slam, but absolutely no exits. As a grown daughter, uncertainty and helplessness defined my role. However, I believed I was prepared, at least, for news of her death.

The five years that she was back in my world, living peacefully and safely, medicated and fairly stable, were so much better. I had her back, at least a version of her. She was not really identifiable as the mother of my childhood, though. The spark and the laughter were gone. The need was huge. Her fears had abated to simmer just below the surface. We could “chat,” and stroll through Wal-Mart shopping for blouses and selecting underwear with an invisible panty-line. Each time I picked her up to go have coffee, or stop at CVS for moisturizer, she always made a point of asking about my husband and the children. Because she had missed 20 years of news, I spent some time filling her in about the state of the world. She had missed the presidencies of Bush Sr. and Clinton. She did not recall ever hearing the term “gay rights,” nor did she realize the rainforest was at risk. She asked innocent, childlike questions. She thought Republicans still stood for small government. The state of things confused her. Our roles had fully reversed. I worried about her living situation, and worked to develop a rapport with the staffs at the two assisted living facilities where she lived during that time.

Meanwhile, I ached to actually look forward to our visits. I wanted desperately to love our time together, but the time was painful, a chore, a fact which in turn haunted me with guilt. She demanded much, and gave little in return. Unlike a child, whose delight in life fills your heart even as you do and do and do for them, my mother’s primary emotion was dissatisfaction, seconded only by deep sorrow. She mourned things she knew she’d lost and even things she could not remember ever having. All she knew was that her life was empty. I felt the terrible burden of being the only thing to fill it.

At this point, my preparedness for her death waned. I became sure that she’d outlive people decades her senior. Her mind was unstable, but her body, as always, was strong. And now that she was housed, fed, saw the doctor, what would stand in the way of the tremendous longevity I imagined? The weeks and months and years passed. My life was full and busy and rich; my children grew, my job fulfilled me, my husband loved me and completed the circle of our family. On the edges, never quite knowing how to be included, was my mother, who really wanted only me. The sight of me pricked her longing for the way things used to be. She saw in me her only hope of recapturing the past, her glorious past when she was beautiful, strong, lucid, admired, and had a trophy daughter worthy of her. The life I now lived, as mommy, wife and schoolteacher, did not fit her dream vision. She tried to care about it, but couldn’t really. She dutifully asked about the children. She enjoyed hearing tales of their brilliance and accomplishments, because she could be reminded of when I was a brilliant and accomplished child. But always it was me, and only me, that she wanted. For my part, I was willing, glad really, to tether her to life, be her tie to any shred of happiness or pleasure. I imagined this role carrying me into my sixties, long after my children left home and into a time when I could give her more of myself, as she aged.

But all that changed. Despite a move from a brief but unpleasant assisted living situation to a warm and supportive nursing home in Great Barrington, she sank deeper into depression. At that point, even I was hard pressed to provide her with so much as a glimmer of pleasure. Enjoyment of any kind was out of her reach. She was withdrawing further and further into a death in life, as she spent every minute of every day lying in a dark room on her bed, her cardigan pulled up over her shoulders. Her dignity, you see, never faded. She would not allow herself to languish in her nightgown, under the covers all day. She got up, dressed, combed her hair, and lay back down on top of the made bed to doze her life away in the cradle of deep depression. And then she got sick.

Her hospitalization and emergency surgery just after Christmas brought her quickly to the brink of death. Post-surgical pneumonia prompted the doctors to call me at work to ask for a suspension of her DNR order. They believed that she could come through this infection with treatment. What do you want to do? If we don’t intubate, she will die. Soon.

I wasn’t ready. I was pretty sure she wasn’t ready. She and I had spoken several years before, when she prepared her living will. She did not want a life on machines, but this was different. She could come through this. And I still did not know the results of the lab tests on the mass removed from her colon. We had no real diagnosis. I stood in the hallway outside my classroom, the phone cord stretched taut, and cried to the doctors: “Am I condemning her or saving her? Can she live?” I suspended the DNR and rushed to Pittsfield to see her.

There she lay in the ICU, a frail, pale woman breathing on a machine, an innocent Darth Vader, with air pumped in and out on a timer. She was, essentially, not there. She could barely register my existence. If this was going to be goodbye, it sucked. There it was again. The guilt. It was at this point that the surgeon finally told me the lab results: cancer. The massive tumor he had removed from her colon was as malignant as they come. If she lived through this pneumonia, what would she face? Another kind of death, this one slow and painful? But would we both be ready then?

Three days in the ICU on penicillin and her pneumonia was cured. She was healing amazingly well from the abdominal surgery. She got out of the ICU and within three hours was making me laugh. Who was this woman? She was drugged and in pain, exhausted and confused, so her witty comeback to a comment I made to the nurse stunned me. Not to mention the fact that she had neither laughed at my amusing comments nor made any of her own for about twenty years.

Back at the nursing home, she was a woman reborn. Though fragile and thin, with no appetite for food, suddenly my mother found her appetite for life and experience. She sat up in bed and eagerly visited when I came. She began to tell stories of her childhood, and share memories of mine. My children came to see her and it was as if they were meeting their grandmother for the first time. My daughter, Maggie, listened to stories of the horses on the Bauman farm, and tales of the retired polo pony, Johnny-Boy. She was delighted with this new grandmother with horsey stories to tell. As we left the room at the end of that first post-near-death visit, Maggie took my hand and said, “Mommy, she’s nice.”

I had a mother. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten her, but there she was. She had complete amnesia about all the years of hardship, vitriol, anger, anguish, sorrow and emptiness. Her forgetfulness sparked in me an ability to live only in the present, with this woman who was my mother, and memories of a mother I once had, and to forget the madwoman who haunted so much of my adult life. This mother did not make impossible demands. My desire to do whatever I could for her increased with every passing day.

Months before her death, she came out of a decades long battle with paranoia and delusion and just “was.”

Somehow, I recognized this woman. Once luscious and full breasted, she had become skeletally frail. On the once beautiful face, her gaunt smile had become a rictus. Her touch on my skin was cold. But still, she was familiar. I felt like a daughter again. And I remembered something. I loved her. Even though I’d been saying the words to her for years, they had always made me sad, because I could not feel that they were true. Last year, as I watched my mother’s rebirth and death, my love for her tapped me on the shoulder and said, I’m still here, you know. That love, it must have been standing in my blind spot for a time.

I had about a month before she began the active process of dying. Although she could not fathom it, her days were numbered. I thought: I am not ready, but I can be. I believed that I only needed some time. Time with her. Time to part. To help her leave. To forgive her. To forgive myself. To love us both enough to say goodbye.

Take it from me. We’re never ready. But the parting is still important. I crammed twenty years of togetherness into a 12 day bedside vigil. I never tired. Never chafed. I could not bring myself to leave her side. Every tender massage of her feet or hands was an opportunity for me. Every offer of a sip of juice was a way of loving her. The music I played for her, well, it made me feel better anyway.

My world shrank to a fifteen square foot space. Once again, as we had for the first twelve years of my life, we shared a room. Two twin beds, mother and daughter.

My few childhood memories of my mother as a nurturer are from when I was sick, my skin hot, my throat sore. Even though she had to go to work during the day, when she came home she sat beside me and laid her hand, cool from the winter air outside, on my face. This time, in her last days, it was my hand on her brow. My soothing talk, her restless sleep. My bustling, her gratitude.

I lived every day of that last week in a state of awe. Every sense was tuned. When we bathed her body, childlike in its state of advanced starvation, its beauty made me cry. Her skin, like silk flowers, encased her once strong bones. Her face, smooth-skinned even at seventy-five, could occupy my eyes for hours. Much of the time I sat and read, or graded papers, or recited memories. Many hours passed without my being aware of what had transpired.

I watched her watching the guest who spent those final days in the room with us, invisible to all but my mother. She stared fixedly at a spot beyond me, murmured, “I need more time,” and yet reached out her arms. She kept a vigil just as I did. She seemed never to sleep. At other times, she watched me intently. We exchanged gazes.

Though she did not have enough fluid with which to make tears, I soaked the pillow by her head as I lay my face beside hers and grieved. In those last days, my mother gave me the gift of her mothering. Although she was busy strong-arming death to gain another hour or day of life, she found the wherewithal to wrap her bony arm around me as I cried on the pillow, to stroke my hair, to gentle me towards her eventual, regrettable leaving.

I yearned to crawl into the bed with her and wrap her up with my body, hold her and ease her way, but I couldn’t. She was so aching and sore in the last days that she could not tolerate any touch but the brush of my lips on her brow, or my open palm cushioning her hand.

She lived seven days past the day the nurses said she could not possibly make it another twenty-four hours. During those timeless days, I forgave her and asked for her forgiveness. I told her I would write about her. I told her I loved her. I said, “Give my love to Aunt Thelma and Uncle Mike.” I told her she could go. I told her she had to let herself go. I said, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll see you again.”

She waited till my husband Dan could be with me before she took her last breath. She had teased me, though, into believing that though she was dying, she would never really die. I was in the bathroom, washing up, when Dan called out, “Vanessa, I think this is it.” I rushed to her bed. She was staring, wide eyed, right at me. The quiet in the room was deafening. The strained sound of her breathing, the accompaniment to my days and nights, was agonizingly, horribly silenced. After weeks of watching her inch her way out the door of life, when the door finally closed behind her, I was left absolutely stunned and bereft. “Is this really the way it is? Is she gone?” I wailed. Her leaving was so permanent; a trapdoor opened in my chest. But: she was still there with me. I could feel her beside me, around me, waiting for my last goodbye.

At last I could crawl under the covers with her, wrap her in my arms and hold that body one last time. The one that gave me life. I owed that to myself.

Publicity shot from when my mother had a TV show out in California, mid-1950s before I was a gleam in her eye.

I Know What I Want, Don’t I?

Posted on March 16, 2014 by spiralwoman

Have you ever noticed how kids are fine with saying, “I don’t want to.” If they don’t want to eat tilapia, play Clue, go to bed, sit on grandma’s lap… whatever it is, they will be honest. They may love tilapia and Clue might be their favorite game. They adore grandma and love their bedtime rituals, but they accept themselves as they are at this moment. They are also okay with telling the truth if they are not so crazy about grandma.

There need to be rules, for sure. The honesty of children does not have to be squelched in order to teach them how to be polite, and maybe keep the brutal truth to themselves, especially if it involves crushing someone’s soul. (Like grandma’s if she finds out little Sally thinks she is mean or smells bad.)

But the beauty of kids, when allowed to be themselves, is that they can change their minds, have moods, succumb to whims. What I especially admire is that they know what they want, recognize their moods, and are okay with operating on a whim.

Even as a kid, I wasn’t like that. I knew early on that I had to toe the line to be fully accepted by the people I should not have had to audition for… over and over again. I don’t remember a time when I “did what I wanted” without having to ask for permission. What was more likely—I would suppress what I wanted so completely that I convinced myself that whatever it was I ended up doing was what I wanted, even though it was actually what my mother wanted. If that makes sense. Anyway, it was a clever psychological trick my brain played on me but it protected me from feeling eternally unfulfilled, squelched, diminished, unseen, imprisoned.

I grew to adulthood having no fucking clue what I wanted. I couldn’t pick out clothes because I did not know what I liked. I only knew what my mom liked. I longed for love but had no idea how it was supposed to feel to be seen and loved for who I was rather than trying to be whatever everyone wanted. The only thing I knew for sure was that I loved to write, and that I wanted to get away from home.

This trick my brain learned at such a young age has gotten me into trouble. With myself, that is. I now second guess so many of my choices through life wondering… did I do that for me, or…? Example: I lived for 25 years in a town, in a part of the world where I had no particular desire to live. Could I see the practical benefit of it? That it would be easy, and affordable, to raise children there? Sure. And my husband REALLY WANTED to live there. In fact, New York City where I had grown up and where I always thought I’d return, was an absolute incontrovertible NO for him. He knew what he wanted and didn’t want. That alone was impressive to me. He felt so strongly about it, so … why not? I had a feeling it was not going to make me happy, but “it’s so practical, and he wants to so badly….” I convinced myself I wanted it too.

Maybe that was okay in that instance. We make sacrifices and choices to remain in relationships and to live within our means. And truth be told, it’s a gorgeous place and I have had countless positive outcomes from that choice. But the point is, I did not know what I wanted, and I did not know what I did not want. Not really. Or maybe I did, but I had no idea how to get what I wanted. I did not know what every 3 year old knows: how to say, “I don’t want to.” Or: “No, I won’t do that.”

How many men did I succumb to along the way because I did not realize I was allowed to say that? When I said “yes” to the first marriage proposal I ever got I did not know there were options. I mean, I would have said yes anyway, but if there was a thought in my head it was more, “I don’t want to let him down,” than it was, “I should think about this and be sure it’s what I want.”

Now my kids are basically grown. My son is a grown man who comes home rarely, due to a busy work schedule and the fact that he is in a band that has frequent gigs in and around Vermont where he lives. My daughter is in college, but not for much longer, and then the short summer visits to her childhood home will become shorter and less frequent, no matter how much I don’t want to think about it. My fledglings have fledged and now it’s my turn to become a full-fledged empty nester.

It dawns on me, gradually, that I can do whatever I want. I mean, on any given day, assuming I show up at work and pay my bills, I can do… whatever I want. I have, over the years, worked hard to become myself fully and to know what I believe in, what I love, what I don’t love. My gut knows what I want and I am getting better at making my head shut up so I can follow my gut.

I like making other people happy but I am finding out what it means to make myself happy. Some of the choices I’ve made have backfired and hurt me. But they were mine, and I did what I chose. I may come off like a toddler sometimes as I try to figure out the balance between “I don’t want to” and kindness, but I’m giving it my best shot.

Apologies are Sexy

Posted on February 1, 2014 by spiralwoman

Apologies are sexy. They are capable of melting hearts, defenses, sadness, and feelings of neglect or not being appreciated. They show strength of character, and that is always sexy, isn’t it?

As one who has spent far too much of my life trying to “be good” – if not perfect, I of all people know it is completely impossible to be good all the time. Don’t even talk to me about perfection. I’m in favor of doing everything in my power to enhance the quality of life for those I love (though not at my own expense, I have come to understand). I love to deliver a well-timed cup of tea or make a special shopping list of everyone’s favorite foods for when the gang’s home at the holidays. I relish being met at the front door by helpful volunteers when I’ve brought home the bacon in the form of 5 bulging bags of groceries and 6 glass jugs of spring water. Remembering to leave the porch light on for after-dark travelers is a special favorite of mine, and am so grateful when the favor is returned.

But we do forget. Our best intentions, when life happens or a day is particularly sucky, do not always translate into actions. That’s when a delicious “I’m sorry, honey” can just smooth out the bumps ever so nicely. “I’m sorry I made you late for your appointment.” Or, “Shit, I forgot to replace the toilet paper, didn’t I? I’m so sorry!” Or, “I know you had a stressful day. I’m sorry I was late picking you up. I’ll make it up to you with a nice backrub.”

Wait, no. I’m going too far. Honestly, the apology is enough. No backrubs necessary. An apology all by itself shows understanding and a basic desire to make amends, for no matter how small an oversight. Somehow, the absence of an apology often feels like a defensively stubborn insistence that nothing’s wrong. It’s all about acknowledgment, isn’t it?

An apology not only acknowledges a faux pas on the part of the sorry-sayer, it also acknowledges the other person. The gal who peed only to realize there was not a square of toilet paper to be found. The guy who is exhausted and counted on a timely pick up. Just being seen and understood, after the fact, is enough to erase whatever the “thing” was.

When I see you and care about you, I notice you. I can’t unnotice you. If I have seen you, I am more likely to remember how you take your coffee, and that you like the shoes left by the door. I am also more likely to apologize if I forget and tromp mud into your kitchen. Sincerely, not grudgingly.

We remind our children to “say sorry” and often have to add… “like you mean it.” Sorry is all too meaningless when it is insincere. Sorry is oh-so-meaningful when it is real, and yes, it’s sexy.

Confident people apologize. They have nothing to prove, so “I’m sorry” is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. This is not hard for a confident person who cares about you to understand: “Even though I fucked up, I know I’m not a fuck-up. I’m not perfect but I love you and feel bad that I forgot to bring you a latte from Starbucks.”

Obviously, apologies are not just for the memory lapses, careless moments, and blind spots of life. They do a world of good when true hurt has been done. Though actions are always more powerful than words, words have weight. “I’m so so so so sorry” while holding hands, hugging, or gazing sincerely into someone’s eyes is a good starting place for mending even an agonizing heart-breach or harmful betrayal.

Maybe the only bad apology, aside from the grudging little-kid kind, is the knee jerk apology. You casually bump into someone on the way to the kitchen, “I’m sorry!” You forget the forks when you set the table, “I’m sorry,” as you go get the forks. I mean, getting the forks is better than, and makes unnecessary, a meaningless apology. The food you just made for dinner burns someone’s mouth. Don’t apologize. You just made dinner. Of course it’s hot. Someone didn’t wait for it to cool down. Other than that, you can’t go wrong with a heartfelt apology, especially to the people you love, who want to know that you are paying attention.

Love Story, released in 1970, is remembered for one line, spoken at the end of the film by Ryan O’Neal: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” As a generation of movie goers sobbed its way through that movie, a terrible disservice was being done to all those people and their descendants. It got people off on the wrong track. Contrary to the hokey line of dialogue O’Neal had to deliver to tear-stained audiences everywhere, love means you are totally cool with saying “sorry.”

Cheesecloth vs. Ziploc: the Ways We Process

Posted on January 25, 2014 by spiralwoman

Have you ever known someone who can spiral down into a very dark, hopeless place… and fast? This phenomenon has its own relentless sense of inevitability, though it has never struck me as inevitable, really.

Things go wrong. My friend, driving to Vermont, got stopped three times for the same dead taillight. Maddening. He was exhausted. Got started later than he had planned. Had to wake up earlier than he’d wanted, to meet my son and help him schlep a futon into a tiny hatchback before driving another hour to Stowe to ski all day. As he lay down in the hotel bed, beyond miserable, he said, “I know I won’t be able to sleep.” Forty-five minutes of tossing later: “I’m fucked.” He gets to the point where the whole weekend is going to be ruined and he’s going to be miserable for all of it.

He does this. It’s awful for him, but it is his way. “Looking on the bright side” doesn’t work for him. Realizing that he gets to ski all day at an awesome mountain is not going to jolly him out of knowing everything’s horrible. Not now, anyway. For him, and probably plenty of others, this is about having authentic feelings. But there is more than one way to feel things authentically.

I realize that I sometimes lay on the bright side too thickly. Maybe in reaction to people who dwell in the dark side. But if a little bit of optimism isn’t going to work, a lot is not going to work either. It’s just going to piss people off and lead me down the path of denial.

I had to realize it is not my job to jolly someone out of a dark place. And that I have to protect myself from the darkness entering me, while remaining empathetic, kind, and helpful. To a point. On the other hand, I usually can allow my own authentic feelings, the ups and downs of life, to come for awhile, and then pass through me.

But what about the really dark places – the genuinely bad moments/days/months… even years of life when grief, fear, spiritual and emotional anguish, are unavoidable and obdurate.

I mean, feelings are unavoidable. No one can or should deny a feeling. But as I thought about all this in the middle of the night last night (typically) an analogy popped into my mind that works for me. People operate, I decided, either like a cheesecloth or like a Ziploc bag. The feelings come, as they must. The frustration at being exhausted, overworked, and persecuted by the state police for a measly taillight. The incipient rage at a machine that is malfunctioning. (Is the computer ruining your life? Is it out to get you? Is it going to cost you the promotion because it has “lost” your report? Or is it a damned machine that malfunctions and you have to just get mad and move the hell on?)

If you have a fair amount of cheesecloth in your makeup, the feelings come, and they pass through you. Some feelings are thin and watery and pass quickly. Others are thick and full of particles and it takes time, so we need to be patient. And forgiving.

If you are more of a Ziploc type of person, the emotions flow into you and sit. They pile up and get sealed off. They can fester and even rot if you don’t remember or figure out how to unzip and pour that shit out.

With cheesecloth, you can probably look at a situation and say to yourself, “Wow, this situation is fucked.” With Ziploc, you are more likely to say, “I’m fucked. You’re fucked. Everything is fucked.” Because you can’t move through the emotions or let them move through you.

A year ao, I was in the middle of a very dark time. It was a time of shifting so profound that new continents were being formed by my tectonic plates. Grief, fear, and depression sum up the basic categories my emotions fell into. Some days it was hard to remember feeling different and for an extended period of time my condition had all the earmarks of a permanent state. But I knew, somehow, in the last flickering, threadbare tag of non-fucked me left inside somewhere, that it was not permanent. I told myself, every day, what I needed to hear. I comforted myself with reminders. I am a good person. I am worthy. I will feel joy again. I will feel love again. I will be okay. I will move through this. I did not have to tell myself it would not be easy or that it might take awhile. I already knew that, big time. The cheesecloth had a shit-ton of stuff to process, but it was processing.

At a time like that, a cheesecloth person and a Ziploc person look very similar. When life’s challenges add up to more than just a bad day or a sad week, they both bend under the strain. A Ziploc person, probably honorable and forthright, wants to accept the horribleness head on, and maybe feels that taking steps to see past it is a kind of denial. I don’t think it is. I don’t buy into the mindset that accepting horribleness is enough.

So what does someone who aspires to cheesecloth do? Accept—that is for sure. Don’t deny – that is the opposite of cheesecloth. Denial is like letting life run off a drop cloth and never touch you.

Accept and let go—that’s good, but for me, there’s more. Accept, and tell yourself what you need to hear so you can let go and feel the nearness of love and joy once again. What do you need to hear from yourself? What you would tell your own shattered child: “It’s going to be okay. I know it will. You’ll get there. I love you and am here for you.”

New Year’s Revolution

Posted on December 31, 2013 by spiralwoman

I’m digging the double entendre inherent in the title of this blog. The year, like the planetary movements that ultimately control the way we measure and understand time, revolves from one December 31^st to the next. A revolution. Another kind of revolution is contained in our ability to reinvent ourselves on New Year’s Day. We make resolutions that might revolutionize… us.

Living in the northeast allows me to feel with tremendous immediacy the pattern of the revolving year. Slick, grayly invisible ice appearing on driveways and roadways in January is familiar because I’ve seen it again and again, on the roadways of my life. Furred infant leaves appearing overnight on the branches of early spring put me in mind of past springs, and the feelings that come with all that rebirthing. The purple sunset on a humid summer’s evening fills me to the brim with familiar wonder, and the warm spectrum of an autumn afternoon when sideways sunshine explodes a hillside with color is as part of my internal rhythms as menses, or sleep.

Circles, and spirals for that matter, are nature’s way of returning to the beginning as we continue on the path to the future. These shapes symbolize unity, wholeness, and infinity. Don’t you love that? If something is whole it is complete, but a circle (or spiral) can be complete and yet still go on and on into infinity, in eternal revolution.

I want to think of this new year, 2014, as a revolution.

I want to return, as always, to my core self, looking inward to the center of my own personal spiral and stay true to that me.
I want to continue rolling forward on the path of change and growth that has accelerated for me over the last decade and really sped the hell up over the last couple of years. (I just this minute realized that the word “revolve” contains the word “evolve.” Wow. That is so perfect.)
I want to do some things so differently that they become as new as they are old. Like how to see myself. How to have a fight. How to be and stay attached to a life partner.
I want to revolutionize my self-image at this midpoint+ of my life and finally actually realize how beautiful and amazing I am, so that it does not feel stupid and weird to write those words.

I guess I’m a New Year’s Revolutionary.

Intention

Posted on December 27, 2013 by spiralwoman

I used to teach my 6^th graders about the 8-fold path of the Buddha when we were investigating Eastern religions. Together, we practiced meditation, and discussed profound precepts such as Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Intention. I wonder if you would predict how these privileged, well-educated (up till this point) children reacted to such lessons?

Well, not only did they instinctively grasp the concepts, they eagerly embraced the practices, at least to the extent that they gladly meditated before tests, after recess, before performances, and closely monitored themselves and each other in the pursuit of the 8-fold path… as they understood it. Even they grasped what Buddha reassured us of – that no one is perfect and that we can only try our hardest. Being exposed to these ideas, even on a rather rudimentary level, it was as if they suddenly had a new lens with which to view the world of middle school. If a classmate said, “I’m so stupid,” 6 voices would chime in: “RIGHT SPEECH!” Why is that important, I would ask? Someone would explain, “Say what is true. You are not stupid, you are smart.” Or: “Your words have a lot of power, you know.”

What about intentions? How do we know if we are living in positive, healthy intention? What if our “best intentions” come to nothing? Is that possible if we are “doing it right?” I had a student tell me once, “As long as everyone truly intends what is good and what comes out of love, how can they really hurt anyone?” I believe that is true, oh wise 11 year old. If my intention for myself (I can’t actually have an intention for anyone else – and trying to is just about control or manipulation, isn’t it?) aligns with my true values and comes from a place of love (including self-love), I will be in a good place. In the words of Phillip Moffitt, my happiness “will come from the strength of my internal experience of intention.”

A client of mine recently sent me an awesome article by the guy I quoted in the last paragraph — Phillip Moffitt — the founder of the Life Balance Institute. I’d never heard of Phillip Moffitt before, but I’d heard and/or absorbed and/or been exposed to the concepts he explores in his piece – about the difference between intentions and goals. He said what my student said, only not quite as well: “You set your intentions based on understanding what matters most to you and make a commitment to align your worldly actions with your inner values.”

So yeah. Whether I’m throwing the Tarot or blowing intentions into sticks to burn in a ritual fire, or simply lying in bed focusing on a way of being in this moment and the next and the next, somewhere along the line I became a person aware, at least on an intellectual level, of the value of setting intentions, and how doing so helps create my desired reality (both inner and outer). Easy? No. A valuable exercise? Yup.

Maybe kids, unadulterated and pure, understand instinctively that living inside intention is a “practice that is focused on how you are ‘being’ in the present moment” and that when you do, “your attention is on the ever-present ‘now’ in the constantly changing flow of life” (Moffitt again). Children are all about the “now” and no one can be in the flow like they can.

I want to live by “right intention” and I want to live with abandon, joy, and love. (I’m not at all ambitious.) So one thing I started trying to do a few years ago is this: I look into the eyes of everyone I meet, even if briefly in a check-out line. As a native New Yorker this is something I had to teach myself, for sure, having been taught that avoiding eye contact preserves a stranger’s privacy. Screw that! The results of this exercise are inevitably incredible. People can open like flowers or shut down like vaults when faced with a stranger’s open, seeing eyes. But I do try to see each person as a person. I think about the lives that stretch out behind all these people whose paths cross mine. It is not that hard to love them—on some level—and have compassion for them, their unknown plights, their unrevealed gifts. If I can look at everyone and myself with this kind of intention and love, every day, I will be a little closer to something meaningful.

My Body Tells Me So

Posted on December 20, 2013 by spiralwoman

A few weeks ago my internal soul rhythms, for lack of a better term, grew distinctly unrhythmic. Swallowed unexpectedly by inexplicable sadness at work, or in my car navigating a holiday parking lot, or proofreading a document for the 432^nd time. Not inherently sorrowful activities.

I would awaken out of an ordinary moment to the heavy darkness rising inside my chest. That feeling in my throat –tight, achy, and swollen with unuttered sound. Hot tears threatening. What the hell?

On some level, not being a complete moron, I realized it had something to do with the holidays. Holidays I truly love and holidays I am beyond excited about because this year, unlike last, I will (for one thing) have my children with me. And I have (for another thing) a sense of what the future can be, maybe, if I will make it so. That (for another thing) there is a future for me. And so much more than that.

It’s not what is, but what was. It’s not where I am, it’s where I was. The anniversary came upon me unbidden, and caught me by surprise in an unguarded moment. Repeatedly.

Every moment of our lives is an anniversary of something, if you look at it a certain way. I mean, ten years ago this minute I was doing something. If I was driving my kids to get their hair cut, then this is the anniversary of my doing that. If I was chopping carrots, this moment is a carrot anniversary. An absurd notion. An anniversary, by definition, “a date that is observed on an annual basis because it is the same date as an important event in a past year.”

Emotionally, anniversaries of happy events feel good. We honor them, at least take note of them. They involve, at the very least, a smile, a toast, a special piece of pie. At best, maybe a cruise around the Greek islands, if you’re lucky, or a nice dinner out. However, we often forget anniversaries until they are upon us. It’s not that we don’t care about them, but they don’t intrude into our consciousness. They are rarely pushy and demanding. Some people even forget anniversaries altogether. That’s why Hallmark makes so many versions of the “belated” card.

Then why is it that our bodies are capable of such treacherous, overwhelming reactions – entirely outside what is in our consciousness – to the return of seasons that mark traumatic events from the past? Talk about pushy and demanding. Those nasty anniversaries will have their way.

Such memory lives in the body, not the mind where we think memory hangs out.

Of course I had “thought” about what a different place I’m in this year than last. Last year: the explosion of what I thought my life was, the immolation of the love I thought would comfort me till life’s end, the realization that I had screwed up badly, misjudged horribly, and neglected to take care of myself. The essential realization that I was utterly alone, unfriended, and far from home on Christmas. Total bottoming out. I spent Christmas Day packing boxes. The movers came the next day and by end of week I was flying out of Louisiana and back to the frozen north where I hoped warmth awaited me.

Despite the life-threatening pain I felt, I still could not empathize with my own predicament, choosing instead to rail against myself for getting into this mess in the first place. The one person who deserved my love and support—me – wasn’t getting it. But for right now, that stuff’s not important. The point is, sure, I “thought about it.” As this recent Thanksgiving approached, I did a mental inventory of the last year. As Thanksgiving receded, I was still, in my head, “thinking about it.” Categorized, filed, compartmentalized conveniently somewhere where I could pull it out if I wanted to. But why would I want to? Best to keep it tucked away. At least till the holidays were over.

Yeah, but as I’ve established, that’s not how that kind of memory works. Unprocessed shit, and all the terror and/or sadness it has attached to it, has a way of residing in the lining of the stomach, the muscles of the bowels, the tissue of the solar plexus, the highways and byways of the circulatory system. Since my inner organs don’t have a calendar or a clock, I can only assume that, using the circadian rhythms inherent in all life, my own body said, “Hey, it’s that time again!”

BAM.

My goal is to become whole enough… holistic enough, that different “parts” of me can’t sucker punch other “parts” of me on a whim. Not long after my second or third crying jag, I took out my journal and lifted the sluice gate. The process began to flow, or rather gush. There’s no end in sight at least for now, so it’ll take time, and in case you were worried, I am giving it the time it deserves. I promise. And it’s not like I didn’t do ANY processing during the preceding year. For a long time after fleeing (everything), the process was about emotional and psychic survival, full stop. Gradually it became about so much more. Some rooting out. Some letting in. Some getting help. Some wallowing in aloneness. Etc.

But it ain’t over, is it? My body tells me so.

Doohickey and Other Forms of Intelli-talk

Posted on September 27, 2013 by spiralwoman

There’s a scene in When Harry Met Sally, I’m pretty sure, where Harry and Sally are on the phone planning to meet. They’re in a hurry and one of them says something along the lines of: “So let’s meet at the place near that thing,” and the other is like, “Yeah okay, bye.” They know. The whole point is that their intimacy is such that they “get” what each other means even when what is spoken is entirely devoid of content.

When I was growing up, my step-mother used words like “majigger” to indicate the particular thingamabob she wanted me to fetch from the place upstairs where it was usually kept. I usually knew what she meant, which led me to understand on a very fundamental level that, in families, at least, specificity is not necessary when haste, distraction and intimacy all come together to make the need for words obsolete. At least temporarily.

“Can you bring me the thingamabob from the closet when you come back?” – called to a family member getting up for a snack.

“Where is that damned whosiewhatist I got last summer at that place? Remember? Where the hell did I put it?” – angrily muttered to anyone within earshot while tearing the house apart.

“Did you get the stuff like you said?” –asked when a husband/wife/mother/sibling/child walks in the door after doing errands.

All of these seem obvious and clear in the moment.

I have always had a little bit of a delay when it comes to recalling nouns in particular. I found out not too many years ago that the human brain stores words of different parts of speech in different sections of the brain. That blew my mind. I mean, why wouldn’t words all hang out in the same place, neatly alphabetized in little file boxes? Why would we keep adjectives in one corner and nouns in another, with adverbs and pronouns, verbs and conjunctions all squirreled away in their own little hidey holes? But it makes me think maybe I have a little problem in the noun-storage space in this brain of mine. I usually think of it, but have been known to make random replacements, such as asking someone to get the milk out of the telephone or put the gloves away in the fridge or answer the doorknob when it rings. But in any case, the convenience of doohickey, majigger, thingamabob and whatchamacallit has not gone unnoticed in my daily life.

And I’m a word person, in the end. I love words. I teach words. I write words and read words and have a close, romantic relationship with them. I do love the convenience of intelli-talk and also…there is nothing sexier than when you say: “Do you remember that thing we saw at the place when we were doing that thing and then the guy showed us the whatchamacallit that you bought for me and I cried?” and your significant other answers, “Oh yes, honey. How could I forget that?”

The Genius of Community

Posted on September 22, 2013 by spiralwoman

In Walter Isaacson’s book Einstein: His Life and Universe it’s not clear to me which part of the mind-blowing story of Albert Einstein is the most mind blowing. I know how difficult it is to rethink my own inner universe, throw out entrenched ideas and preconceptions and false realities in order to usher in something closer to the truth, knowing all the time that the truth may elude me until I die, and maybe even beyond that. And that’s just one middle class, middle aged white woman. So how did Einstein have the chutzpah, brainpower and vision to do all that for the ACTUAL universe? He didn’t just blow his own mind, he blew everybody’s minds. And with a few exceptions, people loved him for it.

But as fun as it would be to draw analogies straight down the line between Einstein’s breakthroughs in theoretical physics and the path to understanding one’s self, it would be forced and silly and not that revealing.

But there is something about his process that keeps coming back to me. Einstein was a loner in many ways, in that he worked for large stretches of time in solitude, doing thought experiments and re-seeing everything from atoms to distant stars in a totally unique way. But he always came out of his genius cave to interact with others. He had genius friends –tons of them—who could pretty much keep up with him when he’d run his cool ideas past them. They’d sit around, or ride the trolleys, or write letters, discussing and debating and sharing. A lot of the time, when Einstein did that, he came up with even better ideas about his ideas. He understood something in a new way or figured out what the roadblock was that had been pestering him. He had lots of “aha” moments when he was by himself, but it seems pretty clear that he had lots of “aha” moments when he was in profound communication and dialogue with other people. I don’t think he would have gone as far, realized as much, redirected our understanding of the universe as completely, had he kept to himself.

I find this fact comforting and validating and not at all surprising. I guess I could have assumed that someone of Einstein’s capabilities might not need a sounding board the way normal (non-scary-genius) people do. But I would have been wrong, as it turned out. He did need it, and so do we.

As both a former student and educator, I always got such a kick out of the way the sparks fly in a classroom where people are talking. A lively dialogue will take everyone to that “new place” in their learning far faster, and more thoroughly, than reading, listening or memorizing will. Even Einstein would admit that reading, listening and even some pesky memorizing are all important pieces too, but those things do not a mind create. Without playing mental catch with someone, it’s just not the same.

My son learned a lot about pitching from throwing a rubber ball at the chimney outside, on which he drew a square out of chalk. He’d go out there all by himself and throw it and throw it and throw it till his accuracy was incredible. But what made him a damned good baseball player was … yeah, you get the picture. Playing baseball. With other people.

Community is so irreplaceable and joyful. A bunch of people sitting around a table drinking wine and discussing politics. Close friends exploring spiritual beliefs gathered together under a full moon on a summer’s night. Parents with their children having dinner together and letting the topics of life unfold among them. Kids leaning forward at their desks as they listen and wait their turn to share an insight or epiphany, and then as they sit there, someone else says something and inside their head, everything gets notched up another level. The hand that was raised suddenly reaches five inches higher and the look of ecstatic awareness on the face of that student is unmatchable. An idea looks like pure joy on the face of someone in the process of thinking. Or learning. Which go together, don’t they?

I get nervous about distance learning, and on-line courses, and the ways education is adjusting to trends, financial reality and the needs of the consumer. The community of the classroom is such a big thing to lose. The very fact that we don’t live within a few blocks of our extended families, to share and pass down the wisdom of the generations that way, as people used to do, saddens me. Where was the red tent when I needed it? When I think of all that I had to reinvent and figure out for myself about being a woman, being a wife, being a mother, taking care of myself, seeking fulfillment, and juggling the things we all juggle, it’s a shame. Will my wisdom be lost among the interstates and computer wires that have replaced, in many ways, the connective tissue of community?

Being connected to other people is one of the best things about being a person and that connection gives me a chance to tap into my genius self. I learn so much about life through the example and sharing of others, and about myself by bouncing me off of people and letting them bounce themselves off of me. We need time to ferment in solitude and a chance to bounce and share. There are times in our lives when we have less time to ourselves, and other times when we have fewer chances to connect with others. It’s a balancing act. Einstein had to figure it out. We all do.

spiralwoman

One woman trying to pull all the pieces together.

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