Barnmaven

These old walls

This weekend will mark my 6th year in this house.

One more year and I will have lived here as long as I have ever lived in any house, and one more year after that it will be the longest I have lived in any home.

The first house we lived in when I was a kid was a little brick rental on the 125th block of Fremont Avenue.  The houses across the street from us backed up to the power lines which backed up to a large cemetery, where I learned how to fall off my bike while riding downhill.  On my birthday.  I also got a Chrissy doll that birthday, the doll with the hair that "grew" by pulling it out of the top of her head.  I remember sitting at the kitchen table holding my new doll between my knees, pulling her hair out and pressing the button to wind it back inside the hole on the top of her head with one hand and holding a washcloth full of ice against the road rash on my lips and chin with the other.

We had a mix of families with school-age children and older couples in the neighborhood.  My brother Ken hung out with Chris and Jay and I played with Kirsten and Jay's little brother Rich until Kirsten moved away.  Rich and I still played together although sometimes he got tired of me and hung out with the big boys.  I would try to catch up to them when this happened but they were mostly successful in their evasion efforts.  

Right next to us lived the Lawlers, who tended to drink a little too much and got into extremely loud screaming matches with one another.  Often Mr. Lawler would be dispatched to the detached garage where he would sleep in his car. 

One night they were having a particularly contentious argument.  On his way out to the garage Mr. Lawler decided to stand in the back yard and get a few more words in edgewise.  He woke up my Dad, who got up and made his way into our back yard. Mr. Lawler apparently took offense to my father's request for him to shut the hell up and go to sleep.  He started yelling at my Dad, which pissed my Dad off to the point where he finally just hauled off and punched Mr. Lawler.  It was spot-on to the chin and Mr. Lawler dropped like a bag of rocks.  Dad crawled back into bed afraid he'd accidentally committed a homicide.  He whispered to my mom, "If anyone asks, I never left the bed tonight."  

Mr. Lawler did survive the incident, although one summer afternoon while drinking with a buddy of his on his back deck he was overheard saying "...and then the sonofabitch just up and cold-cocked me!"  I guess he wasn't drunk enough to forget.

Not long after that my parents had the chance to buy a much bigger house for not very much money.  It had been standing vacant for several years after the owner died, and her son was eager to unload it.  Vagrants had been using it as a flop, so there was not only a lot of renovation to do but some pretty horrible messes to clean up.  

My Dad did most of the work on his own in his spare time.  At the time it was one of the biggest houses on the street, and it was very old.  It still had a coal bin next to the oil furnace that had replaced its coal-burning predecessor, and a full basement with workshop.  It had a detached garage and another outbuilding that must have been used by a gardener.  It had both a formal living room AND dining room. My brother and I had bedrooms upstairs, both with enormous walk-in closets.  My bedroom had built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.  Those shelves were filled with books and I read almost all of them.

My ceiling was angled with the pitch of the roof and in the back of my closet there was a square piece cut into the wall that you could pull out.  Behind it was empty space, a small corner of the roof and ceiling below that was between my closet and the bathroom wall.  On more than one occasion the thought of that empty void gave me the heebie jeebies.  I remember sitting on my bed and listening to a recording of Dicken's Christmas Carol on my record player.  Right about the time Marley's Ghost was talking to Scrooge and jangling his chains, my Dad called me for dinner and turned all the hallways lights off as a little joke.  It nearly scared the piss out of me.

The property also included a vacant lot next door and behind that a small two-bedroom house which we rented out for a while to a lady and her daughter.  The daughter had been in a car accident and broken her back.  She was in one of those halo contraptions that included four screws into her skull to hold everything stable and had to sleep in a specially designed bed they kept in the living room.  I would go visit from time to time and the sight of those screws going through her skin made my knees feel funny.  

After my Grandpa died my Grandma moved into that house for a little while.  Our dog Queenie stayed with her, and as Grandma was one of those women who showed love through food, Queenie got quite fat.  Even after we left the city and she became a country dog she never was able to retain her former figure.

I've lived in many houses since then, some for even longer than we lived in that big old house, but for some reason it is the home that figures most prominently in my dreams.  Countless times I've dreamed that I lived in it again, or visited it or it appeared in passing in a dream about something entirely different.  Since moving back to Washington I've driven by it a few times but have never managed to find anyone home.  I'd love to see what it looks like now that I'm grown up.  Childhood memories tend to add a size distortion to spaces.   Nothing is nearly as big as I remember.  

My children now have vague recollections of our house in New Jersey.  I wonder sometimes how long we'll stay in our house now, and what their favorite memories will be of it when they are all grown up.

I think this is why I love old houses.  New houses can be anything you want to make of them; old houses retain the memories of all who have lived there before.  Even renovated, the bones of the house still remain.  When we bought this house the doorjamb in the kitchen still had all the marks where the previous owners recorded their son's growth.  I left them as they are and my kids' own growth record is on the opposite side of the same door jamb.  I'm sure someday someone will paint that mess over, but it won't be me.

 

Our real lives

 

I was thinking about my brother the other day.  I wonder sometimes in those last days of his life what thoughts were going through his head, if he was in pain, if he knew he was in trouble.  I wonder if he knew he was teetering on the brink of dying and whether he was OK with that or if he would have wanted more time to change things.  I prefer to cling to the latter notion.

I don't believe he was living the life he envisioned himself having, not by any means. That's the thought that inevitably leads me to the rabbit hole, the endless conundrum of the probability of any one person ever fully achieving self-expression versus the actual necessity of this occuring. 

Bloom where you're planted.  Be happy in the shoes you're in.  Success is the path, not the destination.  I want to believe these things - and in many ways I do believe these things - but I also believe that these are things we are taught to make us feel better about being forced into lives many of us have no viable option of escaping.  We gratify our need for expression and validation by telling ourselves - and asking others to confirm it for us - that we're OK.  

Its a beautiful, terrible thing, the human condition.  The ability of this world we've constructed to continue functioning, like the Matrix, relies on our inability to slow down and think too very hard about these things.  You can't grease the wheels of society if you are busy throwing aside convention to follow your dream or die trying.  It doesn't take too much imagination to believe that there are forces at play in our world that depend on this, on the natural tendency of tired, overwhelmed people to smooth over the wrinkles between reality and their sense of how things ought to be.

Tradition tells you to keep your nose to the grindstone, that life isn't fair and that conformity is essential for the majority.  We can't be all airy-fairily gallivanting off to chase our dreams.  Someone has to stay home and keep the lights on.  And so we make the sacrifices, pluck our dreams apart brick by brick until they are small enough to fit the lives we're living instead of changing our lives to fit our dreams.

And I don't know whether it is right or wrong - or if those words can really be applied - to follow one path or the other.  

Some of us tread the middle, and maybe we're okay with it, even more happy than not about it.  We all know people who are desperate to unhook the yoke and can't - or won't - because they didn't realize their dreams until too late and they don't know how to untangle from the obligations they've created, or they lack the resources to step out of the life they're in to find the one they want.  I would guess that's probably the case for most people.  And I would also guess that many people spend a lot of time trying to convince themselves and everyone else that no, they really are doing just what they want, even if inside them the dreams they once held shrivel up into nothing.

I wonder what Ken's dreams were, the ones he held inside and was never able to nurture into reality.  I wonder where his tipping points were and what he felt about them.  

Do we get a medal for being brave enough to learn to be happy with the life we have even if it isn't the one we wanted?

You know, I don't know what I really wanted to be in life.  Mostly I just wanted to be an adult (and its questionable whether I yet qualify).  I feel that I've spent a lot of my life mostly living in the moment and coping with the results.  Like everyone else I wanted to be famous.  If pushed - very hard - I could tell you that I wanted to sing for a living, but when no one ever came leaping out of the wings to offer to make me the next radio star, I suspected it wasn't really an option.  I always considered my horses to be a hobby, and it wasn't until the last few years I've wondered why I didn't think of them as a possible career.  Sure, I wouldn't have ever been rich, but I'm not rich now anyway.  

No, like most of the rest of the human race, I fell into a job that turned into a career and I've worked as hard as I needed to get where I've gotten and if I'd worked harder or been smarter I might have made if further by now but I'm not sure I really care.  

Don't get me wrong -- my life is really pretty great.  There are areas that could definitely use some improvement, and whether I want to admit it or not, I can see the places where I've painted myself into corners.  They aren't forever corners, not a one of them.  They are the obstacles I've chosen and I can either let them stop me or I can let them motivate me to do things differently in the future.

I imagine I will spend the rest of my life trying to identify the things I really want to do and trying to find ways to do more of those things before I'm too old to enjoy them.  And that's OK, and I don't necessarily think its sad in the context of my own life until I recognize the places I see it in the lives of others.  My brother didn't live long enough to start finding the ways to make his inner self become real again.  That's at least as tragic as the fact that the person he was supposed to be got lost in the first place.

Ken is the poster child for those of us whom circumstance dictated a life other than the one we would have chosen for ourselves.  Too many people don't have the resources or the support to self-actualize, to do anything more than try to survive, and just thinking that makes me start to feel a sense of panic, because I know deep down inside that we're meant to be and do more than just survive.   

I could spend my time wishing things were different, but I suspect, rightly, that my efforts are better spent doing things to change the equation for myself, for those I love.  

This self-actualized little boy is following his dream of being the cutest cowboy that ever lived.

There is no "new" year

We make resolutions and rarely keep them.  We party like its 1999.  But really, is New Year's Eve that much different than any other midwinter night when we need to inject a little life into the dark of winter?

Its another day.  A Tuesday, this year.  And I am getting to the point in my life where I truly question the point of it.  Its almost as bad as birthdays;  47?  Its just like 37 but with more arthritis.   My reaction to NYE 2012?  "Where the FUCK did 2011 go?  Or 2010 for that matter?"  We get older and time picks up speed and one day we were thirty and woke up the next and we were fifty and trying to pay for college for the kids who were just five last week.

I don't get the point of New Year's resolutions.  Can't I just decide to do things at any old point in the year?  Does it make them less important if I didn't make them New Year's Eve?  The day I listened to "Landslide" while watching my baby girl in her high chair and decided I needed another baby, wasn't that a bigger day than NYE?  The day SG and I held hands in front of our parents and friends and told everyone we were a "THANG" - wasn't that a bigger day? 

The turn of the century, sure, that was a biggie.  I'd moved to New Jersey then, my ex and I were in our apartment, a year away from buying our first house and then immediately getting "in the family way" with Amazon Girl.  We must have listened to Prince tell us how he was partying like it was 1999 a thousand times the week prior.  I don't even remember now what we did... everyone was waiting for Y2K to make the world stop turning, and like every other apocalypse that hasn't materialized (Big shout-out to the Mayans!), it ends up being somewhat forgettable.   Except for my friends who moved to an island somewhere and built a house off the grid because, you know, pending apocalypse.  And when it didn't happen, he, who was certain this was IT, went a little cuckoo, and she said goodbye to a chapter in her life and went forth to kick some ass.

And let's talk about the folly of going out for NYE if you're neither (a) single or (b) childless.  Seriously, its just not feasible.  You either have to have the party at YOUR house and hope your kids get at least a few minutes of sleep while the adults get their freak on, or you have to pay a highly-in-demand babysitter three times what she normally gets to watch your kids, which leaves you about two drinks worth of cash in your pocket, then you get to fend off the drunken drivers all the way home and hope you don't, in your sober and self-protective state, do something stupid while driving by an officer which then necessitates you proving just how boring you are because you are the only sober person exiting a party or bar on NYE.

It really just better to stay home, order pizza, and try to stay awake long enough to bitch about the horrid lack of talent on TV and how dumb all those people are to stand in the freezing air in Time Square just to watch a well-lit orb do a shabby pole dance.

The important days, they don't need a calendar reference or a national holiday to matter.  They are the days when your son asks your friend for riding lessons - all by himself and of his own volition.  They are the days when you watch your incredibly proud husband stand on stage to put his son's officer's eupalets on his Navy uniform.  They are the days when you have the perfect ride on your horse, the perfect day at work, the best...nevermind....with your spouse or partner, the day you had an epiphany you didn't even see coming, the day your daughter needs her first bra and the many many nights you tuck your kids in bed and they hug you 'round the neck and sleepily declare their love.    The days you get to spend enjoying your parents and laughing with them over memories of the past and the follies of the present.  They are the days you feel the presence of God, the days you feel the smallness of the scale of your life against the wide width of the clamoring world, the days you drink in the sunlight and are grateful for one more moment of a life so sweet it hurts.

NYE.  Fun, to be sure.  A chance to kick up our heels and shake off the past, or to try to catch up on some much-needed sleep while rude neighbors shoot off lawn cannons.  A chance to kiss your date while fireworks burst in a dazzling array and a chance to pretend you can really change overnight into someone who eschews ice cream and goes to the gym five days a week. 

To me?  Its just another Tuesday. 

Every single day of the year is a chance to start over.  We need not limit ourselves to one day in January to try to become the better angels of our nature.

Characters

When I was really young, we lived in the city, but my parents had a Big Plan to eventually live in a more rural setting.  Dad is ten years older than Mom, and so by the time I arrived, he already had a good 15 years or so in the Fire Department.  As he got closer to his 25, my folks bought a two and a half acre patch right smack in the middle of a small island in Puget Sound.  The Island, as residents call it, is about seven miles long and maybe a mile and a half wide at the widest point.  We lived on the belt of the island, and if you stood in the middle of our road you could see water on both sides.  We could watch all the ships going into Seattle from the Strait of Juan de Fuca from our living room window.  When she still sailed, you could set your watch by the Princess Marguerite on her way to Victoria.  7:10 AM sharp she would appear between the trees.  I never got to sail on that ship, and I always wondered what she was like. 

Our small island was a wonderful place to be a kid.  It was safe.  Everyone knew everyone else.  People always waved at one another when they passed by in their cars. 

Mr. and Mrs. Kidd lived in a small white house off the main road.  They had several acres and Mr. Kidd mowed the grass between the big clumps of blackberry bushes, so it was a favorite place to ride horses.  Before I had horses of my own they had a shetland pony that someone kept at their place and they would let me ride her.  She was a nasty little pony, as Shetlands are wont to be, but it didn't stop my friends and I from pretending she was an enormous brown steed.   Mrs. Kidd would always call us into the house for a treat - usually cookies or a coffee cake she had made, served with a big glass of milk fresh from the neighbor's cow.  Mr. Kidd was a slow driver.  When he was alone on the road he would drive exactly five miles under the speed limit, but if someone got behind him, he would drop to ten under.  The island is full of a lot of curvy roads and few good places to pass.  No one liked getting behind Mr. Kidd.

When I had my own horse I spent a lot of time riding on the beach.  If the tide was out my friends and I would race along at full tilt on the tide flats.  When the tide was up, we would go up the beach as far as we could before turning around and heading home.  I would usually see Bob, the local drunk, when I was on the beach.  He was a harmless guy, probably in his mid- to late- 40's, though it was hard to tell sometimes.  He lived with his parents on the island.  I don't remember his whole story, though Dad may remember it, but I know that he was always nice to me.  He'd be sitting in the sand, using a big log as a chair back, with his big jug of Gallo.  My folks taught me to be pleasant to people, always, and because he was so very unthreatening, I would always stop and say hello when I saw him.  Later on when I went away to college, I would sometimes get cards and letters from Bob.  He even sent me a Valentine's Day card once, which I guess in retrospect was kind of weird, but at the time just seemed really sweet.   His kidneys eventually failed on him and he went on dialysis.  He died a few years after I grew up and left home. 

Rod and Willie's house was a favorite destination to ride my horse.  Rod was an independent home builder, and he helped Dad build both of the houses we had on The Island.   His wife, Willie, was a real character and always fun to talk to.  My first horse was named Willie Wonka and I think she got a perverse kick out of having me ride Willie to visit Willie.  I'd ride up the beach to the trail to their house, tie my horse to a tree in the yard and go in for a pop and a snack.  Willie got throat cancer and died, sadly.  Before she got real sick she had to have her voice box taken out.  She had one of those electronic voice boxes and she would talk by holding a microphone to her throat.  She never did seem to lose her sense of humor and she was always nice to me even after things got bad. 

Sometimes I would ride up the main road to and meet my friend Glenda and her horse and sometimes Lori and her appy gelding and we would go across past the Seventh Day Adventist school to the big open field behind Shold's house.  You could go over the hill and through a path in the woods to the Island's other main road (there were really only two).  The trail led you to a small group of houses everyone called "SDA Village" because that's where most of the SDA families lived.  The trail was what the kids used to walk to school.  There was one family there I babysat for.  They had a beautiful golden retriever and their kids were easy to babysit. 

A few miles up the back road was Finis Steven's place.  Mr. Stevens was an immensely interesting and erudite man.  He's gone now, but he had lived on the island most of his life.  As late as the 1970's he still heated his house with a wood stove, grew his own hay, ate from his own vegetable garden, and fixed all of his own equipment.   He had a large block of acreage on the back side of the island, and there were wide grass trails through the trees that he maintained.   He spent years establishing relationships with the squirrels that lived in the trees there.  Every day he would go walk the trails and feed nuts to his squirrels, and he had taught them to do all kinds of tricks.  I don't think he every took money to give demonstrations with his squirrels, but most of the kids and families in the area at one point or another had walked those trails and watched him run those squirrels through their paces.  I wonder what happened to his squirrels after he died.

 

Important questions

For about a year and a half now I've attended an Episcopal church in my area.  I love being Episcopalians.  I think of us as the aging hippies of Christianity, the liberal heathen Christians who by some other standards might be headed on a fast handcart to a very warm place.  While the Anglican church itself has some disagreement over a few key issues, we are a church whose doors are open to all.  That openness and expressed belief that God loves every single person is what drew me back to them, the church of my childhood.

Now, I would guess that the average age of our small congregation is about 65.  I sing in the church choir and except for me and one other guy whose mother-in-law also is in the choir, everyone else is well past retirement age, as are most of the people that sit in our congregation on Sundays.   I love our small church.  I love our little choir.  Even if we're not loaded with musical talent, we enjoy what we do and are all committed to showing up every Wednesday and Sunday and making a joyful noise.

A few months ago our priest left us to go pastor a larger congregation in a larger city west of us.  Until the vestry is ready to call a new priest, we have had visiting priests.  For the most part these are retired priests who supplement their retirement by filling in at churches as needed.  The priest we've had most often is a really sweet older gentleman. I enjoy his sincerity and his delivery when he takes us through the ecumenical rites and shares a sermon. 

Every year our choir, along with anywhere from ten to fifteen other choirs in the area participate in a Christmas choral festival.  The offering from this event goes to a local charity, typically the food bank.  We had easily the smallest choir participating this year, and so we found a song that was perfectly suited for us.  It included a brief solo, and I was asked to sing the part.  I won't be shy, I do sing and I sing pretty well.  The solo was right in my vocal range and it was a great fit for me.  The night of the choral festival the song came off just beautifully, not just my solo but really, the whole song.  We (and I) received many compliments and expressions of appreciation.   In order for our own congregation to hear the song, we also included it as the offertory anthem Christmas eve and then the following Sunday as well.  That Sunday, the priest I mentioned above was our visiting priest.

On that last Sunday, after the recessional, we all filed out of church.  As I came up to the priest, he grabbed my hand and pulled me close to speak quietly.  "I only want to know one thing," he said.

Of course, my mind filled in all the questions I imagined he might ask:

    What a lovely voice you have.  Did you take singing lessons?

    Have you always had such a talent for music?

    I know a talent agent, would you like his number?

Instead, he pulled me down a little lower so he could reach up and tap his forefinger on the dream catcher tattooed on the back of my neck. 

"How much did that hurt?"

 

How...lovely (sort of nsfw)

"Mommy, I made an angel for you!"

"Oh, baby, that's so nice.  How sweet."

"It has a picture of baby jesus on one side."

"That's wonderful, C."

"And the angel's on the other side.  Here you go, Mommy.  I love you, Mommy!"

"Thanks buddy.  She's...she's...ummmm..."  awkward silence.   "...are those boobs?"

"Uh-Huh!"

"Why is your angel naked?"

"She's not naked!  She's wearing pants!"

"I see."

"Pants!  And an invisible shirt!"

"Um, thanks C.  I really love it." 

"Uh, C?  Could you maybe not draw boobs anymore?  For a while?"  Til you're like, 30, maybe?

 

Because there will be plenty of time for boob pictures when he's NOT IN KINDERGARTEN.

 

Honor thyself

It is fifteen degrees out this morning.  As I type this, three horses lean up against the pasture fence, blowing steam from their nostrils, wondering why I haven't shown up with armfuls of hay yet.  Hang on boys, I'll get to you in a minute.  I have something to say first.

There are lots of things I don't write about in detail on this blog.  They're off limits.  And I really don't like it when people are coy and they tell you they're writing about something they can't really talk about.  And now I'm a hypocrite because that's sort of what I'm going to do right now.

You see, I've changed.  I'm not the person I was ten years ago.  I'm not the person I was five years ago.  I changed, and yesterday I proved it to myself.

One of the biggest problems with being codependent is an frightening tenacity when it comes to hanging on to something even when its totally not okay, and sometimes even when its literally destroying you.  I have hung on to people and situations in my life so hard that by the time they finally exploded, there were pieces of shrapnel and body parts found hundreds of miles away.  And of course, in that kind of aftermath, I'd be simply unable to function for weeks and months.

I am so proud of myself today, and so grateful for my recovery.  I know I still have a very long way to go, but when I am able to look at a situation in my life and say "this isn't the right situation for me" and simply step out of it, without anger and without blame, I can honestly say that I've made progress. And yesterday, I did just that.  I was sad, and it hurt, but for once the fear of dealing with my feelings didn't stop me from making the right decision for me.  For me and me alone.

Today, while we celebrate the things we are thankful for, this is going to be pretty damned near the top of my list. The top slots are reserved for the usual sappy things, my children, my family, all those things in life that I am so fortunate to have and should never take for granted.  Somewhere floating around in that list,though, is a box next to the phrase "One step farther away from bat-shit crazy."  And it is checked.

 

 

 

When helping isn't helping

I think its a given that dysfunctional relationships breed dysfunction.  Personality and past have a lot to do with the level of bad juju you start a relationship with, but the dynamics of the relationship develop over time and create lasting habits.

I wasn't always codependent.  There were years and relationships in my life where I didn't take responsibility for another human being's happiness or discontent, success or failure.  It occurs to me those relationships might not have been the healthiest or best, and so they ended eventually.  I can only remember one relationship in my past, though, where the mutual level of dysfunction matched the last 10 years of my life.  In my memory it seems to have been a very long term relationship, but in reality it was probably not that long at all, a few months or a year.  The habits I picked up from it have caused a lot of hurt to me and to other people, though.  It was when I met someone who was also codependent that those issues blew up into something worse than unmanageable.

(Interesting side note, I discovered last week that the man I dated for a short while back in the 1980's is still the #1 most wanted deadbeat parent in the state of New Jersey.  He owes over $54,000 in child support.  How awful is THAT?  Hey, at least I can say "I dated a guy who was Number One!")

One of the most harmful things I have done in my relationships is to continually try to "help" people.  In reality, what I did was enable people to be doing things that really weren't healthy or good for them.  I tried to fix things for them instead of letting them fix things themselves, thereby teaching them to be helpless.  I remember offering to be the stand-in for my ex and his ex because dealing with her was so upsetting to him.  It seemed like the right thing to do at the time -- I thought it would help him be less angry and upset, thereby killing two birds with one stone.  I would help him and myself at the same time.  How silly it was of me to presume to make decisions for him regarding his son, or to insert myself into a relationship that I had no business being part of.  I wasn't my stepson's parent, and I didn't have the right to be his father's voice in dealings with his mother.  I also hurt my ex by not allowing him to work through his issues in that relationship on his own; by helping him avoid the problem, I helped prolong and worsen it.  In short, I messed up, royally.

As I continue to recover I am trying to learn how to hear other people's problems without trying to fix them.  At first it seems cruel to let someone suffer, but over time it begins to feel more natural.  I can let somebody vent, let them know I hear how they are feeling, have empathy for what they are going through, but recognize that they are capable of managing their own lives and problems.  Its something I'm also trying to learn to do as a parent.

There are times when our children need something from us, something we ought to give them, and that is when it is helpful to them for us to provide assistance.   When they are babies, they need everything from us - without loving hands to feed, clothe, bathe and transport them, they would wither and die.  As they grow older, though, they need to learn how to do things for themselves.  It starts with simple things and over time encompasses the most complex decisions about who they are, what they believe, how they should handle their own affairs.

Today I got a call from my son's school.  He was in the nurse's office, crying inconsolably.  His sensory issues had kicked in and he couldn't stand the feel of his feet or his socks.  Rather than just take them off, he was having a downright fit about them.  He does this at home a lot.  Sometimes its the shoes or socks, other times its his pants or his shirt or his hair.   He'll be sitting doing something, and suddenly he'll begin shrieking and tearing at whatever item is causing the offense.  Its hard to know how to respond to these outbursts.  There's a big part of me that wants to do anything, anything at all to help him feel better.  Over time, though, I've seen that there's not a whole lot I CAN do.  If I try to help him with something he'll scream at me.  If I get upset because he's upset, I simply escalate him further.

I think the school nurse was really taken aback when I suggested to her that she simply leave him alone.  I can hear the thoughts spinning now, "Is she really that cold-hearted?  How could she suggest I ignore her son's crying?  How mean!"  The truth is, leaving him alone is the best thing I can do for him.  Because his issues aren't caused by the actual item of clothing in question but instead by his neurological response to stress and the smallest discomfort, I'm not helping him by sitting and cuddling him while he screams or even asking him what I can do for him, or trying to get him different socks or different pants.  What he needs is to be left alone, without any pressure from me, so that he can calm down and start to feel better.

I discovered this by accident on a day when I was busy getting ready for work.  He started flipping out about his hair, and I was so late that I couldn't do anything for him.  Didn't have time.  And so I just said as calmly and lovingly as I could, "I can't help you now.  You'll have to figure this out for yourself."  And eventually, he did.  My mother has seen the same thing happen at her house.  He'll start yanking on his shirt and screaming and she'll see if he's okay, and then say "Okay, that's enough,"  and walk away.  Sometimes it takes him longer than others, but eventually, he gets to feeling better and less anxious, and he pulls himself together.  The more we let him do this on his own, the better he gets at it.  I'm not going to lie and say that there are days when I'm already stressed out about other things that he goes off on a shriek bender that I don't feel like I'm losing my mind right along with my will to live, that there aren't days when I snap at him to please quit it right now fortheloveofgod!  Of course there are.   But he's getting better at it and so am I.  And so I learn, that sometimes the best way of helping someone is to not help them at all.  My son, he teaches me that.

In Sync

I used to row.

I did my college rowing at the University of Washington, Jan Harville was my novice coach and Bob Ernst was my varsity coach, back before he moved over to coach the men. (I hear he's coaching the women again now). 

After I graduated from college I took a couple of years' break from being a jock to invest more of my time into being a wastrel.  Inevitably, that too palled, and so I returned again to the world where your backsplash, your puddle, and your swing were all that mattered. 

Swing.

Swing is the sweet spot.  Its the orgasm of rowing.  Its where all rowers in the boat, all eight or four or two of them, hit the same rhythm on the slide, they come forward, drop oar, push back and finish each stroke simultaneously.  When swing happens, the boat just picks up out of the water and grows wings.  If you've felt swing, you'll never forget it.  One year at Seattle Rowing Club we entered both the eight and the fours at a four mile race in Fremont.  Our eight had some rigging problems before the start, and by the time we had the spacers set correctly, the field was twenty or better lengths ahead of us.  We rolled into the start and sort of simultaneously thought "screw it, we're behind, we've got nothing to lose, let's just row the shit out of this thing."  We just went with it.  By the third mile, we hit it.  SWING.  Before long, we were passing boats.  Leaving boats in the dust.  Swinging.  Flying.  We flew up the canal and by God we WON that race by open water. 

An hour later we did it again, in the fours.  We split the eight up into two boats.  The first four, with our stroke and all heavyweights, was heavily favored.  They got to use our club boat.  For the second four, it was me and three lightweights.  Our club didn't own a second four, so we borrowed one from another club, a heavy old wooden behemoth of a boat.  The four of us looked at each other and kind of laughed.  We had no expectation for this race.  We'd already poured our hearts out on a four mile race.  We were just hoping to have enough left in us to finish.

Inexplicably, it happened again. 

Swing.

Somewhere in that race we found the sweet spot and we flew home.  We won again. 

I don't remember too many details about the rest of that day, or anything else.  I just remember the swing.

***

When you ride, there's a thing you look for.  Its like swing, but I'm not even sure there's a word for it.  Its what happens when you start working together as one.  You have a thought in your head of what it is you want to accomplish, you transmit that thought through your hands and your seat and your legs, and your horse, all his muscle and his brain and his nerves, they act out your thought completely willingly.  Its as if he's an extension of your will, not because he's forced to, but because he wants to.

Yeah.

Saturday we took a horrendously awful never-to-be-repeated drive up mountain roads (just thinking about the dropoff right on the other side of the truck door gets my heart pounding in abject fear) to do an orienteering ride.

The night before, T-Bone smashed my nose with his head as he was jumping up on my bed.  I was up past 11 with ice and a towel trying to stop the bleeding and minimize the swelling.  I was up again at 4:30 with a headache and a painful face, trying to will myself to even want to go on this ride.

After we reached the trailhead (and I pried my fingernails out of the truck door), I wasn't expecting much.  I was exhausted but ramped up on anxiety and adrenaline (amazing how worrying about falling down a thousand-foot cliff will do that to you), my nose hurt, and you know when you feel miserable you typically transmit that straight through to your horse.

I took some time to relax and calm down, to put the drive up behind me.  To groom and saddle Bugs and walk him around a bit to loosen the long, bumpy ride out of his legs.  Belatedly I realized he'd thrown a shoe sometime in the week prior, but I was able to borrow a hoof boot from another rider. 

We started down the long initial trail.  It had rained the night before and where the dirt was hard-packed, the horses slipped and slid on their hind legs, trying to find a grip in the earth.  We made it through the first three objectives, and got to the fourth.  It was a camp area and as we were separating to check our orientation points to find the plate, Bugs started to get antsy about being even a few feet apart from his riding pal.  I took him and circled him a few times, let him move his legs and get his brain back into the game.  We finished the objective and headed off down the trail. Where it was not rocky, we trotted and loped to make up some time.  The last ride we'd done this, and Bugs had it in his head that he was in a big fat hurry.  I spent the last hour of that ride fighting him to stay collected and not go barging off into the sunset. 

But Saturday, even with challenges, we found our sync. He was collected.  He was patient.  He went where I asked him, he stayed where I asked him. He moved off the leg like a dream, he didn't spook or get scared even when we ran into four hunters on atv's.  He enjoyed the hell out of himself, and so did I.  We found the sweet spot that makes you want to get up on the horse again, over and over again, so you can get that all-over amazing feeling that comes when you have swing.

Reparations

"I don't want to spend my whole life down on my knees

Just fixing what I've broke."

- Hem, The Pills Stopped Working from Funnel Cloud, 2006

What are your regrets in life? What are the things you did in your past that hurt another person that they either never forgave you for or for which you never made amends?  You know, the unresolved ones.

When I left my first husband there was no awful thing that he'd done wrong, no infidelity (on his part), no lying, no abuse, nothing.  I went through a lifequake of epic proportions when I found my birthfamily and pretty much fell off a cliff.  I didn't want anything to do with anyone, didn't want to work, didn't want to be married, didn't want to have majored in English, wanted my whole life back so I could do it over and be who I finally thought that I was.  The best I could do was end what I came to realize was a marriage of incompatible people and try again. 

In retrospect, I was incredibly selfish and immature.  Maybe we *were* incompatible, but how would I know?  I didn't try.  I believe he will never forgive me for it.  I don't believe he has to.  Its not a requirement.  And I also believe there is nothing in this world that I can do to make amends for shattering his life.  I can apologize.  I can say it was all my fault, that he did nothing wrong.  But I can never, ever fix it.

Should I have to?

12 years later, he sends me an email to let me know the dog we had together has passed away, as he did last year when one of the cats died.  And I let him know about a mutual friend who passed.  We are polite, we don't ask questions or talk of personal things, but at least we are polite.  There is no meanness, no need to dredge up painful pasts.  I'm comfortable with that.

I remember a friend I had, she was a very needy friend and very controlling.  We had entered a contest together, the Milk Carton Derby during Seafair.  We didn't win the judging, but we did win a random drawing for two tickets on Continental Airlines, anywhere they flew domestically.  For me, it was great timing.  I was planning on going to Boston with my rowing club to compete in the Head of the Charles.  I wasn't sure how I would be able to afford to get there, so this ticket was like a gift straight from God.  My friend, though, thought that we should use our tickets to go somewhere TOGETHER.  I offered a compromise, I would take extra vacation days while in Boston and after the race was over, she and I could do some touring around New England.  It would be in the fall, the best time of year to be in the Northeast. 

My mother's cousin's widow lived in Boston, in a very fine old neighborhood, in an enormous house.  It was three full stories with a basement, she came from old money.  She very generously offered her home to me and any of the other rowers who needed a place to stay. 

My friend wasn't interested in this shared housing, and she tried to find herself a hotel room in Boston.  She could not find any hotel that wasn't already booked.  She called me, angry and demanding a solution.  I said I hadn't realized that so many people would be in town for the race, maybe she wanted to change her mind and stay at my relative's house?  She SHRIEKED at me.  "People aren't in town for your FUCKING RACE, you idiot, they're there for a convention.  Your stupid race isn't that important!!  And no, I don't want to stay at your cousin's house with a BUNCH OF FUCKING DYKES!!!!"  And hung up on me.

She never spoke to me again.  I left her a couple of half-hearted messages, hoping to patch things up, but she never returned my calls, and frankly it was a relief.  (And just for the record, I had a WONDERFUL time in Boston.  We took a silver medal in the women's 8, and a couple of us rented a car and drove to Vermont and did a bunch of sightseeing and had a wonderful vacation. SO THERE.)

I have wondered about her since then, whether she still hates me.  What she would say if we just randomly ran into one another at the grocery store or at a restaurant.

Would she expect me to fall on my knees and apologize?  Would I want to?  

I wouldn't expect it of her, even though I thought her behavior was horribly rude and selfish.  She probably thought that I was the one being selfish.  And rude.  I think where the disconnect happened was that she had very high expectations of me, expectations I wasn't going to fulfill.  That was the beginning of a painful breach that has never healed.

Another person comes to mind, a man who, though I didn't date him for long, was a big part of creating the codependent monster I eventually became.  He was an alcoholic, much older than me.  In the months that we were together, I became unbalanced as I tried to fix him, control him.  The relationship was one of the worst in my life.  He was always at the bar, drinking.  He never came home when he said he would.   He would pick on me for my clothing or my weight or my hair.  I was never good enough.  He cheated on me.  He gave me an STD.  After I finally grew the ovaries to throw all of his belongings in black plastic garbage bags and put them in his car, I spent years being furious with him.  I wanted him to SEE how wrong he had been.  To acknowledge it.  TO GROVEL ON THE GROUND AND BEG MY FORGIVENESS.  To change. 

The things that went wrong with J and I, for a while I did the same thing.  And even when he owned his part in things, I still felt unsatisfied.  I was still angry and I wanted someone to PAY.  To grovel.  To fix what they had broken.

As time passes, I realize that I do not have that right.  A person can only apologize for what they own as a wrong.  If there are reparations to be made, if they have the ability to make them, ok.  But most often, in friendships and interpersonal relationships, there is nothing the other person is going to be able to do that makes you feel better.  That part, the getting over the anger part, that's up to ME.  And damn, that's harder than hell to do.  To stop expecting people to fix the broken thing in me.   Its happening, though.  I think I'm starting to understand the concept of accepting responsibility for my own repair.  At the same time, learning to stop being endlessly angry with the people I feel have hurt me.  Being mad isn't going to make them admit their offenses.  Being mad isn't going to make them sorry.  I need to let it go, write it on a piece of paper and burn it in the fireplace.  Cry my tears and let the river flow away, taking my pain and anger and hurt with it.

Because I too would like the forgiveness of others.  I dont' want to, cannot, spend my whole life groveling for forgiveness, trying to fix the broken parts of other people.  Its not my job.

Someday, I think, if I work on this hard enough, I really will know peace.  Someday.