Barnmaven

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.

Failure: I do not think it means what you think it means

I struggle with the way I keep finding myself in the place of being afraid of my own imperfections.

I give everyone else a mile - but not myself.  Somehow I don't think I've earned it.  Or even worse -- its not that I expect more out of myself than out of others, its that I have a fear of being seen failing.  And because failure is such a frightening concept, I do two very destructive things:  I apply the word "failure" to many more situations than to which it actually applies; and I will do practially anything to avoid failing or being seen by others as what I believe is failing.

In 2007, not too long after I moved into this house, I bought horses again after more than a decade of what I think of as the 'years when I wasn't really myself.'  The horse I bought to be my 'perfect horse' illustrates beautifully another one of my more troublesome character defects:  I decide in my head what the perfect situation will be and then proceed to make it happen without making sure the steps I am taking actually match the outcome I desire.

I bought a mother/daughter pair based on little more than the shape of the younger mare's head and the discovery that she shared bloodlines with my old horse.  8 years old, never ridden, not touched at all in at least two or three years.  Sounds like a great prospect for a woman in her 40's who hasn't ridden in ten years, right?

I started doing some work with her only to quickly find out I was really out of my league.  I sent her off for professional training with a wonderful trainer, I took her to clinics, but ultimately she was the horse I could not trust. She would explode for the silliest of reasons, or even for no reason at all.  I grew fearful and nervous of her, and became concerned with the fact that I could get seriously hurt because of her.   The day I realized I could not stand to ride her I cried for what seemed like hours.   After she had a full year off of being used for anything I paid another trainer to put sixty days on her and I found someone who was interested in buying her.  I spent $700 for sixty days of training and let her go to her new home for $300.  (Never ever ask me for financial advice.)

But was it a failure?  Or was it a difficult situation that resolved successfully because in the end both the horse and I got what we needed?  She got trained by someone who helped her lose her tendency to flip her lid and a new owner who thinks she's the best horse in the world.  As for me, I got Bugs, who has done more for my skill and confidence than I would have ever guessed.

Still, I confess I thought of it as a failure for a very long time.  I felt guilty for having let that horse down, for not being the right person for her. 

This week I find myself in somewhat of the same situation. 

I have for quite some time been consumed with thoughts of my dog Lady, who passed away a couple of years ago.  She was a one of a kind dog, gentle and kind with everyone.  I wish I could imbue every family dog with her temperament, because she was perfect with children, perfect with smaller animals, perfect with people.  And I've gotten in my head the idea that I want another dog just like her.  Last fall we adopted a mastiff mix who ended up being aggressive.  After that disaster we waited a little while and then adopted a different mastiff through a rescue.   She was - is - a lovely dog, loves everyone she meets, loves going places, loves lounging, loves cuddling.  But after two months with us she went from being "interested" in our cats to wanting to eat them.  The same day she went after Tucker - he was only mildly hurt, thankfully - she then proceeded to try to eat our little dog Gizzy. 

It isn't hard to know what the right answer is -- its much easier to rehome one dog than it is five cats and a football with legs Chihuahua -- but it has been extremely difficult to come to terms with that answer.  The best answer to me would be the one where we spend a lot of time diligently working with her on her training and she becomes safe for the little animals in the house.  But for that to be very feasible, I would have to become a different person with a different life. 

 Training a problem dog takes a great deal of dedication and effort; I have the desire, but I'm terribly short on time.  If I did decide to give the time, then one of the people or the rest of the critters would have to be deprived of their fair share of time, for who knows how long.  As I write this out I am nodding my head at the inescapable logic; but it is a challenge to get my emotional self to stop telling me what a failure I am for not being the perfect home for this dog.

I can visualize what it would be like to be the person who doesn't take a poor fit as rejection or failure; but I am not that person, not yet.  I think - I hope - that someday I will be.  In the meantime I will continue to repeat to myself what a friend of mine told me what I wailed to her about how badly I had failed as an adoptive home for this dog:  "It is not a failure to do the right thing for your family and for the dog."  Knowing and feeling are so terribly often disparate concepts in this head of mine.

I think perhaps I might be less prone to these scenarios if I stopped trying to take on so much.  Of course, that's another person I hope to be some day -- the person who stops trying to drink the world from the end of a fire hose. 

How to turn the me that is overwhelmed and thinks she's failing into the me who is peaceful and OK with the way the world works, that is the ultimate question. 

 

 

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On Guilt

My post from last night got me thinking.

I don't know about other moms, but I suspect its the same thing.  Whenever I hear a new theory about the causes of autism, I feel defensive. 

I mean, if vaccines DID cause autism, then I, the parent who made the choice to vaccinate my child, am part of the reason my son has autism.  Or if its the things in my house that made him sick, I bought those things.  I exposed him.

Even if its simple genetics -- those are my bad genes he got.  Well, mine and his dad's, anyway.  Which all leads me to consider inherent Mommy Guilt and to ask myself what good does it actually do?

If one stops to consider that even the best lives have times of pain, sickness, heartbreak and struggle, then it stands to reason that the simple act of bringing a baby into this world is automatically going to cause your child to suffer.  And as your child grows and you have to make decisions about where you live and where they learn and who you interact with and what they wear and what faith you follow (or don't) -- all of these things lead to other things which at some point in time will cause your child pain.   Just choosing to take a certain route to the grocery store might be the one thing that caused you to be in a car accident in which your child was injured.

In this life, it is a certainty that we will all suffer, we will all struggle and we will all ultimately die.  Why then, do we have children?  If we only consign them to certain pain, what's the point?  (Rhetorical question, by the bye.)

Does parental guilt serve a purpose?  Why does it exist otherwise?  (Not a rhetorical question.) 

It stands to reason that the concept of parental guilt is not a new one.  Surely when Cain slew Abel, Adam and Eve must have had more than a few terrible nights wondering where they went wrong.  The instinct to protect our children is incredibly powerful and nearly universal.  We've all heard the stories of adrenaline-fueled parents lifting cars off of their toddlers, of parents hurling themselves in front of buses to push their child out of the way, of parents braving flames in order to free a trapped baby.  The need to protect is instinct, there is no decision process involved.   It would naturally follow, then, that when our child suffers, we feel somehow responsible for not having prevented it.

A little guilt goes a long way.  The parent who feels guilty about working long hours may be prompted to make more of an effort when they are home to spend quality time with their family.  Guilt causes us to try to make the best parenting decisions we can, to learn from our mistakes and to continually improve.  When we want our children to be happy and healthy our parental conscience drives us to be and do better. 

But I think guilt can also go too far.  The parent whose child is sick or has a pervasive disorder - what good does guilt do for that parent?   The parents whose children got sick and died in Holbrook, MA from playing in toxic fields behind the chemical plant, what good does guilt serve them?  They couldn't have known.  The truth is that there are things in life we are never going to be able to prevent.  There are pains and truths everyone must learn as they grow.  They are part of the maturation process, they are the stressors that build our character, our resolve and our resilience.  If we never had our hearts broken, how would we learn to make better relationship choices? 

Life to me often seems like a continual progression from one hot stove to the next.  As I blow on my singed fingers from the last character-building experience, I often wonder from whence the next lesson I learn will come.  And so it is, so it will be, for my children. 

I think its possible to be happy without having to experience pain, but I also think that I'm more grateful for being happy when I can contrast it to the times I have suffered.  The joy of being in love is clarified by the experience of losing a relationship.  The enjoyable and relaxed trail ride is even more satisfying in contrast to the memory of the ride where my horse and I parted company - painfully. 

Still, I find as a parent, that I have yet to learn when it is OK to ratchet back on that guilty defensive posture.  I suppose its natural to react strongly to a perceived sense of being blamed when in fact there have been many times since my childrens' various diagnoses that I have very much felt entirely responsible for every single one of those issues.  Rightly or wrongly, that self-searching is a process I think we all go through when our child experiences something greater than a scraped knee or a cold. 

At some point, though, I had to recognize that blaming myself wasn't going to get me anywhere.   in order to be the parent my children need, I have to let go of self-recrimination and be in this moment, making better choices.  Andyou know, even in the worst case scenario where a parent does indeed make the wrong choice about a babysitter or a pet or a medication or any myriad number of things, self-blame is not a constructive thing beyond the initial recognition of "I could have chosen better."  Recognize it and move on, because the next time you will make a better choice. 

So yes, I recognize that I tend to overreact and jump on my soapbox.  Those moments, though, are useful to me, because they help me recognize the areas in my life that could use a little growth. 

 

Bounce

Sometime around 5:30 this morning I went to take the garbage bag from under the sink out to the bin.  It was still dark, and as I lifted the lid I lifted my face away from the stink and scanned the sky.

About two blocks away I could see an enormous billowing cloud of smoke, full of sparks and backlit by orange flames and street lamps.  "Oh, crap," I said.  Because, you know, I'm all eloquent and shit like that.

I grabbed my coffee cup (when your dad is a retired firefighter, fires are spectacles, not events), stuck my flip flops on my feet and moseyed up the street.  I don't really know the people who lived in the house, but their outbuildings were ablaze and they were frantically spraying water on their vehicles and their roof to keep their house safe.  Its an old farmhouse, and probably would have been in as bad shape as their garage and barn except right about then the first firetrucks arrived.

By the time I left for work, the fire was pretty well out.  I stopped and got out of the car to see if they needed anything.  They had an old skinny horse tied up to a tree, and I inquired if they needed a place to put him.  The two young guys that were there said the man who owned the horse was at work, and they didn't really know.  I checked him over - he was a little shocky, but more concerning he was clearly underweight and his feet looked like they hadn't seen a rasp in about 10 years.  He was very kind and patient and let me look in his mouth and pick up his feet without protest.  I suggested they get him some water and then I went back home and threw a bale of hay in the truck to give them.  He was eating and drinking water when I left, so I was encouraged.  By now I'm late for work, but its not every day you wake up to a fire in the neighborhood.

Yesterday SG left for Nebraska.  Oh, I know we thought he'd not have to go back on the road, but at some point the not-finding of the local work and the pile of bills (not to mention getting hay put in for an embarassing number of horses) dictated otherwise.  He'll be back mid-November.  If there was anyone as conflicted as this man about leaving for a job I've yet to meet them.  Granted, it was a short notice scramble as he got the call about this job on Wednesday for a Monday start.  The adrenaline rush gets you booked and packed before you've had a chance to really think about whether you really want to go to Nebraska of all places in October and November.

Still, it was three or four in the afternoon on Saturday, his flight was leaving at 10 am Sunday and he was still waffling on whether he was staying or going.  I finally threw my hands up in despair and headed out to the barn to escape the anxious pacing and the muttering.  

It shouldn't be THAT hard a decision to go to work or not, especially in a down economy.  You just don't question the gift of paying work - even if it DOES require packing your long underwear.  But then you think back to the last couple of outages which all went much shorter than they were supposed to, which meant the private contractors didn't make nearly as much bank as they were counting on, and you count weeks and paychecks and you think that maybe it won't pan out - but in the end its still a job, and so the decision gets made.

And so we kiss goodbye before his folks come to take him on the two hour drive to the airport and then later on that afternoon the kids' dad comes to get them and suddenly I'm alone, trying to decide if I'm happy about it or not.  On the one hand, there's all of the ALL that is our crazy little farm and that's challenging when there's two adults to handle it.  And there's the lonely part of things, especially on the nights when the only warm bodies you can find to cuddle with are furry and don't have opposable thumbs with which to rub your back.  But then you think about how nice it is to have a bathroom to yourself and how much less laundry there'll be, and dishes too, and then you wake up to see your neighbor's whole life going up in flames.

And then you read a post on Facebook from a friend you've known for years who just lost her husband.  And you realize pretty quickly how good you have it.

My man might not be home right now, but I still get to talk to him and hold him again in a few weeks' time.  My house might be a little quiet and empty, but it is standing.  My husband might not get as much work out of this as he wants, but it is still work. 

This is how you bounce back.

 

Its better if you do it quickly

I've added another guest to the pasture this week, a mare that was injured after getting her hind legs torn up in barbed wire.  The people who were boarding her didn't even notice she was injured for several days, so she was in some need of doctoring and pain management.  Fortunately her injuries are not going to leave her permanently lame.

Part of doctoring her for the moment involves hosing down her legs until the scabs are softened and then scrubbing them off with a bristle brush so that I can get antibacterial agents into the wounds themselves.  The first time we treated her there were some pretty big scabs that had to come off.  Just scrubbing wasn't working and I had to grab them and pull them off.

Its one thing to grab your kid and pull off a bandage or a scab. You know they're going to yelp, you know its going to hurt, but you have to do it fast and all at once.  And your child is (hopefully) smaller than you are and so you're not taking your life in your hands.

Its another thing entirely to put yourself within striking distance of a 1200 pound animal and do something that you absolutely know is going to hurt like hell. 

I've been fortunate in my years not to have many injured horses that needed doctoring.  Only twice have I ever dealt with having a horse stitched up.  Both of those times I just held my horse and let the vet do their job, then made sure I kept the stitches clean until they could come out.  My friend Michelle, on the other hand, has dealt with a sizable herd for a long time and is no stranger to doctoring horses.  She says that its the uncanniest thing sometimes, even horses you don't think will be able to tolerate what you need to do will actually be very quiet and patient when you have to do something that hurts.  Perhaps they realize that they need your help to get better, and so they stand still and let you work.

For whatever reason, this lovely mare allowed me to grab hold and yank some fairly large scabs from her hocks without kicking, rearing, biting or bolting.  She was an angel, and has been every day since as I clean and reopen her scabs and treat them with Betadine and a gel spray. 

I guess she knows the truth - the only way to take off a scab is to stand still and yank it all right at once. 

When SG and I got married its not like I was unaware of the fact that his current career means he is gone for weeks at a time.  I'm still getting used to it, though.  I liked having him home, having two of us doing the heavy lifting together.  Enjoying each other's company, having him there to come home to at night, to kiss goodbye in the mornings.  With him gone life seems emptier, less meaningful.  Far too stressful.  The part of me that is logical acknowledges fully the need for paying work in a down economy.  My inner drama queen, however, is less inclined to care about logic.  She's far more concerned with her creature comforts.  She wants her man home, and NOW.  She puts up such a fuss and my inner Spockette has found herself drowned out by the brouhaha.

A couple of weeks ago, there was a murmur of further jobs on the road.  Maybe months worth.  My inner drama queen blew up like a unicorn full of glitter with a hand grenade shoved up its ass. Then she stuck her fingers in her ears.

Its been a merry spectacle, let me tell you.  Tears, emotionally charged text messages.  Hangups.  And really, nothing had been decided yet. 

Fortunately, my inner Spockette and I tag-teamed her, stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth, duct taped it in place and shuttled her off to the back of the attic for the time being.   When SG called, inner Spockette and I had it all under control.  He ripped the scab off - he will be going directly to North Carolina from Arizon with no time for a visit home, and he will be gone until the end of May.  Inner drama queen made a barely recognizable muffled yelp and hasn't been heard from for a couple of days.

If you try to pull the scab off a little bit at a time it takes forever.  Every little tug hurts just as bad as the one before it and the one after it.  All you have accomplished in the end is to make your pain last longer.    Even horses know this.  Hopefully my inner drama queen has figured it out as well.

 

Kill a groundhog, save our sanity

We woke up a week ago tomorrow to three inches of snow on the ground and frozen, crappy roads about half the way of my 45 mile commute to work.  The irony of this is that it wasn't that long ago I was begging for snow, and the minute I woke up and looked out the window, all I could think of was strangling a small burrowing mammal in Pennsylvania.

Over it now.  Enough with the winter already.

And then yesterday and today, I've had to drive with my windows down because its so warm.

Ahhh.  Spring.  Or as we like to call it in the Tri-Cities, mud season.

The arrival of snow was mitigated by the arrival of my parents, who returned this week from their annual winter sojourn in Yuma.  This was the last one for a while, my dad is increasingly less mobile, it takes an act of God to get him on an airplane, and the 1200 mile drive is getting increasingly more difficult for him.   I'm selfish enough to be grateful for this.  Their annual October departure is really hard, and not having family nearby makes me feel a little empty in the middle.   Now they're home, and not surprisingly I notice the absence of my brother far more acutely.  There's an empty seat at the table, we all know it, and we all struggle with it in our own way.  They're back though, that's what really matters right now.

Their timing was excellent, as SG left Friday for a six week job in Arizona.  (ARIZONA:  You are on notice.  Please stop borrowing the people I love. Thank you very much.)  I hope this is the last road trip.   He's starting a new venture when he gets back, and I'm hopeful that it will work out well enough to keep him from ever needing to do another outage.  Life is full of The Crazy as it is, and not having him here to balance out the Doing of Things That Need Doing makes for a very busy me.   Plus, the last couple of road jobs had him gone so very long, it was really a low time for me.  I'm struggling with it, I suppose I should know better, but there it is.  I hate it when he's gone.

I've managed (as usual) to complicate things by taking on two horses on a care lease.  I wouldn't have normally done this, because we all know I don't need two more horses.  These girls, though, are in need of some TLC.  Their owner is a very young woman who has had some issues and some difficulty, and they haven't been receiving the level of care they need.  They're severely underweight and need some vet care.  Sweet mares, both of them. 

Its never not a zoo around here.  Sometimes it surprises me how well SG has adapted to my chaotic life.  I think he has nerves of steel.  Or perhaps he can cope with it because he knows he can run away every few months and get a little vacay from the cray cray.  God knows I wish I could have one.

SG's departure and the bigger sense of loss I've felt around my brother with my parents return have me thinking about loss and the changing nature of life.    As David Richo reminds us in The Five Things We Cannot Change, "everything begins and ends," and you know - the beginning is always the easy part.  The ending not so much.  I took Tasha, my brother's dachshund, to my parents today so that they can care for her while SG is gone.  (She's used to having someone home, she's elderly, and I am gone 11+ hours a day when I'm working.  She needs someone to keep company with).  She's doing really well, considering, but we all know its a matter of time with her.  Truth is, its just a matter of time for all of us - and for all things  in our lives and in our world. 

Everything changes and ends.  Its a simple fact of life that its hard to embrace some days.  But I know that fighting it only leads to increased pain and stress.  Accepting it just means I can grieve and then, at some point, let go.

Its just...the last few months seem to have been so filled with loss.  My brother, SG's grandma, a close family friend, Hercules, a smart and talented blogger, someone's husband, someone's father, someone's wife, someone's child I read about in the paper. Half my chickens.  Even famous people who I normally wouldn't think twice about, but when your mind is dwelling on loss, their passing seems to only compound the egregiousness of it all.  I'd just like us all to have a break, thanks, even knowing that its not at all likely.

The changing and ending aren't always bad things.  Winter ends so spring can arrive with the scent of growing things on the warm breezes and the return of the birds and eggs in the chicken coop on a regular basis.  Spring ends so we can bask in the heat of summer and enjoy the great outdoors in all her glory, and then summer bows her head and gives way to the lovely burnished hues of fall.   

The seasons and all of nature, they just roll with it.  As should we all.

On the calendar

I am going to the dentist on Friday.

I have not been to the dentist in over two years.

I hate the dentist. I hate needles.  I hate drills.  I hate the way my gums feel after the hygenist has brutalized them with her instruments of torture.  Okay, maybe that's not really fair-- not all hygenists do that to me.  But I have had a couple in my lifetime who really made it hurt, and one in particular who appeared to take so much joy in making my mouth hurt that I had to go home and take a painkiller to ease the throbbing in my gums.

Even worse than this, though, is my well-documented phobia about needles.  SG has to have a few tests done because, well, lets just say laughing so hard during the scene in The Big Lebowski where Walter tosses Donny's ashes from the coffee can and the wind picks them up and blows them all over The Dude's beard and sunglasses that you actually pass out momentarily from the laughing is a sign that something's not working quite right.  And so he has to have this test where they take blood from a vein and also blood from an artery, and I'm literally trying not to pass out as I TYPE THESE WORDS.  He was describing it to me in great length until he noticed the faint sheen of sweat on my upper lip and mercifully stopped talking.

So.

I. Hate. The. Dentist.

When I was young it was obvious from an early point that my mouth was overcrowded and I would need to have braces eventually.  The first time I had to have a tooth pulled to make room for other teeth I must have been 7 or 8, I don't remember precisely.  I DO remember the more pertinent details, such as the valium or whatever the dentist's office made my mother wake me up at half-after-dark-thirty to give me so that I would be knocked out and compliant.  And the fact that when you're me, sometimes you live in opposite-land so that things do the backwards to you of what they're supposed to, and so no, I was not knocked out.  I was ramped up like a rabid squirrel on meth.  I remember the dental assistant yelling at me, "You're supposed to be ASLEEP!"  Like, hello, that's MY fault somehow.  Get better drugs, bitch. 

Then there was the time that I had to have a cavity filled, and I was so anxious that the adrenaline in my bloodstream appears to have been chewing its way through the Novacaine like a honey badger.  They upped the saturation level on the gas to compensate, and suddenly not only did my damn mouth hurt, but the tiles in the ceiling turned sideways and then started to swirl around like they had melted and were being stirred by an invisible spoon.  Yeah, that was delightful.

Then there was the suffering through of the braces for two plus years, not the kind that go on the front of your teeth, no, but the BANDS and the tightening of the wires and the headgear that made my mouth hurt so bad I couldn't sleep and the retainer that I eventually just "forgot" to wear so that my teeth moved back a little bit.  And to think that when I was in the third grade I thought having braces would be SO COOL because you know, all the bigger kids were doing it.

Then there was the gentle dentist in the U-District who had a soft touch, but who also wasn't thorough and who gave me a filling when the tooth was actually cracked and needed a crown and a root canal, and so as soon as I was back at work and the numbness wore off I was in such extreme agony I wanted to cut my own head off.

Finally, though, I found this red-headed Lithuanian dentist downtown, and he turned out to be the most kind, gentle, thorough dentist I had ever found.  I saw him exclusively for the next 9 or 10 years.  I went to my appointments every six months.  I flossed.  I was a dental hygenists DREAM patient. 

And then I moved.  To New Jersey.  YOU try finding a dentist in New Jersey.   In 10 years I went to approximately five different dentists and I hated every single one of them. 

And then I moved again.

And I found another dentist who was OK, but not...just not THE dentist.  You know?  And because I hate the dentist anyway, my motivation to go see one has sagged below the waterline.

I brush, with a very expensive toothbrush that is supposed to destroy plaque, clean between teeth and make your gums as tight and strong as the buttocks of a professional soccer player.  I floss, most of the time, anyway.  But I still have the same bad enamel I was born with and I still grit my teeth when brushing my hair or clipping my nails or having a generally stressful day.  I grit my teeth so bad I don't have a single molar that isn't crowned because of me cracking it with my stress.

And now I have a tooth that's sensitive.  It already has a filling in it, and I've been looking and looking to see where there is evidence of a cavity and I cannot find it, so I can only guess that maybe the existing filling is getting old and needs replacing.  And I cannot, with the cold weather, stand having a tooth this sensitive, and I KNOW I need to get my teeth cleaned and x-rayed, and so I am going to the dentist on Friday.  I'm just scared (irrationally) that somehow I'll come home without any teeth.

My nightmare is that the dentist will look at my mouth and solemnly inform me "I'm so sorry, but they all need work.  This is going to take a while," as he holds up the biggest, longest needle I've ever seen in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other.

Ugh.

 

Small comfort

Comfort arrives in the most surprising ways.

You wonder, sometimes, when you sit there in the too-quiet, agonizing over your parenting decisions, your challenges, your failures, if the other parent whose parenting you can't see is somehow doing it better.  You wonder if maybe you are the problem parent, and when the teacher sends home an email that suggests that your kid behaves worse at school when he's with you, you feel defeated.  I'm not sure that fathers do this thing that mothers do, this thing where from the minute we are carrying them we look at other mothers and convince ourselves that they are doing the parenting gig better than we possibly could.

I secretly study the younger, hipper, cooler moms picking their kids up after school and I think they're more organized, more compassionate, more patient.  More attentive. 

Divorce complicates and fractures this sense of inadequacy into bigger and sharper splinters.  Are they happier when they're with me?   Is he the better parent?  Maybe they won't need me anymore.  Its illogical, its unproductive, its worse than useless, boo-hoo poor-me thinking, and yet its quietly there, whispering words to tear me down. 

I rationalize, temporize, self-console and give myself quiet pep talks.  I'm doing what I can, maybe not perfectly, some days a lot better than other days, and if the key indicator of my relationship with my children is that they love and trust me and share all their thoughts and fears with me, then I'm doing pretty all right.  But still.  You wonder.

And then, when I need it most, an equalizer.

It comes in the form of a morning drop off.  When they arrive later than expected, when one of them is not even dressed, not medicated, not at all ready to catch the bus that's arriving in twenty minutes.  And I've already left for work and my lovely husband gets to handle it.  And I realize I'm not the only one who does this, I'm not the only one who struggles.  Because I've done this to him, I have, and I hoped when I did it that he wasn't judging me...just as I'm not going to judge him now.  He had a bad day, and so I have some small comfort knowing that I'm not the only one.

 

Picking Scabs

I find myself circling in the center of the room, holding patterns, avoiding the loss swept into the corners.  So much pain there, so little of it truly resolved.  I pushed it away to forget it, and this new life keeps asking me to sift through those painful memories and feel them all over again, this time really feel them, so I can grieve them and let them go.

I like the center, I like the pretending part where even though I was hurt, I was tougher than the hurt and the pain didn't really touch me.  I like the middle of the room where I imagine that these things today are not monsters I helped create but that they are all somebody else's fault.  I fear getting lost down the rabbit hole of black, jagged edges where everything I was supposed to be able to trust in wasn't ever really real.  I don't want to be confronted with those feelings yet.  I wanted to wait to deal with them, wait forever as if that's all it would take to make them less painful.

That's the tricky thing about them.  You would think that time would blunt them, burn down the hard and sharp parts, soften the clout to the side of my head and ease the squeeze of the fist on my heart.  And then I find that no, there has been not one iota of change in those feelings of helplessness and grief and anger and excruciating pain.  Not one shred of lessening of the feeling that it wouldn't have happened if I had been better, if I had less ugly, less messy, less self-absorbed. 

Thousands of miles between you and I and there's no comfort to be found, no shoulder to hide my face in, no enabler to help me pretend the past isn't real and that now and the tomorrow is all there ever was or ever will be.  No strong hand to hold to reassure me that this time its different, that you are not the other one.  Every shattered nerve, every thread of anxiety that loops itself through my gut adds more miles to what already exists between us.  But really, its only me putting them there. 

Where do I find the balance between unfocusing enough to make the time pass more quickly and crawling into the hole with old grief and letting it burn its way out of my core?  How do I keep myself from dropping - no, throwing down - the lines of connection so that we can still be reached?

Trust comes so hard for me.  No, you are not the other. I know that.   Never have I had any reason to do anything other than trust you. But the ugly voice from the corners reminds me:  There was a time when I didn't have any reason not to trust him, either.  Open and transparent-seeming eyes looked straight at me, reasonable voices comforted me, soothed me and fed me buckets of steaming lies.  Which part is the part where I can distinguish between the real and the construct?  

And so I avoid the corners.  Let the things swept there lie a while longer.  

Traumatic

I have always loved words.  I grasped the concept of reading at the age of three and I never looked back.  Through the bright afternoons of my childhood and the impossibly dark years of puberty and college, reading provided me with a way to escape, an avenue of avoidance.  My life has never been so bad, but I did have a lot to avoid.

That early grasp of language earned me a boot uphill, out of kindergarten and into the first grade.  Academically I was more than ready, and it feels sometimes that I got average grades in school simply because I was always three steps ahead of where the rest of the class was learning, and so distractible if I couldn't be challenged, that I just got bored and stopped trying.  Academics were never really the issue, but social skills were for most of my childhood the crisis du jour.  Its one thing to say that I was a precocious little girl who easily got along with most adults and never met a stranger.  Its another to say that I had, then and now, difficulty making friends within my peer group.  Then, it was hard to be the child who wasn't socially mature, who was sensitive, who cried easily.  Whether it was that they sensed in me an easy type of prey or whether they resented me for being smart or just because they loathed me on sight, the girls in my classes from elementary school all the way up were not kind to me.  I had few friends, none of them from my class in school.  The older I got and the more aware of it I was, the worse it felt. 

When I started fifth grade we had a new teacher at my school.  She and I did not click well, she seemed to resent the time that I was pulled from her class for advanced learning modules, and I didn't have any respect for her.  I sensed clearly that she did not like me, and I simply refused to perform.  My mother met with the teacher a few times, and then with the principal.  When it became clear that we were going nowhere fast, my mom applied to the district to put me in a different school.

This meant Mom had to pick me up and drop me off at school every day, but apparently she felt this was worth the effort. 

It was in fifth grade that I started to develop, somewhat.  I got my first bra that year. 

They didn't make stretchy little cotton training bras back in 1975.  They made torture ensembles of heavy straps and heavy cups, or so it seemed to me.  But I was proud of my new bra.  I thought it made me very grown up.

My first day at my new school with my new bra, I showed it to one of the girls in the bathroom.  "What size is it?" she asked.  "32A," I proudly replied.

That was the last moment I was proud of my boobs for a number of years.  Because the minute I walked out of the girls bathroom into the hallway and onto the playground for recess, my new classmates had cleverly concocted a little chant just for my benefit:

Roses are red, Violets are blue - Mary wears a bra sized THIRTY TWO!

I wanted the pavement to crack open and swallow me whole.  I spent recesses for the next few weeks inside the classroom or in the library, reading books and making every effort to escape my classmates.  They would find me, though, and the chanting would begin, until I think finally some teachers and playground duties cracked the whip and the taunting stopped. 

By the time I started my first menstrual cycle in junior high I knew WAY better than to tell anyone.

Of course, it wasn't easy to hide those bulky kotex pads that you had to pin inside of your underwear.  It would have been less obvious to wear a diaper.  Fortunately by then, most of us girls were menstruating and the girls that weren't didn't want to make it obvious that the rest of us were more "mature" than they were, so they kept their mouths shut.   We were all old enough to be horribly embarrassed by our rapidly changing bodies, and topics of menstruation and "female things" were mercifully left untouched.  Besides, there were plenty of other things to find fault with.

Thankfully I've recovered from the horror of those early days of development.  I've learned to appreciate my bosom and to not feel embarrassed when other people (visibly, verbally, whatever) appreciate it too.

Two weeks ago my daughter came home from her dad's wearing a cute new outfit.  The top has patterned sleeves and a hoodie, but the part over her chest and torso are thin white cotton.  Looking at her twirl and preen in front of the mirror, I was smiling under my hand when the awful realization struck me.    I wanted to throw up.

My baby girl needs a bra.

Its different for her, thankfully.  She's not the first one in her class, not by far, and the selection of bras for budding girls is by far superior than what we had available to us thirty-odd years ago.

We went shopping.  She picked out three - one gray, one pink, one turquoise.  She looks adorable.  Not once has she come home in tears having been teased by her peers for wearing one.

Do you know what's more traumatic than being teased for wearing a bra to school?

Being the mother of a girl who is now old enough to need a bra.