A Tinged Blue Day

I am tinged blue today. Of course it’s the weather. The whole neighborhood is tinged blue-grey. The

asphalt road’s dampness reflected steely grey and I needed nothing to shield my eyes when I walked the dog. It’s dim in a way that seems as if I’ll never see fully again.

But of course it’s not only the weather. It’s the 50^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That happened before I was born, but not long before. I was in utero, which numbers me one in the subset of my generation that feels we just missed being part of something great. I’m of that generation that grew up feeling like the best hope for our country had been thwarted and fizzled out in a frazzle of drug addled hippies, disco, and Watergate. We just missed free love, and grew up to meet AIDS. Watergate, conspiracy theories, and cynicism shaped our worldview. We never knew a time of real optimism, just a time of grief and reaction. We grew up and were described as cynics and slackers. Now we’re coming into power, bringing cynicism about government to work with and for the government. This can’t be good. This may explain some of the gridlock in Congress. Because we turned cynical as children we turned away from the power of government to do good. So now I find myself in a world where I feel weird arguing for the natural right of a person to have health care or food. Where I’m made to feel weird for suggesting that the government should help take care of its citizens, even at the expense of businesses, like the insurance business, being able to make profits. Is that right, to make people who argue for the protection of the health and welfare of others seem like spendthrifts? As if being good with money – i.e., accumulating it – is the highest virtue.

Speaking of grief. This reminds me of something that happened the other day in my NIA class – NIA is an exercise movement class based on dance, martial arts and yoga. Our teacher starts each class with a few comments on the focus for the day (like feet, or arms or fluidity). That day, she introduced a new routine and said she had made this routine the year before, but had never taught it, because just as she prepared to teach it, her father became ill, and she had to take time off and he passed away several weeks later. So this routine, she said, was dedicated to him, and she was teaching it now, a year later. Her voice cracked and I teared up, and I would bet there was a lump in the throat of everyone in the room.

Aside from acknowledging my teacher’s loss, I was struck by one of the nice aspects of living in a small community. I know the teacher – we socialize together sometimes, and chat about our children - and most of the people in the room are at least familiar to one another. But I was moved not only by our teacher’s story, but by her sharing of it. She stood up there in the front of the room and let us all in on her grief; furthermore, she did so without intellectualizing it, but letting her emotion come through. Then she turned on the music and started the routine and returned to her more familiar, buoyant self. This reminded me, as I am often reminded, when I think of a loss I’ve experienced, how amazed I am at people. We just keep going, with our losses and traumas, big and small, lodged inside. These losses knock the wind out of us, and they retain power even years later, and yet we go on, doing our things, all of us with our losses inside. Sometimes I wonder that we’re not all just staggering around from the heaviness; but we’re not, usually. We live, and that’s a beautiful thing. Still, it was good to remember that we all have these losses inside. If we remember that, we can have compassion for one another. To see a person living and know that she is living with loss makes it hard to be cynical.

Off the soap box.

TMI? The Tao of Worry

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Readers, I am obsessing about my left breast. I feel nothing different in it. It doesn’t hurt. And yet, in the past, I have had pain there, and a few months ago, I had a pulled muscle basically right underneath it. I spent so much time poking around the area that I bruised myself. Right now, nothing is going on. Yet I feel like I feel something, in the sense of sensing something. I feel like I sense something there. A thickness. A weirdness. Which reminds me of two things. One is this story about the sister of a friend who went to the doctor complaining that her breast hurt, “Right here.” She said, jabbing at the spot. The doctor said, “have you been doing that a lot?” “What this?” She said, jabbing at the spot. “Yes.” Said the doctor. “Yes,” she said. The doctor said, “Stop doing that.”

The other thing I'm reminded of is the homeopath I visited for a while in hopes of curing my chronic exercise-induced urticaria. (That’s hives, for the uninitiated.) I was also having problems breast feeding my kid with my LEFT breast. After taking my medical history she pointed out that  I have issues on the left side of my body. Left ovary removed. Mastitis in left breast. Then she gave me a little bottle of something. It didn’t cure the hives. Years later, acupuncture alleviated them - and also led to the discovery of the lipoma (fatty benign tumor) on my left shoulderblade. Left, left left.

So the explanation of why I’m obsessing about my left breast may be that because I have a history of things going wrong on the left side of my body, when I start to worry about things going wrong, I tend towards the left (sinistra in Latin - root of sinister, if you think about it) side.

Good thing I’m going for my annual mammogram on Monday. After which, the husband asked, will I be able to relax about my boob for a while? Yeah, probably for about a month. Realistically.

Of course, maybe the mammogram will reveal something wrong, and then I’ll have the very shallow pleasure of knowing that I was right. Except that I’ve spent a portion of pretty much every day worrying about cancer, so eventually, I may be right, no matter what. Lately, I’ve added cardiac concerns to my worry list. Not that I have heart trouble – at least not that anyone’s discovered. That's precisely the point. No one has discovered any problem. Yet anything could develop at any moment. And it’s the stuff you don’t know about that will get you. It happened to a couple of friends of mine. Of course they are still alive and healthy. But they are living with the knowledge that there’s something wrong with their hearts.

The real question, though, is why the worry in the first place?

Aren’t we all living with the knowledge that there could be something wrong? Indeed, isn’t there something wrong with all of our hearts? Hello? They are eventually going to stop working. We are going to die. That is what is wrong. That is why the worry.

Here are two pieces of advice I've been given by Professionals for dealing with worry:

1. Set aside a certain amount of time every day to worry, and then don't worry until that time.
2.  Or, worry once and worry well. 

This advice doesn't work for me. I cannot "worry once," and the time of day I set aside to worry is usually 3-5 a.m., which is kind of a drag.

I’ve concluded that I need to think about death. “Come to terms with death,” as some might say. Perhaps all you Readers  have come to terms with death and live worry-free lives of great empowerment and fulfillment. If so, please share.

I find it interesting that my worries increase as things get better in other areas of my life. For example, I have paying work. I recently got a raise. I’ve had some success with my blog. My kids and husband are healthy, and I have friends. So the question is, do I have some kind of homeostatic mechanism at work trying to keep me at emotional equilibrium? You know, don’t fly too high, don’t dip too low?  Is it a self-protective system to remind me to balance my life and pay attention to my physical health so I can continue? Is some kind of tao of worry at work? 

Or is it a pathological set up, a self-sabotage that keeps me from fully expressing whatever it is in me to express? The time I spend in useless, pointless worry about illnesses I don’t have, is time spent not doing things that are useful. And it's not as if it's protective. 

How to remove the anxiety? Besides medication, I mean. Perhaps, Readers, you are thinking that I am an excellent candidate for some kind of pill. Perhaps you are right. But I prefer not to take pills. I prefer  to manage my anxiety in other ways. This attitude, I understand, is one symptom of the anxious person. Or one symptom of one kind of anxious person. My kind.

But I digress. The idea is to Come to Terms with Death. Is that even possible? Have you, Readers? I know that Tibetan Buddhist monks sometimes meditate in graveyards and charnel houses to accustom themselves to the idea. And there is a nifty mantra – sutra – on impermanence:

I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape growing old.
I am of the nature to become ill. I cannot escape illness.
I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape death. 

It’s just not that appealing to meditate on these ideas. Yet, remembering that these processes – illness, old age (if you’re lucky), and death – are part of everyone’s parcel does relieve some anxiety. If you’re like me, you get into the mindset that everything in life is supposed to have a certain baseline: things are good, people are healthy, jobs are there, work is productive. So anytime something dips below baseline, there's a sense that there’s something wrong, abnormal, and let’s face it, kind of shameful. So it’s good to remember that there isn’t really a baseline, and that there’s nothing shameful about experiencing these natural processes of life.

All this blather reminds me of a high school weekend party I attended. I had a “deep” teenaged conversation about death with a person I won't name, because he was somebody’s boyfriend. Also because this is a blog, and I don't name names. But I apparently can't resist bragging about this boy obliquely. One of us was angsting about it (death) –guess who? The other one, he said he didn’t worry about death, because when he was dead, he wouldn’t care. And I found that so comforting. I had this moment of total release. It was so simple. Just letting go of the problem. It would come, life would be over, but it wouldn’t matter. Then he kissed me. 

Linking sex and death. Gee, has that ever happened before? Is there any literature on that? Well, anyway, it's a much more pleasant connection than I started with. Although mentioning sex does remind me of my left breast....

Sisterhood

"I thought you were a feminist," the husband joked after reading my last post. I am a feminist. Really. Truly. Germaine Greer, Nancy Friday, The Boston Women's Health Book Collective collectively, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Sisterhood Is Powerful,  Adrienne Rich, I read you all. Yes, sisters, I am a feminist, I swear. I was primed. 

So why the weird stuff about ambition? And how to explain my existence as a stay-at-home mom?

I was never going to be a stay-at-home mom. I was going to have a profession. A sanctioned, capital- P profession. Sanctioned by the parents, I mean. I've dipped into that a bit already, but to recap: That ship ran aground in my mid-twenties, when I realized - surprise- that what I really wanted to be was a writer, and immediately began doubting myself. Stepped off the sanctioned path, got lost in the woods.

Bad mixed metaphor, and beside the point. The point is, I was going to work "outside the home." Yes, I wanted children; but I was in one hundred percent agreement with Adrienne Rich that just because women are biologically compelled/created to have children doesn't mean that having children is the ultimate fulfillment of a woman's destiny. Motherhood wasn't going to complete me. It wasn't my destiny, it was my choice. I agreed then. I agree now. Really.

So even though no childbirth was going to be my ultimate experience, even though having a child wasn't going to fill some hole in my womanhood that would forever go empty, no baby was going to plug a gaping hole in my psyche, well, maybe - definitely - because I didn't have a mother, it did.

Probably because my mother died when I was a baby I discovered a hunger for that mother-child bond that awakened with the birth of my first child. I took a leave of absence from my teaching job, and suddenly, I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to leave my child. Ever. Possibly to a pathological degree.

Who would want to miss a moment when every moment with a baby is full of change and growth?

At the same time, who wants to be "just a mom," a full time job with zero status (unless it is the status gained by proving that you're able to stay home when almost everyone else has to work at least part time, but that's really just reflected status from the breadwinner, not true status?) Who wants to give up autonomy, financial independence, future financial gain, lunches out,  and fun shoes to stay home with this magnetic source of drudgery, filth, frustration, and fatigue?

Choose motherhood? You spend years on the floor or the bathroom--which, by the way, you can never enter by yourself (and closing the door while small hands beat upon it and little eyes peer underneath it or pass desperate notes through the slit does not count as privacy.) "They suck everything out of you," I've heard more than one parent say about their children. The best comment I ever heard, though, from a friend whose three children were under five at the time, was that she "felt like an elevator." Choose motherhood? I did.

If you'll permit an extended metaphor, I would say that being a mother is like a being a nail. You start out all shiny and pointed, and end up dented and flush against the surface of some structure whose shape you can't discern, and which is permanently under construction. Oh, sure, it's only you, doing your part to create a dependable, sturdy, solid corner of the scaffolding of society, but it's awfully hard to remember you're doing something important when your head's been pushed down so far, and not too many others notice, either.

And as wrong as it feels to agree that motherhood has such low status, I actually spend time distancing myself from this choice by making sure that everyone knows that I'm a writer, too. I'm a mom, but also a writer. I mean, it is true. I am a writer. And one of the benefits of being a writer is that I can arrange my schedule so my children are the priority when they're around. For many years they were the only priority, because the labor side of motherhood was so intensely physical and non-stop there was no time or energy for anything else. Even so, I clung to the writer-identity to give myself a modicum of self-respect. Oh no, I'm not "just a mom." I'm a writer.

And another thing. The raising of children is one job, the management of a home, another. I am a parent, yes, but not a maid or a domestic goddess. Who wants to be that? Only very famous people who get paid to do that work.

As usual, I am a welter of conflict about this topic. I feel the job is vital; but does that mean that mothers who work outside the home are doing a lesser job? I know that many who do feel they're failing at both, the paying job and the mom job. It's damn hard to do one thing really, really well. So doing two?

The bottom line is that I feel angry that I feel ashamed  about this choice. I feel I have to apologize to the "real" feminists, because to choose mothering as a career places you in dependency on someone else, and that is a big, feminist no-no. Furthermore, I worry I'm being a bad role model for my children. Mine are both girls, but if I had a boy, I would also worry that he would think that being "just a mom" is what women should be. And there's reality, too, which is that my children have to plan to take care of themselves financially, and while I'm providing them a role model of a mother, I'm not providing them with a role model of a financially independent working woman.

That part I'm trying to change.