The slow climb out
I have been thinking about anger, forgiveness, and compassion. Writer Jim Murdoch recently commented here on the idea that perhaps we have to forgive ourselves before we can forgive other people (while Grace discussed the pointlessness of the concept for her). There is some truth to the idea that self-forgiveness has to come first, though I also see the two working in parallel, each process supporting the other. I’m in the midst of forgiving myself, struggling with what forgiveness means for me and how I apply it to other people (while I talk a good talk, I certainly haven't forgiven all the people on my pain list). I've concluded that a huge part of forgiveness involves compassion, suffering together with others, a recognition of our shared humanity and pain even when our viewpoints differ, even when the other person's vision of us is clouded by their own aching pain.
My desire to be open to others’ misery, even those who have hurt me and are not capable of being open to mine, is strong. I am beginning to feel that being open emotionally does not put me at soul risk (though, of course, this is a very new feeling, an ideal that I have barely put into practice. I can't claim complete emotional openness and 24-hour selfless compassion.). What is so interesting about this feeling, new and delicate and soft, is how it fits together with my recent shifts, my solid acknowledgment of my strength and my desire -- and, hopefully, ability -- to become more connected. Compassion frees me from emotional selfishness and allows me to make myself vulnerable even in the face of rejection, though it doesn't require me to pursue bad situations or put myself in precarious emotional conditions. Being compassionate is not the same as being foolhardy.
Lest you think I really am a Pollyanna, I’ve been writing a lot of very angry personal stuff this week, things totally inappropriate for anyone’s consumption but mine. This writing serves a purpose. It acknowledges my feelings, that I deserve to be treated well, no matter if I am a tempestuous toddler, an angry teenager, or a struggling adult. It carries the conviction that I am capable of authenticity, that I am capable of holding and comforting myself when I am scared and lonely, but can also ask for help when I need it, and that my needs are legitimate and real. These feelings and changes were partially the result of my ability to finally give long-simmering anger a voice and shape. I am grateful to that anger for allowing me to be myself, for helping me recognize when I have been wronged, and for protecting me in difficult times.
But I don’t want to live in anger. I let it serve its purpose. I open my heart again, knowing that I am strong and all too human, that I make mistakes but that my mistakes are not what make me. We all suffer. We all cause pain. Sometimes we run away from suffering, we push it away or deny it, which only traps us in its snares, and in that escape we often hurt others.
It’s people stuck in this cycle for whom I have the most compassion right now, the blind and hurting, those who are scared but don’t know it, those who want closeness but dart away at intimacy. I am slowly climbing out of that dark and airless place, one foot on the fresh meadow grass, the other pushing out of the sludge. I hope that my burgeoning openness, my growing compassion, will help me see others clearly, or at the very least calm me in times of trouble, anxiety, and pain.
We are all interconnected despite our vast differences. The thought comforts me.
Image: Not my kind of compassion. Some positive thinker chalked this on the sidewalk on our route to and from the boy's school. The joke we made was that if you quickly hugged the next person you saw, probably a stranger, they would slug you ("Quick! Slug someone!"). And maybe you would deserve it. Compassion is not forcing your lovin' arms around someone who doesn't want them there.
Easier said than done
I struggle with accepting anger in myself and others, wrestle with being with it and not reacting in kind when someone directs (or misdirects) it my way.
This is good. This is hard. To sit with anger, your own or someone else's, to let it be without action or harsh words, with silent contemplation, can be almost impossible. But I think there are ways to feel it and, even if you express it badly at the moment, to pull back and wait for a moment of coolness to discuss it with the other person and to listen to their anger, too. A lot of anger comes from pain, either pain from the immediate present or something left over and suppressed, suppressed and simmering and ready to blow. It can come from fear, too, fear of feeling that pain again, so shove it away, push away the trigger, the other.
But what I really want to write about is anger and forgiveness. I know some people don’t believe in forgiveness (perhaps for them the goal is indifference). I know that it isn’t always possible and is dependent on the situation and the people involved, on the harshness of the crime and sometimes on whether the wrongdoer has taken responsibility for their actions. It sounds like a cliché, and I’m struggling with it myself, but forgiveness is a gift both to me and the person I am forgiving. It is a way of seeing someone and letting them be that person, letting go of attachment to anger, tracing the anger to where it belongs, feeling the pain and setting it free.
Maybe there are people you can forgive but can never be close to again. Maybe there are people whom you forgive and discover that forgiveness is the thing that cleared the way for renewed friendship. Forgiveness doesn’t have an agenda. It is a form of freedom from heavy emotion that drags one down. It's acceptance of the other person's limitations and your own, a nod to humanity.
Here are my forgiveness crucibles: unfairness; emotional cruelty; not giving someone a voice. I can go around and around in my mind about them, go over pains from years ago or just last week, obsessing over the wrong someone did me, imagining the conversation I would have with them, if they would only give me a voice. And so my psyche revs up and the anger lives again and my attachment to the situation is never severed.
I say forgive. Let go. Drop the reins. And, if you must, walk away.
It's a goal, anyway.
I chose the category "Facing fears" for this post because I think to listen to anger, to accept it in yourself and in other people, and then to choose to forgive, is a scary thing. It requires presence and risk taking and authenticity. Bravery. This feels very pie in the sky, but it's also how I feel at this moment.
Image of the boy running from waves in Carmel, free and happy.
Truth or dare
Maybe it was those dreams of French hackers who took over my Facebook account, adding me to groups on postmodernism and cooking, on philosophies of sophistry, on European pop groups and flexible sexuality. Maybe I was too hot last night. Maybe it was the stomachache I went to bed with that could have been the beginning of a night of anguish but was held off with pills. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe this is my protective carapace in action – just try to reach me through this hidden, hard shell. Go ahead. Try.
The house gleams, clean from floor to fur-free floor (with some exceptions). The day will be gray and blustery and I will conquer worlds from the filtered light of cloud cover. I have to-do lists. I have fires to feed. In my mind there is a heated swimming pool in a luxurious addition to a house I’ve never been in. The water shimmers, it moves slightly as if the earth beneath it is adjusting itself. I stand on the lip, feet wet, in my bathing cap and my bathing suit from seventy years ago (the fabric is heavy and the water binds it to my skin). I do not face the pool, but somehow I make the backwards dive, smooth, clean, triumphant, body sharp as a knife.
In the morning I drink coffee. In the afternoon, hot water. At night, beer and wine. When resourceful, present, I cook every night. I improvise, it’s like jazz or being on stage, and so what if the audience is small and my work, my art, hidden?
I am not supposed to be beholden to my moods, to let emotional whim control my day and how I see myself (it’s an Ennegram type four thing, and it makes sense). If I tie my stability to my every strong feeling, I am bound to implode. But there are days when I feel strong and confident, when I am open, and there are days when I feel strong and confident in a defensive way. I like to ride these feelings when I have them, even if I am shadow-boxing in the living room by the heat of a midday fire, alone except for the animals, making the air move around us, watching the raindrops on the window merge and take each other down.
My body and my mind are my own. I am sovereign over this land. Try and catch me, try and categorize me, take what you see and make it into something else. Go ahead. Try.
I dare you.
Image originally by Margaret Chute of Dorothy Sebastian and Joan Crawford (!) in 1927; scanned by Allison Marchant.
I feel better now.
Packing heat
I like to pretend that I don’t get angry, that it’s all modulation and reasonableness and no drama (oh, God forbid the drama, which translates into inconvenient emotion). Sure, there are flare ups, sudden explosions of short shouted words, bitter and small as they leave my mouth. Yes, there are times when I navigate my grocery cart around the morons and the clueless in the Berkeley Bowl that I might, just might, want to slam my cart into someone, knock them to the ground or at the very least leave a nasty bruise on their yoga- and Pilates-muscled thigh.
But yesterday I realized that I had been a ticking time bomb, a powder keg waiting for a spark, a heady mixture of really pissed off and really sad and the tears intermingled with the tooth grinding and I woke up this morning with a headache and memories of random dreams, of the old classmate with the black Mini, of the old love interest who showed up and stripped down to his boxers, made himself at home in the living room reading the New York Times.
Ah, but I dance away from the topic even now. Nice girls – sweet girls – don’t get angry. What is it about anger that scares us so much? When I was little, my mother was explosive, a shouting, glass-tossing, running out of the house like a maniac angry person. This was my emotional incubator, a place where insults were regularly traded during moments of hotheadedness. Not a functional model, but neither is ignoring anger or controlling it to the point that it is as if it never existed.
I want to feel this anger, to ride it, to let it dissipate slowly, slowly as I heal or change or get used to the new landscape of my life. But I feel guilty about it, too, because anger usually has a target and my target doesn’t seem to be able to take it. The anger enters this person and does its internal damage. It smashes and destroys and brings on paralyzing guilt. It clears the shelves and drinks all the whiskey. It was precisely this dynamic that made me tamp down the anger in the first place, but the dynamic has been rendered meaningless. It matters less now, and so my anger is back. With a vengeance.
It’s packing heat. It doesn’t care who it tramples. It hates itself at the same time, a bully without a home, a feeling without a use, the furnace of pain personified, directed, because without a direction the anger has nowhere to go but inward. It pummels me, or I pummel myself, because the anger and I are one, we dance together, her and me. She’s my skin, my teeth, the glint in my eye when I walk down the street.
From the prompt "It makes me mad."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by ElRobboz.
Men, liquor, punk and pregnancy
Longtime readers have heard it all before. First I shared it, then I shaped it. Now I continually reinterpret, run my fingers over the words, trace the abandonment, part of the story that led me to where I am now. I've gone from openness to control to anger twice removed.
My fabulous writing group met on Monday night. I finally passed Reconciliation on to them, the story of the end of Kevin's life, how we supposedly reconciled through his long last hospitalization. Kevin was my mother's boyfriend from 1984 until his death in 2002. He was a mixed bag, more rotten than good, and his presence in my life led to the troubles, continued and expanded my narrative of never-good enough, of self-blame, the dance of convincing and wheedling, of proving my worth to the unworthy and congenitally reluctant.
I passed the story on to the group, but I didn't want to go there. Life has been emotional enough lately without retracing the days of ventilators and morphine. But there I sat with these wonderful supportive women, who had kind words and useful feedback, including the desire to hear more of my story with Kevin, to have the payoff, to understand why reconciliation was required in the first place and what led to it in the end.
I'm thinking. I'm thinking. It's complicated, of course. Unfortunately, the upshot of what I am thinking is that there was no reconciliation. What went on for those six and half months of Kevin's final hospitalization, of all those hours I spent next to him in the hospital, was another one of my attempts at healing, at proving how good I was, at trying to remake the old story in a different way. The guy was a bastard who didn't deserve my goodness, but I was -- and remain -- too fucking kind to have treated him any other way. It's the same kind of empathy that keeps me from being able to direct too much anger at my mother (with her own troubles) or at a person who recently did me wrong, who hasn't manned up and never will (poor kid: it's hard to be strong when you're an emotional mess).
I started this post yesterday, kept on typing and erasing with the usual worries about pulling up the past on a thick narrative rope. I don't write this to keep the past alive, I write it to interpret it and my interpretation keeps changing. Conveying the depth of my abandonment -- my abandonment "issues," as cliched as they are, as typical, as shared with the masses -- without resorting to maudlin description is almost impossible and yet I am compelled to write about it, to share it, to neutralize it.
We could take my history with Kevin scene by scene, ugly fight by nasty canard, that first dinner where Kevin tore into 14-year-old me for being quiet and sullen followed by my mother having dinner at his house every night followed by her telling me that Kevin said I was evil and she agreed followed by my move to the Little House, the stillbirth, the continued life in bad circumstances. I could add in the confusing bits: his sit down with me and my boyfriend D after the pregnancy, lecturing D about our relationship "because her father isn't doing it;" his confidence in my intellectual abilities and advice to get a library degree; his funny stories that left the impression of uproarious laughter long after the plots were forgotten.
My child's mind fit the pieces together, they already were set in place, but the neglect of my teen years cemented the image: I was the catalyst for the bad things that happened to me. I caused it all. I was a bad person. I deserved what I got. I was a liar and a cheat, irresponsible and evil, too quiet or not quiet enough. Because of the evil within me, the evil I spread with my bad words and dark looks, I was left behind. I was to blame for my own neglect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the history. I know it's bullshit. And I know that writing it out in such bald language doesn't really help. It does get me angry, which isn't such a bad thing -- though the anger remains directionless and sometimes turns on me. Lately, with the help of my therapist, I've been feeling the feelings -- the sadness, the need that once had no end, the anger -- with the understanding that they won't destroy me. That they are totally appropriate. It's the only way I know to heal at this point, letting them out in fits and starts when they need it, giving them a voice, that and being brave, knowing I'm not a child anymore.
It's less about the history now, it's about the effect, the acceptance, the march forward. The feelings are with me in the room, they know why I've called them here, and we're going to hash it out together. We will gut and rebuild my psyche without looking back.
Enough about this. You were expecting stories about men (the gropings), liquor (siphoned gin leaking out of jars on the bus from Wilmington to Newark), punk (fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck her fucking brat), and pregnancy (pushing out silence). But I'm sure you have some of your own stories of love and the bottle and the music that saved you, that kept you from smashing something, that tapped into your anger before your head exploded.
I will leave you with a bit of punk, Riot by the Dead Kennedys, something I listened to on my headphones as I walked through the Wilmington night, lit cigarette resting between my fingers. I was a little unsteadily from the gin, from the vodka, from the amaretto, but I kept on going, turned the anger in on itself, gave myself another scene for future narrative.
Image: Legs, Little House, 1985ish, one of three in the "Legs" series, probably taken when I was up late and liquored, waiting for a man.
Title comes from a comment on my essay from the writers' group. I tacked on the last word.
8:37, Saturday morning
Every Saturday he and his mother make pancakes and he watches the drama unfold. The eggs, chilled in their container, ignorant of their fate. Then, she selects two. It is never random. She moves from the back of the carton to the front. Surely the last eggs know what’s up, though she shuttles them back to the refrigerator before destroying their brethren. This is when he insists on touching an egg, on holding it for a brief minute, transferring his warmth to its cold shell.
“Do you want to crack one?” she will ask and he always shakes his head: No. The mess! Tom can tell she is relieved, even though she doesn’t let out a sigh or stretch her thin lips into a smile. It’s the way she angles her shoulders, the slight relaxation, the slump, when he returns the egg. He has become a master of the nonverbal, of the facial expression, trying to figure out the scene before inserting himself into it.
One Saturday, he did drop an egg, just let it go onto the kitchen counter to see what would happen. “Whoopsy!” his mother exclaimed in a too-bright voice as she hurtled herself across the kitchen to get a wipe. The clear white was oozing over the side of the counter, had just started to drip down the cabinets and onto the floor, and the dog, attuned to any utterance that sounded vaguely like “oops” had already honed in on the trail.
This time his mother did sigh, gave out a loud sigh, before taking out her frustration on the dog. “Mandy! OUT OF THE KITCHEN!” She threw up her arms and stomped her feet, glared as Mandy slunk back to the living room. “I’m sorry, Mama,” Tom said, his heart fluttering, as she picked pieces of shell off the counter and attacked the remains with a sponge. The air around them, charged with anger, calmed as she looked up at him. Everything stopped. She reached out and cupped his cheek, leaned over to kiss his forehead.
It’s always the way, she thought, the anger that explodes out of nowhere, like an egg cracked into hot oil. The expression on Tom's face, the knowledge that she is her mother, that she will be apologizing forever for her lack of self-control, for the spark that she passes on unwittingly. Here's hoping he isn’t as delicate as an egg.
From a prompt: You hold it. As Anne told me recently, the prompts have been good to me lately. Though very shatter-focused.
Image by Petr Kratochvil.
The noises of destruction
One night, frustrated, I drained a 12-ouncer and went outside. Two feet from the oak, I held on to the bottle as if it were a diminutive baseball bat, gripped its neck with my fingers, and slammed the tree with as much force as a slightly drunk sixteen-year-old girl could.
It’s harder to break a bottle than you think.
From a writing prompt last summer: Out the window. NaNoWriMo is beginning to drive me crazy. Sixteen days. 41,000 words. One messy and rambling novel very close to completion.
Bit of trivia: my mother now makes jewelry from pieces of broken glass she finds on the street or breaks on the cement slab in her own back yard, a picture of calm with a broom and dust pan.
Writing prompt: Bone tired
Two notes: This is fiction. And for a much more encouraging take on "Fake it until you make it," check out the post The Greatest Love from the fabulous Melinda Roberts Tyler of Melindaville.
Image from It is Called Mount Cope.
I’ve been reduced to this, eating cheese crumbs out of my clothes, stepping over the cat puke on the rug, shuffling outside in a pair of de-elasticized boxers and a translucent t-shirt, ancient and holey, to get the New York Times at 10:30 a.m.
Yeah, I’ll wave at you, neighbor woman from across the street. Hello. Hello. I don’t know your name because you never gave it to me. The first thing out of your mouth when we moved here two years ago was “Don’t park your car in front of my house again.” OK. Thanks for the welcome, lady. That was when I cared, when my skirts were crisped by the drycleaners, when I ran a brush through my hair in front of a wiped-clean mirror, when I spent half an hour every Saturday wrestling with that damn morning glory vine on the fence to keep it in line. I cared what you thought then, Neighbor, but I don’t anymore.
No. I don’t give a fuck. I trace these two years gone and if I cared I might wonder what happened. He left, briefly, though he’s back now. We’re back to the marriage bed, so to speak. I still can’t stand the feel of his hand on my back, how his fingers trace their way down to my ass. Fake it until you make it, the expression goes. That’s his philosophy, anyway, and at least he’s here. Says he’ll stay with me through this little setback of mine. This emotional trough. He claims to know what love is. This is it, supposedly.
But I don’t believe him and wait for him to disappear.
Inner battle
Grappling with myself. Photo by my husband, taken from the vast Santa collection of my father and stepmother.
The things I am supposed to be doing and don't want to do, the shoulds, they sometimes control me. They become obligations body-checked by anger. Or maybe it’s the should nots, the tamping down of what rises up naturally: I should not be feeling angry. I have no right to be upset.
This is not supposed to be a blog about current angst (except for the mundane, piles of laundry, sick kid, dog-walking variety). Most of the anger I carry around is the nostalgic sort, dealing with that stuff that happened when I was a kid, the things I can’t change and must make right in my mind in order to live a full life. It’s been working, for the most part. I’m letting go.
Yes, I have complained about my current relationships with my parents, have brought up marital discord from the not-so-distant past, but most of this has been in the context of grappling with painful memories, revealing old scars to healing light.
But I haven’t talked about my stepmother. Part of the reason I don’t talk about my stepmother is that she is practically a saint. She is my father’s total champion, and if anyone needs a champion, it’s him. My father has treatment-resistant depression, a condition he has been grappling with from the time he entered college. It was because of depression that he stopped working in his early 40s. The man has been on many different varieties of medication; he’s been through research studies; he’s done electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and lost a chunk of his memory in the process. Eventually the drugs lose effectiveness, the troughs get deeper, he stops functioning.
There are physical problems, too. Diabetes. Obesity. Arthritis. Within the last two years my father has developed debilitating back pain and can barely get out the door. At the age of 57, he is practically housebound, a predicament he and his wife have taken on with characteristic stoicism. Throughout it all, my stepmother has been a rock, always supportive, never complaining, a breadwinner, maker of meals, and vacuumer of a four bedroom house.
Why am I angry with this woman? Why am I carrying around this stupid useless feeling? Because I am invisible to her. Because when I was pregnant with my second son, she talked about it being my first baby (perhaps a teenage stillbirth doesn't count). Because – stupidly, since I really should let go of this one, but couldn't they have waited a week? – she got married to my father two days before my fourteenth birthday. Because she never even so much as e-mails on my birthday. She has no idea why I might be feeling pain and apparently doesn’t want to know. Perhaps she feels she might be implicated in some way. I don’t know.
My father loves me, but he has not been a very good father. It's just the truth. Four years of every other weekend visits does not a good father make. Financial support for one's child – which I do appreciate – doesn't make one a good father either, though certainly there are many absentee fathers out there who don't even do that. He laid the foundation for distrust early. A little recognition of this past and his part in it would make a huge difference. After he read the blog, he acknowledged it in a general way, though we've never talked about it. But what about her?
I know she thinks I'm a bad daughter and in many ways, I am. Phone calls sometimes go unreturned for days. I'm late with birthday and father's day greetings or send a lame e-card. I put off making our travel plans to see them and have been absent for multiple surgeries. I avoid discussions of Christmas, a holiday that is an obsession for them. The guilt floods over me, paralyzing and cold, and I feel a surge of preemptive, protective, useless anger.
What am I supposed to do with this anger? What do you do when you can’t talk to someone about your feelings? How do I do the right thing while honoring how I feel?
So many questions. Does anyone have answers?
(And when this particular angst is out of the way, I have many awards and other kindnesses to acknowledge. That's the next post.)