The buzz
I’m not sure why this particular side effect has stuck. My appetite has returned. I blame my sleeping problems on my mind now and not on the rush of my medicated heart. The jitters disappeared on week three of my regimen. I only notice the ringing when I am quiet, when I sit down to read or in the conversational lacunae, the slow moments when I can't tune out my head. Just after I started writing this post, the heat kicked on and so the buzz has been wiped out by the exhale of forced air, the concentration of warmth, but I can feel the vibrations just inside the bone.
I’ve grown used to talking casually about antidepressants, about being depressed, and I live in a bubble world where that’s ok. But in the online class I’m taking through a community college, well, not everyone has jumped on the depression bandwagon, meaning that not everyone thinks that it exists as an actual affliction.
I don’t know my classmates, don’t totally remember their stories. I do know they run the gamut from curious high school students to graduate students fulfilling a requirement. A number of them are from rural areas of California. Most are young, somewhere in their late teens or early twenties. There are people with shining positive outlooks and those for whom religion is vital, essential to their world view, and there are some who are unsure of their place in the world.
One of our latest class discussion questions was in part about whether feelings of anxiety and dread were a part of being human. Um, well, of course?? That’s not how I put my response, but that sums up my conclusion. We all experience anxiety and deep dread – or should – and perhaps we have to experience them in order to understand what it means to be human, to sit with the pain of other people and let them sit with ours. This doesn’t mean that we have to totally accept the feelings. There are ways of holding them close while moving toward the light, of keeping the worst of what is human in a carefully cupped hand and holding that hand up to the sun.
In the discussion, I briefly mentioned taking antidepressants. No one attacked me personally for this – it’s not that kind of forum – but I was surprised both by how some approached the question (“well, I certainly hope that feelings of anxiety and dread aren’t part of being a person!”) to their clear disdain of depression as an actual malady. Some incoherently compared antidepressants to alcohol, something the weak get hooked on. Others wrote that the idea of anxiety and dread as a part of being human sounded like something cooked up by a pharmaceutical company looking to market a new antidepressant (ah, if only the pharmaceutical companies were more existential in their marketing approaches).
I wasn’t expecting subtlety from my classmates. I wasn’t expecting a group hug. I don’t really care what they think about depression or antidepressants for my sake. But it worried me for their own sakes or for their family members and friends who might be going through a thick sad depressive hell and are afraid to speak up for fear that they show their weakness or their lack of “positive attitude.”
Depression isn’t a simple thing. The reasons for it are many, a weird concoction of genetics and history, of circumstances and chemistry. I resisted the idea of it lurking in myself for years, though now that I look back I can see how I’ve gone through bouts of depression before. Some of it originates in isolation and compacted grief. Some of it is from childhood experiences. I am sure there is a genetic component as well. But whatever the reasons, my experience of it is real and the antidepressants are helping. Are they placebos? Maybe. But I choose to believe they are working for me now in the way I need them to, that they are clearing my mind so that I can do the hard work of becoming a whole human being.
It’s worth the constant buzz in my head and the occasional judgment from strangers. I know what I am experiencing. I know I am not alone, that my truth is someone else’s, maybe yours, and that together we can support each other across the ether, can hold our anxiety and dread up to the sunlight while clasping each other's hand.
Image of the head of Athena at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by Walter Gobetz.
When the pep talk mantra doesn't work
It was a day of little triumphs, like the amazing feeling of getting a fidgeting, recalcitrant first grader to push through words she thought she couldn’t read. Every time she did it and I told her see, I knew you could do it, she giggled with surprise (at her abilities? at my goofiness?). We ended the session with a high five and I thought: this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel good.
It was a day of strangeness. I had my monthly medication check-in with the psychiatrist. We made Mad Men psychiatry jokes and talked about the good parts of being an introvert, and then my worries about my son’s social contentment, which are all mixed up with feelings about my social issues as a kid. It’s waking me up at 1:00 a.m., these worries, despite my constant pep talks to myself: he’s fine, there is nothing wrong with him, there was nothing wrong with you, think of all the support he has that you didn’t, he will get through childhood relatively unscathed, he’s only six, etc. etc. I was clearly fighting back tears when we spoke, which is when she asked me the salient questions. Have I been crying a lot lately? (Kind of, but for what feels like good reasons.) Any suicidal thoughts? (Absolutely not.) Usually she asks me what I think we should do with my medication. This time she made the decision to stick with my usual dosage.
There was money stress, figuring out how we were going to pay our property tax and its surprise supplementals, making sure our monthly bills were paid, doing the accounting for the next six months, complete with emergency savings plan.
Then there was the regular Thursday play date with the boy’s good friend, except something is happening to their friendship and I don’t know what to do about it. Actually, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can see what was once close fading in front of me and again my insides stir up, they tighten. It’s like I have tangled wires in my gut. They fight about everything, these two opinionated personalities that want to control the agenda in different ways. I intervene because I have to. I play monster to make them laugh and keep the peace. I want it to be easy, or at least I want to know that when this ends (if this ends) that my boy has someone else he can be comfortable with and I worry again that his social life will never be easy. How can I give him the tools to make it better for himself?
Finally, at dinnertime, with the takeout from Gregoire, my post-5:00 p.m. beer making me groggy, my everything is fine/don’t want to wallow in worry attitude not working very well, I told my son about my first grade best friend and our huge fights, the way I was jealous of her closeness with the neighbor girl, and how it got better as we got older. There was a Halloween tie-in, the story about her Halloween visit to our apartment in fourth grade when my mother followed trick-or-treating with an ill-advised reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders at the Rue Morgue.
Do you have any more stories about Halloween to tell me, he asked. He’s heard them all before, but I told them again with more detail. Halloween 1976, second grade, was where my mother wanted me to wear a mask and I didn’t, because I was dressed up as a Colonial girl and Colonial girls didn’t wear masks. She refused to let me trick-or-treat without one, so I sat at home and watched the kids in their costumes, my chest tight and the streaks of dried tears still on my unmasked face (Nana was very stressed back then, the explanation always goes, and it is absolutely true). Halloween 1980, sixth grade, was where my best friend and I wandered along a windy unlit country road to get to another neighborhood and I worried about deer stampeding when I should have worried more about being hit by a car.
I don’t know how it happened, but the boy started getting teary and then I did, too, and when I walked over to hug him, I knocked my knee into his chair in a very painful way. After that, I put on pajamas and took to my bed. My husband kindly did the rest of the evening routine while I read magazines and stared at my computer.
And at 1:00 a.m., the worries spilled out again. They woke me up with their relentless whining. I concentrated on my breathing. I let thoughts of the closeness of others comfort me, and, eventually, I fell back asleep.
Image: The boy this summer.
Soul container
I like to picture myself in the mirror of his mind, constant, perfect, beautiful. He contains my soul in cupped hands, treats me gently, always wants to know how I’m feeling.
Thinking about this prompt this morning, how I dealt with it last week and how I always want to focus back on love, the love that I am not sure I believe in, the slipperiness of sex and the danger of it, too, I thought again to the theme of being a character in someone else’s mind, fully known, maybe even created by them, and totally loved. I want a man-god to contain me, to see me from fault to fault to cracked fault. I want to matter on some fundamental level to this idealized creature, this fiction.
What is this all about? Well, isn’t this part of why I am in various therapies, to expose this man for what he is, to rip off his corny toga and see my history written on his skin? It comes back to the original story, the neglected teenage years, though I know it goes further back than that. I still don’t understand how I was allowed to essentially live on my own from fifteen onward, how I stayed in that little unheated, unplumbed guest house even after the baby was born (dead, as my mother coached me to push), how the focus was on me taking responsibility and not on my withered and suppressed grief. I was invisible, I was a blank slate for meaningless platitudes and no one was able to come in and rescue me from the situation.
I say that the antidepressants have separated me from my stories, from my past, and its true. I don’t have as much of an urge to tell the stories over and over again. I’ve contained them with words and made them public. But this story is so huge and meaningful and layered.
When I went to the psychiatrist, when I finally was ready to admit that I was depressed and needed pills, I told her the story. She was appropriately sympathetic and said something interesting: that a year or two of therapy was not enough to deal with this sort of trauma. Of course, she’s working from a therapeutic perspective. But it made me realize that yes, this event did matter, that I have to deal with it, that maybe I’ll be seeing my therapist for a while on this one, despite my urge to just pretend that with the dissipation of my depression, all is well.
So: the man-god who grasps me with his mind, who sees all? He is a vestige from the long time of invisibility, he is my childish desire for parenting, for the hand hold across the street. He plucks me from my past and saves me from myself. It’s effortless, the dance between me and this man. He massages away the scars and heals my soul.
He doesn’t exist.
From the prompt "The best feeling in the world." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take.
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 from the Pime Missionaries of North American (who knows where they got it from). It hasn't escaped me that some people get this feeling of being seen and held from religion, from an idea of G/god. But this is not an authentic path for me.
Reluctant room parent bares all
When we sat in the florescent-lit classroom last September, our five-year-old children ensconced elsewhere as we learned about the year ahead, what kindergarten would be like, I had no idea what I was doing. Yes, I signed up to be a room parent, one of the first on a list of four or five. I thought that it was part of my job as a sometimes-disgruntled stay-at-home mom, a hyphenated sort, to do that kind of thing, you, know, for the children or more specifically for my child, though I’d be helping other peoples’ children along the way.
Confession: I am not a gung-ho type. I like to be left alone and I don’t like to incite others to give group presents or bring treats to various parties. I don’t have fun ideas for teachers and if I had my way my son and I would spend long afternoons in imaginative splendor, him hopefully with a friend along, me coasting and thinking and being.
Another confession: I didn’t realize back in September that I was depressed, that I would take my family along on a melodramatic ride this school year, that many of our post-school afternoons would consist of me being cranky and removed, anticipating the four p.m. IPA. I didn’t know how lonely I was or how desperate, or that I would find it difficult to get motivated to even cook dinner, let alone organize our disparate group.
I know it all now. I’m feeling better, though with the new uptick in the antidepressants my sleep has gone to shit again. The lovely thing about a long stretch of insomnia is that it forces you not to care about the little things (unless it makes you a sodden sobbing mess, but the meds have dried up most of my tears). It gives me a clarity and I see our classroom, our sets of parents with their home lives and their work lives and their problems like everybody else’s and I just don’t care. I have a job to do, the gathering of cash, the classroom squirrel storing things up for the teacher’s present. I harangue you all to sign the card, to bring sugary crap to the end-of-school party. I forward the many missives to give money here or provide food there.
Some of you know me better than others. But I realize as the year winds up and I look back at my mistakes, at how my hopes for this brave new world of elementary school were naïve, at how I was looking for a way out or a new path and was misguided … I realize that it takes a long time to know anybody. My public face is deceptive, though not deliberately so. I am contained. I am a good girl with snarky, dirty thoughts. I look sweet and I may even act that way, but in reality, I am a pit of twanging nerves and imagined violent scenarios.
Or, families of Room 188, that’s how I feel this morning, up before the morning birds have started their business. I hear one of them warming up now. I thank him for his perspective, for the liquidity of his voice. I’ll get another cup of coffee and think of my day. I’ll think of the children.
Sincerely,
Jennifer (blonde boy #3's mom)
From the prompt "Warning signs." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach.
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 of shadows on playground sand by me.
Stay
In the middle of the night, when the dreams wake you up (always a bus and an almost stranger, the meeting in a restaurant turned to a mysterious journey. Last night it was Emily with her magic eyes and her reserved manner and there you were on the bus and there she was behind, dragging a fifteen foot bench they had left by accident), quiet your mind, tell your brain to rest, that nothing is so important that you need not sleep. The night is a dark time for thoughts and love. It is the time that ghosts steal souls, that your life leaves through your breath.
But don’t think about that. Think about small, soft things, sleeping puppies, the tomatoes growing out back, the feel of butter sauce in your mouth. If you must go to the bathroom, walk there with your eyes shut and ignore the cat as he rubs his scent against your calves.
The truth is that nothing is really important, that life is a series of moments connected by time. Yesterday in the sunlight you thought you were happy. On the Bay Bridge, the traffic inching for a reason that had not yet been revealed, you thought of the repetition, its “here-you-are-again” nature, the bridge above and below, the bay gleaming out the window .
Then you passed five police cars – it’s a habit now to count things, so goes life with a kindergartner – and a tow truck, but no car. The police officers were looking over the edge of the bridge and you thought: oh no. Oh no. The boy asked you and your husband what you were oh noing and neither of you really wanted to talk about, so you glossed over it instead and besides, the scenario you were both imagining was unlikely.
But you knew the feeling, the desperation, the substrate of nothingness that might lead someone to the edge of a bridge in the mixed weather of a June Saturday. Another person out there who thought that nothing would ever get better, that they were evil to the core, or so sad that they should end the dance early. It’s an edge you’ve been on, though not quite as precipitously, and you wished that you could hold out a hand to all the people suffering, could hug them and reassure them. Together you would form a community of black humor and heavy sighs, a mutual support group of deep sadness, everyone rooting for the fleeting moments of sunshine.
It wasn’t a group that you thought you belonged to, but now they are your brethren, the depressed and desperate, and you love them for their depth of being. Stay here, you tell them, stay here with me and we will prove that we can live.
From the prompt "Good advice."
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. Turns out the reason those police cars were on the lower deck of the bridge was because a man had stopped his car on the upper deck and was standing on the ledge. He was later arrested for a suspected DUI.
Image of the Bay Bridge by Thomas Hawk.
From me to whom?
No longer. Today in my Round Robin write I confessed. But I can't share it here. Some things are best held between one's ears or kept in short rasped whispers, told to a single stranger across email who doesn't know what is truth or fiction. The confession would be for whom? Unburdening passes it on, though I would argue that we should at least confess our trespasses to those whom we've trespassed against.
Lately my weeks have been appointment-filled. The eye doctor (today), a haircut (tomorrow). I have a lot of therapy jammed in at the end of the week, will actually go from my therapist to the psychiatrist on Friday (and then to Sacred Rose to get on a talented tattoo artist's waiting list). Me, me, blah, blah, blah. My eyes, my hair, my psyche, my skin. My stories, my guilt. I am desperate for someone else's stories, for some stimulation besides my sidewalk strolls, beyond the hall outside my son's classroom, beyond this living room, sunlit and open. The waiting rooms I encounter are all empty and my anecdotes come from half-read stories in the New Yorker.
I have been so sheltered and selfish, buffered against the world by time and home, by a kind man who protects me and takes on too much. I have forgotten what it is like to go without, to not have. Depression can be a form of self-absorption. You can't see beyond the sludge you travel in. You get angry at the world or at those who happen to inadvertently trample on some idiosyncratic sore spot. I'm lucky to have a supportive partner who has waited me out and taken some serious knocks along the way, has not abandoned me despite my difficulties.
This is the spot for a pronouncement, the climb e'very mountain portion of my post. I've made my confessions. I'm changing. Good things lie ahead. But I have no idea what any of it means or how to think about it. I am in the moment, feeling lucky, feeling in between. The changes may be all internal. My entire life could be altered. I don't know. I'm not sure who I am or what I will become.
My therapist says that times of ambiguity can also be times of great creativity. It doesn't feel like that right now. I'm actually afraid of the changes, wish that all it would take would be a few mental adjustments to make it good. No matter how directly I face the symbolic rationale behind my fears, I'm still afraid to drive. I haven't been riding my bike. I see all of this apprehension and am not sure how to deal with it. It hits me all at once, my many faults and weaknesses, the huge tasks that await. The biggest change of all is to admit that I need help to make the changes, need to ask for support from other people, starting with the ones closest to me.
Maybe that is enough as a first step: asking for help. Saying what I really think and feel. Taking the risk to make a stand and to enforce my boundaries even when it might mean loss or exposure. One small thing at a time.
There I go again. Me. Me. Me. But I hope that through all of this focus on myself, I can be more present to my child and husband, can teach the boy that it's ok to risk, that he, like the rest of us, is a flawed yet fine human being. I can finally be present. I am here, my boundaries are stronger, like my foundation. It's me, it's him, it's the family. It's other people.
Like a record, baby
They psychiatrist asked if I had obsessive thoughts. I tend to obsess, I told her, but I thought it was a personality thing. You know, the minute examination of every detail, the post-fight righting of wrongs, the history rewrite, my chance to tell someone what I really think and to imagine them listening, the perfect audience.
In my mind, my imaginary conversational companion is unadulterated by his own problems, totally loving and caring, with a mind free of prejudice and hurt. Recently I realized again that what I am looking for is to exist in someone else’s mind, to be fully formed and real and "me" for someone else, to be their obsession. It doesn’t work that way, of course. There is no perfectly objective (yet deeply loving) mind out there where I can be held gently with understanding and grace. The people I wasted my obsessions on were as broken as I was, maybe more. My strange new clarity of vision shows me that I was a speck of a thought for them, if I was a thought at all.
I’m beginning to feel separate from the rethink and the silent conversation. I still have them – old habits die hard – but they strike me as being more and more ridiculous, a fantasy, some safe way of fulfilling a need to be heard and seen without actually communicating directly.
I finally scored some melatonin yesterday, in liquid form, and took it before bed, hoping that I wouldn’t wake up at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. like I have lately. It worked, or my idea of what it should do worked, and I fairly sprung out of bed at 5:20, full of energy and hope, my mind clear of obsession. Is it the drugs, all of this? The way I can interrupt the thought process, the way my husband and I are communicating differently? Is it the therapy, currently at a rate of 2-3 sessions a week (and I am so tired of me, let me tell you)? Will a few more nights of good sleep make a difference, too? Even without good sleep, I've seen a difference, a return to my old efficiency, the clearing of junk both real and metaphorical.
My worry is that this is all false, that it will go away, that the pills I take are more speed than mood enhancers. The doctor will look at the side effects (insomnia, appetite suppression, the hum of my brain reaching my ears) and take away this pill. Or maybe I’m ascribing too much to it – how could I get lucky on the first try?
As with everything else these days, I have to live with the ambiguity.
From the prompt "Around and around."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit.
And because I'm feeling silly and on my usual 1980s kick, here is a television ad for Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume, circa 1985.
Image by tricky™.
My results may vary
I started taking the pills Tuesday morning, the smoothing-of-emotion pills. Side effects may include insomnia, anxiety, weight loss – and their opposites. I might find a sudden increase in my sexual thoughts and responsiveness (though no one told me this one – it came up in searches on the drug). Maybe I'll sweat more. Lose my appetite. Become restless.
It’s true, my heart is beating faster. My mouth is dry. After I finish this write, I’ll take my daily dose and I’m beginning to wonder what will happen – will there be a cumulative effect? Will I be a crazy woman by the Sunday, my heart racing, manic in my energy levels? “Some people enjoy the energy boost,” the psychiatrist told me. I could use an energy boost. I’ve been unable to get interested in almost anything lately, have had to force myself to do simple things like keep up with our bank accounts, something I would normally do with a control freak’s precision and regularity.
Mainly I don’t want to feel like life is something to be endured. I want to wipe away the hopelessness and the images I’ve been having of my own death. It is only now that I have the pills in hand, that they are coursing through my body that I can see how I was sinking into something deeply and profoundly sad. If the purple pills work, I might be able to clear a path to the future. At the moment I am in the waiting room.
It could take up to a month to see if this stuff is effective, and, to be honest, I was feeling a bit better by the time I saw the doctor. Still, the prospect of doing away with the crying jags, of scraping away the grime and seeing the world around me, is a beautiful one.
But please, little purple pills, don't take away my ability to write, to flesh out the dark underbelly.
From a totally unrelated photo prompt.
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. I was having a hard time concentrating this morning. Hope this isn't related to the medication.
Image by Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL).
Clearing a path
We moved from the place on West Street before her clematis could take hold. In her absence, the vine shrunk, it browned with neglect, and if you drive past the house now, almost 30 years later, the only evidence of her prowess with plants is the gorgeous cherry tree out front, double-blossomed, a cloud of pink and a hail of petals for a brief time in the Wilmington spring.
Our backyard is all weeds right now, Bermuda grass and nutsedge. The sourgrass has had its season and the flowers and herbs I planted last year have survived the winter, mostly. I have plans, to choke out the bad stuff with layers of newspaper and mulch, to put a couple of raised beds in the sunniest spot and fill them with compost and manure and rich rich soil and grow vegetables, but I can’t seem to get up the energy or interest.
I could interpret this as a strike against domesticity, that this year for a variety of reasons I can take no pleasure in sinking my hands in dirt and coaxing fecundity out of barrenness. Or maybe I really am depressed, overwhelmed, stuck in place by this heavy sadness, and all it will take is a season of fainting couches and constant tears, a cultivation and purging of my emotions through the various therapy appointments, and all will be well. Or maybe I need a mental path cleared by antidepressants, though my fear is that the path will be trampled, will be clear cut or burned or – and perhaps this is worse – that the drugs will do nothing but dull my colorful thoughts.
Sometimes I can fake it: our front yard, a slab of tinted concrete, is alive with pots. We planted strawberries and sugar snap peas and carrots, and the herbs are flourishing. The flowers in front of the fence look good, too, so that if you drive past our house or approach through the front, you might think: life here is mighty fine. But on the porch, last year's plants have foundered, the pots run dry much of the time, and although the snapdragon is making a bid for life (and I think she’ll make it), the coleus have given up and I haven’t had the heart or inclination to replace them. All that remains are their browned stems, the skeletal remains of what flourished last year.
From a photo prompt of a paper cup with a flowery vine juxtaposed with leaves.
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. Just realized this is the second post in five days that has mentioned making a path, the open path, and so on. Clearly I feel a need to move forward.
Image: The resurrection of the snapdragon. At some point I'll tire of the atmospheric Hipstamatic prints.
Love is all you need?
I woke up this morning thinking about sex, how it’s a death-cheat, a way to stave off the coming deterioration, the crumbling of skin and redistribution of fat, a way to forget the waiting hospital room with its smells of disinfectant and its beeps of sadness.
Yesterday I wrote about time and how it speeds up as we age and maybe layers, or that’s the way our memory can experience it, the past intermingling with the present intermingling with our ideas about the future, the fantasies and reality, the nightmare waiting down the hall of our minds or maybe it’s not a nightmare, maybe I need to think positively. Sure, there is plenty to mourn and what will be is unknown, but why not at least think positively about it?
And why not embrace my luckiness, the small pieces of happiness in my life. Loving husband? Check. Sweet kid? Check. Nice house? Yes. Enough money? Uh-huh. Time to write? Oh my God: yes!
So what’s the problem? Why is my heart dead right now? What the fuck? It’s like I move in a fog or am wrapped in wool, like a skein of yarn. I want to live like the 20-year-old I never was, which says “midlife crisis” all over it. I keep on thinking of ways to embrace the crisis that aren’t self-destructive, which is how I ended up looking at pictures of tattoos and exploring the various tattoo parlors (such a Victorian word) around Berkeley online. A bit of pain, a bit of beauty, a bit of (over-done) rebellion.
In October I will turn 42, the age that my stepfather said I was when I was 12 and I see how 42 turns to 43 and 43 turns to 44 and so on until I am 50 and even crankier than I am now and if I can’t do anything about what happens to the body (outside of maintenance: I’ve become a big fan of maintenance) then maybe I can do something about me and my outlook. I’ve always been a traveler on the dark side and that’s ok, but I don’t want to be cynical or mean. I don’t want to begrudge people the happiness they have or the youth or the sunny disposition.
It may be corny and in some ways untrue, but I think that love helps. Love of other people without judgment, the understanding that we are all blocked in some way and trying our best. But it has to fall to me to love myself, too (and this sounds so corny and clichéd and I hate talk like this, but it stands). So I love on the outside, attempt it on the inside, and no matter what happens, the death grip with sex, the platonic love, the familial kind, I’ll be ok.
Right?
From a photo prompt that had nothing to do with what I came up with here.
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: What my tattoo will look like -- whaddya think? My mother thought it looked like the woman had been shot, but I blame that on the fact that it looks like a very fresh tattoo. And I'm not sure I could pull off such a large tattoo, but I like the idea of a cherry blossom branch.
Mind slip
I spent yesterday in a serious funk, an I-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed funk. It was Mother’s Day and I wanted to be left alone, to not be reminded of familial connection or maybe pressure or I don’t really know but is the point of that day to separate from the family, from the offspring, to pretend they don’t really exist? It was like a day of real depression, but since my brain is constantly connecting the subconscious dots, choosing its moments of flatness at the most appropriate symbolic times, I think my feeling of being down was directly tied to this idea of Mother’s Day and being a mother and the daughter of an ambivalent mother.
Another thing to bring up to therapy, to my lady of privilege chatting sessions, where I feel so self-indulgent and can go on and on about my self-fulfillment. During my last session, I brought up this dream I had, a very boring dream involving moving clothes from one place to another at my grandfather’s place at Hollywood Beach, moving them for some young women who were moving in. I took them in small batches from somewhere to a shed, a temporary storage place.
The week before in therapy had been tough, with lots of tears and the apprehending of my feelings about being weak, about childhood and dependency, and now I felt the pressure to come up with something, but this? The movement of clothes? Somehow, my therapist pulled me to a different place, put me in the position of the clothes, and then the tension, that feeling of taut energy thickening in the middle of my body, came to life, being shuttled from here to there, anger at the clothes, anger at the task. I even started to cry.
But it sounds so fucking ridiculous, doesn’t it? I struggle with being in therapy, with having the kind of life that allows me to schedule various appointments and go running afterwards, a life where I can write in the daylight and document my post-therapy meals on Facebook. Lucky, yes, perhaps self-indulgent, yes, and the guilt for being me goes on an on.
I forgot to get another job, I forgot what it was like to need something, I forgot my own mind and origins and yesterday I wanted to forget everything. So I kept on reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, got myself lost in the story of a family falling apart, a woman who became a stay-at-home mom in reaction to her own upbringing, the pull of danger, of not being nice, under the surface.
From the prompt "Mind slip."
Image: Boy with his "spaceship" in the back yard, taken using the Hipstamatic app.
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.
Kind of blue
Sometimes my most profound (or so they seem at the time) lines come late at night, after my brain has been stretched in ten different directions by the day, by sunlight and twilight and stacks of children’s books.
Last night I thought about the area around my eyes, salt-cured by post-dinner tears, the skin made pale with deposits left by sadness. I couldn’t tell you now what those tears were about. When I told my husband about them, he asked if I was just feeling emotional or if it was a reaction to something, I had to say it’s the same thing I’ve been feeling for a long time now: Sad. Sad. Sad.
My father called a few days ago and we had a long conversation. It’s been going that way more these days, the long conversations, which I like, though I don’t always feel like I can share everything about my life at the moment. He asked me how I was doing. “Eh. Not so good.” And then he started – politely, not like a proselytizer – talking up antidepressants as a way to clear out some of the darkness.
When comedians go blue, they talk dirty. When people feel blue, they are sad. It goes beyond blues for me, it’s true, but I am functional. I feel, I move around, I do what I need to do. When I take those depression quizzes (online, in my therapist’s office), I am on the borderline. I just don’t feel depressed enough to go pharmaceutical.
Still, I imagine not existing, imagine the pain of being human wiped away. It’s not that life isn’t worth living – it is, it’s the only thing we’ve got – but I am not enjoying it and am having a hard time imagining it being joyful again. If I could take the darkness of my blues, the midnight pitch, and lighten it, make it more like the dawn sky, well, that would be the trick.
My past obscures the rest of me like a heavy blanket or a stage curtain. Or maybe it’s my present: I don’t know. Take action, people tell me. Get moving. But I am muffled by all of this, I move slowly – though I do move – and I can’t see the path clearly. I distract myself with emotional candy and I soothe my brain with wine. Instead, I need to take a clear-cutter to the forest, to the vines, I need to machete through the curtain. I need to rip off the blanket. Maybe it will take drugs, but I’m not ready to go there yet.
From the prompt "Blue."
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 shiftingpixel.com
Joe Lencioni, shiftingpixel.com
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.)
The pain that is invisible
In a conversation last night, she casually tossed out a line that I had to follow up with, because it indicated how bad things were for her at a couple points in my childhood. I’m sure she’s dropped this line with insouciance before, and I’ve just followed her laid-back lead. But it’s deadly serious. And frightening. And sad.
Of course, my mind is buzzing with thoughts, about secrets, about forgiveness and the pain that is invisible when you are growing up, the pain of the depressed, hopeless parent. Maybe not totally invisible. I was a sensitive kid, the little mother, always worried. Part of the worry, however, was about me: what was going to happen to me if something happened to her? Today I feel mainly empathy for her pain and sad that she’s felt so hopeless.
I’m sure she’s awake downstairs, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the New York Times. So, off I go to start the day ...