Monthly Archives: November 2010

Posted inEmotional Growth • Parenting

There’s No Place Like Home

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I thought about moving the other day. It went something like this:

What are we gonna do? How are we gonna survive with two kids and no family around? We need to move closer to someone. But where? Matt’s family lives in the Virginia sticks, where there’s a bun in every 14-year-old oven. That’s not an option. We could go to New York, but if we go upstate, near my best friend, my past will haunt me too much. There’s the city. My birth mother lives there. The city would be great if we had no kids, but we do. So that’s not an option. And if we lived there we’d be two hours from my best friend. No point in that. I have family in San Francisco. Now we’re talking. Nice weather, friendly Californians, but too brown. Seattle’s got me so used to green. There’s Southern California – close friend there – but she’s got a snake fence, a bear fence and a coyote fence in her backyard. Add that to overcrowded schools and gangs and it’s completely out of the question.

So what do we do? Now that we’ve got two children we need double the break time but it’s doubly difficult to get. Their grandparents are all the way across the country so we can’t dump them on anybody. We have to move. But I love this house, and there’s so much we’ve done to it, it’d be a shame to sell it. Not to mention I love my woods here. Not gonna find that in California. I really don’t want to pack and unpack all of our stuff anytime soon, either. And there’s Matt’s job. He needs to be on the West Coast to cover his territory. And if we do move, we’ll have to do it before the kids go to school. For Rose, that’s another two years. Not much time. I could wait another three years until they switch her school. Hmm.

I tossed the idea around for a good couple of weeks. I thought it about so much that I must have gnashed my teeth to nubs. Last week I needed an emergency dentist appointment. My jaw hurt so bad I told them I must have an infection. Nope, the doctor said, it turned out I ground my teeth so much that my body decided it needed to grow some extra bone.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the dentist. She could only take me during nap time and even if we’d skipped naps I couldn’t have gone to her office with both kids. So I called Laura – one of our friends from Maryland who’d recently relocated here. She had nothing going on, so she came right over to sit with the kids. She said she could do it anytime, at least until she got a job. And there’s a recession on. Hot damn! I thought. We DO have grandparents to drop the kids with!

And then Thanksgiving came up. We invited our friends from West Seattle. They’re two families – one from South Africa and one from Australia – and they haven’t got family here, so we see them every holiday. Their daughters are Rose’s two best friends. And we see them every couple of months too. They’re almost like – cousins!

When we had Christian, my friend Jackie offered to take Rose when we went to the hospital. We wound up with a live-in sitter that week, but I realized Jackie was one more connection in our support network.

Our Maryland friends invited us to a wine and food tasting last weekend – grownup night. I have a friend who loves Rose but she works so much she doesn’t get to see her. I asked her last minute and she sat for the kids – for free. There’s another part of our Seattle family. Yup, family. Maybe we don’t have to move at all, I thought.

I don’t know whether we’ll stay in Seattle forever. If we don’t, I don’t know where we’ll go next. Maybe we’ll stay until the kids get out of school. Maybe we’ll move in a few years. But now I know that we CAN stay, as long as we want, because we DO have family here. Turns out we’ve had it all along. And like they said in the Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like home.

Posted inEmotional Growth • Gratitude • Thanksgiving

From Angry to Grateful in Just 30 Years

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Have you ever had to describe yourself in one word? My single-word slugs have changed over the years. I remember having interviews when I was 22, and if they’d asked me, I’d have said “responsible,” but if I’d been really honest, it would have been “angry.” My anger had deep roots. It dated back to my 12th year, at least, when Sue and I started smoking cigarettes and pot after school. My anger sprouted from several seeds. My uncle first groped me when I was 11; my live-in grandmother got sick and my parents constantly argued about her care; and my newfound independence earned my father’s angry disapproval.

I stayed angry through high school and college. I was a self-destructive mess. I smoked; I drank; I used drugs. My first steps toward recovery came in college. I remember I’d lived at SUNY Albany for two months, and I realized I hadn’t had one argument during that time. I was accustomed to fighting with my parents on a daily basis. The realization that life was not a series of arguments hit me hard. Besides the lack of daily family clashes, once I got to college I realized that everyone did not live their lives on drugs. I had already spent all of my college money in high school, so in college I had none left for drugs. Just like that I stopped using cocaine. Every time I smoked pot in college, it would make me withdraw from the group, depressed. I realized I had never really liked the high, either. I just did it to escape. So I quit smoking pot. By Thanksgiving of my first semester, I had quit drugs, mellowed a bit and lost 17 pounds.

My second year of college found me depressed and detoured me back to my path of self-destruction. The previous semester, my roommate and I had quit smoking, but over the summer, I’d gone to Greece and smoked some cigarettes at a date’s insistence. That experience, plus the depression, made it easy to go back to smoking full-time. My depression persisted that semester, and I missed weeks of classes and begged my parents to come home. Over winter break, I campaigned to take a year off of school, but they sent me back. During the first few weeks of that semester, I continued my campaign and my father finally relented because he’d been able to sign me up for another school. I attended a few classes, but my heart wasn’t in it, so I stopped going and got a job selling pets. My father finally realized he couldn’t force me to go to school and I took that year off. I decided I might want to go to cooking school, so I got a job as a prep cook in a restaurant. Once I saw the hours and conditions under which chefs work, I decided against cooking school and signed up for community college.

I had a major manic episode during community college. It lasted for three weeks or two months, I don’t know. During it, I couldn’t keep track of hours or days or weeks. My parents denied that there was a problem, and only after my friends staged an intervention did they take me to a crisis center. I got some pills, slept for three days, and my parents figured I was cured.

After I graduated community college I chose my own school: The University of South Florida. USF fed my tropical soul and my need for control over my life. It was also far enough away that I could distance myself from home life. I got my psychology degree during the Bush Senior “recession”, went back to New York for a year, lived with my parents, and decided that I’d rather be in Florida, so I moved. Happy to be in the sunshine, I started working on myself. I saw a therapist for group and individual sessions and they legitimized my pain. I never felt entitled to my feelings. I’d been programmed to think that my home life was normal and I was crazy and overdramatic.

In therapy, I met some amazing people. My therapist was understanding and supportive and one woman in our group had suffered horrific child abuse. I had nothing on her and I felt my struggles were nothing compared to hers. She showed me compassion and upheld the notion that my difficulties were legitimate. Hearing about her hell and seeing that she still had so much love inspired me. During that time, I realized that working in the psych field was compromising my own sanity and I realized that I really wanted to write. I hadn’t considered writing because my last high school English teacher admonished us not to major in English. “You’ll never get a job!” was his constant refrain. (For the record, I’ve held five writing jobs over the years, and lots of freelance work.)

Once I decided I wanted to be a writer, I wrote about the “Mid-Twenties Crisis” – realizing that my degree had nothing to do with my desired career. I sent it to Cosmopolitan magazine for its “Life After College” special issue and they rejected it, but they hand-wrote a note that said “Interesting but not what we’re looking for.” I sent it to a smaller magazine and they published it. They didn’t pay me but they complimented me and showed me that I was good enough to be published. And the next Cosmo “Life After College” contained a story about the mid-twenties crisis, written by somebody else.

I would never have legitimized my desire to write without therapy. And I stayed in touch with the woman who showed that incredible compassion. I continued to work on myself. I kept going to therapy, eventually got diagnosed as bipolar, and added a psychiatrist and a 12-Step program to my regimen. You’re supposed to stay in 12-Step programs forever, and I didn’t, but I managed to maintain several of the principles in my life.

The 12-Step program gave me a huge gift. A program friend invited me to participate in a gratitude group. Every weekday, we’d send each other our lists of things we appreciate. Over the years, we’ve had some turnover, but the group keeps going. Composing the list forces us to think about what’s positive in our lives. Some are surprising, like when I felt the pain while I lost my mother. Some are mundane, like morning coffee. But the result of the exercise is the same. We force ourselves to focus on the positive and we find a way to see the good. And when we focus on the good, it’s much easier to get through struggles and find solutions to problems of any size.

This is my 12th year of practicing gratitude on a daily basis. Through the lists, we learn about each other’s struggles, triumphs and life’s mundanities. In the lists, we find strength, support and understanding. And if you asked me today to describe myself in one word, I’d say “Grateful.” I’m grateful that the anger I held for so long dissipated, that I have a wonderful family and the opportunity to do what I’ve always wanted to do, and friends who make my life complete. And since I’ve given up most of my anger and focused on the positive, so many great things have happened. I met and married the love of my life. I had two children, one a fertility long shot. I had the adventure of moving to the West Coast. I met my birth mother. I became a full-time writer.

Celebrating gratitude is the whole point of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims understood gratitude. They initiated Thanksgiving as a concrete way to practice gratitude, and we kept it up – once a year, whether we needed it or not. This holiday is the best marketing tool gratitude’s ever had. This year I’m wishing for more “Thanksgiving Creep” – marketing gratitude sooner and sooner during the year, starting on Black Friday. Maybe we can start a trend. The 12-Step programs say “Let it begin with me.” If we work on feeling grateful every day, good thoughts fill our hearts, leaving less room for the bad ones. I believe that if we focus on the positive, we can’t help but attract good things. It’s worth a shot, right? Really, what have we got to lose?

Posted inmarriage

Labor of Love?

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Last week would have been my parents’ 45th anniversary. My mom died last year, two weeks shy of the date. I don’t know what their anniversary meant to my dad. I don’t know what their marriage meant to either one of them. Through the years, they remained faithful – yoked to each other like oxen, dragging their burdens.

Their union always seemed to me like an obligation, not a privilege. My dad always belittled my mom’s opinions; I never saw my parents kiss on the lips, and as long as I lived with them; they slept with the bedroom door open. I wish they’d closed that door, so I could imagine a normal spousal relationship, and because my dad snored so loudly. Once I dreamed I was cornered by an angry T-Rex and when I woke up, the growling didn’t stop. It took me a few groggy minutes to figure out that my dad was the ferocious dinosaur.

I could never figure out their emotional connection either. For every birthday, Valentine’s Day, anniversary and Christmas, my dad would hand my mom a bunch of folded bills as a gift. She’d say “Thank you,” and when I was young, I’d say, “Kiss!” and they’d plaster their hands to their sides and exchange pecks on the cheek. Once during a heated argument, I told my dad that they had a loveless marriage. “I could tell you stories about your mother and me and love!” he threatened, but he never did. So I don’t know the stories – just what happened at the end of my mother’s life.

Fourteen years ago, my mother began a slow decline into herself, as Alzheimer’s disease commandeered her body. At first, she’d forget little things, like whether she’d sent me a package; then bigger things, like how to get home from her piano student’s house. Then she went through a phase where she lost her inhibitions – a phase I greatly enjoyed. She’d tell me secrets she’d held for years, like the incident where Uncle Gus flashed his penis at her as she chatted with her sister at the kitchen table. Soon the uninhibited phase ended, and she lost all control over what she said. Her body became a black hole, slowly sucking up her soul.

My mother had always crafted her own reality, but now the design was no longer her own. For a few years, she held on to the belief that she’d glimpsed a long-lost friend in town, 60 miles from where she’d known her, and she wanted my dad and me to help find her. She’d never had friends when I was young, and it made me wonder if she’d wanted a social life all along.

As that phase started to fade, the disease pulled her deeper and deeper into her own head. She stopped recognizing me, but she always knew my father. That’s when she started to tell him “I love you,” all the time. I never heard him say it back. For a while she could still respond to the outside world, but eventually she didn’t respond to anything. That period lasted about four years before she was finally released from her corporeal prison.

Throughout her decline, my dad took care of her. At first he tried to buy long-term care insurance, but she’d started to show signs of her disease, so his application was rejected. The ultimate do-it-yourselfer, he decided to care for her at home. At first, he’d take her with him when they went out. He’d load her in and out of the car like a toddler, and he’d hold her arm as they walked together in public. But then walking became a problem. First my mother couldn’t navigate stairs – Alzheimer’s alters depth perception, so sufferers perceive stairs as bottomless. They’d navigate the stairs by counting them. “There’s only four stairs,” my dad would say as he held her arm, “One…two…” and my mother would stop and refuse to go farther. He’d keep coaxing but I could see him getting more and more frustrated and embarrassed as his voice sharpened. “VIKIII!” he’d command, “COME ON, Come On, there’s only two more, let’s go now!” Even so, with my mother he demonstrated more patience than I’d ever witnessed.

My mother’s refusal to navigate stairs got stronger and stronger. I urged my dad to get a wheelchair for her, but “Once she’s in that, it’s all over,” he said. Somewhere during that phase, she fell in their bathroom. She went to the hospital for a few weeks and then a nursing home for rehabilitation. The nursing home tried to help her walk, but she made very little progress. She stayed in the home as long as Medicare would pay. Despite the home’s efforts to keep her there, which included a plea to me to change my dad’s mind (like that could happen), my father brought her back home. After all, that home cost $100,000 a year, he complained. The social worker said that people save for a rainy day, and this was a downpour, but she didn’t understand. The dollar wasn’t just almighty at our house – it was THE Almighty. Money is the only thing that I’m positive my father loves.

Once she was released, he didn’t take her out of the house anymore. He’d go grocery shopping or to church or the dentist and leave her in her dining room chair, where she’d slump over, asleep, day after day. Once he called me and said, “I tied a rope from your mother’s chair to the china cabinet. This way, if she leans forward too much when she falls asleep, she won’t fall over.” I suggested he buy her an easy chair, but he refused.
“She’s fine where she is,” he said. When we came to town for a baptism, my cousin, who’d taken my mom’s sister to visit her, pleaded with me to convince my father to get some help.

“A nurse or something, Maria. Just somebody to take good care of her,” she said. I told her I’d talk to my dad and I did, but nurses cost money and Medicare wouldn’t pay for one. Besides, he told me, he’d had a nurse right after the nursing home, when she was paid for, and the woman came late in the day, after he’d dressed and fed my mother, so she was useless. I tried to convince him that he could use a break for himself, but again, nurses cost money and “What do I need that for?”

My dad cared for her for three more years, before she completely lost the use of her legs. Her doctor gave her less than six months to live, and finally, he checked her into a nursing home. She died a month later. We stayed at my dad’s house for the funeral and my dad told us, “I’m going for a walk. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve gone for a walk?” He was finally free.

Although I know that my dad’s efforts were mostly financially motivated, I like to think that his insistence on caring for my mom came from love. I will never know. My dad’s not one to talk about himself. He once told me I’d hurt his feelings and I was genuinely surprised that he had feelings at all. From the very beginning, though, I thought of his chosen servitude as payback for all the nasty things he said to her over the years. Whether it was a crippling love of money, or comeuppance, or real love, it showed me just how strong the forces that determine our lives can be, and how tightly we hang on to the things we love.

Posted inEmotional Growth • marriage • Parenting

Spaz and Spas

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Happy Mother’s Day to me! Got my writing retreat, six months late. I’m perched in the lounge, looking out at the patio, watching the fire pit whip around in the wind. The gray drizzle of the typical fall Seattle day makes the bar even cozier. There’s a wall fireplace between me and the lobby, and the bartender’s setting up for happy hour as I await my massage. I love the red wood beams and stone in the lounge, and the lodge’s native Northwest décor feeds my tribal soul. And now I’m finally writing, after lunch and an impromptu wine tasting.

But I have a voicemail. Matt called. Christian was screaming and Matt wanted to know where I’d put the diaper bags. I had gripe water in Christian’s diaper bag, for gas. Both diaper bags were in the car and I don’t remember mentioning it to him outright, but twice last week he’d asked what I was doing going out to the car at night. I said I was bringing the diaper bags out. Is it too much to expect him to hear the answer to his own question?

I’m supposed to be enjoying this mini-vacation but instead I feel guilty. I just called and both kids are now asleep. He says he feels better but I can hear that he’s still not happy. I didn’t notice his call for two-and-a-half hours. My phone was on. I just didn’t hear it. That makes me guiltier still. He hates when I don’t answer my phone, always says he wonders where I am. Why can’t Matt let me enjoy this? Worse, why can’t I let me enjoy it?

I feel bad for neglecting him but maybe it’s good that he had to deal with the parenting crisis without me. Maybe Matt will better understand the challenges I face on a daily basis. I’m sorry he had to go through the fussy free-for-all but it’s really not that unusual. Plus, Rose could have told him the location of the diaper bags. I think she could have, anyway. I wonder if he even asked her.

I didn’t answer his question and he survived. Maybe this will usher in a whole new era free of unnecessary questions. Every time I send him to the supermarket, I can expect at least three phone calls. That’s for a one-to-two-item list. Once I fell ill before my weekly shopping trip, so I sent him shopping with a full list of groceries. He called seven, yes seven, times. If I ask him to make, say, Rice-a-Roni, he’ll walk into the kitchen, then ask me how to do it. I can understand not finding something in the supermarket, but for God’s sake, if I ask you to make rice out of a box, read the damn directions! They’re right there, in English. It’s not the DaVinci Code, for God’s sake. Does he think I have some special recipe?

You know when I left the house this morning, Matt appeared resigned. Not angry, but resigned to the monumental task of caring for the kids for 36 hours. Driving away, I felt bad. My poor husband, I thought. Although I gave him several suggestions for Daddy breaks, he seemed pretty lukewarm on the idea.

Backing out of the driveway I felt bad, for a good, long while. Ok, about seven minutes. Halfway to my retreat I thought, Shit, he goes on business trips for days at a time, all the time, and I don’t get any help then.

So the one time I do get to go away I’m wasting my “free” time feeling guilty. I feel guilty about ruining one of his days when I have our kids every day of my life. I hardly get to leave the house on weeknights because he comes home so late and then hems and haws about babysitting, or worse, does it and complains for the next three days, telling me war stories rife with tantrums, dangerous close calls and nauseating poops (See “Annoyance Avoidance”). And every time he has a bad day with the kids I fear he’ll never take them again. I’ll be doomed to life confined to my house and my computer, which, I might add, I can’t even use around Rose. I went weeks without a “Y” key because she picked it off my keyboard. Thank God it’s not always a vowel.

I can’t help but suspect that he exaggerates problems and complains to get out of taking the kids. It’s not a nice thought about my soul mate but it does fall under the realm of the possible. I’ve no doubt that Christian was screaming for what felt like forever. I’ve had those days too. But I wonder if he’s pulling that guy ploy they all use to get out of things. You know the one. You ask them to say, sweep the floor and they either take so long getting off their ass that you do it yourself, or they half-ass it, leaving the pile of crumbs in the middle of the floor, claiming they can’t find the dustpan, which is stored in the same spot it always is, the same spot they put it last time.

The sad thing is that what he really needs to reduce babysitting stress is practice. Well, he’ll get a crash course in handling two children this weekend, I thought. Maybe Baby Boot Camp will make him more comfortable with them and he’ll babysit more often, I thought as the masseuse rubbed my neck for 10 minutes. My shoulders had jacked up to my ears by the time I got there. She started working my shoulder blades and I forgot all about it.

When I returned from my retreat, Rose was chasing her BFF around the house and Matt was feeding Christian. Our friend heard Matt was flying solo and came up with his daughter. The girls tore around the house and squealed, so it wasn’t quiet, but the house was at peace. Matt and our friend had ordered Chinese and chatted happily while the kids kept each other busy. Matt was completely calm and happy. Not desperate to see me. Today was a breeze, he told me. The kids were good and Rose’s playmate provided much-needed relief for both tired dads.

So maybe parenting my husband and two kids isn’t solely my responsibility. Maybe if I just let Matt learn for himself, he’ll adapt, just like I do. Maybe he will get better with the kids and maybe I’ll get to leave the house again. Then again, maybe not. Just today, after an impressive, yet generic, three-year-old fit, he insisted we get Rose professional help. He’d never seen a fit like that, “There’s something wrong with her!” I thought her behavior was pretty run-of-the-mill. Maybe I’ll take her to a psychologist so Matt can direct his questions at someone else. Then again, maybe not.