My sister wrote an open letter to my daughter on her blog today. My favorite sentence in it is this:
We may see phantoms that aren't really there, but we also see a kaleidoscope of colors where others may only see shades of gray.
Read the rest at her blog. It was such a beautiful letter that it took my words away -- on a day on which I'm in huge suspense over my own creativity and whether or not others will agree it exists.
Beloved cleaned out under the bed this week and pulled out my seething mass of forgotten purses. I will go ahead and admit that some of them date back to college. And still have stuff in them from college. Like my gold University of Iowa card with my Social Security number printed on it, because we totally all used to use our Social Security numbers as our student IDs and driver's license numbers, back when the world was new. There was my Mike's Liquors video store card (I know, I know). He inexplicably found his University of Northern Iowa student ID in one of my purses, too. I can't explain that, don't remember him giving it to me -- did I steal it? It IS a hot picture.
This morning I stared at the pile in the corner of the bedroom, not wanting it to be there any more. I am firmly anti-pile, especially in my zen space. I ended up opening all the pockets, pouring $35 or so in change into the little angel's piggy bank and throwing away more than half of them. Why I still have them is a mystery -- they're out of style and beat up and full of leaking ballpoint pens and the sticky foulness that is the bottom of a fifteen-year-old purse. It was freeing to dump them in the garbage. In doing so, I realized how much I've changed and not changed and how little I really remember of the girl who carried and in some cases wore those purses through Iowa City and on spring break and to Chicago and Kansas City and all the places in between. The only thing that seems real is the now.
Right now I have one large red handbag that I carry almost every day, regardless of fashion or weather or my outfit. It contains smaller bags with working pens and oral pain medicine for when the little angel's teeth hurt and my business cards and wallet and lip gloss. It's the me of now, thank God.
Yesterday on BlogHer I wrote about my hair.
As a child, I had long braids that I refused to cut, much to my mother's chagrin. I fancied myself Laura Ingalls Wilder. As a teenager in the eighties, I was a spiral-permed, ratted, claw-banged glory. In college, I shoved my ponytail through the hole in the back of my ever-present ball cap or let it pour out from under my do-rag. (I looked more Axl than gangsta.)
After college, I embarked on a fifteen-year fight with my hair. It's very fine -- so fine I can fit my entire ponytail into the smallest hair bauble or elastic band. My hair, when long and uncurled, resembles the head elf in the movie version of Lord of the Rings. The boy elf. The hot one. It looked good on him, not so much on me. So I resigned myself for many, many years to one of the best styles for fine hair: the chin-length bob. And during the entire reign of my chin-length bob, people I met always thought they already knew me, because I looked exactly like half of the upper Midwest.
Frustrated, I tried to grow it out again. I did The Rachel in the late '90s. It looked terrible on me. You could see through the layered parts if the sun was strong. Why did I do it? Boys. Men, I guess they were, but I still thought of them as boys. Boys liked long hair, and I wanted to be liked by boys.
Credit Image: Wikipedia
But when I really thought about it, I wanted to be the girl with the short hair. I wanted to be Helen Slater in The Legend of Billie Jean. I wanted to be Winona Ryder in Reality Bites. I wanted to be Demi Moore in G.I.Jane.
I wanted to transcend my hair.
I went today to attend a program at my daughter's school. The theme was patriotism, after the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. It's scheduled this week so family members in town for Thanksgiving can attend.
It was cute and all until they sang about being the generation of the future. And then they sang, "We have the chance to do it right."
And I got all gooey watching these kids -- who clearly believed so totally in what they were singing -- dance and sing about America being the land of opportunity, so open to immigrants, the poor, the huddling masses.
It was hard not to think about how we're fighting about immigration and occupying Wall Street and all. It was hard not to realize as they sang about remembering that most of them hadn't been born yet in 2001.
I hope they have the chance to do it right. I hope we educate them well enough. I hope we teach them history -- real history -- so they don't repeat the mistakes of the past. I hope this generation puts the emphasis on compassion more than greed. I hope they don't have to occupy anything but their space in the world. I hope they leave that world better than they found it.
I hope there's still time for my generation to do the same thing.
I was just looking at Twitter and saw a link to Alison Gresik's post on the night she almost went crazy. I wasn't planning to post today, but then I read this:
We were nearly home when I tried to make up for how pissy I’d been. This is not about you, it’s about me, I said.
And that’s when Shawn got really angry.
How dare you get this upset and then say it’s not about me? It’s impossible for me to tell the difference, and it’ll certainly be impossible for a child to tell the difference. You can’t keep doing this.
She goes on to explain how her brain took that and spiraled it into suicidal thinking, and then the next morning pulled it together to face a challenge that to someone not afflicted with mental illness might seem like nothing: taking a broken car to a mechanic.
I understand.
Last week in the midst of all the Hillary Adams beating post comments, I felt my anxiety starting to rev out of control. I had just a visceral reaction to that video. I also have noticed that since I went off The Pill a few years ago that my moods are getting more extreme at times, more like they were when I was in high school and college.
The morning after I put up the post, I took Petunia to the vet. Petunia hates the vet. She got wrapped in a towel there once when I wasn't there and ever since then she needs to be sedated to go and will still hiss and try to bite anyone, even me, who approaches her when she's there. She has to wear a bonnet that keeps her from being able to see or bite, and even so, she tries to bite. The vet is trying to desensitize her, so she sat and talked to me for what felt like hours while Petunia trembled and growled and hissed in my arms. Finally, she started talking to me about cleaning Petunia's teeth and the anxiety peaked and I started to cry. I wasn't making any noise, but the hot tears were just rushing down my cheeks and there was nothing, NOTHING I could do about it.
"You're really upset, aren't you?" the vet asked.
"I've had a hard week. I'd like to go home." I thought about trying to explain anything to this woman and realized it would be pointless. I knew it would be a while before I could stop crying, even as I understood intellectually that I wasn't really that upset about cleaning Petunia's teeth or even Hillary Adams, who is now 23 and years removed from that horrifying beating. Hillary Adams was a trigger, Petunia's growling was a trigger, just in the past Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 and my daughter's conference with her talented and gifted teacher in which the same tears ran down my face as I asked the teacher to let me know if she sensed too much perfectionism in my daughter, that perfectionism went with anxiety and eating disorders for me and I really hoped my girl wouldn't ever sit in front of a kind teacher who doesn't really know her and embarrass herself by bawling when nothing at all is wrong.
That's the thing, though -- when you have anxiety, nothing need be wrong. Life itself can feel pretty insurmountable, even as you recognize there is nothing wrong. Cats go to vets, cars need to be fixed -- it's not the end of the world.
But the part of Alison's post that really got me was the part about husbands and kids not being able to tell the difference between your being mad at them or at yourself or at nothing at all but displaying this emotion that makes no sense. I've tried to insulate my daughter as much as I can from my anxiety, but when you live with people, it can be hard. Especially when you're alone with them as much as I'm alone with my girl. As a result of seeing me cry sometimes for no reason and telling her hey, it's not you, I'm just sad and sometimes I get sad and I don't know why, hold on, I'll stop in a minute, I hope she is kind to herself if she ever cries for no reason. I want to make the world perfect for her but I know that I can't and actually I shouldn't, because if I did, she wouldn't know her own strength. She wouldn't learn to self-soothe. Just as I would tell her these things if I had a twitch or Turret's or some other behavior I couldn't necessarily control that might look alarming.
I've stopped beating myself up for irrational crying. It doesn't happen every day -- it doesn't happen now as often as it did when she was a baby and I was really messed up. When it happens, I try to do things I know will help. I sleep. I exercise really hard. I write. I read a lot. I take hot baths. And I let myself cry, because it does seem like there's something in there that needs to get flushed, and maybe the crying flushes it. Often I'll feel perfectly fine hours later and I know that is confusing to the people around me. The truth is that when that sort of crying or anger happens, it's not actually based on anything other than my brain. It's different from when I cry because something someone dies or because I know I hurt someone. I make noise when I cry like that. This crying -- it's just like a faucet.
The vet's office manager called the next day to see if Petunia was okay and if I was okay. She's a nice person and I saw on her face and the vet's face that they thought something horrible had happened to me to cause such a reaction. I don't really want to get into it. I wish I hadn't had to take Petunia to the vet when I knew I was in high gear. But life doesn't stop just because you're anxious. I don't think it should. In order to have faith in myself that I am okay, I have to get in the car and take the cat to the vet even if I'm crying. I have to make my daughter dinner and do the laundry and go to work. And because I still do all those things, because I know the difference between real sadness and anxiety sadness, I feel okay about it. I know people in my life think I should get stronger drugs or go see a therapist again, but the truth is that it passes, I don't want to hurt myself or others, I know how to care for myself and I'm learning not to drag other people into my anxiety when it's happening -- it's best to go in a room and let it go, just like a headache or other type of chronic pain. People with mental illness live like this, just like people with diabetes live like this. You manage the pain. You take care of yourself as best you can. And you try not to freak out when it escalates -- you manage it back to a safe level. It's possible my antidepressant needs to be adjusted, and I can look into that, but here's the thing: There isn't a magic pill that I'll take that will make me wake up tomorrow with anyone else's brain. It will be my brain that will still try its old tricks and maybe we can stop a few more of the downloads of chemicals from coming through, but it will still try. There might be a pill that helps a little more, but we're managing this, not fixing it, and that is okay. I don't expect to never cry for no reason again. I expect to be able to cope effectively with it when I do and to make it stop as soon as possible.
I can't always control my triggers or my reactions, but I want the people I love to know I'm okay and I love them, but I don't know that I can be "fixed." I can manage this, and I'm trying very hard.
On Monday, I talked to a business communication class at UMKC about business communication as it pertains to social media. I told them the story about how a commenter on this blog tried to get me fired from H&R Block years ago. I told them about how I started this blog anonymously and how I evolved to using my real name as my username for pretty much everything. I talked about strong language and politics and privacy.
They asked why I hated Facebook. And I tried to explain how it is when you don't grow up with something -- how that degree of visibility feels different to me. I know anyone with a screen can read my blog, but I also know that most people I know or am related to in real life don't. Or at least not every day. But I know people who are glued to Facebook for hours every day, lots of people, including, probably, from the looks on their faces, these students who I can't help but think of in my mind as kids, though they were sophomores and juniors in college.
Standing there trying to explain how I came to my job in Internet publishing back in 1999, what it was like to pop in the bubble, how this recession is maybe longer but not so different from that pop if that was your industry, going from a career started with very different public and private Ritas to just one now, what it used to be like to have the people with whom you worked really know nothing you didn't want them to know about your personal life, back when you could go to work without everyone knowing who you went to high school with or what you got for your birthday -- it's not so much that I oppose this information being out there -- obviously I don't, I think you take the chaff with the wheat -- but it's different than what they're growing up with. It's been something of a hard adjustment that varies by personality type, but it's one thing to grow up talking to your friends in this way from the get-go and another thing entirely to have started one way and had it evolve before the rules were established. Exhilerating, yes, exciting -- my life would not be the same without this technology -- but also at times disconcerting. It must be what it was like to start life riding in a carriage and end it changing your oil. To start life with only a radio and end it with a flatscreen.
I barely restrained myself from saying "when I was your age." I do think I also restrained from explaining I had a typewriter in college. It was an electronic typewriter that had this new-fangled thing in the side called a disk drive, which I never used.
Okay, I have to go to my job on the Internet now before I find myself reaching for dentures.
We're waiting for the bus. I'm fixated on my list. I love lists. Especially with Beloved gone on the road with his new job, I need lists, because I need to remember to do the things he usually does, the things I didn't even notice, because after ten years together we've each got our stuff that we do. I empty the dishwasher. He starts it before he goes to bed. I keep forgetting to start it and arrive in the morning to a gooey coffee pot and sigh and write myself a new note. My mother always leaves notes all over the house, four pages for the babysitter, Post-Its everywhere, and I have become my mother.
My girl tries to lower her bony butt onto my lap. It is angling into my face, and I brush it to the side.
"Can you sit beside me? I'm kind of in the middle of something here."
"No. It needs to be on your lap." She indicates her butt, as though there is confusion about what she's trying to do.
She angles again; like a cat's nose her rear is insistent upon finding my lap. I put the notebook aside and she settles in, flipping her long hair over her shoulders so it swats me directly in the face. I am a heated chair. She sighs happily and grabs my arms, wrapping them around her waist.
"There. Now I'm warm."
As I lean in to smell her children's shampoo strawberry hair, I realize I'm trying to memorize the feeling of her little body on my lap. She chats happily about Halloween costumes, and neighbors pass by on their morning walks, and the breeze changes, and I feel it, and I grip her tighter, knowing she has to leave my lap and get on the bus soon, with all that means.
Today's post is sort of inspired by Sarah's writing prompt:
Do random free writing about whatever is in front of you. Your main character is staring out the window of your living room and ruminating on the scene in front of her and then her thoughts drift to lunch, then a nightmare of last night, and then the travel plans she is hesitating on makins.
Today's post is in response to Addy's writing prompt, thank you, Addy!
Changing seasons means the holidays are coming. What are your plans, hopes, fears and dislikes for that time of the year? Do you make resolutions or just watch everyone else break theirs? Will you have a neighborhood celebration this year? Too many questions?
I like parties. Thus, I like the holidays, even though I always shrug them off immediately after like a wet coat. (I have been known to take down my Christmas tree first thing in the morning on 12/26 if I am close enough to it.)
The thing about holidays: they make you realize another year has gone by. And yay! Right? I mean, you're still alive! Consider the alternative! But at the same time I get bittersweet and nostalgic, which I hate. Hate? Here's why: If you focus to much on how great things were years and years ago, you miss out on how great they are now. I find myself getting really nostalgic for when I was a kid instead of focusing on making my daughter's holidays ones that she'll be nostalgic for later. I have to remind myself this is her childhood. These are her memories. Get out of your head, Rita.
The holidays, now? Are not about me. I don't sacrifice my whole life for my child, but holidays? Yeah. Sort of do. I'm okay with it, because from the minute that little redhead appeared in my life, life has been different. I can try to tell myself it's not, but yeah, totally is. Before I had a kid, did I consider 8 pm to be crazy ass late to be out, driving, on a road?
There's not as much downtime. Not as much money. Not as much freedom. Initially I felt sort of sorry for myself because of that, then a few years rocketed past and I realized how much life there will be on the other end of this childrearing business when she's off in her own apartment calling and asking how to boil water and I'm finishing work and looking into a full evening of Whatever the Hell I Want. (That does seem unfathomable now, as I type it.)
So I will subject myself to lines and crowds and uncomfortable sweaters and too many cookies and TV specials I've seen 1763 times in order to give her something to be nostalgic about.
The little angel wore flats to school today.
I remember when she used to let me dress her however I wanted.
FLATS.
The neighbor girl started wearing them to school in first grade. I resisted. Today I hemmed and hawed, stewed, then chose not to fight this battle. Not when there have been other, more important battles to fight with her in the past two weeks.
I put boots and socks in her backpack in case the flats hurt her feet, then wondered if I'd made the backpack too heavy. I made sure she didn't have P.E. today.
I think it's silly and probably bad parenting to let her wear flats to school in second grade.
FLATS.
But maybe, what I'm really thinking is ...
SECOND GRADE.
