I Never Saw It Coming

When I was nineteen I was cast as Cassandra in the play Trojan Women.  For those of you who may be rusty on your Greek mythology, Cassandra was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but when she did not return his love he punished her: while she would always be able to foresee the future, no one would ever believe her predictions.  It didn’t take long for Cassandra to go bat-shit crazy.

How nuts would you be if you tried to warn people about the future, but no one listened to you?  Then, when disaster struck and everything you predicted had come to pass, still nobody said, “Hey, Cassie, didn’t you mention something about a wooden horse?”

I’m sure I was terrible in the play. I know I was.  What did I understand of that kind of tragedy?  Back then I thought acne was tragic. Wikipedia describes Cassandra as possessing “a combination of deep understanding and powerlessness that exemplifies the ironic condition of humankind.”  I was a sorority girl.  From New Jersey. Please.

It was only recently, far from the bright lights of the stage and under the compact fluorescent bulbs of my kitchen, that I realized I finally understood Cassandra’s pain.  I understood her because I had turned into her.

One of my three darling daughters (who shall remain unnamed so that I might live long enough to see my house clean and empty) was heading out to the bus stop the other morning dressed in a cute and extremely short skirt showing eight inches of bare legs above her knee-high boots. She put on her windbreaker (no one wears a parka anymore) and headed toward the door.  This was February.  In Maine.  On the other side of that door was a snow dusted thermometer that insisted it was six degrees, Fahrenheit.

I’ve been in this job almost twenty-two years. I have five children.  You’d think I would know better.  But still, like Cassandra, I was compelled to speak.

“It’s six degrees!  You can’t go out there dressed like that! You’ll freeze!”

Like a polar bear who’d just been poked she turned to me and snarled, “No I won’t, Mom. I don’t get cold like you do!”

“Oh, right, right, right,” I said, “I keep forgetting you’re the kid who’s not subject to the laws of thermal dynamics.”  (Fortunately, she doesn’t know what the laws of thermal dynamics are either.)

I know what you’re thinking. I know sarcasm is the weapon of cowards, but for me it’s either go snarky or beat them to a bloody pulp. Since Child Services doesn’t classify “snide” as a felony, I play it safe and lash them with my tongue.  Besides, at this point in my life, jail time feels redundant.

“Thanks, Mom.  Thanks for ruining my day,” she said, heading out into the tundra, thighs first.

I yelled at the closed door (Cassandra would be proud): “I foresee a phone call from Mrs. Stevenson after seeing you walk past her house.”

And what do you know?  The phone rang, just as I predicted and of course it was Mrs. Stevenson, our seventy-five year old neighbor and lifelong member of the Be a Nosier Neighbor Society.

I feigned ignorance, “Did she?  Was she?”

Mrs. Stevenson was outraged.

Mrs. Stevenson needs a hobby.  Or cataracts.

Later, after school, Nanuk of the North in a mini-skirt was in the kitchen talking to her sister.  “Can you believe how cold it was today?  Oh my God, I thought I was honestly going to die at the bus stop.  My legs were literally purple!”

I opened my eyes wide, waiting for what surely had to be imminent, the moment when she uttered the words I had been waiting sixteen years to hear her say: “Just like you told me, Mom.” But instead she turned to me and said, “What is it?  Why do you have that weird look on your face?”

“Really, Mom,” said the other one.  “You look crazed.”

You think?

Who wouldn’t be nuts after years and years of clutching my crystal ball and warning them:  if you don’t get off Facebook you will fail that test.  If you call that boy every night he will never be interested in you.  If you don’t follow up on that job application they will hire the person who did.  If you text at work they will fire you.  If you don’t fill up the car you will run out of gas.  If you don’t practice the piano you will never get beyond “Ten Little Indians.”  If you talk behind peoples’ backs they will talk behind yours. If you have unprotected sex you are an idiot. If you want to make a basket in the game shoot a hundred shots every day. If you don’t turn down the heat on that burner the kitchen will be full of smoke. If you keep playing video games your brain will drip out of your ear. If you don’t brush your teeth no girl will ever kiss you.  If you don’t wear deodorant you will be alone for the rest of your life.  If you steal, cheat, or lie you will get caught or at least feel like a scumbag for a really long time. If you don’t study for the SAT you will not go to college because we are not forking out that kind of cash for a shitty school. If I say no, I mean no. (You’d think this last one would’ve sunk in by now…)

Does anyone ever say, “Hey, Mom. You’re amazing. You’re like Nostradamus. You were right!”

But then, again, did anyone ever tell that to my Mom?  Or yours?

In my case, I did, but it took a while.  I know a big part of being sixteen for me was faking it until I made it:  Sure, I can be an adult, I don’t need advice or help, I can do this on my own.  A recent article in National Geographic examined new research on adolescent brains and found the qualities that we as parents find most exasperating in teenagers—seeking excitement, novelty, risk, and the obsessing over acceptance by peers—are actually the very behaviors that make them so magnificently adaptive and enable them to move from home to the outside world.  In less scientific terms, they need to figure it out for themselves in order to survive.

In Africa they let the babies crawl into the fire.  It takes just one time.

But as a parent, it takes courage to stand back, shut up, and let the fire take over.  And it takes faith.  Faith in your kid, that he will not be a complete idiot and make the same mistakes over and over again like Sissyphus, that poor slob from Greek mythology who was cursed to push a boulder up a hill every day, only to reach the top of the hill at the end of the day and have the damn thing roll back down. As if that wasn’t tragic enough, Sissyphus was further cursed by believing each day that this would be the last time he’d have to push the rock.  Imagine the knock-down-drag-outs if he’d had Cassandra for a mother.

And it takes faith in the universe that your child’s stupidity and arrogance won’t have him meet the fate of Icarus who flew too close to the sun, melted his wings, and sunk to his death like a stone.  (Icarus ignored his father’s advice; men are not immune from the Cassandra syndrome of parenting).

But ultimately what it takes for our kids to learn we were right is the passage of time.  As parents we are not doomed like Prometheus, bound to a rock and forced to have our chest pecked open by our children for all of eternity (although there are those days). They do grow up and they even fly away, taking a piece of us with them.

I remember my mother telling me when my kids were small, “The day will come when you will have to put your foot on their back, push them out of the nest, and say, “Fly away, little bird!  Fly away now! Go!”  I can still see her standing in front of me, pushing at the air with her foot and turning her face the other way, as if she could not bear to watch what her foot was doing.

Earlier today our eldest daughter, who is graduating from college this spring, called me about her post-graduate plans.

“What do you think I should do?” she asked.

“What do I think you should do?” I said, thinking I must’ve misheard.

“Yes, Mom. I’m calling for your advice,” she said, irritated with me and not aware of how much like a paycheck this was to me.  When she was growing up this was the daughter who would check her watch after I told her the time.

Finally, the moment had arrived!  I could tell her all I knew.  Give her the benefit of my almost fifty years of fuck-ups.  I might even get in, “I told you so” if I was subtle enough. But then I looked over at the metal sign hanging on the wall near my desk, a gift from her this past Christmas. On it, a young retro-housewife, her face contorted into an expression of horror, is lifting her batter-covered hands out of a bowl.  Beneath her is written: “Oh my God!  My mother was right about everything!”

And so when she asked for my advice, all I could say was, “You’re going to do just great.  Trust yourself. I do.”

I never saw it coming.

Loving these people.  It’s enough to make you bat-shit crazy.

Survivor

According to Einstein, God is in the details.

This might explain why I have such a hard time finding Him.

Details give me a devil of a time. I know my mother-in-law’s birthday is in October, but I can never remember which day; I know where the car is, I’m just not sure where I put the keys; and I know we have money in the bank, I’m just not certain it’s enough to cover the check I just wrote. Another smart guy with bushy white facial hair, George Bernard Shaw, said “It’s the trifles that will wreck you at the harbor mouth,” and in my experience anyway, he’s the wiser guy.

My most recent screw up was no big deal, but it was typical. I am a breast cancer survivor, and for the past few years I have wanted to run in the Making Strides 5k race to raise money for research. But each year, as date of the race approached, I was never in shape and even if I had been, life had other plans for me. Big plans like watching another soccer game or going to the grocery store.

This year I was determined to run that race. Since September I have forced myself to jog most days and managed to run a 5k in a time that will not be printed here but is not bad for an old bag who survived breast cancer. The point was, I was able to run it—and the heroism ends there. The week before the race I went online to register and was directed to the site for the Making Strides WALK for breast cancer.

I’d been running when all I needed to do was walk.

There’s a message in that, I’m sure.

But I was not going to be deterred. Everybody else could walk, but damn it, I was going to run. Jog. My daughter said, “You can’t run! You’ll look like a freak. Just walk, Mom. It’s a walk.”

“Listen,” I told her, “I’m the survivor. I’m the one who isn’t sure how much time she has left here. I didn’t have both of my breasts cut off so that I could conform.”

She wanted to come. They all wanted to come to cheer me on. But I didn’t want that. Cancer for me was weird thing, a quiet, sad, and ugly thing. If I am asked to talk to someone who got diagnosed with breast cancer I’m happy to do it, but it isn’t something I choose to talk about, or even think about. I had cancer lite. I was lucky. Nevertheless it was a terrible time and my breasts are now bags of salt water. Other women say, “You’re so lucky. Your boobs look like a sixteen year old’s” and while it is true they don’t sag, and are a made to order perfect 34B , they also have the sensitivity of a coffee table. But hey, I’m here. And the options were fairly limited. Life isn’t cheap. When it comes down to it, we all pay dearly. Some of us in pounds of flesh.

So the day came to make strides. My husband woke up with the flu. I bartered babysitting for the youngest kid with one daughter and told the other to find a ride home from the sleepover. I was going to run this walk.

It was the kind of fall day that makes living in New England worth enduring February. The kind of day where the colors are Crayola pure. You think on such a day in Maine that if you bit the world, it would taste like apple crisp or pumpkin bread. You expect to smell cinnamon when the wind swirls a pile of leaves.

I headed for the Survivor table, made a donation, and got a key chain and a survivor medal on a pink ribbon. It occurred to me the only medal I’ve ever gotten is for not dying. Back when I was a kid, you didn’t get a medal for just showing up to a sporting event in a uniform. You actually had to have skill. Okay, so my skill is for staying alive. I can live with that.

Even though the walk took place in our town, I only saw a few people I knew. Frankly, I felt alone, and wished I’d asked the kids to come. But then, it made sense to be alone, because with stuff like cancer—oh lets, face it, for most of it—life is something we all have to do alone. It was great watching the groups around me, generations of a family, a team from a local gym, a collection of women friends. I could have teared up, but like I said, I’m weird about cancer. I just don’t want to go there.

Somebody cut a pink ribbon and the throng of people moved forward. I had a momentary panic—I couldn’t just run out ahead of the group, make a spectacle of myself and start running. How obnoxious would that seem, “Look at me Miss Fit!” But then I stuck in an earbud and heard the Black Eyed Peas telling me to “Rock That Body,” and off I went. The only place peer pressure ever got me was somewhere I didn’t want to go.

As I pulled ahead of the crowd, and before I put my second earbud in, I heard a woman say, “Oh look, there’s a jogger!” She didn’t say, “What an asshole,” or “Who the hell does she think she is.” Her tone said, “That’s great.”

And it was great. Because here’s the thing. Here’s what I want to share. I am not Miss Fit. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not sporty. I wish I were, but I am a horrible athlete, cripplingly clumsy. My claim to fame is scoring a goal for the other team in field hockey. In graduate school for acting I had to do ballet every morning for two years; I never got beyond the back row where I had a former football player on one side of me and a former hockey goalie on the other. I spent my youth engaging in more challenging physical feats like drinking a gallons of Gallo and smoking three packs of cigarettes in a day and then dancing all night long. Who knew avoiding reality was a sport?

Adding to a complete lack of athleticism and a pathologically low self-esteem, I was also lazy and prone to making excuses. Not exactly the makings of an Olympian. You might say, what’s changed? And I would tell you, nothing much except everything.

Because despite myself, there I was, making strides.

It was an effortless run because I was fueled by gratitude. I was lucky to have an early diagnosis. I taught a boy who lost his mom to breast cancer the year after I had my mastectomies, and one day after class he just broke down and wept while I held him in my arms. His mother’s cancer had eaten him full of holes. She was a beautiful soul named Grace, and I knew as I held him that she could just as easily have been holding my sobbing son.

I have never really understood why I got breast cancer. I want to believe things happen to us for a reason, but I’m not clear on this. Not yet. What I did know as I ran past pink bows on telephone poles last weekend, was that I was so happy to still be here. It was one of those experiences where you can’t help but think, we never got kicked out of of Eden. We just lost the ability to see it. Right in front of us. All the time.

Something else fueled me on that short run, and, at forty nine, I’m only getting used to this feeling: pride. I was actually doing this. For other people running three miles is a breeze, but for me, it was an uphill journey. First I had to find the time, then I had to claim the time (harder), and then I had to face my demons and tell them they weren’t coming on this trip.  I couldn’t run with the extra weight of those guys on my “shitty committee”—the wizened ones from the past who you that you can’t, the bitter ones who snarl that you’re not worth it, and the slimy ones who delight in reminding you of how many times you’ve slipped and fallen before. You’ve got to lace up your sneakers and leave those suckers behind. The world awaits you with open arms.

The past may belong to somebody else. Maybe they took it, maybe you gave it. But the future. The future is ours.

Baby elephants get shackles put their ankles in order to teach them how to perform under the big top. A chain runs from a center pole to the shackle, and in this way they are taught to walk in a circle. At first, of course, they pull, rear up, refuse to budge, their wills run riot, but in time they learn that resistance is futile. They tow the line. They follow the tail in front of them. When they get older, the shackles are removed because they aren’t needed: the elephants think they’re still chained. We all have these baby elephant ideas. We go in circles unable t0 move forward. Or run a walk.

At the halfway point there was a water station. I stopped to take off my jacket and gave the volunteer the map I was holding. I didn’t need it. I knew where I was going.

The second half of the run flew by. Cheryl Crow sang about how every day was a winding road and of course, I started to cry, just like I always do when God takes over as DJ. Everybody should be out here, I thought. When I got sick with cancer, people were so kind. Oh my gosh, the cards, the calls, the meals, the outpouring of love and support I received was amazing and completely undeserved.  I am not and have never been a particularly good friend or popular person, but I got it, my family got it, and it helped so much. But surviving cancer is easy compared to surviving life. Nobody gives you a casserole for going to work a job you hate.   No flowers arrive when you pay the roofer. The kids don’t write thank you notes for dinner. Seven nights a week.  Three hundred and sixty five days a year.

And some of those days are as toxic as chemo. The guy who still can’t find a job. The kid who sits alone at lunch. The woman who opens a second pack of Hostess Cupcakes. The old person who watches reruns of the Love Boat.  My dad used to quote somebody, maybe Tolstoy who said, “Every man is the hero of his own life.” We all deserve a medal before the race, just for making it this far.

As I ran toward the finish line, instead of feeling sad that I had kept my family away, I imagined each of their beautiful and beloved faces cheering me on. I could see them in my mind’s eye: my husband, who has always loved me even when I have not, was magically cured of the flu and had that smile he wears that says he is not at all surprised when I surprise myself, my three kids still at home were there cheering, and my kids off conquering the world at college arrived holding balloons. My Mom, sister, and best friend, dear Pauline had time travelled across the country and were jumping up and down, and even my dad, clocking the furthest distance from the Great Beyond, was there in the back, clapping.  My future was there with open arms.

When I crossed the finish line, someone said, “You won!”

Which was exactly what I had been thinking.

But I wouldn’t have won if had walked, even if I’d been the first one across the finish line. This was a walk I had to run in order to get to a new place.

That Einstein, what a wise guy.

God is in the details.

Workhouse Memories

Workhouse Memories

Our family is lucky enough to have a lake house on an island here in Maine.  Most summer weekends we load up the car and head out to our sweet little log cabin where there is no television, no internet, and nothing to do except sail or sun or swim.

I should say most of the time there is nothing to do except sail or sun or swim.  Some of the time there is work to be done (my husband would say “remember the mortgage,” which means there is always work to be done, but he can write his own blog).  Each May when we open up the house after a long winter’s nap, it seems as though there are more leaves to be raked than there are grains of rice in China.  Then there are the spider webs that cover the house like a cocoon, and the dead mice corpses waiting in every room.  Even abundance has problems.

Ideally, all seven of us in the family are supposed to help with the household chores. Where there is family, there is laundry, dishes in the sink, and mold growing in the fridge.  One year when we were gathered the troops to help clean out the basement, our eldest daughter, enraged, cried out in protest, “This was sold to me as a vacation home!”

She’s a funny one.

This morning, as I was cleaning up from cooking a bacon and egg breakfast after cooking the bacon and egg breakfast for our family and guests, I reminded everyone, “Hey, this was sold to me as a vacation home!”  No one responded.  The kids and the guests were all at the beach and my husband couldn’t hear me above the lawn mower he was vacationing with.

It seems this lack of gratitude and abundance of resentment is part of my gene pool. Recently, my mother told me about my father’s mother, Grandma Kate, who demanded that my grandfather sell their beach house.  “That place was no vacation home,” she was reported to have said. “That was workhouse.”

She and my grandfather, Tom, had a summer place at the Jersey Shore where my dad, a city kid, spent the happiest days of his boyhood riding waves and playing skeeball at the boardwalk arcade.  His mother spent those days a little differently–she was enjoying life the way house slaves did prior to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Every summer weekend a steady stream of friends and family came to Tom and Kate’s beach house to escape the city heat. While the guests were out enjoying the surf and the sand, Kate toiled away in a boiling kitchen cooking dinner for twelve (a roast on Sunday) and changing bed linens more often than a hospital aide.  No sooner did she wipe the breakfast crumbs off the counter than the preparations for lunch began.  And what better time to clean the sand out of the showers and pick up all the wet towels than in the afternoon when everyone was out on the beach dozing under their umbrellas?  This left a few minutes for a Coke—which, thank God for her sake had cocaine in it back then—when, whaddya know, it was time for dinner.

After a good fifteen years of this fun in the sun, Kate refused to go to the shore any longer, claiming that heat of the city in August had nothing on the fiery hell of her kitchen at the shore. The house was sold.  The place couldn’t function without her, and needless to say, no one else wanted her position.  Only love kept her there in the first place, but in a world without microwaves, dryers, or dishwashers, even love got worn out.

As I was wrapping up hour two in the kitchen this morning and communing with Grandma Kate, I was annoyed not only by the absence of a dishwasher (and/or cocaine), but also by a horrible song which was trapped in my head like bee in a jar.  My daughter, Hannah, had been singing a few lines of this dreadful tune all week like it a mantra.

“Makin’ memories, Makin’ memories…catching little pieces of time, making ‘em yours, making ‘em mine,” she sang.

“Stop! Stop with that song,” I’ begged.

“What?  It’s from  ‘Disneyland Fun.’  I loved that show,” she said, continuing to hum.

“That DVD was a thirty minute commercial for Disneyland. It was shameless promotion.” I told her.  Perhaps her relentless warbling was my punishment for planting her and her siblings in front of the TV pretty much every day of their childhoods.  Okay, every day.

“It reminds me of Disneyland with Dad,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said.  “But as far as I’m concerned, if they had had that song at Auschwitz, they would have played it over the loudspeakers.”

I have, in lesser moments, accused my ex-husband of being a Disneyland Dad, but in my kids’ eyes, being a Disneyland Dad is one of the things they love best about him.  He lives in Los Angeles and our kids have gone to Disneyland with him every year of their lives.  Our eldest daughter who now lives in California has an annual pass for the park and when she shows it at the gate, the attendant says, “Welcome Home.”

And it is a home of a kind for her.  It’s the home of some of her happiest memories.  I am beginning to wonder if in the end that might be the only home we keep.

This summer I went home, myself.  My mother rented a house at the Jersey Shore and my sister and I traveled to Mantoloking, New Jersey, right near where Grandma Kate’s workhouse was, to spend a week with our families.

When I left New Jersey at eighteen I felt very much like Bruce Springsteen when he sang, “It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win.”  I never missed the big hair, the bigger accent, and the even bigger attitude of New Jersey. I’d go back to visit my mom, but always leave grateful, the way you feel after you visit someone in the hospital or in prison.  Too much of my childhood felt like being trapped on a psych ward or being punished for a crime I didn’t commit.  New Jersey may be the Garden State for some, but the only thing that grew there for me was sadness.

The shore was different.  Every summer my family would take day trips down to the shore, and for two summers we rented a crummy little bungalow there.  Sometimes my father, who lived in another state and was separated from my mother, would come with us.  That was crazymaking, to be sure, but it also made for the happiest days of my childhood.  Because of his boyhood memories, he was happy when we were at the shore, and my mother, my sister, and I latched onto his joy like a hungry baby onto a breast.  For a few golden days, we were a happy and whole family.

I hadn’t been back to the Jersey Shore for any length of time until this summer. When MTV came out with their horrible show, I defended Jersey with a passion that surprised me.  “It’s nothing like that,” I told my kids.  “The Jersey Shore has some of most beautiful beaches I’ve known, and the people are not named Snooki or J Wow. It’s a wonderful place.”  Yet another instance proving that Reality TV is a misnomer.

So here I was, turning forty-nine, back at the shore. Each morning when I woke I’d throw on a bathing suit, run down to the water, and dive in.   Immersing myself in that gorgeous green sea was like swimming in amniotic fluid.  The taste, the smell, the feel of the water affected me so deeply, I felt giddy. It was hard to feel where I ended and the ocean began.  It felt as if I had melted.

At one point I was riding the waves holding hands with my eight-year old son on one side and my nineteen-year old on the other.  I’m sure they didn’t know my face was wet with tears.  A wave knocked the three of us down.  We never let go of each other’s hands.

Halfway through our week in Mantoloking, I was alone with my husband, holding onto him in the water.

“I’ve never seen you this happy,” he said.

That’s something because for the past twelve years he has made me happier than I’ve ever been.

“I’m home,” I told him as the waves rocked us.  “I’ve come home.”

It had been long enough.  The sadness and the shame had been washed away and all that was left was the memories, sparkling like diamonds on the water.  Little pieces of time that were mine.

When my oldest daughter was three months old, she and I flew from LA to New Jersey to visit my mother.  I befriended the elderly woman next to me, a gracious soul, the kind of person you hope you’ll one day be, emanating a perfect balance of wisdom and warmth.  Her husband of fifty plus years had recently passed away, and I expressed my sorrow.

“That must be so hard for you,” I said.

“Oh no,” she told me. “I have my memories.”  Then she paused and said to me as if I would one day need to know, “And after all, my dear, what is life, but a memory?”

I wish I could thank Kate for the memories she made in the workhouse.  Memories such as she slaved for are the hardest to make because they’re the finest kind, borne of pure love.  Surrounded by friends and family enjoying the natural world, my Dad knew happiness, and he, in turn, passed that on to me and to my sister. This summer thanks to my mom (who has her own suitcase full of happy memories with my dad’s family at the shore), my sister and I cut vegetables, wiped counters, swept floors, and washed towels and also rode waves, played board games, and flew kites with our kids.  We all laughed our heads off.  What we were really doing, of course, was passing on the love.  What makes us happier than that?

Happiness, it turns out, can be genetic.  We can get it from our families.

As I was filling up the golf cart this morning with a cooler full of lunch, a raft shaped like a lobster, and fishing poles to bring down to the beach, a favorite and sick poem of my dad’s by Philip Larkin came to mind:

They fuck you up,

Your mum and dad.

They don’t mean to

But they do.

They give you all the faults they had

Then add some extra

Just for you.

This much I knew to be true.  I have empirical evidence. But because I was in a Hallmark frame of mind, I rewrote it as I untangled a fishing line:

But they can fill you,

 Mum and Dad

If they want to,

They can do.

They’ll give you all the joy they’ve had

Then add some extra

Just for you

I couldn’t decide which was worse, my poem, or Disney’s “Makin’ Memories”song which was still lodged in my head like a meat cleaver.  More lines of the song had emerged from my consciousness and now all I could hear, louder than the chorus of birds chirping overhead, was the final line of that dreadful ditty, “Cause when you’re making memories, the happy days are always here.  The happy days are always here.”

And then I went to join them at the water.

The Art Lesson

This morning I told my eight-year-old son Sam that I was going to an art museum for a school assignment (I am attempting to earn my MFA in my spare time) later in the day. I was supposed to spend time observing art that was nonverbal and to write about my experience.  Raising five children over the last 21 years hasn’t afforded me a whole lot of time at art museums, although I have been a frequent visitor to more science, natural history, and children’s museums than I care to count.  I was very much looking forward to spending time alone in an art museum.  It seemed like the sort of thing someone getting a Master of Fine Arts should be doing. But to be honest, I relish spending time alone at Walmart.

Sam, a budding artist, is attending art camp at Bowdoin College, which is adjacent to the Bowdoin museum where I was planning to go for my hour or so to ruminate over artwork.  He’s really pretty good with a pencil and a piece of paper—especially gifted at drawing Bowser from Super Mario Galaxy and Voldemort.  Even more though, Sam is a true artist in the way he sees the world, and in the way he lives.  He’s sensitive.  Mindful.  Maybe a little too aware.  Like many artists, he could use a few more filters.  Life comes at him one hundred proof.

“Oh, man,” he said to me when I told him about my plans.  “I would so love to go.”

I thought I had misheard him, or he had misheard me.  “You would love to go to the art museum?” I asked.

“Yes, I love that place,” he said. He’d been taken once to the museum on a school field trip.

“I can take you with me after camp if you want,” I offered, half expecting him to turn me down.  I wondered if he might just be saying he wanted to go to the museum because he knew I was excited about going.  My kids have all been precocious manipulators.

“Oh that’d be great!” he said, his little face as bright as this summer day.  “Let’s do it!”

How could I say no?  How could I say, “Listen, pal, I have to go alone and be a deep and thoughtful grownup?”  How do you squelch a child’s enthusiasm, especially a boy (forgive the sexism, but…) for an art museum?  He’s my fifth child.  None of my children have ever wanted to go look at paintings on a summer afternoon.  Actually, the other four are in various phases of teenagerdom.  They don’t want be seen with me anywhere at all. Actually, they are hoping people will think they are adopted.

I’m okay with that.

Of course I had to take Sam with me.  What if Leonardo da Vinci’s mother had been a selfish bitch and refused to take him to the Uffizi?

And so, this afternoon, we went together, Sam and I, hand in hand, him skipping next to me like a kite as we walked across the campus.  And like so many of my experiences in the last twenty-one years of motherhood, during our outing to the museum my desires were sublimated to his.  I couldn’t lose myself in the artwork, couldn’t stay too long looking at any single painting, couldn’t really hear myself think, couldn’t even really think on any sort of deep level (I’ve been skimming the surface of my mind for too long).  I was tuned in to him, more focused on his experience than on mine.

It is possible to be a supporting player in your own life story.  Ask any mother.

And let’s be clear.  I am in no way painting myself as any sort of paragon of motherhood.  It’s not high ideals that motivate me. It’s guilt. It’s not wanting to have all five of their analysts call me and tell me why it is all my fault.  I am not a naturally maternal person.  In fact people who knew me back when I had a waist are still horrified that the Fates put one, let alone, five children in my care.  I hate the Girl Scouts.  I’ve never made a Halloween costume.  I am a wretch for every major holiday.  I have a foul mouth.  I refuse to play Candyland.  Okay?  If there’s a parenting mistake, I’ve made it.  At least twice if not five times.  I’m not a particularly great mother, but I am a mother.  Meaning I will only be nominated for best supporting actress in a tragicomedic role.

Rather than seethe (I prefer just to simmer)  with resentment that this was going to be Sam’s trip to the museum and not mine (I am way past that…did I mention I am in my twenty-second year on the job?), I talked to Sam about history, the Roman Empire, the Greeks. At least I was able to feel smart for fifteen minutes (another pleasure denied me by my teen offspring).  We talked about time.  Just how long 3000 years is.  How do they cut into marble?  What tools do they use?  He couldn’t believe those people so long ago could “do such a good job” making statues.  His favorite painting was a contemporary piece (he liked those best, while I was all about the realistic paintings from the 1600’s), a Jackson Pollack type canvas with dripping paint.  He loved it and couldn’t help himself—he reached out to touch the paint.  I knew how he felt. It was irresistible, that thick, gloppy paint, just asking to be caressed.  The guard, who had been lurking behind headless naked statues, came to life and scolded Sam, and in the process of course, dampened his enthusiasm.  Who knew art could be so strict, right?

I would’ve stayed twice as long had I been on my own, but again, I was aware of Sam’s experience. My responsibility to him trumped my desires for the thousandth time. I didn’t want to exhaust his patience and risk carving a bad memory into his marble head.  I imagined him saying in later years to a girlfriend outside the Louvre, “I hate museums and I’m not sure why. I vaguely remember my mother dragging me around…”

As we walked from room to room, I felt a nagging disappointment, one I have grown accustomed to, my life is not my own. I’m the one who wanted to have all these damn kids.  Acceptance is the key to all my problems, and the truth is (shining like a beacon underneath the blanket of resentment) that I love that child more than art or beauty or truth or air.  He comes first.

I remember one morning when our eldest daughter was a few days old. It was before dawn cracked and I was breastfeeding her, again.  She was sucking the life right out of me and I was desperate to a) pee, b) have a cup of coffee, c) eat something.  It hit me like an anvil on forehead that from then on out, my needs were never going to come before hers.  And here I’d thought love had to do with roses and valentines.

Over the years, I have become adept at feeding some morsels to my own psyche.  Today, I managed to take a few notes on some paintings on my phone (the guard was sure I was going to use my phone to take photos.  It delighted me to keep him on edge as I typed away. I’m not proud of this).  I responded to the paintings with the people in them.  It’s the faces I loved.  An eighteenth century painting where a game of checkers has gone awry and one guy has pulled a gun and the other a dagger intrigued me because I wanted to know the dirt on the story being held in that frame.   Another painting, dark, oil, held a woman looking bored, or forlorn, or empty, at a windowsill.  Bricks surround the window she is boxed in.  Her wedding ring was the brightest spot on the painting. She looked so sad.  Marriage disappoints, puts you in a cage.  And then my favorite piece, an Andrew Wyeth watercolor of a sailor standing near a mooring.  His face is smeared, unrecognizable, and he is standing with his hands in his pockets.  He is aloof.  Men are mysterious to women.  All of them are to some degree remote like this sailor, and what is more appealing than remote?

All this feeds into the novel (gulp) I am swimming in right now.  About how motherhood takes so much of who you are, and how the feminists never told us how to be a woman and a mother.  Do pieces of your soul slide out with every placenta?  About how marriage is to love what Raid is to bugs.  The death of it.  That painting of the woman in the window…I know so many married women who are that woman.  I have been that woman.  I want to write a book for her.  I want her to get out of her box and walk over to the Wyeth sailor and either kiss him deeply, or a pull a gun or a dagger on him, or throw a can of paint on him and watch it drip down his remote self.  Maybe then he’d get his hands out of his pockets and around her heart.

But I won’t remember these paintings next year, I know I won’t.  I won’t remember them any year.  Instead, I will remember going to the museum with Sam. I will walk by that building in the years to come and I will remember the feeling of Sam’s small hand in mine.  I will see him scampering from room to room, flitting from painting to painting. And I will remember the look of fear on his face when we walked into a room with a super high ceiling painted with angels and clouds. For some reason the ceiling scared him terribly, and he grabbed my arm and buried his face in my side.  I held him.

I got him to sit down and I put my arm around him, tethered him to the earth as he bravely tilted his flower face toward the ceiling.  I told him about Michelangelo laying on his back for years painting the Sistine Chapel.  We talked about why images of heaven are so often painted on ceilings and how it would be better to just make the ceiling a piece of glass if you wanted to help people be close to God.  And then I looked down at his sweet little face and remembered God isn’t always up.

This is what I will remember about our day at the museum. Or at least I hope I will.  I hope I remember how it felt to be able to comfort and protect this small person. I felt lucky, special, blessed, whole…you name it and if it’s good, I felt it.  Once again today, I didn’t exactly get the day I thought I wanted.  Instead, I was retaught the lesson I keep resisting, that motherhood keeps trying to teach me: it’s in the giving that I get what I need.

This Is Going to Hurt a Lot

I’ve been avoiding the Royal Wedding because it’s too painful.

Granted, most of the pain has been in my head. I am presently acting as host to a bacteria worthy of a 50’s sci-fi flick—The Microbe that Ate My Life—which refuses to leave my jawbone despite the removal of its former domicile, tooth No. 30 and an arsenal full of antibiotics. At least the offending tooth is gone. If anyone happens to need a tooth extracted while vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, let me know. Have I got an oral surgeon for you.

In return, if any of you can tell me if it is possible to remove your jaw with utensils found in the kitchen, I’d appreciate a call.

Nothing can turn a fairly decent human being into a boring, whining, narcissistic solipsist like pain can.

I am not your mother, wife, daughter, friend, owner, sister, aunt, or sidekick.  I am a throbbing pain.  I am the hole in my jaw formerly known as me.  Don’t bother talking to me about the passing of your favorite great aunt.  I don’t care.  At all.  I am not even listening.  I am sending out my tongue on its 5,389^th mission to see if the abscess on my jawbone has grown since I last checked it fifty six seconds ago.

Really, I will be a different person when this tooth situation is under control. As soon as my mouth is better I will:  pay the bills, take down the Christmas lights (so Easter’s come and gone, so what), rake the garden, wash the delicates heaped on the washing machine, get the car inspected, clean out the vegetable drawer, lose ten pounds, and be a better and more compassionate human being. Oh, and have sex. As soon as the lower right quadrant of my head returns, I will have sex with my husband.  How could I forget?

That last sentence was for any male readers.  The women did not need that question asked.  The women know full well how I could forget.

Which brings me back (finally, you say) to the Royal Wedding.  You know, weddings=sex/marriage=no sex.  Are you with me?  If you’re married, you are. If you’re not, go read some other blog.  This will only depress you.

Anyway, in an effort to avoid the agony of the novel I am supposed to be writing and the pain pulsing in my mouth, I decided to watch a slideshow (complete with soaring violins) of William and Catherine’s nuptials.

I am done crying now.

Thank God I didn’t sit through the whole thing.  Just watching clips of that wedding was more agonizing than my bacteria laden jaw and my festering novel combined.

It looked like the fairy tale everyone wanted it to be.  Catherine and William, so stunning.  So full of hope.  So young.  So naïve.

So much like lambs going to slaughter.

Someone needs to tell them this marriage is going to hurt a lot.

No doubt they imagine that their lives will flow as smoothly and seamlessly as that gorgeous satin train that followed Catherine up to the altar.  And the billion of us watching, we want to believe it too!  We want to believe that although a billion of us–give or take a few– have failed to do it, somehow these two rarified humans actually can and will live happily ever after.  Their lives won’t become wrinkled, stained, tattered, bunched up messes they can’t stop tripping over.

I have been married twice.  Both times I was lucky and both times have been hard.  The first time was a failure not of wills, but of compatibility.  Marriage ruined what would have been a fine friendship.  My mother says, “As God made them, he matched them,” and in our case we didn’t listen to the scores of friends (or that small voice inside both of us) who said we weren’t a match. We were, however, aligned in our mutual arrogance; we knew better than everyone.  This has taught me an invaluable life lesson: if everyone you know and love tells you that you are making a mistake or if they look at their fingernails and stop breathing when you ask them if you are making a mistake—you are making a mistake.  Fortunately, my first husband and I made four amazing kids together, which makes my marriage to him my favorite mistake and the best worst thing that I’ve ever had the good fortune to endure.

I am a better person for it.  The way you should be after cancer, or war, or a nuclear or natural disaster.  If you survive, there’s a fair amount of scar tissue and innocent people get hurt, but hopefully you make amends by treading this earth with a lot more humility.

My second marriage has already outlasted my first, and we have had a wonderful life together.  We are lucky. We are a match, a pair.  My husband says, “Ducks don’t fuck chickens” and we definitely belong to the same flock.   He is the best friend I’ve ever had.  He is the one I would pick without a second thought to be stranded on a deserted island with.  He delights me still. And like Pooh says to Piglet, if he lives to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I don’t have to live a single day without him.  He’s wonderful.  I’m not and he knows it.  That makes me love him all the more.

But it’s still a marriage.  And I don’t’ care if Thesaurus.com doesn’t list marriage as a synonym for hard.  It is.  Hard.   And that’s what kills me about William and Catherine.  I just hope they can handle how hard it is to stay married. I hope somebody tells them that marriage has nothing to do with that wedding they just had.  Marriage isn’t about kicking up your heels, it’s about digging in and staying your ground without ever sinking too low.  It isn’t a trip down an aisle or a walk around the park.  Marriage is a marathon.

I  don’t have confidence that Charles, or Grandma Elizabeth or Grandpa Duke what’s-his-name are going to warn these lambs how rocky the terrain can get.  Maybe Camilla will.  She looks like she’s taken a few classes at the School of Hard Knocks.  We can only hope.

I hope somebody over there takes off her flying saucer hat and tells these newlyweds that weddings are parties and parties end, but married people have to go home together.  Weddings are commercials; marriage is round-the-clock, never-ending, relentless programming that veers wildly and inexplicably from sappy family sitcoms to the Twilight Zone. In fact, weddings have about as much to do with marriage as childbirth has to do with raising children. At least with childbirth they give you a hint.  They do call it labor.

But marriage is equally challenging. Who can prepare you for how hard it is to stay in step once you head back down the aisle? Who can tell you how impossible it is to put another person’s happiness first, especially those days, weeks, or months when it seems he/she doesn’t put you second, third, or even fourth?  Who can explain that you will have to love him/her best who can hurt you the worst?  Who can ease your fears when have to take your fragile future and place it inside someone else’s without crushing one, or the other, or both? Your fledgling self suddenly becomes a Siamese twin needing twice as much care, twice as much nurturing.  No one can ever prepare you for how much strain you’re going to put on that satin train: jobs, in-laws, money, children, sickness, addictions, sex, mortgages, monthly payments, more mistakes than you could ever count and more forgiveness than you ever knew you could get or give.  All of it trails after you wherever you go, all the days of your life.

My father’s best friend was a lovely southern gentleman who was married for seventy-five years.  When he heard my first husband and I were having trouble he said, “Well sure they’ve hit a rough patch.  Of course they have.  All marriages have those.  Hell, we’ve had rough decades.”  I didn’t find this encouraging at the time, but I do now.

The odds are against William and Catherine.  One only has to remember his parents to know that.  But we can hope. And we do. Painful as it is, we hope for the best for them.  And for us.  Because sometimes marriages work.  And when they do, marriage is a testament to the very best that two people can aspire to be.  It’s nothing short of miraculous.

Shirley and Eliot, a couple in their early seventies, used to live across the street.  When we moved in ten years ago, Eliot, a gentle man and a retired composer, had some trouble remembering.  When he and Shirley moved out last year to live with their daughter, he couldn’t remember how to get out of the car.  Sometimes you’d see him stopped in the cul-de-sac, still as statue; he would forget how to walk. Once he grabbed my arm, pointed to the mailbox, and asked what “that thing was for.”  Over the years, I watched Shirley care for him day after long and lonely day.  They had few friends.  He rarely slept longer than four hours.  But every day they’d drive by in their Prius, Shirley at the wheel wearing a jaunty scarf around her neck and candy apple red lipstick on her lips, on their way to get ice cream.  “I need something to look forward to,” she explained to me about their daily trips, before adding,  “So does he.”  At the end, when I knew her better, I asked her how she could stand it.  How she could go on.  “I love him,” she said.  As if that were enough.

Marriage is also a synonym for love which is also a synonym for hard.

In addition to Shirley and Eliot, I have never forgotten an image of marriage shared with me by a friend, Marcie.  When she was a teenager, she was with her parents at a motel and her mother got violently sick from food poisoning.  Marcie remembers looking in the bathroom and seeing her mom on her knees vomiting into the toilet.  Kneeling right next to her was Marcie’s dad, one hand rubbing his wife’s back and the other holding her hair away from her face.

Marcie’s image came to mind during my recent tooth debacle on our Florida vacation.  I, too, found myself worshipping at the porcelain altar in a hotel room, vomiting up painkillers my body decided it didn’t want.  Right next to me was my husband, the man who’s vacation had consisted of squiring his wife to the oral surgeon, forking out five hundred bucks to get her crummy tooth pulled, taking care of our son while I slept like a sloth, and visiting Walgreen’s repeatedly for icepacks and gauze.  Oh, and on the way to the oral surgeon, he learned that the business deal he had been working on cratered to the tune of losing some ten million dollars.  He tried to take care of me, and I tried to take care of him.  Neither of us was particularly successful.  It was a painful vacation.

And some days it’s been a painful marriage.  Fortunately, the pain has never, ever come close to overpowering the love. I want to tell William and Catherine this.  That love hurts and then goes on loving.  This is what real love is, and this is what marriage demands.

Fortune is a wheel. To stay married, you’ll have to hold onto each other most tightly when it’s most painful, when you’re being crushed, when you’re at the bottom. Manage to stay together down there, and before long you’ll find that you are being raised again to giddy heights.  If you can just hold on, you will find yourselves riding even higher than you were on your wedding day, back before you knew that marriage was a synonym for miracle.

Bi-Winning

Charlie Sheen, chock full of Adonis blood and Tiger DNA, witty warlock that he is, has been much in the news these days.  His twitter account got a million twitterers in the first day, and his “Building the Perfect Torpedo” tour sold out in 18 minutes, setting a Ticketmaster record. A lot of people want to see Charlie Sheen.  But then a lot of people slow down for car wrecks, too.  Tragedy loves an audience.

The media is full of dispute about Charlie. Is he an addict? Bi-polar? In pre-hab? From outer space?  Is this a joke, or is it funny because he is actually serious?

Charlie boasts that he isn’t bi-polar, he is bi-winning.  He has it all, what every man wants: money, fame, talent, and, not one, but two goddesses whose cumulative age is nearly the same as Vatican Assassin Charlie’s. He doesn’t plan on marrying either woman, thank you very much. Oh, and P.S., he pays them.

What’s the reason Charlie’s got it made and you don’t?  He can explain it to you: “Newsflash: I’m special.”

This, of course, begs the question: if you’re so special, why are you so pissed off? And if your life is so great, why do your eyes dart like those of a raccoon trapped in a trashcan under a spotlight?  Even more, if your life is so “perfect and bitchin’” why did the authorities remove your children from your home? And,  if partying is so great, if the “run” you were on “made Sinatra, Jagger, Richards, all the others look like droopy-eyed, armless children. It was epic,” then why quit?

But what do I know?  I’ve spent the last twenty years in trapped in AA’s “troll hole” as Charlie refers to it.  According to Charlie, AA’s success rate is only 5%, whereas Charlie’s is 100%.  Alcoholics Anonymous, as Charlie sees it, is  “vintage, outdated and stupid and it’s followed by stupid people. I hate them violently… Debate me on AA right now. I have a disease? Bull****. I cured it right now with my mind.”

Phew.  Who knew it could be that easy. It’s a wonder more people don’t rehab like this. Poof!

In fact, someone should recommend this Poof! cure for alcohol addiction to a young husband and father I heard about recently who came home at 2:30 in the morning smashed out of his mind, again. His wife is thinking about leaving him and taking their three little children with her.  The only “epic” part of this sad tale will be the therapy bills those kids accrue trying to believe it wasn’t their fault that Daddy drank so much.

Somebody should tell this guy to take a page out of Charlie’s little black book (not the page with Heidi Fleiss’s number) and cure himself already.  But then, one should probably pause before taking advice about addiction (or anything) from a man who smokes crack with porn stars in a hotel room when his daughters, aged 5 and 7, are sleeping in the next room.

What angers and saddens me about Charlie Sheen is that his insane and inane vitriol will discourage addicts and alcoholics, like the young husband I heard about, from seeking treatment.  The irony that Charlie says he’d cured himself  “with his mind” is rich.  His addled mind is the problem. Charlie may not still be drinking, but he’s still drunk. In fact, he’s pretty much the poster boy for full-blown alcoholism.

Let’s look at the alcoholism checklist and see how Charlie fares:

Denial? Check. Grandiosity? Check.  Anger? Big red check.  Resentments? Enormous check. Blaming? Check.  Justifying? Rationalizing? Inability to restrain pen and tongue? Check. Check. Check. Lack of impulse control? Check.  Consorting with lower companions?  Check (see: goddesses) Victimization? Check. Loss of job? Check.  Loss of family? Check. Insanity? Check.

What’s left? Oh, yes. Death. No check. Yet.

What Charlie should remind us all is that alcoholism is a disease of the mind, body, and soul. It will twist your mind, rot your gut, and suck out your soul more effectively than Harry Potter’s Dementors ever could.  It’s a legacy you get with your blue eyes and an opposable thumb, packed in your cellular suitcase; it’s nothing you would choose for yourself, and it steals away your power of choice.  Alcoholism starts with a party in nirvana and ends in a jail, a car wreck, a heart attack, or a suicide.

Alcoholism is hell.

When you’re an addict, the devil doesn’t come in a red suit with a pitchfork to lead you into temptation, he’s in your mirror.  Hell isn’t some subterranean lair complete with flames, it’s your life as you crave a drink, take a drink, recover from a drink, and start the fun all over again craving a drink. You are an insatiably thirsty hamster and your little paws are cemented to the wheel. There is never, ever, ever enough.

Willpower is as effective on addiction as blowing on a forest fire.  Like Sissyphus in Greek mythology who is cursed to push a boulder up a hill each day, believing this will be the day he gets it to the top, only to have it roll to the bottom every night, we alcoholics get up each morning vowing never to drink again only to find by nightfall there is an empty glass in our hand and we are having trouble discerning whether there is one or two of you standing in front of us.

It’s a disease.  But it’s not like cancer where people will send you meals when you get diagnosed. Actually, by the time it’s clear that you’re a drunk, many of those close to you are either not speaking to you or are embarrassed by you.  A lot of times you owe them money, so a chicken casserole is probably out of the question.

The nice thing about alcoholism is once you get the diagnosis you can ignore it.  What other genetically transmitted illness can boast that a hallmark of the disease is to deny that you even have it? Tricky.  A classic Catch 22.  Circular logic that ends up looking a lot like a noose.

There are 17.6 million alcoholics in the United States according to the National Institute of Health.  And am I being extreme if I double that number? If part of the disease is denial, isn’t it tough to get a head count?  I know neither of my parents would’ve raised their hands, and after attending a party a few weeks ago, I think I have two more names to add to the list.  Oh, and don’t forget the young husband.  Sadly, he most likely belongs on the roster, too.

And of those 17.6 million whose message in a bottle is, “Welcome to Hell,” how may recover?  Not nearly enough.  Who knew hell was such a popular destination.  How can you stop if you don’t admit you need to stop?  How can you stop if you can’t stop?

Because really, if you don’t have a drinking problem, stopping drinking is not a problem.  That’s the test.  It really is that simple

What hope can I offer the wife of that young husband?  Your husband is most likely an alcoholic.  He has promised to control his drinking and he can’t.  It controls him.   When you pour alcohol on promises they shrivel up faster than the Witch in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy douses her with water. The man you love is drowning, and he is pulling you and those three little kids down with him. This is a chronic progressive disease, which is only arrested by abstinence.  If it’s not arrested, it death will ensue.  People die from alcoholism every day.  Don’t tell me all those heart attacks are caused by Big Macs.

This is not hyperbole.  Saying you have tiger blood is hyperbole.

But who needs hope anyway?  According to Charlie Sheen, “Hope is for suckers and tools.” Such a happy guy, that Charlie.  I never saw his TV show, but I am assuming he was the “half” in “Two and a Half Men.”

Hey, Charlie.  Fuck off. Go suck another Marlboro.

I believe in hope.  I believe as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.”  I believe in it so much, I named one of my daughters Hope, after that very poem.

I believe in hope because I’ve sat in AA meetings for the past twenty years and watched miracle after miracle parade by.  Hundreds of stories of hope and salvation, of families healed and hearts glued back together. People from all walks of life, from movie stars to convicted felons, have fallen prey to this disease and millions have somehow risen—or been lifted—out of their own alcohol sodden ashes.  Alcoholism doesn’t discriminate and is non-denominational. It’s an equal opportunity fucker upper.

But fortunately, there is equal opportunity redemption as well.  Recovery is possible, even if it’s only by remission.

Recovery comes in many guises.  A priest I know used his faith to stop drinking.  Another friend went to rehab.  Some people rely on a Higher Power and it’s a she, for others it’s an it (even a doorknob for one woman I heard of), others lean on Jesus, or Buddha, or Allah.  For millions, walking the well trod steps of AA in twenty four hour blocks works best, while others take up exercise and run as fast as they can away from their demons.  The good news is, there is no right way. The bad news is, an alcoholic can’t just go Poof!  First he has to stop drinking, then he has to start changing.

And this is what Charlie doesn’t get.  Getting sober isn’t only about stopping the substances. That’s just the first step and in retrospect, it might be the easiest part. If you aren’t willing to change, you’ll drink again. Which came first the drink or the soul sickness?  Is drinking the symptom or is it the disease?  Who knows?  Who cares. Chickens in eggs become chickens with eggs. The bottom line is if you want to recover from alcoholism you have to recover yourself. You accomplish this by accepting these two absolute facts: you cannot drink and you must change.

Changing means assuming responsibility for your mistakes; it mean taking an unflinching look at your character defects and being willing to let them go; it means shutting your mouth and opening your ears because you+your best thinking got you shit-faced most of the time; it means acknowledging that the role of God has been filled, and not by you; and it means forgiving people for being human right after you forgive yourself.

You know how you can tell Charlie isn’t recovered?  His horrific lack of humility.  I remember one time when I behaved terribly to my father.  I was rude and disrespectful, as only a miserably unhappy person can be.  Afterward, he sent me a letter.  One line typed in the middle of the page, which read: “You’re not that special.  Nobody is.”  At the bottom right he signed, “Love, Daddy.”

Nobody is special enough to behave badly.

You can stop drinking and change your life, young husband.  I know you can because I do it with varying degrees of success and failure every day, and when I quit drinking twenty years ago I couldn’t imagine how anybody got through one day of this stinking life without drinking.  Drive a car without wheels, fall up, sprout a third hand, any of it seemed easier than being able to withstand life with only one channel: reality.

But I did it.  I did it with a lot of help.  One day at a time.  And if I can do it, anyone can. Even Charlie.

Amazingly, those twenty four hours add up and one day you realize that you have this beautiful life, where chaos has been replaced by calm.  It’s the kind of life you thought was for other people, luckier people.

The paradox of alcoholism is that this terrible disease may be the best thing that ever happened to you. Weakness becomes strength, shame morphs into pride, denial transforms into acceptance, and surrender blossoms into freedom. As any person who’s been both places can tell you, Heaven is the flip side of Hell..

If you’re an alcoholic, alcoholism is the hand you’re dealt, but you don’t have to hold onto those anger and fear cards for the rest of your life.  By succumbing to the grace of this good world, you can discard those suckers and ask the dealer to pass the love and hope cards your way.

That’s what I call Bi-Winning.

The Harder Battle

“Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”  Socrates

That Socrates, you’ve got to love him.  The smartest guy ever, and he went around saying, “I know that I know nothing.” How smart is that?

But it also extends.  He knew he knew nothing about other people either.  And we don’t, do we?

This week a friend of mine told me that one of his co-workers, a super successful guy, confessed that he is suffering from debilitating panic attacks. My friend was shocked.  This guy had to be one of the most confident people he’d ever known.  What did he have to panic about?

As a former victim of this dis-ease, my heart breaks for this fellow panicker. Frankly, if he could figure out what the panic was about, it’d be gone.  Imagine a bird trapped in a box.  Now imagine that you are the box and the bird is in you—flailing, flapping, hurling itself against the cages of your ribs, determined to peck its way out of your sternum.

This is not worry, this is not even anxiety.  This is panic.  It has no cause, it has no source, it has no expiration date.  It can’t be talked to, reasoned with, or stifled.  There isn’t enough air, anywhere, ever, and you are trapped.  You need to get out—of the universe?  The gas pedal in your solar plexus is stuck and your engine is revving, racing, roaring.  If your entire body flipped inside out so that all your organs were now on the outside, raw and exposed, like a glove peeled off too quickly, you would not be surprised.  In fact, that may have already happened, but you don’t care because you are out of your freaking mind.

And here you’d thought the line between the sane and the insane was so much wider. A continent, a valley, or at least a California highway.  Who knew it was a hairline fracture?  A thread.  A dendrite.

If you’ve had a panic attack, you know a thing or two about thin ice.

But who would know that my friend’s co-worker, this gregarious, big-hearted man full of opinions on how to run the world better (these guys are management consultants—something Socrates would have been a complete failure at—they are paid to be the World’s Smartest People), he is fighting this lonely, terrifying battle against an enemy he can’t catch, can’t escape, and can’t shoot because he’s the only guy on the battlefield.

But the lady at the drycleaner will refuse to give him his clothes without his claim check, and the guy in the Honda will cut him off and be sure to give him the finger, and the asshole at work will not tell him he did a good job on the presentation even if he did.  Because on the outside, this guy’s got it made.

And when you compare your insides to everybody else’s outsides, everybody does have it made.

Except that they don’t.  We’re all just battered warriors on the battlefield of life.

I do pretty well remembering this when I interact with people I don’t know (I am decidedly less successful with those I know, or think I know).  For example, I would never throw up my hands in disgust—like some people I encountered last week—when a car is edges its nose out from behind a mountain of snow into oncoming traffic.  These mini Matterhorns can be found on every street corner in Maine in February. It’s impossible to merge without risking your life because there is no way to see what is coming if half your vehicle isn’t already in peril.

Ideally an arctic exploration of this kind involves some sort of scout who heads out in advance to survey the frozen tundra, but I have trouble finding anyone to empty the dishwasher let alone scout terrain for me. Therefore, I was by myself, scoutless, when I had to risk my life in just this way, prompting a woman in a Volvo to react as if I had asked to use her child in a tribal sacrifice rather than merge into the flow of traffic in bumfuck Maine.

This little Mary Sunshine stopped long enough to contort her face into a mask of outrage (pretty) and shake her fist at the sky before continuing on, not letting me in.  The next guy in line gently waved me in, and we shared on of those great stranger moments—locking eyes and wagging our heads as if to say, I’m sure glad I’m not alone here in the Land of the Angry People.

This put me directly behind the Volvo carting Mother Umbrage and her children.  What a lovely example she was setting for them.  Anyway, what made her behavior particularly appalling is that she had a pink breast cancer license plate.  I am a breast cancer survivor.  Does she realize that by paying the extra $39.99 for that specialty plate she was contributing to keeping people like me alive? People with double mastectomies who someday are going to need her help merging?  Then, as if the irony of this situation wasn’t scathing enough, this woman pulled into the parking lot of a Catholic school.

What would Jesus do?  I’m thinking he might have let me in.

But, then I said to myself, maybe she was having a bad day. I’ve had a few.  Maybe her cancer was back.  Maybe that morning her husband had told her he doesn’t love her anymore.  Maybe she had a hangnail. What do I know?  Everyone has different levels of stress, but I’ve heard we all suffer equally here. I consoled myself that at least I don’t have to be her, not that day, anyway.

I let it go.

I wish that kind of evolved reasoning had held up for me earlier this afternoon when I went to mail an essay on “How Fiction Cultivates Compassion” (this, too, later proved to be painfully ironic) to my professor.  In front of our post office, in the small, Mayberryesque town where we live, there is a mailbox on the side of the road.  Its mouth faces toward the street, making it easy for drivers to pull up and mail a letter without having to get out of their car. I parked just ahead of this mailbox, checking to make sure there wasn’t a “No Parking” sign (check).  There was a sign, and it read “Two Hour Parking.” I pulled up as far as I could, making sure I wasn’t blocking the mailbox. Or so I thought.

As I was walking away from my car, an older sedan packed with five or six people—younger, twentysomethings—pulled up to the mailbox. The windows of the car were all open, and rap music was playing.  I didn’t have to look at them to know we wouldn’t have a lot in common. As I was walking by, I heard yelling: “You f—ing a—hole”  “What the f—“ and was glad to be getting away from them.  But when one hollered, “You goddamned bitch” “What the f—is wrong with you?” I stopped and fist closed around my heart. They were yelling at me. I was the object of their rage. People on the sidewalk stopped, looking around to figure out what was going on, adding a dash of humiliation to the fear boiling in my stomach.

At this point, I walked over to the car, took the letter out of the driver’s hand, shoved it into the mailbox and said, “I don’t think you were overreacting. Do you?  What is it? A letter asking for kidney?” They stared at me, speechless.  I went on, “And now, guess what happens?  It’ll sit there until the five o’clock pick up in, let me see, oh yes, three hours.”  They grumbled as I walked away. I turned around and said with tears brimming and voice shaking (thank God for that MFA in acting), “Also, I want to thank you for being so kind because I just visited my dad in ICU and he isn’t dead. Yet.”  Leaving them, I turned on my hell and exited stage left into the post office.

I showed them.

Or I would have showed them if any of that had actually happened.  But back in the real world where people were screaming obscenities at me and I was feeling like a parakeet in a paper bag, I tucked my head down and scurried into the post office clutching my manila envelope.  Quaking and shaking in line, I tried to hold myself together. I was overcome by the urge to tell someone in line what had just happened, but all of a sudden, I was wary of everyone. It was as if the people in the sedan were a new order and I couldn’t be sure who had joined.  I really was in the “Land of the Angry People.” (And this was, after all, the post office, a place with a rich history of mental instability).  The problem was I wasn’t angry.  Anger would have been a luxury.  Anger would’ve implied I had gotten up after the punch.

The sedan was gone by the time I got out of the post office.  (The line inside the post office moved slower than—well, slower than a line in a post office).  I made it to my second grader’s school without incident and parked in the “car line” where the parents wait to get their children.  A woman I didn’t know knocked on my care window.  “Excuse me,” she said, her face soft what sure looked like pity, “but I think there is something written on your car that you might want to erase.”  On my rear window, written in the winter dirt was “ASSHOLE” in big letters.

And you thought bullying was just for kids.

I’ll skip inviting you to my pity-party, as it was, per usual, a solo affair.  I’ll also skip the part where I was indignant, where I said things like, “Forget civility in politics, how about civility at the post office?’ and “These people are so entitled!  They know nothing of adversity!” and then more, “What will they do when life really gets difficult if they can’t even handle having to open the car door to reach a mailbox? What will they do when the oncologist tells them it’s malignant?  Pull out an AK-47 and write ASSHOLE with bullets on his lab coat?”  And I’ll skip the part where I wanted to make those assholes pay for calling me an asshole.  But then, I heard myself sounding like an asshole, and, well you can see where that reasoning left me.  We become what we do and all that.

Some people might’ve asked, “What would Jesus do?” but frankly, that has never worked for me. He is Jesus for God’s sake (and sure, you can be literal with that one.  Fine.  Whatever).

What I want to know is “What would Socrates do?”  He might just say, “I know nothing,” which would be tedious.  Or he might remind me that everyone I meet is fighting a harder battle—most especially those treat life as a battle.  The Mailbox Gang, they are fighting something, but it isn’t me. I just got in their line of fire.

I don’t know what has happened to them that a blocked mailbox can induce that level of rage, but I am going to assume it must’ve been significantly bad.  My life hasn’t always been a skip through a field of flowers, and I’ve spent far too many days being angry about the sorry state of my acre of life.  But thankfully, not that angry.  I don’t know what return address the Mailbox gang wrote on the letter they mailed today but I know I’ve never been in that neighborhood in the Land of the Angry People.  And that alone means this is my lucky day.

The essay I was mailing was about how one of the responsibilities of the fiction writer is to cultivate compassion.  But where it’s really needed is this non-fiction world.  The great thinker and cellist Pablo Casals said, “The question is not ‘To be or not to be?’ but rather, ‘Do we dare to listen to the goodness in ourselves?’ That is the question.”

And in the end, for me anyway, that might be the hardest battle of all.