Kvetchin With Gretchen

A number of years ago, I attended a workshop on group therapy at the University of Chicago. The instructor had us do a meditation exercise during which we would walk into a forest and meet someone~~anyone of our choice~~with whom we would have a conversation. The person who walked into my forest that day was none other than the image of Jesus that I always saw on a picture in the Methodist Church I attended as a child. You know, the white, handsome, long haired fella in flowing white robes knocking on a door? Why him, I do not know, because ever since I was seventeen and my parents stopped compelling me to go to services every Sunday, I rarely darkened the door of a church unless it was to go hear my mother sing in the choir on Christmas Eve or Easter. I have not been a believer for some time. I hover between atheist on a bad day and agnostic on a good day.

This is no way means that I don’t believe in the principles of Christianity~~I do. Or that I don’t believe Jesus of Nazareth existed and was a spiritual leader. I do. But I believe that if there is a God he exists within each of us as the goodness of which we are capable, not as an old, bearded white guy who lives in the sky. Some people might refer to me as a Pantheist, but I don’t think that’s completely accurate. My so-called religion is a crazy quilt of whatever works for me.

So I don’t believe in miracles such as Jonah being swallowed by a whale, or Lot being turned into a pillar of salt, or Jesus being the result of a virgin birth or rising from the dead. I think those are meaningful allegories. I think miracles are, for example, when a friend you thought you’d lost forever sends you a letter after twenty years and you reconnect (this actually happened) or when the $700.00 mouth guard you thought you’d lost forever suddenly shows up in the pocket of a forgotten cardigan (this hasn’t actually happened, but I’m still hopeful). I think miracles are largely the result of people struggling with the demons within and coming out on the side of the angels. Or lucky breaks given a fresh coat of paint.

I call my spirit guide Cardboard Jesus, or C.J. (instead of J.C). This is not intended to be blasphemous. Let’s face it, Jesus was not a W.A.S.P., Jesus was a dark-skinned middle eastern Jew. But a cardboard poster of Jesus knocking on the heart’s door is who I was raised on and so he is who came strolling up to me, quite unprompted, and he continues to visit day after day.

I question him about anything and everything and most of the time he actually knows the answers. When he doesn’t, he still manages to comfort me and make sense out of what seems nonsensical. Or reassure me that it will make sense at some point or that I will be okay. Or that I won’t be okay, but I will manage until I am okay. Sometimes he just walks up out of a thick forest; sometimes. he surfs up if I’m meditating in the fabulous beachside home of my dreams. If it’s raining, he’ll carry an umbrella and if it’s blizzarding, he’ll come clomping up on an enormous pair of snowshoes.

One morning this past week he came in on one of those long airport walking ramps, carrying a great big suitcase, because he knew I’d just come back from a trip to Italy. I called him a showoff; he laughed and said that boys just wanna have fun. I told him what I was struggling with and asked him to help me. He reminded me that, as a child, I was frequently told that what I felt was not how I should feel and what I perceived was not correct~~in other words, I was taught not to trust my feelings or my reality, leaving me without a reliable emotional compass.

He gently pointed out to me that I tend to expect myself to be invulnerable as a means of self-protection and experience deep shame and fear of rejection when I am not. As a result, I beat myself up when I fall short of my own expectations and blame myself when others fail to empathize or help me when I struggle. And when I beat myself up, the result is anxiety. Anxiety borne out of despair that I will ever get the help I need.

I marvel at how well he knows me.

I asked him what I should do about this particular situation. He told me, somewhat akin to Glinda telling Dorothy that she already had the means to get her home to Kansas, that I already had the answer to that question. Frustrated, but knowing he was right, I haltingly expressed to him what I thought would be the right thing and he nodded his head in validation and agreement.

Many times, like babies, when we send out distress signals, people can’t read them. Babies are pretty straightforward: they cry and we know it means that either they need to eat, to have a diaper change, or they need to be soothed. And we rock and caress them until they stop. As adults, our needs are more varied and we have language to express them. But somewhere along the way, our verbal requests about our feelings and needs have not been met reliably or have been met with contempt and we learn to subvert them. They begin to come out in ways that are unhealthy and unhelpful. We become snarky, passive-aggressive, anxious, depressed, and sullen. We drink, eat, and smoke too much. When we behave badly, people just think we’re assholes or crazy instead of realizing that we might be sending out an S.O.S. And really, can you blame them? What we didn’t get as children, we probably aren’t going to get as adults. And sometimes we have someone to hold us until we stop crying, but many other times we cry alone.

C.J. helped me realize that I need to push through my fear of abandonment or ridicule and just flatly ask for the help I need or simply for what I need. “Ask and you shall receive,” you know? If it isn’t forthcoming, then I always have the power to talk to the God within me. People send prayers out everyday into the ether; they have faith those prayers will be heard by the God outside of them and at least considered if not answered in the way they’d prefer. As someone who does not subscribe to an outside God, but an inside God, I can still talk to him (or her, or them or it~~makes no difference) and that God is reliably there.

It is unavoidable that the people who raised us will leave an indelible imprint and that we will be  hard-pressed to avoid sometimes repeating bad patterns with others, whether they are similar to our original caretakers or not. Our expectation/fear is that they ARE. And we will act accordingly. If our caretakers were loving and supportive, we will assume that others will be as well and sometimes will be sorely disappointed but, more often than not, will find that others can rise to the occasion. However, if we were raised with caretakers who were neither loving nor supportive, we see danger all around us and proceed with fear and caution.

We need to learn to proceed AS IF others are loving and supportive and go from there. If they are, hooray, all will be well; if they are not, we can take a step back, talk to our inner God or a trusted other or both and decide how to proceed in order to best care for ourselves.

It’s actually much more simple than it is easy. But it is a difficult and winding path worth taking, because our inner Gods generally don’t lie or sugarcoat or evade. He/She/Them/It can be our guiding stars so we will not take the journey alone. I also don’t believe that we should blame others for our troubles even when it seems that they’ve been straight-up shitty; I believe we must look to ourselves first because that is all we have within our control. The best relationships in life contain a solid pact of mutual accountability and we have no say over whether someone else chooses to take accountability. We do have say over whether we choose to continue to pour emotional and physical resources into those people.

Today is Easter and I was so jet lagged this past week I forgot to buy Peeps, my one remaining holiday tradition. I like to poke a hole in the cellophane and let them get nice and stale before I eat them. They are also quite nice microwaved. I could swing by Target and see if they have any left. However, in a few minutes, I’ll close my eyes and summon C.J. to come and spend a bit of the holiday with me. It will be my own version of sunrise services. I don’t have a lot to talk about today, so perhaps he’ll bring us both a venti latte and and we’ll talk about philosophy. Maybe he’ll skateboard up and we’ll discuss the Cubs. Maybe my mind will drift off as it frequently does and he’ll take off early. Or just maybe I’ll be surprised and find there is something lurking in a corner of my subconscious that pokes its head out like a spring flower and once again, he’ll manage to blow my mind with his insight and wisdom.

But secretly I’m hoping he’ll be wearing a big old rabbit costume and bearing an Easter basket. 

With Peeps.

I wake up every morning with a slavering, pointy-toothed Beast sitting on my chest. And no, it’s not my 14 year old, 9 pound dog. It’s a huge, hungry creature called Anxiety. Thus it has been since the early days of college. I know now why that was, and won’t go into detail, but the rug I was relying on to cushion my life transition was pulled out from under my keister in one stunning yank and life as I knew it came to a thudding halt on a cold, hard floor.

Anxiety did not creep in on little cat feet, no~~anxiety came bounding in with the power and ferocity of a tiger, producing nocturnal panic attacks that were designed to terrify and rob me of sleep. I would be in a state of sleep paralysis, convinced that someone or something very dangerous was in my room and I would remain in a motionless, voiceless dread until I could, through sheer force of will, crowbar myself from unconscious to conscious, my heart pounding and my nervous system on fire. Still being for all intents and purposes a child, I was largely unequipped to manage these feelings and events in any productive, adult manner. I felt I had no one to confide in who might not think I was completely batshit. I was confused and frightened so I turned to Dr. Bottle and Dr. Bed for medical assistance: Sloe Gin Fizzes and sleeping as many hours of the day as possible without flunking out or getting fired from the three jobs I worked. I did try therapy at the student health center….ONCE. The therapist was an older man who diagnosed, from a dream he asked me to tell him, that my problem was sexual frustration. Somehow I had the wherewithal to conclude he was both an idiot and a pervert so I canceled my second appointment.

My inherent resilience, ambition, desperate desire for positive attention, rabid self-sufficiency and fear of being shamed pulled me up out of the slump far enough to get by and pass as reasonably normal, but the Beast continued to demand her pound of flesh in order to allow me to pass through the gates of night hell into the light of day.

For many years, I fed the beast what I thought she wanted: a completely shitty diet of:

*Shit I had failed to do

*Shit I did but thought I shouldn’t have

*Shit that went wrong

*Shit that was going to go wrong….someday

*Shit that was wrong with me

*Shit that was wrong with other people

*Shit that was wrong with the world

*In other words, a complete Shit Breakfast Sandwich

And then I would provide her with dessert~~a gorgeous flambe of negative rumination whipped up with fear about grades/money/relationships/my career/what other people thought of me/body image/my perceived worthlessness/health/the past/the future/the stupid thing I did or said that day/you name it and ended in a spectacular after dinner drink of me living as a pathetic bag lady in the gutter, reviled and rejected.

Smacking her lips, she would belch, then turn around in circles and settle into a food coma, letting me get up and attempt to salvage what was left of my miserable existence until lunchtime.

I was Anxiety’s bitch.

And of course this diet did nothing to satiate the bottomless beast. She came back ordering me to feed her copious amounts of junk all day, every day. And as she grew bigger, fatter, stronger, meaner and demanded even more of me, I spent 90% of my time attending to her voracious needs. Luckily I am a high capacity performer, so I did a bang-up job of keeping her fat and happy. But my high-maintenance Beast was taking an enormous toll on my own well-being.

After many years of experimentation~~with meditation, exercise, quitting caffeine (THAT never lasted), therapy, yoga, weighted blankets, deep breathing, tapping, distraction, praying and other things I can’t even remember now~~in my attempts to quell the Beast, I finally stumbled upon what I will call the Starve the Beast diet; a special blend of Cognitive Behavioral techniques and Radical Acceptance.

It consists of a healthy, balanced regimen of:

*things I had actually done right (perhaps a short list, but nonetheless)

*things that had gone well

*things that didn’t go well but were fixable and what I would do about them

*things that are good about me and my life

*things that are good about other people

*things that are good about the world

*reminders not to raise possibilities to the level of probabilities

*rational explanations of what is out of my control and of what needs to be released (like the dumb ass thing I’d said or what could happen in 2, 6, 12 months or infinity)

I am learning to, like I do with my dog when she incessantly and annoyingly begs for treats, calmly and non-reactively ignore the Beast. Eventually she’ll give up and go back to sleep. It has taken a very long time, but the Beast has started to shrink back to non-threatening proportions~~more a paper tiger than a jungle tiger now~~and doesn’t weigh so heavily on my chest anymore. She’s still there, mind you, and I am fairly sure she is with me for life, but honestly, I am not sure what I’d do without her now. She has taught me a lot and serves as a reminder of how best to care for myself and others. Keeps me on my toes.

One thing I’ve learned, about both dogs and beasts, is that they’ll eat pretty much ANYTHING you put in front of them. Oh, occasionally my pup will look askance at a green bean proffered to her, but if I leave it on the floor, walk away, and refuse to give her the cheesy treat, invariably she’ll figure it’s better than nothing and eat it. As will the beast. So you might as well feed them the good stuff. Remember, Anxiety needs to be YOUR bitch, not the other way around.

Try it! The beast might like it.

My client collapses into the chair and proclaims that she is exhausted because her cat woke her up at 3:00 in the morning pawing at her face.  She says she needs to talk strategy to alleviate this problem.  “Look at these circles under my eyes,” she says.  I thought about the set of luggage I recently sported under my own bleary eyes~~luggage that was perpetually packed for a round-the-world trip.

“Cats are assholes,” I say.

The last time I had a good night’s sleep was in 1995, before I adopted a pair of cats from a friend whose allergies were killing her and the last time I put anything other than a heavy table lamp on any horizontal bedroom surface was the day a 50-pair earring tree was sent “cat”apulting to the floor in the wee hours of a work morning.

Okay, so here’s the thing:

We have choices.  We can sleep or we can get a cat.  We can sleep IN or we can get a dog.  Dogs are biologically wired to pee at 5:00 a.m.  Of course, we DO have the option to lock our fur-children in the basement with a litter box or a pee pad, but honestly, how many of us animal-loving losers are going to do that?  Am I right?  No, we have decided that it is far more palatable to accessorize with pet hair and mainline caffeine so that our beloved animals can sleep on the pillow next to us.  And that’s OKAY.  But we can’t have it both ways.

Part of becoming a fully mature, emotionally intelligent adult is realizing that your cat is an asshole.  It is realizing that if you want something enough, you are probably going to have to give up something else to keep it.  Like if you get married you’re probably going to have to give up dating.  If you don’t want to have a job, you will have to give up eating and premium channels.   If you want to have a great body, you’re going to have to give up Cheetos and couch time.

Another piece of maturity is accepting that cats don’t change unless they want to change.  Cats have to embrace the need for change and actively work toward change.   Good luck with that.  The only thing my cats ever wanted to change was the latest place they fancied sleeping. 

My client listens soberly as I explain to her that since she made a rash decision to adopt a cute little puking puffball with claws that will destroy her furniture, her slumber and her rugs she will have to come to terms with the reality that as long as she has a feline house guest she will never sleep soundly again.  Cats are not really like kids~~you can’t “wear them out” or sleep-train them~~they sleep 20 hours a day and prefer to be up between 1 and 5 a.m.  They do not respond to threats or discipline.  They are sleep terrorists.

She tells me she hates me. 

It is useful to know that we can either change our circumstances or we can change our attitude about our circumstances, depending on which is most possible and/or desirable. It’s pretty simple, but not always easy. My client is not going to give up her cat any more than I would have given up my cats.  She needs a strategy, but a different strategy than she was hoping for.

1. The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr is helpful:  “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.”

1. Take up a practice of mindfulness so that you are not tempted to act on the feelings of the moment and adopt a cat to alleviate loneliness after a couple of disastrous Match.com dates. Trust me on this.

1. Say this mantra to yourself over and over: “Sleep is for sissies.”

Both of my cats passed away recently and even though I miss them terribly, I am planning to catch up on my sleep before I consider getting another one. I am also leaving shit out on horizontal surfaces with reckless abandon. But I know the day will come when I will watch that one millionth cat or dog rescue video, throw caution to the winds, and march myself over to the shelter, lay down my money and bring home another furry, nocturnal companion.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead.

About 18 months ago, we started hearing about the new kid on the block, Covid, 19. At first we heard he wasn’t too bad, then the rumors started flying that he was a little bitch. Once he moved in for good, it was clear that he was gonna kick everyone’s ass.

I took on a few more clients and said that I could handle anything for a bit because we were all suffering and needed a little extra help. I mean, how long could this last? A couple of months? We all had to pitch in and take one for the team. Today I feel like a tire that developed a slow leak and has finally gone completely flat. I am physically and mentally exhausted.

“Can’t you just stay home and do all your sessions on Zoom?” people have asked. The answer is “no”. A study after the attacks on the World Trade towers showed that most people who lived through 9/11 did NOT develop PTSD. Whaaaat?? Why? Because they had a safe place to go home to. Those who did develop PTSD were victims of domestic abuse and did not have a safe home. Those same people cannot be assured of safety and privacy zooming from home. Others who struggle, either with being able to connect emotionally or technologically, have requested in-person sessions. I have done these since the beginning of the pandemic, masked, in a sterilized office, at a 10-foot distance. I have fortunately, knock wood, remained Covid-free as have my in-person clients.

Even those therapists who have made the choice to only work from home are not having an easy time of it. Here’s the thing: while we shrinks go through some shit like anyone, we can vent to our own therapists or co-workers and usually our shit is episodic. Most of the time we are not going through the same shit as everyone else, but this past year and a half we have all been navigating a boat through the Sea of Shit right along with our clients. We are doing our best to impart some kind of hope, sometimes from a deep well of our own personal hopelessness and sense of failure.

I am not on the crew of the shittiest boat out there. That honor goes hands down to the medical professionals who work tirelessly to save lives. For every person who has died, there is an average of FIVE people living with grief, including medical and mental health workers. We are a traumatized nation.

What is most difficult for me personally is that while I am used to helping people learn to recognize they are okay “in the now” and that this too shall pass, currently I can’t even pull off that magic trick. Because, as we speak, “in the now” sucks and doesn’t appear to be passing anytime soon. People have a hard time being “in the now” when there’s no way of knowing when an intolerable now is going to become a tolerable then.

I can’t predict the future when it comes to a Godzilla virus we’ve never encountered before. I can only let people know that while I have no idea when or if they are going to be okay I will be there with them and do my level best to help them cope. And somehow, being willing to go meet them in the office seems the right thing, at least for me, to do. Being in the same space together provides benefits that no Zoom session will ever do.

We as a species are fairly hardy~~we can tolerate unusual amounts of stress for an unusual amount of time. Unfortunately, we pay a toll for long-term unrelenting stress, and it’s not rewarded at the end with a trip to Disneyland. It is rewarded with physical and mental health problems that we must work to mitigate. I do practice what I preach, so I exercise, I eat right, I (try) not to drink too much, I follow a sleep routine, I stay in touch with my peeps, I meditate, I journal, I binge Netflix. But the operative word is TRY. Exhaustion from ongoing, no-end-in-sight stress and trauma is no joke. It is a true malady that indicates we need more and better coping mechanisms.

And now Covid’s more aggressive sister, Delta, has moved in as well.

What we really need is a break from the fear and the death and the isolation. Since many people refuse to get the vaccine and mask up, causing experts to declare that not only is herd immunity going to be elusive, but we could be on the verge of yet another huge wave and yet more mask mandates. Cases and deaths are spiking once again.

We need to dig even deeper for a wellspring of inspiration to pull us through. I once had a client who came to me complaining that even though she worked out every day for twenty minutes on a treadmill and was eating single rather than double portions of pasta, the needle on her scale remained stuck on high. When I suggested perhaps she walk farther, stop eating pasta altogether and let me help her learn to tolerate feelings of deprivation she did the reasonable thing and found another therapist.

But seriously, I meant every word I said to her. If what you’re doing isn’t working, then you need to try something else. So what do we try now?

People have been through much worse, right? The Holocaust comes to mind. Slavery. The Spanish Inquisition. The Plague was no walk in the park, the Civil Rights movement, pick a war, any war. The last couple seasons of Ally McBeal. Just to name a few. How did the people who survived get through the rage, the grief, the guilt, the fear, the hopelessness, the tedium? I’m gonna take a wild stab and say that it wasn’t yoga, Netflix or eating kale salads. I believe they got through by faith. By courage. By continuing to fight for humanity and decency. By reaching out and helping their fellow human beings. By developing a core philosophy based on kindness and strength and patience and perseverance. By reaching down to the bottom of their souls and scraping out the last bit of supply and then sharing it.

By learning to tolerate deprivation.

Even though we sometimes do break a bit; we complain, kvetch and rail at what we’re being put through, we feel moments of despair and loss of faith, there comes a time when we simply HAVE to knock that crap off, grow a pair and do what has to be done. Anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, Maskholes, I’m talking to YOU~~grow up and get vaccinated.

Maybe channel Anne Frank and try one of these on for size:

“I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” (E.g., listen to Fauci, he knows what he’s talking about; he’s not perfect, but he wants you to survive.)

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” (I can improve the world by getting vaccinated? Who’d a thunk?)

“I can’t imagine how anyone can say: ‘I’m weak’, and then remain so. After all, if you know it, why not fight against it, why not try to train your character?” (But I repeat myself: get fucking vaccinated.)

Anne Frank died before her 16th birthday.

Now THERE’s a kick in the ass.

At 16 years old, I told my mom that I never wanted to have children. With a disappointed look, she said, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll change your mind! You’d be such a good mother.” Fast forward 24 years when my over-achieving siblings had collectively gifted her with seven grandchildren, I asked her if I was off the hook. “There’s still time,” she said with a laugh.

I am trying to decide if I should leave the house this weekend, when I know I will likely be regaled with multiple greetings of “Happy Mother’s Day!” Most of the time I simply smile and say “Thank you.” Why bother to point out to well-intended if clueless people that I am not a mother, that my grandmother died 25 years ago and that my mother has been gone 20 years this month and that I’m in a really grouchy mood?

Every year, starting in late April, I start to feel depressed for no apparent reason. It creeps up, engulfing me, and I always think I should get some Prozac or go back to therapy. Then it hits me: on my 45th birthday, my mother had the massive stroke that would kill her three days later. She had invited me down to visit for the weekend of Mother’s Day and my birthday the adjacent Monday, just as it was the year I was born. I didn’t get there until noon Sunday, having attended a friend’s theatre performance Saturday evening. I’d bought her a camera for Mother’s Day, but it wasn’t the one she wanted. She wanted a point and click, but my stupid boyfriend at the time, a photographer, had bullied me into buying something more complicated. I still have the last picture she ever took, a candid of Dad looking completely nonplussed.

We made salmon on the grill for dinner. When I asked if she had any wine, she said there was a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay from Christmas out in the garage refrigerator, blithely unaware that it would now be undrinkable. So she sacrificed the last bit of red wine she kept in the fridge, an enormous bottle of Lambrusco. She said that she was drinking a glass a day because red wine was supposed to be good for her heart. I didn’t want to take her last glass, but she said, don’t be silly, drink it. Later that night, we sat in the living room and I asked her if she was game to watch the latest episode of “The Sopranos.” She was a sport, watched it with me and was absolutely horrified by the language and the violence.

On my birthday, I took her to a doctor’s appointment and afterward we drove by my grandparents’ empty home so I could take a walk through. We had just buried my grandpa the previous December; the house was emptied and waiting to be sold. Mom stayed in the car while I wandered through the home in which I had spent so many Thanksgivings, Easters and Christmases; I could still decorate it in my mind with their solid Ethan Allen furniture, the much-used pool table in the family room, my grandpa’s ham radio set, the blue bedroom I slept in when I stayed over, the pink bedroom where my grandma kept all her sewing paraphernalia, the organ in the front parlor, always sticky with grandchildren’s jammy fingerprints. Now it was nothing but walls, floors and a few appliances. Still, I whispered words of love to each room and to the grandparents I felt still lingered and closed the door for the final time.

Mom and I sat at the kitchen table to eat lunch and I noticed her eyes kept nodding shut. But she cut us a piece of cake from the night before and out of nowhere, started talking about how bad she felt that when she was a girl, she was “manipulative” to try to escape punishment. She told me how grandma used to make her cut the switch off the tree that she would be beaten with. I said she shouldn’t feel bad~~all children are manipulative in order to protect themselves; that I was very sorry to hear that grandma, the grandma I had cherished, had done that to her. She seemed comforted by my words, and I found myself wondering why my normally private mother was sharing such a painful and intimate memory with me. Later that afternoon, I said I’d take them out to dinner for my birthday before I headed back to Chicago and Dad suggested the China Buffet. He drove his electric wheelchair out to the van where I helped him up to the passenger seat and took the chair back into the house. After dinner, I went to the house to retrieve it while Mom hoisted Dad’s folded portable chair into the back of the van. We all retreated to the family room to chat for a few minutes before hugging our goodbyes.

I was no more than twenty minutes up Highway 57 when my cell phone rang; it was my boyfriend calling from Chicago. He told me my mother had had a stroke and I needed to turn around and go back. I told him that wasn’t possible~~I had just left a few minutes ago and she was fine. But he reiterated, slowly, as to a child, that I needed to drive back to Marion and to meet my father at the hospital. Numb with disbelief, I turned around at the next exit.

The next few days come to me in bits and pieces. My sisters and I taking turns sleeping on the vinyl chair and the cold hard floor in my mother’s ICU room. Watching “Cabaret” on the television. The nurse asking about her Sjogren’s syndrome and how Mom was able to spell it perfectly, even with her blocked brain. My taking this as a sign she was going to be all right. The concerned eyes of the neurologist when she told us “it was a big stroke.” The nurse telling me the dark brown in Mom’s urine bag was just due to her trying to pull out her catheter. The shadow of doubt at this explanation that I flicked away. Leaving Wednesday night to come back to Chicago for clean clothes, a cat check and a few days at work before coming back Friday night to help her transition to rehab. Kissing her, telling her I loved her, her telling me she loved me and to drive carefully.

That was the last moment I saw my mother alive.

Back in Chicago, I went for a run around 11:00 am. In 2001 I jogged with a clunky old portable CD player that skipped the CD every time I went fast, which wasn’t terribly often. I popped in “Les Miserables” because it was my mother’s favorite. I was praying to God while I jogged, a God with whom I was not in frequent contact, to please please watch over my mother, to comfort and heal her. Tears started pouring down my face and as I asked again for God to please be with my mother, the unsolicited thought “She is already with God,” turned around several times like a cat and then curled up and settled squarely in the middle of my mind.  It stopped me in my tracks but I sloughed it off as an overly dramatic fiction of my frightened mind. She was only 67. She was going to survive.

I worked in my Arlington Heights office until 9:00 that night. When I switched my phone back on after my last client left, the display told me I had seven new messages, and my stomach seized with dread. Each message~~from my father, my brother-in-law, a sister, and I can’t remember who else~~said the same thing: “Call home.” I called my father, who answered on the first ring and told me that my mother was dying. She had slipped into a coma at 11:30 that morning.

11:30 that morning. I slid down the bank of windows on the south end of my office and sat on the floor, my body shaking with waves of emotion and sobs choking off my breath. Somehow I had known the very moment she slipped into her coma. Is there a psychic string that connects a first-born to her mother so that she feels the tug when her mother leaves this world? I would not get there in time to say goodbye. I should never have left. I should have driven down as soon as my instincts told me she was gone. I should be there now to hold her hand and help her out of this world the way she helped me in. Why the hell did I turn my phone off? Why didn’t I pay attention to all the signs I’d been given? When I got home I began stuffing clothes into a suitcase and phoned the hospital. The ICU nurse said she would get one of my sisters. My sister Jennie answered and in a hollow voice told me, “She’s gone. Just now.” It was 10:42 p.m. She and my youngest sister Toni had been there with her at the end.

In the years to follow, I suffered brutal feelings of guilt for all the many ways I had failed my mother: I had not come down on Saturday night as she hoped I would, I had not bought her the camera she wanted, I had made her watch the filthy Sopranos, I had let her lift my Dad’s portable wheelchair up into the van, I had not been there for her when she breathed her last, I had turned off the ringer on my phone while I saw clients, and the worse offense of all: I had drunk her last glass of red wine. I tortured myself for years with the belief that had I not drunk that last glass of the fizzy Italian red, she would be alive today. My father wondered aloud if it had been the sodium-laden Chinese food that did it, which whacked me with remorse for inviting them to dinner. I was beset with a litany of “what-ifs” that drove me into a pit of despair. Not my own or anyone else’s logical explanation that not one glass of wine, nor hoist of the chair, nor sweet and sour pork nor even a combination of all three would have brought on a massive, lethal embolism.  Mom had high cholesterol, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and atrial fibrillation, all of which were the prime suspects.

My mother once said she thought I would have the worst time of it when she died because I did not have children. She felt having children was one’s best defense against loss. I cannot measure the profundity of my siblings’ pain against my own, because I know how much they were all suffering, but I can attest to the fact that her death pitched me into a year of crazy grief. I went back to therapy, took medication, and cried myself into daily dehydration. I could feel the twisting and turning in my brain, trying to make sense of a senseless loss. I went through the motions of the year without tasting, smelling, hearing or caring. I had moments of wanting to die as well, although I had no strength, energy or intent to accelerate that process. As the shock wore off and the anger and grief paled, what was left was zombie-like guilt that I just couldn’t kill. I know now that I simply could not conceive that my mother would die. When I left the hospital, I had complete faith that she would be going to rehab on Saturday. When I went to visit that weekend, I fully expected that it would simply be one of many weekends spent together in the future.

So tomorrow is the 20th Mother’s Day I have spent without my own mother. My guilt has eased a bit (not completely), and while my grief remains, it is at a lower pitch. I know there are many others out there who suffer through Hallmark holidays like Mother’s Day~~those who have lost their own mothers, who have lost children, who have been estranged from their children or their mothers, whose mothers were or are painfully bad mothers, mothers who have children lost to drugs, alcohol, jail, or mental illness and vice versa. Mothers whose children have been alienated from them through no fault of their own. Adult children whose mothers are lost to dementia. Women who wanted children and couldn’t have them. Those who never knew their birth mother. And the list goes on. Many of us will walk into the grocery store and see the flowers and the card racks and the banners crowing “Happy Mother’s Day!” and will not feel happy about it at all. We will want to go back home, pull up the covers and wait for Monday to put us out of our misery. When thoughtless strangers cheerily wish us “Happy Mother’s Day” we might or might not tell them to fuck off.

I suggest that those of us who cannot bring ourselves to celebrate and would rather poke our eye out with a big stick rather than see legions of happy mothers and children eating Eggs Benedict together give ourselves permission to not only not celebrate, but not feel bad that we don’t. After all, we don’t all celebrate Tet or Kwanzaa, but we don’t feel hurt that others do. There are all kinds of other holidays we can commemorate! Today is also National Lost Sock Memorial Day (May 9th), Thursday is National Frog Jumping Day (May 13th), and my own personal favorite, National Dance Like a Chicken Day, coincidentally lands on my birthday (May 14th). We don’t have to take anything away from all the people for whom Mother’s Day is precious and enjoyable. We can always honor the memories of our lost loved ones in our own ways. We can even go back to bed and mainline Netflix and Cherry Garcia.

Or we can get a bottle of Lambrusco and Dance Like A Chicken. It’s our choice.

I am done reading articles trying to dissect why people would vote for Donald Trump. In the long run, it doesn’t matter unless my ability to divine that information would give me a way to change their minds. But I have read these articles obsessively, hoping if I could just find that magical key, I could turn it and open the door to their psyches.

Last week we found out that Trump told Bob Woodward he knew the virus to be “deadly” all along but that he chose to downplay it to the public. At the same time, he takes no responsibility for the 200,000 and counting deaths that have occurred in this country since the early months of 2020. And I would be willing to bet any amount of money that this knowledge will not change the minds of any of Trump’s rabid fans.

Since early March of 2020, I have had less human contact than I have ever experienced in my 64 years. I have copped a few short, guilty, dangerous hugs from friends over these past few months (masks on, faces turned) but otherwise the physical affection I have experienced came from my kitties, both of whom have passed away, one in February from liver cancer and one last month from long-term kidney failure. I know I am not alone with this kind of deprivation. I am luckier than many. The people I love have remained in good health, as have I.

However, some days I feel as though my heart is truly breaking, not just because I miss seeing my friends and family; or because I miss human touch and travel and theatre and movies. I grieve for our country and I find myself confused, enraged and saddened because of the Trump supporters’ single-minded devotion to a man who has mocked, bragged, bullied, cheated and lied his way into the White House; a racist, misogynistic, thin-skinned, malignant narcissist who has put countless lives at risk. It seems so simple to me that we shouldn’t vote for people like this. I don’t want to lose relationships with friends and family members, but I have to draw a line. It’s not about political differences~~it’s about moral and ethical differences. We should vote for a viable alternative because we ourselves are moral, decent people.

Except that, when we feel threatened, we sometimes call off all our bets. We suppress our better angels because it feels so righteous and so satisfying to stick it to the other guy no matter the consequences: “libtard”, “rethuglicon.” We defend the indefensible. It happened when Bill Clinton was President and Democrats were defending him (“it’s just a blow job”) and it’s happening now with Republicans defending Donald Trump. It wasn’t right then and it’s not right now, although there’s a big difference between lying about a blow job and a con job of devastating proportions. We have reached a breaking point in terms of our division as Americans. I see this when couples are on the brink of divorce. Neither party willing to blink, neither party willing to be the first to say “I’m sorry” because they don’t think the other will say they are sorry~~ and the other just might not. The other person might just gloat and declare victory. This couple will go to divorce court before they will say “Perhaps I can do better. Perhaps I hold some blame.”

But even if one side is willing to reach across the chasm and try to fix things, it is as good as useless if the other doesn’t as well. It takes two~~always. And in those cases, divorce is probably the only and best choice. But in the case of a nation……well, we could be heading toward the cliff, civil war, the end of democracy as we know it, a protracted post-mortem for our country. Even if the pendulum has to swing to that terrible brink in order to swing back the opposite way; even if “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” we will see decades upon decades of painful, deep damage and loss. Perhaps it will be irreversible damage and loss.

I have joked that I’m glad I’m old and have lived a pretty good life but the truth is I am aching to do and see all the many things I’ve not yet done and seen and I am looking forward to watching my nieces and nephews live their unique and wonderful lives in relative peace and prosperity. I don’t want to see us suffer years of chaos and hostility and deprivation and pain. I don’t want to see America fail. I want this marriage to survive.

At the same time, as I had to draw a line in the sand in terms of my personal relationships, we have to draw a line in the sand when it comes to our elected officials. And in the case of Donald Trump, there is no compromise. There is no moving the line. Having four more years of his toxic leadership is something we will live to regret. We are not going to be able to change the minds of those who blindly support him. It doesn’t matter if we understand why. We have a pretty good idea and that’s enough. I think divorce is inevitable, but the better parent needs to get primary custody of our country, and I pray that will be Joe Biden.

But even if it is, we can’t relax our vigilance. Divorcing a narcissist is a bitch. He will unleash a smear campaign that will make your head spin. He will do everything in his power to turn the children against you. He will care nothing for truth or justice. He will take a scorched earth approach in his quest to appease his wounded ego and regain his power. He will attempt to take no prisoners. And he will have many enablers.

I told someone recently that I am an optimistic pragmatist. I have always believed that somehow, some way, good will prevail but it seems that right now in order for that to happen, we need to turn our attention away from trying to understand, argue with, or cajole Trump voters. We need to call the attorney, pull together our finances, stop engaging with our soon-to-be ex, take a deep breath and prepare ourselves for the difficult road before us.

There’s no knowing what lies ahead. And I am not starry-eyed. I do not think that some of the relationships I’ve enjoyed in the past will survive. I believe that the pandemic is changing us for better or worse. I do not believe that our nation will be healed in my lifetime. The damage~~economic, social, environmental, political, emotional and physical~~is cataclysmic. I hope that we can at least slow the bleeding. I hope that some day we can move on and we can heal.

Trump voters, I let you go. I detach with love. I will no longer try to change you or understand you. I will not beg, cry, name-call or take you on in any way. I am moving on. I leave you to reflect or not, to change or not, to summon your better angels or not. I will focus on bettering myself, changing myself, reflecting upon myself and on focusing on the things I have the power to change. But I still believe your loyalty to Trump is suicidally misguided. I probably will never be able to forgive you if he manages to be re-elected. I will try to refrain from leaping in ecstatic schadenfreudal joy should he not be re-elected and go to jail (okay, I lied; I will do a mad dance.) But I will dance as if no one is watching, because I am letting you go.

I hope someday we can be friends again. In the meantime, I am taking some space.

In her groundbreaking best-seller “The Verbally Abusive Relationship”, Patricia Evans divides people into two groups: those who look for Personal Power in relationships and those who prefer Power Over. Personal Power is defined as a power style that manifests as “mutuality and co-creation.” It promotes the well being of all through healthy communication and empathy. Power Over is a power style that requires “control and dominance” without regard for another’s dignity or quality of life let alone the truth or the rule of law. (The Verbally Abusive Relationship, Evans, 2010.)

Power Over is the worldview of our current President and his flying monkeys, er, administration. This is his belief of how the world is supposed to work. He has already proven that he has no problem with abusing the power of his office to get what he wants. He has offered to make shish-ka-bobs of Senators’ heads should they defy him. He lies like lying is an Olympic sport. He has a hard-on for other Power Over types like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un. Mutuality is a dirty word to Donald Trump. He ought to have “It’s All About Me” tattooed on his orange forehead as a warning signal to unsuspecting others.

What people need to attempt to wrap their brains around is that there is a MAJOR difference between someone who is a self-centered jerk and someone who has the malignant narcissist cluster-fuck of symptoms. According to Campbell’s Psychiatric Dictionary, malignant narcissism combines characteristics of:

• narcissistic personality disorder (NPD)
• antisocial personality disorder (APD), and
• paranoia

So basically, you have a triple scoop of NO ability for empathy, NO working conscience and a completely delusional victim complex. Campbell’s Dictionary also states that malignant narcissism includes a big fat cherry of aggressiveness and sadism plopped on top for good measure.

In other words, your ex-boyfriend might have been an arrogant asshole but he probably wouldn’t be okay with putting kids in cages, no matter their parents’ alleged crimes.

Malignant Narcissism is a big, colorful umbrella, and I won’t go into everything that’s underneath it. Suffice it to say that there’s a reason it’s called Malignant. It’s a cancer that spreads and destroys everything it touches. The smartest thing you can do if you find yourself in a relationship with one of these motherfuckers is to RUN. And you may have to disassociate yourself with everyone and everything that surrounds him, as painful as that might be. And you may have to undergo a long period of emotional chemotherapy to heal the parts of yourself that have become diseased as a result of that association. Rebuilding the damage that was done will be a long-term process.

Okay, so here’s the thing: If you support Donald Trump because you are enjoying lording Power Over the libtards, keep in mind that your fearless leader gives less than a rat’s ass about you and that you will be on the pointy end of his policies in no time flat (he is already planning to cut Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and the pre-existing clause in the ACA, plus don’t even get me started on his Coronavirus response). You are never actually in control with a Power Over person. You are basically a victim of Stockholm Syndrome (a condition which causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity).

If you actually think that person is watching out for you, think again. That person is watching out for himself and keeping an eye ON you to make sure that you are being properly sycophantic. The malignant narcissist can only tolerate two kinds of people: those who slavishly kiss his ass and those whose asses he has no choice but to smooch on. (Think Pence and Putin, respectively.)

You are always, always, ALWAYS safer and better off living in Personal Power and dealing with people who live in Personal Power. Even if you disagree on some or perhaps many issues, you can trust that your concerns and welfare will actually be CONSIDERED. The Power Over, or Malignant Narcissist person, will occasionally act AS IF they are a Personal Power person, but they are truly only wolves in grandma’s skivvies. They will promise to take care of you today and eat you alive tomorrow. Then they will suck your bones and lick their fingers. That’s the ONE thing you can trust. They are masters of mindfuckery and their cruelty and greed know no bounds.

This is the best argument I can think of for choosing to vote for ANYONE except Donald Trump and more importantly to vote whatever way you have to vote to make sure he is not reelected. Not because I think you shouldn’t have the choice to be a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent or a Green Partier or a Libertarian or a member of the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (it’s a thing). You be you. But desperate times require desperate measures. We simply do not have the luxury to vote for our ideal candidate; not now. So you want to vote your conscience? Can’t bring yourself to pull the lever for a so-called “establishment” candidate? Won’t vote for a Democratic Socialist? Well, no offense, but WHAT THE FUCK? A bunch of us are still grieving that our GIRL didn’t make the final cut, but we aren’t gonna whine about it. We’re gonna pull up our granny panties and take one for the team. Because, to borrow a phrase from the great Mick Jagger, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you might just get what you need.” So don’t be a dick~~ pull the lever for someone who might not share all your personal beliefs, but who is a staunch believer in Personal Power.

Don’t let this cancer metastasize any further.

The life you save may be your own.

The most crucial developmental task of the first three years of life is the creation of a safe, secure attachment bond between a baby and its primary caregiver, generally the mother. This bond is built through constant, intricate give-and-take emotional communications between the caregiver and child. This very innate, sophisticated process is absolutely necessary for proper brain development.

Children who grow up feeling secure in their primary relationships will develop normally, able to handle most traumas that may occur at any time during the course of their lives.

But children who are subjected to severe trauma, including traumatic separation from their primary caregivers lack this ability, and this lack can last a lifetime without aggressive treatment. They will suffer from emotional dysregulation, have less impulse control, overreact to stimuli, and have less ability to tolerate stress and frustration. They are more at risk for anxiety, depression, sleep problems, violent behavior, suicide, substance abuse, and other cognitive, emotional, behavioral and physiological damage.

Imagine being a baby or toddler with a fully developed amygdala, which is the brain structure that processes fear and is fully developed at birth, but not having the concomitant ability to understand or respond in a productive way nor having their primary caretaker to soothe and protect them.

That baby will experience pure, unadulterated, uncut terror, panic and ultimately, despair. My heart is aching to know of the bottomless pain these poor little children are experiencing every minute of every day because our nation has been highjacked by a dangerous sociopathic narcissist and his cronies.

Anyone out there who believes that what is happening is justified for ANY reason whatsoever needs to search their soul to see if they have one.

 

 

In honor of my birthday today, the 14^th of May, I have assembled my own personal top-10 list of some of the things I’ve learned at the ripe old age of none-of-your-beeswax.

 

10) If I COULDA done it differently, I WOULDA. I’ve stopped beating myself up with SHOULDA. I did the best I could with the information and skills I had at the time. This has come in extremely handy since I’ve done a bunch of incredibly stupid things in my life.

 

9) Don’t be a victim even if I’ve been victimized. Things work out much better if I take 100% responsibility for my life and for fixing whatever got broken. Even if I’m run over by a truck, I still have to be the one to go to PT, not the SOB who hit me.

 

8) A client once asked me when she was going to get her period of “nice”, meaning a time when all kinds of annoying shit would stop happening~~like having her basement flood or having an asshole boss. “When you’re dead,” I told her.

 

7) Being special sucks. Being special means you have to keep being special. It means you are under a microscope. It means that you live in dread of the day you are no longer special. Don’t be special.

 

6) The way for me to enjoy pictures of myself is by waiting several years, preferably several decades, after the pictures are taken to actually look at them.

 

5) There is no endpoint to grief or getting in shape. You just get stronger, more flexible and more resilient so that the heavy lifting gets easier.

 

4) Purpose is never given to you like a birthmark~~you have to go out and get it, like a tattoo.

 

3) For Christ’s sake, you CANNOT CHANGE ANYONE. You can influence them, but you cannot change them. My journey is mine and their journey is theirs. Should they just want to keep cruising along on the Asshole Highway, they are perfectly entitled to do so.

 

2) Things happen for a reason, but not for the reason you think. People die because they’re sick, get speeding tickets because they’re speeding and win the lottery because they’re lucky motherfuckers.  You can create meaning from events, but it is not ordained.

 

1) If I want to have good self-esteem, I need to do things that are esteem-able. It’s pretty simple.

 

 

And in closing, as Emily asked in “Our Town”, do we ever completely know and appreciate what we have while on earth? Fuck no. Cognitive dissonance saves us from being aware 24/7 that we are going to die and therefore should probably be living life far more consciously and productively. Jesus, we’d all be mainlining Xanax if we had to do that. Just like when we’re procrastinating on studying or cleaning or paperwork, we often wait until the eleventh hour before we frantically cram it all in….. as the big clock runs down, I feel a great wish to cram every last bit of joy, fun, and peace I can into the life I have left.

 

And if I coulda done it sooner, I woulda. No more shoulding on myself.

 

A client was telling me how much he had to do that weekend. As he was recounting his agenda, he mentioned that he needed to cancel his usual Sunday afternoon plans with his mother but dreaded making the call.

“What do you dread?” I asked. “Oh, you know my Mom,” he said. “She’s going to say ‘Why? What do you have to do?’ and then I’ll have to explain to her that I have laundry and grocery shopping and I haven’t done any work on my job search and I need to do dishes, and….” his words toppled over themselves like someone somersaulting downhill. As he collapsed at the bottom of Explanation Mountain, he said, “Last week when I told her I couldn’t stay to watch the entire game, she got snarky with me and said ‘Fine, I guess all you care about is the free lunch!'”

Here’s the thing: this guy’s mother is a spry, salty lady in her seventies who would kick her son to the curb for a better offer with no fucks given. As a grown-ass adult you do NOT OWE another grown-ass adult such an overwrought explanation nor as the grown-ass adult on the receiving end should you feel you are owed one. That kind of explanation is only required in special circumstances, like when you call in sick to work and you need the job. Even then, you don’t have to describe your illness in gory detail. Nobody wants to hear that it’s coming out both ends. And no one really believes you’re sick anyway. Or if you are blowing your kids off for the weekend so you can shag your new girlfriend or boyfriend it might be nice to tell them you’ve been called in by Special Ops or that you’re working ALL weekend to make money to take them to Disneyland. If you have to break a date with someone because of illness or another true conflict, of course it is appropriate and courteous to offer a brief apology and explanation so they know you value them, their time and the commitment.  And that is sufficient.  Keep in mind that when someone asks, “Why?  What do you have to do?” they are out of bounds.

But let’s say someone asks if you can get together Saturday night and you had previously planned a get-together with your pajamas, Netflix, a bottle of wine and an extra large pepperoni pizza. You are under NO obligation to divulge this information. Nor need you feel guilty or pathetic. Nor need you APOLOGIZE. Plans with yourself are legitimate plans. Or say your Mom expects you to keep her company every Sunday until you die, but you haven’t done laundry since the Carter administration or you want to go out on a date with someone to whom you are not related from time to time. Here are examples of what you say:

“Hey, I’ve already got plans for this Saturday, but I’d love to get together, how about next Saturday?” Or “I can’t make it this Sunday, but next Sunday is great!” If that person says, “Why? What do you have to do?” you have a couple of options. You can say 1) “None of your fucking business,” although if this is a relationship you value, I’d caution against it, or 2) “I’m available next Saturday/Sunday, would that work?” And then rinse and repeat as necessary. We call it the Broken Record Technique. You repeat the same words verbatim or with slight variations over and over and over until the numbskull pushing your boundaries gets the message. If they don’t, then you are well within your rights to revert to option #1.

Unless it’s your Mom. Then I’d stick with #2.