To My Mother, On What Would Have Been Her 80th Birthday

Today, my mother would have turned 80 years old.  I have been thinking about her a lot lately, working on erasing my past wounds and grudges into remembrances of loving kindness and compassion.  It does get easier with practice, and it makes for a much happier memory of childhood.

For all of her difficult ways, my mother had much to recommend her. Besides being beautiful, she was also brilliant with a sharp wit, and a keen mind.  She could cook like a demon, often making up recipes on the spot, based solely on what was in the fridge the day before grocery shopping day.  She was funny and appreciated that I was funny, too.  She loved animals, often to a fault (someday I'll tell you about our 22 cats).

My mother had a way with the holidays that made Christmas in our house always fun and always a joyous celebration.  Though she was an avowed agnostic, Christmastime was a sacred holiday of the inner spirit, and it was set aside as a time of peace, beauty and appreciation for humanity.  Arguments and fights were rare, and the house was a singular place of calm and good will.  Whatever our difficulties, whatever our finances, or the world condition, my mother "kept Christmas well", as Dickens wrote.  And others kept it well around her.

In the past five years, though I am rarely ill, I have gotten fairly significant upper respiratory infections over the Christmas holidays. In 2011 and 2012, I lost my voice entirely for several days, in fact.  This year, third year running, I am suffering from a deep chest cold, that appears to be settling in my throat.  I don't think this is an accident.  I think I am missing my mother. As my anger toward her has melted away, I am feeling sad for the things that went unsaid and unexplained, on both sides.  I don't think those things could have been said when she was alive, but it doesn't change the fact that the words hang there, in the open, like sharp icicles, waiting for gravity to claim them. I think this is why my voice goes away.  It goes away for all the things we never said, and should have.

So, I say them to her now.  Not here, in public, but privately and between us.  But here, I will say, "Happy birthday, Mom.  I hope, wherever you are now, you are able to have the peace and happiness you created once a year, every year, at this time of year."

Peace and Merry Christmas to all.

About 9/11/2013

Let's have a moment of silence.

And by moment of silence, I mean... A single moment. Of pure silence.

Please do not regale me with stories of where you were when you heard and how devastated you were and how scared and how crazy it got, and "oh, my God, people be jumpin' outta buildings and shit."  Don't take this the wrong way, but.... I don't care.  I don't give two pins about your fear and anxiety and depression and confusion.

It was twelve years ago.

Get over it.

Unless you actually lost a loved one in one of those towers or on one of those planes, please. I beg you. Get. Over. It.  You don't have to feign 12-year-old PTSD over something that didn't actually happen to you, just to get a little pity and a hug.  You want pity? Poor baby. You want a hug? Come here. I'll hug you.  But don't go all "9/11-and-I-still-have-nightmares" on me.

No hugs for manipulators.

Remember the dead. Honor the living. Live in the present. Be good to each other today. Move on. Enjoy this day and every day, and love the ones you're with.


Peace.

Just a Little Note of Reminder about the SCOTUS

About the current goings on in SCOTUS right now... I'd like to remind everyone that they all need to take a pill, have a nap and calm the hell down.  You cannot necessarily determine how the Court is going to vote based on the questions asked or the silly, ridiculous statements of a few of the older, crazier, dumber members of the Court.  I draw your attention to National Federation Of Independent Business Et Al. v. Sebelius, Secretary Of Health And Human Services, Et Al., the case that was supposed to scuttle the Affordable Care Act.  SCOTUSblog was predicting that, based on questions asked by the justices during arguments, the mandate portion of the Act would be ruled unconstitutional, thereby taking the teeth out of Affordable Care.  Fox News jumped all over that, and we mocked them for it.

They were wrong.  So, do not believe a single thing anyone writes, says, interprets or predicts based on certorarai or oral arguments.  We have NO idea what the ruling will be on either DOMA or on Prop 8.  So, pour yourself a Scotch (or a Ginger Ale), sit in a comfy chair and catch up on those back episodes you missed of WALKING DEAD… or better still, catch Jim Beaver in JUSTIFIED this season.   It's a good, good season.

The decisions will come down when they come down, they will be what they will be, and creating a mythology about it is useless and defeating.

Breathe, people.... just breathe....

Higgelty-Piggelty and Back Again.

Did some writing this weekend. Well, a lot of writing, actually... oddly... in between bouts of ingesting my two favorite anti-depressants (Sims 3 and the Food Network).  It occurred to me some time about 2 weeks ago, that if Emily Rapp can write her way through her son's knock-down-drag-out with Tay-Sachs Disease, I really have not an excuse in the world for not writing because of stress.

Not that everybody deals with the stress the same way.  But still....

I have decided I'm going to forget a little bit about what I learned (from some people) in my MFA program, and go back to writing my way.  And by "writing my way" I mean... in a complete hodge-podge, higglety-piggelty, seat-of-my-pants, don't-care-if-anyone-likes-it-or-not kind of way I used to write in before I got me some larnin' on how to write.

I've decided to write like someone left the gate open.  Or like I want the Westboro Baptist Church to protest my funeral when I die. Or whatever other Facebook meme you care to adapt to the situation.  (Except any meme with that stupid grumpy cat.  Somebody put that cat back in the den window where he belongs, before I strangle him.)

One of the things I used to do, before someone in the MFA program said I shouldn't, was to work on multiple projects simultaneously.  I did this always, without giving it a second thought.  But then I was told that that "diluted" my energies.  Personally, I think it just kept me -- the woman with the attention span of the average Mayfly - from getting bored.  So I'm going back to that.  Because when I was most prolific, I was writing my way.  The odd way. The higglety-piggelty way.  And it worked.

I started a memoir.  About my life. Which begins with a lie.  Because that's the way my life began.  Maybe most lives begin this way.  You start with a lie, then somehow, if you work hard enough, you end up somewhere nearer the truth.

It's time.

Ronan Christopher Louis: 2010 - 2013

"I began to understand that the act of remembering is actually a kind of retroactive hope. None of us will usher our children into bright futures, but we can imagine them as they were; we can decorate Christmas trees for them, get out the photo albums and cry for them, let ourselves be broken on behalf of another person. And survive it. In this land of dying children, to allow heartbreak is to allow life." ~Emily Rapp~

Ronan Louis, just shy of three years old, passed away on February 15, 2013, at around 3:30 in the morning in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He went peacefully, his mother, Emily Rapp, said in her Facebook announcement, surrounded by family and friends, and undoubtedly by his many beloved stuffed animals, the unrelenting guardians and protectors of his brief life.

It was not an unexpected passing.  Shortly before his first birthday, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs Disease.  The news was crushing.  For those of us who have met Emily Rapp, it has always seemed incomprehensible that there was something in the world that Emily could not overcome through sheer force of will (see her autobiography on growing up physically challenged, Poster Child, for a closer look at Emily's sheer force of will).  But this was too big for even Emily, with her husband, Rick, and little Ronan, to conquer. Tay-Sachs is a pretty insidious genetic illness, and it has taken its toll.  For all parents, this is a solitary, brutal process that those of us who have never faced it could never begin to imagine.  

But Emily is a writer, so she did what most writers do when things start to implode, and some sparse version of sanity is required.  She wrote.  She started with the blog, created shortly after Ronan's diagnosis, Little Seal (which is what Ronan means in Irish Gaelic). In the end, her grief was too big to fit on a blog, and Emily wrote an entire book, The Still Point of A Turning World, due out on March 7, 2013.  

In a real sense, for those of us who never met Ronan in person, but who experienced him through Emily's words alone, he continues to live.  But for Emily now, I'm sure that no words will ever replace the smell of his hair, or the flush of his skin after a bath. The Ronan... the real one...the one she birthed and bathed and held in her arms... has gone now. He came, he stayed for a bit, and then he left. 

But, oh, the lives he touched his brief time here.  Ronan was the pebble who broke the surface of our calm little pool, and those who most loved him -- his parents, his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the closest of their friends who were like family -- moved out from him, in concentric circles, touching the next row of us, and the next and the next, and we all moved outward, in our rings, each touching the next circle outward, on our way to the shore. 

But Ronan will always be at the center of it -- the pebble that broke our calm for a bit, until he had to go. 

Peace, little seal. Peace and light, wherever you may need it.

Ronan
(photographer: Catherine Davis)

  
EDITOR'S NOTE: For those who know Emily, she has asked that, in lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases Association.

Reflections on Love and Hostage-Taking. (But Mostly Love)

It’s February.  And where February is, can Valentine’s Day be far behind?  I should say not. 

Maybe it’s because it’s February, or maybe it’s just the beginning of a new year.  I’ve been thinking much lately of love and partnering and loneliness and aloneness.  The latter two are not necessarily the same thing.  It is possible to fly solo without feeling lonely.  I know, because I’ve done it a fair amount of my life. 

I’ve been single more than I’ve been partnered, and it has become an easy place for me to live.  When I was young, I used to dream of having “someone”… someone who loved me, who told me daily how special I was, how needed I was, how vital I was to their happiness and joy.  And when I was young, I found any number of “someones” who were more than willing to tell me those things – not necessarily because they were true, but because I needed to hear them.  In time, though, you find that not only do most “someones” not need you to be special or to provide them with their happiness and joy, you’d prefer they were complete enough on their own to not require this of you. 

It’s a terrible burden, completing someone else. Especially if you’re not quite complete your own damn self. Solitude offers a relief from the heavy lifting of a relationship. 

The biggest relief of being on one’s own is that you’re not constantly disappointing someone. My relationships start as most people's do -- full of hope and promise and titillating excitement and anticipation.  My quirky humor is appreciated and deemed "unique" and "bold" and "intelligent".  My strengths are overemphasized (as are his), my weaknesses overlooked (as are his).

I suppose reality becomes an interloper in every idealized relationship.  But reality seems to hit mine harder, with more intense results.  I have reported in the past that I ended my longest relationship with someone because I was being actively “unloved”.  The unloving wasn’t accidental, or a by-product of interest or love lost.  It was calculated, and a way of trying to control my behavior.  This is, I believe, where my intense resistance to being controlled and manipulated comes from.  Of all the weapons a person can use in their emotional arsenal against a partner, I find the threat to withdraw love the most insidious and least forgiveable.

“Do it my way, or I will treat you every day as if I do not love you until you do it my way.”

This is the most frightening thing about agreeing to love someone again.  It’s that they can use your own heart as a hostage against you, holding it at knifepoint until you agree to their terms.  I think there should be a law.  Hell, there probably is one somewhere.  In Canada, or Scandanavia, where such goings-on are probably frowned upon.  But here, where I live, it’s an every day occurrence, so commonplace, most people don’t even see it when it’s happening to them.

It makes me shy of love, of intimacy.  Love used to be something I looked at as a safe haven.  If you loved someone, you were their soft place, their sanctuary.  You were the place they could come to feel tended and cared for and looked after.  Not in a mothering sense, but in the sense that you became someone they could go to and be themselves, without fear of judgement or reprisal. 

Now I see love as some place sharp and dark and a little scary.  I used to close my eyes and imagine love to be a place of light and hope. Now I close my eyes and see it as a place of risk of devastation.  I’ve been devastated. And I’ve come back from it. The question is, can I be devastated again and still recover?  How many more devastations do I have it in me to survive?

I have no idea. 

I do believe I am a difficult person to love.  I think my own family – the birth one – struggles regularly with loving me. I mean, if people you grew up with and/or gave birth to can't love you easily, then you have to be that difficult to love. I’m not sure why this is.  Maybe it’s because I’m guarded and withdrawn.  Maybe it’s just because I’m kind of a selfish bitch.  It’s not intentional. And these unlovable qualities about me I’m not sure I can change. 

So maybe, in the end, alone is better, if for no other reason than I can limit my exposure to the disappointment of others and limit their exposure to the qualities in me that make me so hard to love.  At least until I find out how to fix what remains so deeply broken inside of me.

Maybe the trick to love is finding someone who finds my unlovable qualities just the very thing he’s been looking for in a woman.  I estimate there are probably 47 men ever born in the entire history of the planet who find my innately annoying characteristics attractive.  With any luck, one of them… just one… is alive on the planet right now. Preferably somewhere in this hemisphere.

Hope springs eternal.