Russian adventure

I am leaving for Russia tomorrow. I will be back Sept. 6th and will probably be sleeping off the jet lag until at least Sept 7th. I promise at least one blog entry dedicated to the trip.

Current Work

I struggle to write
This is ...
I struggle to know
This is ...
Reaching, grasping, elusive disappearing
ideas of what this is
I struggle to own, to enclose, to believe, surround with my body and soul
what this is
To possess it completely, to make it part of me, inseparable, to grok it if you can accept this term
To understand
This me
This creator or receiver of thoughts
This crier, this lover, this hater, this dancer, this screamer, this whisperer, this silent observer
I struggle to justify the oxygen and carbon consumed
I struggle to find a place
For myself
In me

This is me

Guilty Pleasures

There was a thread on my favorite forum, Childless Stepmoms where everyone posted the things they do that they know they shouldn't because they aren't healthy or waste time or something like that. I thought I would post mine here too.

Just of a few of my indulgences....

• Watching my favorite TV shows: CSI and Star Trek
• Reading electronic books, CSI and Star Trek if I need a fix and they aren't on or I want a new story not something I already saw.
• POPCORN!! Eating it while I watch CSI or Star Trek or reading a book makes it even better.
• Going to the movies (an excuse to eat popcorn and a real escape from reality for me, even if it isn't a movie I really want to see. Some times I just have to go.)
• Watching anything on TV, just vegging out with the channel changer in my hand, watching about 4 awful shows/movies at a time, trying to keep all the stories straight and not missing anything important.
• Going to the library and just browsing around, reading books and magazines, pretending I have all the time in the world
• Chocolate (interspersed with the popcorn, something salty, then something sweet, repeat)
• Sitting on my reclining chair in my pajamas, posting/reading CSM like I don't have a deadline in the world
• Buying books. Going to Amazon or to a physical bookstore and selecting several books that catch my eye without worrying about the price.
• Catalog browsing. One of my favorite games from childhood was going to a store (now I use a catalog or online store) and pretending I have infinite money. What would I buy? If it is a paper catalog, I circle every purchase with a thick red marker. Sometimes I 'buy' everything on the page. The only things I don't 'buy' are things I just don't like, things I wouldn't take if you gave them to me (except as presents from someone really special). I love doing this with Williams-Sonoma or Pottery Barn catalogs. Ahhh my dream kitchen.
• Reading beautiful cookbooks

All these things seem to have one thing in common, spending with abandon, whether it is calories (or points since I am doing Weight Watchers), money or time. So I guess my ultimate fantasy is that I have unlimited time, unlimited money, and I can eat as much as I want without gaining excess weight. I imagine it is a pretty popular fantasy. Brings to mind the scene from Groundhog Day where Bill Murray sees the beauty in his 'condition': No accountability for his actions.

Morning again

I awake
and the smell of what has happened is in the air
stale beer in bottles upright or fallen or broken
and vinegary hot peppers and onions from the local sub shop
that stays open late
and glass, a plate thrown against a wall
and the sound of alcohol induced sleep
loud with snores and labored exhales

I open the doors and windows to chase
the threats and vulgarity with bird song
to replace the rancid pain drenched air with
cool green freshness
Wearing shoes to protect my feet
I begin to sweep
to make right the wrongs from the night before
To start again again

Brief update

About a month ago I wrote that I was slowly returning to blogging and Gary just commented, calling me on it. So I decided to write an entry, which is what I am doing... now.

I just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
I really enjoyed it, more than book 5. The last ~200 pages just whizzed by and I had totally lost track of time. I don't think I moved for 3 hours. I'm not going to write a detailed review, it's not that kind of book for me but I really had fun reading it.

And just a smattering of other things I am up to.

• Way behind at work and will be working this weekend to catch up a bit
• Will be traveling to Russia at the end of August, visa paperwork done this week.
• Latest hobby/obsession is bird-watching which I hope to be blogging about in the near future.
• Got 3 new exercise/yoga DVDs that I hope will help the lower back pain that has flared up. Hope to get to at least one of them this weekend too.
• Went to Cirque du Soleil Varekai last Sunday and LOVED it.

Bloglet service

I updated the bloglet service. If anyone was having trouble with it before, it should work better now. I am slowly easing my way back into blogging.

Absences

I haven't been blogging here regularly for months. I went through a crisis in my life and in my marriage. Things have settled down now in many ways but I still don't feel 'normal'. One thing the crisis did was to propel into some serious self examination. I have been exploring my past, my childhood and working with a therapist on many of my distorted ideas, low self worth, perfectionism, people pleasing and so on. It is too raw to share here in detail, maybe someday. Lately I have started to want to write but I don't have the time to do it well and I haven't eradicated my perfectionism yet. I want to come back to this. I love to write. I am accepting and believing this more as time passes. You haven't heard the last of me yet.

NY Rush

I live in New York.
Or, near New York
Scribbling poems on
the back of an envelope from the DMV
before going to the dentist
to get my teeth drilled.
What does New York have
to do with it?
I am not sure.
The rush, the urgency of its nearness
pushes me on
running through each day
leaving piles of unread mail and regrets
behind me.

Alive

How many breaths will it take for me to realize I am alive?

Gratitude

I have been mostly posting to my gratitude journal, A Grateful Heart. I am struggling with my life challenges and those challenges I have created for myself. I am focusing on this and on gratitude. When I have the energy or inspiration to write more, I will. For now, this is all I can offer, in love.

Encounter with genius

I just spoke with a genius, or listened to one, rather. He is a polyglot, knows about 7 languages, plays violin, is a mathematician, a pharmacologist, on and on. He wants to learn Russian because he will travel there and 'doesn't want to go to a country not speaking the language'. He is brilliant and interesting. Yet, walking away I have a knot in my stomach. Part of this is me. I take every opportunity to compare myself to people and come up short. And in this case it is especially easy to see my shortcomings, my failures, gray and moldy next to his shimmering accomplishments. He was describing the private tutor who taught him English in Chile and the wonderful technique she used. Well, at 10 I was struggling with my family's poverty and my father's violence. There were no foreign language tutors for me. I remember begging my mother for "The How and Why Book of the Human Body" from the magazine rack of the grocery store. It was about $2.29 and it took a few weeks of begging until I got it. But you know, these sound like excuses and bitterness. These kinds of thoughts don't help remove the knot. What I want more than anything else in my life is to feel ok being me. Ok knowing I am not the smartest person, or the most talented or the kindest or the most attractive person in the world. I so much want to accept myself as I am without excuses of my childhood to explain my shortcomings. I want to be able to speak with a genius and be able to appreciate the opportunity to learn from him/her without comparisons. I want to stand on solid ground with myself that will allow me to see the interaction as a gift not an insult.

Childhood

In looking for more information related to "Reclaiming your life" I found this post on The Light of Reason:

the immense cruelty that is inflicted on children by adults who are supposedly devoted to caring for and nurturing them has enormous consequences. In most cases, the results of that cruelty remain unrecognized by the child when he grows up and becomes an adult, even as the damage continues to distort and cripple his life in countless ways. In addition to what most people would now consider obvious cruelty (vicious beatings, sexual molestation and the like), much of the torture that children must endure comes in forms that far too many people continue to find perfectly acceptable.

Read the rest.

Choosing hopelessness

From Reclaiming your life by Jean Jenson

We can see, then, that the adult who tends to overreact to situations was a child who repressed the reality that would have led to recognition that any effort to get his or her needs met was useless; and, since such understanding would have been followed by a feeling of hopelessness, he or she also used denial to create a false sense of hope. This hope flew in the face of the reality with which the child could not cope and in fact was designed to substitute for it. False hope formed the basis for the child's unconscious efforts to change the parent(s) to get what he or she needed, and is one way the "false self" expresses itself. When a child's unconscious continually engages in this maneuver, the unreal hope becomes a permanent part of the child's defensive structure. What was begun in childhood -- the unconscious hopeless project to be whatever was deemed necessary in order to change the parent(s) -- continues automatically into adulthood. The child's effort becomes the adult's struggle; and he or she unconsciously chooses people and situations that will enable this struggle to continue. ... the child's need was for an unavailable, critical parent to become a nurturing supportive one. The unconscious is looking to meet the exact need of the child.

I read this passage today and felt like I understood my whole life and all the choices I have made along the way, my inexhaustable need to choose the hardest path, my interactions with others, everything. Even the poem I posted a few weeks ago makes more sense. Did I leave my first husband because it was too easy to make him love me? And now, I have this intense struggle with my stepson, a struggle again for acceptance and approval, which is completely turned around because he shouldn't be put in a position of such power over me. Just a short while ago I had been struggling for 7 years to try to get the approval and forgiveness of his mother (my husbands ex-wife). Now I no longer obsess over her and what she thinks. It seems I have new hopeless project to grapple with, an even more impossible one. Can knowing this, recognizing this help me?

New Year's Resolutions

This is the time of year that people tend to take stock of their lives, decide upon changes, set goals, that sort of thing. I do this all the time. I am a lover of beginnings and fresh starts. I loved the first day of school, the beginning of the semester at college, opening a new book, empty tablets and notebooks, all that freshness and promise. So of course I go crazy for New Years. But over the 30 plus years I have been doing this I have realized that most of the resolutions are recyclable. I can use them over and over again each year. It takes a bit of the freshness off to write for the 20th time: I will lose weight. Been there, didn't do that, don't really wanna be there again. Same with I will get organized. I will get my finances in order. So I decided to try some new, unused fresh resolutions this year. How do these sound?

1. I will not lose weight. I will not work towards a size 8 or 6 or 4. I will remain a size 12. I will buy size 12 clothes and I will enjoy being a size 12.

2. I am organized enough. I will continue my very functional organizational plan and I will marvel in its simplicity and effectiveness.

3. I will not work harder. I already work hard enough. I will work when I feel like working and play when I feel like playing. I will move around, dance or exercise when my body desires.

4. I will go to the gym because it feels good, not because I need to. When there, I will do what strikes my fancy. Some days it may only be the sauna, or just stretching on the mat. No more gym pressure!!!!

5. One recycled resolution from last year. I will be positive in my thoughts. This one is very important and very challenging. It is not surprising that it is taking several years to get it accomplished.

Happy New Year Everyone!!!

Limitedness

Something to contemplate as this year ends and anther begins:

"We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

--Paul Bowles

via my sister and The Writer's Almanac

A question

Why?

She wondered why they hurt her
Why they screamed how much they cared
While they pinched her
And with their cruel eyes stared

Oh yes, we love you
Sometimes they’d sing
Then they’d slap her
Till her whole body felt the sting

Smiling they’d offer a present
Beautifully wrapped and with ribbons tied
They’d say it was a plea
For the forgiveness of all the times they’d lied

Foolishly she’d accept it
Believing that they knew love’s name
Opening it, she would feel her heart soar
Repeatedly playing their awful game

Of course, the box would contain
A dead pet or hairy spiders or choking smoke
Every time she opened one, she felt the pain
And lost another ray of hope.

---

I wrote this poem when I was a teenager. Lately I have been revisiting my past in an effort to heal. This poem has always been very meaningful for me. To me it describes ultimate betrayal and cruelty. I can't say that I completely understand what my younger self was thinking about when she wrote it. It probably just came bubbling up from my unconscious, but I am trying to understand what it means to me now.

Being today

I am terribly sad
As I move moment to moment
My heart aches
I feel it any time
I stop doing
And yet
The sun continues to travel the sky
My body continues to ingest and then digest food
My lungs breathe
The squirrel takes the peanuts I place on the deck railing
And my eyes smile at the sight
All seem to be oblivious of my heart pain
Today I sit with this
Because this is today

Compassion or Co-dependence?

From Boundaries and Relationships. Knowing, Protecting and Enjoying the Self by Charles L. Whitfield M.D.

Compassion is a feeling that is also a evolved and useful state of consciousness, probably second only to feeling Unconditional Love. But it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate true compassion from the simple and trapping passion of active co-dependence, where there are usually unhealthy boundaries. Have you ever been moved by someone's story? We feel a similar empathy and passion in both compassion and active co-dependence. But in true compassion we feel warm and caring and yet do not feel compelled to jump in and rescue, fix or try to heal them. We are still there for people if they reach out to us in any way; but we are secure enough in ourself not to try to use fixing them to fill our own emptiness.

What does it mean to know?

I have started with a new therapist and we have been focusing on the difficulties within my blended family. At some point Tuesday night, after I was complaining that I didn't feel appreciated my therapist said: You knew he had a son when you married him.
I felt bad when my therapist said it to me. This statement feels very discounting and shaming to me. I spent a few hours trying to understand why. What is the assumption behind the statement? That I should have expected all these problems? That I could have been prepared? This was how I defended myself to my therapist. (Notice I said defended, I felt attacked). I tried to argue that there was no way in hell I could have been prepared for this, never having had kids, not expecting my stepson to live with us since he was in Russia and kids rarely leave their moms in Russia. Add on top of that that I didn't expect my stepson to be such a difficult child. But let's be totally honest here. I knew my husband had a kid when we got involved. Did I give it much thought? No. I was head over heels in love and I only thought about how my heart ached at the thought of not being with him. End of story. Was this smart? No. Does criticizing this now help? No. This leads me to some examples I thought of while driving in the car to work yesterday. When someone complains about how bad their husband is, why don't we say: Didn't you know you husband when you married him? It wasn't an arranged marriage, was it? When someone complains about how difficult their teenager is, why don't we say: Hmmmm. You knew he would grow up into a teenager when you decided to have him didn't you? You weren't ignorant of biology, were you? You understood that sex can lead to teenagers didn't you? When someone complains about their boss why don't we say: You had an interview before you took the job, didn't you? You met him, right, you investigated the company? I could go on and on here but I think you get it. We don't say these things to people when they tell us their problems with their boss or kids or husbands BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HELP --- BECAUSE IT JUST DISCOUNTS THEM AND MAKES THEM FEEL STUPID. IT BASICALLY SAYS "YOU MADE YOUR BED NOW YOU SLEEP IN IT." IF THIS KIND OF ADVICE SEEMS HELPFUL TO ANYONE PLEASE RAISE YOUR HAND.

Happy Thanksgiving

I am spending Thanksgiving at my sister's house. Yesterday I met my new nephew, what a cutie! My husband and stepson have gone to scuba dive in the Florida Keys.

Generally, thanksgiving is a time of giving thanks.

• I am thankful for my self, for working towards healing and wholeness.
• I am thankful for my family especially my sister and her family for treating me to this wonderful Thanksgiving visit.
• I am thankful for my husband and stepson for loving me and being patient with me.
• I am thankful for C. for supporting me through this time and opening her house to me and welcoming me.
• I am thankful for my dear friends at CSM forum, for sharing with me and supporting me.
• I am thankful for the blogosphere and especially wonderful caring people who have formed a relationship with me.
• I am thankful to B. for our recent deep philosophical discussions.
• I am thankful for the abundance and comfort that I have.
• I am thankful for the sangha I have found and the wonderful people there that I can share with and practice with.
• I am thankful for my open eyes and open mind.
• I am thankful to the human race for the heritage and art that I have access to, for all the people willing to share some part of their soul with the rest of us.
• I am thankful, simply thankful.