Answering tech calls from my kitchen

 Today I saw a call from an unknown number flash up. I don't usually pick these up, but I am quarantining at home and have been talking to parents on and off about technology problems. I grabbed it. The woman on the other line seemed a bit confused, which convinced me that it was a parent who might have been patched through to me -- a salesperson would have been smoother and ready to go. The woman asked, "Did I call you already?" and I wanted to snort in exasperation, "how would I know?" but tried my best to put on my professional voice as I asked her who she was, and told her that I didn't think she had called me already.

A month ago I had another weird phone call, but that weird October call was me phoning my therapist of ten years to ask if she was ok. I had sent her a few emails about billing questions, scheduling questions, and she hadn't responded. Sometimes she doesn't respond right away because she has "fights with her computer" but she's in her 70s, and she's Black, and she lives alone, and I got worried with Covid. I called her and she answered. We always laugh a little when we reach each other and I said, "Hey are you ok?" and she said, "No." And she started talking to me about not knowing what to do, and I could hear that she was short of breath, and she seemed so uncertain, like she was taking a poll about what people thought she should do, totally unlike her normal attitude, but I didn't put that together until I got off the phone and and tried processing the call with a friend, and my friend reminded me, "if she is struggling to breathe, she may not be thinking clearly."

On the call I told her she had symptoms and needed a test. I told her I was worried. I told her about how to get a test. But it was after hours and she probably wouldn't be able to get one until the morning, maybe not until Monday. I told her it was serious and I was worried about her. I texted her links and info and she texted me back a thank you. And then I got more worried and responded that she needed to call her doctor, maybe go to the hospital. She didn't respond, and I tried to figure out how much I could push. I'm an anxious person, and she's my therapist, so of course I have lots of extra anxiety about her. Her last message to me sounded like she was good, she had it under control, thank you and goodnight, and what do I know? I'm not a doctor, just a doomscroller. I've been calling and emailing and texting for the last month, trying to find out what happened, dreading, hoping that she was just "fighting with her computer" or her phone.

And in slow motion today I realized what this call today was, it was her colleague calling to tell me she was dead.

I am thinking about what she told me in our last conversation, about how she didn't believe she could have caught the virus because she was always at home, she only left to see two patients in person in her office that didn't want to (or couldn't?) meet virtually. I am thinking about how many people I know who are far less careful. I am thinking about people who think they won't get sick and people who think they won't get others sick. I am making stories up in my head about what happened after our call. I am thinking about how fucking angry I am, and what she would say about that.

"There are no funeral arrangements, at this point," her colleague said.

On the day of our last session, I was so stressed out from work that I forgot to FaceTime her. I was driving home in my own world and she called me, to see if I was ok, 15 minutes after our start time. I pulled over in an empty parking lot and unloaded an avalanche of worry about work -- when we were still teaching without kids in the building, but when it had been decided they were coming back. At the end of the call, she said, "I think you're in a good place now, I was worried about you when we started, but I think we've got you to a good place now."

Our relationship of course was one-sided. I know very little about her apart from the stories she told me to use as analogies. But she has been in my corner for years, listening and cheering and calming me, helping me to believe that I could do hard things and that I was worthwhile. She said "Good show," to me a lot.

I wanted to scream when she told me she was still going into the office to meet with people in person. I was furious at whoever these people were who weren't looking out for her. But it goes beyond those 2 patients. I read that the CDC is now having to tell people to wear a mask to protect yourself, because the messaging to protect others isn't enough to get us to wear them.

I hate everything right now. I hate that things are just rolling along like it's normal. It's not normal that asking people not to kill other people is an imposition.

23 years

 23 years 

I wonder if union leadership are listening to how scared we are. I wonder if they realize how many people I see and share air with everyday, so many more than a classroom teacher. I wonder if they know how many people I see without masks at work, maybe because we forget and are human, maybe because we have different assessments of risk, maybe because some of us are just little kids.

I wonder if Field’s air filters look like Farrand’s.

I wonder if anyone will even remember they walked in my office to ask me a tech question that we worked on together for 15 minutes, when they are doing their contract tracing after being diagnosed and trying to think of everyone they talked to.

I wonder if I will bring the virus home to my high risk partner, to his even higher risk mother. I wonder if my department will be eliminated, if I will just take over classrooms as my colleagues get sick.

I am scared, and I am filled with rage that we are in this place.

It would be nice to find someone to blame.

Sometimes I do. 

But today I’m going to think about 23 years ago.

I remember how hard I worked to get in a unionized job. I remember what it was like before I was unionized, when I was delivering newspapers or working in restaurants and pyramid schemes, and applying for every union job I saw like they were the ticket to a new life.

Because they were.

At that time in my life, our $1000 union dues would have paid an entire month’s expenses: rent, utilities, 4 weeks of groceries, gas, and still had money left over for two tires, which we needed constantly. Now it wouldn’t even cover one rent payment.

But I would never have made that bargain to drop from the union even when that $1000 went so much farther -- because I knew what it bought me. I knew what it was pulling me out from.

I was sexually harassed at my sleazy pyramid scheme job. I was bullied to do illegal financial things and I was too desperate to be able to say no, and there was no one to even ask for help. No one to even consider talking to -- I was alone.

I paid hundreds of dollars in supplies, car repairs, and more for the privilege to deliver newspapers, and hundreds more in self-employment taxes. I didn’t have anyone to talk to who would tell me how to not get scammed out of my own money. There was no group advocating for us to get the company to chip in for supplies. There was barely an internet at the time, and what was there I could barely afford to use to figure out what I could legally do. I was alone.

My restaurant job threatened to fire me when I called in sick because it happened to be the day after my birthday and they assumed I was lying. Never mind that I had never called in sick, and that I worked with food and had the kind of illness you definitely don’t want a food service employee bringing to work. I had to beg them to believe me, frantically promising I’d do whatever they demanded. I was alone.

When I got my first union job, my husband and I cried with gratitude. It represented dental care, birth control, and a tiny life insurance so I didn’t have to worry about my husband going in debt if I died and he needed to bury me, and rules. The best part was the rules, the safety, the sense that I was no longer alone. That no one could take advantage of me or make me do things that were illegal or unethical.

In that first job, I still was struggling -- this time by a supervisor who wanted me to destroy all the high school library books that had premarital sex in the stories, unless it was rape, which was ok according to her religious views. I developed hives from that working relationship, I hated going to work, where I felt pressured to do things I knew were wrong and where my supervisor clearly was out to get me. It took years to resolve. 

But it did get resolved. I was better off than before, and I had never been in danger of losing my apartment, my health care, my ability to buy groceries. I always had someone listening, someone who was trying to make things better. No matter how stressed and upset I was, or how I felt like nothing was changing -- I was never alone. 

Every job since then, I have been a little more secure, a little more independent. I was able to buy a home, buy a car, to get divorced, to support myself without a partner. I did not lose all my teeth before 40 like the women I delivered newspapers with, or have to stay in bad relationships to make ends meet, or give in to bosses who were threatening me. I have been safe, because of my union. I was never alone.

I don’t love every decision my union makes as a collective, but I have served in union leadership long enough to know that there is literally no perfect decision in a group this large with so many competing interests. I know how to get more involved if I feel like my voice is being ignored, but I am also thankful for the opportunity to step back and go with the flow when I feel overwhelmed. I know that I can rely on the union as a collective, but I also know the cost of this, the price of being in a group.

Maybe other people with my experience and qualifications in the private sector would be making more money or living more glamorous lives without having to acquiesce to group decisions, since they would be independently marketing themselves to their employers. I find that hard to believe, given how hard employers work to dismantle unions, and given the stories I hear from my friends in the private sector. But even if I could be making more money or only worrying about myself and my needs in a non-unionized job, I wouldn’t want that over what I have being a union member.

Because I remember what it was like being alone. 

I’d rather be scared inside of a union of people than scared and alone.

I’d certainly rather be angry with my union behind me, sharing in my anger, than one lone angry voice.

My relationship as a union member has been longer and more reliable than my marriage, or my family. The way some people think, “I can always move back home,” that’s the way I think about being in a union -- I may not have the backup plans and security that other people have, but I have this security, I have this backup plan.

Being in a group sometimes means choices are made not for my benefit, but to benefit others. I have to keep an eye on that balance, for sure. I might need to select new leadership, or take on more leadership responsibilities. But I am a historian and I know what happens in economic upheavals to those who are divided and who have no advocates.

I know that I am not better off alone. 

I know that this was the place I was trying to get to, even if it hurts or is crappy for the moment. I trust my past self that fought to get here. 

And I’m glad that in this moment of fear and anger, I’ve got my union with me.

"My strength is in my legs," he said

I was in aqua satin, literal tap pants, with a matching top hat. It was my first musical, and I thought they all would be this fun, with as many chorus scenes and dance routines and costume changes. After 42nd Street, other shows were a dragging letdown of waiting for the principals to finish.
But I was still 14, and while I was a little awkward about sitting on a strange boy’s shoulders and chest, I also didn’t care enough to be embarrassed, about how heavy I might be, or how nervous he might be of being able to lift me. I just wanted to shine, to dance and be Baby, but in a tapping crowd.
“My strength is in my legs,” he said. He was older, maybe a senior, maybe named Mark, maybe a swimmer. He was tall, and I was pleased to have been paired with a tall partner. I tried to figure out why he was telling me this. He said something about how he could lift anything with his legs. There was a moment when I wondered, “Am I supposed to go on about how I’m sorry for my weight, apologize, agonize? What does he want from me?”
Either he explained more, or my 14 year old brain, refusing to apologize for a body I enjoyed, found another path — he wanted permission to allow me to sit on his shoulder as he crouched for the lift, rather than expecting him to pluck me up with his arms and place me in position. I was a bit confused, because it seemed so obvious to me that I would sit, and the “lift” was actually a stand. But as a 14 year old girl who had never lifted anything or anyone very impressively, I thought things were obvious that may not have been obvious to an 18 year old boy surrounded by cultural expectations of his upper body strength.
He seemed satisfied with our negotiation, and he crouched, and I sat, and he stood, and I flew.

Most of the negotiations I would have with future dance partners would be so much more tedious, so much more full of angsty self-doubt, and so much less effective. The more I followed the script I thought was expected of me, to be self-deprecating, to offer solutions, to speculate on my partner’s problems...the less my partner and I found our meeting point, and the less I flew.
There is something beautiful about a bit of arrogance, a bit of selfishness, tempered with a wary tongue. If you don’t rush to don accusations, or throw out suggestions, if you stand still, listening with cocked head and quizzical eyes, secure and content in your own borders, the insecurities of your partner may show themselves for what they are, defenses rather than offenses, and the knots of your problem may fall loose at your feet.

I loved a man once

I'm alone now, but I wasn't always. Once I woke when my husband did in the mornings and made him breakfast before work. He said he didn't really want pancakes with fruit in the batter before work - he said he wasn't really that hungry that early. So sometimes I stayed in bed. The problem with that was he'd kiss me before leaving, and his cologne which was nice when I was awake made me furious when it intruded into my sleep. So often I'd get up and try to cook breakfast anyway.

He liked big lunches. I'd pack them, or he'd pack them himself. He'd iron his clothes and shine his shoes and sometimes he'd cut his hair before work.

He was always on time.

He told me he loved me a lot. Sometimes he'd call home at lunch. While he was gone I'd do laundry and clean things and write letters and worry about money and the ATM fees from how many times he got $20 cash. I'd read cookbooks. I'd look for jobs in the classifieds.

After he got home he'd cook dinner, or I would, or we'd cook together. We'd watch Star Trek or PBS or read books or sometimes he'd garden on the balcony or maybe we'd write. We talked about his day, and things we'd read and heard and seen, and decide what was right and wrong in every instance. Sometimes we'd talk about what we'd tell our future kids about it.

We'd close up the apartment for the night and go to bed together. Sometimes we'd have sex, or maybe argue about whose turn it was to give the backrub. I tried to fall asleep first, because he snored horribly. Sometimes I'd get so angry listening to him snore because sleeping was hopeless. But I'd say I could sleep when he left for work.

In later years we worked together on newspaper routes, waking at 3 am to drive to a warehouse that smelled so strongly of rubber and plastic and ink he'd have to pull the car over so I could vomit. I tried not to get sucked into the Wall Street Journal articles because folding and wrapping faster meant more money for us in tips.

He always folded more papers than I did.

He also did all the driving.

And all of the talking to strangers.

For years he worked that job, and then would drop me home and work another full shift at another job.

And he loved me.

I'd ask:

"How much do you love me?"

And he'd answer:

"It's without measure."

We'd fight about money. Or sex. Or our families. We fought a lot about the future. I wanted a plan. He wavered. I wanted him to get a degree, then a career, and then I'd get a degree and a baby, maybe, or a career. He wanted things I didn't want, and was afraid to tell me, couldn't see how to get them and keep our life. 

He was afraid I wanted things he couldn't give me.

I did.

But I didn't want to let go of his hand to get them.

Because he loved me.

He brought home kittens. Jewelry. Lemon trees. Furniture. A computer with internet. Plans to get dozens of CDs for "not too much."

I worried, constantly, about money. About paying bills on time. About debts. About lonliness.

I would ask:

"How do I know you love me?"

He'd say:

"I come home to you every day."

I cried and confessed I couldn't be a pastor's wife, sobbing about how sorry I was that I'd ruined his plans, that I'd deceived him, I just couldn't, just couldn't stomach it, couldn't live begging people for money and being nice to people I didn't trust and being an example.

He cried and confessed he'd never be able to give me the life my sister had with vacations and a house and two cars and cable TV and new clothes. And I hated myself for wanting those things when I was loved.

And over years the decisions and compromises and things you do to get along and make things better, and we made more money and got degrees and a house and cell phones and two cars and new clothes. But we didn't read each other's writing as much, and we didn't see each other every night. We'd work separately on different floors and made friends that weren't shared. 

And I'd ask him:

"Why do I need to come home tonight?"

And he'd answer:

"Because you're my wife."

I loved a man once. He cried when I left him, and asked about my new boyfriend, and asked if he was a good man who took good care of me.

I was loved once. He came home every night and brought me gifts and called me his little German French girl. I saw him give a report to the police when he was mugged walking home from the bus. He got me swing dancing lessons and horseback riding lessons and taught me to drive stick.

I wasn't always alone. 

I'm alone now. It's ok. But I wasn't always.

Turning our heads to the wall

There are men you can fight.
Strangers. The ones that you are taught are dangerous, the only men who will hurt you. Probably dark skinned. You can fight them. You should. You must.
And there are men you are supposed to trust. The ones that live in your house. That work beside you. That sit next to you in class, or hold doors open for you, or say hello when you are at the grocery store. You aren't supposed to fight those men. You aren't supposed to see the way they look at you, or take them seriously when they are just joking, or feel threatened when they are drunk or when they raise their voice at you. Anything untoward you see, anything you hear, from a nice man, a white man, a man you know, is a mistake on your part. You misunderstood.
You learn.
You get better calming those men. You get better looking out from their eyes and seeing things the way they do. Your body. Sex. The room. The world. You know what will upset him, what he needs to hear and feel and see. You know how to say things that would make you cringe if you saw another woman saying them. Because if you were watching your sister or your mother or your friend say these things, do these things, you would recognize their shame, the shame you learned to stop seeing in yourself.
Appeasing a man.
Because you are afraid of what his anger will damage.
Because keeping the anger from happening is easier than fixing what might break.
When you don't have a grown woman nearby as your ally, you have to weigh the consequences.
What happens if I don't calm him?
Who might get hurt?
How will I get home?
What happens once I get home?
How many other people will know?

We left the bar sometime after Virginia and Colorado were called. In front of me as I walked home alone, an agitated woman in her 20s was talking on the phone and asking if she could spend the night at the apartment of the person on the other end. Her boyfriend was upset over the election, and had decided to stay out and get trashed, and she had not been able to explain to him how the election upset her as well, but how she didn't want to take care of him when he stumbled home, or be around him. He had gotten angry with her for being a drama queen.
What belongs to you, once you have told a man you love him? What do you get to keep for yourself, and not have to surrender?
Is it worth wearing things he doesn't like, or "making a scene" that embarrasses him, or showing your intelligence or success, unless he can prove himself better and smarter and more successful than you? How does he react when he feels intimidated? Insecure? Emasculated?
Will he just belittle you, or will he yell? Will he keep it private, or will it become a spectacle? Will he take out his anger on passerby? How many people are you responsible for protecting in this instance?
How much is a man responsible for the consequences of his emotions, once he has a woman to "take care of him"?
I heard myself a few nights ago, soothing and shushing and changing the subject and not rising to the bait slapped down in front of me, over, over, over.  I knew, he is feeling insecure. He is stressed. He is proud. He is hurting. He needs care.
This man isn't my lover. Because I have learned, to a pathological degree, to run from this sensation in a lover.
But how much can we really escape our female programming, no matter how strong we think we are?
I heard myself saying the words, and told myself it didn't matter, because I would get to leave him and lock my door, because I wasn't his wife and could pay my own tab and get home on my own feet and I told myself it didn't matter that I was letting him scream in the street and have a temper tantrum and sneer at me and pontificate about how he, too, was going to run for President.
Run for President.
I laughed when he grabbed me, because we've known each other a decade and he's been there for me, you know? He wouldn't...he just wouldn't.
Run for President.
I cried this morning and my boyfriend listened to me talk about being sexually harassed by a man I was standing next to while wearing a suit, with two powerful women next to us that didn't even hear it. Because you stop hearing it at some point. There's too much. And my boyfriend said, "I believe you," and I cried harder, because I don't believe myself anymore.
What does it mean to love a man when you can't draw the line any more between his feelings and yours, his perceptions and yours, because the ability to see the world through his eyes is what keeps you safe? When you can't distinguish the parts of your sexuality that are you and the parts that are him? When you allow your friend to tell you you aren't as smart as he is, but you run from your lover because you can't predict his next move, and not being able to predict a man's next move is just too fucking terrifying?
I cried this morning, thinking about all of the white men who will feel stronger and more powerful because a pussy grabber is President. Will it make me safer, because they are more confident and not as threatened and emasculated? Or will it put me in more jeopardy, because they will know they can do anything, anything, and because the number of possible victims just exploded, because no matter how hard white women work to appease, they will not be able to protect anyone. Maybe even themselves. I wonder about women voting for that bastard, and I think about me, sitting at that table, trying to calm him down. We can't have them angry. We can't have the world set up in a way that makes them insecure. We need them to feel calm. Shh. Shh.
White women's power comes from her relation to white men. It is a power he has to be in the mood to bequeath. She is his property, she is his reason for destroying other men, a tool, an object. A balm. She cannot stand alone. It is an abomination.
Michael tells me we will all have to toughen up. Hard days are coming.
My first step is not to answer the phone right now, as my white male friend calls to gloat about the election and tell me about his plans to reach the Senate in five years, wrapped up in a "Happy Birthday, let me buy you a drink."
I know there is a good man inside there someplace.  I have seen him, I have been his friend for years. But I cannot, cannot appease any longer. Appeasing the upset white man and making excuses for him, and tiptoeing around my stepfather/my friend/the man we should be able to trust.
And this world you are building of humiliation and hierarchies will have to soothe you, and comfort you, and build you up when you feel threatened. The "subjective" values you despise are the ones that could have saved you.
My care is a gift I do not owe you. And I do not know how to fight anymore. The models for fighting are based on the idea that your enemy is a stranger.
But he isn't. He says he is your friend. He says he cares about you. He seems to care, sometimes. But only as long as he feels he is better than you.

Responding to death

You can't say that you love someone because of how he handles death. You can't say, "When I need to remember why I love him, I remember how he treated me at the funeral." It is morbid. Mocking pain by making it romantic, like you wear black tulle and listen to songs about legendary suicides. But I think it a lot, even though I try to avoid saying it. I don't have the words to articulate it yet, but how someone handles death, how they react to death, process grief, respond to the grief of others...it is important. There is a trueness and a deepness to those moments, cognizant of mortality, that is so foreign to how we live and talk and act in "real life". Like the difference in how we talk and act in our sexual lives - us, and yet very not us at the same time. Wholly apart from the self we present to others on the street. And the self we present in the presence of death - it is again, wholly apart. 
In my significant relationships in the past, the intrusion of death was always an incredibly awkward and terrible bit, not only for the loss itself, but for the change in my partner. For the strangeness and discomfort of watching my partner struggle and stumble and be foreign, a stranger to me. Not a person who "did it wrong," merely a person who was a newcomer to the realms of death, or a newcomer to grieving with another. A tourist: fumbling, stiff, detached. Maybe it wasn't a change in them at all - maybe it was a change in me, an unwillingness to continue being intimate once life became too real. But I know, even if I can't explain it, that there are people you want around you when you are grieving, and people you would rather avoid. And I think it has something to do with sensing who is real in those moments, in touch with their own mortality and weakness, and who is, for whatever reason, false.
One of the irrefutable truths about my love for this man is that his familiarity with death puts me at ease. Death is not something he treats as a secret, or an ill-fitted shoe, or a bus tour. It is for him a matter of course. Painful, yet inescapable, and transformative - like growth, or birth. Like waking up slowly, to allow the stiff muscles and joints to stretch. Like coming home to an apartment filled with water, from a window broken by the storm. He knows what needs to happen. 
Death is a thing that happens. He doesn't turn into a different person, and I'm not afraid to look at him. I'm not ashamed of him, because he doesn't seem like he is cutting out grief's tongue, or surprised to discover grief can touch him, or acting out a part he expects he should play. He isn't fearless, he isn't always collected, and sometimes he is uncomfortable with his feelings, or with mine. But even if he runs away for a bit, he comes back. And there is a stillness deep inside of him, not of grief shut into a locked box, or barricaded outside of himself, but of grief that has been accepted, that will be acknowledged. A stillness more of a tree than a rock, yet more of a cat than a tree. Seeing, knowing, and considering.

The ability to allow someone beside you to fall apart, and to pick up the role of polite humor to the crowd not from discomfort, but to deflect attention so that person can grieve, undisturbed. The ability to be close, not through what is said but through what is unsaid. The evidence of a life lived in connection with others, relationships spanning decades, skimming along surfaces with charm and kindness because loving others means forgiveness and acceptance. No less rooted than a love that demands exhaustive honesty and constant inspection, but one in which the work of love is done alone, instead of in discussion.

In our responses to death we can see truth about ourselves and our loved ones. We can see the depth of character that is, or is not yet, present in people whom at other times we would judge and classify by traits which at these times fall into insignificance. 

Do you know what it means to mourn? Does your desire to connect with a person who is in pain overpower your fear? Jim talked about us all having a boat on the River Styx, and how we may freak out when it seems like someone is dumping water from her boat into our own. I see myself there, in all of the moments I know someone is asking for intimacy I cannot sincerely give to him, and I see men I have known, avoiding connection that they fear might overwhelm them. But even in the moments we choose to connect, we can choose to be sincerely present and vulnerable, or we can choose a level of falseness. And I think one of the lessons age is teaching me, is that being insincerely present is rarely better, for anyone, than being absent.  

There is something beautiful about being with a person who knows grief. The kind of beauty in taking a deep breath, feeling the air fill you in forgotten corners, feeling your heart slow and your muscles relax. Perhaps being able to sit next to a person while you grieve is not, by itself, enough to hold a relationship or a friendship together. There are certainly people who were very close to my heart at certain dark times who have drifted out of my life, with whom I'm not certain I could maintain a friendship. There is too little in common between us. But out of anything else I've learned, the ability to find connection in sorrow is the closest I have found in our winding emotions and life paths to solid, true ground.

"It'll be ok"

How many times has someone said these words to me? How many times have I felt desperate to hear them, and angry and bitter that I was alone, and didn't hear them from a companion? Quieting my mind sometimes seems like such an insurmountable task...the worries about my bank account, how my life compares to what I imagine others have, my loneliness, my feelings of not being good enough or not doing enough to warrant love.  And yet if I added up all of the times someone has told me, "It will be ok", would the sum of that care outweigh the pain I put myself through pretending that no one had ever loved me enough to stand by me, pretending that I've never been loved, that I am really alone?

"It will be ok" - the magic words that say something so completely opposite of what they seem to say. These words don't mean that your pain is irrelevant, though they may encourage you to consider a larger context, to take a moment for perspective. They don't mean that you will be the same, or that anything will be like it was before. They don't mean that you will be good, even. They just mean you will survive, and sometimes that is the most comforting thing anyone can say.

"It will be ok" doesn't mean the speaker can fix anything, or even that the speaker will be with you when the clouds clear. I've still found the words to be powerful, a belief of someone outside myself in myself when I feel utterly incompetent, a belief in goodness and hope when I can't see anything worth saving.

"It will be ok" has preceded a lot of adventure and joy in my life, and has been itself the source of a lot of intimacy and tenderness. I can never get enough reassurance, though, and almost as soon as I hear the words, I'm missing them, and building fear and voids and needs and worry. If I had a magic power, I'd want to be able to open a photo album that would display all of the "it will be ok" moments of forty years, fanning them out in colors and emotions and connections of a life lived among people who have loved me and supported me and believed I was valuable, people who haven't done what I may have tried to puppet them into, but who have shown up in unexpected ways to tell me that it would be ok.

Hospitality of wishes

What if I treated wishes with kindness? Listened graciously to the desires of others without hearing obligations? Was patiently attentive to my own hopes instead of snarling, "It doesn't matter what you want." What if?

What if I heard wishes not as needs, and not as insulting fancies arising from privilege...what if I could recognize wishes as something gentler, something more significant...respectful preferences of a guest, or trusting confessions from one heart to another, or from my own soul?

Would I be less likely to fall apart later, hysterical about my lover, family, friends not meeting my needs - my ignored wishes returned to me in disguise? Would I be a better friend, less resentful, more present?

Would I sometimes give joyfully to panhandlers without discomfort, and sometimes politely decline without guilt, without needing to pontificate about my decision? 

Would I be less afraid of drama, secure in my own boundaries?

Would I be better equipped to listen to intense pain from those I love? Would I be less defensive and hurt when their pain is about me, and less likely to assume it is about me at all times?

Would I?

Would those I love feel more heard, seen...would strangers in my world feel more included? Would all of us feel less needy? If our wishes were treated more politely, if we ignored wishes less, and rolled our eyes less at disillusioned disappointment, and were less likely to tell each other that wishes matter less than needs, would those hopes be less likely to mutate into demands? What if it was ok to wish, without waiting for all needs to be met first? Is there a way to honor wishes, so as to be more discerning about needs, to limit what cannot be declined, to get better at honestly requesting care, to worship our fellow humans by giving them more sincere choices? 

What if my gift to you is to give you the freedom to decline my requests, without punishment? To promise that I will take care of myself if you say no?

What might it be like, if there were more choices than obligations?

I can see Terence's smile at Olive Garden in 1993, "Hospitaliano." Can I learn hospitaliano, towards my own wishes, towards the wishes of others, moving beyond "niceness" - a land of repressed desires and cyclical explosions of resentful needs - into a place of attentive kindness and self-sufficiency and earnest free will?

What if I had fewer needs and more whims? What if I said no more often AND more kindly? What if I granted more wishes and refused more burdens? What if I was more of a dad and less of a mom? What if we all were?

https://books.google.com/books?id=APshr1dOhk4C&dq=the+experience+of+being+needy+private+exclamation 

Two middle-aged Asian men with a selfie stick

A beautiful, laughing black woman in scrubs taking a walk with her boyfriend. A wispy white hipster girl with pixie hair & Risky Business sunglasses. I'm holding my coffee mug and a book, waiting for the signal at Fletcher & Huron at 10:22 am on a Saturday in June. I walk through the silent festival venue, passing a bewhiskered, muscley young man walking what appears to be a small red bear with a fox's tail. He's wearing the same glasses as the pixie girl, but without the sun protection. 

The fountain creates a calming backdrop to the maddening chirp of the chipmunk, who increases his volume & frequency as he notices me watching him. His voice echoes, after a moment's delay, in the vibration of the metal streetlamp post behind me. There are sirens, far away, like the sun, muted by the morning cloud duvets.

Tiny gold florets in flowers that look like pieces of cauliflower - if only Sandra were here to tell me what they are. 

The echo isn't an echo after all; it's a second chipmunk.

Just outside my apartment building is a cement trunk, dumping its load through a chute angled into my neighbor's backyard. It is probably what woke me, along with the 7 am sunshine happy to find no serious resistance in my almost transparent window-shade. Michael loses his mind over that window-shade. It doesn't block light, doesn't darken the bedroom, doesn't provide privacy. I don't want it to. It does its job perfectly, which is to suggest privacy, and to soften edges, without denying me my window to the world. I certainly sleep sounder, more deadlike, in spaces with blackout curtains. But I am not convinced I sleep better. The disorientation of waking in a space that has no connection to anything larger, to opening curtains and finding a world that went on moving without me and seems not to give a damn...I find the process of reintegrating on those mornings very unsettling, the work to rejoin the stream of life seems to undo whatever benefit I gained from uninterrupted sleep. I don't want my waking and sleeping to be so divorced from one another.

Tami mentioned last night enjoying seeing me re-emerge on Facebook, into my summer self. Slower, more thoughtful. I may have too much divorce between my winter and summer selves, between my work and leisure selves, to accommodate a fierce break in conscious states.

A butterfly landed on my bare toes and ran away when I turned to look at what was tickling me. Unless it was a lizard, or frog. It's in the cauliflower-flower stalks, small brown foot-tickler. Chipmunk Primo ran by the other foot to join his companion. My coffee cup is empty & I can't focus on Marie-Louise Von Franz. Bell towers and giggling teens on campus tours and the birds are so damn happy they don't have to wear a bra or be punctual or make good choices.

I gave up and laid down fully on the cool cement wall of the raised bed. I saw a woman who looked like Adrienne laying down on a bench the other night waiting for the bus, thoughts of "Rock on" warring with "Be considerate of others and how much space you are taking up." The former won, along with a bit of jealousy at her fearlessness, thinking I could never do that. I've sat up even now. People judge. People expect you to anticipate their needs. They shouldn't need to ask you to behave yourself. 

I lay down again. The cement is so cool. Welcome back, Jolie.

The ribbon on the Mylar balloon scuffs the donation pillar. The sun makes a break from the duvet.

I wondered as I walked here about the work/summer divorce, and whether I should be more integrated. Does holding your breath for ten months so you can roll in daisies (or have your nose tickled by cauliflower-flowers) create more or less wholeness and goodness in my life? Would it not be wiser to be more moderate? 

Education isn't a profession of moderation, though, for educators. No one expects a teacher to do a moderate job. They want a miracle. Miracles don't need to use the restroom at regular intervals and they don't accept "good enough."

I don't have a classroom of shining child faces any longer. Perhaps this is the time to explore moderation? Even though nothing about me is moderate, even though I work best fluctuating from extremes, unable to leave the library stacks until the entire collection has been shelf-read, unable to open my work email or follow a schedule of any kind in July. Is my window-shade moderate? Or is it just a way to get away with another extreme?

Michigan itself is extreme. This planter was the epitome of frozen desolation a few months ago. David commented last night on the copper dedication plaque for the fountain, how the plows had not been kind to it. How can his brain even connect the neurons required to look at sun-warmed metal & concrete and imagine snow plows?

The air is soft now. The sun is reminding me I haven't applied any SPF. Chipmunk Primo ran back to his start point, and then went off searching for the foot-tickler in the flowers.

I notice my bladder. Marie-Louise wrote an entire couple of pages about the significance of human urination, the unstoppable force, its significance as a symbol of human instincts & nature. I smiled reading it, thinking she had never talked to a teacher. Everything she said about urination was entirely false for anyone who's ever worked a job where they were "on the floor": factory, retail. I suppose most of her clients and friends were of a certain social class.

I don't know if breathing more shallowly all year through would be better, worse, more authentic, more stable than the sprint/collapse I live now. I know last week's training during my first week off filled me with unreasonable rage & comical distress. I am not supposed to be working. I have ten weeks off and this three days is an unacceptable encroachment of my privilege. Not sure if it would have been so inconceivable if it had happened a bit later, after I'd had a week to start breathing again.

The sun is hot enough now. I will join the crush of youthful drunk strangers at the river. I will separate my floatation device and wander down the river alone, with their voices in the distance. Slowly, thoughtfully, breathing.

It is time

It is time. To put away email, to text your entire phone list. It's time to announce your presence, to lean in, to let go. It is time to wonder, risk, explore. Time to try. Time to say yes. Time to breathe deeper, laugh with your eyes closed, and let tomorrow worry about itself. When it is time, all barriers will melt before you...except for those which stand, which will seem righteous rather than sinister, and petty rather than overwhelming. All puzzle pieces will fit, all tones are in tune, all emotions are true. When it is time, it is both easier than ever to attract a mate, and harder than ever to find simpatico with one. For when it is time, you are whole, as a child is whole onto herself, observing her world. And without the conditioning which tells us to pair bond, what girl-child would submit to the shame we serve up for our woman-selves each day? 

I'm better at having a broken heart than you are

The thing is, I'm just better at having a broken heart. I've been tossing it at boys since I was 8 years old. I know this letdown. I know the path. I don't like it, and the hill is a bitch. But I know it. Its grooves are familiar, and as much as I hate finding myself here, I know the way home.

But I bet you don't. And here's where my strategy of open-heartedness will pay off, while your choice to wall away in your castle denying you feel will fail. I love and scream and swear with a full throat and an outstretched hand and a constant willingness to see my faults. Your exacting nature does not permit such searching; you will never waver from your course, will never back down, will never reconsider. You are too careful to be broken, and you will quietly gather any disobedient hurt bits and hide them away. No one will know. And you will be even more precise in the future. Even more rigid. Impervious.

Messiness doesn't mind mistakes quite as much. A guileless love is unashamed of heartbreak; a childlike and effusive love knows and accepts the cost of emotional sincerity - or simply forgets it. I throw my heart away joyfully, with glee, with abandon, just to watch how beautifully it tumbles down the hill.

And thus I know heartbreak. I know it well. 

And you do not.

All my exaggerated pantomimes and microscopic linguistic analysis of my own emotions don't seem to be encouraging you to express yours. And I cannot feel them for you, although I sense that part of what drew you to me was the hope that you could delegate this task. But if you cannot feel and express and make sense of the boundaries between your emotions and your responsibilities, if you cannot see how this is not "extra work" but is the foundation of being intimate with another person, you cannot have any patience or understanding for someone who lives each day on the floor of the sorting house, slowly sifting and classifying and making piles to organize the chaos, trying her best to build meaningful intimacy with the people in her life.

I saw you tonight, ranger on the move, passionately arranging some deal on the phone you told me was broken. Good luck to you. But I think you have more feelings than you care to admit. And I don't envy you that realization.

I am better than you at falling apart, and that means I have more experience picking myself up.

Shattered

I love seeing my friends. People I love, with whom I have history. I look forward to trips, excursions, parties, bar nights and brunches, operas and sledding and movies and dance clubs. I love getting spontaneous invites and surprise visits and hearing people I'm out with suggest "one more place?" - extending what might have been a perfectly lovely breakfast or walk or happy hour into a day or an evening of catching up, telling stories, and connecting. It doesn't sound like "one more place" as much as "I don't want to part."

But the ends of things, the return trips, the goodbyes and partings and breaks in these connections get harder and harder to step through - the more excited I was to begin, the more planning and preparation I exerted to make the meeting happen, the more time that has passed since I last saw the person I meet.

The goodbye ought to be just as happy, if not more. I am loved! I love! The connection was evidence, affirmation, and a new treasure chest of stories and memories and beautiful things I can look at and hold onto when real life, and separation, come back. The beginning ought to be more fearful and sad than the ending - it might not go well, it might not happen at all. Yet beginnings don't crush me with worry and dread - I'm too energized by change and unknown and figuring things out. All my fear, all my sad, all my love twists inward at goodbyes. Returning home pulls my heart down into my stomach. It shouldn't - my bed is the most comfortable bed on earth. My apartment fills me with joy when I walk in. But to get there, I have to separate from these people I love.

These people I love so damn much. I knew I loved them, came to see them, looked forward to their company, but I had forgotten what exactly it felt like to be next to them, to touch them, to hear their voices. The shape of their faces when they smile and the texture of their skin on my fingertips and the exact span I need to stretch up to wrap my arms around their shoulders. I had forgotten what it was like to love them with flesh and voice and eyes. They were just an idea I loved, but I remembered when they hugged me all these other things that I had forgotten. How tender they are. How full of kindness. How open-hearted and sensitive and joyous. How brilliant. How beautiful, one right next to the other, a sofa full of heroic divinities. And now I know I will forget them again, and they will go back to being an idea, instead of this one specific unrepeatable utterly human being.

I want all of my loved ones within arms' reach, every single one of them, all the time. And I also want this feeling of falling in love with them anew, because it has been two decades and they have become entirely different gorgeous versions of the exact same person I loved the first time, fully bloomed and shimmering-winged, and I get to fall in love with an exciting stranger that is my best friend, has always been my best friend. This love, familiar as myself. I know you like I know my own dream world, but you have all these stories I don't know from these lives you've lived without me, and all I want is to sit next to you and listen to you and watch you be familiar and brand new in buttery baklava layers of sweetness. It is so good to be near you. And I am so very happy, and sad also, because I already miss you. I cannot hold this liquid moment still. I don't want to forget again what it feels like to be your friend.

Each summer my father would appear at the airport as a stranger that had gifts for me. And I wanted nothing to do with him and his foreignness. But ten weeks later after I remembered who he was I had to leave him at that airport and forget all the pieces of him again. And I'm tired of forgetting. I want my loves. Someday they won't be at that airport and I will have forgotten them and there won't be any way to remember again, how they smelled and how they cleared their throat and how they told a punchline.

And the lies Helga tells her son Freddie when he quite rightly sobs at every goodbye, telling him that he will see these people again, that there will always be another time, these lies we tell ourselves so that we don't fall apart like toddlers at every airport and train depot and bus station and repacked suitcase, these lies aren't doing the trick for me anymore. I miss you now. I miss you for every one of the hugs and laughs I will want to give you, that I wanted to give you for twenty years, that I will have in my heart for you, even though my head will turn you back into the idea of you, without your you-ness to surprise me, and hug me back.

I know that missing you is good, and beautiful. I know that I am lucky to have so much love in my life, so very lucky to have these pains of missing you because I have loved you well and hurt myself to sever from your sphere. I know. But I am in public, and I don't have the space or privacy to cry these heavy tears, to process this sadness, this love that wants to stay next to you and wants you to exist only for me until I feel like I can love you all the way through, a full saturation of color, until you can fully know and I can fully know you understand. Only then, only when you really really understand how I love you, until I know without a moment of doubt that you see what my heart holds for you, can I feel peace at you existing outside of my space, can I drive away from you with a bittersweet smile instead of feeling ripped, the quiet letdown of a finished ice cream cone rather than the wailing misery of a fallen scoop melting on the sidewalk.

It is beautiful to love and to be sad at separations and goodbyes. But it is not beautiful quite yet, not until I can properly rage at the hideous injustice of loving people out of arms' reach, people who may not understand how important they are to me.

"You haven't asked her"

"But you haven't asked Jolie what she does." 

His statement froze the three strangers mid-stride. They had been about to melt back into the party; the olive-skinned woman who talked and danced and pealed laughter at her own jokes, her quiet partner whose face didn't seem to move even when it did, and the rotund man lecturing them all on holding cell phones next to their heads. They had chatted, or rather the dark woman had told stories, and Michael had drawn her out further, polishing her loquaciousness until she relaxed and remembered her personality, while the pontificating man had attempted to dominate with Mr. Wilcox-style wisdom. But the conversation had run its course; the kohl eyed woman and the tousled hair man were energized and glancing about the room, ready for further stimulation now that this intercourse - begun in hesitant fumbles - had given them courage, and the quiet still one was going to be the same wherever she was dropped next. 

"You haven't asked her what she does." Michael repeated.

I wasn't ready to talk to any of them. I had tried, though not very hard, truthfully, but I had smiled and responded and nodded and opened my mouth and inhaled, ready to offer words. Other people had been quicker. Or perhaps cleverer, or surely smoother. I hadn't had anything truly wonderful to say. It is easier to let them have what they want. They want to hear themselves. But Michael's words had shamed them, and the Italian woman focused her sharp, striking eyes on me. "Well? What about you?"

I stuttered. She was standing too close to me, and her eyes paralyzed me. She was waiting for me to be amazing and I was warm, and flustered. I don't need the attention. I already am getting more than my fair share of attention, just standing here in my new dress with the tulle-stiffened flounces, shifting my weight in shoes that are just barely uncomfortable. I just want to observe, and be in my head, and let Michael charm everyone else for me so no one notices I haven't said anything. I can't think of what to say. They are talking so fast and I don't know them and don't know what they want from me yet, other than for me to be unthreatening. It is easy to succeed at demure if you don't open your mouth, but now I have to speak and am going to give myself away.

She smiled slowly, watching me struggle, and remarked, "How pretty you are." I was surely supposed to have said something more clever here, but I did not. Michael told them how smart I was, and I watched the conversation form iron bars around me. He was looking at me with such tenderness, knowing I was twisting in discomfort but not realizing putting me on stage was making it worse. He is proud of me, he wants me to be shiny, but I can't be shiny right now, I have too many arms to be shiny, and I love him for being his business self and taking over the room but I just can't do anything more complicated than polite right now. I am slowly leaking life force onto the stripped wooden floor when she strikes, "When are you two going to get married?"

I want to burst out laughing. If anyone who knew me, knew us could have been here in this moment. If he would leap in to save me right here. If she would stop toying with her prey and would have pity on me. "I've already been married," I reply lamely, goawayjustgoaway lady drumming in my brain. I succeed in dumbfounding her, just for a second. "I didn't like it."

"But...but look at him!" she refuses to accept defeat. "Look at him! Of course you want to marry him, you haven't been married to him!"

"Yes, he is very handsome." He is, and God only knows what he is making of this exchange in that tight labyrinth brain of his. He is very handsome, so handsome I can barely look at him when I'm angry, or flustered, or supposed to concentrate on other people. He is very charming, walking into this party and cultivating every person here so that they eat out of his hand and thank him for the opportunity. He is very skilled, very clever, and very aware of how awkward I am. And perhaps I should be pleased that this is the only thing he doesn't do quite perfectly, setting me at ease, manipulating me. Because I think he misjudges the cause of my unease, never suspecting I could be insecure about him, about whether I've pleased him, about whether he thinks he got the bad part of the bargain with me on his arm tonight, and my head stuffed with sawdust.

I want to tell him I don't need the compliments, that the attention is crushing me, that I just need his arm around my waist and the freedom to be vacant and rest on his social skill. But I don't have enough articulateness to even make the attempt. I touch his hand over our shared plate of food. I try to mind meld with him, staring soulfully into his eyes. "What?" he asks, startled. 

I didn't have a very successful evening. But for all of my personal stiffness and dullness, I did nevertheless walk away with this moment. You haven't asked her. All his smoothness and charm, like an athletic ability, and he so fit he is able to double back and pick up stragglers on the steep hill, without worrying he himself will tire. You haven't asked her. You haven't paid attention to my mate. You will stop what you are doing and show her homage. I will use my power to compel you to do so. And this millennia-old male power maneuver that would have enraged me if I were at full capacity, would never have happened if I were at full capacity, and breaks my heart with love at this moment. I am the one he cannot read. I am the lonely child and he is trying to bully his friends into playing with me. He doesn't realize the only reason I try to engage strangers in this mood is to be beautiful for him.

Nighttime thunderstorm

I will put my book down. I was disinterested in movies. Found myself no longer craving the noisy cheer of the bar. I hear the wind pick up, insistent and loud as it pushes the sultry air through the trees and the cracks between my air conditioning unit and the window sash. A storm is coming.

I will turn off the lights and open the drapes. The storm is supposed to last for hours.

The ceiling fan pulls the refrigerated storm air inside, where it tumbles to the wooden floor, past the dusty radiator which is warm from the slow sunset in my west facing living room windows. Their screens glitter with rain, drops I can feel bursting, brushing my hands as they settle on the peeling paint of the sills. It is my fault the paint is peeling from these sills, for I cannot bear to shut out the rain, at least not unless it is sheeting, violently, gushing in.

But this storm has perfect manners. Pleasant rumbles of thunder, popcorn soft, allow for plashing and trickling and leaf rustles and the quiet drone of the fan. It doesn't seek to destroy the paint left on the sills, any more than necessary. Lightning not meant to startle, but to decorate, revealing lilac skies with diamond highlights. 

How can something so troublesome and disappointing during the day be such a blessing and a beauty at night?

I need to move my car before I sleep, out of the university lot which will start ticketing at six am and into my paid parking spot, in the structure a mile away. It won't be an unpleasant task, not in this storm. But I hate to move away from the window. Placidity is a comfortable seat by double windows, looking out onto the dark, polite thunderstorm.

Trust the ants

Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love  -- By Clancy Martin  "Our feelings change from day to day, and yet if we don't expect too much from our feelings, if we don't react to those feelings too vigorously, if we are patient with our feelings, even a bit ironical about our feelings, we will remember that Friday will come around again, and we'll find ourselves once more in love."

I'm working on learning to trust the ants, in my own Psyche myth. I tend to want to leap up and do something, and feel guilty for sitting around thinking. I still sit around and think, a lot, but I don't give myself credit for that work - real work is something you can cross off a list. But what this tends to lead to, in my personal life, is a giant flaming disaster. My Eros is not a fan of being an item on the list, ever. He enjoys the mystery of his invisibility, and an organic unfolding of events and relationships.

I am much more likely to be wringing my hands over the phantoms the female chorus whispers in my ear, about the doom around the corner and about how I need to take a lamp and a knife in the dark and set about creating my own "real" solution.

But I am learning. Trying. Practicing trusting the ants. 

Part of it involves letting the phantoms wash over. A few days can make a world of difference in how big and scary those phantoms look. Coming home from a feminist rally, ideas and horror stories churning in my brain, is NOT the time to sit down to have a serious conversation with my lover. A night out with the girls, listening to their worries for my ultimate lifelong happiness...A week of tidal hormones, cold icy waves under a dark sky...I want his comfort, immediately, I want to bring all of the insecurities to him and have him banish them away with steady solid masculine practicality. And yet, my Eros, I have learned, is not so good at that. His typical response when I reach out in tremulous, amorphous fear of an imagined future is a brusque rebuff, "What? [sigh] I'm really busy."

So I'm practicing letting the phantom hang out for a bit. Trusting the ants. What if he's a Titan, a monster who will eat you and that's why he won't show his face? Well, that is true, that would be really terrible. I'm going to put that on the shelf for a little bit, though, and trust the ants. You need to pull out a knife and a lamp and slay him first, before he suspects that you know his true identity! Well, there isn't really any undoing that path. But I can find a room I can lock, and go in there for a while. Peek out in a little bit when he can't see me, and make a decision then if he looks Cyclopean or mostly just regular.

Because the part that Psyche can never really explain or share is the way it feels the morning after he visits her. The languid happiness of connection. I am allowed to trust my own intuition, too. My third eye is valid and dependable, too - and is acting from more data points than yours. This feeling, of wanting to gambol around in the forest and string flower necklaces for him, is not something I have to set aside in order to find truth - it is part of the truth. 

It isn't the only part. The fear is part, too. And pretending that the fear isn't real is not sustainable, I've been learning. I can't will it away when it comes. I can't logic it away or wallow it away or get it to go away, period. But I can find alternative responses to the fear, that are less drastic, more private, and that permit me a way to practice trusting the ants. Ways that permit me to feel, but still watch for them. To lock myself in a safe room if need be, but without shooting off missiles at people before I do. "What can I do at this moment, to honor and acknowledge this anger and hurt, and to get it outside of myself, without actually turning it loose like zombies or weaponizing it at a person?"

And if I can watch other women's relationships with new eyes, not the eyes of a child who needs to make people get along, or the eyes of a girl afraid for her fellow girl, but the eyes of a heroine, watching her fellow heroine, I can see new things. The disappointment that she feels, but does not allow to overpower her. The weighing she does between her feelings of anger and resentment and rejection, and the decision she makes to love, to listen, to understand, to choose patience and forgiveness and to respond with gifts of tenderness. Not perfectly - not as some strange saint. But as herself, with all her usual edges - and yet, a clear and conscious decision to act with grace. To trust, not just him, but her intuition of him, her choice to open herself, her ability to be ok despite his shortfall. To trust her ants.

And the magic, as an observer, to see this unfold, and to see a graceful response from the hero. Not gallant, not storybook - but a response of a human recognizing grace and returning it.

I can do this, too. I can be my graceful self, instead of my Medusa self. Grace is not a weakness. The grace is a choice, carefully considered and selected from all of your options. It is a gift from strength, because you have it to give, because you aren't in need, because you will need to rely on someone else's grace another time when you do not have reserves of strength.

And maybe the question to ask is not, "Am I ok with this?" and certainly not "What is the worst that can happen if I let this go?" but rather "Where am I, right this moment? How am I, right this moment? I think I am probably ok, despite this. Is this true? Can I leave this for the ants? Can I trust them?"

Because if I can trust the ants, I am free to act with grace instead of panic. I can enjoy the breath in my lungs as I watch them sort the grains, and make order out of my emotional disaster. And perhaps when it comes time to speak, I can speak both with sincerity and strength and with tenderness and compassion, and I will not have to make the compromise that breaks my soul.