It’s Always Good Until It’s Not May 26, 2009

I wonder just how long I’ll have to live before I can write a memoir about love, and about what makes a relationship work.  Is it the genuine love for and support of one another?  Is it intellectual compatibility and stimulation?  Is it someone who makes you laugh?  Or is it nothing more than our own attitude, with almost no relation to the other person involved?  What can be compromised, sacrificed, before we say uncle and find greener pastures (or mirages)? For the first time I can remember, the NYT had a female same-sex “Vows” column, and it set off nearly all my little land mines: one proposed to the other on their second date.  How very “U-Haul” lesbian.  One was vegetarian when they met, the other decided to cook them up some yummy beans…with bacon.  Nice.  But they both love words, have sharp senses of banter and intellectually-toothsome careers.  I know exactly what I’m doing – I’m comparing my insides to their outsides.  Yeah, yeah.  And I was so happy most of this day, most of this weekend, until suddenly and immediately I wasn’t.  I must be such a joy to be in a relationship with.  Moody, distant at a second’s notice – only a few days ago I was sure I was going to fuck up this greatest relationship of my life, and here I am in a matter of milliseconds questioning whether she and I are going to make it.  Oh, ye of no faith whatsoever.

There is good news, folks – I didn’t act out on it, I knew what I was doing, and even though C is the most emotionally sensing person I’ve ever known and has definitely picked up on my struggle, it hasn’t ruined anything.  But the bigger questions are these: if love is a decision, how do we decide to keep making it?  Is it the level of compatibility that allows some people to not constantly question and doubt, or a personality trait?  In one of the “State of the Union” columns, one spouse credited the success of her relationship to the fact that she said she simply never allowed doubt to creep into her mind, even during the hard times.  Part of me wants so much to do that, to just buckle down and say this is the person with whom I’m spending the next 40-odd years, so let’s start getting used to it and nail up all those back doors.  Something about that is so appealing to me.  And I do have so much here – so much support, love, humor, ease, pretty great and getting better sex, food likes, affection, expressiveness, generosity, a great dog caretaker – so much.  I don’t truly think I could get more in one package.  But the wit isn’t there.  The intellect isn’t there.  And I doubt it will ever be.  And sometimes that is so incredibly okay.  Until it isn’t.  And I need to get better at soothing myself during the “isn’t” moments so I don’t blow them all up and have nothing but charred bits in my wake.  I know how good this is.  What I can’t and don’t know is if it’s forever.  And learning to accept that is really the greatest challenge – that we make plans and God laughs, that I can try to force my will upon my life like shaping pipecleaners, but it’s really not mine to mold.  I can just pray for enough light to take the next right step, and know that every time I see a future – be it shining or desolate – it’s nothing more than a figment of my imagination anyway.  Maybe if I could put a little less stock in the happy-ever-after convictions I have sometimes, I could learn to put a little less in the sturm-und-drang ones, too.

Piss and Vinegar February 24, 2009

I’m full of both today.  What sucks about wisdom/insight is that, once you have it, you can’t really ignore it or pretend you don’t know about it.  Yestarday was a really tough day for me emotionally, which is generally what makes it hard physically if it’s going to be, and at the end of it I was getting hungry and decided I was going to take myself out to dinner.  Nice gesture, but I’m sitting in my therapy session, literally fantasizing about this meal I’m going to have – I find myself weaving in and out of conversation presence as I’m thinking about panchan, and squid in hot pepper sauce, how it’s going to look when they bring it to the table, and am I really going to go to Han Bat or should I try someplace closer even if I’m not as familiar with it? I brought myself back enough for the session to be somewhat productive, but when I did finally get to the restaurant and the food was brought to my table, I realized something.  This food, no matter how perfect, how delicious, was absolutely not going to sate the hunger going on inside me, and for that reason I knew I’d likely overeat and then feel all full of self-loathing and shame for my distended belly and my percieved lack of will power.  I’m reading Caroline Knapp’s “Appetites: What Women Want” and hope to hear further insights from her on this issue, but it was a major epiphany for me right there in the moment to realize my efforts to anaesthetize with food, with anything external for that matter, but particularly with food.  I’ve been using it to those attempted ends probably since I hit puberty, so I don’t know why at this moment it became so clear to me – no different than the cigarette someone smokes or the slug from a drink someone takes right after a stressful event.

So here I am, left with the knowledge that no retail therapy, no imbibed or consumed substance is going to help me with my current inner state of teeth-gnashing.  So what do I do?  Sit in the discomfort?  Know that this too shall pass and bide my time?  I’m attending Al-Anon meetings though maybe not as many as I should, and I’m aware life is a little stressful now for a combination of reasons so banal as to really be unworth the document space to list.  When we realize we need to turn to something not on the outside, is that when we look deeper for something on the inside?  Is that where prayer and meditation come in?

The Quell of Loneliness (get it?) February 29, 2008

Someone whose blog I liked very much has deleted it.  My head spins – why?  Where did she go?  Away from potentially critical, questioning readers?  She’d been miserable in her marriage and in relationships in general, started on a journey of self-discovery, and then met a man via this medium whom she decided was the answer to all her questions.  Many people congratulated her and wished her luck, but one or two cautioned her that she seemed to be repeating history.  I guess my fantasy is that she didn’t particularly want to hear the naysayers, wanted to remain blissfully ignorant and throw herself into the (unquestionable) joy of the beginning of a relationship without the buzzkill of cautionary tales.  And maybe she will, in fact, be blissfully happy.  Maybe for some, it’s possible to change a tune without learning a different instrument.  I’m probably jealous, more than anything.  Yes, I want what my higher power wants for me, blah, blah, blah, but I’d also like someone besides my sponsor (though she’s been right so far about everything else) to tell me that life will keep getting better and that I absolutely, positively will meet someone and be capable of a loving relationship.  Because most of the time, I honestly don’t believe it.

Being with my mother and the goddamn Blackberry that’s surgically attached to her thumbs for twelve days didn’t help matters any, to be sure.  I’ve never been so lonely in someone else’s company, yet here I am, sitting next to her, seeing the world and dying to talk to someone about all of it.  We might as well have been driving through Elizabeth, NJ for all she paid attention, yet we were driving through the streets of Mumbai and Manila, past local culture and sights unseen.  For sure, my recent ease in my own company helped me tremendously, but it was still incredibly lonely.  It made me miss B: suddenly I’m back to looking for her on Facebook, Googling her…someone with her name, living in her area, won honorable mention in a squash cooking contest.  A f–king squash cooking contest?  All she could cook when we were together was macaroni and cheese from a box and fried eggs.  So I start wandering down the road of “has she grown up?,” “should I contact her?”  Yuck, yuck, and yuck.  At least I know better than to listen to myself at this moment.  It’s just little drops of the drug, still stored in my veins somewhere, come out to haunt me.

One thing I WON’T do to quell this loneliness is sleep with boy C again.  All it did was make me miss women even more than I already did.  How do straight women deal with 5-o’clock-shadow-burn?  Or with all that hair?  If only I felt as much of an ease flirting with women as I do with men, I’d at least find someone to sleep with.  But that probably isn’t the answer, either.  I need to get back into my groove, to fill the emptiness myself.  I need to do what I think – correctly or not – my blogger-in-absentia was unable to do, to become truly at ease in my own company so that being with someone else never again has to mean abandoning a part of myself.  It’s a wonder I’m not emotional cheesecloth after being with my mother for twelve days: let me give myself the time to return to my former level of contentment before I start making any big decisions.

Faith February 4, 2008

Okay, I think I have to write about something I feel awkward writing about. I feel like I’m in one of the dozen or so Morgan Freeman movies where he plays God and makes himself apparent to someone in such a way that they have to acknowledge his existence publicly.  So here goes: I have a Higher Power, a God, a Spirit Guide – whatever anyone chooses to call a loving, guiding presence that makes occurrences beyond our wildest dreams possible.  I’m sure of it.

The other day – yesterday or the day before – I finally thought to ask my H.P. to help me with coming up with a paper I need to write and pass in order to begin my dissertation. I’ve been stuck and avoiding thinking about it, even though it’s due in less than two months, and I kept telling myself something would come to me, but then finally, standing in my kitchen, I just looked upward (there’s no genuflecting or prostrating myself in this relationship) and asked for help coming up with a topic. Yesterday, I’m on a walk with my sponsor’s husband’s daughter (got that?), and after asking me about the work I do, she mentions a professor who talked about the creation of “safe space” and its contribution to self-esteem. My heart kind of skipped and my head started reeling: I won’t go into it in detail here, but it’s a concept that fits my interests in a way nothing else has: a safe space could mean Alateen or Al-Anon (or any 12-step group, for that matter), it could be a chess club, it could be a team – it’s all about what makes a space safe, and the benefits that has for teens and adults alike. I’m so incredibly excited about it – it feels right in a way nothing else quite has. But the point of this story is not that I found a paper topic, but that I asked for help and I got it, just like that. I could almost picture my H.P. smiling down at me when I realized what had happened – I was looking outside at my wonderful dog playing in the snow and thinking about how amazing it was to have found him, and it clicked: I asked for this dog, I asked for this house, I asked for direction, and I got it. One of the most wondrous things about this program is this notion of a loving, benevolent entity rather than one that tests our faith or punishes us for trespasses: more and more and more, I see evidence of this presence in my life that is conspiring to make me whole and happy. So call me what you will – I had to say something. Morgan Freeman told me to.