When will we exhale

Echo technician says deep breath and hold…..ok exhale

and I think – have i really exhaled at all in the last six months – have any of us?

We hold our breath for test results, for the bills to hit, for the money to come in, for a job offer, for the pain to stop, for word from loved ones.

We hold our breath walking past people who refused to wear a mask, when we first get on the first train or bus since we all went home and closed the door behind us

Have any of us exhaled at all?

Will we exhale when the current administration leaves? when the new job starts? when the bills are paid and there is something left over? When the kids are grown? When the vaccine is verified and safe and available?

When you finally get the hang of meditation? when the medication kicks in? When pot is legal? When we can go on vacation?

what will it take for us to exhale, aside from the technician saying “ok, exhale”

still an open wound

Watching news pieces on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 brings tears to my eyes. As the tears roll down my cheeks I think about when I cried in the days that followed. I felt I couldn’t cry on that day in front of my daughter who was so afraid while watching footage of the planes hitting repeated as if on a loop and how she turned to ask if more planes coming. I was too stunned in the moments after the planes crashed to have much of a reaction except to know my daughter was safe at school in midtown as I was too, having not gone to work that day because of the nightmare I had hours before that came to life for thousands.

It wasn’t until 3 days later as it was realized that at best it would be bodies recovered on the pile as it was started to be known. A call went up for supplies for the firemen and all the others who were there searching, removing rubble: requests for needed gloves, water, socks, workboots. I bought a couple of six packs of heavy socks and brought them to the collection point in the Chelsea Piers.

As I walked the few blocks there to drop off the socks I found a moment to release the fear, the tears, the sorrow, the loss, the shock, the pain of what we had all just witnessed. Reacting to so many lives shattered, the photos hanging from lamp poles..have you seen… The people outside St Vincent’s hospital waiting waiting and the slow realization. That too many of their loved ones would never be found.

That over 30 States have no curriculum that addresses 9-11 and its subsequent impact on this country and the world is shameful. The point, however, is raised that it may have something to do with the fact that the people who witnessed it are still reeling from its effects and in many ways don’t want to revisit it as they haven’t yet recovered from it. I can understand that as I have yet to be able to bring myself to go to the site or the museum as there still is a part of me that is still an open wound.

You’re the best

I spent some time with my daughter yesterday; she stopped by, one of her very infrequent trips, not because she doesn’t care, but rather the pandemic has been a world disruptor. She stopped by to get hangers, some clothes – meant I had to actually make some order in the bedroom that I have been using as a closet and dumping ground for just about everything.  Why I have kept on sleeping on the couch when there is a perfectly little used bed along after the need for me to sleep on the couch has passed. When she grew out of the crib and onto the bed, I slept on the couch. For the years the entertaining Irishman was around, I slept on the couch. For the 4 years she was in college, I slept on the couch. When she moved to Baltimore, I slept on the couch.  When she moved back to NYC, I slept on the couch. Now she lives on her own, with her first love, now boyfriend, and I still sleep on the couch.  And in thinking about it, when my former husband lived here after my daughter was born, all too often I slept on the couch, too many times waiting for him to come home. Other times it was a result of the middle of the night feeding, she, nestled in my arms, would fall back to sleep and within minutes so would I.

So off she went, home, toting bags of things she decided to bring to her own abode. Included were a few things that I had purchased for Christmas presents for her partner, and somehow didn’t give them when she and I had our very late Christmas earlier this year. When she texted me later once the presents were opened, she told me that one was especially appreciated.  And then added “he said ‘your mom is the best”. 

Those few words brought tears to my eyes.  And keep rattling around in my mind. Why do they touch me so.  Because I have done good? Because a third party validates my hope that I am better than my mom? Because no one ever said that to me about mine? Because I care? Think of others. and need signs of being loved?

and I need to sleep in my bed tonight. To treat myself as well as I treat others.

for paul, long dead

the stone

The stone I carry in my psyche’s pocket
Weighs me more than I need to be
Yet I have fought to keep it
Painful and as cumbersome as it is
There is an odd disconcerting
comfort
of knowing it is there
It’s smooth, worn by worry and pain
and grates, rubs raw the rough places in my soul.

It is my mother’s stone. The hardness and anger
She felt
At me
At herself.
At the world.
At her dead husband
At the hand she’d been dealt.

I have kept it hidden yet at hand
I have used it to keep me in touch with her discomfort
Her pain
Her loss
Her misery

Like the mother and daughter ensembles she would create
For holidays
To show off her sewing skills
To have a connection with me
See, how we look alike.
See, she is like me.

But we didn’t
We weren’t
We aren’t.

It is time to empty my pocket.

two women

Two women met as neighbors late in 1947- one my mother, the other had no children of her own. Before long, Nellie chose Audrey to be my godmother. I will never know why, maybe she knew Audrey could be the warm, loving maternal support I wanted, needed. I, as did many kids in the neighborhood, always felt welcomed in Audrey and Sonny’s house. I could play with Butch the gentle and beautiful German shepherd dog, help Audrey bake cakes for neighbors’ celebrations. It was calm and loving there.

Within a few years, we were forced to move away, the county having decided the service road for the new Wantagh expressway would go through our living room claimed the house as eminent domain (although I have firmly believed it was because my father was very vocal rallying against the local politicians, but that is another story). A handful of years later my dad died. After that, I hardly saw Audrey & Sonny anymore (not until I was out on my own) – they lived one too many towns away, too many highways away. We had no car. One summer day maybe in 1962 I pedaled back to my old house and parked my bike across the street. I wanted so to go see Audrey, but was afraid she would tell my mother (I wouldn’t presume that she would keep the secret-although in hindsight she might have) that I rode my bike over the large highways on my own, without permission and I did not want more of that punishment. All I wanted was to be in the company of a mother figure who I was certain loved me.

Nellie died in 1977, Audrey died in 2009. On the same day, this day, July 6th.

Here on the left is my brother, the young widow and myself having Christmas celebration at Audrey & Sonny’s house in 1960. And Audrey during the same visit.

I said in an earlier post I have very few photos of my mother smiling. This may be the only one. Maybe it was something about being at Audrey’s that made her smile.

It always made me smile.

what did happen?

Saturday morning, the first since my grown daughter relocated to Cambridge to start her first real job. Making money I was making in 2009 (and not since) when the world went upside down and millions lost everything. A Saturday morning when I could do anything, no restraints, well except for the lack of funds and the pressure of mounting bills and overdue payments. At a time when so much attention is being given to events of 50 years ago and the subsequent years in my life and the lives of a whole generation, I find myself saying :that was then, this is now. How do I move on with my life, when the world wants to recapture times long past?

A male, about whom I was crazy 50 years ago reaches out on social media. Oddly, I have thought and searched for him off and on for some time. Curiosity? Wondering what happened? Done because I am single and someplace in my psyche I have an active fantasy? Have I been trying to recapture the past as well? Other males , well several, have done the same, most of which I slept with – almost always in an attempt to have them love me, see me and like me for exactly who I was, whoever that was. What purpose did it serve for a man with whom I had sex, likely only once or a small handful of times…when my breasts were indeed just a small handful….to tell me how wonderful I was, how much he liked me. If I was so wonderful, if he liked me so much, why did he go on to another woman? Did I give out the message that I really didn’t want to be in a relationship although I really did?

It is that time in the world for a whole segment of the population, and some much younger who wonder what it was like back then; it is the time of Woodstock. I was there, I worked there, I can remember some of it. There is a hunger to relive it, revel in it like we wore the mud and the rain. I admit I have indulged in this reveling as well. Hell, I am in a movie about the making of it. Me. In between the business heads, money men, producers, there’s me recalling a moment at Woodstock in the performers’ pavilion. To be honest, as I look back I wonder: did I actually see what I said I saw? Is this another trick of aging, doubting my recall? I SO gotta pull down the journals from 50 years ago and find out what happened.

wafts of lillies of the valley

I take a shower this morning with the fresh bar of soap I had in the small old wooden cabinet that hangs in my one person sized bathroom.  I don’t recall who  or where  this soap was acquired, but as I slip it from its plain wrapper, my nostrils are filled with the scent of lillies of the Valley. I reach a wet hand to read the small print on the cellophane covering and see it was made in France and it is Muguet, the fragrance most associated in my mind with my godmother, Audreyanne.  I smile as it suds on my hands as I recall that today would be my 28^th wedding anniversary, if I had remained married, and for that day she was my mother.

She had long been the mother of my heart.  When I was very young and lived next door to her, I used to soothe myself by thinking that the stork must have sneezed and just dropped me one house too soon.  Then we moved, forced by Nassau County under eminent domain, to a town several miles away.  It felt like it was thousands of miles away from the source of my comfort, the place where I should be.  Several months after I finally got a bicycle of my own, I pedaled over the highways, traveling along by memory to her house on North Wantagh Avenue.  As the pink house with blue trim came into view, I became afraid that if I rang the bell, she or Sonny her husband might tell my mother I visited them and then I would be subjected to another burst of her anger for riding so far and over ‘dangerous’ roads without her permission (which never would have been given), so I stood on the grassy spit of land across the road and longingly looked at the house.  And then, afraid I would be seen, pedaled back to Garnet Lane.

Decades after my mother’s death and knowing she was confidently out of earshot, in the months during which I was making preparations for my wedding, I finally had the courage to tell Audrey all of this.  She smiled and laughed and hugged me.  I then asked her if she would be the role that in my heart she always was, the mother of the bride.  We wiped tears from our eyes and she agreed.

You can have your anger back now.

In a recent therapy session, I was reminded that it is my anger that keeps me connected to my dead mother and the unworthiness she leveled at me.  I heard it, and realized that I have heard it before – actually a few times. And as it happens when one hears the truth, I experienced a ringing in my soul, a reverberation of right. And the recognition, once again, that her anger has resided in me way too long.

That thought was echoed to me while listening to Nadia Boz-Weber’s short video postings – one in particular on forgiveness. She proposes that being angry or harboring resentment towards one that did you evil may actually tie you further to that person, and in doing so, some of that becomes you. Not unlike Harry Potter being a horcrux.  That thought, on top of the realization that the fear I have long held that I would become like my mother has, in part, indeed come to fruition. Her anger has become the root of my anger. Her anger at the universe, her parents, her husband for dying and abandoning her, her anger at me for not being a mini her, all that anger and the expression of that anger aimed at me in myriad welts and cuts has seeped into my heart and now, I am and have been angry at her.  As if to say: anger? I will show you anger.  Except I cannot show her anything. She’d dead. For decades.

So, how do I spit it up, remove it from deep within? It was suggested to me that actually, she did express her love for me by teaching me how to take care of myself, do for myself, be able to wash the dishes, go shopping, change a light bulb, fix a running toilet, iron, cook, sew, take pride in my work, be responsible. My first reaction was that is not an expression of love but functions of an adult.  Then of course, I can think about how little of those my own adult child can do, and yet there is no question that she is loved and knows it.  But in thinking about it more, sitting with it, I can see how it was Nellie’s desire for me to be able to take care of myself, the unspoken message is no one will do this for you, loved ones die, people will leave, so you must know how to do it.

Still, I am not convinced it’s love.  And not the love I wanted it to be, that in a sense I still want it to be. So how do I release the anger? Acknowledge the gifts she gave me and be satisfied with them? How do I give up the angry Nellie for some other unknown Nellie.  Well, maybe not completely unknown, but one that existed long long ago. She was, at one point, or so I was told when young (that is, both she and I young), fun and funny. The family story (now just left to my own memory) has her dancing down a boardwalk at Coney Island while 7 months pregnant with my brother – men, soldiers, young girls conga-lined out behind her. She was smart – smart enough to skip two different grades in elementary and junior high school so she graduated the same year as her older sister did (I am sure Anne (the sister) was ever so annoyed by that!). She was very athletic, nicknamed Babe for Babe Didrikson the gold medal Olympian track and field star who also excelled in golf, basketball, and baseball, the epitome of grace and athleticism of my mother’s age.  Even bigger than Serena of this age.

But all that is long before me. So where did that confident woman go? Where was that woman for me? Was all that beat out of her, in particular, after my father died? Did the need to do everything herself wear out the funny smart girl?  For many years I thought I had understood, empathized, and compartmentalized my mother. I could rationalize her actions based on her experiences in her life. In the last ten or so years, however, the experiences of my life took center stage and I could no longer say “yes, I understand why she hit me, why she was so angry, why she was so hard and ungiving”.  I found my anger. No, actually, I finally acknowledged how angry I was. And now I need to find some happy medium place; to put my anger to bed, to release it, release me, release her. Perhaps that is why Nadia Bolz-Weber’s video on forgiveness spoke loud to me. In it, she puts forth the notion that perhaps forgiveness is a badass move, saying what you did was so bad that I will no longer be associated with it.

In a Lenten discussion group earlier this year we spoke of forgiveness, penitence, and confession. Some spoke of the 9th step in recovery groups, the make amends step.  After you have acknowledged and listed all those by your actions you hurt, you seek them out to apologize to them, to seek forgiveness.  I have been on the receiving end of that call – T, the person with whom I lived in the early 70s, the drug dealer, the alcoholic. To be honest, I really can’t remember what I saw in him, was it entirely an act of rebellion on my part, or maybe, and more like it, I got trapped in the relationship due to a moment of not thinking, replying in kind to his “I love you”. So to get a call, 30 years later saying I am sorry that I treated you so poorly was staggering.  In part because that call meant our relationship and me stayed with that person, whereas I have little recall or place little importance on that relationship. Should I have told him that while he was putting his cards, so to speak, on the table and admitting fault? No. It was not about me, that act was all about him and his need to unload his stack of misdeeds.

So in the midst of the conversation about how we forgive, can we forgive, what do we forgive, came the co-joining of forgiving and not forgetting. An oft-used phrase, to, in a sense, validate hanging on to that remnant of pain. If one truly forgives another of the pain caused, then don’t you have to let go of that hurt within you? Or do you keep that pain, like a bulldog and its bone in the corner of the kitchen ready to be gnawed on for comfort or to confirm misery?

I get home, get on social media, and answer the posted question of what movie scared you the most…my first answer immediately – pinnochio….to my child mind, I see there indeed is a place where the bad kids go….and they get turned into donkeys.  What actually I am remembering is the threat my mother made regularly: to send me away, to send me to the place where bad kids go. How scary it was for that child to feel that at any moment, she would be sent away. I never had a sense this was just an attempt for me to do exactly what she wanted me to do when she wanted me to do it, but rather it was an option she could act on in the heat of her displeasure.

Which wells within me the conflict I struggle with – how do I forgive my mother? For years I could say I understand why she was the way she was, but scratch under that, and I still believed, and regretfully still, in a dark corner of my psyche what she spewed at me, still thought I was not, still think I am not worthy of love, that I am inherently a bad person – because only a bad person would not be loved by their own mother. That at a time when I needed a caring role model and had none in my mother’s image, all that understanding flew out the window and I ached and raged within from not being loved by her.  And how recently while having brunch with my oldest friend she asked me “do you think your mother loved you”, I was struck speechless.  I could argue in her defense on why she was why she was, but in my heart, I felt the answer was no, not really, not how I wanted to be loved, how any child should be loved.

Any wonder why this morning, like many other mornings, I wake with a heavy heart and paranoia that my heart is failing as to mimic my mother’s demise. It certainly would be the ultimate connection of failed hearts.

But in the second light of day, I re-read the “because only a bad person…” it strikes me that it fails to keep in mind that my mother was wrong about so many things, so damaged by things and events long before I happened along.  In some ways I wish I knew what they were, it would help me further understand her mindset, her own emotional damage. And then there is the part of me that doesn’t give a fig, that I don’t want to understand one more drop of her stuff so my stuff becomes unimportant.

So, if everything about her dealing with me was wrong, why isn’t “I am not worthy, not loveable” wrong. That the concept of how could a mother not love a child unless it was a bad child still assumes my having a hand it in somehow.

I didn’t.  I was born to a woman who probably shouldn’t have had a second child.

So, the question remains:  how do you forgive? How do you let go? Breathe it out, releasing my anger at her, and breathe in the love from the universe so that the child within finally gets that she is loved?

Exhale

Inhale

Repeat

Or did I have it right initially when I could understand why she was the way she was? Yogi Bhajan says “if you are willing to look at another person’s behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time, cease to react at all.”

I sense this is the start of that period of time. Appropriate as her birthday is two days away, and how I would love to give her spirit the gift of letting go; to say, I set you free of the anger and pain. I remind myself this is not a one and done thing, as much as I want it to be; I want it to be here, I spit it out, it’s yours again, but it is about years of harboring resentment and ache, self-loathing and fear, longing and doubt and that is not undone in a moment’s exhaled breath.

More importantly, I take the breath to set myself free.

what if?

What would any of us be if left to our own devices? That is, if not told no, you are too short, not smart enough, not pretty enough, not talented enough.  If not told, don’t try, that’s stupid, why bother, you’ll fail, why do you want to do that.  If not told, you can’t do that, you will not amount to anything, you are worthless, you are not lovable. Would we be further along in our personal growth? Would we have pursued dreams long shattered by the lack of encouragement? Would dark thoughts recede quicker? Would money be saved in years of therapy unbruising ourselves?

Head up, Wings out.

Four words that I recently found and for reasons of which I am not sure yet, I find them remarkably encouraging now as I round my 70^th year than I likely would have ever before. And there is a touch of sadness I feel as though I have spent the last many decades with head down and only wanting wings instead of knowing they were there all the time.

I think about my issues with food, which seems to be the manifestation of lots of internal stuff…not worthy, why bother… and in a recent book I read that there is a moment in our lives where we get stuck;  when we are struck by the emotional wall of not being loved unconditionally, of not being valued as we are and how in part we remain there. In early years of therapy I struggled to find the anger buried deep at my mother for the hurt she piled on me. Not only the blows and hits, boots thrown, but the insults and mess she draped on my shoulders every time her anger raged or my brother or frustration triggered her anger spells.  For years I could see it all from her side, from her angle, how she struggled with everything on her plate, a plate she never asked for.  But slowly I found my voice, a small 3 year old not understanding how chicken pox on Easter Sunday could possibly be her fault; why was love showered on her sibling was not given to her. How she felt unsafe in her home where she should have been able to feel ultimately safe. How that lack of safety did little to help her trust her wings would be there.

But that was then, this is now.

As I approach 70, can I be fully who I am, whoever that is. Can I finally stop limiting myself? Can I trust my wings? Can I stop listening to the messages, the voices from long long ago? Can I stop repeating them now? Stop believing them now?

Head up, Wings out.

I find myself listening repeatedly to This is Me from the Greatest Showman movie soundtrack.  Although it could easily be claimed by LGBTQs as one of their theme songs, I think it is nothing less than a call of love. A call to believe in yourself. That you are good as you are. That you can do what you see yourself doing.  That we are all battered and bruised and full of scars.  I also found myself the last several mornings listening to small talks by Nadia Bolz-Weber. May be more god oriented than what I thought I was looking for, but at the heart of it is that we are all good as we are.

This is not to say, you don’t have to change, that you are just,  say, like Popeye I yam what I yam –  It is what it is. No. This is not an excuse for bad behavior. But I think it speaks to the place in each one of our battered hearts and souls, a cry out saying: am I really so bad that I am unlovable.  Or maybe it’s just my cry.

Head up, Wings out.