Grieving and Gratitude

While I was out on maternity leave and home with my then-almost-a-month-old daughter, I decided to start listening to the stereo during the day.  This is something my mother always did while I was growing up.  Leaving the stereo on and one light whenever leaving the house, she always returned to a lighted, sound-filled home.  I don't know what her reasons were for this, but I assumed it had something to do with not wanting to come home to a dark, quiet house.  As I sat at home, nursing, changing diapers, sometimes cleaning the house, and sometimes eating lunch, the combination of our grandmother clock's steady tick-tock, and intermittent newborn cries could have induced a turn for the worse in my mental health.  Fighting this decline was critical, and so I started listening to the oldies station.  

I love music in general, and the oldies are no exception.  Much to my surprise, I've noticed the music of my childhood years edging its way onto the local stations, indicating that the tunes of the decadent eighties are now going the way of the dinosaurs.  It was noticing this, combined with decent pattern recognition skills and auditory recall, that led me to realize the local station was rotating a few playlists.  Tiring of being able to predict the next song to play, I decided to really shake things up and listen to NPR instead.

Although there is predictability to NPR, it didn't bother me because I knew I'd be listening to different topics each day.  I started to learn about politics as I changed diapers, and listened to people I've never heard of talk about their new books while I nursed.  

Then Sandy Hook happened.

It was one of those moments when I knew I'd remember where I was when I heard the news.  That day, I was eating lunch at my dining room table and my daughter was on the floor in her jungle animal play gym nearby when the news broke.  It was the first major tragedy to make news since my daughter had been born, and I had no preparation for the impact it had upon me.

I looked at my daughter.  I thought of my workplace friends.  The teachers filling in for me on leave.  My students.  In particular, I thought of an elementary school in which I work.  The principal, the office staff, the students with whom I work in the halls on travel skills.  The dedicated teachers who support them in their educational programming every day.  I thought of the people at Sandy Hook, desperately waiting for children, spouses, and friends to leave the school building.  I looked at my daughter again and finally understood why some people live in desperate, controlling fear, and cloak their children in it.

Oh, how I cried.

The photos started to go up online.  You know the ones I'm talking about.  Young children and the educators who lost their lives.  The person who carried the gun, and the person who brought him into the world.  I have never cried so much over the deaths of people I did not know.

I began this post intending to write something about safety versus independence, and how being able to live fully means being willing to accept a certain amount of risk, to deliberately exchange our attempts at keeping ourselves safe for the richness and joy that can be ours when we stretch beyond our habitual ways of behaving.  All of that is true.  Sandy Hook is a painful reminder that we cannot be certain that this moment won't be the last one, and of how limited our control is over what happens to us.  

We do have control, though, over the spirit in which we approach life.  After all, we only have our lives, our loved ones, our memories and values and dreams, for so long.

Let us be grateful for what we have while we are fortunate enough to still have it, and let us express that gratitude by living as fully as we can.
 

 

The Sensitive Man

It's Halloween, and since I'm feeling unusually enormous, what with being 38 weeks pregnant and all (not to mention the fact that it's flipping cold outside), my dear spouse happens to be outside handing out the treats this year.  I saw him through our front door, and even from the back, he looked slightly forlorn, as if he had been left out of the clubhouse.

I waddled my way down the stairs and out to the cold, concrete slab that passes as a front porch to sit with him for a few moments.

"Sometimes I feel like the local deviant," he told me.

I frowned.  "Yeah, I know," I said.  "I picked up a bit of a vibe that you might be feeling that way.  What's up?"

"Well, you know.  The being-a-man thing.  And having a ponytail."

It's true.  He's a man, and he has a ponytail.  His hair is much longer than mine; thick, wavy blond hair of which I am perpetually envious.  I have many fortunes in life, but great hair is not one of them, which may go some way to explaining why I am consistently attracted to people with gorgeous hair.  But I digress.

"You know what, though?" I said to him, hoping I was being reassuring, "You're a kind, sensitive man.  That has to count for something, right?"

His turn to frown.  "I think that's part of the problem."

I wondered if he was right.

The more I come to terms with the ways in which women have been wounded by societal stereotypes, oppression, and control, the more I see the ways in which the way the world happens hurts men, as well.  The more I deal with my own issues and grow in compassion around the ways in which I'm expected to demonstrate my worth and value in the world as a woman, the more I can see the issues that men face, and the more I feel compassion for them.

My spouse is a tall, distinctly masculine-looking man, yet has some traits that are not so traditional.  He is our regular household cook.  He loves to bake, and has often mentioned opening his own bakery one day.  He increasingly takes care of many of our household tasks.  Besides his long, blond ponytail, he is soft-spoken, gentle, kind, and much more patient with young children than I am.  He shares his toys with our friends' children when they come to visit and has fascinated little ones over and over with his collection of old spinning tops, light-up airplanes, and stacking block towers.  I feel so fortunate that he will be co-parenting our child with me.  I wish that his gifts in these areas could be more broadly shared, but I find that they often are not, in part based in a fearful bias around adult men interacting with children that aren't theirs.  Time and again, this fear seems to permeate our society's collective subconscious.

I don't know what to do to help change this.  It doesn't make sense to me that someone who demonstrates nurturing qualities is suspect of ill intentions, simply because of belonging to a particular sex or having a particular gender identity.  Yet I know that I have made similar assumptions about others.  An aspect of humanity is that we all tend to make snap assumptions about us based upon what groups people belong to (or appear to belong to).  Sometimes I think the best and most meaningful way to challenge these assumptions is in being in the world just as we are, even if it's challenging or lonely.

All I can think to say to him is that maybe he can set the tone of any interactions he has at our front door, and that maybe they'll all take their cue from him.  And, I think to myself, maybe I can look at my own behavior and not assume ill intent from people based on their sex or gender.

Now he is at the front door, handing out candy and joking with teenagers, who are walking away and wishing him a Merry Christmas instead of Happy Halloween.  His face seems a little lighter as he comes up the stairs once again from our front door, and it seems that maybe he is having a good time after all. 

Chicken Little Syndrome

When I was a kid, I went through a period of time where "Chicken Little" was my favorite story. I remember sitting in my grandmother's basement, switching back and forth between that and the children's version of the story of David and Goliath. Even though there were dazzling bright red letters on light blue background that nearly induced nystagmus on the David and Goliath book, I eventually favored Chicken Little, mostly because it was so silly! I mean, this tiny bird ran around all the time screaming about the sky falling when it wasn't! What a goofball!

Well.

Some twenty-odd years later, in the wake of what could have been a horribly catastrophic work situation, I find myself shaking my head, confused and puzzled by the innocuous, low-key outcome that actually took place and feeling a lot like Chicken Little.

All I know is that, time and again throughout my adult life, I've been in positions where I've found myself worried and fearful of what may come next. Worried that I don't have the skills or internal resources to deal with it. Worried that something bad is going to happen because I opened my mouth and tried on being assertive, rather than being passive or aggressive, or passive-aggressive. Worried that this time, this time it's really going to turn out just as badly as the worst case scenario I'm playing in my head says it will. Time and again, I have found that the worst case scenario virtually never happens.

How did I come to expect the worst out of things? I don't suppose the answer to that is really important. What is important to me, though, is all of the time I've wasted on worrying about the things that I cannot control. No matter what happens, no matter what I think I want to have in my life, there will always be factors that are outside of my control. It isn't like my worrying makes it easier or changes how other people think or respond. To think so is just believing in irrelevant hocus-pocus.

Basically, I can control how I choose to think about my life and what I choose to do about it. As far as I can tell, that's about it. When I think of it that way, there is so much I can control, but at the same time, so little.

Whenever I hear Chicken Little screaming and scrambling about inside of my head, perhaps I can find a way not to get caught up in it, not to follow him around and start screaming myself, but stop for a minute, look up at the sky, and see if it's truly falling. Chances are, it will still be up there.

The Ocean!

--> Singing to an ocean, I can hear the ocean's roar.Play for free, play for me and play a whole lot more.Singing about the good things and the sun that lights the day.
I used to sing on the mountains, has the ocean lost its way.

--Led Zeppelin

The Spouse and I headed down to Misquamicut for our annual day-at-the-beach last Sunday. It's a pity we don't get to the ocean more often, living as close to the coast as we do. After driving and being pleasantly surprised at the lack of traffic, we got within 2 miles of the coast and were rudely awakened by the reality of end-of-summer beach traffic. Since The Spouse  loathes waiting in a non-moving vehicle and I loathe waiting in a non-moving vehicle with people who loathe waiting in non-moving vehicles, we decided for the sake of continued marital bliss that he should walk to the beach while I sought parking.

Once my fine luxury automobile (look, after having driven a 1992 Buick Century for most of my adult life, a Honda Civic is a luxury vehicle) was safely docked in some parking spot a zillion miles away from the bathhouse, I proceeded to track down His Spouseliness. He awaited my arrival in all of his sun-weary excitement at a picnic table. We headed down to what was supposed to be the beach but, due to high tide, a hot day, and it being the last beach-able weekend before the start of the school year, we were instead met with a gigantic people carpet.

Eventually we found a patch of sand maybe about 8x8 feet and planted our stuff. We didn’t fret too much about the insane numbers of people because, well, we were at the BEACH, baby! Yeah! There was pasty-bodied fist-pumping, followed by the two of us trotting eagerly (not running – way too crowded) to the water.

I got to the water and was met with…fear? I sighed and, yes, it’s true, I rolled my eyes with impatience at my own reluctance to ride the waves. Was this particularly compassionate? No, of course not. But I had come to have fun, not to watch The Spouse dive under 300-foot high surf and squint into the sun without my eyeglasses (basically rendering me temporarily blind) until I spotted him again. Since his hair these days is reminiscent of Fabio, it was easier than I would have expected. Men with long blond hair are sorely lacking in New England, and the particular dude with whom I keep company was gleefully frolicking in the surf as I dealt briefly with my inner worrywart.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely LOVE the ocean. I could body surf for the rest of my life if it weren’t for my day job and the fact that lousy surf happens. We had come on a perfect kind of day. Well, I mean, aside from the riptides, the intense undertow, and the waves, which seemed a lot bigger and more intimidating than I remembered them being. The lifeguard kept blowing his whistle. The kayakers kept yelling at people to move back toward shore. I wondered if there were going to be lots of jellyfish. I thought about several bad experiences I’ve had, and all of them have involved the following two things:

1. Being in a body of water.

2. Panic.

Even with these thoughts, it didn’t take me long to get into the water, and it’s because I kept on thinking of all of those metaphors about life that have to do with waves. You know, things like, “Life is like being in an ocean. You just have to let the waves take you where they’re going to take you.” Or whatever. I figured it would be an entertaining way to pass the time to see if I could just let the waves take me wherever they were going to take me.

The other thing that helped was dropping the judgment and totally letting myself be afraid. Once that happened, I had the freedom and space inside of me to realize that I was creating worry and fear. I could feel myself being afraid, just for the sake of being afraid. It was abundantly clear that my mind was just trying to come up with a reason to be afraid. I remembered that, even though I’ve had bad experiences in the water in the past, I can swim now, and I’m even a fairly strong swimmer. I have more confidence in my swimming than I have ever had in my life. I’ve made many beach trips in my day, rode many waves, and lived to tell the tale. I knew that this was just an old habit of fearing everything worth doing that was trying to take the reins, wanting to keep me protected from experiencing new bad experiences in the water.

I feel pretty ridiculous talking about my brief hesitation before getting in the ocean. Yet I realize that it’s the brief moments of hesitation where I have a choice to either act out of my fear and old habits or to continue on with what it is that I originally wanted to do. I noticed that I had a total ball on the waves once I recognized that there was fear, and then was free to make a choice regarding what to do about it. Did I want it to overtake me, or did I want to ride the waves anyway? When I made the choice to go in, the fear quickly transformed itself into the pure bliss and excitement of flying toward shore on the top of a wave while slamming your thighs together so that the bottom of your bathing suit doesn’t disappear.

Of course, the waves had to test me a little bit. At one point, one of them totally bitch-slapped me on the back. That kind of hurt. I slapped it back, and then we were on okay terms. Another one tried to separate my lower body from my upper body, but I just did my Superman pose and I was fine.

So. Waves. Get in the ocean and ride them! And if they’re too big, just dive underneath them. If only all of life were so simple.