Monday, March 31, 2008

Sometimes You Think Time Waits

Kiddo and I spent Saturday afternoon helping my parents clean out an old storage area that they'd rented after my grandmother came to live with them in 1992 or so. The stuff in there was coated with an inch of dirt and grime and it was dirty business to get all we wanted to keep sorted out and the remnants thrown away.

My grandmother died in 2002 at the age of 101. I'd been tasked by my parents (who lived in another city) to stop by and look in on her daily after my grandfather's death in 1989. I was 22 then and the last thing in the world I'd wanted to do was take care of a 90 year old lady I had absolutely nothing in common with. I figured (in the selfish way of youth) that I'd get around that by stopping by for breakfast. That way I could claim to have done my duty but be able to beg off spending too much time there -- after all, I was busy! I had a life!

So I went for those reluctant breakfasts. We didn't have much to speak about in the beginning so as she was making me fried eggs and coffee and oatmeal, I cast about for topics and happened to see an old suitcase full of pictures in the closet. She pulled it out and laid out those pictures and told me stories about the people in them. Those breakfasts -- and her storytelling -- engendered in me a love for genealogy and stirred up my love of history and nostalgia into a fomenting soup.

And you know, it wasn't too long before breakfast with my grandmother was no longer that reluctant duty. There were more pictures and more people each time I went. There were stories of real lives and loves and deaths, of first baseball games she saw and her first sighting of an airplanes, her first World Fair trip and her Depression-era hardships, and of her trip in a Model T halfway across the country in the mid 1920s. The first time she heard a radio, the first time she saw a TV.

But there was more to it than that. Much more. I was finally able to grow up enough to look past her wrinkled face and scarred nose (from a bout with skin cancer in the 50s) and see within, to the immortal 25-yr old that lived in her head. She always said that was about how old she felt. She had a spirit and a wisdom and a kindness that up until then I'd never been able to see.

I look back now and I still feel tears well in my eyes. I am so very thankful my parents forced that duty upon me. If they hadn't my grandmother would have died and I would never have known what an amazing woman she was, nor would I have had the pleasure of her presence in my life. I am equally lucky that she lived as long as she did and I had her until 2002. She was the repository for a lot of the old keepsakes in my family. Most of those she gave to me before her death.

In the storage shed I found a monkey my grandmother made me when I was born. This little handmade monkey, all brown and white and red of lip and butt, freaked my kiddo out something fierce. She wanted me to cover it up or hide it when she went to bed because it was staring at her. Hah!

We also found more old letters and pictures, including an old tintype of my 4th great grandfather that's in such good shape it seems he's about to jump clean out of the image; it's that crystal clear. Finds like this stir my soul.

Funny thing is, up until now my kiddo has always made disparaging remarks about "Mom's Dead People." When she was a toddler I took her to cemeteries I needed to do research at, and I have pictures of her leaping off of tombstones. She's never been the slightest bit interested. That's why her words surprised me so much when she was looking at all the old letters heaped in a pile around her.

"Mom," she asked, holding up a letter written in 1880, "What will people a hundred years from now know about us? We don't write these anymore. Our emails just....disappear. How will they know who we are?"

I just looked at her with a bit of amazement. I can't honestly say I'd thought about that all that much. So I told her so.

She sighed. "It's a shame. All we'll ever be is statistics, someone will think that 85% of us believed a certain way. And it's not true."

She's right. Are we of the Information Age doomed to be remembered as nothing more than a representation of statistical information culled from data sets? Our blogs are here but then they're gone. We text and delete without concern. We IM and close the session and walk away. We can't pass all those down, can we? We don't write letters on real paper, with real pens, to real people anymore, do we? We've seen so many benefits to our lightning fast communications, but maybe the downside is that we will lose the ability to give the sort of gift to our descendants that my grandmother gave me when she opened up the letters and the pictures and the tangible items of my own past. We are all individuals after all. We're not numbers on a survey.


((Song: "Two Different Roads" by Michael Nesmith. Lyrics here:
http://www.morethanweimagine.com/andhits/two_different_roads.html))

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Happy Birthday To You!

On this, the eve of kiddo's birth, I awoke remembering what I had done the day before she was born.

The ex and I had traveled to a city a couple hours' drive from where we lived at the time. The ex was traveling there to look for work -- he was about to graduate college and he was desperate to find a good living for his about-to-grow family.

Now I wasn't supposed to travel because my doctor had pretty much put me on bed rest due to my toxemia but I felt fine that day. I was going stir crazy, being as heavily pregnant as one could be given my small stature. Besides, I wasn't really worried because I planned to just ride in the car and get out only for lunch and bathroom breaks.

So we went. I had a great time. I didn't feel bad at all, did exactly what I'd planned to do (sit except for the above-mentioned exceptions) and we made it back home in time for the doctor's appointment I had in the evening. I walked in, the doctor took one look at me, and said, "You need to go home and pack your things. You're going in the hospital tonight, and we're having that baby tomorrow."

Apparently the way I felt and the way I looked weren't the same.

I was secretly glad. At that point, I didn't care (as Murphy Brown famously said) if it took a melonballer, I just wanted it OUT! So the ex and I looked at each other all nervous-like, drove home, and I packed for the hospital. I was ready.

I don't remember anything else until the next morning. They woke me up at 6 am and got me prepped and ready to go. They had to induce, which in retrospect was something I wish I'd been able to avoid. I know now that my body wasn't ready to give birth and if I'd waited a few more weeks maybe I'd have done better. She was actually due sometime around the second week of April.

Again, I don't remember much about the intervening hours. I know my parents were there and my mother-in-law, chainsmoking in the outside patio until I was sure both had voluntarily given up a couple of years of their lives. My father, especially, since he'd lost his sister in childbirth when he was 15 years old. I'm quite sure that the wait was horrifying to him; now that I am a parent I understand that in a way I wasn't able to then.

I had friends come in, the parents, the in laws.....for about 12 hours. I was doing pretty good, not too much pain until about 8 pm. I asked for drugs, got an epidural, and felt immensely better. However, the labor wasn't progressing and I never did dilate past a 4. Eventually her heartbeat began to fluctuate badly and it was then that things moved along at an incredible pace. They prepped me for surgery at 11:30 pm and she was born at 11:35 pm.

My life's never been the same. I could wax all poetic about the only love in my life that is completely unconditional, etc., etc., but I'll spare everyone. All parents feel it...at least I hope so. I can't imagine not bonding in that way with your children, for one because it makes sense in an evolutionary species-propagating sort of way, but because it is just such a profound experience.

I was damaged permanently in the birth. Part of the way I am now is because of what happened that day. You know what? Give me the choice again -- no child, or be different -- and I'd choose her every time.

That's love.

Happy birthday, baby.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Trust I Seek and I Find In You

School has been pretty intense and new and it's taken a lot of my time and will for the next 13 weeks. I'm finding that I'm really enjoying it so far, though -- the research aspect of the legal profession is very interesting -- and my memory's already improved a lot! I'm thrilled about this since I'd noticed that my memory had tanked over the last couple of years. I believe that has a lot to do with the fact that my current job has allowed me to "park my brain" and a lot of it can be done on auto-pilot. I look forward to finding a position where I'm constantly being mentally challenged. I hope that a job like that, along with a class here and there for the rest of my life, will keep my mind from atrophying!

I speak a lot about friends in this blog. There are very few real constants in my life but the friends that I have are one of them. I tend to be a very nostalgic person. I may go back and forth on my feelings about my friends -- get tired of being with them during my pushing away phases -- but their presence is as necessary as air or water to me. It's funny how those tides ebb and flow. At some times one or another of my friends are more important to me. Sometimes I need a certain person's sort of personality to help me through things. Sometimes I need a straight shooter and sometimes I need someone who'll just patiently sit and let me lay my troubles down at their feet. Sometimes I need someone who'll just let me bitch, and sometimes I need someone to slap some sense into me. I use up so much of my good friend karma that I worry if there's a finite amount and I'm eventually going to get to the bottom of the karmic barrel. That's why it pleases me so much to give back to my friends that are in need. I usually feel so selfish and needy and demanding, and the times that I can support a friend who needs a shoulder makes me feel like I'm righting the balance.

I was asked a question recently; why do people feel a need to share secrets? What drives people towards revelation?

I think (as in everything) there are a number of reasons, all of equal value and weight.

Every one of us has experienced carrying a secret thought or belief or aspect of our personality around inside our heads. Perhaps it is a deed, or the thought of a deed, or merely a realization that your own thoughts are incongruous or contradictory to what your abstraction of "right" is. Perhaps it is something caught up in phrases that you say to yourself, the what you wants and what you needs arguing with the what you shoulds and what you ought's. The practice of regression and denial. All of us are so busy trying to be that we forget about being.

I'm talking about our Shadow Self. Carl Jung defined it as "that which we think we are not" and personally, I think it's one of the most potent aspects of the human psyche. I've thought about that wolf lurking at the fringes of my own psyche for many years now but have only recently begun to tempt it forward. I’m growing more and more certain that tempting it was the best thing for me to do. Believe it or not, I haven’t felt so much like myself in years.

But back to sharing confidences. It’s not that surprising, really. If you carry something around long enough you have trouble seeing it. You go over and over and over it to yourself and try to approach it from every angle but in the end you know you're only able to look at it from one perspective; your own. It loses its sense of otherness to you and begins to be something you’re unable to distinguish from what was before. There is only so much introspection one can conduct before the sound of your own inner voice begins to drone in your ears.

Besides, sharing burdens alone -- secret thoughts, confusing feelings, loves and hates and inadequacies -- is frightening. It makes you feel totally alone in your own head. They say that troubling feelings and thoughts are amorphous, without weight or being, but anyone who’s ever carried one around knows what a lie that is. They are heavy. You feel their presence inside you like something pushing up against the cage of your skin. I know a few people who clutch those sorts of feelings to themselves and feel like it gives them a unique sense of control and power but for the most part the opposite is true. There’s only so long one of those things can live inside you before you have to break its hold, even momentarily. You give it more and more power over you the longer you let it remain bottled up.

That’s not to say that one needs to go willy-nilly talking about everything inside their skull. By no means. It does mean that one should take the internal time to analyze and learn from the things that rise from within before allowing them a bit of breathing space. It does mean that when you choose to let it out, the choice you make – meaning who you show it to – says more about how you feel about someone than pretty much anything else I can think of. It is the ultimate form of love and trust.

To find that someone has placed ultimate trust in me -- and by doing so, express so very plainly how significant I am to them -- means more to me than I can express. It is an intimacy that rivals sex and often bests it. It is longer lasting, more constant and unwavering, and exists unfettered by the complex mixed signals that two physical bodies can send. It simply is.

Each time you are trusted with something it becomes part of who you are. The person that entrusts it to you realizes that it could change the way you view him or her and so when they choose to reveal themselves to you in such a raw unvarnished manner, it is an honor. I take it as such and give it the recognition it deserves. That sort of truth -- the warts and all kind -- is such a rare commodity that when it's given it needs to be appreciated. Yes, learning things changes how you view someone. It might change for the worse but that is not the fault of the benefactor. It is the responsibility of the beneficiary to choose whether it is more important that you maintain your idea of the person you know, or whether you accept the person for what they actually are. It gives you the opportunity to allow someone else’s shadow to step into your light. Push your own friends' shadows out if you want to, but my friend’s shadows can always walk with me. I have plenty of room to spare.


((Song: "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica. Lyrics here:
http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/lyrics2/noth-else-mat.html))

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

R.I.P

.....to E. Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dungeons and Dragons.

I had the honor of shaking his hand and speaking to him briefly at last year's GenCon in Indianapolis. He was in a wheelchair and was obviously not in the greatest of health but he was there, warm and rather regal in bearing. He definitely stood out.

I've played D&D for nearly 26 years now and many of the meaningful memories in my life are attached to the game. I've made lifelong friends through it and lived many an adventure I would not have otherwise been able to do. I still play, and now I have the added pleasure of having my daughter sit at the table with me. I see her enjoying it just like I did when I was her age, caught up in the fantasy and the undeniable sense of accomplishment and camraderie.

It's remarkable to leave a legacy (beyond your children and relatives) that transcends your life on earth. How few of us can claim such a thing? His was a life well lived.

As Rich Burlew of Order of the Stick said, "Wherever he is, I hope he rolls good stats on his next incarnation."

Thank you, Mr. Gygax. Rest well.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

It's official.

As of yesterday afternoon I am no longer a woman carrying a name I wasn't born with. I've returned to the name that I was born with, and I'm determined that I'll die bearing it. Even if I do ever get married again -- and believe me, that's a remote possibility at best because I'd much rather just live in sin! -- I'll never give up my name again. That particular caboose stops here.

But let it be said that I was proud to wear my exh's name when I had it, and it is the name my daughter bears, and it is a good name. It's just not mine any longer. I think I've borrowed it long enough.

For some of the people I know, this will be a strange adjustment. They've never known me as that other woman, the one with the different name. I don't even know if I do. I've had to purposely make it an act of conscious decision, to write or to call myself by the name I was born with. That feels strange! But it will pass.

Well. Nice to meet you all. Again.


((Song: "Sympathy For the Devil" by the Rolling Stones. Lyrics here:
http://www.rollingstones.com/discog/index.php?v=so&a=1&id=106 ))

Monday, March 3, 2008

I'm Lonely, Wanna Die

There's a saying that goes, "We are all essentially alone," or something to that effect. Well.....we are, aren't we?

It's without question one of humanity's greatest fears, surely on par with that of the unknown (which of course also encompasses death and change.) When presented with fear, people use all sorts of methods to combat it, some more effective than others. If some methods are found to work better than others they become enmeshed in our psyches. It's the classic trial and error...one system of beliefs deposing another, and so on, and so on. Some of our most potent and enduring societal structures and belief systems have sprung from these repeated attempts. And as one might expect, the stronger the fear, the more entrenched the solution.

Society does have a collective memory -- a foundation on which each successive step is placed. Without this ability to adapt and flourish in spite of what we don't understand or even care to try to, we would have doomed ourselves long ago. But with it, are we doomed in a different fashion? Have we created so many ways to allay our fears or displace them completely that we've lost the ability to confront or accept them?

Alone, you say? We can't possibly be alone. Death can't be the end! It's not right, it's not fair. Find your perfect someone for you to be the half to that whole. Or wait! You're not alone....believe in God! Or Allah, or if you're not into the male figure, worship The Goddess. Or just pick something up there. Anything will do.

People have done it since the beginning of recorded history. But just because people have done it doesn't mean that what they've created is real or true, objectively speaking. The fact that the solutions that humanity's managed to create so far have become the medicines of choice in no way gives them any special meaning just because they've been so.

But before you think me a religious critic, some people also like to spin this the opposite direction, looking for truth or salvation or some sort of ultimate explanation in science. Science makes as its goal the same as religion, though it approaches it from the opposite end of the spectrum; to organize chaos and make the universe into an understandable and ordered place. But really, aren't these just two facets of the same stone? Ask the mind and it answers in one fashion -- via reason -- and ask the heart and it answers in another -- faith. Each one wants to be the ultimate authority and to disprove or disregard, if not downright negate, the other. It's a great game plan since the need for understanding happens in most people. To alleviate the uncertainty, most just pick a side and go with it. Both forget, however, that between the heart and the mind there is another, vitally important middle -- the place where the fears of the unknown and of being alone lurk. Born of neither mind nor heart and always just beyond either's grasp.

I find it amusing, and very telling, that both sides strive for the same end; to pull the reins in on the power of fear. To tame it. Break it, even, so that it becomes definable and can then be contained or dethroned or even defeated and eliminated.

Call God your God.....or call Science your God. Either way, what you are truly seeking is control of the middle place where those fears lurk. And you know what....that's okay! Fear is healthy and fear is a constant. Only by walking toward it can you make it settle down.

But I was speaking of the fear of being alone. I suffer from it -- friends of mine do too. The urge to find anything resembling a life raft -- a person to define yourself around, or a belief, or a cause -- is stronger than the will that most can manage to muster up to try to fight it. They say that believing in nothing is easy. I say that turning away from that instinct to gather just for the sake of gathering is far from easy. I believe they don't know of what they speak.


((Song: "Yer Blues" by the Beatles. Lyrics here:
http://www.beatleslyricsarchive.com/viewSong.php?songID=139 ))