In the groggy clarity of having woken up to the L-word series being over, the garden planted for 2009, things gotten off my chest to my mom, and facing a brand new week on the first day of the rest of my life, I woke to a blog link from Marc Pagani, whose house we celebrated Obama’s inauguration at. It was a nice way to start again.
I replanted the Kaffir lime tree into the backyard and then planted an herb garden along the side of the house – basil, tarragon, oregano, sage, borage, cilantro, and creole tomatoes. Then I added some foxgloves to the garden in front and planted Love in the Mist and Camomile in back. The day was really outstanding and again it felt good to get my hands in the mud.
Only I wanted to ride my bike, I wanted to work on the piles on my desk, I wanted to start reading my novel, and I wanted to hang out and relax.
To much to do and no time for any of it.
Mom:
Sorry to keep having the same recurrent argument with you and I don’t like fighting or being estranged so I want to put an end to this dance. But I want you to know that I’m just frustrated. The way I see things is you are getting to a period in your life where the next years are about trying to strike a balance between feeling safe (physically, emotionally, financially) and staying healthy and relatively happy. I have my opinions as to how to modify certain areas of your life and you have your opinions, but we diverge too widely on what to do.
The problem is age old with us because I continue to hear from you that you need help and yet when I attempt a solution, you shut me down and I end up feeling frustrated and angry and so I keep my distance and leave you to your own devices, and then everything is hunky dory for a time but pretty soon the cycle starts up all over again. This cycle has been in effect pretty much our entire life. When I moved to California, the distance helped to ameliorate a lot of this but since I’ve been back home, I feel we are steeped in the old ritual that doesn’t serve me or us.
The reason why it is more amplified now is that I have legitimate concerns about your well-being – from your living alone to your health and material soundness, which all in my opinion require attention now to modify them. I love you, which is why I try to nudge you to a path that will ensure you are living well and that when issues come up in the future, we will be prepared to meet any challenges together. I get frustrated when you don’t accept my invitation to sit down and find a solution and yet don’t offer up your own solution to the issues arising now or even provide a plan for issues that will come up in the near future.
But you have your life to live your way and must thrive or not based on your own choices and decisions. I need to back off and let you be. So that is what I’m going to do. I am not going to try to plan for your wellbeing or try to insinuate my help, plans, organization, or whatever onto you. I’d rather us meet and participate in a more neutral relationship.
However, I do have a request and that is I don’t want to be pulled into topics where I don’t feel comfortable just being a bystander. Your economic well-being and your health and your safety are all matters in your control, not mine. What you do about them is the consequence of your choices and I am not going to allow myself to feel responsible about the outcomes of your decisions.
I’m leaving some literature here on Medicaid that I pulled off the web and also an article on depression.
Love, R
Yahoo’s word of the day is so lame most of the time – are they pandering to people with a 20 word vocabulary or what? My favorite words I’ve learned from other word of the day lists are coprophagia, toady, moot (I guarantee you everyone gets this wrong), and many others.
Today, Yahoo’s Word of the Day is durable. Unless they are making a joke of the fact that nothing in life is durable, it’s a word that should be in a fifth grader’s vocabulary.
Michelle was telling us how her teacher is a wordsmith and how even when you take the words with the most weighted meanings and look at their etymology there is usually a neutral definition. Like for instance, evil is when something is done to excess.
I don’t know if it is me but most of the people I know are on antidepressants and even though I don’t believe in them, I’ve been suggesting to my mother that she should get on them too. The problem is that most of the people I know who are depressed are also addicted to pot, alcohol or Vicodin – all depressants! It’s crazy – if they gave up the addiction that they think is helping them through troubled times, they might not be depressed. True true true.
Meanwhile, when I was divorcing S, being toyed with by N, and dealing with an army of men who were hell bent on telling me that I didn’t know shit from shinola about building a house – I found myself many times on the floor of my kitchen in the fetal position. My therapist recommended I take antidepressants but I told her I wanted to feel ALL THE PAIN so I didn’t have one residual bit left in me after it was all said and done. And feel it I did and yes there are vestiges of the pain even now – though duller and less frequent waves pass through me – but each one is a reminder to stay on my path.
I was reading Dr. Weil’s self healing magazine and came across this article (Defeating Depression Naturally June 2008) – it says everything I have learned through trial and error. When I was suffering from panic attacks – the entire establishment of medical professionals felt my only option was drugs – so I took Zoloft for six months. Since I was trying to be a fiction writer and Zoloft made me stare at the blank screen every day and zone out, I got off the drugs myself and found a program that does behavior modification. How this works is they help you find behavioral tools to deal with your problem instead of putting a bandaid on it. It worked, not miraculously, but still surprisingly, it worked well then and still does.
The article by Dr. Weill highlights that more than 20 million Americans suffer depression and antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed drugs in this country, but depression isn’t a disease or a specific biochemical error, “depression comes when our lives are not working.”
Depression allows you to learn about yourself and become stronger. There are many stages, the first is the call or realization that something is wrong, the second is to meet guides on the path who help you develop your own wisdom, and then there is the surrender to change or letting go of what made you stuck. Next you deal with your fears or demons and find meaning, purpose or direction. The dark night of the soul is about moving from despair allow life-giving freedom to emerge.
Wow – brilliant Dr. Weill – I applaud you for writing what flies in the face of current thought – depression is a normal part of life and it is something to go through not rid yourself of – well done!
Finally, a good cup of tea! I spoke with David at New Mexico Tea Company about my caffeine intolerance and he suggested the Puerh. I love this tea and came back from China with many little bird’s nest of Puerh that a friend gave me. Her father had a tea store in Shanghai. Finally, this morning, I steeped a perfect cup and sat down to enjoy it. Wow – what a difference good tea makes – and it’s relatively low caffeine so I didn’t have to do the pre-wash to decaffeinate it myself.
Watching the sky outside my office with big rectangular clouds obscuring the baby blue sky, I’m convinced that like a snake, I’ve recently shed some skin. Some part of me feels like the last two weeks have been torturous in ways I couldn’t get my mind around. And suddenly today, I feel like the answers are much clearer – like, oh yeah, I’m doing that again and right, I haven’t done some of this and I like this, and hell, spring weather also helps provide a little feeling of bloom instead of decay, but all in all I think we die and are reborn sometimes without realizing that that is what is tormenting us for days on end – I kept trying to name it – virus, menopause, economy – in fact, it was me, shedding.
Woke this morning to an outstanding day and went with a friend and our dogs to Cabrini Dog Park in the Quarter. While we sat and caught up on a million things, the dogs ran around like lunatics. They made a friend, Charlie, and soon the three were inseparable.
When I got home I was itching to garden and so I want to Harold’s and lo and behold he had coleus and coreopsis and columbine and I was transported to garden heaven. So I bought a truck load of flowers and herbs and came home and spent my day on my knees planting the front garden.
Joy, joy, joy.
Dear Mom:
This is the letter I’m not going to write you, but it’s the one I want to write. Since I was a little girl I’ve always wanted to take care of you, to make things better for you. This has manifested itself in dreaming of buying you a nice little cottage with a garden to live in, dreams of taking you to wonderful foreign countries to experience the likes of Venice or to once again see Cuba, or sometimes it is to get you a cat to curl up in your lap. Always, foremost on my mind, is that I would like you to be happy.
It’s hard to sit back and watch your mother choose a life of drinking, of solitude, of inertia, of fear, and alienation. I understand you can’t suffer reality so you hide inside a bottle of alcohol and pills and invent a vivid world, one that is often times really scary as you’ve invited crack addicts to live with you, taken home strangers, and countless other less than wise decisions.
So what I’ve decided is that as much as I want to take care of you, to make these last years of your life happy and wonderful, I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to make myself happy. I’m here when the bottom falls out for you, but between now and then, I am going to try to no longer accept being manipulated by the dance of pity.
There, now to break old familiar patterns. That’s my hard work in front of me. Channeling Wonder Woman right now to see me through.