The Best Laid Plans, Acts of God and the Electric Company

Sometimes I wonder if we're supposed to try to plan things.  It seems, on occasion at least, as if the universe is trying to tell me it's folly to believe that I can develop a list of things I intend to accomplish and proceed to tackle them.  

Like tonight.  I arrived home after a "day that was filled with surprises."  (A little ditty which I just learned has been stuck inside my head for several decades courtesy of the Mickey Mouse Club--strangely enough, since the only time I could see that classic show growing up was when I visited my out-of-state Grandma.)  My husband and I had gone out for a Happy Hour supper, and made several stops on the way home.  We were searching for a rear wiper blade for our 1996 Isuzu, only to be told, by the forthright employee of the last auto parts store we visited, that Isuzu is not "third-party-friendly."  Meaning they don't share parts information with the makers of accessories like wiper blades.  So my son will leave town tomorrow morning on his first long-distance road trip sans rear wiper blade. 

We also stopped at the public library so that I could view the website I'd set up for a client on Internet Explorer, the browser he uses which is no longer supported by Mac, which I use. 

When we returned home, we walked into a totally darkened house, on a totally darkened block, and heard, but did not see, our two sons somewhere in the cave of our living room, announcing a power failure that had begun some three minutes before we arrived.

Instead of starting the blog post I had planned to write this evening, I spent the next forty-five minutes scrambling for candles and flashlights.  Apparently,  I am out of practice in dealing with power outages.  I found myself using the candle I finally located that had enough of a wick to support a flame, which I had ignited after braille-ing my way through the kitchen in search of a candle lighter, to grope my way toward the light switch upon entering each new room.  As if the only problem was that I couldn't see the light switch!  

Then I returned a call I'd missed from my daughter, and she advised me to call the power company, her former employer, in case they didn't know about the outage.  I figured that, since my computer still had some juice, I could use it to look up the number.  Forgetting, of course, that I would need an internet connection, which was not possible with no power to the modem or the router.  My clever daughter looked up the number in her phone book, in her house five blocks away where they had power.  I typed it into my computer, which was at least good for note-taking, hung up, and then called the power company number. 

As I was "press[ing] 1 to report a power outage," the lights went back on.  (Clearly, I should have called earlier!)  After I hung up, the power company called me (a robo call, of course) to see if I had experienced a power outage!  I pressed whatever number corresponded to "I sure as hell did!" and hung up.  They called again--a different robot this time--to let me know that I had experienced a power outage, which they had subsequently fixed, and that I was one of 1,942 homes affected.

If I was planning to blog about something more meaningful tonight, I no longer remember what it was.

Vacating My Post--Finally!

No, not my blog post.  Although I will be doing that too, tomorrow, but not "for the rest of [my] life," (as Humphrey Bogart's Rick warned Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa).  Just until next Wednesday.

No, the post I'm referring to--in the sense of "job, employment" that Thesaurus.com tells me is synonymous with "appointment, assignment, berth, billet, office, place, position, [and] situation"--is that of full-time mother.  I have occupied this post, up-close and from afar, on- and off-line, for more than thirty years.  Most of us who attain this position, whether through careful calculation and arrangement or, as in my case, by backing into it--not once, but three times!--never stop being mothers.  But I have been reluctant to stop mothering, more so than your average (Mama) Bear.  

Some would (and have) call(ed) much of what I've done smothering, or brand me with the disdainful sobriquet "helicopter mom."  I would (and have) counter(ed) that I have placed a high priority on parenting, and that my last two, in particular, have been relatively "high needs children."  School years and adolescence have been bumpy--to say the least--for my two-years-apart male offspring, the tag ends of a not-so-blended family.  Their older mom was "sandwiched" between their own and a geographically distant elderly generation of family members requiring major support.  And these boys both came with their own charming but challenging traits and difficulties.  It has not been The Brady Bunch, by any stretch of the imagination.

At twenty and breathing-down-the-neck-of-eighteen, however, they are as ready as any their age that I can imagine to spend several days on their own--in each other's company, even!  They can cook and launder their own clothes, if not clean up religiously.  One can drive the other to work, or to the emergency room.  A sister who won't hang up on them lives nearby.  There is food in the house.  The dog will get them up every day.  The setting and their own amazing maturity will keep them as safe in my absence as I can when I'm here. 

My nest is not empty--yet.  But I am the one leaving it.  For my own good, and theirs, and their father's.  But not for good.

Beginning to put to bed a long and (mostly) lovely part of my life. . .

A Gift from the Blogger Snow God

A snow day in mid-May?

Not really.  The weather here yesterday, while not exactly seasonal, was not wintry.  In fact, I dressed lightly for my late afternoon run by the lake, and even removed a layer as I went.

But Thursday was like a snow day because I was prevented by circumstances beyond my control from posting a blog. 

Blogger--the software that supports the creation of blogs for Blogspot, of which Put it to Bed is one, was "unavailable" through the day yesterday, and for half of today. 

I enjoyed the reprieve.

Musings of a Lame Duck Mom

A mother holds her children's hands for a little while. . . their hearts forever.

I was going to post this on Mother's Day, but my husband and children kept me too busy celebrating to finish it.  So here it is, in true procrastinator fashion, five days late.

I never intended to become so wrapped up in mothering.  If the truth be known, in fact, there was a time when I thought I didn't want children.  In the heady rush of my feminist awakening, I made big plans, and they did not include little people.

But what did my head know? 

My three children, when they did come, were all surprises.

And so was the mother they gave birth to.

Turns out, loving and nurturing and enjoying small persons whose care, and upkeep, and upbringing I have been entrusted with is probably my greatest gift.  In every sense of the word.

As I approach the end of the thirty-three plus uninterrupted years I have spent as a mom to minor children--my youngest turns eighteen next month--I find myself somewhat at sea. 

My nest is not yet empty.  Two of my children still live under my roof, and the other is ten blocks away.  I am not finished being a mother.  But I am not nearly so actively engaged in mothering as I was even a year ago.

There are some other things I have to contribute, and meaningful--if not lucrative--work that I am doing.  But I am not sure I will ever again be as good at anything, or that I will derive as much satisfaction, or have as much fun as I have had as a mother.

Then again, having backed into this particular phase of my life, perhaps there is something wonderful ahead that I haven't foreseen. . . .

Happy (belated) Mother's Day, to my mother, who taught me more than I acknowledged; to my daughter, who first made me a mother; and to all of us moms, accidental and otherwise!

Freaking Out About Control

It's Friday evening, and I want to talk about control.  Briefly.  Because it's Friday evening.  The end of another of too many days lately that have spun out of my control.


One of the valuable pieces of information that I picked up in reading Chip Heath and his brother Dan's book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard is that self-control is exhaustible.  And exhausting.  And that many of us are living beyond our means in this respect, trying to deal with powerful emotions, eliminate bad habits, govern behavioral impulses, and keep our creaky little vehicles of self on the road.  And given this habitual deficit spending, we may run out of the steam necessary to power the changes we desire.


So I am left wondering if the self-improvement enterprise in which I am engaged, and of which this blog is a chronicle, is such a good idea after all.  Am I becoming a control freak?


As this appellation is popularly applied, it tends to refer to people whose need to control others makes relationships difficult, at home and at work.  And while I admit that my desire to determine how things are done and to achieve desired outcomes does sometime slop over onto the people around me, for the most part I am the primary victim of these tendencies.  If I am a control freak, I am mainly a self-control freak.  I spend a lot of time bossing myself around, trying to manipulate my own feelings and behavior, and reflecting on the process.  And I'm not too nice about it, either.  


The main symptom of this supposed disorder, given my flagging energy, is a chronic sense of dissatisfaction and failure when circumstances and results--and particularly my own efforts--fall short of my standards.  And even when I do muster the strength to make things happen, I am plagued by the constant tension involved in straining against the grain of uncontrollability, and in waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it so often, and so predictably does.


Maybe my whole campaign to "put things to bed" suffers from too much of a good thing.  Maybe I shouldn't be trying to fix so many things at once.  And maybe my personal clutch is worn from careening over the bumpy back roads for years, with little regard for the long haul and the wear and tear on my "controls."  I am not adept, even at this late date, at negotiating the various gears at my disposal, and at figuring out when it may be useless to attempt to apply them. 


Psychologists treat the urge for control variously as neurosis, as a source of stress, as a reaction to stress, and as a basic human tendency.  It seems reasonable to assess the flexibility with which we seek control in evaluating the healthfulness of this pursuit.  It is probably best not to try to control everything, nor to insist on too great a degree of control in any specific area of our lives.  


By this measure, I could stand to lay-the-hell-back.


I have only a few hours of wakefulness left in this day, and I am goading myself to hit the bike, resting in its trainer stand in my basement study; to write what I laughingly call "Morning Pages;" to finish reading one of the three books whose ends I am nearing; to do the evening dishes; to meditate; and to set the alarm and hit the sheets in time to get up for an early Saturday morning Martin Luther King event.  Oh, and to try to see some of a basketball game with my son. Enough, already?

The Center's Not Holding

I’m having a hard time staying on course lately.  The community organization that has been a large part of my life in the last few years is in crisis—yet again—and I’m getting drawn in.  I’m not sure whether I’m attending a prolonged wake, or handing instruments to roadside surgeons.  The field is definitely contaminated.

Personally, I am presently engaged in the process of reconstructing my routines, and refocusing my efforts.  This is a project I know too well, having spent most of my adult life living semester to semester, as a student, an instructor, a parent of students, and a professor’s wife.  I have also juggled part-time and full-time work with mothering, which has required me to restyle my days on a regular basis.  I know that I am not alone in this but, at least among my friends and acquaintances, I seem to have experienced more than my share of flux.  So I’m a little off balance to begin with, these days.

I’m giving myself a little talking-to this morning, consisting of the advice I would give a friend who found herself or himself in similar circumstances.  And I am telling myself to give some thought to how much flexibility and responsiveness I can afford, as I react to the new demands and opportunities created by my organization’s death rattle.  And my answer needs to be, not so much. 

It has taken me months to reach this place, where I am beginning to do things that I have been planning/wanting to do for a long time, and to have some clarity about where I want to put my energy, what is important to me, what choices I have.   The years are short, as Gretchen Rubin reminds us, and I don’t want another of these precious periods to pass only to come around again to the same point.  And though my Buddhist teachers would perhaps say that “progress” is an illusion, I think they might also be sympathetic to my desire to be in my own here and now.  And on my own path.

So I am reminding myself not to jump ship.  My ship.  If I need to throw out life preservers, or lend navigational skill, or put in a call to the Coast Guard, I am more than willing.  But I have my own vessel to pilot, and going down with my large and listing seafaring neighbor is not an option.  

The phrase “whatever floats your boat” carries a flavor of hedonism, but in this case, I am what floats my boat.  And it is my job to keep it afloat.  As I witness the struggles of the perhaps doomed craft whose crew I never really left, I need to stay aware of my own weather, and keep my oar in the water.

Goal Disposal for Idiots

Yesterday, we established that I was laboring under too heavy a burden of goals.  And, as Neil Fiore so eloquently put it, we must “abandon unattainable goals and halfhearted wishes” if we are to succeed.  Further, he says “[i]f you cannot find the time or motivation to start working on that goal, let go of it, or it will keep haunting you, making you feel like a procrastinator...”

Since I generally have a hard time letting go of things that have ever had meaning for me, the idea of abandoning goals is somewhat harrowing.  Kind of like amputation (Will I develop phantom goals?) or divorce (Who will get custody of my psyche?). 

Dr. Fiore’s suggestions of “planned setbacks” and “mental rehearsals” gave me the notion of practicing with a preliminary group of more or less throw-away goals.  I made up the following list of fairly easy to give up aspirations:

1.    Become a minister.

2.   Get involved in community theater.

3.   Become a dance therapist.

4.   Paint the basement.

5.    Join the Peace Corps.

6.   Become a midwife.

7.   Learn Spanish.

8.   Earn a law degree.

9.   Blend my family.

10. Become a dance therapist.

11. Build a porch onto my house.

None of these objectives make sense in my life currently.  Keeping them alive makes me feel like a procrastinator.  So I am going to abandon them. 

I offer the following ideas of how to accomplish such a jettisoning.

Ten Ways to Leave Your Once-loved Dreams Behind:

1.    Write the list on a piece of paper.  Fashion a paper airplane from the page, and send it soaring.

2.    Write the list on a piece of paper.  Hop off the bus, Gus, leaving the list behind.

3.   Write the list on a piece of paper.  Tear it into pieces, deposit it in a public toilet, and flush.  Flush again.

4.   Write the list on a piece of paper.  Ignite.  Be sure to let go before the flame reaches your fingers.  Sweep up the ashes and dispose of them.

5.    Write the list on a piece of paper.  Bury it, with or without a marker, on  land you can’t frequently access.  Dance on the grave.

6.   Write the list on a piece of paper.  Put it into a bottle, and launch it out to sea.

7.   Write the list on a piece of paper.  Eat your words, perhaps with ketchup.

8.   List the goals on a blackboard (like the wall in my back bathroom).  Erase.  Chant appropriate exorcising words to prevent reappearance.

9.   Visualize the kind of person who might be able to accomplish each outgrown goal.  Release it to find a new owner.

10. Draw a cartoon/caricature of yourself having accomplished each goal on your list.  Laugh heartily.  

Obviously, I will have to dig deeper in order to hone my focus.  But now I will have some tools to use in effecting the required removal.  (Why do I feel like Harry Potter in my kids’ video game, dashing around the Weasley’s garden doing battle with gnomes?)

Procrastinating 101: Deciding What Not to Do

In his second last chapter, “Fine-Tuning Your Progress,” Dr. Neil Fiore, author of  The Now Habit:  A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, provides a good deal of advice for keeping ourselves on track, once we have begun to change our procrastinating ways.  He suggests the use of “planned setbacks,” as a way of practicing for handling procrastination relapses.  He speaks of resilience (good), and hardiness (also good, and composed of commitment, control and challenge). 

He tries to “distraction-proof” us readers, describing five types of distractions and giving suggestions for dealing with each type.  The five types are:

1. 
   
   1.    Strong emotions—deserve immediate attention
   2.   Warnings of danger—stress response; use focus and relaxation exercises
   3.   “To-Do” reminders—write down on a pad, use as rewards for completing work instead of as reasons to procrastinate
   4.   Escape fantasies—rely on unscheduled to ensure adequate pleasure and guilt-free play
   5.    UFOs—Unidentified Flights of Originality  [p. 173-175]

Fiore also writes about the value of mental rehearsal and preprogramming to support us in beginning and staying with difficult projects.

But the part of this chapter that most intrigued me deals with “effective goal-setting.”  Fiore instructs us that

[h]ow you set your goals strongly influences your ability to recommit to them and bounce back after a setback. … [In order] to ensure effective goal setting that lessens problems with procrastination and enhances the ease with which you work and persevere along the path to achievement” . . . .[you must] make commitments only to those goals and paths that you can wholeheartedly embrace…. [and] abandon unattainable goals and halfhearted wishes.”

“One of the best-kept secrets of successful producers is their ability to let go of goals that cannot be achieved or started in the near future.”  

He goes on to say that

[i]f you cannot find the time or motivation to start working on that goal, let go of it, or it will keep haunting you, making you feel like a procrastinator—as if you’d failed to accomplish something important that you promised yourself you would achieve.

And finally:

Remember, you are the master of your goals; don’t let unrealistic goals be used as an occasion for self-criticism and for lapsing into identifying yourself as a procrastinator.  As a producer you know which goals to wholeheartedly pursue and which ones to let go of.  [179]

It seems to me that Fiore is really onto something here.  And, as with so many ideas that strike me as profound, and that have eluded me so forcefully for so long, it is really quite simple.  I have been suffocating under a mound of the un-doable, particularly in combination, for a good long while.  And “haunted” is a fitting verb for the action of this collective detritus in my life.  I need to abandon some goals here, if I am to have any chance of being, and feeling successful.   I’m going to get right on this.  Thank you, Dr. Fiore.

Paying it Backward: Surrounded by the Procrastinators I Helped Create

I have become aware in the past few days that I am living in the midst of procrastinating others.  Even my dog waits to eat his food, until he gets the proverbial "round toit."  


It is probably a truism of families that we partner with people who share or admire or can stomach at least some of our dysfunction.  We then go on to reproduce and nurture beings with similar predelictions, until we are swimming in a sea of whatever distressing traits we may eventually wish to discard in ourselves.  And thus, we pay the price in spades for our quirks and foibles, as they come back to bite us in the end.


My children have watched me struggle to get things done since they opened their eyes, though they also witnessed much ultimate accomplishment.  (I'm a busy little procrastinating bee!)  My eldest saw less of it, as I was younger and in a less stressful period of my life.  She is an inveterate list-maker and action-taker, relatively unscathed by whatever nature or nurture might have influenced her to be a putter-offer.  My second and third children, both boys, both still at home and sharing the pool of stress that has been my Calamity Jane existence for more than a decade, are another matter.  


My oldest son is presently conducting an advanced seminar just for me in relinquishing control over what is not mine to control.  "Do what I say, not what I do" has proven every bit as effective as we should have predicted, and the result is a soon-to-be-adult master procrastinator.  Less than three weeks from his arranged school start date, we are scrambling to complete a daunting set of postponed tasks required to get him where he purports to be going.  And we are trying to evaluate the portent of his delaying tactics.  Cold feet?  Developmental issues common to most young people, learning to get from point A to point Z, staying on task, and delaying gratification?  Practical inexperience?  Congenital or learned difficulties with time management?  General unreadiness, which would dictate a sensible retrenchment and pulling out Plan B?


Whatever got us to where we are, and wherever that turns out to be, the current state is intensely painful.  Yesterday's post detailed Dr. Neil Fiore's procrastination metaphor, which likened the situation my son finds himself in to having to walk across a board suspended 100 feet above the ground between two buildings, having himself set a fire in the building he is in.  I've been there so many times myself I don't have to imagine his distress.  And it turns out that I am in the burning building with him, captive to my overidentification/codependency, and the impact that his failure to plan is having on my time and resources.


I am learning on the job how to handle this one.  The level of difficulty for someone with my habits is high, as are the stakes.  What I need to do, for both of us I think, is to help him figure out how to construct or recruit a net, and not to become that net myself.  As he has told me, it is time for him to leave the nest, even if he falls out.  


On a recent stroller trip to the lakeshore, my two-year-old companion and I were watching a particularly graceful seagull up in the "'ky," and I observed no mother gull flying behind or below him.  Wherever that mother bird was, with her head under her wing or not, she has much to teach me.


Another lesson of this involuntary curriculum is how painful and stressful it has been for those who care about me, and those who must live with me, to watch me flail and wail and scramble to meet stretched deadlines and deal with the chaos of my own making as a habitual procrastinator.  I'm not sure what AA step this is, but I can appreciate its power. Hopefully, in helping my son I will help myself. And vice versa.

Done for the Week: Time to Clean Up My Act

Monday again.  Feels like about six minutes since last Monday.  A new week stretches before me, also about six minutes long, but with about six months worth of "have-tos" and "really oughtas."  I'm not sure how to reconcile this, but I know it will require meditating, culling, and further efforts to quiet my brain and my adrenal gland.  

Here's what I can remember of what got done in the six-minute whoosh of time that was last week.

Done List--Week of May 10-16

1. Continued 5K training, mostly on recumbent bike due to foot injury
2. Finished The Last Time I Saw You, by Elizabeth Berg; The Total De-stress Plan:  A Complete guide to Working with Positive and Negative Stress, by Beth MacEoin
3. Took my blood pressure daily
4. Attended monthly organization meeting
5. Published 5 blog posts
6. Meditated 5 times
7. Prepared adolescent for prom date; attended prom parent functions; waited up for late curfew
8. Made coffee for, attended and gave presentation at my congregation's annual meeting
9. Attended bill signing for transitional jobs legislation
10. Attended daughter's graduation (something of a miracle, because of schedule conflicts, an impoverished gas tank, stimulus-funded road construction and resulting traffic snarls, and downtown parking challenges) 
11. Helped son look for a car
12. Worked on new website for fledgling jobs group
13. Supported my mom by phone through week of feeling ill
14. Took my dog for several walks
15. Wrote Morning Page three times
16. Began gratitude journal
17. Survived spouse's acute depressive state
18. Practiced yoga once
19. Began household cleanup campaign
20. Tried, and mostly succeeded, not to stress over teenager's first solo driving trip out of state  

Last week's focus goal was to try to disentangle myself somewhat from the ups and downs in the lives of my two teenaged sons.  Three items on the above list, highlighted in green, are related to this goal.  The two car-related accomplishments, (#s 11 and 20) both pertain to my older, nearly adult son.  I did a better job distancing myself from the half-day road trip than from the car purchase process.  He is tending toward "cool" cars befitting his preferred self-image, while I would like him to buy something safe whose purchase and upkeep won't compete with impending student loans for his and our resources--what he calls a "Grandma car."  I'm trying to breathe deeply, and remember what kind of car I purchased at his age--and the fact that my parents had to live with my ill-considered marriage at that same age.  The younger teen had to listen to lots of mini-lectures prior to prom--somewhat earned by previous questionable choices--and to contend with a bit too much hovering.  In the end, I bent more than I was planning to on the matter of curfew.  Progress, probably.

My biggest upcoming challenge in this long passage to mother-of-only-adults is standing back while my elder son decides whether or not to enter school this summer, as planned, or to spend a little more time transitioning.  I confess to a whole range of physiological stress symptoms whenever I visit his future in my mind.  Again, deep breathing is in order, I suppose.  And probably less attention to the whole issue.  It is, after all, his life, and as much as I might wish to protect him from the failure I fear, or the difficulty of what feels to me like massive change, he will need his own failures and successes to grow.  And besides, if I know so much about how life should be lived, maybe I should be applying more of that wisdom to my own quandaries.

In red above is what seems, from the vantage point of this particular Monday morning, as I sit here surrounded by the dirt and dishevelment left by my household of four humans, one canine, and two frequently visiting preschoolers, to be last week's most important achievement.  So important, in fact, that I have decided to make its continuance this week's focus goal.  I have been doing a lot of things to try and address my need for peace of mind in ways that concern my own body and mind.  But the external disorder surrounding me is disrupting my internal state.  I recall an episode of the TV drama Family that I used to watch many years ago--when I probably should have been working on my dissertation.  The mother, played by Sada Thompson, with a semi-permanent wrinkle of concern perforating her forehead, said to her grown daughter, herself a single mother of a toddler, that hers (the daughter's) was "not the home of a happy woman."  Or something to that effect.  I have remembered that little snippet of manufactured conversation for so long because it spoke to me then.  As it speaks to me now.

I think it's time to make my home that of a happier woman.  So I can be.

My Seminar on the Porch

Today is a porch day.  If I had one, I'd be on it.  If I had a regular everyday job, I'd call in sick to it.  If I knew how, I'd just chill.


You might think that the weather in my parts must be glorious, but in fact it's raining.  I just returned from a free injury evaluation at the sports medicine outpost in my gym, having learned that we can't rule out a "broken foot" --the technical term, apparently.  And though I have recently refashioned myself as an athlete of sorts, the "sport" in which I sustained this sidelining injury is the laundry marathon.  While we're waiting to see whether my foot needs to be "taken to the next level," with attendant x-rays, deductibles and co-pays, I am assigned to rest, ice and elevate.  And I am thinking that this could be the opportunity I need to learn how to relax.


So I'm going to recast today as a porch workshop.  I'm going to try to conjure a porch mood, wear a porch wardrobe--the sweats I have on are perfect--and make use of some porch props.  Geranium --check.  Blanket --check.  Mug of tea --check.  Sleeping dog --check.  


As I decide what to do today, I am going to first picture doing it on a porch to see if it fits.  Like this. . . .  Blogging?  Yes.  But not about being "more productive."  Meditating?  For sure.  Getting lost in The Memory Keeper's Daughter?  Absolutely.  Writing?  Naturally.  Paying bills?  I don't think so.  Ditto, solving family members' emotional problems.  Enjoying a glass of wine?  Definitely.  And napping.  Calls from work?  A clear no-no.


Because I think it will be more fun to learn to take breaks rather than building for a breakdown, I will spend some time today perusing the lovely picture book I bought a couple of years ago to feed my porch lust    --Porch Presence.  Maybe if I build it, at least in my mind, I will come back again, and sooner.

Married to a Workaholic (Again!)

[Available from Zazzle.com --the shirt, not the workaholic]

If I am becoming my mother, as so many of us fear, it may have something to do with the fact that I keep marrying my father.  


The workaholics in my life, past and present, are, or were, good men.  They are, or have been, absorbed in activity that I recognize as meaningful, and morally valuable.  


My father was a doctor, the kind who made house calls and got paid in rabbits and farm produce as well as in cash.  When he kept patients waiting, it was because he took the needed time to listen to each of them, and to relate to their lives and their true illnesses.  I was used to his absences from family outings and occasions, the skid marks he left arriving late for dinner and leaving afterwards for the hospital, the interrupting phone calls and even police dispatched to our home if our one family phone was tied up too long and an emergency call couldn't get through.  His work was important, and it came first.  And last.  


My first husband was, and is, a clinical psychologist.  Like my mother before me, I spent long evenings alone with our child, since he worked late, past her bedtime, several days a week.  Unlike my father, he didn't break for dinner.  We took two cars to parties when he was on call, which was almost always since he usually practiced solo.  My sleep was broken by patients' calls to discuss their insomnia, as well as more urgent problems.  His patients were important, and their needs came first.  And last.


My second husband is a university professor and committed change agent, who commutes to work in another city, in another state.  His students and the disenfranchised community groups he works with command his energy and attention, in between writing, preparing for classes and presentations, traveling internationally for meetings and research, and fulfilling other professional obligations.  In the last few years, he has begun to provide expertise, always for the defendant, in death penalty cases.  His iPhone accompanies us everywhere, even to bed and the dog park, and can be relied upon for late-breaking bulletins and late-night and weekend calls from graduate students and project participants.  These people are important.  I should have listened when he told me that, in his first marriage, work came first.  And last.  I thought we would be different.


But why am I writing this sad saga in my blog about procrastination?  Because, for whatever reason, this pattern in my relationships with men is part of how I got where I am today.  And part of how I didn't get where I thought I wanted to be.  My husbands would tell you that my choice to devote much of my time and energy to child-rearing necessitated their focus on work, and on providing.  In both marriages, I experienced it differently.  It seemed that their fevered work paces were unalterable, and after initial skirmishes, I gave up and worked (or didn't work) around them.  Having grown up with one mostly absent parent, I felt that my children needed to be someone's first priority while they were young.  And it was clear that person was going to have to be me.  Whatever other work I took on, for pay and as a volunteer, had to occupy the space that was left.


But in truth, I can admit now that there was an element of martyrdom in my compromising. And that motherhood, for all its challenges and importance, functioned partly to get me off the hook of dealing with fears of failure and even stronger fears of success.  An even more uncomfortable confession is the naming of my own inner workaholic.  Had I known how to manage the perfectionist mother and the unfocused but nevertheless perfectionist scholar/writer in me, I might have been able to give attention to more of the work I longed to do.  


I still live with a workaholic, and our routines at this point assign much of the family and household work to me.  But I aspire, as does my spouse, to effect some small but important changes in how we share time and responsibility and freedom for our own pursuits.  My blog writing has been partly fueled by his willingness to assume the dish-washing chores--mostly--for the last few months.  After years of wrangling about this domestic task, years which saw me trying to restyle dish-washing as a meditative practice, and trying to hold my male children accountable for a job their male parent escaped as much as possible, he somehow heard me, finally.  He says it was when I pointed out that washing the dishes took at least an hour an a half of my time each day.  He thought I could do something more important with that time.  And he was right.


So I defend to the death these days his right to do this work without criticism.  When my children complain about improperly stored items or food residue baked onto plates, spoons and bowls by the dishwasher, I invite them to do better.  


I have accepted that my partner's approach to work is a product of his own demons, and not a realm for my reform efforts.  But I am no longer going to use it as an excuse to give up on myself and the use of my talents.  If nothing else, his example is a cautionary tale in my face that can motivate my own more human-friendly work balance.  And who knows?  Maybe if I stop fighting it, he may eventually come less to defend it.  As I said before, he is a good man.

Grief Postponed: Part I

I remember the morning, two and a half years ago, when it became clear that my father’s death was imminent. 

I had been making regular trips over the nearly twenty months since flying with my parents back to their home in the New Orleans area after their Katrina-sponsored sojourn with me.  My husband joked that I was commuting to New Orleans.  My father’s failing health, strained local resources in the aftermath of the storm, and the difficulty of ensuring adequate care for the less-than-independently-wealthy moved me to spend nearly a week of every month helping to care for Dad.  This was to have been another such visit.  But the night I arrived, a Wednesday, I saw immediately the deterioration in his condition in the weeks I had been away.  

I think he had been waiting for me, his eldest. It had become difficult for him to talk, but he stroked my arm for a long time and repeated how good it was to see me, and that he loved me.  He seemed to be saying hello and goodbye at the same time. 

Two days later he had stopped eating.  And then I knew. 

On Saturday morning, I sat on the sunwashed patio at the center of the assisted living facility where my parents had been for less than three months, and called my husband.  I cried as I told him what was going on.  We made tentative plans for travel for him and our kids.  When we hung up, I dried my eyes and went back inside, and upstairs to my parents’ “apartment,” through the halls of elders clinging slenderly to life.  And back to work, for the duration, spelled by my sister, my frail mother, the facility staff’s brief ministrations, and the daily visits of the hospice nurses.  I called the church my parents had been attending and asked for a priest.  I promised my father he would not be alone. 

By Monday, my father had been mostly unconscious for the better (worst) part of two days, surfacing intermittently as more family members arrived from distant states and from cancelled vacations.  The hospice sent grief counselors to prepare us.  Ancient family dynamics erupted, and were covered over.  Late Monday night, after more subdued family wrangling, and in the interests of peace, I went to my sister’s to sleep, leaving other family members with Dad.  My phone rang at around 6 a.m. to bring me the news of my father’s death.  To this day, I don’t know, probably can’t know, if my promise was kept.

The days following Dad’s death were filled with the commonly surreal events—sitting with his body as we waited for the ambulance the law required to transport him to the hospital where he could be “pronounced;” watching as he was zipped into a body bag; “shopping” with my youngest brother in a casket showroom; greeting relatives; hosting a wake; ordering the necessary death certificates that would allow my mother to continue to receive income. 

I cried, really, only one other time.  My daughter, who couldn’t travel because of a difficult pregnancy, had put together a slide show of pictures on my husband’s laptop.  He had set it up at the back of the church where Dad’s funeral was held.  When I walked over to look at it, just before the service began, I heard the strains of “Danny Boy” which my husband had added to the images.  I was transported to the morning that Dad had sung it for a small family breakfast gathering following his younger brother’s death.  And I began to cry.  A cousin I see only at funerals came up behind me and said “Let it out.  It’s time.”  But it wasn’t.  I stopped crying.  And haven’t cried since.

Burning Off: Communing in Flame

Fire has been presenting itself to me as metaphor, solution and ritual of late.  This past Sunday, I attended a “Fire Communion” at my Unitarian church.  Having been born into Catholicism, I’m a sucker for communions of all sorts, and this denomination of religious refugees provides several—flower communion, water communion, bread communion.  This was my first fire communion.

The artfully organized service contained several elements that provoked, quieted and inspired me.  But the centerpiece was the opportunity to write words on a small piece of flash paper representing a story I wished to let go of, and to add this story to those of others being released into the fire.

I have been moving into a time of sorting, assessing, reclaiming, and discarding over the last few months.  I’m not sure where this is coming from, but I suspect that my impending empty nest, the significant birthday this year will bring, and the continuing process of trying to come to terms with the death of someone I loved all my life are acting together to fuel this consuming process.  So I was more than ready to consign any one of several outgrown stories to the flames.  But I had been told to use one piece of paper.  Being generally compliant—see Catholic background reference above—I didn’t think of violating this instruction.  And even if I had, it was hard enough to scribble a few words on one square of what turned out to be quite fragile paper in the time allowed.  I was forced, therefore, to settle on one story to relinquish.

I was taking this exercise seriously, and felt the compunction to identify the most important story to leave behind.  Or the story that subsumed the others.  The ultimate old story.  My ultimate old story, at this moment. 

As I moved to the front of our sanctuary to claim my piece of paper, I considered my choice, and struggled with language.  When I gripped my pencil, the words came to me.  I wrote “the wind beneath everyone else’s wings,” with no little difficulty, primarily because of the tendency of the sharp lead to puncture the paper fragment, but also because I wanted the words to be perfect—perfectionism another story I might have chosen to incinerate.

What did these words mean?  What story did they stand in for?  And what will it mean to move on from it?  What story will take its place?

Despite the cheesy Bette Midler throwback, I meant to convey my readiness to claim more of my energy for my own.  I have been immersed in nurturing others for more than three decades, and it feels like time to shift the balance.  My children, who have been the chief “beneficiaries” of my absorption, my husband, my aging mother, and my sister who has the major responsibility for Mom’s on-site support, hold the largest liens on my life.  And I am not planning to abandon any of them.  I intend to continue as the main caregiver for my two-year-old grandchild, nurse practitioner for my much-loved dog, underpaid nonprofit employee, and social justice activist in my church and other contexts. 

But I have depleted myself too much in all this caretaking, caregiving, and just plain caring.  I have allowed my nurturing self to devour equally important parts of my identity.  And I need to let go of the idea that any or all of these beings and causes will plummet to earth without my constant attention.  I can, and have to, begin to live more in my own life.

When my turn came, I dropped my words into the makeshift cauldron, savored the satisfying pfffft as the fire caught, and returned to my seat, leaving behind the carbon residue of my tired narrative.  I am eager to see, as the smoke clears, what emerges.