I'm Not in Kansas Right Now

Dear Ones --

I don't expect everyone to approve at what's going on at my other blog.  That's why I started a separate blog that is age-restricted.  The question has arisen concerning whether the actions of yesterday's post are self-empowering and I think it's certainly a question that deserves thought and discussion.

All journeys begin somewhere.

I'm fifty-three years-old and never-married.  I've had a few boyfriends and many heartbreaks.  My heart is still leaking, in fact, from something in my recent past that did not come to fruition, and it has had a thud after my encounters over the last week: in many important ways, the thuddee actually gets me.  That's a powerful turn-on.

Alas.

Consider, now, that I have been fat for something like forty-six years.  I was the butt of a lot of teasing up until I went to university.  Then I became the Best Friend, the Fag Hag, the voyeur of what my thin, pretty/handsome friends were experiencing.  I listened and sympathized.  I listened and wished.  I listened and grew fatter.

I passed through the chapters of my thinnitude under the stress of either gaining a new body and new horizons, or saying goodbye thereto.  I spent much of the time in my romantic relationships wondering if I could really be loved, if my battle scars were at least forgivable, or if I could compensate for them in some way.  I spent so much time in my head that I couldn't feel my body except when I was out and about, mostly in the gym or on my own, walking the city in black cashmere trousers or a short black skirt.  Then I felt tall and in possession of a secret: you don't know what I really am...

I was Beauty and Beast when I was thin.  As I gained weight I felt more and more that I was the Beast alone.

In these last seven years, it has been a surprise to me that men found me either attractive or fuckable.  That perhaps one man fell in love with me for a bit and that a couple of other men fell in like is astonishing.

It shouldn't be.  I'm not ugly.  I'm funny, smart, giving.  They even found me sexy, although that has never been something I felt.

Until the last few weeks.

What has changed?  I'm really abstinent for the first time in more than six months.  I've been through a great deal of grief and estrangement.  I'm not working as hard as I should be in my twelve-step program but I have done some deep digging in my stepwork and in throwuppy.  My old feelings of being the butt of jokes and excuses, of needing to be invisible, are shriveling a little bit as I take them out of the closet and place them in the light of the room for two pairs of eyes.  I'm slow to pick up on having boundaries crossed or argued about, but at least I remember, now, when my therapist points instances out.  I'm becoming more sensitive to them and more protective.

I don't know if I've lost weight or not, although a friend noticed that I was looking "healthier" and my food plan is so predictable that it would be difficult not to lose weight.  Not knowing has thrown me back on my day count and my body.  Because I'm also pretty disenfranchised from my size, I can't tell much from the way my clothes fit.  This pretty much leaves me only how and what my body is feeling.  It has a knot of anxiety in its stomach.  Its neck is sore.  There is a twinge in its left shoulder.  And it's randy.

There is also a brain in this body -- a mind.  And a heart and a pleasure center.  I may not be ready for a boyfriend or a boyfriend may not be ready for me, but for a change I'm relying on those other bits to tell me when a situation, a man, a sexual liaison, is not right for me.  And I'm walking out, shrugging my shoulders, taking pleasure in a cold drink and the searing acridity of a cigarette, relishing my messy Cave and my dog.   She is always glad to see me and manipulate me in our seven-year dance of often opposing desires.

So yeah, it feels good to say, "You're not the right one."  And it feels good to seek a Right One, despite, right now,  the sexual emphasis on seeking.  I missed out on so much in the years when boyz wanted girlz to be fresh and skinny, and in the years when I didn't trust myself.

It is empowering to trust my instincts.  It's bloody empowering to have instincts after the cloister of grief.  It's empowering to read or hear that a man I could like thinks I have a lovely body.

And it's most empowering of all to write, to write the journey.  It's only a journey; the destination is a place everyone recognizes.  Love.  Home.  Friendship.  Maybe health insurance.

But it's my journey, for better or worse.  I'm being careful.  And I'm shrugging my shoulders when that's what I feel like doing.  And I'm glad I know these things.  Somebody in my future will appreciate the self-acceptance I'm being tutored in, the joy, the frontiers of my self that I'm defining and learning to defend.

All journeys end somewhere, and the somewhere is always [re]new.

You Get to Have Friends...

...until you change the terms.

That, it would seem, is the theme of the week. It hurts, even when I've made the changes out of self-protection or against my better wisdom.

There are all kinds of ways to lose friends, after all.

Actually, I've lost three friends in the last several months and it should have been a warning of what was already too late: being pals with people you employ or work for.

In the case of A, I asked for an accounting of several hundred dollars I was paying out and got anger and vague answers to my questions. Again, the warning was there when I had, months earlier, put a down payment on the work I would be asking for and suggested starting on something already in place only to be met with friendly silence until my freelancer's regular job wasn't producing the rent. I figured we'd get the project done sooner or later but I got angrier over the claim that accounting for time is impossible until I took my freelancer's inventory* and pretty much made it impossible to be met with anything more than fury.

It happened again last week. After factoring in the need for time to write, my still-fragile ankle (I spent some days in Arizona in sandals. I'm really not ready for sandals.), the temperament of the dog, and the fact that my other steady gig will be moving in June, I decided I would have a somewhat better shot at serenity if I didn't walk that dog for a couple of months. It was one of those brain-waves that sometimes hit in an awkward but correct instant. I wish I'd had it a couple of weeks ago but keeping their interim dog-walker on is probably a good thing for the walker and not the embarrassment ("What will I say to X?" the owner dithered about the walker who had been with them pretty much since December 20th, when I left for Christmas) that my decision was portrayed back to me.

I received a terse email this morning saying that they had changed some plans and would not need me to board the dog in a couple of months. I wrote back that it was fine and "are you angry with me?"

So far no answer.

I had -- how to put this? -- laid down some boundaries that protected my wallet, my body, my time and my serenity**. I'm a nervous wreck when I walk that dog, who has bloodied me several times by entering into battle with other dogs, and who has tried to bloody several humans, not all of whom are over four feet tall.

These are all good reasons, objectively speaking. I would have hoped that A didn't want to rip me off, and B would have simply respected my time and health. Nonetheless, I'm two friends down.

& then there's the ol' When Harry Met Sally crisis. I don't really need to tell the story with that introduction, do I??? The gag here is a day of quarrelsome emails that were based on the fact that I have a dumb crush & Harry does not. Harry felt the best way to deal with my crush was to disavow having inspired it.

No problem there, Harry. I fought it like the flu.

But I still had a crush. And that crush makes certain things really painful. Harry couldn't seem to get past his innocence and I fell into a sink-hole of explaining my explanations. I wondered whether, after all this sturm und drang, I should terminate the flawship. I was angry about trying to save his innocence but still get to claim my feelings. That turned into having my inventory taken (do you feel better now, A?).

1. I was angry as an attempt at dealing with my feelings.
2. I was threatening Harry as a sorry attempt to make him feel the way I did.
3. I am constitutionally bitter and rigid.
4. Miscellaneous stuff I can't recall because I deleted those emails for good.
   

The first two were patently incorrect. I was angry at the endless exchange and the claim that because Harry had not promoted my crush, my crush was therefore insignificant. I didn't threaten; I wondered out loud.

As for numbers three and four...I don't know. I don't have an outside perspective on myself. I am in ways, and probably not in other ways. I wonder if the split of these adjectives and their opposites are true of everyone?

I felt like a small pile of ugly dust when I finally begged that the exchange stop.

Here's the amazing thing, though, about me and about serendipity. Having cried myself into a sinus headache, I got a Twitter from someone I'd exchanged a few tweets with. How was I, she asked, and then, email me what's going on. Her perspective helped and I made a new cyber friend out of it.

And later I thought about two things that happened the last time I saw Harry. We'd fallen asleep. He woke me up coming out of a bad dream, moaning to talk himself up to consciousness. Later I woke him up -- laughing in my sleep. And I sneezed once and he laughed because my sneeze actually does come out as an achoo. "It's part of my adorability factor," I retorted.

So I'm left pondering, can I be friends with someone I had a crush on (Harry pretty much tortured the active part of it out of me, as though I'm no longer contagious), who couldn't sit still while I worked through feelings I was honest about, and finds me bitter and rigid (a combination I would run from in someone else).

And who wouldn't find laughing in her sleep and achooing charming as hell? I do, at any rate.

So I'm down three friends, up one, and I like two teeny things about myself that I hadn't even known about before. Who's winning? Who's hurting?

* In twelve step parlance, taking someone else's inventory -- i.e., telling that person what is wrong with him or her -- is a crime punishable by righteous indignation.

** As in, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Hello Again

Thank you everyone for so many kind wishes, prayers and listening ears.

I got home very late Monday evening from three weeks of mostly dealing with the Aftermath. Sorting, giving, tossing, organizing; reading tiny bits of paper to my father; eating & sleeping; absorbing.

It's good to be home. I have a lot more absorbing to do.

This is not so much about Mom being gone. She began to leave, emotionally and mentally, when she fell in late May & was in such rotten shape that to regret her dying when she did would be an act of cruelty. She would have been 88 years old this month & she was ready. When the social worker at the nursing home asked her three days running (she couldn't remember much by September) if she knew what hospice care meant, she replied it meant end of life. Then asked how she felt about that, she replied, "Shit happens." I'm more OK with her death than I imagined I would be.

But it was an intense time of family & looking at family. Much of this began earlier in the summer & circumstances conspired in various weird ways to keep me looking back in time. Conversations with cousins, with people I knew in grade school, being a unit with my father & brother, making calls & receiving visits, figuring well, we're talking living wills and family trusts -- is there a better time to ask about my birth mother? Much was revealed, much has been forgotten, only a little of it all is something some of us can address.

My brother & I were pretty united over the summer in our efforts to help & plan but death, even a benign one, is a wall one hits, I suspect, with the kind of impact that brings out undercurrents. I collapsed one day soon after Mom died, binge-reading, napping & finally sobbing hoarsely. Jim did not collapse. He soldiered on, reading mail to Dad, sorting business papers, making business phone calls, wrapping up my mother's official life. I have lived alone my entire adult life & I'm not only used to having a lot of private time, I need it. I wasn't surly through that day but I was not communicative nor was I a team-player. Around five I began to stir & Jim walked into my room & said, sarcastically, "Are you going to connect today at all???"

I snapped back in equal sarcasm, "I'm going to take a shower." Which I did & then came out & made crab quiche for dinner.

When we drove to the airport for his flight home, I got a lecture between his taking cell phone calls. Dad was hurt by my moodiness. Dad didn't know if we could all spend time together in the future. Et cetera.

I listened & was mortified. I'm used to being as much in my own world when I'm with my father as he is -- I thought -- used to being in his own world of talking books, science lecture series, football & the Discovery Network. I didn't mean to hurt my father but my "mood" was exhaustion, escapism, grief & a response to how accustomed I am to Dad being literally plugged in to anything but live human beings in his home.

And, dammit, I listened & accepted without retort. I began to see an old pattern re-emerging in that week with my brother. He kept answering for me or cutting me out. People would ask when I was planning to leave & despite my having an open ticket & no set plans, he would give them a day that for some reason he thought was best. We had a small remembrance party with my parents' Arizona friends & the hostess said Jim would say a few words & then Francie would say a few words -- except that Jim thanked everyone for coming for me.

Years ago, he took me to see his shrink to see if I had any memories of childhood that would shed some light. I'm a pro at shrinks & after a while the man broke in & said, "You're great. You know, I met your parents & I've been seeing Jim for a while but nobody ever talks about you. It's like you don't exist or something."

Yes, well, that's a pattern. & rather than turn things narky, I said nothing of my own hurt feelings & ability to speak for myself & let him codify me into whatever story of me he's comfortable with.

I'm "sorer" about that than I am about my mom's death. Once again I feel as though I have no brother, both because the man who calls me "Sis" (Sis? When the fuck did I become SIS? I HATE that name; it's as bad as being called "Fran". Sis makes me feel like a 16-year-old snake & Fran is a nasally whiny version of "fat". Sis infuckingdeed) doesn't get that I am a grown-up (& he could have spoken to me at 2 in the afternoon instead of letting his resentment fester until 5) person on my own, and because I eventually came to feel resentment & disgust rather than anything more fond for him.

I laugh that he is my mother's child -- uber-organized & organizing, dogmatic according to his own lights, a little belittling of my father for Oedipal reasons of his own. I'm my father's child -- happy in my own world, relaxed about certain kinds of things. He needs to DO in order to justify his days & I need to BE in order to survive mine. He's far to the right socially, politically, theologically & I wonder if this gives him some sort of patriarchy complex, a need to be the Man.

I'm sighing here & thinking, whatever. The full story turned out not to be all about Dad being hurt. I felt more manipulated yet. I wonder what other childhood attitudes will blossom in the next few years & I wonder if I'll have a brother after them.

All of this was particularly odd because a week or so after he left, two cousins came to visit. They were eager to hug & catch up & I had to warn them that I am the Antichrist to their similarly conservative headroom. It worries me a little -- I am glad-handy with everything they find reprehensible. It worried me more when I jokingly said that Catholicism is as heathen a religion as anyone could wish & they nodded solemnly. It's a paradox that I'm sure the Old Testament, somewhere, warns against: how can one love someone whose advocacies in life are anathema -- possibly, in their gestalt, sinful?

All of which makes "love" feel a little fragile.

I've always known death brought out the worst in people but I thought it was material rather than whatever this is. I went on to spend two nice weeks with my father & if Jim's competency with legal papers made me feel pointless, I did a lot of heavy lifting & cuticle-ruining going through closets, drawers, desks, under beds. Dad & I drove up to the Grand Canyon, which in nearly 20 years of spending half or more of the year in Arizona I've never seen. We had a nice time & we experienced that wonderful rare thing of synchronicity when we stopped at an Indian market outside the Park as we drove toward the Painted Desert. I don't know why that was so but we enjoyed it the same way, inhabited that 15 minutes so happily that our rhythm the rest of the day was set. It was a two-day excursion we'd never done because in those nearly 20 years my mother simply hasn't been well enough for it.

There are second acts to come even as, once again, I wonder why I can't open my mouth to stake my boundaries and my self, & why I'm not right -- as in, stable & OK -- the way I am.

Me

I'm going to sound very whiny in this post, so if you're a critic of that tone or that tendency in me, go away.

I was talking to one of Us last night and saying there's not much "me" in my days lately. Everyone I know is in terrific emotional and/or physical pain and I've become the listener and, in some cases, adviser or advocate for my friends and family.

It may have started when my dog Roger moved away. That was also about the time my mother, who has chronic congestive heart failure, was rushed to the hospital for three days to treat fluid in her lungs. My blessed brother Jim handled that crisis and flew down the day she got out of the hospital and stayed long enough to get everybody settled and for my father to have the first symptoms of shingles.

They asked Jim if we could take turns going to see them for a few days every two - three months, so I'm going out for their birthdays in mid-October & for Christmas. Jim will get to do the spring cleaning.

It was also about the time I learned my former sponsee, whom you may remember from PFT as "Pam," whom I gave my fat clothes to, has been back and forth between the hospital and nursing home since early April after everything that could go wrong with a hip replacement went wrong: raging infections, two strokes, a breakdown in health care, severe depression. Her health care agent, the person who is in charge of making decisions when she can't and advocating when she can't (and she can't: she's on so much morphine and in so much pain, she can barely remember her own name, let alone remember to ask why she has shooting pains in her left foot), lives in Michigan and can only do so much from so far away.

It became quickly apparent that she needs someone at hand to chase down doctors, go over medical records, get physical therapy for her partially paralyzed left arm going. It also became quickly apparent that person was going to be me.

This means I have to tightly organize my days. Get and drop off dogs on time, bathe in mid-day, have food ready for dinner, be braced to race over to Cobble Hill to talk to people. & I've become a pretty disorganized person who seems also to be on call for other people's problems. If it's not time I spend for and on Pam, it is, therefore, guilt. Which is also exhausting.

Mix in one of those 90-minute apocalyptic phone conversations in which two people lay their cards on the table and leave rattled but as up-in-the-air as they were before, the observation that one of my dogs was peaky -- losing weight, lethargic, drooly -- taking her to the vet and finding out she does, in fact, have Lyme Disease (my first thoughts were reprehensible: 1. thank God that HUGE amount of money I signed on their credit card came up with something, 2. I'm proud of myself for noticing she wasn't well when there were no overt symptoms), and finding two women from my Missoula past through Facebook and touching on old feelings...

You have someone who has been severely depressed, in and out of sugar, incredibly, seemingly incurably tired.

I'm getting a cold now, which doesn't in the least surprise me except for the question of how I could get one with so little human contact. I may well have dug into my own system to find a little teeny weak virus to exploit for the purposes of shutting down further -- shutting down even on the pain that I have allowed myself to feel.

I talked about this last night and ended up in the sugar. Writing about it will either do the same or begin to shake off some of the load that's been so heavy I don't want to talk about it. We all know that depression and food are the Catch-22 of all Catch-22's. I know that I can shake out of my depression a lot faster by getting out of the food and that I cannot entirely shake it if I'm in the food.

So it's Day One. I can't take my germs to the nursing home (how convenient) and I discussed with one of Us last night how, when we're really depressed, brushing our teeth or taking a shower counts for a lot. I think I can brush my teeth today. I have written a blog, which seemed beyond me.

Now I need to learn how to build rooms for other people's pain and lock the doors on them until I need or must get into them.

Fractures

Taman Vanscoy's You Forgot to Leave Me

Fellow Sagitarians might enjoy today's iGoogle horrorscope [sic]:

"Although you might be stressed from a variety of relationship situations, they are showing you a path back to your own issues. It could appear that someone is trying to push you around or maybe you are playing the role of the tough guy. Either way, go the extra mile to define your boundaries -- and then stick to them."

Do relationships ever lead anywhere except back to our own "issues"? I mean, once the heroin-aspect of a new best friend or lover has waned. Still, I've been thinking about this boundary-thing & how it gets messed up so easily. I told the Good Doctor Miller that I have no sense of self in relationships. If someone likes me, I'm likeable. If someone doesn't like me, I'm unlikeable. If one person likes me & another person doesn't like me, I'll side with unlikeable.

Lately these "issues" have made me positively hermitic. No one in my little world to like or dislike me. Which is where food can so easily come in -- it both likes & dislikes me.

I'm about to leave for five days with the Aged P's in lovely suburban Phoenix, 110 degrees & they essentially don't leave home these days. For 48 summers, my parents meant Flathead Lake, the 90-minute drive through farmlands with the Mission Mountains peeping beyond, then the big climb that crests with the Missions above St. Ignatius blue as blue & always There. Past Nine Pipe Resevoir, which the painting I've skeletonized reminds me of & the last shot to the moment the family still plays "I See the Lake!" Ask anyone in my family what is the quintessential moment that says Montana to them & it's that first sight of Flathead in the crotch of the dry hills above Polson.

No more, alas, but my mind & heart turn to Montana this time of year & just as quickly I have to turn them the other way. It's gone for me. No home to return to. The Lake would betray me by being an unreliable destination.

I've also been thinking about self-esteem & how that IS these "boundaries" everyone likes to bandy about on Oprah & Dr. Phil & wherever else we turn to watch people worse off but essentially a lot like us. It comes mostly from the everyday obligations -- I walk my dogs well: check. I eat correctly: check. I write -- especially that: check. I do the dishes & pay bills & take a shower: check. Try to do a good turn: check.

Basics. Good places to lean on in hard times. Next week I'll be unpacking dusty boxes from Montana & furtively throwing out photos & books & whatnot. I want very much to do this without going apeshit with food or frustration with my parents. Self-esteem from esteemable actions.

It's also occuring to me that I'm going to have to challenge myself & soon. I don't know how but I need to do a New Thing, a Hard Thing. Out of the comfort zone. Into the pixilated marshes of uncertainty & the quicksand-shore of the first steps of mastering lessons. What I'd MOST like to do is canoe the Yellowstone River around Pompey's Pillar. I want to push HARD against the prison bars that are not boundaries, push harder than the dating thing or the going to the movies thing.

Something that's mine alone.

Or maybe mine & Daisy's.