Circling the Wagons

It is a Thursday in August, 2022. On Facebook, a fellow therapist laments how stuck she feels when teen and young adult clients describe how stuck they feel. Between COVID, Monkeypox, global warming, the war in Ukraine, and political polarization, it is easy to lose hope. I am fifty-eight, and I resonate. I am grateful I didn’t have children. I think I would feel incredible guilt, inviting an innocent to this particular party.

The comments include reminders that the history of humanity is filled with war and pestilence. What we are experiencing is not new. What is new is the relative ease that many of us - especially the more privileged among us - have experienced since the 1940s. Comfort and security have felt like a birthright to those of us blessed with the random luck of pale skin color, secure economic status, affordable education - the random good luck of being born into a time of relative peace and prosperity.

The flip side of this gift is inexperience with bigger struggles. We don’t know how to manage as the system we have relied on reveals its weaknesses under the weight of multiple burdens. My sister, in her sixties, is incensed that it takes a month to see a podiatrist, though cognitively, she understands that the medical field is facing a mass exodus. 

Doctors, nurses, and admin staff are cutting back to part-time or leaving their jobs altogether as the increased need for care intersects with the burnout that managed care created long before there was COVID-19. Add to this concerns over personal safety - evidence now suggests that multiple infections with COVID-19 increase the risk for long term damage to vital organs like the lungs, heart, and brain. It’s a wonder that anyone wants to continue working in patient care.

Prices are on the rise as the cost of fuel and basic staples like wheat are impacted by Russia's attack on Ukraine. The media, in its 24-7 attempt to stir ratings-boosting anxiety keeps us on alert for recession, for the next strain of COVID, for the wildfires that, in the western U.S. we await like terrible relatives that visit every summer. You know things are bad when killer bees no longer make the top five terrible things happening in the world.

Bad things always happen. It’s just that now, we know about them instantly and insistently because we are plugged into an algorithm that’s one objective is to keep us plugged in. Anxiety makes us pay attention. But it also leaves us feeling powerless. I am not going to fix the medical model that’s broken. I am not going to broker peace with Putin. I can’t even get my crazy neighbor to stop ranting on NextDoor. But I can take NextDoor off my phone. And Twitter and FaceBook and every other platform that invites doom scrolling. 

I can “circle the wagons.” I’d like to find a metaphor that isn’t quite so anti-Native American. But for now, this is what my post-COVID brain-fog brain can come up with. For most of history, humans knew how to respond to adversity because adversity was normal. We expected food shortages, and prepared by canning, drying, and storing staples for long winters and dry spells. We expected dangers from wild animals we had not yet destroyed, not to mention native peoples we had not yet destroyed. So we circled the wagons, creating a makeshift barrier against danger. We made a campfire in the middle and came together with shared food and stories and songs. Someone kept watch so others could sleep. Then the favor was returned.

Today, I circle my wagons by spending time with friends who know how to laugh in spite of the insanity we face. We don’t talk about the shit-show, or if we do, we catch ourselves and stop the talk before we dive in too deeply. We empower each other, sharing ways to make a real difference - organizations that we can fund or help through volunteering - to make life a little better for others. 

We tell each other stories and find stories on Netflix and Newsweek to make us laugh, to find hope, to discover so much good news happening, right alongside the crap. On Facebook, the therapist community rallies in support. You are not alone. And the enemies at the end of the firelight are mostly living beings like you, doing their best to survive. Maybe when all of this shakes out, the kids who now despair will tell their own children, this needed to happen so we could see all the ways our systems were already broken. It was scary. It was hard. But the world is a better place because our pain forced us to change. That’s my hope. In the meantime, I am circling the wagons.

Perfectly Arranged - a Eulogy for my Mother

So many of us have a hard time asking for help. A lack of skill, a pair of arthritic hands stymied by the vicissitudes of pickle jars, a bout of flu or any of the zillion other limitations we all face can evoke dread, dread that we might inconvenience someone. If you are not burdened with this affliction - the fear, nay phobia, of burdening others, count yourself lucky. 

Those of us so afflicted, I am certain, have good reason, even if that reason seems unreasonable now, as adults. It’s the outcome of being a child born to people who were daunted or distracted, themselves saddled with a host of unmet needs. I know this first hand. Needing help as a kid was a risky prospect. My parents were irritable, impatient, and checked out. This is the trifecta of emotional neglect. Today, we would say they were emotionally immature. 

We were not visibly abused. Yes, my older sisters were spanked. This was considered normal in mid-century America. Many of my friends were too. My parents prided themselves on learning they shouldn’t spank and, lucky for me, stopping before I came along. But I only had one friend who was hit with a belt (that I know of). Everyone else got a swat or two, feeling more the sting of shame than physical pain. It could have been worse. And yet, it was bad enough.

We three girls were depressed. We had eating disorders. We were afraid to follow through on an interest in the violin or a gift for sketching. We were certain we were not talented or smart. If we were, wouldn’t we have held our parents’ interest? Little did we know that our parents were both depressed and had eating disorders too. No one called it that. They just dieted. All the time. Especially mom. They just drank. All the time. Especially dad.

We had a nice house, filled with beautiful things. From around the age of nine, I spent my summers antiquing with my mother. This meant long drives from the Fairfax area of LA, to Saugus, all the way past Six Flags Magic Mountain, my eyes lingering on the rides as we passed, till my neck could turn no further. Our destination, a warehouse of old furniture, tools, utensils, brick-brack and knick-knacks, the detritus of other people’s lives. 

My mother had a giant ford station wagon with faux wood panels. This was when automatic cars shifted at the steering wheel, so the front seat and back were both bench seats made of slippery vinyl. When my dad drove, I might nestle under his right shoulder, his left hand, more than capable of handling the automatic steering. My mother was not one for nestling. In the sweaty summers, wearing shorts, my legs stuck to those seats. I can remember the distinctive sound of my legs, peeling away from the vinyl. 

We went to those sales, sorting through heaps of used furniture. My mother pointed out what to look for - pieces with intricate carving, nothing broken beyond minor repair. Often, the only thing wrong with these pieces was that someone had painted them, hiding the grain of walnut, oak, or mahogany beneath. We looked at silver too, discovering lovely, but tarnished serving pieces, each one a work of art, engraved or carved, a ladle, voluptuous with curves, a cake server, prim and lacy. She liked things I later learned were called conversation pieces - a cast iron boot jack, for example - this one shaped like a naked woman with her legs spread. There’s one for sale on eBay right now for $150. She probably got hers for a buck. She giggled when people inquired. She liked being a little naughty, a little audacious.

My mother took the silver servers home in the back of the station wagon, along with a rocking chair or a dresser. Little by little, she filled our house with antiques. For the first few years of her collecting, she refinished pieces herself. As a kid, I never thought to wonder about this. It never dawned on me that my mom was unusual. I never wondered what other kids' moms did. I didn’t really think much about moms at all. Adults felt like aliens. Aliens we had to obey. 

By the time I was 11 or 12 and my sisters were out of the house, living with boyfriends, my mother had taught me how to refinish furniture - an art I’ve since forgotten. I remember hot days in the backyard, gloved hands, the smell of paint stripper. This was how I learned that I hate sanding, which is probably why I gave up on furniture rescue and learned to love Ikea. She would work on one piece, I on another. She was never the kind of mom who sat on the floor and played Candyland or Legos. If I wanted her company (and I did), I had to wait till I was old enough to play her favorite games: fixing up old stuff and decorating the house. Then we could hang out. 

Thus, my mother filled our house with antiques she found on the cheap, refinished and proudly displayed. Eventually, she found a dining buffet table where she kept all those silver serving pieces, brought to a gleaming shine with a touch of elbow grease - often mine. No one else I knew had stuff like this. People came to our house and marveled. Some were impressed. Some were cowed. 

In college I brought a very cute, very sweet boy home. After making out with him on the fancy living room sofa, he realized he’d stepped in dog poop and tracked a little inside, onto my mother’s gleaming wood floor and oriental rug. He was mortified. He helped me clean up and then disappeared - like off the face of the earth. I never heard from him again. He never returned my calls. Would that have been the case if we lived in a regular house with linoleum flooring and plain old carpet? 

My father attributed her need for this finery to growing up on the east coast. Now I know it was a driven need embedded in the Jewish psyche: classism rooted in ethnic self-hatred rooted in trauma. The magical belief that money can fix whatever is too Jewish, too shtetl, synonymous with backward and loud and irritating and uncouth and all the other words that mean contemptuous and shameful. I remember hearing the term “social climber” and realizing, Oh, that’s my mom! I had no idea that her unending need for admiration arose out of shame. Her four grandparents all fled Europe in the wake of violent antisemitism. Her mother used to tell the story of being admonished as a little girl to be a real American. This was the country that saved them from Hitler and the Cossacks. It was dangerous to be a Jew.

I don’t know what my family lost in their flight to safety. Maybe it was fine antiques and silver. I doubt it. My mother found herself, once, in possession of a letter from a not-too-distant ancestor. A great, great uncle I think, writing to his brother in America, begging for money, the hardship described in his Yiddish hand, now faded and yellowed. I remember my mother being fascinated, but without empathy. It was as if she was above him, disconnected, as though watching a movie. Yet, she took the time to have my dad translate the letter. She was curious, but more like she wanted to have a story to tell, something that would get a reaction, something that would make her interesting; not something she was interested in out of concern for a family member struggling to survive. I don’t know if that uncle ever got the help he needed. How terrifying to be destitute in a land where you are treated like vermin to be eradicated.

Did my mother even like the work of refinishing furniture? When she could afford to have someone else do it, she stopped. But maybe I have it backwards. Maybe she loved it once and got tired of it, the wear and tear on her body, the chemicals and dust. We never thought to use masks. We were outside. But still.

It’s probably both. She loved it once and then didn't. She had been an art student before getting married. She had an amazing eye. She put the house together and herself together like an artist. Of course, I see now that the house and her body were the only canvases available to her for several decades, till she finally let herself paint again.

I am sure it was fun. Shopping, antiquing, getting ready for parties, these were the times my mom was actually present. She might be stressed. After all, these activities were all about putting on a show. Antiques set the stage. Her clothes were her costumes. The parties were the performances. This is what she loved to do. It was how she felt seen, wanted, special. It was when she came alive. It would have pleased her grandfather, I think, to see her fulfill the promise of the new country, to see her safe from the danger he fled.

I think she felt a little bit special for a very short time with her dad. But his attention was fleeting. Her little brother came along, supplanting her. He was the darling, the boy who shared with dad a love of Corvettes and fishing boats. They were men together in a world where women were just a skosh more visible than wallpaper, there to nurture and serve.

My mother described her own mother as a spoiled child. The youngest girl of 12 kids. Raised, for the most part, by her oldest sister, my great aunt Betty. That’s a weird story, right there. But apparently not uncommon. My great grandfather had 9 kids with his first wife and 3 kids with his second - her sister. 

This is what happens when you’re a Jewish immigrant circa 1900. There is isolation in relocation. Imagine that loneliness before there were even telephones! Then add on being different and speaking with a thick accent. Tack on the belief that Jews are cheats, stingy and untrustworthy. Oh, and don’t forget that whole thing about Jews killing Jesus. 

Great grandpa must have been overwhelmed with all those kids and no help. And where would he even meet someone without J-Date? So, he telegrammed the Rebbe back in the shtetl, and Bim! Bam! his wife’s sister is on a boat. On her way to America. Where she’s going to raise her sister’s nine kids. And then have three more with her dead sister’s husband. 

What was she thinking on all those long days and nights on that ship? Woo hoo! I am out of that stinking shtetl with those fucking progroms! Screw your ethnic cleansing, baby, I’m outta here. I get to travel! Third class on a ship just like the Titanic where all those people died. But at least I will get to see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. 

And then I will wash clothes and cook and clean meal after meal, plate after plate, for 13, then 14, then 15, and in the end 16 people. I will buy food and clothes and shoes for all those mouths and bodies and feet, dealing with new anti-Semitic strangers, now in a foreign language. 

And I will do this till I drop dead like my sister. Woo hoo!

No wonder my grandmother was insecure, demanding, and childish. Her mother had no time to care for her. The only people available to take care of her were also children, her siblings, with all of their own unmet needs, children of trauma. Clearly, needing help has been a risk in my family for generations, especially for the girls. Women helped. They didn’t need help. They helped until they died. 

How amazing then, for my mother to go to art school. Otis Parsons. It meant nothing to me on the rare occasions when she talked about it. No wonder she didn’t tell me more. But also, no wonder I never asked. She never showed me how to take interest in others. Her interest in me was limited to keeping me alive and trying to keep me thin. The latter with the mixed result of having a perpetually hungry and sad little girl who deified donuts. Then later, a teenager who maintained a tiny waist on a strict regimen of:

• Sleep all day so you’re not hungry.

• Then eat a sensible dinner with the family. 

• Then take a brisk, after-dinner walk to the corner store to buy one of everything Hostess ever made, vowing to eat just one, the ho ho, just nibbling the icing off the edges, just dipping the tip of the tongue into the cream filled center (it’s not for nothing they were called ho hos). 

• Then, fuck it, devowering the whole bag of treats walking home, followed by turning on the bathroom tap to mask the sound of vomiting, sticking my fingers down my throat and flushing what I’d just eating down the toilet. 

It worked. Till it didn’t. But that is a different story. 

It’s hard to need help from someone who comes from such a long line of people, especially women, starved to have their own needs met. No wonder she was always irritable, always in her own head, always straightening and tidying and making sure that everything looked perfect. Late in life, a doctor diagnosed her with anxiety. She was furious. She fired him. For months after, she squawked, “I am not anxious!” ruffling her feathers like an indignant bird.

By the time I was in college, she had shed all the friends she’d entertained when we were kids. Most moved away from the neighborhood as their kids went off to start their own lives. Her new friends were wealthier, as was she. Their houses displayed the same kind of antiques and art as ours, though likely purchased or handed down rather than scavenged. They drank expensive wine and kept their booze in cut crystal decanters. They voted republican and cranked out plumes of smoggy disdain for the unwashed masses - my great grandfather’s type, with his sister-wives and twelve kids. 

If I was home when she hosted a dinner, I would be summoned into the living room where she could display my lithe, elfin body to the approving gaze of her friends (Thanks, bulimia!). I might be called on to recite a poem I’d written or discuss what I was learning at UCLA. Now, with the distance of decades, I can imagine my mother, the artist, whose trajectory was disrupted by marriage and family, finally getting the attention she craved - dare I say needed - with her perfectly arranged home, her perfectly arranged meal, and her perfectly arranged daughter.

A Little Bit of William Shakespeare

I have been listening to Bill Bryson’s tome, A Brief History of Nearly Everything. I’ve had the book in my queue a long time, and started it a few years ago, excited by the opening chapters’ optimism, the reflection on how lucky any of us are to be here at all, that each of our ancestors, all the way back to the single celled mother we all share, somehow survived, found sustenance, weathered hurricanes and earthquakes, avoided predation, especially that of humans and nations bent on war, and ultimately reproduced, over and over until there was a you and a me.

Then, for reasons I can’t remember, I put the book aside and read other things. I cleaned my house listening to fiction or music. I went to the gym and watched YouTube videos on sewing or home repairs. Whatever. I got side tracked. And then last week I needed a book that I could read before bed, something that wouldn’t keep me up, wondering what comes next and having to read just one more page, one more chapter, leading to one more day of sleep deprivation. So I scanned my app for unread things and rediscovered A Brief History. I’m so glad I did.

I’ve just finished the part about atoms, how they are mostly space, and yet create the magnificent illusion of matter. Even more wonderful, the idea that atoms last for eons, endlessly recycling themselves, a wooden chair for a few hundred years eventually ends up a tree again. A particle of stardust finds its way back home as a bolt on a SpaceX rocket. Or as Bryson remarks, a bit of William Shakespeare lives on in you and in me.

The implication of this resonates with Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, No Death, No Fear. Like waves on the ocean we arise and fall. We come into being and we go out of being. But, the ocean itself remains. In a few millennia, parts of you and parts of me will exist in some other form - a tree, a book, if there are still such things - a brilliant physicist, if there are still such things.

Of course, there is the small matter of our consciousness, that thing our atoms somehow manufacture that never wants to die. Even the suicidal among us usually don’t want death as much as a reprieve from pain, to kill off the thing that hurts, almost inadvertently becoming collateral damage in the process. 

Perhaps all that space between neutrons and electrons and protons is where the soul resides. Maybe the soul is a fabrication of our collective imagination. Maybe it’s just the name we give to the awareness that we are - the atom become aware of itself in our current incarnation. Maybe that’s our sole purpose, a vehicle of these tiny particles, longing to know themselves. More likely, that is just me, anthropomorphizing. 

Where am I going with all of this? I have no idea. I am merely musing. Perhaps I should look for a way of wrapping up these ideas neatly. But maybe not knowing is just a fine place to sit. After all, even Bryson only covers Nearly Everything. Besides, I have guests tonight, and I need to vacuum up a kajillion atoms of dust and cat hair that were once William Shakespeare and Gengis Khan.

Body Image at 57

After a childhood of intensive, mother-supervised weight control and a self-imposed eating disorder through my teens and twenties, I let go of anything remotely resembling a diet when I was thirty-one. Food restriction had become more and more difficult as my appetite asserted itself anyway. So it wasn’t like dieting or even the last vestiges of bulimia were keeping me thin. 

Then, in graduate school, I took a class on working with eating disordered clients. I was blown away by a concept I had never heard about before: body positivity. This was 1998, and no one was talking about body acceptance or fat acceptance in the mainstream. It was a radical idea that I was ready to embrace, though it would take me several more years to really feel good enough in my round and ripply body. 

After decades of early messaging from my family - all of whom carried deep body shame and dieted obsessively - it took a lot of work to let go of my own shame. Add to this the media messages we are all surrounded by, subtle and overt, that tell us thinness is a key that opens the best social and professional doors, and I was, like so many women, programmed to see my fat stores as a terrible problem to be managed, and ideally eradicated. 

Reprogramming myself took daily repetition of new messages, vowing to love myself, to stand up for myself, to give myself a life I loved, and to stop behaving like I’d committed a crime by feeding myself. The punishment I had endured for this crime? Heaps of garbage on my head in the form of self judgment that stopped me from creating the life I wanted, believing it was impossible for a fat person to have that life.

The fear of fat still permeates media and culture. Thank goodness there is now also a growing number of voices that counter the shaming messaging. We have wise, funny, smart women like Roxane Gay and Lindy West talking openly about accepting themselves and countering fat-prejudice. Yay!

With time, I have learned that it really doesn’t matter what I look like. I have an amazing life, a kind husband, great friendships, a fulfilling career, and joyful hobbies. When I learned to love and accept myself unconditionally, the people around me took my cue and did the same. The few judgy folks who could not, fell away, making room for better, truer friends. 

When I decided to change my diet and work on my fitness, it was no longer with the aim of changing my body - at least not changing it to meet some external standard of beauty. At fifty, I lost a promised inheritance, money I had counted on to help me through when I was old and, possibly, infirm. Without that safety net and without children who might step in, becoming infirm suddenly felt much more frightening. I already had widespread arthritis. It suddenly felt important to do whatever I could to stay strong, flexible and mobile. Women in my family tend to live long. I don’t want to spend decades at the end of my life unable to care for myself. So I went vegan.

My first years as a vegan were incredibly fun. I had always been a good cook. Now I was learning some food science, following the lead of other vegans who were making cheese from nuts and cake using the liquid from canned beans to replace eggs. If I get another lifetime after this one, I would like to be a food scientist. But, I still had pain. I started reading How Not to Die by Dr. Michael Gregor, and was stunned to learn more about the relationship between food and arthritis. I realized I needed to do more than let go of animal products. I had to stop eating processed and refined foods too. I figured, I would try it out for a few weeks and see how I felt. 

Putting my cooking skills to use, I learned to make delicious food without oil. I substituted miso paste for salt and dates for sugar. I started eating mostly whole foods - intact wheat, rye and oat grains instead of flour-based foods like bread and pasta. I let go of the fake meats and cheeses that have become popular in the past few years. 

Without any intention of losing weight, my clothes started getting loose. I went down two sizes in six months and then stabilized. I haven't had a scale in decades. My doctor knows what I weigh. That’s good enough for me. My priority is my knees and hips and lower back - all of which had been achy and stiff for years. I discovered that I could hike longer and farther. I could climb steeper trails. My balance felt more stable. Because I love being out in nature, I was ecstatic. I could spend hours wandering outside now, watching birds and taking pictures of flowers and trees and stunning vistas. 

Here’s what I know at 57 that I didn’t and couldn’t know any younger. I could not care less whether anyone finds my body attractive. What I love is feeling strong, knowing I have a body I can trust to take me where I want to go. I love knowing that if I have to crawl under the sink and take apart the pipes to find a clog, I won’t end up in bed the next day, too sore to move. I love laying in bed in the morning, feeling the muscles under my softening, slackening skin. 

I have a vision of myself at 97, dying peacefully in my sleep, maybe the day after taking a long walk in the woods, maybe after eating a big batch of the amazeballs lemon bars I make with oats and dates and chia seeds, a big, satisfied smile on my face.

Invitation to the Insurrection

“Joy doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection.” – Rebecca Solnit

Last week, I gathered up my poet friends and we met online to share work and offer ideas, tightening up a line, unmixing a metaphor. It’s not unusual for a theme to emerge when we meet, though we don’t choose one in advance. This time, as we all sat with heavy hearts over the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our hearts already weighted with pain over the injustices we witness daily - people of color, still being terrorized and killed for the crime of having darker skin; women, still being commodified and stripped of rights; children robbed of basic knowledge as science is devalued, even as we worship technology; the earth, literally burning as wildfire ravages the land and embers burn, even under snow.

Our poems reflected the tension in the air, the sense of helplessness as each item we recycle feels like such a tiny drop in an endless ocean. And yet, each poem had a turn toward joy. Each of us managed to unearth gladness, often for something small, yet powerful - images of hope, compassion, and tenderness; finding the beauty in leaves that fall too soon; the delight of using the hem of a shirt as a napkin, knowing that’s one less paper towel thrown away. 
Commenting on our work, Jeff, a poet who is also a pastor, offered solace, paraphrasing Rebecca Solnit’s quote above, reminding us that finding joy in these times is an act of rebellion against tyranny, oppression, ignorance, and greed. Then, riffing off this idea, Alison, in pithy glory proclaimed, “We are joy Insurrectionists!” In the days that have followed, I have been rolling this notion of joy insurrection around in my head. 

I have little, fetal ideas about creating a non-profit with the aim of building an army of joy insurrectionists. I don’t know if I have the wherewithal to make this happen. But I am enjoying the fantasies in my head, imagining an online group where we share art, music, comedy, writings, videos and stories that foster joy. I would love to be part of a Joy Insurrection Choir where we sing songs that inspire awe and laughter. I want to make tee-shirts and mugs that say, “Joy Insurrection! Fighting evil with laughter, beauty and mischief.” I want to find a way to monetize all this, not for profit, but to fund the work of people who can save the planet. I want to fund education for kids who will take back power from the forces of ignorance and repression and use that power to create peace and a sustainable home for all the living things here on earth.

If this is something you would like to do too, join me. This is your invitation to the insurrection.