Unpopular Logic

I sometimes feel like I'm all alone in my thinking.  I might just be too sensitive or maybe too serious, though both of those characteristics I cringe at the idea of owning.  Over the years, I have tried to create a version of myself that is silly, irreverent at times and masked with bravado.  I would love to bury my overly serious and sensitive side, but I feel like it raises its ugly head more and more often these days.

For instance?  Charlie Sheen.  See, most people would now be chuckling to themselves… he’s kind of all the worst of a New Orleans Mardi Gras, isn’t he?  Prostitutes, drunken revelry, drunken regrets, invoking the gods, thinking you’re a god… all while riding on top of an overly decorated float surrounded by an entourage of fans who only love you for the goodies you throw their way.  Now while I can certainly see why folks are laughing at him, I cannot be content to do the same.  All I can think about are his kids.  It physically frightens me and I feel incredibly sad for them.  These are real children that didn’t ask for this ‘privileged’ life.  Shoot, the last time I heard of a child requesting their own birth was … um… yeah…

See?  I do this ALL the time.  The television shows and the reality programs that other people seem to not only watch, but enjoy, send me to a level of despair that is nearly intolerable.  I saw a moment of “Wife Swap” back in the day and all I could think was that it was this awful televised version of child abuse.  The kids get a new mom for a week and they are expected to obey her crazy set of new rules?  I’m sorry, what?  Now, I clearly realize that the parents in these cases are twisted to begin with since they would even consider participating in a show like this, but then we just add to these innocent children’s pain.  Here’s a whole new train wreck for you to endure.  Woo hoo.

Off the television (and usually at the grocery store), I watch parents sneering at their children and, between clenched jaws, spewing “Stop.that.right.now.” This is typically followed by my personal favorite “Do you want a spanking?”  I want so badly to go up to these parents and ask them when exactly it was that they stopped loving their kids.  Now I don’t think for a moment that they did stop loving their kids, but if they could just see – through the child’s eyes – how much it looks like they did maybe they’d be a little more respectful.  I mean, could you imagine living in a world where whenever your boss got slightly irritated, he angrily spat at you through his teeth and asked you ridiculous, condescending questions?  If you do live in that world, you should quit that job.  Now. 

On the television, it plays out live and we just watch it.  Or we don’t think about it.  We just watch the drama and ignore the very real reality.  Charlie Sheen has, what, 4 kids?  Each one of them not only gets to experience their personal hell live and in person, but they get it on instant replay to boot. 

I'm speaking from the viewpoint of a daughter of a relatively nice alcoholic.  He never hit me, he didn't have delusions of grandeur, and the pain endured from his alcoholism was mostly from his absence - his retreat into self-medication and sleep.  Still, he didn’t spare me the errant comments.  He didn’t spare me the clenched teeth.  He didn’t spare me the look of absolute hatred and resentment when his gaze fixed on my face.  And he didn’t spare me the memory of them all that I can’t erase no matter how hard I try.  Yet I was lucky, in a way, because my father was a non-celeb.  He didn't go outside much and I didn't have friends over very often.  I only told the friends I trusted about my dad's condition.  Even with that sometimes I'd get it thrown back in my face in a hurtful way, but for the most part I endured my sorrow privately and in the relative safety of a close circle.

I don’t doubt for a minute that's why my heart bleeds for these kids.  I don’t doubt for a minute that’s why every day I take this job of mom so very seriously.  Sure, I’ve slipped.  I’m not perfect either, but I hurry to apologize, to point out that that was a huge mistake on my part, to assure them they weren't to blame for my poor behavior and to never, ever do that again (and really don't).  I believe this is what seems to be lacking with both celebrity and private parents – the self awareness of the influence, the TREMENDOUS influence that we have.

If you can look back on your childhood without recalling a single errant comment that broke your heart; without recalling a time when one of the people that was supposed to love you most in this world, seemed to love you least; then God bless your parents and we need more of them.   If not?  Unfortunately, that makes you kind of normal and maybe you can take a second and consider how damaging those moments really were.  Maybe take another second and consider that no child deserves that damage.  Not Charlie's and not our own.

And while, on the whole, I’m definitely opposed to evangelizing, here I feel maybe more people should come over to my side.  On a personal level, let’s watch our tongues, our affect and our tempers a little more and on a more global scale let's not support televised child abuse, or neglect the kids that are the collateral damage when their parents implode.  I realize we can’t sign a petition to take away Sheen’s kids, for instance, but we can just turn the damn thing OFF.  If we don’t watch, the networks won’t play it – and they certainly won’t make more.  If we don't watch, then maybe the kids can suffer their parents privately - sharing the problems they're enduring with trusted friends rather than the whole judgmental world. 

Sigh… but I think I’m alone here in my unpopular logic.

Joke of the Week

My best friend in Indy recently put up a Facebook post that said “girls are mean” referencing 8th grade girls.  Her friends in the know replied with “Yes they are” and went about commenting on other things. 

I just have to wonder – have we become so accustomed to cruelty that we have come to expect it?  Why are we so mean to each other?

Thinking back to my 9th grade?  I was no exception to the girls Steph described.  A friend and I created a weekly newspaper we called “Love Letters.”  We’d write our reports on heart-shaped sheets of paper stapled together at the top.  That one copy somehow made the rounds not quite as virally as today’s applications, but rather impressively still.  We wrote on who was dating who, featured the ‘couple of the week,’ and titillating break-ups.   That part was all pretty benign.  The part that was so mean was our joke section.  There were the standard funnies that were going around or that we’d heard somewhere and sometimes we'd clip a comic from the Sunday paper, but we always had “The Joke of the Week.”  The mean part was that sometimes that was followed, quite simply, with someone’s name. 

I know why I was the girl that wrote Love Letters and who featured a fellow student as The Joke of the Week.  You see, I’d been The Joke of the Week on more than one occasion.  My mother, who never understood how ‘modern’ girls behaved, often dressed me out of style at best and in my brother’s hand-me-downs at worst.  The clothes were ill-fitting, or unflattering and always too short.  To this day I won’t wear ankle length pants.  I have flashbacks to the teasing as soon as I see my pants fall short of draping over the tops of my shoes.  It really did hurt my feelings and what made it worse was that I didn’t choose it.  I didn’t have a job and couldn’t get one at that age; therefore I had no money and had no control over what I was given to wear.  The teasers, though, never took that into consideration. 

So, in response to my pain, I picked on some poor kid that was socially awkward and made him or her The Joke of the Week.  Did it make me feel better?  I suppose.  It at least put the spotlight on someone else for a while.

I wish I could go back and do that year over again. 

Today I was checking myself a bit.  Do I still do and say hurtful things?  Right off the bat, I realized I have the reflex to be mean to anyone who ever hurts my children.  When the beings I love the most are injured, I just want to lash out and make that other person hurt just as much.  But, here’s the thing.  Even though that seems somewhat justified, what purpose does it serve?  If I apply logic, it fails.  Justice is one thing.  Revenge just perpetuates the problem.  After all, isn’t that the very reason they hurt my kid in the first place?  Someone gets their feelings hurt, they hurt back, that person hurts, they hurt forward…  on and on.

I have always felt that my job as a parent is to get out of the way and let the kids become who they inherently are.  My job isn’t to ensure they become a doctor, lawyer, or head cheerleader.  My job isn’t to lord over their homework and lock in those good grades.  My job is simply toward their character.  They are under my guidance to become kind, gracious and compassionate humans.  If they fail at that, I have failed. 

When I have to explain to Dia that something she did wasn’t kind, I always remind her that we don’t need any more hate in this world.  There are enough bad guys to last us.  This world needs love and the best we can do is provide that, one person at a time. 

Advice from the Lovelorn

I have this theory that relationships are like wallpaper. 

We have a room - say the kitchen - and it needs ... "something."  We look, and think, and consider, and look some more and then?  We find it.  The perfect wallpaper.  We spend hours putting it up, smoothing it out, cursing over the inconvenience but knowing it is so very, very worth it.  We spend the next few months smiling every time we walk into that room.  "This is so right" we think contentedly. 
Eventually, though, we stop really seeing the wallpaper.  It just becomes part of the room.  Its place is appropriate and welcomed, but we don't really notice it anymore.  Then it gets a few stains, or starts peeling in a corner and we notice but we just leave it.  No time, you know?  Pretty soon, it's looking drab, dirty and that corner is really starting to come loose.  We know we should take the time to fix it, but - later.  Maybe we even put it on our 'to-do' list.  But life and everything else takes priority and we never get around to it until it's really so bad that we have no choice but to strip it altogether and start over or be forced to live around the true eyesore it's now become.

I shared this theory with my last two significant others but, obviously, to no avail.  In one case, it didn't prevent me from becoming the wallpaper and in the other, I'm afraid the wallpaper might not have been high enough quality as all attempts to repair it, failed. 

Yet if anyone is wise enough - I ask them to heed this wallpaper advice: Fix it before it's too late. 

You see, I've been experiencing this tremendous feeling of regret lately.  I'm 46 and, in the last almost 5 years, I've had all of about 9 dates with all of about 3 different guys.  Two I met online in a frustrated attempt to get back at my ex for trolling internet dating sites while we were supposed to be in counseling working things out.  Obviously that is the wrong reason to chance upon someone. Still, it led me to a couple of dates with pretty nice guys that just weren't right for me.  The other guy I dated was a very old friend of mine and was one of those cases of trying to create something that wasn't there. 

So probably because I'm a bit lonely, my mind keeps calling back to former relationships and thinking "what was I thinking when I broke up with him?"  This calls back all the way to my first ever boyfriend who is aMAzing and handsome and wonderful and who I should have stayed with barring all costs, but who I threw over foolishly.  We're talking 7th grade, but still.  Now, he's in a completely stable and very happy relationship, so I'm happy it turned out as it did, but darn it did I ever miss my chance there.  My second regret is my next serious boyfriend.  He was a complete doll who, when I called him to break up, drove all the way to Indianapolis from Sacramento non-stop to convince me not to.  We were in a long-distance relationship that had somehow survived over a year despite our relative youth, but after my father died I was just too much of a wreck to deal with the grief after every goodbye.  Ah, excuses....  Fact of the matter is I should have stayed put, but I took the easy way.  I ended up married, and I suppose, exactly where I needed to be as Tim and Cheyanne were results of that detour. 

Obviously that marriage didn't last and on I went to the next set of relationships.  Of them, only two do I truly grieve having lost.  Of the two, one left me so I had no control there.  The other I was just stupid, stupid, stupid to ever let go.  I suppose I had my reasons, but I guarantee they were petty and now I sit with no time or opportunity to pursue active dating; with a less-than-optimal dating pool to dip my feet into should I find the time; and basically having to rely on an act of God to produce my true love.

So, I land here, on my blog today, to give my friends out there some advice from the lovelorn.  Don't replace the wallpaper - Repair it.

I know (though I can hardly be called upon as an expert) how hard it is to live with someone for a very long time.  I know it's hard to call back that feeling of love that you once had.  I know it's easier to look at the stains and the torn corners and to be lulled into a sense of ordinary (perhaps even boredom).  But as someone who has been there and wish she didn't do it - it's worth the time and it's worth the effort.  It's even worth the investment if there needs to be one.  The grass isn't greener.  It's just different grass.

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DISCLAIMER:  This is NOT to say stay in bad relationships.  I have NEVER regretted leaving the two I should have never been in to begin with.  If it makes you cry, hurts (physically or soulfully) or if you get nothing in return, bail out.  It's scary to be alone sometimes, and I for one miss a plus one, but on my worst days it's better than being in either of those relationships. 

I also would like to disclaim that life often detours us in a very correct manner (and there will likely be a blog post on this fairly soon as I've been working on one for awhile).  So, while I wish I'd stayed with my high school long-distance boyfriend, I'm not sure I'd have ended up with the children that I did and that was far more fulfilling to my soul than any man has ever been (no offense to anyone out there). So in reality I probably have no idea what I'm talking about and you can feel free to ignore my advice altogether.

A Wee Bit of Wisdom

I started working out daily again this week.  I got too poor there for awhile and had to put the gym membership on hold and, I guess, got bummed out in general about that.  I came up with excuses not to go for outdoor runs (which is really stupid because I prefer them anyway) and ended up taking too long of a break.  See, the problem is, every time I take a break from running I have to begin again - at least to a certain extent.  That might end up being short runs, but usually I try to go for longer run/walks until I can run the whole way.  Nowadays, however, it ain't that simple.  My stupid foot doesn't like walking long distances and my left knee has decided to turn on me on stairs (or squats).  I suppose it's all part of aging?  (Though my podiatrist claims it's part of running most all of my adult life, but what does he know?)  The funny thing is that nothing hurts when I run.  Not my foot, not my knee.  While I'm running, I'm pain free.  Even afterwards, my foot may bark in the wrong pair of shoes but my knee actually stays happy.  So a break from running actually makes me feel worse.  Now, finally, my brain kicked in (a rare thing) and I decided I had to get the running back on. 

Dia and I have this thing where I write out our 'to do' list for the day and draw little pictures of what we have to do next to the words.  She loves to cross off when we've done them - and she knows which ones to cross off from the pictures.  So everything from chores to playing Hungry-Hungry Hippo go on there.  For the past few days "work-out" has been on the list with a little drawing of a TV and me (sort of) on a mat (sort of) in front of the TV.  It's totally cool because she's all on board with this whole thing and so, every day, we're in front of the TV doing some work out video thanks to On Demand's Fitness TV.  I explained to Dia that I needed to get back in shape generally, but mostly so I could run again.

So today she said something about me being a runner.  I don't remember exactly what elicited it.  I think I went down the stairs faster than her or something and she attributed it to that.  Anyway, my response was "Well, I'm not really a runner right now."

Know what she said to that?  She said:

"You can stop doing what you are for awhile, but you can never stop being what you are."

Wow, child.  Just wow.

I'm Alive!

On January 21, 2002 I died.  It was Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday – or at least the day we celebrated it that year.  It’s a day I will never, ever forget.

In fairness, I was only all the way dead for 18 seconds.  I was undergoing a tilt test prior to a catheter ablation of my heart and it didn’t go so well.  The test began and I remember telling the nurse that I actually felt OK.  A millisecond went by and, then … no, no, actually I was going out.  The next thing I remember was experiencing freezing cold.  I was chattering and shaking and asked the nurse why I was so cold.  She said I had coded and they had to give me epinephrine when they restarted my heart.  “It makes you feel cold” she said.  “Oh, OK.” was my response.  As if that happened every day.

My dear doctor was quite shaken, actually, and went out to report my condition to my mom who was in the waiting room.  “Would she want to continue with the surgery?” he asked her.  Thank God Mom answered quite correctly:  “Yes.”

After a day in the ICU and a few more days in the hospital than originally planned, I came home very much alive and very much intending to stay that way.  Every year since, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday I celebrate my “I’m Alive Day.”  It means more to me than my birthday and Christmas combined.  It is the fourth most important day of my life.

But let me back up a second. 

Way back when I still lived in Indianapolis the left side of my left side went completely numb.  After a horrifying and not recommended-for-anyone test called the EMG, which stands for ExcruciatinglyMegapainfulGram (no, that’s not it – I believe it’s actually called an electromyogram), the docs all decided that I truly had gone numb on the left side of my left side and took me very seriously which meant I went through a barrage of tests and fast.  Each one came back more or less normal and each normal result sent me to another test.  As I was undergoing an ultrasound of my carotid artery, the technician suddenly looked up and asked, quite urgently, if I felt alright.  I did.  Although there was that fluttery feeling I often felt that I thought must be some inefficient form of gas.  While that never ‘resulted’ in anything, I still didn’t really want to share with this perfect stranger that I was having a bout of gas but, since the point was to find out what my body was doing, I did fess up.  He just looked at me like I was out of my gourd and then asked me to wait a moment.  Next thing I know I was being seen by a cardiologist and eventually was referred to Dr. Corey.

You see, I really didn’t have bouts of gas.  I had bouts of my heart racing at about 280 beats per minute.  Dr. Corey couldn’t fix it.  He knew of doctors that could, but felt the risk was too high.  He said there’d be too much scar tissue afterwards even if I made it through the surgery.  The worse news was that my heart could tolerate no more than 5 years more of this activity it was enduring.  If I didn’t die of eventual heart failure, a couple irregular beats would be all it took.  If I died that way, he said, it would be extremely sudden.  The good news was that it wouldn’t hurt at all. 

I never did wrap my brain around that news.  I can’t say that it ever sunk in all the way.  Every time I went back to Dr. Corey for a check-in, it seemed the old ticker was doing great.  I was a runner for God’s sake.  Of course it was doing great.  But that fluttery feeling never ceased.  Now I knew… it wasn’t gas.  It was bad, bad news.
 
Yet inside this bad, bad news was a very strange gift.  Quite literally every day when I woke up, I thought “Cool.  One more.”  It made me treasure all the little things that went unnoticed before.  It made me love the people in my life just that much more.  It also unfortunately honed the bitch in me as I had no tolerance for petty complaints and whining over trivial things.  I wanted to change my career and do something important or dear to me, but I didn’t have the luxury of leaving a good paying position for something more heart-worthy (so to speak).  The thing is, when you are given 5 years you can’t just bail out on life, cash out your life savings and go to Australia on extended holiday.  Not when you are a mom anyway.  I had to keep keeping on and pray for a cure or a miracle.  Yet each day was, quite literally, a gift.  Even on my grumpy days, I knew it and appreciated it.

Life went on.  I moved to California and met Art.  He was an insurance claims adjuster at the time.  When we got serious, I told him about my condition and he felt, quite appropriately, pretty freaked out about it.  He shared my story with a colleague of his and, in a wonderful moment of serendipity, that colleague just so happened to have a daughter with the same condition that just had a surgery by a Cardiac Electrophysiologist and was all better now.  The woman gave Art the name of the doctor up in Oregon who referred us to Dr. Bhandari in L.A.  He saw me Friday January 18th and, after an evaluation, said “I can fix this” with tremendous confidence, described the surgery and planned to schedule it for Monday.  Wow!  It was all so sudden.  I said I’d like the weekend to do some research on it and he said I could do the research, but waiting wasn’t advised because “You are going to die.”  Without missing a beat, I said “Sure, let’s go ahead and schedule that.”  And that’s what we did.

So here I am.  Alive.   And now it’s been 9 years since the surgery.  Nine years.   In those years I haven’t done anything important for society – I haven’t won a prize or been lauded for anything.  Shoot, I even failed at a pretty significant relationship, huh?  I suppose, in the Grand Scheme, I haven’t made a mark.  My living doesn’t really matter.

But it DOES matter.  And so very, very much.

In nine years I would have missed SO much.  The biggest thing obviously is that I wouldn’t have Dia.  No Dia in this world at all?  That would just be tragic.  After that?  Man, I would never have even met so many of my dearest friends.  I would never have gone to Scotland, England and France.  I wouldn’t have seen my daughter walk across the stage for her UCSC graduation.  I wouldn’t have seen Tim make it in his world so successfully. 

I wouldn’t have met the wonderful people my kids are dating.  I wouldn’t have seen the first African-American President of the United States.    And there are a million other moments – parties, holidays, weddings, births, moments of joy or uncontrollable laughter.  I would have missed them all.

The most amazing part of my whole journey is that there was a time in my life that if it hadn’t been for Tim and Cheyanne, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have ended it.   I can’t say for sure, but I know I had places in my life where the mire was deep and some void in me was almost desperate.   In a million years, I could have never done that to my kids, but I know I felt that kind of despair.  I can’t be so dramatic as to say that I was standing on the ledge and Dr. Corey came up to give me a push, but it wasn’t that far off of that.  By the time I saw Dr. Corey I was pretty far from ever feeling like I wanted to leave this earth, but at the same time the news he gave me changed my living.  He gave me my life back.  He gave me the perspective I needed to appreciate this moment, this day – whether it was an ordinary one or even a bad one … well, it was still a day.  That, I learned, was much better than the alternative. 


I share all this, not only as a Thanks Be To God, but also as a message.  I know life brings challenges and sometimes more than any one person should have to endure.  Right now I can think of friends that really have way too much on their plates.  Certainly I wouldn’t try to sell those friends on my Pollyanna Happiness Prescription.  It would be both disrespectful and presumptuous of me.  I know that sometimes it’s just too hard to appreciate what we’ve got, you know – to count our blessings.  When it doesn’t feel like there are blessings to count, what’s the use? 

What I want is for those friends and for anyone who might just be going through a bad couple of days or who haven’t seen their dreams come to fruition yet or who feel this life is just a meandering path leading to nothing much… to all of us humans just trying to catch a break… Well, I’d like to let you in on a little insider info.  Here’s the worst part of knowing you are going to die:  It doesn’t feel like you are dying.  It feels like everyone in your world is dying.  You are losing your parents, your children, your friends, even the people you didn’t much like.  Every single thing in your world is going to be gone. 

At least that’s what it felt like to me. 

When you think about life that way, it changes it.  How would you live today if you knew it was the last day you’d ever see your spouse, or your child, or even your dog?  Well, I found that changed things more than anything else.

So, to all my dear readers and all my dear friends – pick a day.  Any day!  And celebrate it.  Declare it your “I’m Alive Day.”  And if you can't find it in you to celebrate your life, celebrate the people in your life.  Let us be happy just to be alive and spread joy and love!  This, I’m quite certain, is the purpose of life.