Writing up Eliza's interview yesterday started me thinking--again about how to handle our are dark fantasies and ambivalent feelings. I found this meditation that I wrote when K was a baby. I'm so glad Eliza is my friend because her calmness and quiet sense of humor teach me how to move through the world without hurting myself or anyone else. Here is another approach, much less cool and philosophical than Liza's...
Yeah. I’m so angry, sometimes, I realize I’ve stopped breathing.
And, in terms of what makes me angry,
Take your pick!
-The fact that there are more than ten Americans that take Sarah Palin seriously; that just because she didn’t fall apart during her debate with Joe Biden means it was a SUCCESS, is unnerving and infuriating.
-Some people’s attitude toward breast-feeding and how they think I’m a hippy freak and I’m doing my son DAMAGE because I have nursed him longer than a year. Best quote from a family member:
“Maybe if you weaned him, you could pull yourself together.”
-My son who is two and a half still can’t quite sleep through the night. YEAH! Maybe a few days a week, he’ll only wake up once. But mostly, he wakes up two or three times. Last night, I was up with him five times.
*Even though I getting along really well with the father of my child, every now and then though, we disagree about parenting decisions and he will want a dossier submitted about why I introduced yogurt into the baby’s diet at 10 months.
And now I have to smile and be polite. Because I don’t want my son to have issues with his father. And I know I need to just stand back, hands up in the air so as not to touch or opinionate my son’s relationship with his father. Even if he asks bonehead questions about baby’s diet.
That said, there is a corner of my big Mama’s brain, that knows it is good that he asks because it means he cares.) Mostly, I’m salty that I have to explain myself when I would never do anything that doesn’t my child thriving everyday of his life. Yes, it’s the explanation that annoys and insults me. And, remember, I’m a tad overtired, so writing a cogent description of the benefits of local yogurt for babies, feels impossible and most likely I will have to skip a shower to write this.
And so… I give him updates on my baby as though I care what he thinks.
It’s the acting gig of my life.
Because of all this and much more,
I need another Chocolate Chip cookie the size of my head.
You see, if I eat enough cookies,I won’t lose the last 20 lbs from the high net gain of the pregnancy and I can be Invisible to men I might be attracted to.
This is good.
Because
I haven’t shown the very best judgment in terms of my choices of boyfriends.
So I’m dating cookies.
Even after the cookies and maybe some cookie dough, I'm still breathless and angry BUT
I can’t talk about it or act upon it. Because...
While Sarah Palin is a joke AND dumb( I think my favorite blooper was not knowing Africa was a continent), I can’t prevent her from running and, even writing about her here won’t prevent her from becoming a leader in our country. Because this is a DEMOCRACY.
I can’t say a thing to the family member who said: “maybe if you stopped nursing, you could pull yourself together.” Boy, every time I think of that one it blows my mind. Sort of a global insult. It means: you are too fat and you are making a scene nursing all the time and it's bad for the baby( maybe just like that strange white yogurt). Huh? But I can’t SAY anything to this person, because while she said this, she was folding my laundry, after just cleaning my kitchen and was about to go and do the marketing. Gotta keep my lips zipped.
I can’t tell K, my son, how I really feel because of aforementioned protection of his relationship with his father. AND because dad pitches in with child support with not a peep of complaints and when he sees his son, he is present and loving to him.
I can’t tell my son,for instance:
“ Your dad asks these questions about what I feed you to compensate for the fact that he doesn’t really want to be in the trenches with all the mess. For instance,once, when your father spent the night at our house, and in the morning, the toilet got blocked and flooded the bathroom and hallway and he didn’t get out of bed to help clean up. And when I said I didn’t have a plunger, he said, “Oh, well, I’m going to go home. Because I’m going to have to go to the bathroom soon. So. Bye.
Not so big on the helping-with-messy-messes, your dad. I hope when you grow up you pitch in and buy a plunger.”
But no way can I say that! Because that really would interrupt my kid getting to know his other parent. And, anyway, he will know soon enough.
And sometimes, with my friends, I give into the roiling, enraged monologues that run through my brain. And, the good people that my friends and family are, they listen. But very soon, their eyes glaze over. They have heard this before. And they sometimes, if they are tired too, they roll their eyes. Also it's a bit like describing in vivid detail the side-effects of chemo-therapy. People want to ask, to be polite, but they don't want the graphic detail of the color of your bile. Same with single parenting; people ask how it's going, to be polite but they don't want to hear how hard it is to be on taking care of a tiny human 24/7. They don't want to hear about the tears because the baby won't sleep for more than 3 hours at a time...for two years.
Because, they can’t take it in. And I don’t know where to put my ire.
So, I have to pretend that I’m not livid which is,
I am fairly certain,
HOW PEOPLE GET CANCER!
I’m not the one who is supposed to get cancer.
The bad people in the world are supposed to get cancer! The pedofiles, the murderers, the embezzlers, the people-who-consciously-make-other-people’s-lives-worse are the ones who should get cancer!
They can go through the fear and the assessment of their wasted lives; then they can go through the chemo alone and maybe make one real friend-maybe a saintly nurse-, and see they want to do GOOD with their life and whether they die or survive the cancer, they turn themselves around and no longer behave in a hurtful, selfish way.
Just like Darth Vader.( He saved Luke’s life. Died a good guy Jedi.)
THOSE are the people who should get ugly, nasty sick. Those bad, bad people who hurt others. They should nearly die or even die and leave the world a better place.
Whoa, those are some dark thought.
Yeah, I’m still full of dark thoughts.
(sigh)
And what if…
Having such dark thoughts…
Just thinking them( and writing them down)
Could give you…
CANCER!
Shit. I think you CAN get cancer like this!
Double shit.
I can't get cancer! Who would give my son his yogurt so the bacteria in his gut will be balanced when he tries new foods?
How do I get rid of the darkness?
Julia Cameron, author of “The Artists’ Way,” is right.
Anger IS fuel.
But what happens if you don’t or CAN’T burn that fuel?
Huh? What happens?
What happens if the fuel just sits there? In your gut, in your heart, in you spirit and isn’t combusted??
Exactly.
POISON!
Or, or, or, or…
That unused fuel, that un-combusted aggression, energy becomes…
A BOMB.
A bomb waiting to explode and kill innocent bystanders.
I don’t want to be a bomb.
I want to be a superlative mom.
(And a brilliant, successful, lucrative writer, but I don’t want to look greedy.)
And, so to avoid my inner bomb, exploding into the regular world,I need to…
I have to…
FORGIVE.
Oh my God! What a pain in my ass!
Like I don’t have ENOUGH to do!
-Being a mother AND a Father to my baby!
-Feeding both of us. And I’m the angry, stress eater, remember? so that’s a lot of food prep.
-Doing the laundry(NOT in my apartment; down four flights of stairs)(except when the nice family member does it; but she lives out of town, OK? So, back off.)
-Washing the dishes.
-Keeping the house picked up so that when K. grows up he won’t retaliate against my cluttered living and become anal retentive or OCD. And then blame me.
-And, from time to time, I have to bathe, not to mention wash my hair.
-And on TOP of All THAT I have to forgive Sarah Palin for being ignorant and a horrible role model for women. I have to forgive this do-gooding family member because they really just love me. (But they would love me more if I were thinner.and I didn't nurse my baby in public.) And I have to forgive K’s father for asking too many questions about YOGURT!
AHHH!
I know! I know. I know.
I can’t be FREEEEEE
Unless I forgive
Blah, Blah, Blah!
I’ll be able to run faster, breathe deeper, write better, find a kick-ass publisher quicker, lose 20 pounds in days—and keep it off, and LEAP tall buildings…
If I Forgivvvvvvve
OK, I need to go to a workshop on Forgiveness.
I’d love to chat with Pema Chödrön. She is a Tibetan Buddhist Nun who teaches stuff like this.
She teaches the practice of Tonglen:
What you do, (well, make sure you are breathing, for starters…) is you breathe in all the gross bad stuff
So, bad feelings, dark thoughts, murder plots, growling, drooling, inarticulate vitriol. BREATHE that IN! Take it IN. Rather than push it away. And don’t panic.
I KNOW! It’s really hard
and counterintuitive!
THEN when you exhale, you send out into the world the antidote, the remedy to the bile, the GOOD stuff.
So, happy thoughts, light, images of chocolate chip cookies, rainbows, images of books(even other people’s books) in bookstores, lavender fields, a paid mortgage, general good stuff.
So, in my case it would be sending out deep breaths, calmness, acceptance and
Not caring if the bad people are dead or alive…
Well… that last part’s not quite right.
It needs some tweeking.
Not so sure that would pass muster with Pema.
Who ELSE does workshops on Forgivness???
OH!
Well…obvious…
Jesus Christ.
Duh!!
The foundation of all Christian Doctrine is forgivness.
Right, Right, Right.
Poor guy. He preaches,‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ and ‘turn the other cheek.’ All of those incredibly difficult and counter-intuitive forgiveness exercises. And then the guy is crucified. Do you know how it works? Slow motion suffocation!
Yeah, speaking of being breathless with anger....
That's got to be at the top of my list for most lonely and harrowing way to die. Yikes.
And then he supposedly now spends eternity forgiving people’s sins.
Yeah… Jesus Christ was a lunatic.
No comments:
Post a Comment