Love For Sale

I was a bit silly and I decided ‘just for fun’ to create an account on eHarmony; a friend at work mentioned how many great dates his roommate got from this dating site. Last time I was on a dating service, a few years ago, it was one disastrous first date after another, but I decided I would look into it again, on this ‘other’ site. I hired a matchmaker last spring; she had a May special advertised of two matches for twenty dollars, and I thought, hey I can afford that. So far, no matches and I feel a bit duped, let down.

Well, it seems that there are quite a number of eligible men on eHarmony, trouble is, to join it would cost me a cool couple of hundred bucks for a minimal amount of time. The last site I was on was a small monthly cost, payable each month. This site wants the money, up front. So, it seems that I can’t afford to find a match. Wow, love is for sale, but only if you can afford it. I guess not exactly love, but perhaps the chance, the hope for love. They allow you to sign up, create a profile, and see matches, but no communication ‘til you pay. I guess that’s fair.

So, why did I think of this as silly? Somehow, I am embarrassed at times that I’m single. It’s true. I suppose if I deconstructed all the messages we get about being alone or being in relationship, I’d find plenty of things I’ve internalized about these states. I’m getting tired of trying to find out what I’m thinking, that’s why I want to date--to lose myself in a relationship. I didn’t really say that, OK I did. Honestly, though, sometimes there is something to be said for just living.

I wish I could just have a chalkboard in my brain that would list all the dumb things I’ve internalized that aren’t true about life or myself or people in general and I could just wipe the board clean and start over. How’s that for meaning making? I’m realizing that I’m probably too hard on myself and others, more often than I’d like. Still trying to open my heart chakra.

So, my profile is still up. All the great guys who’ve paid their price can see my profile, and I can see theirs, and I can’t afford to join, so we can’t meet. I’ll take down my profile soon, as it seems sad and strange to leave it up if I’m not joining. Maybe one of these days I’ll meet someone the old-fashioned way, or save up the hundreds it will take me to shop for love. In the meantime, I guess I could learn to be more content, and feel less silly for wanting what I want. Right now, I just can’t justify spending more money on taking a chance on love, and most of my free time is needed for homework. Great.

Hard to Leave

The last time I wrote about going up to Alexandria for a family reunion, I recalled a billboard that said Alexandria was easy to get to and hard to leave. Well I made an overnight trip up to Alex on Sunday, and it was again, easy to get to and hard to leave. I went up last minute to visit my brother Steve in the hospital, he’s been fighting lung and bone cancer and his time is running out. We don’t like to run out of anything, that’s why we have convenience stores, right? Running out of time, though, that is hard, and it’s hard for my brother and all of us. We want to hang on, to slow it down, to stop the days now. But we can’t.

So, the trip up North was a peaceful, if not sad, drive for me. Once I was there with family, it was terribly hard to leave. Even the drive back, coming back into the city was hard on me. I’m not a long-distance driver to begin with, and it’s times like these that it’s hard not to be resentful that I’m single. Like God, if there is one, thinks that I’m just such a tough soul, I can handle anything, alone. Hard to go back to work, as if my whole life isn’t shifting. Hard not to wonder about the meaning of life.

I’m realizing that meaning making is a part of each day. That as we live, we go about finding meaning. Meaning making is shifting for me as I’m learning meditation. Meditation is helping me to slow down, which means that as I’m greedy to make every moment count, I can step back a bit from my greed, and relax.

Meditation can take me, in my grief, a few steps back, to look at the sadness, the numbing sense of loss, and put it in the larger context which is my life. Which is my family of origin, which for me has often been a source of pain and confusion; and give me the ability to also see with clarity, the value my family has of simply being there, for each other in our hard times.

So we gathered, and as I’m home, my family is still gathering in Alexandria. My brother Steve is now at home, on the Lake. My younger brother is flying in from CA, my oldest sister drove five hours last weekend to be there. There are eight of us sibs, and we’re almost all of us taking the time to be there; my brother will not be alone. With eight of us growing up, alone was something we rarely were.

Brain Love

Poets, artists, philosophers have long held that we love from the heart, but I am proposing, without wanting to find all the scientific evidence, that actually we love from our head. Our brains, to be more precise, (if not more scientific). And I’ll tell you how I know; I know this from studying neuroscience. I know this because I absolutely love neuroscience like such a nerd. I can’t wait for new books to come out, I read parts of them and the table of contents on Amazon. I’ve had to tell myself, to calm down, to hold back, to just wait, read a little manga or something light, something fun, for a while. But the field of neuroscience is burgeoning, and I can’t keep up.

Then it dawned on me, driving home from work, listening to KBEM Jazz 88 station, I love neuroscience because my brain is in love with itself. Neuroscience is like a mirror for my brain, and I can’t look away. It’s a powerful thing, this brain love, and I’m not sure where it’s going, and hopefully, I will never leave myself. That would be truly a lonesome thing.

Going Home Again

Some say you can never go ‘back home.’ I say you can. I’m home. I spent twenty years in exile in Owatonna. It was of course self-imposed, but I didn’t see it that way, and of course I had all sorts of what I thought were good reasons at the time for staying in that podunk town, but it was never home for me. While I was there, mostly alone, I would dream at night of the years when I was young, working, going to the U of M, and hanging out with friends and Steve, whom, I would eventually marry. We had fun, for a while. We all mostly worked downtown, and at night we’d go out. We went to movies, dinners, and disco dancing.

The Nicollet Mall was as beautiful as it is now, lights lit in the trees at night. We spent our money on fun clothes and occasionally things like tuition. So, in my room in Owatonna, where my life consisted mostly of caring for my kids and having church lady friends who were pretty conservative, sometimes at night I’d dream that I was back in Minneapolis, and my friends and I were trying to decide where to go and sometimes we’d decide to go to David Fong’s in Bloomington. There’d be some moaning about “It’s so far out there.” But then someone would counter with,”Yeah, but let’s go!” And we’d all head out. This was about as far as my dream would go, we were going to go and it would be great. It was the closest I came to real fun.

A few months ago, I started talking with a woman who takes voice lessons before my daughter at MacPhail, we’ve become friends and she invited me to come to karaoke to hear her sing at David Fong’s. It seemed like a perfect storm of life convergence, the past, the present, my dream life all coming together, and so, even though it was a work night, even though I’d have to skip meditation class, I said, “Sure, I’ll try to be there.” This is not like me, I like to go to bed early and I don’t go to bars alone. But I did, and we had a blast. David Fong’s has literally not changed in 30 years. The karaoke scene in the bar was fun and homey. My new friend is very sweet and fun and she has a great voice. I’m learning to have fun all over again. I had a girl’s night out, at home, in Minneapolis. I’m happy to be here.

The Stuff of Life

I have way too many things to do, and too much stuff in my life. This is a recurring theme. Getting rid of things, sorting through things, taking on too much. I’ve had times in my life when I wasn’t so overwhelmed, windows of calm, and then it seems the wind picks up and I’m caught up in it and life takes me into the eye of the storm, where it seems safe, but it’s not.

My ex used to listen to a radio talk show, where this guy would give advice, mainly to other guys, and he’d call them ‘my friend’ and say things like if you got in debt, then get a second job, and I think I believe some of this stuff, thinking that if I just keep working harder and harder I will get to a place where things straighten out, where life will be easier, more like I remember from the past.

So, I try harder and harder and get farther away from where I want to be. What’s up with that? I don’t want my future to be only like the good memories from the past, that seems weird, at best. And of course, when the past was the present, it wasn’t necessarily perfect, our minds just do that to us.

This is today. My bedroom is a mess. I need to sort through summer and winter clothes. I’m going to try to move my bed around yet again, to try to find a spot that seems more like it works. My oldest daughter Kathleen will be here with her two boys a little after noon, and I will drive her to dance lessons downtown, and hang out with Max and Elliot, my grandsons. I will pick Kathleen up at 3, stop home so we can take separate cars and drive to visit my mom in Waconia.

Friday, my mom called to tell me that my brother Steve, who has bone and lung cancer is in the hospital with pneumonia. I am grieving. I went to class yesterday just trying not to cry, naproxin in my purse, in case of a headache. I’m scared of the way that grieving takes over your life, makes you stupid, and I’m a bit shocked at my lack of compassion for myself. I meditated this morning. I just want someone to hold me.

This is this week, I have lots of homework to do for the second MA degree that I’m pursuing. I finished a class in neuroscience and couples therapy and now I’m taking an art therapy II class, which is uncannily too much like art therapy I; which reminds me of why I’m studying neuroscience.

My finances are a mess, so much so that I just want to ignore them. I had an old boyfriend who just put all his bills in a drawer and left them there. Totally, just left them there. This is one way to deal with this I guess. Then there was my dad, who had my mom write down on a check register that they kept in the car glove box, every time they bought gas and what the mileage was. Keeping track I guess. I am not really one to keep track on that level.

Maybe that’s where I’m at right now. Keeping track, but keeping track of myself. Where I was, who I was, what I did well, what I want to do better. Remembering my older brother Steve, and how our family was back then. Maybe that’s why my bedroom, my money, my stuff seems like such a mess. I’m in that spot where I’m taking it all out of the garage, the basement, the attic, the stairways, and I’m sorting through it all. What good is it all? What do I keep, what do I throw away? Where am I going? What do I want? If I am stripped of all my stuff, and my caregiving role, who am I?

This was last week, a huge garage fire, not two blocks away. I drove right past it, saw the red hot flames, and suddenly I was 7, standing in front of our house in Franklin Park, Illinois, where we lived for a year and a half. Standing in front of our garage on fire. Standing there watching the flames eat up the new sandbox, and the new picnic table set that my dad had bought for us. They were still in the box, and when my dad had time, he was going to get them set up.

My older brother Pat, and his friends had been smoking behind the garage, it was years before anyone dared tell. I had been hanging out with them, ‘bugging them' just minutes before. Then we all went in to eat dinner. A neighbor boy ran right in our front door, without knocking, "Sorry to disturb your dinner, but your garage is on fire." Things were not so good for us in Illinois. We never got a new sandbox or picnic table, and we soon moved back to Minneapolis.

Some thoughts on gender by a mighty Fine mind

I dreamt last night that I was in a hoarder’s house and I could barely walk through it. Hoarding has been on my mind. Thinking about my mother’s hoarding, and how it is a temptation for me. In my dream I felt trapped, confused, embarrassed and angry. I woke up not quite ready to delve into more introspection on the topic. I’m gonna let it sit some more, I’m going to be kind with myself.

I decided time to sort through library books that need to go back; and I gently picked up Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, a witty and amazing read. A book that I wish everyone would read. In this book Cordelia Fine, Ph. D., deconstructs our gender myths. She says we look for answers outside ourselves for the incorrectly constructed schemas that we hold within ourselves. (I say amen.)

Take a look around. The gender inequality that you see is in your mind. So are the cultural beliefs about gender that are so familiar to us all. They are in the messy tangle of mental associations that interact with the social context. Out of this interaction emerges your self perception, your interests, your values, your behavior, even your abilities. Gender can become salient in the environment in so many ways: an imbalance of the sexes in a group, a commercial, a comment by a colleague, a query about sex on a form, perhaps also a pronoun, the sign on a restroom door, the feel of a skirt, the awareness of one’s own body. When the context activates gender associations, that tangle serves as a barrier to non-stereotypical self perception, concerns, emotions, sense of belonging, and behavior- and more readily allows what is traditionally expected of the sexes (p. 235).

What I didn’t dream, in my life as a single mom, was having to do everything, well, nearly everything by myself, as a woman. Many times, I made myself think of my dad supporting 8 children and a wife, and I told myself I could support 4 children (my 3 daughters and 1 grandson), and myself. I purposely made myself think ‘like a man'. For the most part it worked. I could pay the bills, fix the broken household fixtures, I could shovel the walk in the dark of night and get up every morning and go to work, and come home every night and feed my family. What I never counted on was that people would never see me as someone who needed the income to support my family. That the amount of money that women make dollar for dollar was skewed against me. That actually working moms make less money than working women without children. Still. 


Confessions of a Hoarder: Truth Be Told

As I’m trying to make time to meditate, and make more room in my life for people and things I want to do; I’ve developed a couple of bad habits. One is watching TV on Netflix. We don’t have cable, and haven’t for years, so for a very long time I never watched TV. Yep, never. No water cooler talk for me that revolved around fictional TV characters. Back when everyone wondered who killed JR, I couldn’t have cared less. Now, I’ve made my way through Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, am in the middle of season 3 of The Office, and have started watching Hoarders, one of the saddest shows ever.

This show has been strange and cathartic for me. It has made me see that my mom is a hoarder, as is one of my sisters. For real, not just collectors, not just hard to let things go, not just messy, but hoarders. I think I may be one, too. I’ve had my girls to help me fight it off, and I don’t get so defensive, but on a gut level, I feel it. One of the things that these hoarders all seem to have in common is a deep loneliness. They have people in their lives, but they are not connected to them. They live alone in their piles and boxes and a place in their head where all this stuff means something and takes the place of interacting with others on a level that comforts and satisfies. It is a sad, sad trade off. There’s also a huge amount of anger, just brewing under the surface of these sad people, an emotion that they seem unable to express unless someone is messing with their stuff.

So of course, as I’m studying neuroscience and therapy, my wheels are spinning, and this is what I’m thinking. Dr. Dan Siegel, who’s written The Mindful Therapist, says that as babies develop the right sides of their brains are developing faster than the left. He says that the right side of the brain processes are: earlier to develop, holistic, non-verbal, visual/spatial imagery, metaphors, stress reduction, autobiographical memory, and (an) integrated map of the body. This is complex, but stay with me here....The left side is: later to develop, linear, linguistic, logical, literal, lists, factual/semantic memory, and digital:Yes/No-Up/Down. (Siegel, 2010, p. 61). Siegel states, “Often the feeling of isolation comes along with a drive to be certain of the outcome of interactions, to guarantee the results of communication” (p. 61).

So now I’m getting it. My life, my loneliness and my compulsion to buy clothes and (cheap) jewelry. I wasn’t always so much of a hoarder, when I was young and had close emotional connections. It’s become a struggle in the past 10 years, when my life became very hard. I was raising three daughters alone as my sister succumbed to mental and physical illness and I accompanied her to way too many emergency room runs and doctor appointments. My dad was struggling with cancer and experimental chemo before he died. My youngest daughter’s thyroid disease was undiagnosed; and so we struggled with childhood depression, chronic colds, migraine headaches, and an assortment of issues associated with thyroid disease, that finally after years of therapy and specialists, my family doctor finally figured out. My middle daughter became depressed also in the midst of this, and my oldest daughter was a young mom.

And my mom. She is a hoarder. She never gets outwardly mad, but you can’t take things away from her. You can’t throw away old paper from 30 years ago. I have helped her move twice since my dad died, and it’s monumental. She has a three bedroom apartment now, all the closets are filled with clothes. She has become a tidy hoarder, so it’s harder to know. She has an amazing way of filling things up, with stuff. I nearly cried when we moved her to her apartment only a year ago. She had piles of garbage (old refrigerator drawers that she’d saved, with old towels) that she insisted of having the movers bring and I nearly lost my temper over her bringing them on to the already nearly full moving truck. It was a sad moment in her new apartment, when you couldn’t walk through it due to the boxes, and she knew she should have thrown stuff out. My childhood memories of bringing friends home after school were to hear, “Doesn’t your mom ever clean?” I felt ashamed and isolated, and ashamed of being ashamed of my mom.

I also remember my dad’s frustration with the clutter, and his idea of helping was to enlist us kids to clean on Saturday mornings. I invariably got the kitchen, and I would throw away anywhere from 10-20 plastic bags from bread and twisties. Dishes were washed and put away, bread crumbs cleaned out from the counters. The floor cleaned. My dad would take the unsavory job of cleaning out the fridge, saying things like, “Geez- us” and “Oh my God” as he threw things away. My dad and I would bond over the clean kitchen, my mom would smile and say thanks, and within a few minutes, fly off the handle and nearly cry because her plastic bags were thrown away. Throughout the week, she’d blame me for not having her plastic bags. I would secretly wish that our house would burn down. Then we could start over, and be like the Brady Bunch, with a clean house.

As a teenager, I cleaned my bedroom every week. I threw things away and my mom would retrieve things, like my old make-up out of my bedroom trash. People would walk into my bedroom, and it was clean, and orderly and they’d ask how come my room was so clean. I guess I was beginning to live in the left part of my brain, I was not finding what Siegel calls “resonance” with anyone on the right side of my brain, so I shifted to finding safety in the left side processes. I handled the loneliness and the craziness in this way. I grew to love school and the orderliness there. It increased my sense of isolation, but gave me a new reason for it, I was just smart and introverted. There, some sense made of the chaotic universe.

to be continued...

The Sound of Cognitive Dissonance

sounds like

buzzing

scraping

whirring

whining

crying

screaming

all the sounds your emotions want to make

when your head is telling you something untrue

about yourself

about life

about your life

and you are trying so hard not to hear it

but the sound is killing me

and I want to ask

“when was the last time your feelings really mattered?”

“did they ever?”

how long have you not been hearing the sound?