Spoiled Only Child

Death, etc.

Whoosh! That was the sound of me returning from another dimension. Things have been out-of-control crazy over here. On Tuesday night, my father-in-law died suddenly of a heart attack. He was 90 years old, and had lived an active and independent life until the very last day, but still... Losing a parent is hard. Really hard. And it's even harder when the remaining parent is also 90 years old and difficult, and they had absolutely no plans for their deaths, and they have no money and every bit of the responsibility falls on you. So Mr. SOC has had a tough go of it. And in addition to dealing with the viewing and the cremation and the memorial service and the military honors and writing the obituary and giving the eulogy, there have been family feuds and fights over money and reunions with long-lost siblings. And during all of this, Mia was sent home from school with a fever, so I've been pretty much out-of-commission taking care of her. Mix all that with Mr. SOC's childhood memories of his father (From his eulogy: "I remember the feel of his woolen overcoat that smelled of New York and smoke-filled train cars." Sob.) and wine-soaked ruminations on death. (It's inconceivable really, that you can be here one day shopping at Walmart and mooching the free coffee at the bank, and—BANG!—the next day you're a pile of ashes in a box on the mantle. For those of us left behind, death is the most incredible disappearing act. How can you be here, so solidly here, and then just... not be?) So anyway, we've been living in some kind of alternate universe for the past five days.

Then today, I thought Mr. SOC might finally get a day to relax, take a breath. But instead, he went to his parents' house and cleaned his dead father's filthy bathroom. And now he's at the emergency room with his son, who appears to have a bat bite on his arm. And we really don't want him to get rabies. But he got this bite a week ago, and hadn't mentioned it, so I hope to hell it's not too late to start the rabies treatment. It's all a bit surreal.

But the one benefit of all this is that, until Tuesday night, I was having a little personal breakdown, complete with feelings of hopelessness, etc. But this seems to have rocked me out of it. It was like a volcanic eruption that shifted my perceptions and forced me out of my self-centered downward spiral. So now, even though we are stressed and saddened and have a long road ahead of us figuring out how to deal with my mother-in-law, I somehow feel better than I did before it all started. I am not depressed anymore. I think maybe part of my problem has been this expectation that life is supposed to be fun. Every day is supposed to be fun, and anything that happens that is not fun causes me to panic, because I am losing out on the fun life I deserve. But sometimes, life is just hard, it's just putting one foot in front of the other, doing what you have to do and making it through. And it is so freeing to just let it be that.

Words from my dark place

Maybe if I can just slap some words over all this dread and fear, it would help. So even though I feel like I can't do it, I'm going to try.

Things I am afraid of:

• That working here is going to drive me crazy. I feel crazy right now, I really do.
• That I'm going to be laid off.
• That I'm never going to find another job. 
• That I am absolutely, positively, unemployable outside of this place.
• That, without my income, we will have to sell our house.
• That I live in a world that no longer has any use for people like me.
• That I am lost, and I will never find my way.
• That our country, our economy, our world are broken beyond repair.
• That I'm not going to sleep tonight.
• That I am depressed.
• That I am headed for some kind of mental breakdown.
• That I am ruining other people's lives with my anxiety and depression and insomnia.

Things I need to remember:

• That, unlike many of the people on this sinking ship of a company, my husband has a good job that will allow us to live a good, middle-class life even if I lose my job. (No, we probably can't afford our house without some kind of income from me, but we won't starve or have to move to the projects.)
• That the economy will get better one day.
• That this situation is temporary. Someday, somehow, I will find my way out of this stuck place.
• That I am valuable.
• That my situation is only intolerable inside my own head. In every rational respect, I am perfectly OK.

Last night, I hardly slept. I'm working the fucking night-shift this week--I now have to do it one out of every nine weeks--and it's got my very delicate sleep schedule out of whack. And I lay there in the dark feeling like my chest was squeezing, crumpling. And I kept thinking, I'm stuck in a work situation that is intolerable. I can't stand it anymore. And there's no way out. None of the masses of people that our company has laid off this year have found full-time work in this area. Not a single one. So I am trapped working at this place that is making me crazy. I'm not emotionally capable of continuing to work there, but I have no choice. I felt like I was going to die or go nuts or I don't even know what.

Today, I came to work and our boss told us that it's looking like we're going to have to make lots more severe cuts next year. He told us all to start getting prepared. The tone of his voice and the look in his eye said, "We are fucked. We are hanging on by a thread. There is no hope." I'm not sure what preparations I'm supposed to be making. I feel overwhelmed, powerless, lost, adrift in an endless ocean. I know that someday I will look back and see how close I was to shore, how everything really was OK. That I had my family and my health and my (relative) youth and all the things that really mattered. But right now I can't see it. I can't see the horizon from here, and I am scared.

I need to focus on what's right here and now. Telling myself stories about a better future is not going to help. Right now, I have air to breathe and food to eat. Right now, I have a steady income. Right now, I have a beautiful, happy daughter. Right now, I have a husband who loves me. Right now, I have lots of vacation time. Right now, I get to go home every night to my family. Right now, I am healthy. Right now, there is a beer in the refrigerator waiting for me. Right now, I am going to leave work and go home and try to breathe.

Zen list

One night this week, I was doing my usual nightly routine of lying in bed stressing about the millions of things I want to get done but will never have time for. And I turned and asked Mr. SOC, "Do you worry about all the things you need to get done?" And do you know what he said? His answer was absolutely stunning. He said, NO! To me, worrying about the things I need to get done is such a huge and integral part of my life. I can't even imagine what I would do with all that spare brain space. If I could remove that worry from my head, 75 percent of my life would be the mental equivalent of sitting in deep meditation beside a serene mountain lake. This is revolutionary, the idea that there are people who actually don't have an unending to-do list cycling through their brain at all times. Can I ever be one of them? That is the real question.

I am clearly not there yet. But one thing that might be constructive is to lay out my priorities for my limited time. Because as it is, I think I spend a lot of time doing things, or mostly one thing, that is not a good, or even enjoyable, use of my time. (I'm looking at you, MacBook.) And if I could do less of those things, I might be able to do more of the stuff that I want to do. So I'm going to make a little mini-list. Somehow I doubt that zen masters make such lists. In fact, Mr. SOC has never made anything more than a grocery list, and even those tend to be woefully incomplete. But I'm choosing to believe that this list is better than my usual lists, and so it represents progress.

Things I want to spend less time on:

• Aimlessly surfing the internet until my eyes blur and my mind fogs, reading crap that rots my brain
• Worrying about what I need to do
• Being angry

Things I want to continue to spend time on:

• Being present with my family
• Cooking
• Writing
• Reading novels
• Exercise
• Learning new things (Spanish? Really should get back to that.)
• Meditation

Things I want to spend more time on:

• Music
• Kind acts
• Romance
• Keeping my house neat and uncluttered (I never want to be one of those people who spends all their spare time making their home perfect. But maybe 10 minutes a day trying to keep the clutter monster at bay?)
• Getting out of the office (Stop eating lunch at desk while surfing the internet. It's just not good.)
• Personal grooming (I know, this is sad.)

I should probably delete this post

So here I was worrying about death and infirmity, and something completely unexpected came and whacked me on the back of the head. Politics. I am not the kind of person who takes politics personally. But we just had a school board election, and the people who won want to dramatically change our schools in a way that I think is unconscionable. And I can't do anything about it. These people who I don't support in any way are going to ruin our schools. My child will probably be OK, but the poor kids, the ones who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, well, good luck to them. And we will all be poorer for that.

This election got me thinking that this whole far-right movement really is taking hold again, that less than a year after Bush left office, all the hope is disappearing in favor of the most polarized politics our country has ever seen. I mean, there are actually people--lots of people--who are prepared to kill health care reform just to make the president look bad. Something our country so desperately needs. If you don't like Obama's plan, then come up with an alternative, but please don't send crazy people out in the streets with signs saying "Hands off my healthcare!" It feels almost as if we've come to the end of the viability of the two-party system in America. This just isn't working anymore.

It's all making me start to wonder if this is even the kind of country where I want to live, the kind of place I want my daughter to grow up in. I am profoundly disillusioned with the selfishness that seems to permeate the American psyche. Who cares about the poor? Who cares about the uninsured? Just as long as I get mine. This goes totally outside the bounds of what I allow myself to write here, but I just cannot keep it inside. I have actually started to cry multiple times every day for the past three days thinking about this stuff. I am so afraid of where my country, my state, my county are headed. I just don't understand why those of us who have more can't seem to find the slightest bit of care for those who have less. But I guess it's more important to us to have five televisions, to have closets stuffed full of crap we don't need from Target, than to make sure that poor people have healthcare or decent schools for their kids. So we'll just build more jails and pay for more ER visits, all for the luxury of not having to give a shit about anyone else.

The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger

Oh my. That was intense. I finished this book just before going to sleep last night, and for a while I thought it was going to keep me up. It broke my heart. It confirmed my deepest fears. It was fascinating and wonderful and sexy and completely unbelievable and totally true. I hardly know what to say.

So it's about this guy, Henry, who time travels, and not in some metaphorical sense. He actually disappears from wherever he is in the present and materializes, stark naked, in some other place and time. He has no control over when or where he goes. It's also about Clare, the woman who marries him and loves him completely and puts up with all the annoyances of being married to a guy who might not be present for the wedding day with nary a complaint. I know, it sounds ridiculous. But it works. Their love is so beautiful and palpable and hot, it will make you swoon. 

But here's what I think this book is really about. The fact that everything has already happened and is always going to happen, that none of it is under our control. We all like to think that if we work hard and make the right decisions and have the right intentions, we can bend life to our wishes. But it is all an illusion. Henry visits his past, but he cannot change his future. He knows he is going to be shot, and yet he cannot move out of the way. Everything is happening just as it was always going to. Clare knew that marrying this guy was probably going to be a disaster, and yet their marriage was something that simply was. It was not a choice. It was a fact. That's kind of how I've always felt about my own marriage. (Not the disaster part. Just the idea that this person had become my family, and that I had no choice in the matter.)

This book is also about the impossibility of holding onto anything. No matter how solid, how permanent, this moment might seem, it will vanish. Everything does. Last night, I held onto my husband and was terrified. It could happen at any moment, the vagaries of time and fate could take him from me. Solid flesh and bone can turn to vapor in a heartbeat. Anything, anyone, can be taken from us. Henry could look up his own obituary, know the exact moment of his death, but really he is just like all of us. We all live with the knowledge of death hanging over us. Sometimes I don't know how we do it.

These are realizations I came to well before reading this book--and they scare the hell out of me. And so does this book, because it does not give me a window into a place where I can be OK with this stuff. Henry's death is unhappy and violent, full of regret about all he is losing. Clare never gets over his loss. Is this life all about losing things, gradually, piece by piece, until we are broken and limbless? Our parents die, our spouses, sometimes even (oh god please no) our children. Our bodies whither. Our physical pain increases. I have developed this fear recently that things are only going to get worse from here. I have come all the way up. I have married and found my career and bought my house and had my child, and now I am at the top of the roller coaster, as Clare says. Now all that is left is to start losing things.

I know my mind is in the wrong place. I need to bring it back to the here and now. I know that suffering is the space between where we are now, this moment, and where our minds are. My fear is an illusion, created by me. I'm trying to stop, but this book did not help. I love it still.

The Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster

At 60, Nathan Glass has decided there's nothing left to do but wait to die. And then, he reconnects with a long-lost nephew and embarks on a series of adventures and friendships that show him that, as long as you are still breathing, there is always another chance. This book was kind of silly, definitely not the best book I've ever read. But it was incredibly readable. And it was full of flashes of truth and beauty that blew me away. Paul Auster is a man who knows the secrets of the universe, and they come through in everything he writes. I don't think I will ever forget this beautiful passage:

I want to talk about happiness and well-being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.
I want to talk about the early June weather, about harmony and blissful repose, about robins and yellow finches and bluebirds darting past the green leaves of trees.
I want to talk about the benefits of sleep, about the pleasures of food and alcohol, about what happens to your mind when you step into the light of the two o'clock sun and feel the warm embrace of air around your body. I want to talk about Tom and Lucy, about Stanley Chowder and the four days we spent at the Chowder Inn, about the thoughts we thought and the dreams we dreamed on that hilltop in southern Vermont.
I want to remember the cerulean dusks, the languorous, rosy dawns, the bears yelping in the woods at night.
I want to remember it all. If all is too much to ask, then some of it. No, more than some of it. Almost all. Almost all, with blanks reserved for the missing parts.

—Paul Auster

UPDATED TO ADD: I give up. I just have to add this. I cannot stop thinking about a section of the book involving a mentally ill person. She has figured out that a person is born about every 40 seconds, and a person dies about every 50 seconds. So every 40 seconds, she shouts out "Rejoice!" and every 50 seconds she shouts "Grieve!" And I guess this is insane behavior, but it sums up this crazy world of polar opposites so perfectly. A world in which death and birth can both can exist. A world full of hate and love. A world in which a battlefield and a serene mountain lake can exist, in all their horror and peace, at the same time. When you sit down and really think about that, it is stunning, unbelievable. And this way of putting words around that experience is extremely powerful for me. I find myself perceiving the world now in these terms. My unending bronchitis nightmare? Grieve! My daughter's unstoppable zest for life? Rejoice! My fear of death and calamity? Grieve! The perfection of a crisp fall day? Rejoice!

I have a cold. Please kill me.

Remember how I said I hate it when people blog about being sick? Yeah, well, I now hate my former self. I will never belittle the experience of being sick, or the common cold, again. Never. Because this is fucking awful. I have been trying so hard to stay away from this blog during my long days of coughing and misery, but now I am at my wit's end. And if there is anything, anything, that might ease my mental suffering, I will do it--including blogging about my snot. Whatever it takes.

I have now been coughing, or feeling that tickly sensation in the back of my throat, continuously for eight days. It is enough to make a person lose her mind. For the past four days, I the cough has been accompanied by congestion, fatigue and general awfulness. The most torturous part is that, after spending all day yesterday lying in bed drinking tea and eating soup, I felt immensely better last night. I woke up this morning so excited about my return to good health, new facebook statuses dancing in my head. "I am so grateful for my good health," I imagined myself writing. No, maybe, "I am finally reemerging into the land of the living, and I am so grateful for it." The birds were chirping and the sun was shining. It was the first day of the rest of my life. And then I sat down at my desk, and I couldn't stop coughing, and then I noticed that strange woozy sensation again, and before long I felt just as awful as I did two days ago.

I can't describe the mental anguish that this illness has caused. I feel so guilty for lying around the house doing absolutely nothing. I feel guilty for coughing over and over, forcing everyone around me to listen to it. I feel guilty every time I go out into the world, because I am surely spreading my germs. I feel guilty that Mr. SOC has been sleeping on the couch for five nights and there is no end in sight. I feel guilty that we haven't had sex in ages. I feel guilty for skipping out of work. I feel guilty for ignoring my to-do list. I feel guilty for being an emotional wreck. I feel guilty for being knocked flat by a stupid fucking cold. This virus is screwing with my head, I tell you.

Now, I am waiting for Mr. SOC to get home, dreading his realization that I am not on the road to recovery, that I am once again coughing and whining and snotty and that tonight is probably not going to be the night we rekindle our romance. I want to lie on the couch and do nothing. I want to get up and force myself into action, to become healthy by acting healthy. I want to fall into a black hole until this is all over. I want to move into my own apartment, quit my job and be left to cough alone, in peace, guilt-free, until death finally takes me. Didn't I tell you this cold had driven me crazy? Didn't I tell you?

This is what I can write in 12 minutes

1. I really hate it when people blog about being sick. For god's sake, do you think you are the first person to have a cold? And yet, when you have post-nasal drip that tickles the back of your throat, making you feel the urge to cough every single second for days, and you are hacking a dry awful cough 17 times a minute and you have no idea when or if it will ever go away, well, your world really narrows down. There is nothing but you and that godforsaken cough and, really, what else is there to write about?
2. It appears that fall has arrived. It is supposed to still be hot as hell here right now, but instead there is a crispness to the air and I am dreaming of pumpkin farms and winter stews and getting that vague worry that, oh my god, I really am going to have to go through this fucking Christmas thing again, aren't I? Couldn't I have just one year off? Just this one? Anyway, this also means that my secret summer vacation is over. I guess I have to go back to thinking about my life goals again and caring about my job and whatever all that other stuff I used to do was. But really, why? Summer vacation was good. It took a real mental load off, and I don't think I did any worse at my job. And in this economy, there's really no sense applying for other jobs. So maybe I will continue the summer vacation indefinitely. At least until after the holidays. Although I might take an online course or two. And think about my Spanish again, and my little secret business plan. Oh hell, I guess it really is over.
3. A friend sent me a notepad full of blank lists, and I am using it way too much. Its lure is more than I can handle, all those beautiful blank lined and numbered pages. But I go as fast as I can and I just cannot get to the end of my list. I cleaned out the fridge tonight, but the freezer is still full of unidentifiable objects and the kitchen cabinets are crammed with crap, half of which probably needs to be thrown away. I am still tripping over unpacked crates and bags from our Labor Day trip. And really, every corner of this house is piled with crap that we don't need and don't know what to do with. Old baby clothes, pots and pans we never use, ancient magazines. When will there ever be time to get to the end of the list? (I know, I know. Never. Fuck.)
4. I think I am obsessed with the lists because I have some unexplainable feeling that the change of seasons is a sort of fresh start. I'm ready to stay home, clean up, weed the garden, bake pies, knit intricate sweaters, clear out all our clutter, begin the winter nesting rituals. But the reality is I only have time to do one one-hundreth of that crap. Which leads to frustration and many, many lists.
5. My mother just left after a two-week visit. I love her very much, and consider her one of my best friends, but I realized that I just cannot fully relax when she is around. Maybe it's because of her mounting health problems, and my constant fear of her death, which seems to have really intensified lately. Or maybe it's that she never, ever tells anyone what she really wants, so I am always guessing about whether she's happy and has what she wants. Oh, it's not even worth writing about. But I was looking forward to breathing a big sigh of relief when she left. Instead, I got this cough as soon as her plane took off. So now I'm just hacking miserably, and blogging about it.
6. I guess that was more like 22 minutes.

One of those days

Today I am full of fear. No particular tragedy has befallen me; it's just that some days the vulnerability of being alive comes to rest on my shoulders and I am trapped. It started two nights ago, when I woke from a nightmare that my mother had been diagnosed with some kind of terminal brain disease. The fear of that dream stayed with me through the day, infusing everything (including Mia's school dropoff) with a sense of doom. I had hoped that today would be a fresh start, but instead I woke at 5 a.m. to go to the bathroom and was gripped by the fear that my mother is going to die. It spiraled outward from there. What will her death do to Mia? And maybe I've made the wrong choice not to give Mia a sibling, because all the people who love her are OLD and they're all going to DIE and what if she ends up all ALONE? Maybe I could talk to her older half-brothers, ask them to befriend her if this happens. Can she ever be close to them with such a huge age difference? I eventually fell back into a fitful sleep, from which I woke tired and full of a sort of generalized dread. And here I am.

Lately, I feel completely raw, open to the world. In one sense it is joyful, but in another it is terrifying. When you are aware that anything could happen at any moment, that you control none of it, it makes you look at things differently. Sometimes, it leads my mind down a dark path. I'm hoping I'll break into a clearing soon.

Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon

I don't know why I grew to hate this book, even though it was fabulously written and told a very entertaining story. I started out loving it and gradually grew to resent every page. But by that point I was close enough that I had to finish. It's a book about a professor/novelist--Wait! I just figured it out!. It's because the whole nutty, misbehaving professor who can't deal with life thing has been so overused. And I hate it every time. I think that's it.

Anyway, so this professor has been trying to write the followup to his successful novel for seven years, and he has written 1,200 pages and is nowhere near finished and the thing sucks. And his whole life is falling apart. He's a pot-smoking, emotionally dysfunctional loser whose wife is leaving him and whose girlfriend has just told him--surprise!--that she's pregnant. Oh, and the girlfriend is also the chancellor of the university where he works, and she's married to another guy who's also his boss. So he goes on a bender with a suicidal nutcase of a student, and they steal a jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe and shoot the girlfriend's dog and go to Passover dinner with his wife's crazy family and run over the family's pet snake and drive around for days--weeks?--with the dead dog in the trunk. And there is a transvestite somewhere along the way, and a crazy drug-addicted agent whose career depends on the guy's failed novel, and a stolen tuba that figures prominently. And at various points this guy is bitten by a dog, beaten to a pulp, hit in the temple with a baseball bat. And I don't think he ever sleeps during the entire course of the novel. And then he loses the only copy of his novel while being attacked by crazy people. And then at the end he marries the girlfriend and becomes a father and lives happily ever after.

OK, it's becoming obvious why I hated this book. It was ridiculous. I guess some people would find it funny, but to me it just didn't ring true in any sense of the word. That's it for me and Michael Chabon.