I guess I'll go eat worms

If my mom had any genius in her, it was her mastery of cleverly shaming her daughter, her only daughter until I was 14, with brothers all over the place.

If I expressed any sadness or disappointment to my, um, mother, something I quickly learned not to do -- I was on my own growing up, my dad abandoning his daughter to her mother almost entirely, he liked his sons --  my mom would say this diddy she claimed was a 'poem':

Nobody loves me

Everybody hates me

I guess I'll go eat worms.

I did not know the word shame when she said this, like when I was five and six years old, but I felt deeply ashamed when my mom would recite these lines in a sing-song-y screech that I think my mom thought was cute.  I felt a lot of shame. I was ashamed that I felt bad. I felt ashamed that I had believed my mom might care that I felt bad. And, after the first time she said this shit to me wihtout offering just a little bit of comfort, like a listening ear for a couple minutes, I was very painfully ashamed that I had turned to her for emotional support.

My mom never offered me emotional support, not even a listening ear.   When she would say that nobody loves me whine to me, gosh, I felt bad. But I never considered telling her I didn't like it because she would assuredly have said something even more wounding.

Irish girls are the best

When my daughter was a toddler, I bought her a XS adult green t-shirt that said 'Irish girls are the best".  I put her in black tights, a belt and called it a dress.  I must have been at least separated from her father because he would have forbidden me to use that t-shirt as a dress. He usually forbid me to do pretty much anything other than housework. Creativity was not his jam. He told me many times that my creative choices were crazy.

I had my daughter wear her Irish girls are the best t-shirt on St. Patrick's Day for years, perhaps until she got to around middle school age and began to treat me a lot like her father did.

But, come to think of it, I am certain she wore Irish girls are the best at least once on St. P Day, to her high school.

if wishes were horses

It is a Ralph Waldo Emerson line:  if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.  It is not a particular great quote, imho. It is etched into my being because my mom said it a bajillion times as I grew up.  My mom had a perfect touch that empowered her to say snide, hurtful things that were sneakily slipped in, things another adult who happened to overhear her might not realize was a dig.  She said the wishes horses thing when I was unhappy and wanted to be happy, not so subtly mocking me -- I felt her stinger -- just for being a normal human with feelings, longings.


I wish I would fall asleep and never awaken, be dead.

Weirdly, I had a 'funny' exchange with my property manager. I joked with her that I'd be leaving this building in a pine box and she winced just now and said "I never go into apartments when residents haven't been heard from, it would just gross me out to find a dead body." I said 'Geez, I was not imagining dying here, just that I'd be living here until I check out, like in a hospital or nursing home.


Not so funny in the way I told it. Oh well, I am so depressed that I am catatonic, just about.

Bloom! it is, after all, spring (almost)

making an apple pie

My housecleaner is helping me go through all my cupboards, closets and drawers. I throw out a lot. I discover things I need that I forgot I had. And sometimes, he asks if he can have something.  I wish he did not ask because I like him and care about him but I don't like him asking for things I have kept and cared about for 30 or more years. Most of my 'treasures' are not treasures to anyone but me and they are treasures to me because I either associate them with my daughter or my mother.

I have a very good, fine kitchen knife that I paid $87 for about 30 years ago. It is a German knife. It is a knife you can use for just about anything. It can rock on a butcher board as you slice and dice.  I keep it in the box because it is such a fine knife. I don't want the edges getting knicked in my cluttered draws. Although my drawers are being decluttered.  My cleaner guy said, and I am still a bit flummoxed by what he said, "If you want to sell it, I'll give you a few bucks for it." He said this right after I had showed him the very faded $87 price tag and told him my mom had bought it for me when Katie was five or younger. So thirty years. My mom long gone. My daughter long gone. And my one good knife. My one great knife.  The model of my thirty years ago $87 knife is no longer sold by Wusthoff but simlar knives like it, also by Wusthoff sell for $129 and $139. Of course, the blades are steel. I wonder what Trump's tariffs might do to quality knife sales? Why would I sell my one prized, great knife, one I treasure so much I clean it, dry it and put it in the original box to keep it safe?And for a couple of bucks?

He saw a luggage tag on Tuesday and asked if he could have it. I had wondered what happened to the only luggage tag I had ever owned. I have new luggage but no tag. Last time I flew home from NYC, my bag came out of the luggage conveyor with no tag at all for I had used those paper bits the airlines offer with not-strong elastic. Gone.  Plus my suitcase came two airplanes behind my own.

Look at how I run on. This is about baking pies with my Katie.

She always wanted to help. She always wanted to imitate me. If I got on my knees and scrubbed a patch of our kitchen floor, she did her tiny toddler best to imitate me, sometimes pretending because she did not have her own scrubber.  I spent a lot of tie in our kitchen when she was very very young, and we still lived in Omaha. Our kitchen was mostly "L" shaped. In the corner of that 'L', under the cabinets, there was an air vent. She loved to sit in front of the vent, for cold air on hot days and warm air on chilly days. This allowed her to remain very close to me.

That vent in that corner was below the only real counter space we had. So when I baked a pie, I sliced my apples after peeling them. Oh, sometimes she and I went applepicking together. Sometimes we had open house in our home and served apple pie. The day before our open house, we would bake lots of pies all day, plenty to eat and enough, hopefully, so every household could take one home.

My favorite thing about making pies with Katie when she was one and two was how she helped.  She could not peel or slice the apples and risk getting cut. She could not yet measure the spices and sugar. So the way she helped me was she stood nearby, watching everything I did. I actually rolled out pie crust in those years. She watched me do so closely. After I had added sugar, cinnamon and whatever spices I was adding to the apples, she would stir the apples to spread the sugar and spices.

And then the very very very best part:  she would suck the sugar and cinnamon off a few slices.

It gobsmacked me that she did that, that she loved to do it, that she believed she was helping as my tastetester (as I had named the job).

I loved those pies. I loved her. I still do.  I don't remember kissing her on top of her head while making apple pies. For some reason, I started the head kissing as we listened for the cranberry poofing on our holiday pie. We would grow still. I felt much love (I guess she didn't, eh? I guess she loved to lick the sweet cinnamony pie slices? and I was a chump.)

Pies. It was a mother daughter activity I loved very much.

Sometimes, I managed to find some cinnamon ice cream to eat alongside our apple pies.

Those were the days. I thought the love embedded in them would never end.

starving one's self

When my daughter was still my daughter and in treamtne for aorexia for a few years (and she sure looked anorexic when I saw her briefly three years ago in Chicago!), she once remarked to me that being hungry, starving herself gave her a sense of great power and that power comforted her.

I have been fasting a lot lately. I often remember her comment about how starving herself gave her a sense of power.

I miss her. I hate me.

my daughter and my heart failure

I had a glimpse of my daughter a couple years ago. I went to her office building, not intending to go in. A guy came along and let us in the security building. It was fifteen below zero out and he waived us in. When he asked who we were there to see, I tried to stall. We had decided, my bro and I, that we would not go in but when that nice man, who I thought was a janitor for he wore blue work clothes, waived us in, I just couldn't bring myself to tell him the thoughts that came to me. I had urges to tell him my daughter worked in the building, she hadn't talked to me in about fifteen years and I wanted to see where she worked so I could know where my daughter spent part of her life. So I said the name of her firm and then the guy came up with us, still being kind, making sure we got to the right business. Or maybe he was worried we were a security risk, I am not sure, but I think he was being kind.

So I went up to the door of her office suite. I did not open the door. I just looked aorund for the restroom the guy had said was right down that hall. Turned out it was inside the suite. I did not open the door until the receptionist called out to me and asked what I wanted. I said I was looking for the restroom -- keeping up my story for the guy I thought was a janitor. The janitor seemed satisfied and he left. And Dave and I began to leave. We were at the elevator ready to go down and exit when Katie came out of her office suite screaming. She kept screaming that I was crazy and trespassing. Not really. I was invited into the building by someone who worked in it. Not a trespass.

She was speaking to me as if I were scum, vermin, dogshit on her shoe.  I just couldn't run out like a kicked dog, run off like a dog by my daughter. I was waiting for her to stop screaming and being verbally abusive. I kept a calm tone and I did not try to engage her except to say "I am leaving when you stop talking to me this way."

I felt so humiliated. She began to threaten to call the cops, which scared Dave cause he has a record of criminal convictions.  Then I just had to see if my beloved daughter would actually call the police on me. What did she imagine, that the Chicago Police would send over a couple of squads with sirens blaring for a well mannered, alleged, trespass? She called. And boy did that hurt. And the dispatcher asked her some questions, like what was I doing? She said it was her mother and that her mother was severely mentally ill.

I see, in hindsight, that she could not quite bring herself to lie to the police. She did not lie and say I was behaving in a threatening manner or destroying property.  I wasn't doing anything but waiting for my daughter to stop talking to me like I was dogshit on her shoe. Is that so much to ask? That my daughter, whose life is built as much on my sacrifices for her as on her own hard work?

At least she didn't tell any lies but the one about me being severely mentally ill. At least she didn't flat out lie about some behavior that I was not doing in her thirst to sic the cops on me.  She always seems to forget I am trained and will always be able to think like a lawyer. I think she forgets what a detailed memory I have. I remember pretty much everything I learned in law school and from the years I did practice law. I worked with cops for a few years, yeah, daughter dearest. Cops don't fighten me. Well, of course I am white but I know a fair amount about what it takes to get the Chicago police to rush over squad cars. She would have had to tell some kind of whopper to get any cops rushed over to that building. At least she didn't make up another lie (for it is a lie to say I am severely mentally ill) to try to get the cops buying into her cruelty.

And did she ever take note that I remained calm through that encounter? did she note that if she had not come out of her office suite, she never would have even seen me. Dave and i were waiting for the elevator to exit and we would have. She could have seen us depart without HER creating a scene which she probably blamed on me.

I do not have a mental illness, although I do have a tormented heart and soul over the loss of my only child.  It's like I am in a twisted form of purgatory, futilely waiting for my daughter and unable to invest in my own life with the huge hole in my being.

Oh man, it hurt to hear her snarl to the cop dispatcher that I was 'severely mentally ill'. I wanted to point out that severely mentally ill is psychosis, hallucinations, uncontrolled violence.

I tend to imagine she has told everyone in her life that I am severely mentally ill to explain her evil choice to shun her mother.

I am so unhappy.  I have heart failure physically and emotionally.  I wish I would die.

things making me happy today

Swimming. I am no longer counting which means I surrender to the physicality of moving through the light-dappled water, in an amniotic buoyancy. I move, move, move and I forget exactly where I am. It is so wonderful.

The water is different every day. Like everything else, I guess. The way the sunlight reveals itself in the water is quite different each day. And the way the water holds warmth is different each day. There is some part of my thinking self that keeps askng 'why isn't the pool a uniform temperataure?' Some days the pool is a uniform temperature. Some days it is not. Why? Why? I think about this instead of counting. And I like thinking like this much better than counting.

Today there was a large cold spot in the middle of my lane. In one instant, I would be moving in water warmed by the sun then with a stroke or two, I would be cold. Kerchunk. After hitting the cold patch a few times, however, I began to look forward to it. I looked forward to the wonderful moment when I would move past the cold spot and reenter the warm. In and out.

Another thing making me happy is that some of my fellow swimmers have begun to talk to me in the locker room, awarding me with their attention. "You swim so long. I kept looking over and noticing 'she's still in the pool!' You were in when I got in, you were still in when I got out. How long do you swim?" Just like a child who wants his parents to wave at him each and everytime he comes around on the merry-go-round, I love having someone notice me.

I lost a prepaid swim pass two weeks ago. I asked the lifeguards if someone turned it in but no one had. Today, when I left the pool, the lifeguards gestured for me. Someone had found my swim pass the day before and turned it in. A very small thing but it added to my happiness. I love it that someone turned in my swim pass instead of using it. And I love it even more that the lifeguards know I am Tree Fitz. I love the lifeguards, of course. I love all the other swimmers, too.

There is one guy, age 84, who swims with a baseball cap. I look everyday but, so far, he manages to swim for half an hour without ever getting the hat wet. Is he bald under there? Does he wear it to protect himself from the sun? There is another guy, also 84, who has a very fat belly. It sticks straight out from his frame, enormous. He swims over an hour nearly every single day -- and he has for thirty years -- I know this because he brags in line. How does his stomach manage to stay so huge when he swims so much? This guy, with the big tummy, wears a wetsuit. I can't help thinking he must wear it to, well, hide his tummy, which, of course, he cannot do: it sticks out with or without the wetsuit. It touches me to think he is self-conscious about his tummy. Also, it makes me sad, because I imagine that he has to eat huge amounts of food to maintain that tummy and still swim an hour every day.

I don't know these people's names but I love them. I used to have a much narrower perspective on what I thought it meant to love people. Now I think the capacity to love other people, and to be loved in return, is as abundant as sunlight or the stars. I have found that I can love everything upon which my eyes light, just like an infant. I am not always in such loving space but I love it when I am. I am today.

my new favorite person

A Chinese woman is part of the longstanding gang of swimmers at my new pool. She swims in my favorite lane of the pool and all the guys love her. By 'the guys', I mean the eighty-something men who swim at the same time I do everyday. I am spring chicken in this crowd. There is a pack of younger, alpha swimmers but, trust me, I belong with the geezers.

Anyway, the guys have all been friendly to me but China girl ignored me.

She went to London for a week. I was so happy she was gone because I got to swim in my sweet spot.

This morning, as I approach the pool gate, early Beatles blasting away and me dancing, the guys all said something, nodding friendliness at me and I just kept on my earphones and rocked on. China girl was back. She is sixtyish, also chicken, as my dad would have said. I was thinking "Now she'll see that I am going to become a regular too." Also, I was thinking "Why didn't she stay in London? And when is she heading to Taiwan for Christmas?"

"Why doesn't she like me?" I whined silently as I stripped down to my swimsuit poolside.

"You look fantastic, you lost weight!" said China girl. "I go away one week, come back, you look great!"

"Thanks for saying that!" I exclaimed, "I have lost ten pounds since I moved here a month ago."

"Keep up good work," she says, "By Christmas, maybe ten more pound!" And she made the thumbs up sign.

I am thinking of implementing a new policy. I am going to assume everyone is wonderful.

chica mia, mija querida

Just wunnering. . . .

I have had a particular tough day today.  I was in an old gmail email account that I don't really use anymore. For years, I used it solely for emai listservs. I stopped using it for actual email that I check daily when I moved to CA twelve years ago. Over the years, I would toggle over to check on a few list servs I watch but I have migrated any listservs I want to follow, and they are fewer and further between these days (email lists are getting old fashioned!) to my main email account.

So I am in this email account I opened around 2000, back when you had to have an invite to have a gmail account -- that long ago! -- and suddenly I see a couple emails sent from my daughter in 2012 that I had never seen.

I read them. Get this. She wrote that she loves me and she knows it hurts me that she shuns me (my language here) but she's working on connecting with me but would I please respect her privacy.

Sure, Katie Joy, I'll respect your privacy just as soon as you tell me why you shun me, for over 17 years. YOu made your cruel decision when you were still a child. In Steiner's model of human development, you aren't a fully adult human until around 28. And its been long time since you were 28 so you slash my heart every single day for a choice you made as a child.  And you talk to your dad, who, according to Hennepin County Child Protection, a child therapist specializing in sexual abuse, the Minneapolis Police, the Omaha Police and a MD in MN who examined you, incested you but I am the one you shun.   I still have the Hennepin County Child Protection report and later reports when Hennepin County appointed a guardian ad litem for Katie and ordered a full family study by Hennepin County psychologists. So I am not slandering anyone. I am referencing legal government documentation.

I think you have blocked out your memories of what he did. Paul, that therapist you saw for a few years, told me child predators count on the memory playing tricks. He told me he believed your dad was actually planting his evil onto you by suggesting I made it up. Say, do you remember when your dad suggested it was one of your male cousins, as if you didn't know it was your dad.

Is that why you shun me, because your father incested you and you have lied to yourself into believing I planted such ideas?  If that is your truth, write and tell me. And I will let go. I won't let go without you telling me why you have come close to destroying my life.  No, you have not come close. Your decision to shun me has destroyed me.  I am in emotional agony all the time, tearing up, crying for no apparent reason.

I had just finished a masters, I was launching a new career that I loved and then you shunned me and I fell apart.  I am like a baby bird fallen out of the next, all broken and unable to heal myself.

The thing about one of your August 2012 emails that I only just read this week:  it was my birthday week but instead of happy birthday you coldly threatened me with a restraining order you could not get in IL since I am, um, in California, far far away.  If you want to really have no contact or not hear from me, you really ought to stop making legal threats like calling the cops to have me arrested when someone who works in your former work building let me in -- I could have found him if the cops had come. I didn't care about the cops. Chicago police was very unlikely to show up for hours, if at all, and they would not have arrested me. I waited until you called the cops on me, and I was behaving calmly, because I wanted to see if you would actually call the cops on me when you were the only one screaming and hysterical. I was not the one acting crazy.  And then to read your restraining order threat i those August emails -- its just so cold and completely inconsistent with you statement that you love me, that you are sorry your shunning hurts me, that you are working (It had been ten years as of 2012 and now its been 16 years. . . ). . .

My mom had lots of sayings that she tended to trot out at the wrong moments, sneering at me and her other children when we were hurt and seeking her comfort, something my mom never offered. One of her sayings, one I musta heard her say, to me or others, a bajillion times was 'you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar".

Making threats that reference the legal system, to your mother, is the way an ungrateful, unloving daughter behaves. You could have said you didn't want contact without threatening me.

so the other day, reading those 2012 emails (and how the heck did I ever miss them and it is so puzzling to me that I suddenly found them. . . I think I archived them but did not read them in 2012 for they were still bolded in my email box, the old one I haven't used regularly since 2006.. . but how would you know?)  I know you don't like me sending you notes and leaving voice messages but my behavior is not sick. I am acting like a mother who gave everything she had to give to her only child and that child shuns me.  I have been polite.

I did leave a couple wild and angry voice messages after I found your 2012 legal threats and the "I know this hurts you and I love you".  If you cannot treat me as if you love me, don't say you love me. And please, for your sake and mine, don't ever threaten me with legal shit. It is so cold. It's a hella lot like, um, your cruel father, the one our marriage counselor said had no threshold of decency. Looks like maybe your threshold of decency is also nonexistent.

Tell me why. Tell me why.

Oh, and slander?  Truth is the only defense to slander. If I am reciting Hennepin /county /child Protection documentation, that is my truth.

WTF did I do?  I've been thinking a bit about Rob Jack. He was a good kid and I liked him, and I imagine I would have liked him no matter what. ?But I really liked him because he said to you, in front of me, more than once, that it hurt him to hear you constantly put me down, to constantly complain about me when he never saw or heard me doing anything awful. Like you and he would spend time with me and he would think I was a perfectly good person but when you were alone with him, you'd denigrate me in such ugly terms. No wonder Rob broke up with you, for you showed him how unkind you could be.  Sure I have flaws, all humans do, but being cruel and lacking a threshold of decency is not one of my flaws.

as my father's life ebbed away

My father had a massive stroke that left most of his left side paralyzed. His left leg could walk in a heavy limp, he was never able to use his left arm again for anything and the left side of his face drooped frozenly. Many years before that happened, when he took me shopping for back-to-college stuff, as we walked through a parking lot to get to the department store, he saw a man with a paralyzed left arm limping. He stopped, pointed that other man out to me and he said "That's the kind of thing that could happen to me" (I guess he had been told he was at risk of stroke because he did not take care of his diabetes?). He went on a bit, saying how self conscious he would be and how unhapopy he would be. As he spoke, I have a strong intuition that a paralyzing stroke was in his future. About ten years later, it happened and then he lived a few more years, getting progressively dependent and progressively miserable. I lived in MN, he was in Chicago. I visited him a few times a year, bringing his first grandchild. Every time I saw him, he spoke of wishing he would die. Near the very end, when some of my brothers had taken over his health care choices and ignored me (they always had ignored me and were furious when I voiced, just once, an interest in our father's care and esp. his wishes).  It was customary in our family for my four brothers to bully and brow beat me. As the second oldest child, all my brothers (well, not really my baby bro David) were almost encouraged to see me as a lesser being. Encouraged by each of our parents and the culture of the fifties and sixties as I grew up.

I visited him at least once a month as he seemed to be approaching the end of his life.  I also wanted my daughter to know her grandfather as much as she could. Dad doted on all babies, esp ones related to him. How he doted on Katie, his first grandchild.

In the second to last visit, we went down to Chicago for the weekend before Katie's last week of school. It surprised me, and pleased me, when my dad urged me to stay.  He wanted to spend some time with me.  I reminded him Katie had one more week of school and we'd be back the next Friday. He said "How cares about a week of school?"  Well, Katie did. our Waldorf school was centrally important to our lives and school was indescribably important to Katie. The last week was a special week that she would have been hurt to miss.

On that visit, he was in a nursing home and not on machines. By a week later, he had been moved to a facility that provided more intensive care, like a feeding tube and oxygen mask.

In our penultimate visit, he kept asking me to pray that he die. I said I would pray that God's will unfold for him, pointing out to him that asking me to pray he died was not something I wanted to do. I did want him to end his suffering. His eyes became so expressive then. He could just about shout at me with his eyes "please let me die".

I believe he understood that two of my brothers were making the decisionsm giving docs the impression they were in charge. They did not have a power of attorney. I did not fight because I never won fights with my brothers and my dad was dying.  I reasoned that the last thing any of us needed was more sadness. So i sat with dad as much as I could, leaving Katie with sisters-in-law.

When  returned and he had the food tube in his mouth, he could not talk. His eyes said it all. As I stood next to him, whispering about my love for him and telling him Katie stories in hopes of pleasing him, he kept on begging me to let him go. He was in a small room with another patient in the next bed. I got close to whisper for a bit of privacy. As I whispered, I knew what I wanted to say to him.

"Dad" I whispered with as much loving tenderness as I have ever had in me, "I can't do anything about the feeding tube or the oxygen mask but you can. Joe and Tom would not listen to me even if I asked them to remove the tubes.  But you can let go dad. You can close your eyes, pray, feel reverent and just let go."

My dad died within two hours of what I said.  I never told anyone I had said that, except my aunt the nun. She, ever the pip (she left the convent later on, married a divorced priest, even scored a pension from her order when released from her vows!), called me to find out if my dad was really truly near death because she didn't wnt to drive from Chicago's North Side (she was my mom's sister, not dad's) if he wasn't really dying. I described my last visit with him, talking to her within an hour of the visit.

I was often challenged by my aunt the nun, tales for another time maybe. Even as a young child, I thought she was condescending, with a superior air. I heard her dissing my mom a few times, accusing my mom of slovenliness, my mom with four, then five, then six kids and Jody just sitting there criticiing her kitchen table for not being properly cleaned. Jody did not lift a finger to help. And damn, that table top was not dirty.  I didn't discuss my contempt of my aunt the nun with any siblings for a long long time.

But the day my dad died, probably the one time in my life when my aunt the former nun (now former) approved of something I did, she said, after I told her I had told him he could just let go and his suffering could end, she said "Good. Someone should be talking to him like that. it sure sounds like he is dying. I guess I will drive down to see him tomorrow."

He was gone before that tomorrow.

After talking to Jody, I rounded up my kid, my three nieces (i have more, three were around then) and took them all to the Aquarium and the Natural History Museum. These museums are separated by Chicago's 8 or 10 lane Outer Drive but there is a passenger tunnel under the speeding cars and the wide roadbed.

Katie loved the coral island. I treated the girls to a dolphin show. Or some fish show. Then we straggled over to the Natural History museum. Mainly the girls wanted to see the gigantic dinosaur skeleton in the lobby.

I had gone to both these museum dozens, if not hundreds, of times with my dad.

The girls, that day, were taken by the pedestrian, underground walkway. If they screamed, it echoes rilliantly. So they ran around there like crazy creatures screamint, listening to the echoes of their screams and running around to see how their noise changed as they changed positions.

I left them in that tunnel and sat on one of the ledges along the grand staircase up to the entry to the Natural History museum. I saw, feeling myself to be in a bit of a bubble. The girls noise recedes, the traffic noise, which whips around both sides of the Natural History museum muted and I flashed on endless scenes with my dad at the Aquarium, the Natural History Museum, amusement parks and, the favorite museum, I think, of all my siblings and me:  the Museum of Science and Industry.

My reverie was lovely. And gentle. In my mind's eye and in my heart, dad became a gentle man doting on his little children.

And then I felt him pass.

Later, describing that scene to my mother, who happened to be in Ireland with her second husband that day, she asked me the time, converted the Chicago time to Ireland time and said she is sure she had felt him pass at the same time.

I loved every squeal my nieces and daughter made.  I felt wave after wave of wonderful love. My dad's love for me and all my siblings.  My dad's love for all those noisy, happy girls, who were aware their grandpa was very sick and likely dying but as kids, they remained happy in each moment.

Gradually the actual physical scene I was in returned to my focus. It was a hot day in June.  I was grateful the girls had been apart from me as I sat with my dad, energetically, as he passed.

And I was grateful dad had been able to release himself from his suffering.

I would give anything if he were still here. I wish he had taken care of himself. He would be in late nineties now.

a sense of foreboding

My inner voice has become much more noticeable than it ever has been. I did something today that I kepet putting off because everytime I considered getting the task done, I felt queasy and miserable. So today I finally went to the place, did the paperwork. And it was a disaster. Really awful. I came home having wildly suicidal thoughts, which I don't have much anymore.

I would like to be not alive but I am disinclined to suicide.

But when I hear someone died, famous or not famous, I listen for the age they were and if it was very old, I cringe. I don't want to live to be 97. Take me out now.

dang dang dang

I decided I would make another cranberry pear pie, to take to my weekly writing group tomorrow. The pie dough was moldy, the pears were too mushy. I waited too long. And before I realized it was too late, I had poured my Canadian maple syrup on the cranberries only to see that the cranberries were inedible. Well, if I were truly starving, I'd probably have eaten most of the stuff I just mentioned but, so far, I skip moldy, spoiled food. Call me fussy.

super heroes

A former friend once remarked to me, and as I reflect on the exchange, I am wondering if he had just heard someone else say this, that people's network of friends were like a network of superheroes, that each friend represented a kind of super power and added together provided what a person needed.

I liked the concept. And I am quite sure I'd like to have a super power or two and a network of friends with their own super powers.

This guy, who I no longer am in relationship with (he ghosted me after treating me poorly for years, after I endured him treating me poorly for years. . . . ). As he put it in one of our last face to face visits, he said "we were never friends, we are just two people who met at a conference."  Yikes. He said this nearly 8 years after he had socialized with me. Who socializes with someone for that long if they don't see the other person as a friend. Those words cut me painfully. In hindsight, I think he was doing he shithead best to sever ties with me when he said that.

I have had years to reflect on this guy, to review many of our long-ago-now interactions. I think he is dishonest across the board, a sneaky, sniveling, fearful little man who projects his insecurities onto women and blames them for whatever he is feeling and experiencing. Fuck him. Yeah, fuck him.

I like the idea of one's friends as a team of super heroes, each providing a super power I need.

I need these superpowers, but not necessarily only these. I am just popping off the top of my head. I need love. I need a magic touch that generates a lot more money into my life. I need a committed male lover who wants to be with me and who can't get enough time with me -- is that a super power or does this fall under the power of love?  I want a happy sex life.  I want my daughter to love me:  a specilalized superpower of daughter-mother respect and love:  I need this one most of all.

I need hope as a super power.

I need tenderness as a super power.

I need lots of time in nature.

I need a car (not a super power but geez, I want a car so I can leave Berkeley and venture into the beautiful land I live in. And I want to take road trips again. Right now, I'm jonesing for a road trip to Chicago, then swing by Minneapolis. Are these super powers?

The power to blink and produce what I want might get me a lot of the things I have listed. Or a magic lantern. Or my own genie. Or my own magic power.

That's what I need:  magic.

the gray drizzle

“The gray drizzle induced by depression,” William Styron wrote in his memoir about his depression “takes on the quality of physical pain.” In my own experience, the most withering aspect of depression is the way it erases, like physical illness does, the memory of wellness. The totality of the erasure sweeps away the elemental belief that another state of being is at all possible — the sensorial memory of what it was like to feel any other way vanishes, until your entire being contracts into the state of what is, unfathoming of what has been, can be, and will be. If Emily Dickinson was correct, and correct she was, that “confidence in daybreak modifies dusk,” the thick nightfall of depression smothers all confidence in dawn.

And yet daybreak does come, with a shock and a rapture, to find us asking ourselves in half-belief:"What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?"

I have no faith in this moment that daybreak from my depression will dawn. And Styron got it so right:  when I am most depressed, I can't remember what it felt like to not be depressed. This is the worst aspect of my deep depression:  I have no memory of happy.  And when I fall into such holes, I tend to fcus on my Katie wound, the neverending grief of her shunning me all these years. I don't htink she cares one whit about me yet I can't stop longing for her. What is wrong with me that I long for someone who took took took from me, all my financial resources, all my ability to give, all her private education, all my love and ceaseless giving and she just turns me off, out of her heart. I don't feel anger towards her. Oh no. I feel anger towards myself, blaming myself for her choices.  She has contact with her father, who incested her when she was five, but me she shuns?  she took took took frm me until I had nothing to give and then she booted me out of her heart. Why do I want such a person to act like a daughter, to show me love, to care about me?

capitalism is not form of government

embrace suffering

"We need pain to alert us for what needs attention. We have been treating it as some kind of enemy to our cheerfulness."

First Nobel Truth: suffering. If you want to be enlightened, face suffering.  ~ Joanna Macy

life has not forgotten you (or me)

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

man's search for meaning

"When a man finds that its his destiny to suffer, he will have to eagerly accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."
--Viktor Frankl "Man's Search for Meaning"

I miss my dad

My dad had a twinkle in his eye most of the time. The twinkle only left when he was angry, which he was not often in relation to his kids. Dad adored all his kids. He spoiled all of us to the best of his ability.

I miss my kid, sure, but this, my first attempt (a not very successful one, imho) at having a holiday season, I missed my dad. I miss being adored by him, even when I had nothing going on to elicit his adoration. I miss how much he loved all his kids.

A favorite story about my dad. . .

When my sister was an infant, born when I was 14, I took care of her more waking hours than either of our parents. Mom was already doing her best to leave the marriage and her children by working a part time job which paid her college tuition, taking college credits. She only minded my sister and toddler baby brother when I was at school and mom took off as soon as I was on child and dinner shopping prep duty. She used me like an indentured servant and yeah, I sometimes feel that anger cropping up like a little vomit sneaking up my throat and then subsiding.

Dad came home at an unexpected time. I had been getting ready to feed my baby small baby sister. She was maybe four or five months old. I was going to feed her a jar of baby stew, baby food stew, so maybe she was sixteen or seventeen months. My sister was a very late talker so I mix up her age. She was not talking but baby sis did not really talk until age four or five.

And, and I share this with chagrin, I was just going to feed my dearly loved baby sister, who I had longed and prayed for all of my fourteen years until she was born and survived infantcy, a room temperature jar of baby food. Dad came in, saw me grab that jar of baby food, saw me head to the high chair with my sister in it, saw I was not going to heat it up.

Gruffly dad said "Would you like to eat cold beef stew?" Of course baby food beef stew was all goopy. Then dad said "give her to me" and he held her, cooed to her, while he got out a saucepan, filled it with water, slowly simmer the water to gently eat up that baby food stew. And then fed her.

As he fed her he gently chided me, and also called out to my bros who were supposed to help with the baby but never did. Dad was always working two jobs in those days so he didn't know much about who did what and, in 1967, baby feeding and diaper changing was girl work.

I never fed my sister baby food that should be served warm ever again without heating it up. It took only a few minutes in a pan of heating water, as dad had shown me.  I forgive myself because I was a kid myself, with school work, neverending housework, other children to ten (Tom and Dave, toddlers when sis was a baby), endless diapers.

I so loved seeing my dad's tenderness towards my sister Margaret. I so loved Margaret. I so love them both now one alive, one lost to me.