gratitude

There are many times that I wake up, stumble to the bathroom for my contact case, and start the day with a low buzz of swirly, got-to-do thoughts. Sometimes I remember to stop myself. I take a breath, slow the head race, and remember these things for which I’m grateful:

for a healthy child

for matt, who loves dogs (almost) as much as me.

for the guardian of all small creatures.

for friends like this.

 

and this.

 

for a house full of fur.

for good sleep and a warm bed.

two questions

There are a few reflection exercises I like. This is a daily one, and I’ve mentioned it before on my company’s blog. It helps me stay mindful.

Every night I ask myself:

1. Are you proud of the choices you are making at home?
2. Are you proud of the choices you making at work?

The exercise struck me as inherently Buddhist in its focus on action (not results). It’s a self-check, innit?

It’s also closely related to NA/AA speak. Meetings, and those who attend them, are full of platitudes. Some are great, in that I find them amusing and accurate (Those who relapse are attending powerlessness graduate school) and some are real shit, in that I find them nauseating in their triteness (Directions to AA: Just go straight to hell and make a U-turn). Clearly, I have mixed feelings about the program. Forgive me that (or don’t).

One, though, has stayed with me for years: Do the next right thing.

Like the daily reflections I’m really digging, I can get behind this for the same reason: It’s action oriented and it pulls me into the present. Most days, I wish I had done better. I lose my temper at home or my focus at work. I regret wasted time. The exercise is, most days, uncomfortable for me. I think there’s something to be said, though, on living through that uncomfortableness. 

just that.

relapse.

I’ve planned and executed a relapse for over a year. It started in Barcelona in November 2011 when I slipped up after a mere five months of sober time. I admitted that to the people I love most, and I started all over again counting the days. I didn’t drink again until Copenhagen the following year, and while I felt an awful guilt after both occasions, I chalked up the incidents to being out of the country. They didn’t really count.

Right.

I picked up again last summer, the second theoretical anniversary of my sobriety. It was, once more, an out-of-town experience. But I drank enough to be wicked to my sisters, with whom I was vacationing, and to feel like utter shit. Still, I never brought it home. That made it ok.

Fast forward. Accelerating signs: the slow withdrawal from NA and AA; the loss (or purposeful relinquishing, I don’t know) of writing as an outlet; the poisonous thinking that alcohol wasn’t really the problem; the good stressors of a new house and a new position at the company I’ve been with for five years.

SXSW is probably the worst possible place for me to go, ever. I went. On the plane, I said to myself that I wouldn’t drink: This is domestic. If you excuse drinking here, you’re done. Don’t fuck up. I did.

I remember a glass of gin with a cucumber prettily placed on the rim, and I remember hating it. I know that I was confused, that I became lost. I know, only from an early-morning phone call from the woman who somehow acquired my credit cards, that she put me in a pedi-cab around 10pm. I am certain that I wandered for hours, but it may have been 5 minutes. It is a mad blur that only an alcoholic recognizes.

I have barely made it through the past three days. The hangover was killer. The shame and guilt have been far worse. I am embarrassed, but not just about slipping. I am embarrassed that I have not been completely honest all along. That everyone believed, with no objection from me, that I was a blazing light of sobriety. I have rationalized and justified my behavior. I have told half-truths.

Writing this down is not something I thought I would do. What I would have preferred is to hole up my house with Sex and The City reruns and a blanket – for a few weeks.

Repeat.

But it feels better to tell. Whether it’ll feel better or worse after I’ve shouted it out here, who knows? I’m chancing it.

It’s a funny (haha?) thing because I have no conscious craving for alcohol. I don’t want it. I just got lax and lazy and believed that it was time to test the waters again. How stupid, you fucking alcoholic. The waters are never safe. I knew that, but I sold myself the same lie over and over again until I halfway believed it, long enough to pick up a drink.

This is my rigorous honesty. This is me admitting that I have a terminal illness. This is me saying that I am shitfaced powerless over alcohol, that I fell down, and that I’m working on getting back up.

“I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.”

― Heather King, Parched

You is kind. You is smart. You is sometimes a jackass.

“If you don’t start out too big for your britches, how are you gonna fill ‘em when you grow up?”
– Stephen King

There are times, many, in fact, that I wonder if Cole doesn’t have a tad more ego than the average dirty-pants’d six-year old. Maybe ego is the wrong word. Maybe it’s not. I’d like not to admit that he’s either overly self-centered or bursting with an unrealistic (bloated) view of self. But he does think pretty well of himself. He’s happy to be Cole. So happy that, upon playing a “What Are You Thankful For?” game with the family, Cole wrote one word: Me.

From a Buddhist perspective, ego is a center of self, but it’s the false center, the one derived from others. True center is the one you’re born with — that’s the self. A kid is born without consciousness of self, and once born, the child because aware of the Other. The child is aware of his mother, how she holds him, smiles at him, and tells him, “You are precious to me.” And through that love and care, he feels good and important and valuable.

And then, through that interaction with the Other, he becomes increasingly aware of thatthingwecallself. He goes to school and learns that he’s not the center of the universe. Sometimes he fails. People don’t like him. Someone rolls her eyes. Another tells him that he’s not cool. Problem is, though, that’s not real awareness. It’s reflected. It’s born of a million different interactions with Other. It’s a complex, growing, tangled thing that’s shaped by how the world reacts to us. Ego changes. The reflected center grows and shifts and mutates until it’s a great hulking thing that we believe is … us.

(It’s not.)

Now is it possible that I’ve bolstered inflated Cole’s view of self? You bet it is. I lavish praise on the kid. I may have, on occasion, given him a line from The Help: You is kind. You is smart. You is important.

 

I’ve gotten better, though. I have. I didn’t realize that I might be doing him a disservice with the over-the-top ERMERGERD YOU’RE SO GREAT until sometime last year. And now, I’m careful to praise him for hard work, rather than intelligence; for kind action, rather than sweetness; for a job well done, rather than innate ability. And I’m honest. When he asks, “Am I the best bike rider you’ve ever seen?” I give it to him gently, but I give it to him true.

He’s working out his identity. I’m working on ensuring that identity is solid and realistic about his strengths and weaknesses. Again with the balance.

Up the street

Last week we lost Big Ellie.

Oh, sweet hound.

She and our Australian shepherd, Lady, stay outside most days until I get home with Cole in the afternoons. So when we arrived home last Monday to only Lady waiting at the gate, I knew something was amiss. My first instinct was that, given Big El’s recent cancer diagnosis and her bout with bronchitis, the hound might be somewhere toward the back of the yard, sick. Or that she had run away to die. I guess dogs do that.

Hours later, we received the phone call that brought her back home. Until yesterday, we hadn’t figured out how she was making the grand escape. Walking around the fence yet another time, searching for her route out into the great beyond, I wandered and Big ‘El ambled with me. And against the side fence, the once that divides our property from the house with two other fool dogs, El made her move. She crouched. She shimmied. She scurried as fast as a 90-pound, 9-year old fatty can scurry, under the fence. Halfway under, I pulled her back. And I saw the hole she’d dug.

El is grounded, banished to the life of an indoor dog or an on-leash dog until we can make the fencing secure. She’s unhappy about this, and so are we. But she managed to escape again today, straight through the front door and across the street. This time, I caught her before she slipped out of our lives again.

I don’t know why she wants, so badly, to get out into the world. But she wants to. She simply must. She’s willing to brave busy roads and unkind strangers and the uncertainty of her next meal to get a taste of freedom.

I wish I were a little more like that. Motherhood has made me cautious. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I am no less happy today than I was seven years ago. I’m more content right this millisecond than I’ve ever been. I am comfortable with myself. It’s cozy in my own skin. I’ve grown up. But in that growing up (and growing wiser, let us hope), I’ve lost some of the spontaneity that drives growth. Is that possible?

Does getting older mean getting complacent?

There seems to be a difference, however subtle, between complacency and learning to find contentment with what you have right now. Right now, I don’t much want for grand travel or some childhood remembrance of freedom. My want is more internal, more about finding what I’m here to do (other than to parent, which has proven to be my greatest calling in the most delightfully unexpected way). The wild streets and endless possibility and exhilarating uncertain aren’t really just outside the front door. They’re here. All around me. And the simple matter of throwing off the quiet, slinging open the door, and getting up the street—it’s as easy as deciding.

Whooaly shit

Time flies. Let’s jump right in.

The Kaiser started his first year of Catholic school in early fall. Thus far, it’s been (mostly) sunshine and pretty, pretty roses. Of course, the homework overfloweth, the work rampeth upward, and the push for mommy-centric volunteerism is high. I’m good with those things.

For All Saints Day (uh, happy All Saints Day), Father Smith sprinkled the classrooms with holy water. Now I don’t really understand this, because A) it sounds messy and B) it sounds stupid, but that’s what they do. Cole tells me this with some glee. “And he came in and [exuberant hand motion] sprinkled us with holy water.”

That’s nice.

“The power of Christ compels you…. to do your spelling.”

Whatever. But a droplet of holy water found its way to Cole’s cheek. He darted his tongue out. Licked it away.

And as he tells me his tale, we eat and I smile and nod, nary making a single solitary sarcastic comment. And then, he dropped the bomb.

“Mom, after I ate the holy water, I suddenly remembered all of Hail Mary.”

“Huh?” I pause, fork to mouth.

“Before I licked the holy water, I couldn’t remember the prayer. After I licked it, I remembered it. I knew it all.”

He is convinced a miracle occurred. And who am I to squash his belief? But I don’t really have a good response for that, so I mumble and nod and smile and stuff spaghetti into my mouth. He reaffirms his thinking aloud, retelling the story, and his eyes implore me to make a comment on what is surely the hand of GOD HIMSELF at work in the world. And I do. I tell him that that’s really great and cool and that I’m so happy that he’s learned Hail Mary (he hasn’t–still says, “Blessed is thou among women and blessed is thafudodawubJesus”).

It’s a brave new world for us. I’m not big on organized religion. I’m not big on dogma and legalism. I’m not big on (any of that) Old Testament drivel. But Cole is, and I have to balance my desire for him to take it all with a grain of salt with what clearly brings him joy. He’s thrilled about God. He loves to talk about the sublime and abstractions–the very bigness of it all. And he’s a little fundamental in his belief, as I imagine most six-year olds are. He believes in the Flood. He believes that God is very clearly male. He believes that Adam and Eve were part of a perfect creation story. He wonders why God makes hurricanes. He knows that bad people go to hell.

It’s hard for me. It’s hard to give him other information without confusing the hell out of him. It’s hard to hear beliefs I don’t share. But we made the decision to put him in a Catholic school. Now I’m making the decision to leave his faith to him, and do my best not to bruise his mustard seed.

Sweet house

It’s been forever. ForEVER. I meant to post as soon as I signed the papers and moved in — but moving into a new house is no small feat and my list of “gotta do this/get this/fix this/rearrange this” is huge. I’m happy. I love it. Cole loves it. The dogs love it. And our chickens, coming soon, are gonna love it. Highlights:

Must grow grass.

I took this picture a few minutes ago, just for the blog. And upon coming back in, this greets me:

From my front porch looking in.

And one of my favorite sights when I come home:

Leftover marigolds and firewood. Feels like home.