My Mother's Hands

I remember, as a teenager, when my mother looked at her hands one day and said with some dismay, "I have my mother's hands". I was young enough that I was not astonished that my mother's hands looked old. I mean, seriously, wasn't she born old? (She was probably all of 40 when this story happened. I was an insensitive teenager, it need hardly be said.)

Well, karma's a bitch. I don't have my mother's hands. I have my GRANDMOTHER'S hands. My mom has always had beautiful manicures and rock-hard nails. How she managed this, with all the kids and dishes and work, I have no idea. But my rock climber-manicure-free-snaggly-cuticle hands probably figure in her nightmares. I can't quite remember what my grandmother's fingernails looked like, but I'm not getting a long-fingernail vibe from my memories.

And this morning, I noticed that my hands have FREAKING SPOTS on the backs. Jesus, Mary, and Saint Joseph, this getting old thing has no attendant dignity. I should probably be honored to be taking my place among the women with interesting, hard working hands. Ummmm...... not so much with that. I want to take my place with those women, right enough, but I want to LOOK young when I do it. Alas....

Is there a way to make this work?

Camping, I mean.

I can already read my sisters' posts. Why sleep on the ground when there's a perfectly lovely bed at the Ramada Inn? A point not without merit, I have to say.

Should Dave read this blog, I can hear his comments. You never liked camping. Why would you do it now? True enough, I never did much care for camping the way we did it as a family. I stopped going on those trips as soon as I could get away with it.

But I have this thought that won't quite go away. I want to sleep outside on the solstice. I think I might want to figure out a way to camp alone-ish -like maybe go with my friends or the kids or something. Or maybe alone. But there must be a way that I can do this. (Think Bridget Jones Goes Camping.)

I am categorically ruling out sleeping on the hard ground without a pad. I am categorically ruling out a tent that takes an advanced degree in tent-making to set up. I categorically rule out hikes that resemble the Bataan death march. I categorically rule out gross coffee made over a campfire or any food wrapped in foil and tossed in the ashes to cook. What a vile idea.

But I could rule IN things like sleeping outside and feeling the breeze, a gentle stroll through the prairies, sitting in the woods somewhere and getting some writing done, yoga under the trees. I could wrap my brain around paddling around somewhere in a canoe. And when I get hot and uncomfortable, I'll either go swimming or go find some air conditioning. I could pack food and wine in my new (garage-sale find) picnic basket. I could drive somewhere for Starbucks in the morning. How hard can this be?

The thing is... I have to buy a tent and a sleeping bag and all that stuff. Dave took the stuff we had on his last jaunt to Argentina. Does it make sense to buy it (anew) if I'm not sure I'll use it again? Am I dithering about nothing?

Here's the tent I'm thinking about: Andrea's tent. I have no intention of camping in the winter, so it should be fine. I'll probably just borrow a sleeping bag and pad from the boy-child. Should I start like little kids do and camp in the backyard ;)

It's Enough to Wear a Girl Out

I'm tired all the time. I don't succumb to it, or anything. It's not as though I spend days in bed -although I wish I could! But it's definitely keeping me from doing all the things I want to do and from some of the things I need to do.

In social work, we do a quick run-through when people report excessive fatigue.
Are you exercising enough? Of course not. Next question.
Are you overweight? See above.
Are you worried and stressed? Read the blog!
Are you depressed? Probably a little.
Have you had an emotional shock? Ummm.... yeah.
Do you expect too much of yourself? Well, if I did wouldn't I be accomplishing more?
Do you work at nights? Yup
Is there stress at work? Yup
Do you drink more than 6 cups of coffee a day? Yup

And I've had this same cold really since February.

Ok,so I have an excuse or two. But that doesn't change the truth that there's a lot to be done. Excuses don't matter. Nonetheless, I'm kind of (excuse the sad word play) tired of plodding through my days in a combination of dreading the legal/relationship discoveries and just plain exhaustion. And, I'm adding the fun of a summer class to the mix. Is someone going to find me in a dark closet sucking my thumb? Or is the activity going to be an antidote to the exhaustion?

Remedies I've considered:
a short retreat at the Cenacle
a day trip to the Indiana Dunes
a mental health day sometime very soon
today I skipped rock climbing in favor of puttering around the house (reducing further still the amount of exercise I get, so maybe that wasn't wise)

What do you do? I need some help here!

Who Am I? -Revisited.

Oh! You thought I knew the answer??!! Seriously, what were you thinking? This is a big question, and it did sort of get thrown at me.

Some of you have been following the evolution of my profile to the left of this post. It's a work in progress, to be sure, but it's getting there. And I've made one more decision. I'm changing my name back to my birth name. This is going to be a confusing transition for all of us. I've had my married name for longer than I had my birth name, but we'll figure it out. We're nice smart people.**

Here's my thinking. I have only a little anger toward Dave and none toward his family. But they are not my heart's home, as fine as they are. My siblings, on the other hand, well, we're gifted with each other for life. If someone needs a kidney... If someone's ex-partner needs a serious ass-kicking.... Pretty much no matter what, siblings stand up. Mine certainly did. So, I'm saying in a fairly maudlin way, actually, "these are my people" and leaving a family that didn't stand with me -never even knew me, really. (Of course, not all my siblings have the same last name. The argument gets a little wispy, but work with me here! We're talking symbolism.)

There's also the claiming the new me. I'm not that former person who let someone else define her. I'm this new chick who wants to be brave and idealistic and ...all those other things. So maybe taking a new name will symbolize that.

The kids are okay with this plan, but only okay. They're not crazy about it. I'm trying to figure out a way to help them understand that there is no name change that will affect the ferocity of my love for them. A kidney wouldn't begin to cover it ;) And since that's so unshakable, maybe they need to relax and work on their sibling-ness. They're very close, as it turns out, but all relationships need nurturing. (Are you paying attention, Dave? Lesson #1) I'm here. My name only matters to me. Run off, now, and be sibs to each other. As persuasion goes, it lacks a certain elegance, but that's the gist of the idea.


**It's Buford, by the way. Welcome to the world, grown up girl!

The Gift of Being Seen

These reflections might well become so tangled up as to be, not just useless, but indicative that I am in need of some serious help. We'll have to see. The unrelated thoughts that started me down this road are these...

We had a memorial service at work yesterday for the people who died. I met and expressed the traditional condolences to one of the families. I was talking to the sister of the deceased. The thing she didn't know is that I didn't know her brother. She of course assumed that I did, and there was no reason at all to correct her. The point is that I didn't deserve her effusive praise of our efforts to save her brother. "You knew him. You understood him. You SAW the real him", she said. I have every confidence that the shelter staff who did know him did exactly that.

And what a gift that must have been for a person most people not only overlook but exert effort not to see. The seeing would have been a quiet thing, with no fanfare or announcements of "I see you and know you to be a valuable person. Surely your life will henceforth be changed." It was more of a quiet "namaste" -the divine light in me honors the divine light in you."

So we have quiet, profound seeing -or envisioning, to make it sound more important- and that allows a person to name their own dignity, perhaps.

The second thing that happened is that I realized a few days ago that I had to work hard to be as deceived as I have been about my marriage. Effort had to be expended in order NOT to see the data that were right in front of me. Which doesn't make the demise of the marriage or the deception my fault, but I did more than make it easy for him. I helped. The bone-chilling thought that occured to me is that my efforts might have been so intense that I missed his betrayal of the kids. What if he betrayed his fatherly role as profoundly as his husbandly role? Since "Oh he would never do that" has fallen completely out of my vocabulary, I felt like I had to ask. I didn't so much want to know what Dave had done, but what I had done. Had I failed to see something that was vitally important? (The answer seems to be no, thank all that is holy.) I'm not sure I could have recovered -or that the kids could have- from such a spectacular failure of vision on my part.

They both report, by the way, that they never talk about important things with their dad. He sends them money -which he can do and I can't, so that's a good thing. But how is he ever going to see them as interesting and nuanced individuals if they don't talk about important things? But I'm trying not to own that sadness. It isn't mine. The point is that questioning and listening to the answers ought to be an important part of the kind of seeing that can help a person become their most authentic self.

And finally, I'm wondering if Dave and I failed so spectacularly to see each other that we actually lost sight of our own identities. I certainly lost mine. I had to work so hard to be the person I thought he would like -and he didn't like her either, as it turns out- that the real me just plain wandered off. Is being authentically seen part of knowing who we are? You have to claim the real version of yourself and act on it. You have to allow the authentic vision of the other person. And those two things are intertwined in some way that I haven't figured out yet.

So, if I'm on the right track, authentically seeing someone is a life-changing gift that involves:
quiet reflection
questioning
listening
acting
allowing
-and probably more reflection just to round things out. And besides, it's just good to know that there's someone who knows how you take your coffee. Someone has noticed that you're on the planet. That's not nothing.

Godspeed -and May Our Hands be Blessed

Four homeless guests of our shelter died this weekend. They weren't together when it happened; we have four separate events. As far as I know, there was no violence or mayhem, but four of the "least of our brethren" are dead.

It's easy to think that this is a sign, somehow. I mean... seriously.... FOUR???? OK,we're paying attention. What are we supposed to learn here? It's easy to think that we missed something, overlooked something, avoided something that might have helped us prevent these premature deaths.

Did we do too little? Of course we did. We might have done all that could be done. Probably, that's true. Nonetheless, we did too little.

Did we do the wrong things altogether? That's possible and more disturbing.

Or, was this inevitable, and we offered some solace and comfort and a smidge of dignity to their last days?

I just don't know. We scramble and scrape and pull more than a few rabbits out of hats in order to relocate the inherent dignity in our clients. We see their worth before they do, but that's just a function of the human condition. Most of us can see someone else's dignity more clearly than our own. Now we're faced with -not for the first or last time- the task of crafting a dignified death and memorial for people who have no experience of that.

Peace to Terry McBrien, Dennis Jones, Dave Smith, and Jim Blomberg. We will miss each of you and all of you.

It also occurs to me that as we offer the basic necessities, a little focused attention, and some hope to our homeless brothers and sisters, we can be really hard on ourselves. I can not be okay with a "you win some, you lose some" attitude here. We have to grieve the losses. We have to challenge ourselves to be more effective, more gentle, and all-around better models of a just world. Yet we also have to be gentle with ourselves about those losses.

We do a lot with a little. We take our work home. We agonize over our mistakes. And we go to bed every night knowing that we're safe and cozy and blessedly self-determining, while others are under bridges or safe-but-harried in the shelter. We have to get up in the morning and do it all again. People's needs are relentless.

So... homelessness finally broke these men. We couldn't stop it. That doesn't make them -or us- weak. It just means that injustice is a formidable foe. And we have to figure out some way -many ways, no doubt- to be sure that it doesn't break all of us.

Godspeed to these men, and may our hands be blessed for the work still to come.

Hope as a Spiritual Practice

A monastery where I've found some peace and some spiritual direction burned to the ground at the end of April. Doesn't that just figure? That's what my cynical self asks -or suggests. The place I find solace burns up; my power to attract negative energy apparently knows no end. (insert eyeroll here... I don't really believe that.)



But they're rebuilding. I don't know what their meetings are like. I don't know what their individual reflections are like. There must certainly be moments of despair and darkness, particularly for the person who's single-handedly financially supported the monastery. However bleak those moments are, though, they're choosing to rebuild.

(If you want to help them, go here: John Michael Talbot)

One chooses -they're choosing- to act as if they're certain that there is goodness in the world, that given the opportunity people will do the good thing, that the universe will support any effort to bring good into the world.

I know, in a way I never knew before, how much courage and faith that takes, and I stand in absolute awe. I've spent the day putting my phone away where I can't reach it. I've wanted to talk to Dave -the one I used to know- so badly today that I can hardly stand it. The thing I have to do, the grownup-Andrea-thing, is not do that. I have to remember that no good ever comes to me from that. There is no hope there. I don't mean hope for a marriage. There's been no hope there for a long time. I mean there's no hope that he is who I want him to be -that he is the man he ought to want to be.

Work was hard -and I'm bloody TRYING to bring good into the world. The legal stuff was hard, and I'm trying to do that gracefully and without too much malice. Is it wrong or naive to want to talk to someone -to talk to my husband- about that? Of course I know it is. But I'm thinking that the universe should jolly-well step up to the plate and support the people who try to bring good to the world. So how do I reconcile these two things -the courage to believe that the universe supports the good and the courage I need -to believe that this particular person will take advantage of the fact that I'm trying to be and do good? Or am I just failing to live up to the possibility of hope as a spiritual practice, and I ought to act differently?

Here's all I have right now. Their fire and my trial-by-fire... it all does the same thing. It strips away all the stuff you think you need -the buildings and the history in their case, the relationship and the history in mine. It teaches you who you are. It teaches you that you can live with terror and even move through it, slowly and carefully if need be. It teaches you to hope for the right things.

They might wish that their buildings and artifacts had never been burned. I might wish that my life hadn't been ransacked. But so what? Wish all you want. What you have is right in front of you. Deal with that. Move forward from that. The right hope is in the belief that you can.

Right this minute that hope -for me- is feeling as fragile as it felt in the beginning of this process.