Strong

 
 I have started seeing clients. My course work is done and I am now unleashed and allowed to scamper through the minds of those who are willing to let me. I had my very first client last week and all self deprecating snide comments aside, it was a truly moving experience. She was my kind of client. She is dying. Or at least she is in all probability dying. She was certainly coming to terms with this as a possibility. She is a cancer sufferer, or at least that is what she is now. What she was before was an entrepreneur, matriarch, socialite and the centre point of strength for her family. Now she is someone new. Someone everyone is uncomfortable with.

     Her daughter called me. She knew I had met her mother in a coping skills seminar I had given several months ago. I facilitate these events at a local cancer centre where skills and support are given to patients to help them cope with the multiple levels of stress and emotions that go along with being branded with the big "C" (or hushed, whispered little "c".) I had left an impression on her mother, she said, so would I see her. Every second word out of the daughter's mouth was related to strength. She is not strong enough, she is not fighting like she should, I am worried I am not strong enough, she was always so strong and now she isn't anymore, can we find some way to give her the strength? I felt for this daughter, whose love and respect for her mother was so apparent. You could see she was reaching out, not knowing how to make her mother back into the woman she used to be.

      Strength is such a loaded idea. What is it to be strong? We always think of it as a great character trait. Strength of mind, strength of body, strength to bear pain, strength to hide your feelings. You hear  stories in eulogies of how wonderfully strong the dead were. No one says they were vulnerable and hurt and needing support. Instead we champion the stoic. Go into the night with your head held high. Why is this so laudable? Why not go into the night kicking and screaming and holding out your hand clinging to love and looking to be buffered from the fear? Because it hurts the ones around you. It burdens those who love you. It is scary to show your pain. It is even scarier for those who love you to see it. Both sides end up feigning strength. Shoring up their walls to hide their terror. It contains it supposedly.

       I saw this woman. And after about half an hour she was able to cry. She said to me, "oh, that feels so good. I have not cried in years and all I really wanted to do is cry." I told her that I had a very positive attitude towards crying, and I thanked her for being able to feel safe enough to do that in front of me. I wanted to talk to her about what it meant to be strong, since this was the word that was pervasive. I said, what is the strongest tree? In your mind is it a redwood? An Oak? Giant and immovable? Or stop and think for a minute about a palm tree, slim and flexible. Delicate almost in appearance. When hurricane force winds blow who is left standing? It is not the old giant tree with its rigid trunk and unyielding branches. It is the palm tree, bending over to impossible angles, washed over by the force of the attack, accepting of the onslaught, that will survive. These are trees that were born to withstand trauma.

     To me strength is feeling. Strength is reaching out and admitting that that you are hurting and being able to accept help. Strength is being able to see your loved ones in pain and allowing them let go and bend with the wind, while understanding that it will not break them. Strength is not about building an impenetrable wall over which nothing gets in or out. Strength is about resilience and showing your pain and knowing that it will flow over you like a hurricane. It's true, some storms are too strong and we can become uprooted, but if our very design is to bend and flow with the wind, most of our storms will pass over us making us stronger and ready for the next one.

    So I dedicate this blog to the sufferers. I get angry sometimes with the rhetoric of fighting and strength that comes with cancer. It puts this onus on the ill. It makes them feel like they are failures when they look at their fear and their sadness. It makes them feel responsible when they have no energy to get up and fight. I say to them that your strength is in your reaching out your hand and saying, I am scared, I am lonely, I need your help. Your strength is in bending, and coming close to the ground where we can touch you.

Fucking love

It's become frustrating all this cake eating. Having it. Eating it. Then came the couples counselling course. So now I have the privilege of self analysis. I love this class. I think it is my destiny but the class is dangerous. It's all about attachment.

Attachment styles are the next big thing. Are you securely attached? Insecurely anxious? Insecurely avoidant? Have your neurons been healthily formed to make your limbic system fire in a good way? Did you get enough attention as a child so can you safely roam trusting that your home base is steadily waiting in the wings to greet you with love and support? One can't help but to look at themselves and ask, what are my patterns?

The last couple of weeks I have been steadily self diagnosing. We all want to think we are securely attached. That we are both connected and independent. That we are capable of giving love that is open and trusting and that someone will do the same for us. When I peel back my layers I wonder. I wonder why there are times I feel so lonely.

It's not for lack of relationships. I have those. My daughter, my family, some beautiful souls that I can share my bed with. A big hairy dog who takes up too much space and demands love and affection in an unconditional and terminally endearing kind of way. There are just moments when there is an emptiness, a feeling of reaching out for something intangible with a longing so deep and poignant that your heart literally aches. The most deeply rooted fear in us all. Abandonment. Was it because someone didn't pick me up when I cried?

Thank fuck for plasticity. Our brain's unstoppable ability to change and grow and learn. Turns out, if you can find someone to pick your crying ass up in the present, you can change your destiny and feel safe all by yourself. Or so they say. The trick is to trust that you are not too heavy. Maybe I should eat less cake.

Fantastical

I remember watching a British documentary once, years ago. It was about sex. They were interviewing men and women about their fantasies. They edited all the men together and one after one, they said the same thing: two women at one time. Threesome. No description or detail. Just the simple repetition. Two women at once. It was as if for them, just multiplying tits and ass by two was the ultimate turn on. More is better. Crass and direct. Boring.

The women however were dirty. Really really dirty. Dirty and specific. Dirty and creative. Dirty and downright kinky. One fantasized about apparatus, machines, and equipment and ways to be restrained. Another thought about animals, dogs and ponies. Another wanted to take control, having a man kneel before her and paint her toenails. And then there were the aliens...

I was talking about this with some friends, and we began to describe our own fantasy lives. We all agreed we had worlds. Not flashes or images, but narratives, details and repeated scenes that we would go over and over again until perfected. Personally, I have an island. I visit that island and replay scenarios. Chase scenes, auctions, and public displays. It's my world.

My favourite story is from a lesbian friend of mine. She had this fantasy that involved a power station. In her fantasy it is her orgasms that fuel the electricity. She would be in the station and people would have to make her come over and over again so that the energy would be generated. She said it made her feel so powerful. I loved the image. A city illuminated by her come.

I have had partners ask me what my fantasies are. I think in hope that they can fulfill them in some way. It is rare that I reveal the details. For one, they could never do to me the things I imagine. I think that is the point of the imagination. To go to the impossible. It is so limitless. I am not ashamed of my dirty world, it just belongs to me. I am in it's centre, the most desired, the most insatiable, the most irresistible. It feels like home, however, where calm sleep follows.

So two women you say? Imagination please. What are they wearing? How do they smell? What do they say to me as they take control? I need details please. I need impossibilities. It is a fantasy after all and that is the point.  

Fucking School

Fucking School. It's its fault. I have nothing to say as the following words have shut down my creative process:
 socio-economic location, system, discourse, the Global South, social capital, retrenchment, the welfare state, reflexion, self care, APA 6, abstract, qualify, quantify, reify, marxism, neo-liberalism, Global North, intersectionality, dialectic, deontological, relative, subjective, bias, critical, ethical, social justice, community, societal, accreditation, Harper, meso, macro, micro, minutiae, syllabus, reference list, 118707715, ISP, field, field notes, codified, residential schools, oppression, repression, obsession, suicide, story telling, Kubler Ross, Foucault, feminist, hetero-normative, life course, phenomenological, relative, inconsequentially, (Klein, 2012), grounded theory, statistically, outlier, mean, functional, structural, subconscious, Jungian, urban, rural, healthcare, eldercare, care, trach, deadline....

I will write again when my means to and end has come to an end.

Sick

I never get sick. Well "never" is a stupid word. I rarely get sick. I did this week though. My kid brought it in the house. She is the port of entry for all germs. Usually I use a magical combination of placebo to ward off any bugs, but this time the virus outsmarted my brain and my immune system went into overdrive, stuffing up my nose, congesting my chest and aching my bones.

There is a question on OK Cupid, how do you feel when you do nothing all day? Good or bad are the choices. I chose bad. Nothing all day bores the shit outta me. I don't consider reading a book for 8 hours in a row nothing, or writing a blog, or even flirt chatting with random strangers. I consider lying on a couch forced to watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory and What Not to Wear as "nothing".  More so, the nothing is characterized by my self imposed quarantine. Not wanting to inflict the plague on loved ones, I cancelled a much anticipated poker night with pregnant friends and multiple lovers. It was going to be my kind of fun. Instead I stayed alone, feeling quite pathetically sorry for myself as I blew my nose and drank copious amounts of tea I could not taste.

My mother told me when I was a kid that I was very rarely sick. If I was, I would come home, say I was going to bed and then sleep it off till I was better. She never really plied me with chicken soup and head rubs. If I injured myself she would get mad at me. I understand now, she was just worried and it came out mean, but as a kid I always wondered why she would yell at me when I came in bleeding. Maybe that is why I would retreat, so as not to get my mum pissed off. Let me be clear, my mother was not abusive or uncaring, she just had an old school attitude to sickness and injury. That it was kind of your fault and that you should suck it up and deal with it. Grin and bear it has been her mantra. She had a lot to grin and bear, and I quite honestly respect her for her strength. Perhaps she thought if she paid me too much attention, I would get sick more. There might be something to that logic. I have occasionally applied it to my daughter on "itchy bum" nights. Those of you with kids may know what I am talking about. When your child works themselves into a frenzy because something is itching them. I hear my mother's voice come out of my mouth sometimes, "well it's just an itchy bum, it's not going to kill you, so you better just relax and go to sleep because there is nothing I can do for you."

One of my fondest memories is when I was about 8 and I had the flu. I can count on one hand the amount of fevers I have had in my life, and this was the first that I recall. One of my other mothers that lived in the collective, who had a kinder, gentler attitude towards illness, put me in her bed and played in my hair till I fell asleep. To this day, petting my head sends me drifting off to my happy place. I struggle between both. Wanting to be left alone, and wanting to be coddled. I like to think I am stoic, stiff upper lipping  it like a British WWII propaganda poster, when there is a lot of me that craves being tucked into the big bed and gently caressed to sleep. Hmm, any connection here with last weeks blog??

I blame this meandering installment on the mucus in my brain, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently. What it means to care for and be cared for. I hope with my daughter I make her feel better. Although the other day's crying accusation of "you are not sorry for me!" as I  told her to suck it up after she whacked herself with a rebound door nob after a  frustrated door slam, hints that I am trending towards my mum's school of thought. Truth be told though, I caught this fucking cold by letting her in my bed the night she was sickest so that I could cuddle her to sleep.

Superheros

 

  I have only had my heart broken once. It was a very long time ago. His name was Hart. A perfect name really. I was in university and very young. He was a Jewish rugby player with dark black curls that a friend of mine dubbed the "hair of the future." When I first met him, I was not all that interested. I had just split up up with another rugby player, this one of Scottish descent and I was really just looking for distraction. We ended up talking all night and going back to his place. We stayed up till the morning. I remember watching Sesame Street with him. Our sides ached as tears of laughter rolled down our faces watching Bert do the pigeon shuffle. Bert's legs are pretty much the most comical thing you can experience on no sleep, a few to many beers and a joint or two.

     We started dating. He took me to a Marx Bros festival and showed up looking stiff and uncomfortable. It was because he had hid a flower tucked into the back of his pants under his jean jacket. It was simply romantic and I remember it perfectly. He liked me more than I liked him. He told me he loved me on the phone soon after, and I did not love him back. I think I just said, "oh, oh ok.." He kept wooing me and we would smoke pot and give each other artificial respiration on the couch. He could fireman carry me. One day I was touching his abdomen, he had a very strong body, and I said, "I like these, " referring to his washboard like stomach. A few weeks later he pointed out that they were more defined. He said, "I made these for you, cause you like them."

One night, and this dates me of course, we went to see Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I started feeling woozy about halfway into the movie. I made it till the end but I was getting sicker and sicker. We took a cab to his apartment and I rushed to the bathroom. I have never been so ill since, as I sequestered myself in his bathroom, projectile vomited into his spaghetti pot, evacuating from both ends simultaneously. When there was nothing left in inside of me, I said, "Ok I will grab a cab and go home." He would not let me. I said, "You will get sick..." He said, "No I won't, I am the Wolverine." I was not a comic nerd back then. I read Dickens and the Brontes;  a whole other level of Masterpiece Theatre nerd, so I asked,  "The Wolverine?"

My fever was high and painful and I felt like I was dying. He said the Wolverine was indestructible. The Wolverine did not get sick or die. He told me the complete story of the Marvel Universe to distract me until dawn and I finally fell asleep. When I woke up, I was irretrievably in love. It was a love I had never felt before. He had taken care of me. I had let him. This was new.

The semester came to an end and he went off to Israel to play rugby in the Jew Olympics. He wrote me one very strange letter, and that was all I heard from him. I imagine he met some heptathlete with matching abs and better genetics. I was destroyed. I did not know why he did not love me anymore. There is no happy ending really, just a summer of ice cream and pathetic videos in bed, crying jags and hermitude. School started again and I never really found out why he went off me the way he did. I remember looking for closure years later and writing  him a letter, but there was no response. I still google stalk him in fits of nostalgia.

So where are these memories coming from? They have all been safely tucked away in a wistful space in my brain. It is my whippet man. He reminds me. He has wooed me, and he has taken care of me. I didn't want him at first, but he just kept persisting. When I look at him sometimes I feel the same. He won me. A different love. I have been panicking recently. A new witch doctor I see has unleashed some emotions and tells me that I need to stop fighting all the time. He keeps asking me what I am seeing as tears roll down my face in his office. I am seeing me letting go. Maybe they are tears of relief. I have been pretending since I was a child, that I was ok all by myself. I  don't feel sad. I am just on a precipice. Panicking before I jump.

I call the whippet guy Superman. He looks like a cross between Clark Kent and Woody Allen. Good thing he can fly and catch me when I leap.

Whippets

Whippets are one of my favorite cookies, beaten out only narrowly by oreos. What makes them so special? It is a complicated convergence of a hard chocolate outer crust, which needs to be cracked and peeled to reveal a soft fluffy marshmallow centre sitting atop a not too sweet, but satisfyingly firm and crunchy graham cracker foundation.  I was shown recently the "proper technique" for cracking the outer layer, through a surprise attack whack on the forehead of your unsuspecting whippet eating companion.  

The forehead whacking guy is a new lover who likes to tell me how refreshingly normal I am. I think he means, not crazy, or not overly dramatic. I think he means resilient and balanced and independent.  I think he means rational. How normal these traits are, I don't know, but I know he means it as a compliment.   I keep warning him that he has just not seen my crazy yet. I am only half joking. People rarely see my crazy, unless they bump into it on day 22 of my cycle. I tend to hide it under a hard sweet layer of chocolate  exposing  it only semi anonymously in under- read blogs.

I do have a squishy marshmallow centre though. I noticed it today when I had to wrap a broken winged pigeon in a tea towel in front of my daughter and next door neighbors. They looked at me in awe a bit, as I calmly called for a shoe box and held the bird gently and firmly in the palms of my hands. They were relieved I was doing something, releasing them from obligation.

I knew he would die. I took him to the vet .  I asked them  to pretend they were going to save it in front of my kid, all the while aware that they were just going to euthanize him. Only once my daughter was safely plugged into some commercial free kid animation did I go out back,  curl up fetally in my hammock, and become intensely sad. I had had a client today, she had had some past trauma which was unspeakable, and she kept sitting bolt upright on my table with the same look in her eye that the pigeon had. She wouldn't speak either, except to say over and over again that she was sorry. I felt quite helpless, and the bird brought it all flooding in. 

The thing is there was a moment when I saw the bird plummet from the balcony upstairs, that I paused. I thought should I do something? Do I leave it to my cats to finish the job? Do I go into the house and close the door and pretend that this insignificant creature was not writhing in pain under my neighbor's porch? I really wanted to pretend it wasn't there. My solid, semi sweet graham cracker foundation would not allow me to walk away. It shored up the marshmallow and forced me into action. My client is coming back at the end of the week to try again. On the inside I am dreading it, wanting to refer her elsewhere. I keep seeing the bird. 

Ok so next blog will be a raunchy account of a threesome with two African Americans as illustrated through a racist oreo metaphor .. it will be so much more entertaining. (just joking, it will actually be about pirate cookies)