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Learning and trying to be kind and living my life as fully as I can stand it.

Friday, September 16, 2016

A look back

Sometimes I think if I actually wrote about how hard it is to raise four kids under the age of two-and-a-half people would just start showing up at my house trying to save me. Or save us. I just started a sentence describing this past week, with a handful of sick kids and a sick mama and I got bored in the middle of it. Who really cares? Everyone has sick kids, every parent gets sick, everyone tries to keep their house clean, their bills paid, their dog's nails clipped. It's nothing new or special--it's just in bulk and it is relentless. But I think all parenthood is relentless.

I love these bright, beautiful children so much. I could stare at them for hours. It's the spilling, gate-smashing, screeching, bottle-spilling, whining, needing, door-to-the-bathroom-opening everything  that makes it so hard. The projectile vomit just when I was already at a breaking point, making me burst into hopeless tears in the kitchen before taking the blue Ikea highchair out to the courtyard to spray it off.

Complaining feels at best lame, at worst risky. Like tempting the gods of fate to even think it's too hard.


A year has passed since I wrote the words above. Not exactly a year because a year ago today I was in the hospital for a colitis flare that wouldn't end and I wasn't doing any writing in the hospital. I was resting and ordering meals from food services. I broke, physically in a way that got me hospitalized, but I know that physical break was caused by the mental and emotional breaking that had been going on for months. That and the stupid colitis that I wasn't ignoring so much as was just gritting my teeth and bearing it because I didn't think there was anything I could do to make it better. Except for maybe entirely change my diet to eat only whole foods and no dairy and no gluten and no sugar and. . . no. On some level I want to try that because I know it would be good for me, even if it didn't entirely heal the colitis. On the other levels the only way it could happen would be if someone would shop for me and cook for me and pack lunches for me and then provide me therapy when all of the emotions that get cuddled up in all the food I eat come raging out to devastate the earth around me.

What is really possible? I don't mean in the sense of "Anything is possible if you try" though I guess I do mean it in that way. The truest of true ways which for me comes down to what will you give up or change in order to do the thing you need to do? If you can even figure out what the thing you need to do is.

Months ago I picked up a Brene Brown's book Rising Strong for the third time. It hadn't been meeting me where I was up to that point, though I'd loved her earlier books. I picked it up because it was in front of me on the table and I brought it with me on BART on my way to see a play at the Berkeley Rep. The chapter grabbed me, because it started with a personal story and because it ended with her therapist asking her "What if everyone is just doing the best they can?"

This question sent the author into a rage and she fought it, the idea, for weeks. She asked everyone she came into contact with, coming up with her own qualitative data about what it means if you believe that is true about people and what it means if you don't.

I usually don't. And I haven't believed it about myself for most of my life.

I put the book in my bag as the train pulled into my stop and walked up the stairs into downtown Berkeley. As always, the energy of a city, of people walking quickly around me, dressed in different styles, talking about different things, pulled my heart up and out into the world. It's one of my best mes, the city me. Also the alone me. My god do I love to be alone. The best alone is alone in a sea of people. My favorite. I walked to the theater and met up with my younger brother. Better and better.

The play was Aubergine. It was exquisite. It was about grief, which I wasn't expecting, but was welcome and timely as I had just started my new role at work where I'm learning to specialize in grief. The characters were quirky and bold. And at one point one of the people in the show asked "What if people are just doing the best they can?"

Zing! Okay, god and the universe. I am listening. This message is meant for me today.

So I've been carrying that idea around with me for months, holding it up as a lens when I need it to see others in a different light. It helps. More than that, I've been wrapping it around myself as a cozy blanket when I need it. Maybe I'm just doing the best I can.

Right now, with what I have. With the energy I have possess, with the mental toughness available to me in the moment, with the truth surrounding me, the what is actually happening surrounding me. I've started to understand the concept in a different way. That it's not exhorting me to do the best I could if everything else cleared away and I could just focus on doing my best at this one thing. Because let's be real, I can do lots of things really really well and I expect that of myself. Expect it to the point that if someone says I did great and lists ten things I did well, I shrug as if to say but yeah that's what was expected. But if someone says one thing I could have done better, I wear that like a mantle until I can force myself to stop thinking about it. Because all this time I've been interpreting Do your Best to mean--imagine the most wonderful way in which this thing can be done and then get as close to that image as possible, whipping yourself for missing the mark which will almost always happen.

Sheesh. It hurts me to write it out. So very hard on myself and often on others. People have said that to me about myself for years and it has pissed me off more than anything. What does that mean? Or I know! But I didn't really know. I knew because enough people said it that I thought it must be true even though I couldn't feel it to be true. I didn't know how to shut it off.

What I learned last year in the hospital was that I could not trust my own self-assessment when it came to my physical health. I would simultaneously feel like I needed to do better/work harder even as my body was breaking down to the point where two doctors would look at me eyebrows raised and said This is going to take months to get better because your body is so messed up right now. I have become an expert at living, even impressing others, while in the pit of desperation. In crisis mode all the time. And my body paid. My heart and my mind have paid too but I'm still unpacking that damage.

Three weeks ago I took my four kids and my dad to a hospital where I was going to meet with my financial advisor. My kids looked cute and as though I'd scooped them out of the gutter where they'd been hanging out with PigPen in their pajamas, brushing each others' hair with Brillo pads. We shuffled our way into the lobby and past the security guard, a black woman a few years 5-10 years younger than I am. She said Are those all your kids?

Yeah, I said.

How did you get your body back?? she asked with admiration.

I didn't know how to respond. It felt good to hear, as much as it surprised me. Mostly I wanted to say, and would have if I'd come up with the words sooner, I'm getting myself back. It shows on the outside.


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