#6
…in which Lauren thinks about her childhood and the sadness that underlies her anger because it's important to understand this to be able to move on…
Anger is the protective outer coating of the fear and sadness that I've long hesitated to look at. I think this is true of most people. If we explore this, we might have cold water thrown all over us and just melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West.
It's a scary journey: Once I started seriously chipping away at my anger, I had an unexpected flush of emotions. I use the word "flush" in many senses: It's uncontrollable, but it's also a hopeful, therapeutic thing. It has the potential to flush out the toxins and replace them with a welcoming foundation for what will sustain you more constructively going forward. Emphasis on hope.
A horoscope I happened to read when I was writing this column held strikingly appropriate guidance for me: "There's an untold story inside you, and it's starting to create irritation, if not agony. Stories, like splinters under the skin, will bug you til they come out." [Los Angeles Times, Jan 21, 2007]
Indeed. I feel like the Cowardly Lion who nods pointedly when he sees the sign "I'd turn back if I were you." (Of course, his compadres don't allow him to do that.)
That's pretty much the way I've been feeling in recent weeks. I've been having extreme anxiety dreams, often involving people from long ago. I was the queen of anxiety dreams when I was married, but these recent ones create an even deeper sense of being stuck with no escape, accompanied by interminable torture. (But the extreme, mercifully, sometimes finds its complement, like last night, when I had a dream of hopefulness with dozens of ideas about one-page stories I wanted to write. For whatever reason, they were all on medical topics.)
This angst tells me I HAVE to write (I knew that) but at the cost of some, maybe a lot of, pain (I probably knew that too but wasn't ready to acknowledge it).
So I've been flushing a lot. I've been looking back on my childhood, my family, what holidays were like, which tend to give full expression to family dynamics, for good, for bad.
For the longest time, I truly thought we had the ideal family.
We — my mother, two sisters, and I — did a lot of eggshell dancing around my dad. I can't speak for the dog; she seemed pretty happy though she didn't hang much with dad, now that I think about it.
I've long been haunted by being the misbegotten "third times the charm": It was hoped that I, like my two older sisters, would be a boy. When I too proved to be a girl, I was left in the hospital with my mother, nameless, for a week. It turned into something of a family story. And that was the end of the baby making.
I think it's no coincidence that, also three times, I've become good friends with women in five-girl families – in high school, college, and now in adulthood with my next-door neighbor.
I tried to make it up to my dad as a pre-teen, playing ball with him in the driveway a few times. I'll bet he doesn't remember.
My earliest lesson at home was to stay in the background, not cause waves, not share good news, even of celebration (I guess that was also a type of wave to be avoided). Call us the E. Vin Keelers.
One summer, when I was 14 and about to go off to boarding school, I somehow won the "most valuable" award for my swim team. I was hardly the highest scorer that season (to whom the award typically went), so the coach must have used a different algorithm that year to make the choice; my team members must have been mystified.
My parents were not in the audience that night – they rarely came to my swim meets, much less an awards ceremony at which I wasn't expected to win anything. Years later I came across the award and literally couldn't remember winning it.
I still wonder why I won because I never asked the coach. That didn't even occur to me.
Maybe it was offered out of pity because I would scratch bug bites on my legs and arms into huge welts every summer. Wearing a bathing suit, I found it impossible to cover up, though I certainly tried. Plus the constant activity in the water – swim practice, water skiing, sailing, etc. – made the welts nearly impossible to heal, much less without the embarrassing scars that remain today.
One of my sisters, years later, wrote a story about this, which made me furious because I considered it my story to tell, if and when I chose; until then, I hadn't. I felt violated. (Significantly, this "coming out" of my story happened near the family homestead in Michigan during a family reunion.)
We'd all tremble at the faintest sense of dis-ease on my father's part. I'm struck, forced to put a hyphen in that word, about the similarity between disease and dis-ease. Heaven help us if we were caught in his chair when he came home from work. Dad would sit down, armed with his martini, behind the hometown newspaper. Life was good for him at that point and needn't be disturbed by the children who were "better off seen but not heard."
Maybe this speaks to my inability to engage in casual chit chat – not a skill we cultivated in our family.
My dad always said there were two things he vowed never to do. One was work for my mother's family company, a vow he broke happily, it seemed, until the company went down to ruin due to my mother's bad-boy uncle's selfishness, which broke his heart. (I've never been able to uncover the other.)
I spent my early life mostly alone in my room. It even caught the attention of a sister's friend who, at my sister's surprise 50th-and-a-half birthday party just a few years ago, commented on it. It took me back to a bad place I thought I had left behind: Loneliness as my implicit companion.
A therapist years ago suggested that perhaps it was my mother that we were all eggshell-dancing around.
At age 26, she was relatively "old" when she married, so she may have been relieved to have escaped being a spinster, which back then held a kind of terror for women. Even so, she and my father battled quite a bit the first year, according to my uncle, but ultimately she seems to have settled on "peace at any price." That meant literally no disagreement, heaven forbid outright argument, in our household. That set the tone for years to come not to mention issues we three sisters are still dealing with.
Mom probably felt lucky she didn't have to work (though I'm guessing it was dad that wanted her not to; it must have been a status thing back then, as portrayed as the norm on TV). But she was bored to death. I remember noticing when she gave up reading Time magazine, something that she, as a political science major in college, always made time for.
She drank and smoked too much. In fact, smoking was a continuing act of defiance of my father that she never relinquished, and it drove him nuts because it was the one thing he couldn't control. She was unhappy in her marriage to the point of thinking about leaving him. She told me about this during one of my solo visits with them in Florida. It was shortly after I'd gotten married, a handful of years before she died.
She never did leave him, which I'm convinced caused the onset of her dementia. I think she just gave up on herself. Decided she wasn't worth it.
What kind of a message was that for her daughters? I'm guessing that didn't figure into her thinking.
I always wondered what she might have done if she hadn't had children. Her happiest days seemed to be in her mid-20s when she had a women's radio show in Kalamazoo and, later, when she'd entertain her "Every Friday Club."
She was renowned for the day every year when she'd host the meeting. She'd spend weeks before the event working on her book report every night after dinner on a manual typewriter. The day of the event, she'd get a friend to do her stage makeup, and she would dress in a costume appropriate to the topic rented from the Civic Theater, where, years before, she'd played one of the three witches in Shakespeare's "Macbeth." I don't know which of the three she was, but I fondly remember her quoting with relish, "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble." She also did a pretty good Katherine Hepburn imitation – something about the Calla Lillies being in bloom.
How did a woman with those instincts turn her Leave-It-to-Beaver existence into something halfway satisfying? I'm not sure she did, though it took her a long time to realize maybe she had a right not to be dissatisfied. That's not at all the same thing as what my generation says: We have a right to be satisfied.
Mom, to her credit, did give me what I consider my most important message, though it wasn't explicit or intentional. Still her life experience made it LOUD AND CLEAR: Always take care of yourself financially. She couldn't – or perhaps thought she couldn't. Maybe that mistaken impression accounted for why she seemed to lack the guts, towards the end, to change her life. That, too, was a striking message.
She didn't live many years after claiming she was going to leave dad. She had long been monitoring her leukemia, but her doctor always said it was the smoking that would get her in the end. He was right: Diagnosed with lung cancer in April (even though she'd had a chest x-ray every fall in anticipation), she was gone in August, a day before my sisters and I could get there to say goodbye in person. Age: 68.
I turned 52 last month.
I helped my dad celebrate his 85th birthday. On the day. Which is always important to me. I hosted a surprise dinner at his club.
Now I'm back home.
Now I'm completely purged of antidepressants.
Now I'm quitting my job for good. Literally when this column appears, I will be 100% free.
Now what?
Now, now, now… but the issue is what's next?
I tell people I want to write. That's rather vague. I admit it.
So they probe. They want answers. As is so often true in relationships, the questions others pose are more about themselves than me.
I don't have many. But I don't want any.
The answers will come. I know they will. Because I trust the process.
I need time completely away from professional responsibility to figure this out. Let the universe tell me how to proceed.
Friends who know me well say they can tell by looking at me that it's the right next step. We're not even talking about success here. Just the next step. But success depends at least in part in taking that next step.
…Dorothy arrives in Munchkinland with a thump of her house as it hits the ground and a surprised "oh" that escapes her lips. Then, slowly, she opens the front door from black and white to a world of color, magic, and imagination.
What an apt metaphor that threshold is.
And the friends Dorothy makes along the Yellow Brick Road to Oz are revealed in the end to have inside just what they each claim they lack.
I'm taking the Cowardly Lion as my model for the next little while.