A Few Good Memes

I miss writing here at AFGM. Several things have come between me and writing lately, some by choice, some most definitely against my will.

Primarily, the time I used to spend writing (after kids are in bed) is now spent talking on the phone to Christine. How are things going with my sweet Mariposa? Splendidly. While we have a comfortable rhythm to our lives now - me visiting her once or twice a week and she visiting me/us twice or more a week - I still get excited when I pull up to her house on Wednesday evening for date night. She’s affectionate and nurturing to my kids, but still makes it clear to them and to me that I’m the parent and will be regardless of what commitment we may end up making. Her love for me is unflinching - it’s easy for her to see the good in me even when I may not be flying it out on a flag on my front porch. Our interests are delightfully similar. Music, gardening, the outdoors, racquetball, running, food. Our tastes are similar. We’ll walk through Pottery Barn and find ourselves attracted to the same items. Her house decoration, her clothing choices, her sense of humor - all of them seem completely normal to me. As I’ve said before, we’re from the same tribe. I’m doing a minor remodel of my kitchen. She’s doing a medium-scale remodel of her bathroom. We actually enjoy doing projects like these together. She helped me put up a giant space mural in Ian’s room and it was truly a joy. She finds cool clothes and stuff for my kids at the thrift store or on eBay. My kids love her dog - a somewhat hyper 2-1/2 year old golden retriever. My folks like her. My friends like her. She fell in love with my church after a few weeks and after proclaiming that church was not going to be a thing we shared in our relationship. I really like her kids. Her older son is cool and aloof, but underneath the veneer, he’s clearly a compassionate and very intelligent young man with his values in the right place. Her younger son, the one with Fragile X, was initially, honestly, rather frightening to me. Not that I’m inclined to judge people. A few of his behaviors were troublesome at first glance. As we’ve gotten to know one another better, we get along really well and can laugh and feel comfortable together (including morning cuddles sometimes when I get a sleepover there - all 150ish pounds of him!).

What’s occurred to me recently is that Christine is the person I’ve been looking for for a long time. I’m very much an environmentalist and an acoustic musician and feel connected to the earth. I generally believe in the worth and dignity of people and that we have the power to change the world for the better. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and had these senses routinely drummed out of me for years. When I got to college, the folks I gravitated towards and became good friends with were the hippies and the radicals and the tree huggers and the dirt worshippers. Yeah, there were some nutballs in that crowd, but many of us worked at the food co-op, wrote and sang songs about environmentalism and social justice, actually worked for a better environment and social justice and believed in a better world that was inhabited by real people living real lives and thinking for themselves rather than what they were told by their corporate overlords. Of the women I dated in college, the person with the most lasting impact on my psyche was Paula, a naturalist, a musician, and an atheist who attended Catholic mass every week. She was my first love as an adult and she helped me start finding the person I wanted to become, despite my suburban, materialistic upbringing.

Christine thinks for herself. She grew up in small-town Minnesota until 11 and then small-town Indiana. She spent four years prostrate to the higher mind (at a well-respected Quaker liberal arts college), got her paper, and she was free. She worked in education, first in Head Start and then with special needs kids. She left the workforce to raise her kids. When she got divorced 5 years ago, she just wanted to work outdoors, in nature To be with plants and flowers. It’s her first love. It’s probably genetic - her brother is a succesful nature artist in Michigan. So she works at a greenhouse and really enjoys it. At least she enjoys digging in the dirt and planting and watering and hauling mulch with the skid loader. She could live without some of her freaky religious co-workers and could stand to make a few more bucks. She unapologetically loves gardening and kids and baking and decorating and Martha Stewart and craft projects and music. I told her she’s “radically domestic”.

I’ve tried to break up with Christine several times now. Every time I’ve looked it in the eye, though, it’s been my own shit. Some of it is grief and shock and adjustment. Some of it is my propensity (as Robert A. Johnson discusses) to manufacture a mythical woman, a composite of all of the positive aspects of various women in my life I admire and respect and then to compare Christine to that myth. It’s folly, of course, but I do it. Luckilly, I’m now at the point where I catch myself doing this before I’m inclined to take action. I feel like the 7 month journey of ours has been a promethean gift. Thankfully, I’ve only singed my hair and Christine has been like a human fire extinguisher. In the words of Paul Simon, “I was a crazy motion ’til you calmed me down. Took a little time to calm me down”. When I look at Christine as a human being and as a thinking person in this world increasingly lacking in sanity, I see someone who has very strong, very compassionate values and has made life choices consistent with these values. This is a person I’d be much, much poorer not to have permanently in my life. Likewise for my kids.

Let me not put her on a pedestal. And let me not lead you into thinking I’m somehow blind to her weaknesses in a desperate rush to piece my life back together. Like any one of us, she’s a human being with plenty of shortcomings and room to grow. I still have more to learn about her. Her older son has two more years of high school left. So she’s going to spend at least those two years in her town (ideally having her son living with her - he lives with his dad right now) and I in mine. This will give us time to move forward gracefully and have a very solid foundation down when we decide to make our separate lives one.

Oh, and amusingly, her profile on match.com explicitly stated that she was looking for someone who did not have full-time kids or whose kids were mostly or completely out of the house. Adjusting to the idea of helping raise young kids has taken some time for her. Thankfully, my kids have mostly charmed the socks off of her. Yeah, she’s seen them bicker plenty (something she had no experience with, having one of her sons developmentally uninclined to bicker). But she has told me she now really loves the idea of helping raise my kids, especially since two of them are girls, a chance she thought she’d lost out on.

So, yeah, evenings are spent on the phone. And doing a lot more dishes and laundry and pickup than I used to. Why? Because I had to fire my nanny/babysitter of almost 2 years. Why? Because she managed to steal almost ten thousand dollars from me. Sittergate ‘08. We hired her before Anna died so we could have more time with one another and with the kids, knowing that Anna’s time was likely short. We issued her a credit card in her name so she could do things like grocery shop and such. I pay my credit card off every month. Adjusting to single parenting, and knowing that all the charges are mine, I didn’t necessarily scour my statement every month. I started going more and more over budget. I finally dug into my statements and found she had been using my card to buy herself all kinds lovely things from stores I never have set foot in. Renting cars for the weekend, hitting the bars, etc. I probably can’t mention much more than that, but I am being repaid and do have some recourse in that arena.

So I’ve hired two other college students to come in a few days a week and help and I have a lovely woman who does deep cleaning and I bumped her hours up some. But I’m having to do more work around the house and shop more and stuff - stuff I should rightly be doing anyway. And I certainly don’t mind it. I’m a bit of a control freak, I suppose, so I’m glad to be doing more stuff around the house, because it’s being done the RIGHT way, i.e. my way And I’m saving money having less help and doing my own shopping. I’m also baking my own bread and trying to take more control of my food supply in general. I’m going to join our CSA this summer after lapsing last year for the first time in ten years. Having the luxury of access to a greenhouse, Christine and I are starting some tomatoes and peppers next week. I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” - a family’s journal of trying to spend a year eating what the grow or can obtain locally. In a cool twist of serendipity and small world, the book was a gift from my good musician friend Michael, former band member of Carrie Newcomer, friend of the author. The book sat on my shelf from Christmas until a month or so ago when K, one of my two awesome new babysitters strongly implored me to read it, having grown up in the same town as the author’s farm and being friends with the daughter, co-author of the book. It’s just gotta be my destiny as I get closer and closer to slow food, thankful for the companionship of my sweetheart, a sympathetic accomplice.

Christine, Alyssa, Ian and I were in the UU Christmas Pageant today at church. Chris was such a sport, agreeing to be in front of the whole church after having only attended about a half dozen times or so. We took my kids to the rehearsal yesterday (they had been recruited several weeks ago) and when the director lamented that she hadn’t filled the parts of Mary and Joseph, well, we had to fulfill our civic, moral, and religious duties. Yep, we were Mary and Joseph. Rumor has it the baby wasn’t mine. She and I need to talk about that.

(Oh, yeah, I shaved my goatee off a few weeks ago too. Whee!)

Happy Holidays, all.

 

 UU Christmas Pageant 2007: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I just finished reading Robert A. Johnson’s “We” (thanks to my dear friend Oceansmiles’ recommendation).  It would not be overstatement to say it may be the most important book I’ve ever read.  It should be required reading for every westerner, especially western men.  He uses the Arthurian legend of Tristan and Iseult in a Jungian framework to skillfully disentangle the notions of romantic love, from what he calls “stir-the-oatmeal” love, exploring companionship, commitment and friendship in the process.  He implores us to come to an understanding of and connection with our own deep spirituality, our own religious experience, whether by traditional religious means or otherwise (with useful suggestions for modern people) so that we can free ourselves from the unconscious projection of the anima onto our otherwise mortal and flawed beau/partner/spouse.

The book is written mostly as an examination of Tristan, the symbol for the male psyche and is extremely enlightening to this western male.  I think it is probably very informative for women as well.  I would love a similar treatise told from Iseult’s perspective (or whatever myth might be appropriate).  I know Johnson has “He” and “She” as well as several other myth-meets-Jung books.  I’m likely to read many or all of them.

This book has shone a blazing spotlight on the mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, and miss-whatever-her-name-was that I’ve made in past relationships with women and how they all have come from some flawed, yet completely understandable assumptions carved into my bones by our western culture over the last 900 years or so.

If you are a man who has ever loved a woman or a woman who has ever been loved by a man, read it.

“Overcome me, baby, overcome
All I’m asking is to be alive”
- Vienna Teng, “Momentum”

I was swallowed whole by the snake I went hunting. Luckilly, I remembered to bring my flute and my knife and have managed to cut away, piece by piece, until I found the heart and disgorged it. I’m out of the pit now and playing the flute, trying to understand exactly what happened. Things I learned in the belly of the snake:

• Nonassertiveness has been my achilles heel for a long time. I am this way from my father (we recently discussed this). As I examine this further, I see that I have never integrated my animus (Jung’s archetype for the masculine/warrior). Odd, as this is the opposite of what Jung says should happen. Men should be warriors struggling to integrate the anima (female archetype). I’ve never identified with men. I don’t follow sports (save for a 3 year mania where Anna and I were rabid Bulls fans together). I’ve always been repulsed by Robert Bly type of men’s groups. Or by men’s groups in general. I mean, isn’t the world a big men’s group? I have never been a warrior. I never talk to men at parties - I talk to the women. Nearly my entire readership and blogroll is women. Men seem mostly to be fools. Nonassertiveness - I’ve normally been paralyzed with anxiety to, e.g. ask a waiter to bring more water. This was a source of stress between Anna and I. She needed a warrior and I was often a wimp. Now that I’ve seen this weakness with my conscious mind, I’m finding it surprisingly easy to overcome. I watch people who are assertive (especially a guy at work I really admire who is assertive and also has a kind heart) and I learn from them. I’m making great strides in areas large and small here. I’m beginning to find my own internal warrior. Perhaps my mind knows I can’t afford to be back inside that snake. I almost got completely digested.
• On the subject of God, I rejected the Christian god 20 years ago. The imbalance toward the patriarchy in Christianity filled me with the urge to defecate. But I do believe in God. I’ve been afraid to admit it for a long time. To surrender to the idea that there is some greater power that I can not access via my ego, my intellect. Some experience that is tangential to reason. My ego and intellect are what have allowed me to survive, (to be a warrior?) in this merciless, capitalistic, patriarchal world. I’ve studied Buddhism for years, but I avoided the more mystical aspects of it. Now I see there is some joy in surrender. Oddly, I’m becoming more and more disillusioned with Unitarian Universalism. We have no common symbols, no shared myth. Like Seinfeld, it’s a religion about nothing. To deny the power of symbols and archetypes is to institutionalize suffering, the very thing that religion should be attempting to alleviate (speaking only in a spiritual/psychological way - UU is pretty great in terms of social justice). The west is *impoverished* with the downfall of religion and myth. It’s Hollywood’s job to peddle myth now and they do a pretty craptastic job of it, mostly.
• I have no idea how to understand love, romance, commitment, and connection with a member of the opposite sex. None. I think few of us do - it’s the curse of our western psyche. I’m beginning to unravel some of the mystery of it via Robert A. Johnson’s “We”. I do know I fell in love with a girl. Fell in love once and almost completely. And it utterly wrecked me. Yes, it re-triggered my grief about Anna. But it also triggered something much, much older and deeper. I thought it triggered something old in my family of origin. Now I’m beginning to see it’s even older and deeper than that. Which would explain why it hurt down to my soul’s core. And why it’s still so inexplicable.
• I have been living without intention for a long time. I’m beginning to learn to cultivate mindfulness via meditation practice. Something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult life. I guess that tight, dark snake belly is the motivator here, too. It feels like learning to ride a bike or even to walk for the first time. The intent at the outset was to alleviate depression. The larger intent is to find some inner peace for the first time in my life. To truly be able to see my thoughts, feelings, physical sensations as weather patterns in the sky and to inhabit the sky itself.

Now I’m late for the sky and haven’t meditated yet. Time to get practicing.