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Perimenopause, Truthtelling, Medical Trauma & Intimate Partner Violence

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Recently, I learned that my father lied for my entire life (longer, actually) about being a father of twins who were born in 1967. One of them is coming to visit my brother and I in August, and I literally could not be happier about a thing happening; all I want to do is hug him and look at his face and take a photo with his tall self (during our first chat, I asked them both how tall they are as my brother and I are very tall, too).

Since discovering the existence of my brothers, I have been meditating on lying and why we do it. Why did my dad do it? Why have I done it (not very much, but I have been guilty of hiding myself and parts of my selves). All of the artwork I have done since December has been of eyes; iteration after iteration of eyes. I make them even when I don’t intend to make them. Eyes, eyes, eyes. Paths. Eyes surrounded by paths. The path of the past to the present. Yesterday I was in my amazing quilt class and we had a guest speaker, Zak Foster, and he said the most interesting snippet “There is no history, not really. There is only the present, and many, many presents.”

I loved that and it made me think. Right now I am going through perimenopause which is this insane journey of weird physical symptoms, overwhelming rage, quick tempered emotions that spin out of nowhere, pain, decisions that are hard for me to make, a sense of perspective, a sense of looking backward to look forward, and a sense that there isn’t as much time in front of me as there is behind. It’s a bit of a mindfuck.

Today I was getting an ultrasound to check that the Mirena IUD I had placed last week to provide me with progesterone is in the right place in my uterus. I had it placed last Wednesday and it has been very painful and exhausting: surprisingly so. It has reminded me that I am older now, and it reminded me of my past presents. When I was getting the IUD inserted, my cervix kept “running away” (the words of my midwife as I have no idea what this means but it sounds weird and sad) from her. She finally had to dose me with some extra Lidocaine and hold on to it with forceps. As I lay there waiting for the inevitable, this wonderful nurse Caroline was holding my hand and telling me that I was a wild horse running free on a beach, like the horses of Chincoteague from those old books. I felt my body tensing up over and over. They kept telling me to relax. I kept apologizing. I remembered something.

When I was about 20, I had this seemingly wonderful boyfriend named Ryan, who was so cute with long hair and who liked to go camping. He was from Midland and we went out to west Texas and camped alot on forestry land and cooked rice for dinner in the dark. We went on an ill-fated road trip out west one summer and discovered we didn’t travel well together, but in retrospect, my part of that was that I was/is/always will be desperately afraid of intimacy as I don’t trust it. The model I was shown was irregular and broken and weirdly sad and incomplete. Now I know that at its center was a big lie, which must have contributed, but isn’t the entire explanation. Either way, I discovered that I was pregnant with Ryan’s baby later that year and we both decided we didn’t want to have a baby then (I haven’t investigated how I feel about this just yet but think it is mostly ok with me). Ryan came in with me when I was having the procedure – the doctor must have been very open-minded? – and he told me later that I tensed up and looked like I was in the most pain of anyone he had ever seen. I remembered this vividly in that moment last week when I was getting the IUD. I couldn’t stop tensing up, I was very quiet, and I kept squeezing Caroline’s hand. At one point I asked if I was hurting her, and she said no, to keep squeezing, so I did.

Today I went and got the ultrasound to check its placement and everything looks good according to the tech. She was very nice and her name is Jane and she has been doing ultrasound for 35 years which I find amazing. While she was ultrasounding, she kept asking me if I was ok and I kept telling her that I was, but I was tensing up and was trying to get myself to relax. She took about 30 photos of my uterus from on top of my belly and inside my body, showed me the IUD (it looked good!) and off I went. I apologized to her and told her I had a lot of medical trauma associated with my childbirthing body parts, and she said she was sorry, and I told her it was ok as it wasn’t her fault.

After Ryan and I had the abortion, everything was hard and I think we started fighting about everything everywhere for months and the fights got worse and worse and worse until his neighbors didn’t want us to live at the co-op anymore. He moved into a little house with a friend and we kept trying but it was done, somehow. The fights got worse, and then 9/11 happened and I remember noticing there weren’t any planes in the sky when we sat on his porch. I was supposed to go give a presentation at UT about something and he was threatened and we fought and he pushed me into a wall. Later that day he broke up with me.

Girl, so confusing.

Last year, last May, a friend of mine was killed by her partner. He killed her, set fire to the family house she was living in, and then killed himself. He did make sure her horses were safe, which is some blessing in all of this. When she was killed, no one described the incident as domestic violence, only murder-suicide. She worked with my husband, and his boss never spoke about it again. It was as if they weren’t allowed to speak about it, but I don’t think that was what is was. I think he didn’t know how to talk about it, deal with it, wrap his heart around it, and so passively coerced his coworkers to do the same. It was horrible: it festered. Just before her death, Cody’s other coworker lost his father, and his wife thinks that because of the lack of space for discussion, that her husband felt that losing his friend and coworker was more painful, was worse, made more of an impact, than the death of his own father.

This week I went to Willowind, a therapeutic horse farm that teaches people how to ride horses peacefully and provides horse-based therapy to people who need it. A friend who teaches there had saved some horsehair for me, some special ashy blonde hair from a huge dappled draught horse named Abel. His fur looks like stone and he is a giant. I am planning on taking the horsehair and combining it with a design of a horse, making my friend’s mother and sister a necklace each. I want to do something with the loss of this person that is beautiful and special just as she was.

It has been a hard time of loss and of change. Growing older is not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. I have a hormone patch on my tummy that I switch left to right twice a week and it is helping me sleep better. I hope the IUD helps other things. My skin on my face looks better, my boobs are droopier and I want to make a corset for them and be a little radical. When I walk around my garden I am amazed everyday at my plants’ abilities to grow a little bit more. I wonder what it would be like if our only stimuli were light and water?

Circling back to eyes and lies, I have made (almost done with the third anyway) three quilts about it. They are all the same size, baby sized, and have various iterations of eyes and repeated patterns that are a little spiky. One is spooky, one is sweet, one looks like a flag somehow. I wish I could ask my dad why. I wish I could call my brothers ask them over now, but I have to live up to my name. I plan to make a quilt about us, but it is a bit of a dive into a deep well, and I am not sure exactly where to start. Zak told me to talk to my fabric, and that seems like a good idea. He also said to write, so here I am.

One of the things my therapist shared with me is that she thinks I don’t exactly know how to have a real partner, as the example given my brother and I was so fraught. I agree, but it makes me sad as, for the most part, Cody is so great and I wish I was better at being a partner. I am trying very much to integrate with him, to think about him, to not be afraid to share stories with him. It is amazing to me that we have been together for 10 years and there are still stories we haven’t shared with each other. I am lucky to have him and he me but there are lots of things that I have yet to learn to be a whole person and the best version of myself. I have always been so good with kids, but adults scare me quite a bit. The brothers, though, don’t scare me at all. Why is that?

How can so many worlds exist within our minds and our hearts at the same time? How can there be so many both/ands? It is a great mystery this life of ours. Nature gives me some rhythm which is comforting, but I want to be more honest about how I feel and what I am thinking about. I am too scared I think to voice these things out loud, but I think I can write them down. Maybe I can get to a place where they come out in a more formal way, but for now, making stuff and writing stuff will have to do.

I had baby chickens in my studio for a month or two and it got all dusty, so I am off to go and dust it and get it ready to start making things again. I have about 8 power rings and an amazing pendant that are asking to be finished. When will I move on from eyes? Who knows? They are beautiful and it is interesting how many types of eyes there are and how many colors. Right now the world and my place in it feel very mysterious and spinny, but I saw this poster in the hospital today that said “Bloom Where You Are Planted” and I thought I could start there.

I miss my friends who have left the planet before me; I wish I could talk with them. Their loss shows me how precious it all is, how fast it goes by, and how important it is to notice the weird little plants and how they grow in the sunshine and the rain. It is all interconnected, everything. All of my feelings of fear and inadequacy that came from early days somehow connect to the lie my dad told that he kept so well hidden. How different things can be when we are just honest, even if it hurts in the moment. Right?

Laughing & Clapping Her Hands

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It was a second floor, garage apartment in Hyde Park, in Austin. She moved there during COVID, sometime in 2020. She moved out of a house with people who had been friends who had become controlling and strange, into an apartment with a lease facilitated by a friend who was controlling and strange, but that is another story.

It was a second floor, garage apartment and you gained access by walking up a set of wide, wooden outdoor stairs. There was a landing, a tiny deck, at the top. There were a few plant pots with tropical plants, and a neat row of plastic Birkenstock shoes: colorful. There was a screen door and an inner, wooden door that was white with a small window. In it, she lived with her turquoise furniture, bone collection, shadow boxes, chandeliers made of old sets of silver and chains, and her plants. Her kitchen was small but lovely; everything was small and lovely. There were two rooms and a bathroom and a kitchen. One room was her bedroom, bedazzled with plants and specimens and interesting rocks, a chandelier in the corner. The other was a living room with a white leather hideabed, a round vintage plastic table, low to the ground, and two old chairs covered with interesting, faded fabric. In the corner was the preserved carcass of a roseate spoonbill, suspended in flight and hanging from the ceiling. There was also an antique dentist drill, complete with spittoon, which strangely had belonged to my first husband, years ago.

It was Texas in June, summer, hot, even in the morning. I was there in the morning, and we stood out on the small deck with the colorful shoes and tropical plants, and gazed out through the giant bushes that bordered the property, through their leaves, out to live oak trees and a pond in the center of the backyard. She said, “there is something weird in my eye. Like a cloud?” “There is a cloud in your eye? Both eyes? The same?” “No, just one, like a grey cloud at the bottom of my eye”.

Later it was discovered that her cancer had spread to her brain and that was when she had to start radiation and we didn’t get to come to Maine together, which I had been wishing for, but it is ok now that it didn’t happen. Earlier that spring we had gone to Galveston and stayed in an amazing apartment right on the beach, and ate at Gaido’s. Her face was a little swollen then, and she had no hair so she either wore fabulous hats or fabulous dresses with her bald head. It was the last Easter, and we didn’t know that. When she started radiation, they made her this crazy radiation face shield that she said she would bedazzle for Halloween that year. It really would have looked cool.

I will never forget the moment that I realized that she might have brain cancer, after breast cancer, lung cancer, and bone cancer. How exactly did she keep going so long? She is, after all, a miracle. Radiation made her mind muddled and she sort of forgot some things, but the most important things she valued stayed sharp. It was in October, before Halloween and her chance to bedazzle the thermoplastic radiation cap that her doctor told her that chemo had killed her, had destroyed her liver and she would soon die. She said that normal livers were like sponges, allowing substances to pass through them, and hers was like a rock. Quickly, her abdomen filled up with fluid and ammonia, there appeared little white glints, like lenses, in her eyes, and she died a month later. She told me that I had to start working in hospice, and I just finished my training and have my first patient. To be with someone who is dying is a great gift of mercy and trust, going both ways. Today I thought of her and saw her sitting in the corner in a hot pink dress, off the shoulder, bald head, laughing and clapping her hands. What a world. What would she think if she was alive today? I suppose she would be laughing and clapping her hands, about something.

GGMS

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Have you ever had a grand realization, one that knocks your metaphysical socks off and clears the air inside your mind and to which you answer, yes (?). Gus Garcia Middle School, 2007-2009, second and third years of my teaching career. As my friend and I texted about a few weeks ago, Gus Garcia Middle School will always be depressing.

Gus Garcia Middle School is also where and when I started to run, away, toward, maybe both? Like him, I chose to run rather than to face the music. No, I didn’t leave two children behind, but I, so like my dad, chose to run away and toward something else. It all is becoming so much clearer now.

Looking back is hard, as this time period was now almost twenty years ago, and that is hard to believe. I was an adult then, I was married to my first husband, and I owned my first house. I was trying to remember how it all started, but I must go further back.

It all started at Porter Middle School, during the fall of 2006, when I was hired as a long term sub in a science classroom with a wall of windows and deep sinks and a scary science closet that was filled with treasures. It was the beginning of my adulthood, that year. It was the year I bought the first house, for $106,000 from my friend Lyndsy. It had no central air conditioning or heating. The dishwasher didn’t quite fit in the kitchen and always shimmied. One of the counters’ edges was cut at an insanely sharp triangular angle. In the summer, it was hot, and in the winter, it was cold. It was a long house on a long lot, it had a shaded, covered rear porch that was lovely despite having a leaky roof caused by branches poking through the corrugated (cardboard?) material that made it up. The backyard also sharpened to a point in the back. There was Austin city property on one side of it; an easement for power lines that went in between two fences. It had a carport and a nice tree in the yard. It was the house in which I started gardening in earnest, growing all kinds of things in a big veggie patch in the back and native plantings in the front. I made paths of a sort, and a symbolic gate in the front which I modeled after a Torii gate and was very happy when it actually worked and fit together. In later years, when looking at the house on the internet, I found the gate to be gone. That was ok. Most everything else remained.

At Porter Middle School I ended up becoming a real teacher after several grueling months of terrible classes that had little bearing on real life as a teacher. I learned how to be with kids and how to ask them to learn science. They made me laugh a lot and I realized I liked that and this alot. At the end of that year, the school would close and become a new school: Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. I remember watching the staff of the new school walk the halls of the old one and wondering who they were. Little did I know that I would work with and for them many years later. At some point during that year, we were all informed that if we wanted to move to Gus Garcia Middle School, the newest school in Austin ISD, we could. Most of us did, although a few stayed in south Austin or retired. I remember touring that new building when it was a shell: such hopefulness. I remember touring it when it was painted and I wondered about blue, yellow, and orange, but did agree they were bright. The campus looked like a community college. They had pods for each grade level, color coded, with work rooms for the team of teachers in that pod. They all had copiers and computers! These were the days before laptops. They put flat screen TVs in each classroom, but forgot to order chairs for the science classrooms.

This was the beginning, and what follows is important, I think. When I came back to Austin ISD in 2015, the man from HR that I spoke with said, “oh, you were at Garcia.” I said, “I opened Garcia”. He said, “those years were hard.” I said, “yes”.

Let’s dive in.

Long Lost Family

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I have been watching a BBC programme (English spelling!) called “Long Lost Family”, and I have been crying alot, watching all the stories about people finding long lost family members; sisters, brothers, children, and parents.

Right now I am feeling super sad about it all, about my dad’s choice to hide his first children, the twins, from everyone except his immediate family, who also chose to hide them. It just feels sad and weird, compounded by how far away we are from our entire family, and that they are probably the reason for that. The information does fill a hole, but maybe the hole is a little bit deeper than I had thought.

I don’t know what to think about this all, today. Sometimes I am so happy about it. I wish so much we could take a train and meet each other and walk around or get dinner or a beer or something. I somehow want to see how tall they are, especially since we match each other in heights – Mark and I at 6 feet and Pat and Carew at 6 foot 4. 14 years and a world apart – and yet, sort of together finally.

I think that lately I have been so mad at a dead person, and also so sad for him and wanting to hug him all at the same time, just to tell him that he didn’t need to do this. I wonder how a parent couldn’t want to see their children and know who they become. The Universe gave me a great gift when I was 34 when I got River as a son after so many years of fraught feelings around having children and being in relationships in general. Cody is my favorite person and I am so lucky to be able to love him and have him in my life, and River is a major bonus, as is his family. I just don’t understand why you would give that up? I am sure that some part of my Dad decided with Carew and I that he wouldn’t give us up, despite being really challenged in the parenting and adulting department.

I don’t know what else to say. It has been grey and rainy here for a couple of days, but I know that spring is around the corner. This winter has been long and full of so much, so many learnings and questions, curiosities. I just can’t get my head around it, this human condition. Sometimes people make these crazy decisions, and what is so crazy is that, in those moments, those are the best decisions of each of these people. They are doing their best, even if their best seems, to us, later, as unnecessary, bad, or hurtful. Blah! I don’t know what to say.

I will say that I am thankful that I have brothers and that knowing them completes a hole in my life that had been there for so long. I didn’t know what or who they were, but I knew that they existed, maybe for my whole life. What a world!

Hard Times

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Today the sun came out, big and bright, and warm temperatures melted some snow into water, and you could see it run in the streams for the first time in many, many months. This was such a cold winter. So cold, for so long. Snow banked all over – small snow mountains covering every inch of grass. Frozen hard over the last few weeks to be all but impenetrable except for an errant foot or paw.

But today, it began to melt away, so fast! Amazing how a bit more sunlight and a lot more degrees Fahrenheit can change things.

Times are very stressful, as I am sure (or I think?) they may be with all of us. I have been a student of philosophy, law, and the government for many years. I began as a cross-examination debater when I was 15-16, sophomore year of high school. That year I learned about legal arguments, topicality, philosophical trajectories, speech patterns, structure, order, and logic. Debate was wonderful for me; debate taught me how to speak in front of strangers with confidence, which was a problem I had had for many years. I used to always speak holding my hand in front of my mouth, until I began debate with my friends, hanging out on the outskirts at the end of freshman year.

The government that as inaugurated in January is making striking, strident changes to systems that seemed almost impenetrable in their layers of bureaucracy. I have this theory that people in general are good, and I believe that the layers of that bureaucracy are like the one I am more familiar with: public education. Almost everyone is in the mix for the right reasons, but the structures and inertia can be insurmountable. Watching someone, who I think is on drugs of some kind, speak more than a US President, brandish a chainsaw on the internettelevision, and then use a metaphorical chainsaw on departments all over the government is so frightening.

When my school, which was named Gus Garcia Middle School, in Austin ISD, went under restructuring due to vast failures (more on that another time), one of the things that every teacher had to do was keep a binder at the front of the room, next to the door, so that if anyone from the district, Region 13 Service Center, or TEA could look at data you had collected inside that binder. Data came from assessments. It was so stressful to think that anyone coming in your classroom would look at the binder and somehow “see” something you weren’t doing. The realities of what was happening at the school were complicated and multi-layered and go back to the history of Austin being a highly segregated city. Segregation’s effects linger and can strikingly effect districts perceptions of schools and neighborhood. Resources follow that line of thinking, resources in the form of things, and not people who could really make a difference.

Anyway, I digress.

When I read about the massive layoffs of people, real people with real lives!, I wonder: what are they doing? Isn’t it bad politically to have lots of people lose their jobs when you are president?

I don’t understand what is happening and why and what it means for all of us. We live in a very isolated place almost up to the Canadian border; will anything happen here? If this was 1850, would we even know of anything happening? I just don’t know, and that makes me feel guilty. But is there anything I could do? What would it be?

These are the questions swirling around my mind. There is nothing we can do and yet —

Something big is changing, bigger than anything in our lifetime. The only thing I can compare it to is 9/11 – it feels similar to that time. Everything is uncertain, government are giant jerks, shower, rinse, repeat.

The universe is showing 7/9 (there I said it) planets in a line on Friday night. All year I have thought that the universe wants us to look up. Look up at the stars? At ourselves? In a dream the other night I said to someone that the thing I miss the most when I leave Maine are the stars. I realized that must be true.

Free Weight

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For awhile, I looked in the mirror and I didn’t recognize myself; who was that, staring back at me with little wrinkles everywhere, eyelids that are changing, a worried brow, gray hair? For a while, I knew that it was, indeed me, but a me that somehow had changed. Now, they have come together and I see the same old face in my current new face.

This blog has existed for about ten years, and so much has happened in those interim ten years. For a long time, I was good at writing regularly, at night, by myself, in my house. But then ten years ago I got together with the man I am now married to, and my evening behaviors changed. To me, writing is a solitary act. I really don’t like to do it when anyone is home, even with the door closed. I somehow feel that it is important not to be interrupted when channeling whatever this is.

Here I am today, writing stream of consciousness style, so please bear with me. Today is my friend Mary Ann’s birthday and she would have been 46. She died two years ago. She visits a lot, but we can’t talk anymore, and that is what I miss the most. I also miss talking to my dad, as we did during his last few years of life. We had had a lifetime of fights (since I was a teenager, so half a lifetime I guess), that we gave up sometime after I got married and we moved Maw Maw into our house after she had a stroke. Taking care of her made me realize that our lives are very finite and we can leave the planet oh so quickly. I vowed to never talk to my dad about anything important ever again, and we began talking all the time.

Today I am thinking about his first, secret-to-us family in England. What is weird about this iteration of thinking, after now knowing for about 2 months, is that I feel the most compassion for him that I have ever felt. I never could feel this compassion for him in life because he never told us about this thing, this majorly big issue in his life that explains so much. When I asked my aunts about him in 2017 and they told me they wouldn’t tell me, I thought all kinds of things.

I thought he had gotten someone pregnant and his parents were really mad. (Partially true)

I thought maybe he had gotten drunk and wrecked a car and his parents were really mad. (No)

I thought he had fought in Vietnam and had PTSD. (Not true; now we aren’t sure if he was ever over there, but he said he was, so……)

Basically all of the things I thought it could be were way more colorful and interesting than a breakup of a marriage in its infancy, and leaving the infants that came along with the young marriage behind, never to see them again. It’s just so damn sad.

Lately, sometimes, I get so sad. It’s like something is literally hanging around my neck with a weight. What’s in the weight? I don’t even know. Is it just me? Am I a melancholy baby after all? It would seem so. I used to be more fun though, I think. Why is this weight so heavy and how do I lift it? I don’t want to feel this sad and anxious all the time; emotions so overwhelming and a general feeling of no one liking me. And coupled with that, a crazy desire to keep everyone happy so that I don’t say things when I am angry or sad or irritated or when I need to. Those two things must be intertwined; some ouroboros that is.

Earlier I was talking to a friend of mine who lives in Texas and we were talking about how reflective the 40s is. This decade is wild and whack. I don’t understand how the shift is perhaps a bit more money in the bank, or perhaps an investment (house) or something, and then people start to die? Right now, I think this trade off, this change, this phase, level-up, or whatever you want to call it, is bullshit.

I also accept that everyone dies and literally they have to die at some point. It just seems that it is weirdly becoming a regular part of life, and I am having to adjust to it and “deal” with it, and try to understand it and be at peace with it. One of the things I learned when Maw Maw lived with us is that death doesn’t scare me. I think I knew this, as I when I got very sick in high school and didn’t die, I think I chose to no longer be frightened of it and be open to it all the time. When Maw Maw was dying, a day that I haven’t written about yet, it was very weird and mysterious. Watching someone leave the planet “is NOT like in the movies” (I said this over and over at that time).

Why can I not seem to get out of thinking about Maw Maw, my Dad, Mary Ann, and my friend Kate (who died this past summer). I am shaken by Kate’s death; I always thought she’d end up working for the federal government and be interviewed on 60 Minutes or something. Mary Ann I just miss. My Dad I just miss. Those two were my phone people; I spoke to them almost every day. I haven’t had my phone people in over 2 years, and I miss them. Maw Maw I miss, but she makes me smile and laugh. She was old and she was ready to roll out. I just miss her, again, because it would be fun if she was here and we could watch a movie. They just seem to live in my mind right now; I am not sure what to do about that.

When I think of my Dad right now I just wish I could tell him that it’s ok, we know, and we just wish he would have told us because everything is fine. It happened so long ago, before he had even met my mom, and I know that no matter what happened, it was not an easy decision and I am sure he didn’t want to make it. My Aunt Margaret told me about his white wedding, and how beautiful it was, everyone in white dresses and my Aunt Helen was the flower girl. She told me she has photos somewhere and I so hope she can find them. I have a hard time imagining my dad as a 26 year old person. How was he ever that young?

I wish I could tell him that it’s ok because it is. It explains so much, almost everything. It explains why we came to the US, and why his family didn’t know that. It explains, perhaps, why we fought so much. Did he feel guilty every time he looked at me? Did he feel guilty all the time, ashamed, anxious, afraid, and did he transform those feelings into rage and anger? (Seems so). It seems so sad, what a waste of time and energy. My mom said that she would have welcomed the boys into the family, but who knows if they would have wanted that, or their mom. I know that with Cody’s situation with his baby mama, she was (metaphorically) driving the bus and made it extremely hard for him to see or have partial custody of his son. It took many thousands of dollars and hours of time to secure those rights. But, he did it, he chose to fight for them. Why didn’t my dad fight for his boys?

I can only imagine how sad he must have been, and that is how I have compassion for him. I wonder if he knew it wasn’t working when they were living in Scotland and found out they were pregnant. I wonder where they moved after that. Did they own their house or rent it? Was it near my grandparents or her parents or neither? How much was he working then, and doing what? I know that he was a cigarette salesman at one point down in Devon/Cornwall, but was that before when he first got back from Australia, or between Outward Bound and Noble Denton?

It is such a drag that I probably won’t know the answers to many of these questions. The tragedy of this story, or at least one of the big ones, is that the boys’ mum died the same year that he did. She died still with his last name, after all that time.

I feel better after writing a bit. Please bear with me as this all comes pouring out. I am so scared to let it, but it feels like a weight lifted when I do.

Grief, again. Grabbing hold of my heart and squeezing it in a vice. Some people describe grief as being shaken by a wild animal, but mine is a cold squeeze and I feel like I can’t scream out even though I want to. If I scream, someone might get mad at me for being too dramatic or sensitive or overly-emotional. If I scream, people might know and worry or be mad at me for making noises in quiet places. I said this to my therapist two weeks ago and just remembered it:

“If I look at it, then I may be sad forever.” Where does that come from? When I say it outloud or read it, I know that it is some part of my brain trying to trick me. I can’t be sad forever, and how would letting this out make me sadder? Perhaps it’s the weight? It doesn’t want to let go?

Indirectly

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My Dad was an incredible storyteller; when he was dying, nurses at the hospital would ask my brother and I if the stories he had told them earlier were true. One asked, “did he really jump out of planes?”. After he died, we received card after card after card telling stories or sharing condolences about the loss of him, and the loss of his stories.

My brother and I always said that we knew that parts of the stories were true, but we never knew how much, or if some of them were real. Turns out that he spoke around a core truth, a center story, about which we only learned three years after his death.

Before he died, he said to my brother and I a great many things. Just before he went into a coma, in which he laid for 9 days, he told both of us individually that he wasn’t afraid to die and he knew this was the next step in his life, in his journey. This conversation, to both of us, was comforting and I think it was to him, too. He repeatedly told us that we had to take care of our mother.

One of the common themes of his stories was his time in Outward Bound, both teaching in Devon and helping boys of under-resourced backgrounds who had gotten into trouble, known as “Borstal Boys”, and trying to get another school started with little success. We always assumed the school he wanted to start was also in Devon. He spoke about it and told us that it was his biggest regret that he didn’t just try harder, that he was sure that it would have worked eventually, but that he felt that he had to earn more money, and so he eventually abandoned it.

It turns out that there was a story at the core of this story, and probably, at the core of all the others, too. It turns out that he was married in 1966, had two twin boys in 1967, and somehow left that relationship and his sons by 1971. He never told my mom this, or my brother, or I, and his family kept this secret until this last October.

This has been so hard for me to write about, despite peoples’ suggestions that it will help. For some reason, writing about this has been difficult because it scares me. My brother and I found our half-brothers (we think) and last week, sent them handwritten letters asking them to speak with us. They are 58, we are 44, and 40. Writing the letters was hard, and putting them in the mail required a lot of energy and focus, Why? I cannot tell you, although all I know right now is that I feel that knowing this story, and sending the letters, put something in motion that I now can’t take back.

When my Dad got together with their mother he was around 24 years old. I can’t even imagine my Dad as a 24 year old. For some reason, he was always old. Like my brother says, he will be 50 in our minds forever. But he was 24, and then he got married when he was 26, and had two boys when he was 27. Just like my husband Cody did. Just like so many people did. And then 4 years later, he no longer had them, had left them, and had asked his whole family to keep the secret, which they did.

For about a month, I was really mad about this. Sometimes, I still am. Right now, though, I think – why? And I know that there must have been a reason why. Tragical romance? Raising twins as babies gone awry? Lack of involvement in child raising on the part of my dad who was a rig worker and was 6 weeks on, 6 weeks off? Parents didn’t like him? All of the above and so much more?

This is the first time I am writing about this. I keep having emotional outbursts that are inappropriate. I keep thinking about my Dad. I have so much compassion for him now; more so than I ever have. I also want to shake him sometimes and I wish I could talk to him. Somehow I feel that this is the core issue that the whole family rotated around, even though we didn’t know what it was. Years ago, in 2017, I asked my aunts (his sisters) if there had been something that had happened that stopped him from having a close relationship with his family, and especially his mother. They told me it wasn’t their story to tell. Now I understand that, and they were right to tell my mom first. But, I feel somehow ok, good, accepting, forgiving, and curious about how I knew something was off.

For years, my heart has ached at my lack of family. I always wondered why we moved to Texas in 1983, and why we never went back to England. Now I know. I feel like I knew about my brothers even before I knew who they were or what they were to me. It’s as if their absence was a presence in my heart, all along.

I hope to write more about this and explore how it is changing my perspective toward myself and my dad and my place in the world. It is wild. I just turned 44, and I have decided I will live to 88. This means that my life just started its second half; just started over again. Right now I feel so sad sometimes, so angry, so confused; what am I supposed to be doing? Where am I supposed to be? But I suppose Destiny interjected the need for me to know the answer to the big question. The answer is: two brothers, twins, born in January, fellow Capricorns. I hope they want to speak to us.

My Odes to Grief

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“I used to be a great and powerful man”, my father said to me the third-to-last time I saw him, in October of 2021. I walked into his room and he looked so old: white as a sheet, with slightly pink skin, hair all akimbo, eyes wet with tears. He spent those last few weeks crying so much of the time.

I said, “you ARE a great and powerful man, and you know as well as I do that strength comes from here” (pointing to his heart) “and here” (pointing to his head). He apologized for crying and I said, “well you know me, I am the most emotional person in the world and I cry all the time“.

He would die about 6 weeks later, about one week after speaking to me oh-so-clearly on the phone from his hospital bed in Bar Harbor, Maine for the last time.

I have had a hard time writing lately. I am not sure if it is the pandemic, the death of Cody’s grandmother who lived with us, teaching during the pandemic, graduate school, the nonstop droning length of COVID19, or my father’s death. But now, I am faced with two immediacies. I am gripped by grief: it is holding on to me something fierce and fast. It will not let go. People keep telling me just to “let it all out” but I am afraid to let it all out lest it consumes me and renders me a puddle of tears on the floor.

Those people who know me or my father, Michael Blythe, know that we had a very difficult relationship. He was a difficult person; he was highly intelligent in all areas except for emotions and communication. He was afraid of emotions and so diluted them, and he was afraid of communicating his emotions so he covered them with anger and rage. Ask his friends, the breakfast crew, about how much they loved him while recognizing the fierceness inside.

At the same time that my dad died and I came to understand the grief of a child for her parent, specifically the grief of a daughter for her father, especially a daughter who is so like her father minus the rage and anger, one of my best friends, my sister, really, has taken a turn in her cancer journey and now is in the hospital, breathing with the aid of oxygen, and worrying us all very much.

Death comes a-knocking. We must welcome it as an old friend, as one of the only guarantees of this life, and yet, we don’t talk about it because it is so frightening and so utterly sad.

I was speaking to a friend last night about my feelings of grief. She said, “you aren’t writing”. I said, “I know. I am afraid”. She encouraged me to start again.

I feel I am of two minds. One of them is rational and logical and understands that everyone dies and that it is ok. That brain says: everything in life is fine, and it is just sad that you can’t talk to your father anymore. The other mind is a tiny animal with gnashed teeth and sharp claws whose heart is outside her body. I had an internal analogy at first that I was a reverse pincushion; instead of the pearly ends facing out to protect hands and fingers, my sharp ends were facing out to catch me, gouge me deep, and feel the horrific bottomless pain that is losing your father.

The night that he died I stayed up so late, drinking a whole bottle of wine by myself over the course of a long evening (this was when I thought that alcohol would help: turns out, it makes everything much worse). I spent the evening looking at photos of me and my dad, especially of photos when I was little. I looked at photo after photo and I began to ask myself: what did we even fight about? I could not answer the question; I still do not know. I think it was that I was a headstrong teenager, and he was going through a crisis after losing his job, and those two storms met head-on and became thunderclouds that brewed for twenty years. I am so blessed that we smoothed those clouds out the last three years, he attended my wedding to Cody, and we talked all the time. I am so thankful to Cody for showing me the importance of healing my relationship with my dad, because he had lost his many years before, and was, like me now, always wishing he could call him.

The night he died I cried and cried. I felt like I was drowning under a heavy wave of water that would not let me up. I felt I was on a cliff’s edge about to fall. I felt a huge weight, like a stone, on my heart. It pushed deeper and deeper down and in, like what I imagine a black hole does to matter: I was collapsing. I went to bed at 2:30 and my mom woke me up at 4 to go to the hospital. I went downstairs and sat on her couch and said, “pull yourself together, kid. You have to drive your mother to the hospital where her husband has just died”. I said, “I am driving you to the hospital”. She said no. I said, “yes, I am” and she handed me the keys. We arrived at 4:25 and he had passed just a few minutes earlier at 4:19.

In that room, he was so peaceful, laying slightly to his side. His face was pink, pinker than it had been anytime over the last few months. When he finally was medicated for pain, he received so much medication that the nurses told us he must have been suffering for a long time. This was no surprise: he was always a pain in the ass about admitting anything was wrong. The nurses had cracked the window to let his soul slip out into the air, up to the mountains, out to the sea. He was so peaceful. He never had been so in his life. I sat next to him and smiled. In my mind, I said, “Daddy? Where are you? Are you on a plane? A ship? Traveling somewhere first class on an adventure?” I suspected so, and still do.

Grief is grabbing hold of me and won’t let go, and one of the only ways I have ever found to discover what I really feel and am thinking about is through writing. I also know that writing about death is hard for others to read, but perhaps that can change. Another friend and I were talking today about our friend in the hospital, and she told me that she envisions me as someone who writes and gardens, gardens and writes. In other words, she was the second angel to appear with the same message: write, Patience, write.

As I walk through the stages of grieving my father, experiencing an immense, tangible, and tragic shift in the public schools in which I have worked for 16 years, and support my friend who is also, perhaps, transitioning away from this reality into another one, I will write it all down. I hope you will join me.

Thanks for your patience.

No More Leaving

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No More Leaving
 
At
Some point
Your relationship
With God
Will
Become like this:
 
Next time you meet Him in the forest
Or on a crowded city street
 
There won’t be anymore
 
“Leaving.”
 
That is,
 
God will climb into
Your pocket.
 
You will simply just take
 
Yourself
 
Along!
– Hafiz

 

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post and since my discovery of what had been bothering me all these years. I feel as if some dark glasses or horse blinders were torn off my eyes and thrown across the street when that discovery hit me. It is so strange to me that we can tell ourselves these stories about ourselves for so many years without actually being forced, by our minds and hearts and new experiences, to reflect upon them in an active way.

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For the last several years, I have been looking into the effects of traumatic experiences on myself and on others. I have discovered that many of us, especially as we get older, in our mid-thirties for example, have developed elaborate defense mechanisms and intimate pitfalls. So many of these are not obvious to anyone, even ourselves, until, if we are lucky enough, our eyes are opened and we can re-open the Pandora’s box of emotions to see whether what is in there is serving us, anymore.

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When I think of the delicacy of the human heart, I like to think of the Egyptian mythology of, when one dies, that one’s heart is measured against the weight of a single feather. I do think that the human heart is just that light, just that easy to shatter. But, the other side of the coin is that we, too, are remarkably resilient, like the trees that I spend so much time gazing upon. Despite the myriad fractures and sometimes breaks in the surface of the heart, we keep on keepin’ on, living from day to day, month to month, year to year. Perhaps the scarification of those fractures are what the defense mechanisms are, the fears, the caginess, the aversion to risking one’s poor, suffering heart.

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It is like crystal, like the petals of a poppy: translucent, and easy to bruise.

I think the sadness of being out of touch with one’s emotional pitfalls comes from the realization that most people are genuinely good, and want to love and care and protect and enjoy one another’s company. It’s almost as if adults live in the center of a long, winding labyrinth with doors along the way. All the doors must open, eventually, and whatever obstacle that lays beyond them must be acknowledged and explored. For if not, I would imagine, you end up rather like someone whose fears have become her/himself, and the real person inside is just lost.

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“An unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates

 

Kindness

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I have just learned that Stuart Kestenbaum, long time director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, is leaving his position in the spring of next year. My last post discussed at length my last Haystack experience, and how transformative it was for me and for the people in our class. One of Stu’s great gifts is his incredibly wacky sense of humor: his voice is soft and his manner full of grace, and his jokes sneak across to you almost constantly, causing everyone in his presence to have no choice but to laugh. In addition to this, he is a beautiful writer and has a habit of sharing poetry with Haystack attendees, including myself.

When I went to Haystack two weeks ago, I was shrouded with doubts and feeling regarding an ethical position of mine in this life: one of attempting to be truly kind to all people regardless of how they act outwardly. A couple of years ago, I started trying to adopt an attitude of not taking anything personally and understanding that we all act out of fundamental self interest, regardless of how things may feel in the moment. Recently, I had added to this philosophy by tacking on the idea of impermanence, or the temporary nature of all things. I find that when people are challenging, rude or just plain mean, an attitude of understanding it is not personal, but rather is something happening within their own hearts, and that the experience itself passes in mere moments, it helps to remain kind and to feel solid enough in my own self to keep progressing in this beautiful game that is life.

Here is the poem that changed my doubts into confidences a couple of weeks ago. Stu read it to us on Saturday night, just before workshops started, and it changed my questioning feelings into feelings that made me feel stronger and more determined to do what I love to do on the Earth, which is to talk to people, share with them, be kind to them, try to understand them, and help them express themselves in positive and productive ways.

Lots of love and admiration to Stu: wherever he goes from here is lucky beyond words to have him tell stories in his unique, lilting and loving style.

Kindness – by Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

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