Worry equals love

My daughter is proposing to drive to Tennessee and spend 4 days camping out at a music festival. I'm pretty sure she's going to be OK at the music festival even though she's a princess who has never slept in a tent. It's the 10 hour drive, at night, after a full day's work that worries me. She routinely shorts herself on sleep.  Although I think I've kept my worries to myself I'm  sure she knows I would rather she didn't go. So I wish her well and tell myself that worry is negative energy like crossing the bridge twice, once before you actually get there.

Except, I have this private belief, developed in childhood that what you worry about doesn't happen. The bad things that happen, that take you by surprise are because you failed to anticipate and worry about them.  This could be called productive worry. Productive worry is what made me study for tests so that I would pass. Neurotic worry is what made me study so much that I almost always aced the test. Productive worry has me check the weather forecast, the oil and the fluids in the car before I embark on a long car journey in the deep of winter. Neurotic worry stops me travelling.  Productive worry has me lay out my interview outfit, check the traffic report and plan in detail how I'm going to get to the job interview. Neurotic worry has me lie awake all night rehearsing answers to every possible and impossible question that might be asked of me. 

Then there is the really insidious belief that worry equals love. I know this because my mother told me so frequently. "I only worry about you because I love you so much"  which was only a short hop, skip and a jump from " if you loved me you wouldn't do   fill - in - the - blank because I will worry about you."  So as a child I stayed at home -  a lot. Stayed at home bored and resentful and got on my mother's nerves -  a lot. I finally broke free at 15 when I had the opportunity to go away to college. I could go to the one 2 towns over, a good school ve-ery close to home or the big, exciting ivy league school at the opposite end of the state. I asked for my mother's opinion to help me choose between these two alternatives. She made a huge mistake in citing the neighbor's opinion of her as the critical factor in making a decision. As in " what would the neighbors think of me if I let my 15 year old daughter go away to college."  In retrospect it was the kindest thing she could have said.  My decision was instantly clear. If it was the neighbors opinion of her that was her biggest concern I was free to go. I cut those traces and left. It wasn't that clean of course. I had to cut those cords again and again and again. They re-grew of their own volition. Then I became a mother and  found myself attaching the silken threads to my daughter. 

She went to the music festival. She texted me to let me know she'd gotten there alive. Her exact words. She didn't communicate over the next few days and I restrained myself to the occasional "how are you" text. I have to admit I breathed a huge sigh of relief (had I really been holding my breath for 4 days?) when she rolled up at my door late Sunday night dirty, exhausted, happy and indubitably alive.

Mother's day

"When I was a child, I spake as a child and now it is time to put away childish things." Or is it? Perhaps life is a bell curve and I'm over the hump and on the way back down to old age when I can become child-like again shedding responsibilities like daisy petals.
"he loves me, he loves me not"
He loves me but do I love him?
How many people can we love in a lifetime?
I have a son. " He loves me, he loves me not."
He loves me, he needs me not. Yet I need him.
I miss him - that little  boy who told me stories of Batman and Calvin and Hobbes and begged me not to go to work - and now he comes home and doesn't stay and doesn't speak.  A good conversation  for him is teasing. It has its own kind of intimacy but it has barriers too.
And yet he lives - he grew up -  they don't all - some are missing.
As long as he lives there is hope for re-acquaintance - for an adult conversation for connection.
Old age is a privilege. We don't all get to grow old. My father taught me that. Every day over 70 years was a gift for him. He died well my Dad, not so my mother . She lives on and knows not why. Every day a burden, a woe is me, a glass not full day.
I wrote her a mother's day card this morning. "you are in my heart and in my mind." A lovely sentiment it would seem. It is true she is in my heart and mind but often not in a good way.
I am a mother and I have a mother and I should feel blessed   and usually I do.
I have a son and a daughter and both have reached their 20's. My college friend who wanted a child so badly she adopted one lost her son when he was barely 20 years old. My son's roommate died in his sleep in their dorm room in April. Mother's day will be sad and  poignant for their mothers.
But we have our children for as long as we have them and to have them at all is a gift. 

Thanksgivings past and present

I don't remember the first Thanksgiving I celebrated but it had to be the year I turned 13. We left England on November 5, Guy Fawkes night, sailed across the Atlantic in a big storm on the Queen Mary and arrived 5 days later and disembarked in NY. We stayed with my father's brother, Gunther, who had a house in Ozone Park, NY. It was a strange, tense time. No-one could sleep because the bed rooms were too hot. We didn't have central heating in the UK so our bedrooms were un-heated. The food was strange, the television was on a lot more than we were used to, we felt awkward and out-of-place  and my mother cried  every day. She resented everything about her German sister-in-law. The more Irene tried to help my mother the more insulted Iris felt. It was horrible. Undoubtedly it was Irene who cooked that first Thanksgiving turkey although I remember nothing about the day itself. By Christmas we were living in half of a  rented duplex in South Ozone park. My mother roasted the Christmas bird which is when I learned that the bird Irene cooked was "dry".  The tension between the two families was if anything even higher.

As a child I didn't enjoy Thanksgiving. It was all about eating which I found pretty boring, because it involved too much time and work for  preparation, and created too many dirty dishes  that I was expected to stick around to help clean up, and way, way too much tension for too little pay off; an over-full stomach. Tension, walking on egg shells, tip-toeing around waiting for someone to explode and start haranguing. Usually, no always, Mom. At least at Christmas, there were gifts, and decorations as well as tension.

When I had my own household and it was my turn to host Thanksgiving I realized I could diffuse some of that tension by inviting strangers to the table. My mother could usually be counted on to behave in front of strangers. So Thanksgiving found me actively seeking lonely widows, lost foreign students, visiting scientists, or people just too far from home to get there. I'd been in that situation myself and had been grateful to be rescued from dinner alone.  It was a two-for-one,  I kept my mother at bay and I got to feel noble about having real Thanksgiving spirit. We were the natives and it was necessary to find a few pilgrims.

Later still, I came to feel like Thanksgiving was truly *my* holiday. The Pilgrims, after all, were the original immigrants. They were celebrating having enough food to make it through the winter. And as immigrants we had much to be grateful for. We had not only survived that first bleak winter we had flourished and put down roots.

As the years added up I came to a further realization; it isn't even necessary to have turkey for Thanksgiving.  It's big, it's heavy, it's hot and greasy and slippery and often it doesn't taste all that good. What the people want is everything else! All the yummy stuff, (starting with stuffing of course) that goes with the turkey.  One year I made a turkey dinner according to Julia Child, with all the potatoes drenched in butter  and a wine based gravy. My father didn't like it. He wanted my mother's giblet  gravy.  The year my parents went to my sister's house and it was just me, 2 kids and my spouse it occurred to me to ask. Hey what would you really like to eat?  Macaroni cheese said my children. My husband's idea of food from home is idli samber, ( he's a South Indian from Madras). So that's what I made.

 I've learned to be careful about  expectations I create for myself of what I should do. If I'm not paying attention I end up as angry as my mother.   So I pay attention, I ask questions, I try not to assume anything. And I often fail.
We are back to family tension time again. Only this time the source is my sister. She feels put upon and unappreciated. She kept her feelings to herself, just like Mom taught her to do, until she could stand it no more and exploded in the modern way. By e mail. The kind that scorch the in-box. I have my orders to take care of Mom for Thanksgiving.  Mom doesn't travel and to be honest why would I bring a source of angst and misery into my home so we go to Mom and take her out for Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant.  I never thought I would be a restaurant dinner on a holiday kind of person. I've spent too long in service jobs to want to make others work on a holiday.  But hey, you never know, maybe they need an excuse to get away from their family too!

"I don't do windows"

I washed windows today. Is washed the right word? I sprayed them with window cleaner and then wiped with an old tee shirt. It's a bigger job than it sounds.  We have combination windows; 2 storm windows and a screen in metal tracks and then a pair of sash windows that are about 50 years old. So the screen has to be pulled out. Then the storm windows have to removed  and  cleaned on both sides. Then the sash windows  which are divided into 6 lights have to be cleaned on both sides. This is tricky on the second floor. I end up manipulating sash  windows up and down,  leaning out and under and contorting myself to get to the outside surfaces. At some point I have to track down a step stool. Then a brush and a tool to pry the spiders and dead stink bugs out of the tracks and a bar of soap to rub on the tracks so the windows will slide up and down as everything sticks.  I usually end up with broken nails and wrenched muscles. Then  the whole deal  has to be reassembled, at  which point the bits I missed  become very obvious. Window cleaning is time consuming, tedious and physically demanding.
My parents didn't employ anyone to mow the lawn, clean the  house, wallpaper, paint, fix plumbing or electricity or do any kind of renovations. My Dad did it all. My mother cooked a meal every day of her life. We never ate out.  Yet we had a weekly window washer.  He arrived weekly with a bucket, a ladder and a chamois leather all carried on a bicycle.
 This was England in the 1950's when people still burned coal and smog was a frequent occurence. The air was dirty. So a window washer was necessary and affordable. 

Driving lessons

I didn't get to take driver's ed in school with everyone else because I was too young. I had to wait until my second year of college which meant no Driver's ed. I got Father's ed.
My Dad hadn't been driving all that long himself. He got his first driver's license a couple of years after we landed in the US.  That would have been around 1965. So he would have been a first time driver at 45 years old. In NY state at that time a driver's license came with a warning. The first 6 months is probationary, one speeding ticket  while on probation and kiss that license goodbye. Dad got the speeding ticket, mailed in his fine and thought nothing more.  He rationalized that  the rule only applied to young drivers, not mature family men like himself.  Then the summons turned up in the mail. Mail in your driver's license, you are suspended for 6 months. When you complete driving school we'll see about giving it back. He was the only driver in the family. He parked the car in the garage and there it sat while we all went back to cycling walking.  We lived in a Hampton Bays, a village between the North and South forks of Long Island. Public transportation was non-existent. It was a hardship for everyone.

I guess he'd had it back about a year or so when he started to teach me on his Chevrolet Nomad, a big old station wagon, manual transmission of course and no power steering. The gear lever was on the steering wheel and the clutch pedal was stiff. We went to the most wide open space he could find. The parking lot for the ocean side beach, well after beach season was over. He sat silently and grumpily in the front seat while that big car bucked and heaved and shuddered as I tried to find the right way to ease out the clutch and feed it some gas and get it moving smoothly forward.  There were two poles about a thousand feet apart that I was scared to drive between them.  I knew it was ridiculous but I was still nervous.  I don't remember road practice just that first outing in the parking lot. I do remember Dad's disapproval, lots and lots of disapproval. But to his credit it was mostly non-verbal. He didn't curse or raise his voice but there was a whole lotta body language.

I failed the road test the first time I took it. It was expected. Nobody passed the first time. Even though I parallel parked and hauled that baby through the required 3 point U -turn and signalled in all the right places the examiner failed me anyway because my leg vibrated when I depressed that damn clutch pedal. Dad was probably relieved that I failed. He didn't pass first time either.

I don't remember the second test when I actually got my license or my first solo drive. Likely it would have been along Dune road - the narrow road that ran along the barrier island with the Atlantic on one side and Shinnecock  bay on the other.  No traffic, beautiful views, impossible to get lost or take a wrong turning.  You had to earn the joy though by driving across the impossibly narrow humpbacked drawbridge that connected the village to the beaches. It was the kind of narrow where you instinctively breathe in and suck everything in to make yourself smaller as if that has some effect on the size of the metal box you are sitting in. I lived in fear that the drawbridge would start to rise while I was on the incline and I would have to restart on a hill with a long line of cars behind me.

The old Nomad died on that beach road. There was a loud bang and a rift appeared in the hood where a piece of metal that had snapped off a fan blade had penetrated.  The car was sold for junk and my Dad moved up to a Chevy Impala nearly new. My sister totaled that one on the Long Island expressway.


I got my first speeding ticket on the Long Island expressway. Fortunately, for me, I was in my second year of driving and off probation.  I sent in my fine and they sent it back and demanded my appearance in court. I was nineteen and properly terrified. It seemed I was sufficiently over the speed limit that a lecture was required to impress on me the severity of my offense. Today it would be called reckless driving.

I loved speed when I was a young woman. Roads with curves and hills. Down shifting, double clutching, the combination of moves with handbrake and clutch  required to get a car moving forward on a hill without rolling backwards all made me feel like a real driver. Commuting to work and mother hood cured me of that. Commuting is tedious and mother hood took the edge right off my need for speed.

Now I'm a little old lady driver. I don't enter the intersection when the light turns orange; I drive the speed limit.  I've been known to ease over to the parking lane to let the tailgaters pass me in the 30 mph zone and I smile and wave at them when we meet up again at the next red light. 

The reluctance of the turtle

I like list making. I like order. I like imposing order on chaos. I like being able to locate a tool, a book, an item when I need it. I like control. My control. I like pulling weeds because there is an end product. I like knowing the names of birds, plants, trees. I don't remember place names. I can no longer remember the names of people. I no longer remember people. They come into and out of my life and this makes me sad. I think this is one of the reasons I keep a journal.

I like sequences. Ordering events on a timeline. Life is ephemeral Each moment slips through our grasp. OK that's silly- grasp. What is there to grasp? If I don't remember it - did it happen? If an event doesn't make a change in my brain chemistry/architecture then it didn't happen in my life.

I am a sharp knife. I cut people by my very existence. My first husband sought to blunt me by isolating me. He preferred my company when I was ill, the sharp edges blunted by weakness and vulnerability. My present husband chooses not to engage. He chooses to use me. Pick me up by the handle and use my sharp edges against the world. He makes sure he is impervious. No soft spots. Don't let the knife penetrate. My daughter is also a knife. She and I can fence with each other rapier against rapier, jousting in a prescribed manner.  Books, ideas, psychology - little sparks fly. Occasionally we slip and draw blood. We both get hurt at different times. Often we are oblivious when our knife has penetrated the other. Yet we continure to develop the footwork, the moves, the rules of engagement because we like engagement and having our moves honed.

 My son is not a knife. Not a hammer, not a whetstone - he doesn't like sword fights and knife play. He refuses to engage. Withdraws turtle like into a shell. He's a tortoise, I'm a hedgehog.
          "The elegance of the hedgehog" is the title of the book.
Perhaps I should write one and call it The Reluctance of the Turtle.

That's my story for today. Knives, turtles, hedgehogs.

August 16, 2012

I'm a survivor.  I know that about myself. I've gone to the edge and looked over and said - Nah, it ain't that bad. It will work out.

I went to a college where there were lots of bridges over narrow deep gorges. It was a pretty campus. It was also known for having a high suicide rate. When it all got be too much some jumped over, "gorging out", we called it in that cynical  college student vernacular. Every day I'd walk to class, cross a bridge and look over and down to the rocks below. It was too pretty to spoil with a smashed up body. And anyway the pressures on me were not so great - I was an ordinary kid with unexceptional talents. Simply completing 4 years was enough. All around me my compatriots were doing self destructive things. There were lots of drugs and of course the old standby - alcohol. Easy routes to self destruction and copping out. As a female I didn't have to worry about getting drafted to fight in Vietnam but I did have to be concerned about an unplanned pregnancy. Abortion was illegal back then and the pill not readily available to 18 year olds. I graduated from college at 19 years old, not knowing very much but knowing deep down in my bones that I am a survivor - I don't quit.

I had to look at that again about 10 years later. I had married young, to a guy who was essentially the boy next door, although I'd had to return to the country of my birth to find him. I made the vow "for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in sickness and in health till death do us part." My parents had remained together, although from the outside they seemed to be ill-suited so I didn't expect marriage to be easy or a bed of roses. One by one I gave up my ideals; that he would be an intellectual companion, that we would encourage each other to be bold, to take risks, that we would travel and have a diverse group of friends. He was sickly, his stomach hurt a lot and he used his pains to control me. We couldn't eat out, our diet had to be bland, no pizza no Chinese food and so on. He din't like my friends or the people I worked with. My world got smaller. I gave up job opportunities for him, I moved to cities I didn't want to live in for him. I stifled myself for him and I told myself it didn't matter. He wasn't a bad guy; he didn't drink, he didn't abuse me - until one day I woke up and I knew I would die If I continued to live in this marriage. It wasn't a question of changing, or accomodating or adapting, it was a question of survival. If I didn't leave I would die, I would have an un-intentional car accident or I would get sick. So I left. Just - like - that. I found a place to live- took half of our savings account and moved out. Started over. Tapped into that core that believes in survival.

August 22, 2012

It's 2:15pm Eastern Standard Time, August 22 in the year 2012. I am 60 years old, soon to be 61. But that is not what this is really about, is it? Clock time. How many minutes, how many seconds do we get to live? And of those finite number for how many are we really alive and fully conscious as opposed to just functioning, respiring, digesting metabolizing. I could go down the path of what it means to be conscious, conscious of self, the entity that resides somewhere in this body? the head that watches, thinks, calculates and evaluates. I could speculate about biochemical pathways and synapses and chemical messengers being transmitted and received. But that's not what this is about.

Where I am in time. From a biological point of view I'm finished. I've reached adulthood, procreated, reproduced myself and my mate and raised offspring to adulthood. If we were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow they would survive, they have the skills. In a Darwinian sense I'm done. In a philosophical sense every day hence is a bonus. Each day a gift to be savored and enjoyed.

I was privileged to observe the nest of 2 wrens. They built it in 24 hours in a hanging plant directly outside my kitchen window. They abandoned it, or so it seemed for 5 days and on the 6th day I peeked in and spied an egg or two. In total the female laid 4 eggs. Exactly 15 days after hatching 4 tiny birds flew the nest. Those were a busy 15 days, a constant to-ing and fro-ing of adults carrying spiders and other insects. When the nestlings finally fledged 3 of them flew up and away into the trees but the last one fluttered down into the grass and chirped feebly. He had feathers fully quilled but there was down on his head. By my count one egg hatched 2 days later than the others. I hovered anxiously watching out for neighborhood cats and other predators as did Mom and Pop wren. They sat in the nearby bushes and trilled loudly and longly and aggressively. Wrens are tiny birds, smaller than a  house sparrow with a voice that belies their size. This is what it feels like to  turn your teenagers loose in the world - a 16 year old with a freshly minted driver's license. They are as vulnerable as this tiny wren. He blinked a couple of times and hop-hop-hopped  into the cover of some hostas. A few minutes later the azalea bushes began to quiver. At least he was off the ground.

That's where I am today - a human being who has the time and the curiosity to watch a pair of birds build a nest and then observe on a daily basis as the family grows, develops and leaves.

January 8, 2010

Fresh snow this morning. I went outside to brush off the cars and decided to keep walking. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the world was beautiful. I walked to my favourite spot, a wooded area overlooking the Potomac. There are trees, a grass covered alley, a small prairie, a variety of wildlife. I come here on a regular basis and it is here I try to get in right relationship with the world. Some would call it prayer or meditation. I like to focus on a familiar tree, a particular view that I have seen at all times of day and throughout the year. In about 36 hours, all being well I will be in New Delhi 6000 miles on the other side of the world. What I see around me will be very different. I will be different. The trip ahead will not be easy. There are terrorism restrictions at the airports, adverse weather conditions on both ends. There is a good chance we will experience delay, boredom, frustration degenerating at best into back and head pains; stomach and bowel discomforts at worst into an outcome that doesn't bear thinking about. Yet the very fact that I can travel 6,000 miles in essentially a day is something that only the very privileged got to do just a few decades ago.

January 4, 2010

In preparation for my trip to India I tried on a sari this morning. Six yards of slippery, satin fabric to be wrapped, tucked and draped around my body. I used the elastic waist of my yoga pants as a foundation and a simple fitted cotton t-shirt as a substitute for the blouse that Indian women wear. When I was finished I surveyed myself in the full length mirror. I looked OK, I had achieved the proper drape and proportions but I felt all wrong.
Last night I tried out the 3 different Salwar Kameez that I own in preparation for my trip to India. None of them feel right. It is as if I am stripping off my own skin and zipping on someone elses. I briefly considered going to our local India store to try on different salwar kameez in search of the perfect fit but realized what I am looking for doesn't exist. It is not just a matter of fit or fabric it is a question of identity.
I married outside of my culture and race. I was born and raised in England, my husband was born and grew up in India, we met, married and had children in America. As long as we stay in America we are a couple. When we go to our respective birthplaces we become strangers to each other. Try as I might to blend in, to be Indian, for the duration of our visit I am not. I feel like an actor and a very bad one at that. This disconnect, this feeling of always being out of place, out of time is I suspect what all immigrants feel when they first arrive in their new country. It is why some hold on to their language, dress code, eating habits far longer than helpful.