Category Archives: Beloved

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Weathering emotions

Just before Christmas, I was describing the present I had gotten for a friend’s son.

“Wait,” she said, “I’m not sure he’ll like that. I want him to be happy.”

……

Oh, I thought. I reassured her, “I think that he will like this a lot.”Β and he did.

But… I don’t want my children to be happy.

WHAT! HORRIBLE MOM!

No, wait. Let’s play with the idea.

Say that your goal is for your child to be happy. You want them to be happy, as much of the time as possible.

Your child will pick up on what you want. Your child wants to interact. Your child loves you. So your child will try to make you happy. Even when they aren’t happy. Then you are in a vicious circle, with you wanting your child to be happy and your child valiantly attempting to be happy or at least act happy whenever you are around until finally they hit the teen years (or possibly age 3) and scream at you, “Go away and leave me alone!” Then they will be sullen and guarded and only show up when they want food, transportation and money.

My goal is NOT for my children to be happy.

Are adults happy all the time? Well, don’t be silly. Of course not.

So why do we want children to be happy all the time?

I want my children to be able to handle the full spectrum of emotions. Happy, sad, grumpy, confused, brave, scared, apathetic, all of them. I want them to be able to name each one and tolerate it. Because my children will be adults and they have to be able to handle all of those emotions. I strongly suspect that they will encounter each and every one….

How do I model this? I tell them how I am feeling AND they don’t have to fix me. My sister died in 2012. I was very sad. I cried a LOT. Sometimes I would be sitting in the kitchen crying and my daughter would wander through the room and stop and hug me. She is not a natural hugger but she knows that I am and that I find it very comforting. She wouldn’t cry with me. She had her own emotions.

I came home from work once and said that I was furious and hurt. Ok, more than once. But once I described a meeting which turned out to have me on the agenda. The other five people knew that and I didn’t. I felt jumped and attacked. It hurt.

My son said, “Five against one?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then they didn’t have enough people, did they?” He grinned at me and I felt much better. Still mad and hurt, but he was so funny. We went out for pizza because I didn’t want to cook.

Our US Constitution includes the pursuit of happiness. We are free to pursue it all we want. But I don’t ever think we will catch it. We will and we should still have times when we are sad or afraid or feel confused or hurt. I would go to work and tell my nurse, “I am in a really bad mood because something in my family is a mess. My mood is not about anything at work.” She would nod and then through the day I would cheer up, because I had to think about work.

Emotions are like the weather. We don’t control them. My mother died fourteen years ago. I see an ornament on the tree that reminds me of her and I feel sad and miss her. Next morning I change from writing Christmas cards to writing Valentines and I am using a stamp set and stickers and it reminds me of her and I think it’s funny. I am happy then remembering her. Let the emotions come in like the weather: name them, acknowledge them, don’t try to control them, let other people know you are in a storm, accept help, and let them pass. And let your children have their full range of emotions as well.

The photo is me and my younger sister, in 1965.

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Voice lesson

The picture is my father in 2009. We went sailing on his friend Paul’s boat. My father loved to sail and loved to sing. He taught me to sing from when I was tiny….

I had five voice lessons in the spring. The teacher is a woman who comes into town to see her mother, from New York. When she comes, she teaches many of the best soloists in town, including people I’ve taken lessons from. One of our soprano soloists gave her my name.

She started by asking my singing history. I explained that my family had sung folk songs since I was tiny and that I’d been in a chorus for the last 14 years. That my father had been in the chorus and that he had recently died. We are working on the Faure Requiem and the Rutter Requiem. Our director asked me to work on the Pie Jesu in the latter and I was having trouble with the high notes. She asked about my father’s voice. I said that he was a very fine bass, who had died from cigarretes. In the last few years he couldn’t sustain, but his entrances kept the bass section on track.

She took me through the lesson. There were five things that she had me work on. It was hard to keep them all in my head at once, since they were all a change.

1. To breathe in so that the back of my throat felt cold, like the feeling you get in icy air. This opens it.

2. To think of the breath as circling along my jaw when I sustained a note or phrase. This made the notes feel alive and stay alive. Richer.

3. As I went into the passagio, to think of the sound going out the top of my head and then directly out through the back of my skull.

4. On the very high notes, to press down more with my lower ribs in my back. This increases support.

5. To open my mouth dropping my jaw, but keeping it narrow. This changes the quality of the vowels tremendously.

The lesson was so helpful that I scheduled a second one two days later and had the sense to tape it. I can practice it with my tape. She will come back within a year and I hope that I’ve improved in all five.

first published on everything2 April 2014

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Painting Angels II

Painting Angels II

After my mother died, I wrote a poem called Painting Angels. It was about my kids’ comments about her death, but also about her being an artist. I wondered whether she was painting the sky or sunsets or clouds. She loved watercolors.

I was driving to the Boiler Room yesterday and came to the hill going down to Water Street and the sunrise was glorious. The leading edge of the front caught fire and there were yellow and orange and pink streaks up into the clouds.

I think my mother and my sister helped paint that sky. I stopped and took photos with my phone until I got too cold and the sun was up.

Thank you, mom. It was a beautiful show in the sky. I lost my mother in 2000, my only sister in 2012 and my father in 2013. I feel that the show has been blessed, and that getting my mother’s artwork out of storage fourteen years after her death and showing it is the right thing to do.

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The Mother Daughter Show II

Over the last two days, I hung the Mother Daughter Show II, at the Boiler Room in Port Townsend, Washington. It will be up for the month of December.

This time it is the joint work my mother and I did in the 1980s. She did etchings to go with nine of my poems. The tenth poem was written for an etching she had already done. I asked my mother if she would do this project with me and she replied, “Only if the poems rhyme. None of that free verse stuff.”

I worked on the poems, I think with my mother’s etching style in mind. She used a zinc plate, with a tar solution on it. She would do a drawing in the tar, usually with a dental tool. The plate was placed in acid, which would etch where the tar had been scraped away. She would etch the plate multiple times, which gave different depths to the etched lines.

When the plate was finished, she would remove the tar and run an artist’s proof. She would heat the plate on a metal hot plate. She would ink it and then gently wipe the ink off until there was a very thin layer on the unetched parts of the plate. This had to be done delicately, so that the ink was not wiped out of the etching lines. She would place the plate on the press, place a piece of wet paper gently over the plate, lower the thick pile of wool pads over the paper and run the press. After the plate had gone through, the paper was peeled up and there was an etching, with the edges of the plate pressed into the paper.

Sometimes she was not satisfied and would return to the tar and change the etching. Sometimes she ran multiple proofs until she had the color right. Then she would run an edition. The print and poems are editions of fifty. Each etching is signed and numbered: 1/50, 2/50, 3/50, and so forth. We had the poems printed first, on a lead type press, and then my mother ran the etchings. We had a show in the late 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia.

My mother died in 2000. My father died in 2013. My mother was a prolific artist, so trying to deal with the estate felt insane. I put the art in a storage unit. When I had The Mother Daughter Show in July, it felt like a remembrance of my mother. And anyhow, I have to do something with the art in that storage unit, don’t I?

I find the etchings easier to show and sell then the watercolors. I want to clutch each watercolor, but eventually I will start to let go of them. I have the etching plates, too, because my mother said she was terrible at finishing editions. I have the box of poems printed on the lead press and the guides for running the edition. I do not have the press. My sister took it to California and it disappeared. That is ok, because there are presses in Port Townsend. There is a big art community, which is part of why my parents moved to this area in 1996. Art, music, gardens and boats.

My mother did many small fantasy etchings, flying elephants, fairies, a mermaid, a merman. The poems I sent her were almost all about animals. I wrote Eating Water Hyacinths and my mother did a charming etching of two manatees. She looked in various books to see what manatees looked like and then drew them. I wrote a blue crab poem and we bought a live crab. I photographed her drawing the crab, which was skittering around unhappily on the dining room floor. I enjoyed the constraint of rhymes. It made it easier to write the poems, though I am not sure why.

I have six of the series hanging in the show. I don’t currently have the other four framed. The Gallery Walk is this Saturday. I hope that people will come and perhaps we will sell one. We are also going to show the Panda Minimum, outside. The Panda Minimum is a mountain bike camping trailer, a bit like a teardrop trailer, designed and built by a local friend. We will have it outside the Boiler Room. I’ve already told the friend that I think the Panda will steal all the thunder and the art on the wall will be ignored, but ah, well. I have a third show scheduled, for June and July, at another venue. It is easier to do shows of my mother’s artwork than my own, because I think she was so good.

Also published on everything2 today.

The Boiler Room: http://www.ptbr.org/

Donate to the Boiler Room! Or come to the auction, also tomorrow!

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Say yes

In the improv tryout
for Lark in the Park
Joey said

Say β€œyes” to everything

He said

It is easier to say β€œno”
But then the improv ends

He made us try
Saying β€œno” to everthing

Each skit was a fight

He made us try
Saying β€œyes” to everything

Yes

We bloomed

And is that it?
All the Beloved wants?

He said that you learn
To say things
Without a question
With a hint
With an idea
With a suggestion
And the other actor responds

I’ve noticed
People don’t respond well
When I say
Don’t do that

I have to learn
To lead
Without leading
To suggest
To let them choose
To change their path
It doesn’t work
To drive them
Offer
Offer
Another idea

Say β€œyes” to everything

Is that what the Beloved wants?

I say β€œyes”
β€œyes”

published on everything2 August 2009

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Twisting words

My sister got mad at me many times, but sometime in the last year of her life she said that I’d “twisted her words”. I don’t know if it was on email or on the phone, but I felt hurt. I do take people’s words seriously, I do look them over carefully, I do ask questions about what they say. The memory training as a small child, to memorize all the verses of songs, means that I have an excellent word memory. Combine that with the medical training, where you have to present an entire patient history from memory: chief complaint, history of present illness, past medical history, social history, medications, family history, physical exam, labs, xrays, specialist opinions, assessment and plan. One boyfriend complained that I would remember what he said and ask questions a week later. He’d say, “I don’t remember what I said.” But I remembered and had thought about it. It’s hard to discuss if only one of us remembers….

After my sister died, her husband got mad at me and was yelling at me on the phone about my niece. I said I would talk to my niece’s father. My brother in law continued to yell and said that I “twisted his words.” Oh.

Later an old family friend, who has known me since birth and was a huge and kind support to my sister, practically a second parent, got mad at me. He said that I “twisted his words.” I felt grim.

Then my cousin disagreed with me. We were disagreeing by email. She cut me off, saying that I “twisted her words”.

No one not intimately connected with my sister has ever said that I twist words.

So this has been hurting and now my sufi reading led me to go close to the place that hurts. Say yes.

Yes, I twist words. Words and books and songs and music were my safe place in a scary childhood. That is where I went to hide myself. I would play in mansions and palaces and forests and space stations of words. I feel safest in the real woods and sleeping in a tent…. people are what I fear most, that they will hurt me. But I say yes to twisting words: I twist them, I knit them, I paint with them, I play with them, I find joy in them, I misspell them on purpose, I adored Walt Kelley, Edward Lear, Robert Burns, Don Marquis, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, nonsense poems. Both of my grandfathers loved nonsense poetry and scurrilous poetry and they both memorized it. My father would read the Book of Practical Cats to us, and when I was little he would read Chaucer in Old English. I just threw away his note cards on Old English from college, though I wish I’d mailed them to Princeton. Never mind, I still have 20-30 boxes of my parents’ paper. I am sure that there is something that I can mail to Princeton. They, after all, are still sending him mail at my house. I memorized poetry that my father would quote and then in school, anything that I liked. “What a queer bird the frog are….”

What a queer bird, the frog are
When he sit he stand (almost)
When he walk he fly (almost)
When he talk he cry (almost)
He ain’t got no sense, hardly
He ain’t got no tail, neither, hardly
He sit on what he ain’t got hardly

I loved that poem and copied it laboriously and took it home. That is the first poem that I remember finding on my own out in the wide world, not from my parents.

I twist words. Not with malice, but with play. And that was why it hurt, my sister’s saying that I twisted words with meanness. I can let that go now. If another person who knew her says that I twist words, I can say, “Yes. I love words. I love to play with them,” and if they are angry, I can let them go…..

Let them go…..

Round of “What a queer bird” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHwwJkKp7Oo&index=1&list=RDUHwwJkKp7Oo

Passenger Let her go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBumgq5yVrA

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Lammily doll

Barbie has competition this Christmas.

Nickolay Lamm took measurements of the average American 19 year old female off the CDC website, made a 3D model and then dressed her like a Barbie.

The images went viral and he used crowdfunding to fund making the dolls, which will hit the stores for 24.99. Right now my QFC grocery store has a small pile of Christmas offerings, including a Barbie dressed in pink, all gussied up for breast cancer treatment fundraising. My sister, who died of breast cancer in 2012,Β  was hugely frustrated that most of the breast cancer money goes to treatment and not prevention, so I haven’t bought one. But the Barbie costs $19.99, so 24.99 is reasonable.

And second graders like her. A video of children at a private school responding to the doll shows them saying that she looks like a family member and that she looks real. Her hair is softer than Barbie’s too, judging by the video. I wondered why a private school was used, but perhaps it’s about permission. Or something.

It is interesting that Mr. Lamm talks about average being beautiful. “She is fit, strong and wears minimal makeup. She promotes a healthy lifestyle.” We could argue lots about Big Brother pushing everyone to be average, but I like the message that the average body is fine and can have fun and can be a doll. Barbie is impossible, everyone knows that. I cut out the article from the AARP magazine about Barbie turning 50. It contains a very interesting list of when the doll got to do different jobs. Teacher, nurse, doctor, multiracial, Army Barbie, astronaut….. It made me feel better about Barbie: her body is ludicrous but she has quietly moved into different careers over the years. It made me proud of her.

There have been other attempts to create a more realistic doll than Barbie… I have one of the Get Real Girls, the camper. She has a back pack, a sleeping bag, a camp stove, a GPS, socks and hiking boots, shorts and a t-shirt. I like her but she is still not the average American female. She’s more privileged. We had the basketball one too but apparently the evil introverted thinker and extroverted feeler blew up a lot of dolls with firecrackers one Fourth of July….. only the camper has survived. She was mine. Also the Barbie twin babies, now orphans, and quite a lot of pink furniture.

The male dolls, that is, action figures, got blown up too. If Lammily is successful, will we have a male average doll? I will bet that that takes longer. I have enjoyed the action figures such as the librarian action figure and the Sigmund Freud action figure. For his graduation from nursing school, I got my Ex a male nurse action figure. He thought the doll was ridiculously great.

And me? I want a Lammily doll for Christmas. No, really. When Demi Moore appeared very pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, I went to buy one. I wondered why I wanted one, until the man at the checkout spoke up: “Women shouldn’t be seen like that.”

“Like what?” I said.

“That.”

“Pregnant?”

“Yeah. They should stay inside. They shouldn’t be seen like that.”

Oh. That’s why I wanted to buy it. Images of women pregnant and a beautiful woman pregnant are evil. I still have it, that evil magazine…..

Lammily: https://lammily.com/
Mr. Lamm: http://patch.com/new-jersey/oceancity/barbie-gets-competition-bruised-and-scarred-lammily-watch
Get Real Girl: https://www.behance.net/gallery/3590013/STARTUP-GET-REAL-GIRL-ACTION-DOLL-LINE
Get Real Girl Nini: http://www.amazon.com/Get-Real-Girl-Backpacking-Adventure/sim/B0018L29NG/2

Barbie turns 50:http://assets.aarp.org/www.aarp.org_/articles/bulletin/interactive/barbie/index.html

Librarian action figure: http://mcphee.com/shop/librarian-action-figure.html

Sigmund Freud action figure: http://mcphee.com/shop/sigmund-freud-action-figure.html

male nurse action figure: http://www.amazon.com/Nurse-Action-Figure-Stethoscope-Clipboard/dp/B0006FU9ZK

first published on everything2 this morning.

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The Path to Wonderland

I thought I’d learned that lesson
But no
The Beloved
Knew I had not
Hadn’t really faced it
Some small piece
Still wanted to depend
On someone else

Still fused.
Still thinking that you
Who know me so well
Would hear when I say please
I really need you to call
You say I will
I wait by the phone
You don’t call

I feel hurt
Anyone would
But my heart doesn’t stay broken
I survive
It happens again
And again
Until it occurs to me
That I’ve been reading Rumi
That we are each entirely part
Of the Beloved
Connected
And yet I’ve been fused to needing you
I don’t need you

I love you
I’m not used to not needing you
But I will be soon
10/22/06

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Homebody

How funny that the traditional positions are reversed

you to be the homebody
while I go out to fight

I am still struggling with what you have chosen

say yes to everything

because so much of the time you don’t answer

I take that as a brush off, you know
silencing
you don’t want to hear it
you don’t want to discuss it

you have your interests

I am interested in everything

but particularly people
what makes them tick

and discrimination
which makes me want to wade in
with my sword
and carve people into mincemeat

perhaps I am to learn patience from you

perhaps this is a respite

perhaps this is a safe place to retreat

you have been fighting for a long time
I am glad that you have laid down your sword
and are finding rest

though sometimes I think you are missing things
withdrawn from the present world

I see that you seem happy in the past

I am trying to accept that

meanwhile, I am well enough

to pick my sword back up

and wade in.

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The Cult of the Collective Unconscious

My motto is “We are the fever dreams of the collective unconscious”.

I often write things, especially poems, that seem to come from my unconscious. I sit and look at it and wish that I felt what the poem says I feel. Forgiveness, for example.

In my first year of medical school, I started falling asleep. We were in the same auditorium for up to eight hours a day, five days a week. Thank the Beloved for laboratory but sometimes there was nothing to dissect or stare at while I fell asleep against the microscope. Sometimes it was a fifty minute lecturer, talking fast as hell, slides so it was dark, windows only in the black and the shades never raised once all year. There was peer pressure not to ask questions, as then the lecturer would go over fifty minutes. The floor was tilted, so if we heard the clink of a can falling over, we automatically jerked our back packs off the floor, because a tide of some nasty soda would roll down. Or coffee. This was in the dark ages when energy drinks had not been invented.

We went to the bathroom in herds during the ten minute breaks. We sat in the same seats, mostly, through the year. The second year we moved up one floor and sat in the same seats. The whole thing resembled everything I’d read about cults. “I’m joining a cult.” I thought. “This is brain washing, just like cults do.” Since I was raised suspicious, I watched for signs of cultdom all through it. I had gone to college a year late, because of my exchange student year, and I had worked for five years before going to medical school. i had worked at seven jobs by then, the most recent being two years as a laboratory technician at the National Institutes of Health in the National Cancer Institute under Steve Rosenberg, MD. He had camera crews following him around and coming in to the lab. The NIH Building TenΒ  was a weird place. We had mice and rats on the North/South halls and human patients on the East/West. Try it in the mice and move on to the humans. It was continually overcrowded and the doctoral fellows fought with the medical fellows over inches of laboratory space. The hematology/oncology fellows usually won. When they showed me around the “old” hospital at the Medical College of Virginia, it did not look old compared to NIH, which was always undergoing construction. Most of the time NIH had warnings not to drink the water, because some lab was being torn down and revamped. The Medical College of Virginia looked pretty cush to me.

I started falling asleep in the medical cult lectures. I would fall asleep at 40 minutes in to the lecture. My copious notes, which I mostly didn’t reread, would trail down the page. I drank coffee at every break. I tried standing against the wall, fell asleep, and woke up sliding down sideways. My stomach hurt. I thought that falling asleep standing up in a lecture would be a stupid way to break my arm, so I said, fuck it. I’ll just go to sleep. I quit the coffee and quit caffeine, except for chocolate. My stomach felt better.

And I went to sleep for ten minutes in every lecture for most of the two years.

When we are asleep, the Jungians think our unconscious is connected to the conscious. Actually they talk about the collective unconscious, that is, that the unconscious is all one….Β  I access yours when I am asleep. Heh, heh. Now, don’t get all paranoid.

So this falling asleep ought to make me an awful doctor. I missed 1/5 of every lecture….Β Β  or maybe I didn’t. Maybe 1/5 of every lecture is in the collective unconscious and maybe I can access that. When I write the mystery order that I don’t write an explanation for and the next day it has solved the medical mystery, that might be my unconscious. And yours. And everyones’. What a delightful idea and what a useful talent. I can’t reach the infectious disease physician at UW, so let’s see, switch brain over to unconscious, it can access the infectious disease doctor and his colleagues anywhere on the planet, and write those orders. When my conscious brain objects, tell it to shut up, it won’t hurt the patient, just don’t worry your pretty little head over it…….

And then the multiple doctors who have been telling me that I “should not be taking care of myself” during my recent illness look a bit silly, don’t they? I told the last one that said that, “I’ve contacted eighteen doctors in the last 3 weeks and only two offered appointments and I’m scheduled August 5th, so I think I’ve tried damn hard to find someone to help. If no one will help, then I damn sure will take care of myself.” He was a little shashmushed, as my grandmother would say. I’m sure it’s misspelled, but it’s a Turkish word meaning sheepish and embarrassed and “I’ll shut up and think about that now.” A useful word.

I think it would be very helpful for humanity to learn to access the collective unconscious. How could we fight wars if we could access how the other person thinks and feels and they are us and we are them and we are all one? I think it is a good idea. There, I’m starting my own damn cult. And it is going to be really fun, so you should jump on the bandwagon now, come one, come all, no one excluded, no one discriminated against. The cult of the collective unconscious. Join it. Now.

this essay was rejected by JAMA though I can’t imagine why……