Tag Archives: daughter

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My mom loved me

My mom loved me

It’s herself she didn’t love
She didn’t love her anger
She didn’t love her fear
She didn’t love her sorrow
She didn’t love her shadows

She packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
and rode forth singing.

When I was angry
she felt her anger
When I was scared
she felt her fear
When I was sad
she felt her sorrow
When I felt my shadows
she felt hers
I hid my shadows

I hid my shadows for many years
and then my saddlebags were full
They called me

I dove in the sea
I rescued my anger
I rescued my fear
I rescued my sorrow
I rescued my shadows

At first I couldn’t love them
My mom didn’t; how could I?

But I loved my mom
I loved all of her
Her anger
Her fear
Her sorrow
Her shadows
Her singing and courage

I thought if I could love her shadows
I could love my own

It was hard
It took months
I looked in the mirror at my own face
And slowly I was able to have
Compassion for myself

I am sad that my mom is not
where I can touch her warmth
and tell her I love all of her
I tell her anyway

I’m finding many things as I surface from my dive
Sometimes I feel the presence of angels
I was looking for something else
I found a valentine
that she made me
No date
Many hearts cut out and glued
to red paper

I am so surprised

My mom loves me
shadows and all
now and  forever.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child Sweet Honey in the Rock

I took the photo of my mother working at the etching press while I was in college.
This was previously posted on everything2.com in 7/2014 and written before that.

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Sophistocated Noder

The picture is my daughter years ago. But hey! That’s how I am feeling at the end of the Blogging 101 class! I am a sophistocated noder! I know stuff! I know a lot more than I did a month ago! I have met other people! I have made another page! I have Big Plans!

And…. I am still a clueless newbie really, but it’s been very fun.

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Adverse Childhood Experiences 3: Attachment Disorder

I ought to have an attachment disorder, which now is called “separation anxiety disorder” in the DSM IV, now redefined in the DSM IV-TR and then the DSM V. That is, they keep changing the definition of psychiatric disorders. It’s a bit unnerving, isn’t it? Not only the brain is “plastic” and can be rewired throughout our lives, but the psychiatric diagnosis manual is being updated.

When I went into allopathic medicine, I was under the impression that I needed to learn everything I could and apply it. Spectacularly wrong. I needed to learn everything and then track everything because at least one fourth of what I learned was wrong or was going to change. I just didn’t know WHICH 25% was wrong.

This is why older doctors have a healthy skepticism towards new medicines, new equipment, new ideas. Older doctors are more likely to use old cheap medicines and eschew the new-fangled samples. It’s not just that the pharmaceutical companies only give us samples of the new expensive stuff. It’s also that some of the new expensive stuff is not as good as advertised and has a chance of hurting people. I still would advise my patients to use coumadin (warfarin) if they have a clotting disorder. Yes, you can take the new drugs without doing a monthly blood test — BUT if you bleed, I can’t reverse the new medicines. So I wouldn’t take them: if I need a medicine to keep me from clotting, I want coumadin. I will decide about the new medicines in 5-10 years. Old and cynical, that’s me….

As previously written, I had five “experiences” under age three that left me not trusting adults. However, the adults seemed to love me, even though they kept abandoning me to other adults. At under three, this did not make sense. I could have decided never to trust anyone and presumably would have really gone off into some sociopathic bad place, but I didn’t do that.

The clue to what I did is in my mother’s stories. My sister was born five days before my 3rd birthday. She came home right by my birthday, at Easter.

My mother said, “You asked if you could dress Chris. She was two days old. She was nearly ten pounds and had a triple chin. You wanted to put a lacy dress on her. I decided that you could try and told you to be very gentle.

You put Chris into the newborn baby dress. She was so big that it barely fit and in fact, that was the only time she ever wore it. You had to stuff her arms through the sleeves. She cracked her eyes and looked at you, but she did not object at all. You were gentle.”

That doesn’t seem like much. Next story:

My mother said, “You would meet visitors who came to see Chris at the door. You would say “Come see my baby.” I let you open presents for Chris because she didn’t care. You would show the visitors your sister.”

My baby. That is the key.

I think what happened is this:
1. The adults who took care of me did seem to love me.
2. Even though they loved me, they kept abandoning me, or giving me to other adults. I really really disliked this.
3. I thought that adults were misguided and wrong to give me away. I thought there must be some explanation. I would try to figure it out. Meanwhile, I was going to take care of my sister: she was MY BABY. I was going to show those stupid, loving, confused adults how to take care of a baby and NO ONE was going to give HER away. I could love adults but no way was I going to trust them.

That was my crisis brain wiring by age 3. Adults are loving and untrustworthy. You can love them back but they may abandon you to someone else at any moment. You can’t predict what they will do. They may be even LESS trustworthy if they are loving and you know them, than if it is a stranger.

My mother again, “When I got you back at nine months, you didn’t know me. You wanted to be as independent as possible. You missed your (maternal) grandmother. In the grocery store, you would cry if you saw a white haired woman. We couldn’t comfort you.

I thought that you didn’t like us at all until you ate a cigarette butt and got really sick. You let us take care of you. Then we left you with friends for a night. You were absolutely furious when we got back and I thought that you really did like us….”

Poor young mom, 23 and recovering from tuberculosis and still not strong, with an angry and grieving nine month old who really didn’t want much to do with her and didn’t trust her at all…..

Changes from the DSM IV-TR to the DSM V: http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/changes%20from%20dsm-iv-tr%20to%20dsm-5.pdf

The DSM IV criteria for separation anxiety: http://behavenet.com/node/21498

Theme song: The Devil Makes Three “All Hail”

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Please allow me to introduce myself

I have joined blogging 101 and missed yesterday’s assignment: to introduce myself.

Hello. I curtsy, but have to look up the spelling, because I spell it curtsey initially. So: I am not a great speller.

Hello. I am a mom, divorced, with two children, one over 21 and in college and one in 11th grade.

I am a rural family doctor.

I had strep A in my lungs and muscles in June and am just now getting permission to return to work part time. I had more time to blog.

I have been writing on everything2 since 2007. My sister started there in 2001 and became an editor. She married a Brit that she met on line. He was a “god” on the site. She was diagnosed with breast cancer between when they were engaged and when they were married. She died in 2012. I only had one sibling.

I write poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the latter mostly about medicine.

I am a madashell doctor, and traveled across the US in 2009 with the Oregon madashell doctors, giving talks about single payer health care, medicare for all. The United States health system is a terrible mess, geared for profit not people. It is amazingly awful and unfair. My sister had all the care in the world because she worked for Cal-trans, so was part of the largest Union on the planet, the California state government union. But she could have worked elsewhere, lost her job, lost her health insurance and died much sooner.

I have a cat and a fish.

I am very interested in the sufis and the zen buddhist teachings and some of my poems reference the Beloved.

Thank you.

http://madashelldoctors.com/

http://everything2.com/

<a href=”http://Blogging U.” title=”Blogging 101: Introduce yourself”>

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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.” 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!