Accusation

7/23/07
Mon 1310

Scott in summer baseball camp. Connor downstairs with Martin. A day spent largely in waiting for something I’d felt was useless regarding the dog, but then turning out there was a legitimate medical need—an ulceration on her cornea.

So, there’s just about 1 1/4 hours left before needing to go get Scott. Which leaves me feeling that time is a little short for delving as I did yesterday into the nuts and bolts stuff. I can see why people get impatient with it, and feel that it’s ‘hashing things to death’ and ‘overthinking’ it. To go into that level of detail in considering the components of truth and reality.

So in reading my old journal I see myself talking about these sympathetic vibrations. It’s about fearing what I feel. Sensing the presence of reality that is below the level that most people relate at, and feeling it as a sort of accusation. Either of myself, for having those ghosts of feelings, or the other person. And fearing that I’m infecting people, or that they somehow can see these confusing realities and feel tainted by them. Or that I’m nervous because of them which alters my behavior and creates discomfort. Sometimes something neutral feels like an accusation and I feel apologetic about it. And I feel it warping the air and I wonder if the other person picks up on it. And it all has to do with a sense of accusation; either me accusing myself because I’m not feeling the correct feelings or thinking the correct thoughts, or accusations of the person I’m with. And I shy away from those, the idea of accusing someone. Perhaps it’s that ‘dark side’ phenomenon where what one denies is magnetized to one and becomes more persistent.

So there are a couple tangents to this road about accusation that I started really exploring when Jack’s mother accused Scott. One is the issue of having been accused, and what best represents the truth. One is about being aware of thoughts and feelings that seem to have a patina of accusation—a sense that on some level I’m accusing another person. Another is accusing myself when at the level of identifying thoughts and feelings the scale is very different from the scale we generally talk to other people on. And I’ve been confused about how honest to be about the happenings on that level.

Then there’s another twist that Sharon identified which is about the twist and paradox of this core self doubt. What it accomplishes, or what I’m ‘trying’ to accomplish in persisting with it.

I have a horror of being someone who is behaving in a way where integrity is lacking, yet THINKS they’re behaving with integrity. I have a horror of being a person who imagines and proclaims her foundation is solid and without reproach where the holes in that foundation are big enough to drive a truck through and it’s visible to everyone but me. So it’s like I’m always trying to spin around fast enough to see my shadow.

There’s the element of self doubt which probably has its roots in having had to doubt myself when my mother joined with my accusers. There’s that core element of my life I’m not able to accept the truth of. So at each step I doubt my perceptions, doubt my motivation, and fear I am skewing reality to my advantage and that this invalidates my reality and means I’m wrong and need to adhere to the American white protestant reality. Then there’s a way I feel myself ‘accuse’ others, even when I don’t intend to, and I feel uncomfortable about the presence of that latent accusation. And wonder how ‘truthful’ to be about it. Lastly there is dealing with the truths that I’m aware of that are on a scale where there is conflict and ambiguity and I worry about how truthful to be about that reality. Then there’s the question about whether self-doubt serves the function of keeping me ‘unlike’ the others who ‘fool themselves’. And ‘protects the truth’. The truth is, there is doubt, and there is doubt about the truth of my being, the All of Me that participates in any given behavior.

History is to perception what gravity is to objects

7/22/07
Sun
1142

Interestingly I found an article online about a book called, “Mistakes Were Made—But Not By Me”. The author was interviewed. The topic was cognitive dissonance, and the defensive psychological maneuver one makes to reduce internal conflict. What can explain someone pressing forward in the face of evidence against a course of action, once they’ve begun it.

I think this is exactly what I’ve been talking about when I consider doubting myself. Is something appearing in a certain way to me in order to reduce a conflict I have about it: is my brain selecting certain facts to support its own point of view, or to protect a choice I made earlier? Is it selecting facts that would cause me to not feel so bad about something I’ve lost, or selecting facts that give me reason to pursue something?

I’m reminded of the dream of being in the restaurant waiting to be seated, and it taking so long and then being in agony about whether or not to leave: the dilemma being, JUST as we step out of line will our turn come up; or if we continue to wait we’re fools who will be waiting forever. I’m guessing that cognitive dissonance may be a theme I’ve identified in other areas as I’ve grown. It was clear to me before I called Kayla that she was going to slam me. Yet I clung to that possibility that she was not, and that I wasn’t being fair to her. I see a similarity in that and in all those years of attempted relationships where I kept holding out for a relationship’s possibility, when others would have given up long before. The not being able to make predictions about what a probably outcome was going to be, and needing it made explicitly clear before dropping it. When I could have saved myself the trouble of getting the final evidences of proof. Another dream where I was unable to leave Sharon, despite the fact that conditions were against it. I wanted what I needed from her so badly yet under the conditions that were present it was impossible for me to get it, yet I still couldn’t leave.

Paralysis between options and waiting for something outside to break the impasse. Like back to the restaurant picture—If I held out for service and it came, then I did the right thing by holding out for service. If service never came, then I was foolish to keep pursuing that fruitless avenue. If I get disgusted and step out of line to leave, just as service arrives, then I was very stupid to have quit when I did. There’s a certain being at the mercy of outside events in how I view myself.

There’s a sense of being held between two poles, in a state of tension that’s almost unbearable: the sense of wanting what I can get from someone or something, but it beginning to look unlikely I will get it. How long do I hold out? I wonder if this is another of those places where no one else can go—like death. When I die, there will be no one there but me. In some of these situations of evaluating my behavior or possible behavior, there is a place where no one is there but me. A mistake I’ve made all my life is to act as if there IS somebody else there—someone whose prescription I should follow.

There is a weird thing about having problems. My mind is running on a lot of tangents. I talked for a while with Joy.

What does the phenomena of my responses to her say? In the first place there is a part of me that sees her problems as cyclical, ever-repeating, and that there is something at the core of her that perpetuates them.

I was going to go back to thinking about the emotional climate I sometimes experience in talking with Joy. But maybe this thing with Becca deserves a little more thought too.

What’s true is that I took it as her believing something negative about me in hearing her message saying she’d concluded that we’d changed our minds about inviting them. I saw it as her having concluded something negative about me. I see that as a ‘bad’ behavior: to invite someone to something, then change your mind, and then act as if I hadn’t invited them and disinvite them that way. So it’s not just being rude, it’s being rude, rude, and cowardly.

I saw a different perspective when talking with Becca: that was the perspective which is far more neutral where it makes sense to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ because it’s easier. I can see how this is a very reasonable perspective. How interesting that I interpreted it so negatively.

Just as she, expecting an invitation and not getting it, tried to explain to herself the dissonance by concluding it must have been a casual invitation to begin with and one of those things that wasn’t meant to have much weight and therefore is ok for them (all parties concerned) to blow off. I encounter numerous situations like that. I can see how she might conclude this would be one of them.

I can also see that I responded to it as if the negative take—that only a rude person would invite someone and then disinvite—as if it were the only possible take. Which meant that I had to conclude that she had thought that of me. I really believed that she should have thought it more likely for the mail to be screwed up than for me to do the behavior that I assumed she shared my point of view about. Holy shit. So I went to her from a ‘position’ of : “Hey, you implied I did this horrible thing”.

So I’m ‘guilty’ of a few things here. I’m guilty of assuming my particular framing of a behavior is the only one there is. I’m ‘guilty’ of putting a harsher interpretation on a situation than was necessary.

So instead of wondering ‘what it means’ that she would interpret my invitation not arriving as reflecting me having changed my mind (and over a whim of Scott’s to boot)—I should be wondering what it means that I would have taken the interpretation that she might be thinking something bad about me—thinking I was capable of a behavior that I thought clearly wasn’t my style. Perhaps some of it was my disappointment in having not seen her, perhaps my fear that she has a problem with Scott that I hadn’t been aware of—and this because of the larger context of the thing that happened with Jack and Scott. And fearing that maybe other people DO see him that way (for example, I think Kent and my SIL would be inclined to believe that Scott had been hitting Jack—they’d see the accusation as another step leading down the path to a conclusion that started when SIL saw Scott hit his cousin.) I think when Becca had said that about whether or not Scott was a “angry” child when I talked to her about Kayla, it scared me into wondering if I was ‘in denial’ for objecting to her seeing him as an ‘angry child’. I think it was because I wondered if maybe because of the way Scott had been with Miles, that SHE thought it was likely too that Scott was being aggressive to Jack.

There’s a bigger story too about seeing myself as ‘victim’ to someone else’s mistaken feelings or conclusions. Which I think is part of what I was going to talk about when I talked about my responses to Joy.

I see that there is a sort of drama component when talking to one person about some hurtful act another person did to me—I portray myself as ‘the reasonable one’ and the other as being inexplicably unreasonable. In my recent history I have that story going with Gary, with Kayla, now most recently with Becca. I talk about it with someone else to receive reassurance that I’m not the crazy one, that my behaviors and responses ARE normal and reasonable and to bond with this other person over receiving those assurances.

I suppose there’s another approach to framing that though. Inexplicable things happen, people behave inexplicably, and we often feel hurt by it. Rather than talking being “just” a self-serving way of reassuring myself that I’m ‘right’ and someone else ‘wrong’, talking can also be a way of getting some insight into the principles and facts of the human condition that gave rise to the feelings in the first place. Bonding with the other person can be beyond getting assurance about being “right”—it can be the bonding process of working together to gain understandings about ideas.
Part of where this takes me is again wondering how we can possibly form relationships when this scrim of perceptual filters and ego-protections our brain manufactures is present. How can we evaluate anything that comes in through our senses, when the basis of its apprehension may be shifting. I suppose that’s a sort of quantum mechanics—the idea about what given facts we’ll select from any given moment to reinforce our reality and what emotional color that will have. That the facts we select may be influenced by what has happened just prior, or in a greater context, or by certain fears, desires…

In my past I’ve been upset at how the facts that make a certain behavior seem reasonable at the time seem to encourage a different behavior when I look back on it later. I’ve been frustrated by the fact that only certain facts were available to my awareness, even though time shows that other facts were present too, but I’d not distinguished them from the background. Perhaps this is witnessing how quantum mechanics works on this macro scale. Even though objects don’t behave this way, a flower becoming a vase and vice versa, the facts we select from DO. The conditions of our emotions and senses as the bedrock from which we select our facts are the elements of chance and randomness that is at the core of each subatomic particle…

So where does one go from THAT? The realization that quantum mechanics may be manifesting on this level in the choices we make and the basis from which we make our choices. Which are all fluid and may be present at any given moment, or not. It’s all at an incredibly complex level of interaction.

It seems that history, recent and more distant, might be like the force of gravity, which Einstein said is space warped by large-mass objects—we experience that as gravity. Perhaps history is what warps –what, perception? Is perception analogous to gravity, which really isn’t a downward sucking motion at all, but merely the warping of space by the mass of the earth. (So again, what the hell is space?)

So does that mean the fact that in recent (hypothetical) history Gary has said something hurtful have to warp my perception, which may be warped already in that direction by history a bit more distant but somewhat consistent. How does this work out, I guess I’m wondering, on a practical level? Is there a way I can be free of my perception, or be free of it warping in proximity to events/history?

“The United States is a country that believes in Belief” is something the author of the ‘Mistakes…’ book said. I think behind many of my questions is the question about whether there is a True Objective Reality against which things can be independently measured? (This is the kind of talk I’d have enjoyed with John D). And if not, what? I guess it seems important that there be an outside True Belief rather than that we’re all just grabbing at straws to keep ourselves oriented—as we hurtle toward death? That whole notion of randomness, it seems like meaninglessness. And each of us humans that do more than just respond on a level of apparency is looking for meaning, I think. I think ultimate meaninglessness has been an existential question that’s troubled me all my life, even as a child. Does it make my search invalid, I guess is one question, if I just seize on something random to orient myself around? Like in a big flood, each of us caught in it are floating by, or trying to stay afloat, clutching our little pieces of jetsam and proclaiming they’re the One True Way. If indeed, I’ve not really latched on to a Larger Truth and am only spinning by on one of many pieces available to grab onto, does it somehow invalidate the piece that’s keeping me afloat?

And along those lines I’m reminded of a question I had earlier, which is, I’m giving myself permission to give myself over to this writing and musing, thinking that it’s leading Somewhere. I’m giving myself permission to spend what I’m spending on seeing Sharon in the faith that it’s leading Somewhere. Somewhere psychically better than Here, where I have more wherewithal to act effectively…to have more of Myself available to me and be able to live at a higher level of personal satisfaction.

What the fuck am I looking for? What the fuck am I trying to accomplish with therapy? How can I KNOW when it’s supposed to end? Kind of like the dream in the restaurant, oddly enough. How can I know if I’m ‘just’ indulging myself at the expense of other pressing things I should be doing, or if I really AM on a path that has an agenda and a clear ending point.

Later:

And how can I really know? The path laid down by people who’ve come before us with the mythical archetypal stories of the hero’s journeys—maybe those aren’t so much a pathway to go down that someone’s discovered, but instead are just an attempt to find reason in life. Sharon’s work with me involves following the structure laid out in the myths: The myths are Everybody’s stories, or being far from Home and the experiences we have, often adverse, as we try to return Home. I’m pretty sure this is the template that a Jungian would use, which is what Sharon is. The particulars differ, but the template is that one is separated from Home (a universal) may wander lost for many years, realizes he/she is lost, and attempts to return home, having to take a dangerous Journey in order to do so. So perhaps my recent story could be of me having floundered lost for so many years, taking some false leads, but ultimately my path guiding me toward Home whether I realized it or not. Various nuggets of encouragement associated with various things (thoughts, events, interpretations of events, books, passages in magazines, conversations with people…) would encourage me that I was on a path I should be on. Finally I realize I am lost and have a vision of what Home is like. I get a good look at it, and then in order to get there I have to return to the perspective from eye level with the waves that are rising awful high. Or, I was on a hill that gave me some perspective, but then my path plunges into a dark and dangerous forest.

I suppose that person would despair sometimes and wonder if they’d REALLY seen that vision of Home, if it really existed, or if they were doomed to wander indefinitely in the dark. If Home had been a figment and if the fact they were in this forest at all proved something negative about their character.

I guess what I’m saying, is that I do have an expectation that this writing, this time to myself, this giving priority to this time, this therapy and this money being spent in therapy—this is leading Someplace. I’m not just treading water, even though right now it’s easy to believe I am. Fear that I’m deceiving myself that treading water is not a permanent condition that will later appear as a blip in the overall scheme of things regardless of how little progress I see now. Fear that I’m telling myself that, but in actuality I AM in a dead end. A condition that will last forever because I’m not using my will power to lift myself out of it.

I guess that’s part of my question, is my very search, and if I’m going about it in the right way. I was raised in the tradition that humans are flawed (sinful) and that there is a True Way and that it is our will that keeps us adhering to this true way, and that it’s very difficult. So the strength of one’s will is shown by how closely they can adhere to the true way. I’ve sort of been tyrannized and castigated by this my whole life. And in opposition to it is this: the idea that inherent in humans, or maybe only some, is a wisdom that will guide one through the experiences one needs most. That adhering to the One True Way actually interferes with this process of moving toward wholeness and enlightenment. That it’s more organic, and authentic to listen to each experience as it happens free of judgment, and get what is needed from it. That point of view assumes that the Soul wants to grow in positive directions, is oriented in a direction of expansion. And odd the paradox that in expansion there is wholeness, where common sense would call it dis-integration.

So what IS my journey. And is the end point a place where I can still recognize my life, or does it reveal itself to my perception as meaningless ultimately?

The phone rang and I talked a long time with Connor. Then back to wondering about whether at any given point I am where I’m supposed to be, or am I there through error, and worse, through continuing error? Such as, I’ve considered myself to be in a recovery period where I need to not volunteer, need to not be out doing outwardly useful things, need to be spending time in interior spaces. Now am I still here because it’s the right place to be? Or am I here because it’s habit and I’m waiting for a signal that never comes? A signal I’m in error in waiting for, because it’s unrealistic to expect that when I’m ready for the next move, I’ll KNOW it. I think that’s been the basic framework of what I’ve told myself about this period: That I’ll know when this inward time is coming to an end because the time will begin to weigh heavy on me, rather than seeming to vanish. That there will be a sense of knowing inside that it’s time to go.

I think that’s part of the problem of how Sharon and I ended last time. It’s because I didn’t get to experience that sense of definitive ending. I’d had to rationalize it in a certain way that went sort of like this: I didn’t expect to have the clear sense it was over in quite that way (I’d expected it in more of the sense of completion—I’d expected something like that to tell me when done was done)—but maybe it had been done for a while before it ended like it did; and we’d failed to realize that which was why it ended as abruptly and uncomfortably as it did. Kind of along the lines of “The Lord said, ‘I sent you a boat, a helicopter, and a rescuer’”—that is, god’s answer had arrived in a shape that the person wasn’t expecting or awaiting. Perhaps all my signals for being done had come already, and in failing to notice them a situation was set up where parting was going to be more harsh. That’s how I rationalized it then. That we’d been ‘done’ and I just hadn’t realized it. I guess that makes me uneasy about judging whether or not I’m ‘done’ or anywhere near ‘done’ in my current work. And that awaiting a signal might be foolishness. That’s what I’m afraid of.

So, then, to flesh out the template of a journey: Did my exile from ‘home’ begin when I was faced with the truth that my mother wouldn’t protect me and so had to turn away from that truth and thus had to turn away from me? And thus lived a life with a major blind spot because at a core level I couldn’t allow myself to see the truth of something? Yet I felt honor-bound to protect the truth (finding its manifestation in my behavior of doubting myself, or attributing being self-serving to myself and therefore feeling I couldn’t trust myself). I was tripped up by just how far a scale to take the truth. And I suppose that’s partly about how far I involve other people. Because I sense that there is a scale of the truth which is analogous to the molecular level of matter where we enter a realm of reality that’s its own universe. On the thought and mind level, there is a point where another person cannot exist and it is not right thinking to make basic decisions from this place from the point of view of another.

I keep trying to describe this. I keep having a sense where the components of our thoughts and emotions go deeper than the level where other humans can contact them. In my case, I think that’s the place where I decide whether I’m doing right action or not in staying in this swimming hole, plunging the depths. Whether whatever ‘other’ people would do really applies at such a level.

Early on I discovered that from the level where I experienced reality, present were many contradictory and uncomfortable emotions—uncomfortable in how they involved other people. If I’m responding to Rick telling me he loves me by telling him that I love him too, yet I feel parts of myself that aren’t necessarily in agreement with that, am I ‘lying’ to him? And though I may feel uncomfortable, that I’m being dishonest by not telling him about the presence of these facts of those parts of myself, where is the place on the scale of reality he was coming from for confessing the stuff that comes from a sub-level of that scale?

My musings are telling me that though we largely interact with people, there is a place in our selves where we really can’t take another person and we’re on our own. And that I discovered that fairly early, maybe in that instance where I wasn’t sure what my mother meant when she and that lady asked me if I’d taken a toy, and so assumed they knew on that level too. Perhaps for the rest of my life I’ve been confused about what truth is at that level and I haven’t really been able to see—because at that time I couldn’t. Because it involved the truth that in that instance my mother hadn’t protected me which maybe my childish mind generalized to other and all situations. I suppose that part of what I’d tell myself would be that my mother hadn’t protected me because she knew I was ‘bad’, that even if I hadn’t stolen the toy I might as well have. I suppose I had to believe that I was flawed, because I couldn’t tolerate believing my mother was. Perhaps there is the seed of the self doubt that has been an intimate part of my life for as long as I can remember.So I always lived in fear of that flaw being exposed, and I always had to wait until someone made their truth explicit to me because I couldn’t trust my own judgment about their behavior. And I would choose to think that I was flawed when it came to any question between me and another person.

So perhaps that’s my separation from home, the sense of a flaw between me and mySelf, and the journey home is the examining its origins and the degree to which it’s invested in my life, how it’s affected my life by the way it’s affected how I experience events.

So on one hand maybe I’ve had a mistaken view that I can’t trust my own vision and reading of events. But then there’s this case with Becca this morning where I very positively believed that a person couldn’t not-pursue inviting someone somewhere without being rude and cowardly. And essentially I accused Becca of accusing me of that.

Which is something Sharon and I touched on this last visit. It was about the hint of accusation. About my sensing of feeling like I sound like I’m making an accusation in situations that are intended to be neutral. An example I gave to Sharon once was my asking Joy if she’d borrowed a sweater of mine and feeling these shades as if she might think I was accusing her of having taken it. And even though nothing was further from the truth, having the shades there made me feel very uncomfortable. As if on a lower level and not accessible for reality checking there was a shadow interaction where I’m accusing her and she’s feeling accused, and neither of us can understand why a question is causing these secondary vibrations to sound. Of course I don’t KNOW if that’s her experience or if I’m doing it all by myself. And, I just realize, that resembles my having said that it’s very difficult to ask discriminating questions of children without contaminating them as a source of accurate information. My sense was that in asking Joy if she’d felt I was accusing her of having stolen my sweater if I’d plant a seed where if she hadn’t thought I was accusing her before she might now. So It makes it a problem to just ask and reality check. Just as in with children if an adult asks a question intended to determine if a child is talking about something that really did happen, vs something they thought of happening, or something that happened but in play—trying to distinguish among those possibilities is very tricky. Why would there be a parallel in trying to distinguish the truth from children’s narratives with trying to explain to myself a situation where I’m intending one way but sense other sympathetic vibrations that suggest the intent is different. And if I notice this, I feel uncomfortable by it and therefore feel like I’m lying on some level to the friend I’m with if I don’t mention it. But would mentioning it just reinforce the sympathetic vibration and make it seem more significant?

These are among the dilemmas I find complicating my dynamic with people. I don’t know if I’ve written them in quite this way before, where they are a subject of observation.

Making the leap from “default” to “I decide”

7/21/07
Sat
1522

Gary and the boys are gone to the beach. He’d said they’d be leaving last night; I guess I didn’t really think it was really going to happen that way.

It seems I’m just bummed on a number of fronts.

Part of it is the mixed bag of having this weekend, sort of, because they were supposed to be gone last night and weren’t, weren’t in fact til after I’d left to go grocery shopping. So since they’ll be back tomorrow it’s a pretty short break. And there isn’t another one coming up the rest of this summer. In fact, Gary’s going to Vietnam in a couple weeks.

I’d forgotten it was only last weekend he was gone. So I’ve just come off a 12 day stint without a break. I’d had a feeling of wearing thin, being unhappier than usual yesterday, the end of that 12 days. I was just more acutely bummed out…but I’d forgotten to account for the weird thing that happened with Becca. Yesterday was a strange day, and I’m not a whole lot more comfortable today.

Here’s one of those ambiguous areas where my ‘default’ plays a role:

I’m really unhappy. This triggers a part of me that wonders if I’m ‘responsible’ for my unhappiness…that is, if it’s my fault. Because I’m not responding right to it. Because I’m exacerbating it. Back to the ‘you’re-handling-it-all-wrong’ theory of behavior, the one that says if I’m unhappy it must be my fault somehow. It must be a flaw.

Some of it is guilt. I feel guilty that something I wanted is a part of my unhappiness (children). I feel guilty feeling this displeasure when I really have things pretty good, in the bigger context of the world. I picture myself in an unflattering light: spoiled pampered housewife without the ‘cares’ of starvation and ambient violence—no right to be unhappy in other words.

Yet I am.

I’m just looking at the flavors that sound their notes in unhappiness. ‘the primary feeling of discomfort or displeasure, of being overwhelmed, and facing something that’s taxing, and in the context of a life that has me on my own in that. Then there’s the wondering if the way I’m handling it is making it worse for myself and that I’m at fault.

Some existential angst, at the notion that it’s in a greater context of meaninglessness anyway

Awareness this ‘break’ is going to fly by and there won’t be another one for a long time…maybe til they’re back in school

Worry about money, that to make ends meet I’m going to have to return to work with this extra expense of my therapy weighing us down

The perennial regret that I’m not enjoying this time in the boys’ life more; that the difficulty of feeling drained by their needs and dynamic—of spending my days with people who don’t have the niceties of empathy, perspective, and patience—that that outweighs me being able to directly celebrate the people these kids are now. It bothers me that I find little to take pleasure in with them right now. I do love them, and there is pleasure in that. Why am I not able to find a way that enables me to enjoy them, even when I find their behavior taxing? The moments of taking pleasure in them seem like brief surfacings for air against a background of feeling pulled under and worn down. I tend to blame my situation with Gary for the larger part of this; feeling that ‘if only’ I had a more empathetic partner in Gary, and—I don’t know: I just don’t think he shares the psychic load! There is some way I’d like to get some feeling of strength and sense of ownership in this from him. It’s hard to know how to put it into words, and my ‘default’ suggests that I’m ‘just’ blaming him for a failing in myself. I have a hint though that if I felt emotionally connected to him, in a good way: where he liked me so much that he was interested in my thoughts and feelings and experiences in parenting—that if I felt genuine pleasure in being with him and felt that he felt the same about me, that that would mitigate this grind quite a lot. That if he were an effective parent with the boys, where they respected him and their relationship was less fraught, things would feel better, I know they would. I know I would mind this less, and feel more buffered against its effects. I feel if Gary and I had a truly enjoyable marriage that that would be the cartilage between two surfaces of a joint.

I’m very upset that this is the thing I can’t give my boys: my complete pleasure in them as people.

But, I do want to take this into account too: that though that situation I described is truly awful, it’s awfulness may be being exacerbated by circumstances that aren’t always a constant:

I had 12 days of unrelenting parenthood in order for Gary to go up on Mt. Hood last weekend. No break in days, and Gary home late each night. Planning Scott’s birthday night, and his birthday party. Nagging discomfort at the thought of leaving Scott’s party early, under Gary’s objections, and going across downtown in the worst of the traffic and trying to get to Sharon’s. The prospect of seeing Darlene. Dealing with the way Gary dealt with me, and then his criticisms of Scott’s party afterward. The remark: “Scott comes first” in terms of my leaving his party 15 minutes early so I wouldn’t be TOO late for Sharon—as if I were being very selfish and putting myself first, or putting Sharon first. His rudeness when I went back to make sure he had a way of settling financially with the party place. And then, Becca going counter to her style in not showing up for a party she’d been invited to and said she was coming to, and her belief that counter to my style that I’d dis-invited her on account of letting my child’s whims overrule common courtesy.

It seems reasonable to wonder at what would have made it seem plausible to her that Scott would veto my having invited them and that I wouldn’t have the courtesy to talk to her about it. For her to explain my invitation not arriving as that seems like quite a stretch. What on earth would make a person explain perplexing events that way?

I guess that’s what a perplexing event is: one that requires an explanation. I suppose the elements one chooses to explain something says a lot about them.

What I’ve wondered if this says about THIS situation is that the issue of how Scott is with Miles looms much larger for her than it has for me—that it’s a source of stress when we’re together and if right now it costs more than pays for her to get our two families together right now. Maybe it’s best to just drop Connor or Martin off for playdates. And I’ve worried that the fact that it weighs more on her than on me is because I’ve been ‘in denial’ about Scott. Because what I notice is that it’s been quite a long time since Scott was being mean to Miles, and that for the most part they’re time together has been pretty smooth. Maybe there’s been something at the end if they’ve worn a little thin on each other, but it’s seemed it’s not just Scott…that sometimes Miles’s frustrated or unhappy about something that doesn’t have to do with how Scott’s treating him. But as far as I’ve seen, it’s not been an issue and I’ve relaxed about it. Maybe it’s still a very present and alive issue for Becca. And in which case, does she perceive that it’s happening a lot? Does it seem like it’s still a present problem? And if so, is it because it’s been so upsetting for her that it’s very much in the forefront of her mind, as if it has just happened, or is it because it’s been happening much more than I have been aware of? Is that because I’ve been in denial? Is it because I haven’t been taking it as seriously as I should be?

I think this may account for what happened, and for Becca’s rationale about it: that she and I have not been on the same page as far as Scott’s behavior with Miles has been concerned: I’ve been considering it resolved and she’s been considering it a still very active issue.

So the bigger picture I’ve been attempting to look at with all of this is that these are the threads that I identify in the fabric of being unhappy. And trying to answer my accusation that I’m unhappy because I’m flawed in offering that maybe there’s a cumulative effect to stress—that my sharpened experience of being unhappy may be due to 12 days of child care in a row instead of 5 and 5; and planning 2 birthday events when I don’t really like planning parties, as well as feeling disappointed by a couple of friends (Becca for all the stuff I’ve already mentioned, and Helene for not coming down to visit), as well as the continued sorrow about the things that Gary and I are not—in addition to the overall malaise I’ve felt since my powerful emotional experience in mid-May.

So, since there HAVE been a few more rocks in my rucksack lately, maybe it’s not surprising that I’d feel like there had been a few more rocks in my rucksack lately.

My ‘default’ voice would say that I’m just making excuses for myself in saying that stress can be cumulative and cause a stronger perception of unhappiness and that it’s to be expected and not a sign of a failing in me.

Still, it’s a problem that I’m not enjoying the boys like I should. They deserve to be raised by someone who is taking pleasure in them. The reason is that I am not adequately buffered against the wearing aspects of being around children constantly. I feel that if my relationship with Gary were better that that would contribute a lot to the buffering. Without that improved relationship with Gary, what else could build up that buffering?

There’s the confusing notion that a happier attitude would; but where to get that happy attitude when I already feel worn down? It’s a chicken and egg problem. If I’m unhappy already is it a failure of my will that keeps it from turning around? If I’m unhappy is it because I’ve done something to cause it in the first place? Is it because I don’t have a happy attitude that I’m unhappy, and that I persist in being unhappy because fail through my weak will to turn it around?

It’s kind of like being ‘bored’. It’s like it’s a character flaw. I became ashamed of being bored when I was a kid; in a similar way I’m ashamed of being unhappy.

My ‘default’ voice would say that I’m just making excuses for myself in saying that stress can be cumulative and cause a stronger perception of unhappiness and that it’s to be expected and not a sign of a failing in me.

This is the place I started to mull over with Sharon. This is the place in my own consciousness that is so individual that I can’t really look to what others are doing as a guide. This is the level where people can only be aware of in themselves, not in anyone else. In my past I’ve still assumed other people experienced it one way, and assumed that way my standard too. But I’ve come aware that it’s different: this is something I can’t look to other people for guidance in because I don’t know how to ask them what it’s like for them, and it really is at such an individualized level that there’s no one else to look to in how to interpret it: but me. That’s what I meant when I said, “*I* decide” to Sharon. I can decide at this level whether I have a valid reason to be unhappy or not. It’s at this level that there really is no one else that can get behind my eyes and tell me if what I’m seeing is valid or not. This is where I decide if what I imagine other people are experiencing and how they’d characterize what I’m experiencing is something to use as my behavioral guide or not. All my life I have—now I see that there are better assumptions to take my guidance from.

Which brings me to the other question I had with Sharon. In making that decision, “*I* decide”, I’m reminded of people who have said very unequivocally that they know what they’re doing—and yet it seems they are mistaken in a way big enough to drive a truck through. People who assert they’re doing things for the right reasons but it’s apparent they’re deceiving themselves. Do I deceive myself when I say, “*I* decide?”

It’s certainly this whole question that’s been behind my anguish about not liking Darlene—am I deceiving myself in some way as to the validity of my feeling? Is there a way I’m protecting myself that’s blinding me to my responsibility in a matter. Am I erroneously blaming her and absolving myself?

I question and doubt myself. Is that something that solidified as a pattern when I accepted the worst of myself back when my mom and the neighbor thought I’d stolen the toy. Which is it? Am I lying to myself to protect an image of myself, or am I telling the truth? I think when I shrink down to that kind of scale in my consciousness, that’s my basic question. Am I perceiving what I’m perceiving because I’m lying to myself, or am I telling the truth? If I don’t like something is it because I’m lying to myself, or am I telling the truth?

I’ve tended to default to the view that I’m lying to myself.

A lifelong issue–self doubt: poisonous or protective?

7/20/07
Fri
839

Dream:

Something about being in a resort sort of place, beach or mountain, I’m not sure. Maybe mountain, on some sort of high lake. It seems that I am enjoying the resort, but then end up in some sort of work capacity at a hospital. Yeah, Sharon is in there somehow too. She has an office in this hospital, and I go to see her. I’ve left a car in the parking lot, because I couldn’t find any other space. But I don’t have a permit for that lot, and it’s in desperation that I’ve left it there. I’m approached by a woman who tells me I can’t leave it there without a permit, and it will be impounded if I do, even if only for a few minutes. I guess I was hoping that it wouldn’t be noticed, for just an hour and I could do it just that once. Perhaps this is only an area for patients, or more likely, for the physicians and more elite of the medical world. There is an image I see in the dream, which is of a stand-up fan that Scott has tied the electrical cord around (he’s interested in knots) and that somehow represents what might happen to my car, that it be impounded. I don’t believe that I move it, and I move from being in this facility as a client (Sharon’s) to a worker, a physical therapist. I move around the hospital seeing patients, mainly elderly, in wheelchairs and such. Doing the regular physical therapy job: fitting people to wheelchairs, helping them out of bed. There’s one point though where I go out on a roof. I feel it’s a little bit of a shirking of my duties to do so, but I just want to go out and see the view.

Later

I’m feeling very unhappy. From having been interrupted above by Connor coming and chattering, chattering, to the news that Gary’s going to Viet Nam in 2 weeks, to persistent unhappiness about the phone call from Becca explaining why they hadn’t shown up at Scott’s party: the invitation had only arrived yesterday and she assumed that its failure to arrive was about Scott not wanting Miles to come and that they had been dis-invited.

That’s the largest part of my feeling down, followed by Gary’s news about a trip to VN (and the usual; first, it’s “we might” [have to go], then ‘it might’ [be just a week, to be followed later with a week + several days].

The open-ended nature of my therapy with Sharon has me feeling a little anxious and down too because feeling like I am right now I can’t say I’ve shown enough improvement to think I might be closer to stopping and freeing up some money: Connor wants to join the Dive Club and take lessons which are going to be an extra hundred a month and we already live close to our margin, so there’s the spectre of me going back to work which we haven’t been talking about but may need to.

The part about what happened with Becca that has me saddest I think is that her assumption was the worst about Scott, and I realize a lot of her behavior toward him has been informed by persisting in seeing him as someone who’s going to be mean to Miles. And the confusing situation that I can see she’s justified from her point of view since Scott HAS been mean to Miles, mainly rubbing in that he, Scott, is older and Miles is younger. She’s the one who has seen Miles in tears; she characterizes it as “Miles loves Scott so much, and then he can’t understand why Scott talks to him that way.” So her mother bear is alive and alert, and MY mother bear says, ‘he’s just a little kid who is impatient with littler kid behaviors; he’s also a younger child who has been treated the same way by older children’. Besides the fact that Scott has been perfectly well behaved around Miles the last several times we’ve been around…THAT’s what’s been typical of his behavior.

I’m remembering though how I felt when Cliff, Steve & Monica’s son was consistently mean to Scott, actually physically pushing and hitting him. I did feel bummed about that, I felt bummed by the way Monica responded, and it definitely damped down any enthusiasm I had about getting together with their family. So I can’t blame Becca really, because it is true that Scott has said things that hurt Miles’s feelings. It’s just that I feel that this hasn’t been true for a while, for quite a while, and I’m a little sensitive right now to Scott being defined by some of his lesser moments. And I think I’ve had a sort of intuition that this may be true of Becca; there was something about how I felt when I told her about the conversation with Kayla, where I didn’t feel better and in some ways felt a little worse. I felt strange the last time we went over to their house that she felt, in front of me, that she had to admonish Scott when we first got there, that he had to be nice to Miles and not say mean things. I can’t remember when we had gotten together last before that, but I really don’t think that Scott saying mean things to Miles has been an issue for quite a while. And it bothers me that she seems to be defining him by that—and not in the more realpolitic way of understanding that children often are this way without it meaning a moral failing in them. To me it seems like is seeing it as a failure in him. It’s a subtle difference. It’s one thing to recognize that a child is behaving a certain way at a certain time and to make adjustments to accommodate it for its duration, but with the understanding that it does NOT define the child’s moral character. I’ve noticed that I’ve been nervous about Scott around Miles for some time now but I was willing to make allowances for that because of the potential for friendship that I saw in Becca. I’ve seen our friendship as one with potential more than actuality, because it seems that we often DO miss each other. Part of it is because with 6 kids between us we’re interrupted so often; part of it is my sense of losing the things I really want to say and that sort of throwing off the rhythm of a conversation. But I’ve been giving our relationship the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, this whole thing about them not showing up for Scott’s party skews my perception in a different direction. It causes me to feel more resentment that she would see fit to instruct Scott on how he should behave when we go to their house…and in the way she speaks sometimes with Connor. I think what she said is right, I think she DOES embarrass him. She has a way of speaking that is so Social Worker and in a self-conscious sense. Like when we were at Pier Park last week and suddenly said to Connor and Martin, “Tell me how it is you are imagining things will go, what you’re wanting…” Connor said, “WHAT???” as in, ‘what are you talking about?’ It actually was rude and I talked to him later, but privately I’d been thinking the same thing—‘what on earth?’ It had to do with something Becca had heard them saying about Connor giving his game cube to Martin. I hadn’t been around for that part of the conversation. But there was a contrivance to her tone that I felt uncomfortable with.

Now it sounds like I’m trying to talk myself out of liking her. I see my tendency to have excepted her from a group category like Kayla, and to have turned a forgiving eye toward things she did and said that might resemble something Kayla might do or say. Now I’m contemplating putting her in that category of, “OK, fine. I don’t want to expose Scott to the possibility that if he isn’t perfectly patient with Miles that he’s going to be categorized as an ‘angry’ kid and ‘why is he being mean’. And I’m not going to expose myself to the tension of maybe something happening that will cause that. I don’t want to have to always be watchful to prevent him from being categorized, to be super-alert to needing to intervene before he does a behavior that people use to confirm their pictures of who Scott is.

It was her calling him an ‘angry kid’ once that disturbed me in the first place and which was why I didn’t take the comfort I’d hoped for from talking to her about the bruising encounter with Kayla. I don’t see him as an ‘angry child’. I think sometimes his behavior is unfathomable to me, but I think it’s been the exception rather than the rule that Miles has felt bad after something Scott’s said. I think she sees him in terms of that, and that’s what distresses me. I think there are times that it’s perfectly normal, even if undesirable, for a child to be exasperated with the behaviors of a younger child. And yes it may be unreasonable for them to be exasperated, and their ways of expressing their discomfort may be unacceptable and definitely need to be corrected, but aren’t we sometimes exasperated by the behavior of young kids too? And we have at least the benefit of some perspective in overlaying our more primitive responses to acceptable ones—exercising self-control?

I think it’s the difference between seeing a child expressing negative feelings in an undesirable way, maybe even repeatedly during a given phase of their life, and seeing the child in terms of that—so that other facets of him go unnoticed, or are subordinate to that one behavior. In the case of Cliff, I think I can see that that reflected a certain period in his life he was going through, and that it isn’t HIM. And I did make an effort to look below that, and try to see who he is beneath that behavior.

I suppose it’s possible that I’ve been missing times that Scott is being mean to Miles. (spectre of the fear: AM I in denial about Scott? Does Becca think I’m in denial? Have I just not noticed or given significance to the times Scott’s been ‘mean’ because I’m in denial? I CAN see that from my point of view, this whole issue of their dynamic has been a much smaller thing than it has for Becca. In retrospect now, remembering some of the things she’s said I can see she sees it as a problem. That at some point good will between Scott and Miles might wear thin. I’ve seen it as a fact; she’s seen it as a problem.

I see from her point of view that she’s had to deal with Miles’s tears and questions. So of course it would loom larger for her. But I’m troubled about her acceptance of this dynamic as a fact-on-the-ground about who Scott is.

At Pier Park the last time Connor stood up to get something and knocked over a plastic container that had held cookies. I thought he’d knocked over the container that held melon, because I saw one on the picnic cloth. It was one of those things where a certain timing and a certain chance of what I happened to view fooled me as to what had happened. I told Connor to clean it up and he responded angrily. When he walked away Becca said, “Why is he so angry?” And it didn’t seem to be in that moment; it was more a question about him in general. As in, ‘why is he such an angry person?’ I chose my words carefully saying that I thought he had been embarrassed, and that when he’s embarrassed he often expresses it as anger. Later I talked with Connor about that and learned that he and I had had two completely different views of what had happened. In his view yes he’d knocked over the cookie package, but he’d picked it up and couldn’t understand why I was insisting that he clean up something else he’d NOT done. He was also responding to my being irritated at his clumsiness/carelessness which HAD embarrassed him. So he and I both had a shared understanding and a bit of a laugh at how differently we’d seen what had happened, and how I had been fooled by what my brain thought it had seen. He also wanted me to tell Becca that that was why he was angry and that he didn’t want her to think he was angry with HER.

I think she does make him uncomfortable though. On account of the social work voice I mentioned before. Almost like she’s adhering TOO tightly to the voice and words recommended in the child-raising books.

I think the conclusion I’ve drawn before but hadn’t given much credence to might be true, though. I think that with Scott with me that for her it’s more of a hassle than anything else to spend time with us. That with her on her own with the 4 kids she is overwhelmed and doesn’t have much left over, and the thought of us being there and her needing to be vigilant to protect Miles may seem like more trouble than it’s worth. I’ve entertained that idea before and dismissed it.

I see that there’s a danger in how one regards a child. I think it can be so easy to see them in terms of who one THINKS they are, and one tends to select the facts that confirm an already-held point of view. And one does this without really knowing one does it. It seems natural to one to do that. I suppose I don’t see that tendency as a threat to Connor because in general he’s easy-going and has behavior pleasing to adults. I think that Scott having an older brother puts him at a disadvantage because he already has in his self-definition Connor’s view of him—which tends to be exasperated by his younger- child behaviors. So some of his behavior may reflect the dynamic between him and Connor and people see that as his starting point, draw certain conclusions, and then treat him that way, further influencing who he becomes.

I needed to think about the implications of Becca’s message yesterday and why I’d felt disturbed by it. So I’ve got it: I’m disturbed because on one hand it was easier for her to assume that I’d dis-invited her and her family to a party I’d specifically invited her to than that something had gone wrong with the mail. I’m disturbed because she assumed that I would choose such a dishonest means of conveying to her that she was no longer invited as to just drop the issue and say nothing more about it. And, I’m disturbed that she assumed that my dis-inviting her and her family was due to Scott having hostility to Miles. (and that’s two-part: the assumption that Scott would call the shots in that, as well as the assumption of the kind of person Scott is.)

This is the first time I’ve had negative feelings toward Becca. And funny how my tendency is to cut her off. Certainly it may be easier for me personally to not have to be anxious about how Scott treats Miles whenever we’re together.

I think the biggest thing that surfaces from this is my perception of a danger to Scott—that people’s perception of him might be tilting his path in a direction he might not otherwise go. And that people are showing a tendency to shrink-fit some of his negative behaviors to his essence, and I fear his essence may be warped into that shape, and that he may be then blamed for who he is. I guess it’s back to that lifelong issue I’ve had, of people doing behaviors that cause a response in vulnerable people—then blaming those vulnerable people for their response. Which is what Sharon and I have been working, the over all theme—people not doing what they’re supposed to do, and then saddling me with the blame for my response to it. Injustice at its most basic. Blindness to how their own behavior brings about the behavior they then judge.

Something else to take from this is the knowledge that the issue of Scott & Miles is bigger for Becca than I had realized. And that we need to bring that out in the open if our friendship is to continue on the path I’d hoped it was on. We have to acknowledge that this has been a sticking point more than I’d realized. And what does it mean that it was more than what I’d known? Does it mean I’ve been ignoring, or ‘denying’ it? Does it mean something that goes to MY core as a person, and as a parent? Surely the worst-case scenario is that Scott’s behavior is a result of the shitty relationship Gary and I have and a certain shittiness in my attitude that results and infects him. That it’s ME and MY attitude, and Gary’s and my relationship that causes Scott’s mal-adaptive behaviors. I suppose that’s what gives this whole thing its charge—that what I’m dismissing as kid stuff may be something deeper-seated because to take it more seriously is to indict myself.

Which takes us to something I’d told Sharon. I am aware that on the level where I live the boundaries are not crisp and clean, and that there’s a lot of leeway for interpretation. And that because of the environment I was raises in my ‘interpretation’ of my part in things was that I was expressing what was negative in my character: what I feared I was. I was afraid to take a positive view was to be deluding myself, and so I saw things from the point of view that I was probably protecting myself and therefore taking a more positive view of my behavior than I deserved. I saw my behavior, that is the substrate that builds my behavior through the lens of ‘sinful human nature’. I saw any attempts to see myself positively as being ‘rationalization’. That was my default; to keep me humble, I guess. As I said to Sharon, “Why should I be the exception?” “Why should I be the person who says I know what I’m doing and REALLY DOES know what I’m doing, vs being someone who is rationalizing and denying?” Was there something that came out of a dream that led me into that way of thinking?

Because, what if instead of viewing my behaviors and the conditions in my Self that lead up to my behaviors through the original sin lens, what if I give myself the right to believe that my behaviors ARE from right motivation, aren’t self-indulgence, selfishness, denial, rationalization.

As Sharon said, in a way I strive to be the exception in containing this element of self-skepticism. That ‘other’ people just assume they’re ok and don’t see their flaws in reasoning that everyone else can see—maybe I can head this off by being skeptical of EVERYTHING I do. Partly to avoid the humiliation of being so transparently flawed in ways that everyone but me can see. I try to get the jump on them by seeing it first, or trying to account for it ahead of time in my behavior. I suppose that’s about loving and ‘protecting’ the Truth, too (‘protecting’ also being Sharon’s word). As well as an element of protecting myself. I was surely blindsided by what happened with my mother and our neighbor—perhaps this hyper-vigilance over my own behavior and motivations has to do with that. Perhaps it’s about being aware that I am ‘naked’, in the Adam and Eve sense when they first realized they were naked. Perhaps that’s my fig leaf, the self-skepticism, my attempt to cover my ass.

Who I’ve been in this world has had to do with that. The trying to anticipate someone seeing my flaws by seeing them first. A defensive posture, I guess.

I’m a soul who for as long as can remember been trying to figure things out. I suppose being in the world with other people is the bulk of what I’ve been trying to understand.

In a world where people are dying of starvation and being killed in horrible ways by other people, it seems kind of frivolous to ‘navel-gaze’.

Later

I was interrupted by children.

So there was one point during the day when I felt terribly unhappy. And I was aware I was unhappy. And I wondered if being aware I was unhappy was the same thing as ‘telling’ myself I was unhappy, and therefore making myself unhappy.

I don’t know.

Not supposed to be feeling this way

7/18/07
Wed 821

The day has arrived for Scott’s party. I don’t know why my awareness of this day has felt like a weight. It really shouldn’t be that big a deal—the place kind of takes care of itself. Some stage fright, I guess, about how it’ll be with the parents of kids. Darlene’s going to be there and that’s also a bit of a weight. Plus, I’m going to have to leave early in order to not be too late to Sharon’s. And I don’t want to miss it, Sharon, I mean. But I’m nervous about whether or not I’ll be able to pull off leaving early gracefully.

Scott hit our next door neighbor yesterday. Trouble was brewing, I think, because of the problem of 3 kids playing and triangulation. I think Scott was odd man out and his behavior grew more annoying as he sought attention. Then he and Connor were rough-housing and I heard Scott lose it and start yelling. I went to the door just as he hit her and I summoned him inside. Connor, to his credit, owned the whole thing; said it was his fault; he’d teased Scott and knocked him to the ground and pulled down his pants and she laughed at him. So I’m pleased that he took responsibility. But I’m troubled that he provoked behavior from Scott that if the neighbors heard (namely Steve, Stevie’s dad) would convince them that their impressions of him are correct. Scott also called her a ‘dumbass’ at the top of his voice.

Anyway, I feel I’m going to experience the ending of this party as a relief and release. Even though the hardest part is done; the planning and preliminary execution.

It will be nice to leave early, in the sense that it avoids the usual pitfall of saying goodbye to Darlene. I mean the complicated process of disengaging from her. This should make it quick.

Yesterday was a difficult day. Rainy, both boys bored and therefore difficult behavior.

I may have written this already, but the way I’ve come to think of this is that I really don’t like my job. Perhaps this was in the context of once again trying to make Gary understand that this IS a job, and in contrast to his, while demanding he likes, I don’t really like mine. I don’t like how I feel in the company of children. Therefore I don’t really enjoy being around children. Their behaviors, while developmentally appropriate to their level of maturity, are very draining on me, as is dealing with the consequences of their behaviors and the complications those cause. {once again the disclaimer in case my boys ever read this: I love you so much. I hope you can separate that I can love you yet not love the discomfort that children’s natural behavior causes me. I hope you can see that being uncomfortable with children’s need for stimulation, entertainment, children’s ego-centrism and lack of perspective, loud voices and the constant need for vigilance on my part is separate from the deep deep love I have for you. I suppose that depends on what age you are at should you ever read this.} The truth is that MY job frequently takes me to the edge of extremes of feelings that aren’t at all fun to feel. Many, many times in a day. Their own behaviors complicate my ability to take care of administrative tasks (drs and dental appts, making sure the ortho is paid, getting them to their activities, making arrangements for those activities) and that raises my anxiety about being able to get everything done without forgetting any important details—which I’m prone to do. Moreso lately.

So the bottom line is that I have a job whose conditions take me to extremes of discomfort in feelings that I don’t like having. It requires that I be in the company of children. And the company of children drains me. Even if we’re not in the same room I’m waiting for the shriek that says my intervention is needed, or to be otherwise interrupted.

I love my kids. I think staying home with them is the right thing to do. I think of this as a legitimate job. I think my problem has been the perception that Gary doesn’t and hasn’t seen this as a job, and can’t imagine what it’s like to be exposed to some of the more extremes of feeling that I am. I’ve not experienced his psychic support and empathy and so have felt I’m going through this by myself, except for the support I get from other mothers. In addition I’ve not had the support of his TIME, on a practical level. His long days mean my exposure to the difficulties (the occupational hazards) is greater, longer. Greater because the difficulties of the day tend to have a cumulative effect.

And I don’t know how much peri-menopause might be playing into this. It wouldn’t be surprising, seeing that it’s been in my late 40’s and on into 50 that I’ve experienced the difficulties with Gary’s long hours, the changed dynamics with the boys, and the rigors of 2 moves. With one child having a difficult adjustment.

The truth is I find it difficult to do many other jobs when I’m distracted by children. And when I’m not being distracted, when I do have some quiet time, I don’t want to spend it doing my many sub-jobs; I want to spend it catching up on news, reading a book, writing in here. And so there’s conflict with things I should do and things I want to do, because I feel like it’s a window of time that’s closing.

Dream last night:

I keep imagining I’ve written this already, then realize I’m almost asleep again. Last dream: a “common area” sort of like Klaus’s commonbook: a place to list, keep track of, & synthesize ideas. Before that, sort of like being on a cruise, and not able to access the deck outside to talk around to see the lovely moonlight as the perimeter of the whole of the interior of the ship is private cabins, & you only get a glimpse of what’s out there when someone opens a door. I keep thinking there’s a way to access a deck where you can get to the outside to walk around the perimeter by using internal elevators. There’s also something about waiting to use someone’s hot tub, but needing a babysitter to watch a child. Waiting for them so I can go across the street to Baird & Karen’s. It’s dark, I have a towel. Again, moonlight. I decide to go & leave the child alone for a bit—the child is old enough to be OK, I think. White towel. Baby sitter is there—something about taking child to hot tub, or to another. This is part of the dream about access to outer decks.

So, to help myself feel better, I’m going to look at what I need to do today:

1) Contact the coach about Connor joining diving club, and fees for Beav pool
2) Bath/hair
3) Go to library, vet
4) Print dreams
5) Pack computer case—laptop, glasses, power cord, book, vol 30, checks for Sharon, wallet, cosmetics
6) Pack for party
a) cake knife and server
b) candles
c) ice cream: pack in ice chest with ice
d) camera
e) waivers
f) boys, mine, & Gary’s socks
g) ice cream scoop
Is that it? Seems there must be more.

Later

After Sharon, Coffeeshop; I was only 10 minutes late to Sharon’s. Expected more, traveling from Beaverton.

So the party is over. Whew; I like being able to put that behind me.

A couple things I’m not sure if I should feel bad about or not: not really wanting to talk to Darlene today at Scott’s party. It feels contrived. So I took cover in party activities; talking with parent guests, bouncing with kids. But relieved to not have to see any more of her.

Connor was angry with me. He’d been wild in a way that made me uneasy. He just seemed on the edge of being over the top; too much. And finally, he came down one of the slides, so fast (as was his design) that he’d hit the barrier at the end and flip over it; several times I noticed that it seemed he was a little rough with the younger kids and so I would say something to reign him in a little. Then he came down a slide, vaulted over the end and smacked into one of the kids. I was angry with him at this point and looked at him very hard. He’s sensitive to that, and was very angry with me.

I don’t know what to do, though; I told him over and over that I feared that what he was doing would result in what had just happened, and I was exasperated with him not having heeded me. It could have been worse, too.

Other thing about feeling ‘bad’ is the realization about not liking the company of children. Like Darlene, I am troubled by a feeling that I’m at fault for it in some way for not having a better attitude. That somehow this is evidence of a failure of will and if I had a better attitude (through the agency of a stronger will) then I’d be less grudging—would meet my obligations. Am I obligated to like being around children more? Am I obligated to feel warmly toward Darlene? What am I supposed to do to be different? The child thing seems to be to find something to occupy all of us so that I’m buffered somewhat from the more difficult experiences of children.

Are my worst fears true?

7/16/07
925 Mon

Dream as I’m waking up:

On a camping trip, a backpack. This is a dream that evolved out of an earlier. But I’m going on a backpack with some friends, who are interchangeably: Tom & Cheri, Britt & Sim, a guy named Moose and his girlfriend, someone else I can’t remember right now, another couple. I think I’m with Charlie P. We’re preparing to leave one place, sort of like a cabin or hotel room. I’m using my old Lowe pack, with the cavernous top compartment. I’m in my real-life dilemma of having trouble organizing what to bring while having to think quickly and under pressure, because my other friends are ready and waiting for me. I’ve gone back inside the cheap motel room to get some things I may have forgotten, then I forget that I’ve left the bulk of my stuff outside, and am panicking because I can’t find the stuff I need (because I’ve forgotten I’ve already packed it and it’s outside in the big pack). So I stuff a sleeping bag into my day pack and take it outside, only to realize that I have the other things in that pack and now the day pack is superfluous. That involves some repacking. Then we’re discussing which way we need to go and are looking at the map. I think we’re only supposed to actually walk a short distance. Then in the dream it’s fast-forwarded and we’re again trying to decide which way to go or if we even need to go further. We’re in the middle of two groups of buildings that make up a sort of resort—sleeping quarters and eating quarters I guess. We’re trying to decide if we need to go further or if this is indeed our destination. I’m thinking we’ve already arrived, and am making a case for that. So we go and put down our stuff in the sleeping quarters and go to eat. (I’m reminded of a sort of convention type campground, retreat, I mean, or a church camp) In the dream we’re in a line waiting to order and looking at choices and prices. The prices seem expensive, but there’s one thing that seems reasonable is a block of chocolate accompanied by something…soup? I’m not sure. But I’m going to order that, and my parents are behind me in line. As we wait for a server to open up (and someone goes around us: I’m not sure if they’re going ahead in line, or if they’re just up to look at and discuss the menu, so I’m watching out of the corner of my eye and wondering how to protect our ‘turf’ if need be—do nothing, or say, “Hey!”). There’s a part just before this, where I’m choosing something from a display of food to take to the cashier with me where I’m talking to Moose and asking him how he got his nickname. (He was a friend of my first boyfriend Rick). I’m watching to see which of the servers open up so I can make sure that no one takes that spot, and I ask my parents if they want to come up with me and we can place our order together.

I just finished up vol 29, where I was very uncomfortable after a party where I felt the worst about myself and feared that it was apparent to others. I felt hostage to my perception of how others were perceiving me. I feared that my worst fears of how others perceived me was The Truth. And so again reminded of having accepted as true something someone else told me, back when I was a child. I accepted the worst possible possibility of myself as true because adults seemed so positive it was true of me.

{ I can see that I was trying to be truthful with myself. I felt afraid that every nuance of feeling I had meant something awful about me in someone else’s eyes. That resonates with the issue of truth that I misunderstood as a child: that being truthful meant being willing to accept someone else’s assessment of me—or, as an older person, my perception of someone else’s assessment of me. }

7/17/07
2041 Tue

I woke with an interesting dream. Something about a place to “check my mileage”. I was too lazy to write it down and again tried to tell myself I’d remember. Didn’t. There was also something about a “finder”. Maybe having something to do with a tutorial I’m working through for this computer’s operating system. But both seem nicely metaphoric: checking my ‘mileage’ and finding with my ‘finder’. I wish I’d written them down.

Now I need to write a dream I had earlier this week:

I met a man in a place—some sort of natural food place. He is a dancer of some kind—not tango, but something more esoteric—some sort of soul connection kind. We feel in connection & are excited about it. He invites me to a studio. My friend Linda joins me & it seems natural that we both go. He is excited & happy when we arrive. I need to use the bathroom. For some reason there is a box like a cigar box that I know to pee in, & I’m not sure if this is some human norm, or something special in the crowd of dance—a way of ‘feeling each other out’—taking a measure from the ? I have to pee so much tho, in this guys private chambers that I pee an excessive amount that splashes—too much in the box & droplets flying out as they splash so I take some extra time trying to clean this up. He comes back in, because I’m taking so long, & he is angry & upset—it’s as if my taking so long has confirmed something to him that I’m not what he’d at first thought I was.

And, I wanted to be what he’d ‘thought I was’, and I’m feeling very sad that he seems to have concluded this, and in fact everything I do or say is being pulled into that picture of confirmation—a face deforming me to the reality of that conclusion—I feel very sad, because I see that there is little chance I’ll be able to ‘redeem’ myself by convincing him otherwise, because attempts to ‘convince’ are part of the problem. I do protest a little because it’s painful to have misstepped out of that wonderful place of his earlier regard where he seemed convinced that I am & possess something magical—an ingredient that together with him can make magic…

Fodder for other people’s stories

7/14/07
1859

Gary went up to Mt. Hood today. Gone for the weekend, which I’m aware would ordinarily cause a lot of dread because it means not only am I The Whole Show for the boys over the weekend, but that my shift stretches quite far. No Sat/Sun break. One 10 day hitch instead of two 5’s. So it’s a greater effect than just adding two days. The two days mean 12.

So I was afraid today might be very difficult; me sort of paralyzed while things deteriorate around here and we’re all just furious with each other. That hasn’t happened so far, and the window for it happening has decreased quite a bit. We had a ‘purpose’ in the middle of the day outside of the home, and that was to go over to a skateboard store in NW that Drew had told Connor about. They have a ‘graveyard’ for ‘dead’ decks. Connor’s is pretty close to dead and he so wants another. The only one they had was even deader than Connor’s. I digress. What I meant to say that while it was kind of an ordeal getting there, I didn’t suffer in the ways I might have in the past. I really appreciated how nice the people were at this store; and how nice the skaters are too. Accessible and kind.

An interesting thing along the way during the ordeal that kind of illustrates the issues of perception. I’ve been thinking more about this, in the practical terms since I had that insight about how people don’t want to live with someone else’s opinion of them if it conflicts with their own self-estimate. In the case that gave me the insight it was the dream about Kayla and Jack, and accepting that I couldn’t “make” her change her perception to agree with mine. And that though her perception informs a very negative conclusion for her about Scott, it’s going to be a hopeless waste of energy to try to change her and I just have to live with the fact that she sees my little boy the way she does. I suppose it WOULD be an issue of ‘changing HER as opposed to changing her view of it, since her view of it is probably deeply connected to who SHE is. So, we’re walking and Scott’s hot, and he’s anticipating another unbearable walk like we did several weeks ago. At least twice, as a matter of fact. And he’s complaining, LOUDLY. So here I am in public with a boy who at any minute might tell me I “suck” (and so expose me to an imagined perception of others that I’m a ‘wimp mom’: “She let her son say THAT to her! MY child would not do that because I would have slapped his face!!!” So I’m bracing myself for a difficult time and perhaps a dose of humiliation because we’re still blocks from the place and he’s already deteriorating. We sit down on a bench at his insistence (he plopped himself down). A man walks by pulling a little girl about Scott’s age by the hand and she’s wailing. Scott kind of backed off from his complaining at that point. Here I even felt the impulse to hint at using this girl’s behavior to shame him into behaving better: the “you sound just like THAT girl” sort of thing. I did not, because it seemed like it would be a disloyalty to my solidarity with the other parent who at that moment was having a hard time and having to accept that to anyone present he and his child would be remembered that way, and a certain life story about them—it would be frozen forever in the self-righteous stories he and his child are going to be the subject of: “And then he/she totally CAVED to that child. That child runs the show!” I’m sure Scott and I were fodder for some stories that make people feel good and righteous by implying there’s something wrong with us and the way we do things.

Still, as it is evening, I’m feeling…some personal satisfaction? In parenting? In having the evening in the company of my kids and we played outside and Scott came that much closer to mastery in riding his bike? Where I may have assumed I’d be bored I actually enjoyed it? I even felt some happiness as a direct result of having been with my kids all day?

I was able to get some of the things done that I really wanted to: get caught up with a few news programs—got my adult fix. Had a real satisfying visit with Marti, got some vacuuming done. Meeting those needs made it easier to be generous with the rest of me. Or maybe having that satisfaction I didn’t feel frustrated about doing kid things. I think that part of parenting is getting easier as they start occupying each other and needing me less.

7/15/07
948 Sun

Now it’s 1615 and I’m wondering if I can start drinking yet. Today hasn’t been quite as seamless, or full of grace. Connor’s been at a buddy’s so it’s been me and Scott. We had plenty to occupy us, but I’ve had about enough of the company of a 6 year old. In the past 5 minutes (and we started the movie “Iron Giant”) he’s said, “That hurricane makes big waves”, and “look at those big waves” and ‘those are big waves’—the way he does EVERY time we put on this movie. And I have to answer, every time, “Yes, those are big waves.” Nothing else will do. That’s what I don’t like about conversing with 6 year olds. I suppose there’s a perfectly good developmental reason for it, something about testing hypotheses to see if they’re still true. But he says it at the same time, and in the same way, each time, and as if he’s never said it before. Now I’m going to have to go sit with him because this is a part of the movie that’s scary for him.

It’s just that the things that consume children are very boring for me. And the only thing worse than being bored with children is being bored with children who are restless and unhappy because they’re not occupied. And I hate occupying children. I suppose probably because I’m not good at it. As Sharon mentioned, I need to find something that will overlap all of our interests so we can be in a natural resting place for each of us.

Actually, one of these intersection points has been home with the video games. Connor’s occupied with them, Scott often likes to watch, so I get a chance to listen to some news segments I’ve missed, maybe even read a little. But that’s a fragile peace, since Scott can get bored quickly and come looking for me. So I’m always waiting for that shoe to drop.

21:00

Gary still not back. He went on the weekend trip to Glisan Glacier. I didn’t think he’d be gone this long. It wore thin a long time ago. It gets uncomfortable and difficult for me, and I feel angry that Gary so clearly was more motivated by his good time than any desire to not prolong the extra effort this trip for him demanded of me. I guess that sounds selfish. Of me, I mean. To want some of his behavior to be motivated by consideration for me, isn’t that ego-centric?

It’s what I want, or what I’m missing when he leaves stuff around the house that gives me more work to do. I want him to be motivated by the desire to spare me discomfort. I guess that means to have empathy. To want someone to have empathy for me, is that legitimate? Or is it spoiled and childish?

So he comes in and says, “Poor Buns”. I would much rather that he’d come home at around 6:00 or so instead. I’d rather experience his sympathy that way.

So does it de-legitimize what I want, the fact that part of it is based on my discomfort of being around little kids all this time? Shouldn’t I like little kids more? Isn’t it because I’m lacking in some way in not liking such a sustained period of time around kids, even if my own?

I had a notion about the difficulty, meaning the comparative. Perhaps there’s an equivalence: Gary has a miserable time, often with the boys because of the style of parenting he uses: and for me, PREVENTING the misery he has with them by attempting to be respectful of them and not tune them out despite how much they deplete me

Love of Truth

7/11/07
2113 Wed

Saw Sharon tonight; over at A.B’s, and watching time diminish before they close.

So, I think we’ve excavated the skeleton to work with: the importance of the story of the lost toy to my life and psychology.

The notion that my redemption is in my refusal to pass on that betrayal to my children. My resolve that I will not remove my presence from them so that they have to turn away from themselves to keep that truth from themselves.

She suggested that the reluctance I spoke of, to hold my mother (and her) accountable, is because to hold them accountable is to take the next step and to hold myself accountable. For having myself turned away from the Truth of myself.

Sharon spoke of it as my ‘love of the Truth’ as manifested in the whole misunderstanding-it was my love of the truth that led me to concede that I’d done something I hadn’t. Because if adults said I’d done something, then it must be so.

Still, there was that disconcerting absence of emotion in talking about this with her. I felt a little weird to begin with because I’d forgotten my checkbook and said so to her when I was entering her room, and I felt weird about it. So I don’t know if it was her look—I didn’t know how to read it and I felt uncomfortable about it. I didn’t say anything of it at the time and I wonder if it would have made a difference if I’d had.

That same lack of emotional connection, sense of resonance (that I often get later when I’m writing I feel right now. I don’t know if that’s the same thing I was going to say when I started before I got distracted.)

7/13/07
Friday 255

The last thing I remember of the dream that I just woke up with is being at Jane’s. She and I are talking, standing next to the bookshelves in the house she moved into with Joanie, her spouse until the state of Oregon took back what it had legalized. (Jane said they have their wedding license, as well as a copy of the refund check the state send them).

So in this dream she and I are standing in front of a book shelf that’s more like a library type bookshelf than a home bookshelf—more utilitarian. Metal, and not up against a wall. As we talk I notice there are books from the bottom shelf that are out of the shelf and partly on the floor. Some aren’t books, some are more like a collection of papers. The dream seems very influenced by the fact that I was there yesterday evening to discuss the book we read for July. She asked me if I’d taken them out, not so much to criticize me for having left them that way, but more to see if I was curious about those titles. I think I had not, but I bent down to help her put them back.

As usual, the important part of the dream seems lost to me. There may have been a group of us in a hot tub; and it seems religion and maybe catholicism was a subject for discussion. That may have been why we were in front of the book shelves, looking for a book that had to do with that subject. As usual the tantalizing emotional imprint of parts of the dream remain, but not the particulars that would anchor them into something recognizable.

I felt a little uncomfortable at the end of the discussion, in real life, by the way. I drank more wine than usual, and when I was trying to tie the book’s theme (Vietnam’s influence in family dynamics then and since) in to the book by Andrew Bacevich I’ve been reading about militarization in America and Vietnam’s influence over that too, I felt I lost my point, or at least the clear direction I thought I had to it. I felt self-conscious then that I was really obviously impaired and everyone was just being polite. Similarly, Jan shared her new stash of pot with me and then we stood outside with Jane, Joanie, Alix and Sherron for a while watching the lightning storm. I was eager to ask Joanie some questions about her yard, because it has a similar topography to ours, and I wanted to express a desire to have them over to dinner to look at our place and get some advice. But I feel I may have inserted myself in at an awkward place, or, inserted myself in awkwardly—more of an interruption than an insertion. It’s been a while since I’ve felt troubled by that ilk of social anxiety—sort of that level of detail in considering an unease about how I’ve come across.

I wanted to say that what Sharon said about my ‘love of the Truth’ as a young child was an apt description of something I’d forgotten about. It WAS my love for the truth that had motivated me to say that I’d taken the toy. I was so proud of myself too. I’d forgotten that. I was expecting to be praised for having been brave and ‘told the truth’.

Like I’ve mentioned ad infinitum, I’ve lost my step in that nice rhythm I’d found, about empowerment and choosing. That leaves me wondering about my best choice for a response in something that happened just after I got up. When I got home last night I discovered the toilet was plugged with the water rising nearly to the brim of the toilet. I remembered that just as I went in upon awakening to use it; I went downstairs instead and flushed to check to be sure it wasn’t plugged too. Then I came back upstairs and decided to stay up for a while. Went to close the bedroom door so I could turn on the light in the front room. Gary was getting up and said, “What are you doing?” in a tone that gives me the feeling that he was asking because I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing. I’ve gotten that feeling before when I’ve awakened in the middle of the night and decided to get up. “What are you doing?” when it seems it should be obvious what I’m doing. Is this really a ‘men from mars women from venus’ thing? I think my tone would be friendlier, like “Can’t sleep?” “You getting up?” “What’s up?” “How come you’re up?” The ‘what are you doing’ just feels to me like I’ve already annoyed him and his asking me is an expression of that annoyance. So, once again, “What are you doing” tonight. So I just tell him what it’s already obvious that I’m doing—in tonight’s case it was ‘closing the door’. And, seeing that he was getting up and he’d asked, I asked him what he was doing. He said, “Going to the bathroom.” So I told him not to use the upstairs toilet because it’s plugged.

Later:

I did e-mail him; part of what motivated me to write that above was that I was trying to reach a decision in myself whether or not I should bring it up. He e-mailed me back and took responsibility for how he had treated me, acknowledging that he indeed had been unfriendly. So that put that quite to rest.

Martin came over today and brought Felix, his son, Scott’s friend from preschool days. I enjoy talking with him; he goes deeper than most men.
I’m trying to come to some sort of resolve in myself about whether to support bringing troops home by early next year, or not. An interim report (demanded by Congress last May as part of passing the supplemental) said that out of 18 ‘benchmarks’ of progress the Iraqi gov’t was required to meet to keep American troops engaged, there has been tepid progress on only half. And things that have been termed ‘progress’ are progress in the technical sense only. And in very important areas there has been none. In the meantime the National Intelligence Community says that Al Qaida has reconstituted itself and is at a strength similar to when they hit us on 9/11. Bush has disagreed with that finding, which is amazing. This is the group that presents the synthesis of all of the 16 or 18 intelligence agencies in this country. It takes some amazing audacity to dispute findings from them. I played ‘spot-the-talking-point’ when listening to an interview with his National Security Adviser and there it was: “We’re safer today—they’re still dangerous—but we’re safer than if we’d done nothing.” Bush used that yesterday so I suppose we’ll be hearing some version of that repeated. Anyway, I’ve been vacillating so much about bringing-the-troops home vs keep them there (“and give the surge a chance to work”). The Big Decision was supposed to wait until the main report in Sept, but the progress looked so dismal that many in Congress are saying it’s useless to wait until then for the major report from the top general, Petraeus,

So this is an important question: bring them home starting close-to-now, or wait. I have a feeling that even if we wait til Sept we’re not going to see a much different picture, barring a miracle. The Iraqi government is taking most of August off so a lot of the issues that are supposed to indicate progress aren’t going to be dealt with anyway. Then I suppose we can have the carrot in front of us that given that, an adequate chance for this to work hasn’t been given. Give it a little longer.

Of course, the big whip held above our heads is that there will be a bloodbath once the US has exited and those who pressed for it will have it on their heads. I think that’s the major stopping point for me in considering what our country should do…will suffering be multiplied far more? (I’m less worried about the political fear of history branding me responsible for those deaths). The component of that that means the most is the issue of betraying to a horrible fate those who have supported and assisted the US. Would pulling out of Iraq mean a safe haven for terrorists? Looks like they have pretty safe haven within the borders of our ally, Pakistan.

jumping to conclusions

7/9/07
Mon 1345

Wool gathering brought me to a thought I had last night when I was mulling over the dream I had that Kayla and Jack were in. One of the important themes in that dream was me being able to be aware of Kayla’s perception of the incident of Scott’s conflict with Jack, while not giving myself over to it (by treating Scott harshly, say, and being punitive, thus echoing her: “You don’t learn things fast enough, do you”), or allowing it to be the frame for the incident. For me, the frame had to be much longer: not that Scott was morally deficient (as Kayla’s conclusion implied), but that children that age need to be helped through complicated emotional passageways. That it was legitimate to look at it from the point of view of the child who’d been having a nice time with a certain emotional milieu, and then having it suddenly disrupted—a sudden transition. In the longer view, Jack needed more skillful ways to include himself in a group, and Scott needed to find ways to be respectful at interruptions, to identify his needs and ask for them to be respected. That view acknowledges that there may be more to a child interrupting a game than adults may be aware of…emotions of distress may easily become dislike which may trigger the slippery slope of physically lashing out. Adults often expect that children just know how to manage their emotions in such situations and control their behavior, and write children off as morally deficient when they don’t. The longer view says that dealing with situations humanely means entering it from a more detailed order of magnitude—seeing what went wrong and supporting a child in learning to handle it better. By order of magnitude, I mean dropping into the scale of the building blocks of behavior—seeing what kind of skills need to be present for the meta-behavior to be acceptable, and then helping the child build those skills. Going a level deeper into the component parts of the surface.

If a child hits, it *could* mean he’s morally deficient. But it’s more likely that it means he is overwhelmed by the requirements of a situation and lashes out.

What was required of me to be able to stay present was that I be able to tolerate the fact that Kayla had a different perception, a harsher perception. I think that’s a tricky one that I can see in children, and therefore the tendency in myself. I see it in other adults too: an inability to tolerate another person having a different perception of an event. And the frustration that we can’t really MAKE someone see things our way. For Scott to give Connor an impression that Scott perceives himself better than Connor in any way is intolerable to Connor.

Managing perceptions of others is an occupation of our (U.S.) militarism, our foreign and domestic policy.

It was difficult in the dream to know the perception Kayla had of Scott and his behavior, and to know that Scott had just reinforced it. And to know that if I tried to dissect it a bit more deeply for her she would just consider me trying to make excuses for Scott’s misbehavior. Furthermore, her perception included a pressure that I see it her way, and that I behave accordingly and punish Scott. I suppose that’s what overwhelmed my mother all those years ago in the face of the other mother who claimed that I’d taken her child’s toy. Maybe she didn’t claim that; maybe my mother perceived that she was making that claim, and then my ill-fated misunderstanding clinched the deal.

7/10/07
1042
Tuesday

Scott’s birthday. I’m feeling a bit better since getting his invitations mailed. I suppose anxiety for me comes from perception of a large undifferentiated task; when I break it down into details and actually do those details I feel better.

Both boys downstairs for now; I’m going to need to come up with something for them soon.

Funny, the relationship with details; sometimes helpful and sometimes overwhelming.

I’ve begun a slow process of cutting back the wellbutrin. I’m going to do it slowly.

Boys are here now, interrupting constantly. I don’t feel like I have the space in my mind I need to have to put one thought in front of the other. One of the things I really want to do is work my way through my OSX For Dummies, and satisfy my desire to have a more solid foundation under me in using this machine.

Organizational structure

7/08/07
Sun 928

Last dream first:

I’m coming home; expecting company, Kathy Marti, Mindy. Toni’s not coming. As I pull up to the driveway, Kathy’s slowing and turning, on her bike into my driveway. A motorist ahead of me has yelled, “You son of a bitch!” at her, then I pull into the driveway too. Marti is somehow there and sitting in a dimly lit part of the house. I cheerfully say that I haven’t started dinner yet, thinking about a salad that I hadn’t made but felt it wouldn’t take too long to make. Then, there are these two people who were in my car and I’m giving them a ride home to the old neighborhood on our BLVD. It’s understood that I’ll be back to Marti, Kathy, Mindy, when I’m done with this errand. I never see these two people clearly, they’re just blurs, but female, I think. They have something to do with my sister, like she’d invited them in as we were driving, or that she’s the one driving them home but I’m there. The feeling of a blur intensifies by her pulling over very sharply and abruptly so that one of the figures gets out. I realize that’s why we stopped, and say something about being proud of Karen for taking them home. She does a u-turn on our BLVD to head back west again, and somewhere along there I think the other person goes away too. But then I’m in some sort of foster care facility with a woman who is the caregiver—it’s a private home though. The caregiver is a Black woman, and there is another woman there who the first one ignores as if she’s not there. This second woman is dogging my steps, following me, obstructing me when I try to get something, and keeps pulling on my clothes. So I, unlike the caregiver, am unable to ignore her. So I’m saying things to her, like, “I need to get to the sink” when she is blocking my way, or “I don’t like my clothes being pulled” when she is pulling so hard on my clothing that it’s stretched way away from my body. Then the caregiver took some sort of notice, kind of dismissive and it seems not really that helpful. She took notice, though, stopped her pretense for a moment that the other woman wasn’t there. There is a sense of a lake, or a circle being closed, and the phrase, “deal with the devil”. And I’m very aware that while I’m at one house I’m being awaited at another.

In the middle dream I’m at Scott’s preschool…he’s in preschool again.

Kayla and Jack are there. Scott’s playing with other children; they’re putting together a colorful puzzle-like toy that forms the shapes of animals. Scott’s holding a yellow piece. Jack breaks in to this circle of children and Scott throws a small star-shaped stuffed pillow at him and is hitting at him. I’d been talking with Kayla just prior; a fairly friendly conversation considering our last one—and it was clear in the dream that this was the 1st time we’d seen each other in person since. When Scott threw the pillow & hit out at Jack there was this, “I KNEW it” sense from Kayla—like this was the confirmation she’d been just waiting for, her justification for the feelings she’d had toward Scott.
She said, to Scott, as I moved to intervene, “You just don’t learn fast enough, do you?” I got next to Scott & said, “What is it you wanted to say to Jack with your body? Did you say you weren’t done playing? You could use words to say, “we’re not finished here yet, but we can play when we are.” I just had to block Kayla out & deal with Scott. Then stay very close in case more intervention was needed. I saw Kayla across a room later & met her eye & smiled a little. Not sure if I should go apologize for Scott’s behavior or not. There’s a sense that she’s thinking that incident should have “proven” something to me too, and I didn’t really want to confirm that by approaching her. Earlier, we’d just said something—it was becoming a fairly intimate conversation considering the one before: It was about ‘mother’s guilt’ (I’d brought it up and she said she keeps HER guilt hidden so the world won’t see it; I guess a sort of needing to protect from vulnerability—or sense the world will exploit any weakness.

First dream:

I go to work for an internet company. I’ve never done it before, & my predecessor doesn’t really train me. He’s a man. There’s something about a power or road or both—connection being repaired & completed 1st time in a long time, or maybe first time ever. I call asking advice of the former #1. I learn I’ve been hired to have qualities that he doesn’t possess. The qualities are need to be “tough” to make sure things get done that he failed to do. I feel a sense of these qualities existing in me, though nascent, not fully realized and the question is can I develop them to meet the needs.
Part of the job includes an ability to use a special pen or pencil and when writing or highlighting something on paper it becomes a clickable link on documents, or web pages. There’s a phrase in my mind that reminds me of the reading book group I belong to, called Ladies Literary League. In this case it’s “Girl’s Google Group”
Now the nature of this unprecedented connection is that it spans Mexico to Canada and is vulnerable to elements of nature. There’s also a feeling of a lake in this dream.

Geez. Word quit when I was in the middle of transferring the dreams to a document for Sharon. So I just spent a long time navigating some Word peculiarities and getting back my work.

Quickly, before Scott wakes, I need to write about my angst of the past few days. I feel acutely my inability to organize and make things happen, even to put it into some sort of organizational structure. Wondering if this is an example of a type of central processing disorder, that I get overwhelmed quickly by details and don’t know how to organize them. For example, Gary had wanted to go to the Little North Santiam river today for swimming. It’s not that hot out, so we’re rethinking it. I’m the type that never knows what to do when someone says, “What do you want to do today?” I feel like going into a video store looking for a movie: there is so much to choose from that I can’t think of anything at all. Same with how to organize my day. It’s like the details form this faceless mass and there doesn’t seem to be any logical place to start. So, even though over the course of the year I’ve come across any number or projects I could do, when faced with the question: “What do you want to do today” I can’t think of any of them. I feel like I’m not a very good helper to Gary in that—initiative in doing things.

So I wonder if this is contributing to my feeling of dread regarding Scott’s birthday? I think I felt this way before Connor’s too, just sort of aimless and apprehensive. Maybe that’s free-floating anxiety. It’s a sadness, like I’m not anticipating it the way I should—being more celebratory as it approaches. Instead there’s his party to get through and I feel anxious about the particulars—if the party room will dwarf the number of children there and make his circle of friends seem puny—should I invite some more to fill in the number—that sort of thing. There’s an apprehension about having Cliff this week—it just seems another obligation that may be difficult, to get through. I feel guilty that the boys feel unstimulated and bored on the weekend—Aw, SHIT, we just got back from vacation! But I felt guilty for not being able to engage them in things they enjoyed during times Gary was away at our camp and I was feeling compelled to organize the tent and our clothes a little. Or I’d read while the boys just sat. I often felt bored as a child, and a sort of sense of hopelessness surrounding that. It seemed like the whole organizational thing was a problem then too; and I felt like a failure when some of my projects I’d had ambitions for weren’t realized. I just didn’t have the materials, or help I needed, or something. I feel that I may be passing these feelings on to my boys and I feel sad at the thought. I feel I don’t celebrate them the way they deserve—instead I experience them as a drain on me and a source of lots of obligation.