Facing a fear

04/05/06

My parents left this morning. It was a relief to have a good visit with them. It was a relief that at last they could see my boys in their better light; we’d had several times in a row when they were definitely not at their best.

It seems that that day they took Scott really affects how I feel about this visit; maybe because they had a good time with him and they got to spend some one-on-one with him—and that that outing made a huge difference: had he not gone and had been home all day with Connor sick, I think he would have started some misbehavior, and the tone would have been soured by my response (irritated) to it. That period with him gone with my parents came at a strategic point that made a big difference in the feel of things.

04/09/06

Gary gone with the boys. I’ve been reading quickly to finish a library book that is due Wed; “I, Wabenzi” by Rafi Zabor. I get impatient with him and have stretches where his story gets tiresome, but then he’ll turn a phrase in a way, in a description of some inner process of his that resonates with me. And that he is better than most at articulating and communicating the unseen structure of meaning. That’s how it feels, and I get that corresponding feeling of orientation and expansion. So it keeps me reading. I keep wanting to stop and put some quotes in here, but then it slows me down. I also want to stop and explore some of the thought-streams that reading it inspires.

A brief sketch of who I am right now finds me a person who has two children that I’m often exhausted and a little overwhelmed by, often irritable with especially the younger one, and then filled with remorse that so much of these early years of his have my irritation as a backdrop. I remember how my dad’s moods seemed to set the family’s tone: now it occurs to me that maybe all of us were cooperating and colluding in creating it. And it makes me wonder about me and if I’m doing that in this family.

Lately I’ve been aware of fear: it was kind of awakened in reading that book “Thread of Grace”. There was something in her vision of it and description that made me get on a visceral level first the horror of war and the horror of living in it—and then it sketched the outlines of my fear about FEEL is part of the vulnerability. The fear manifests as fear of physical pain and the awareness that there is always the potential of having to live with it deep in your cells. And the thought that people have deliberately tortured people and took pleasure in it and that people have had to live with that all-consuming pain until they died. I’m interjecting my current voice here. I realized that I can’t bring myself to put the particulars of the pain I fear out into the world. It really frightens me to consider doing that.>—it makes me feel sick inside, and the horror of that is starting to overwhelm me with its presence as I write here. imagining that feeling

The shadow of that has been in my mind since reading that book. A fear of being subject to that kind of pain, or having to witness it, or And there are people who are being subjected to that at this very moment in other parts of the world. I’ve just been kind of haunted by it, a fear of pain, though it has been relegated largely to background unless I bring it to the foreground like now. Really, this has been with me for a couple months.

Listening to the death penalty phase of Moussaui, someone who was peripheral to the 9/11 plot, has brought forward in my mind the thoughts and images of people who were in those planes and in those towers. It has brought to mind an awareness that these people were forced precipitously, to consider the reality of their own violent death. To be right up against that moment and know they were going to die—and for some to have to choose to die by jumping from the window, or burning to death in the fire. What came out is that some of the jumpers “organized” their jumps—and some jumped hand-in-hand.

I suppose this is all a manifestation of a newer, bolder awareness of my own mortality and the fragility of our lives against some forces that are in motion that are much larger than an individual can withstand.

Later

A sick feeling inside. Even NPR, not just left-wing fringe news media is reporting that it appears that the United States may well be preparing to strike Iran. There’s been talk about using the nuclear bunker-busters.

04/10/06

I had to pick up the boys last night from Gary’s mom’s house, since he still had work to do on her fence and they’d really been there long enough. She gave me a note that she said she’d written for me, before she knew that I was coming over. I read it at home, and it was to tell me about a lecture she’d gone to and found very interesting; thought I’d find it interesting and had wished I were there. She signed it, “Darlene.”

Aside from noting that she could have called, and that she didn’t, as usual, sign “love” I have to concede that that was a nice gesture, and definitely a reaching out. So I feel a little pressure inside to acknowledge that with a phone call. A part of the pressure says to do it now, before getting Scott. Part of me says, no, this is MY time and I don’t want to spend it on the phone—with ANYONE. But I do feel a softening to my aversion to her, which is welcome, because it makes things easier—as well as a little confusing.

So, there’s a part of me that urges caution about calling her; says, “Let’s think about this a bit.” So that’s why I’m writing now.

I guess what seems appropriate to me is to respond to what’s needed, and in that case a reaching out like that needs some acknowledgment. What happens is I get a picture in my head of us being friends, and doing things socially together and that feels a little weird. Maybe because it really is jumping too far ahead. I suppose the way to that would start with this acknowledgment, or even to her reaching out to me. But in this case it’s best to just think of the next step. The Next Step.

Because certainly, it would be nice to be free of the burden of dreading her presence, having it feel like a cloud on my day at the prospect of seeing her—even being able to ask favors now and then, like the use of the beach house, or to watch the boys now and then. An easing of my dislike would make the prospects for those things more likely. Those feel like good things, although it’s different from the momentum of dislike so it’s confusing—like a river current reversing itself and the riffles it causes.

Got to go get Scott.

I feel a sense of resolve that I need to return to Dr. Wright and discuss this medication with her. I don’t know that it’s helping my irritability, and it may be making the trigger a little more sensitive.

~ by kaleidoscoperefractions on September 11, 2008.