Shoulds and sub-shoulds

01/17/01

O shit. School’s been canceled again; 3 inches of snow fell. So it’s been no peace all day today—interruptions every few minutes. I’ve had about 10 just writing this last few sentences.

It’s 12:49, with all the makings of a long afternoon. I feel like it’s 5:00 already.

I’m just sitting quietly as they eat, in this brief window. I’m beginning to wonder if I should worry about Connor’s show of affection. They fight over who will sit next to me; I can hardly be in the bathroom very long before he’s calling me about something. He’s frequently wanting to grab hold of me and hug me, then Scott 324got more of me. Someday it’ll be amusing; right now it feels like another obstacle to doing what I need to do. Here comes Scott.

Later

Awww heck. I just remembered that I lost last night’s dream. There was a classroom situation yet again, and it seems it may have had something to do with growing or harvesting something? I wonder if I’ll even get to see Sharon tomorrow anyway. She said the way she likes to work is that while we’re in therapy my ‘spot’ is something that’s reserved, and that if I need to cancel it’s not given away to someone else. That means I pay her whether or not I can keep that appt. I was a little skeptical about that. After all, it’s very possible that she invited me to a session after getting my e-mail (at my expense) and invited me to start having sessions with her again on a regular basis in order to boost her clientele. That’s the cynical way of looking at it, and I wonder if I’m being credulous in returning to therapy at her invitation, when I hadn’t really felt a need for therapy. She said that the unconscious responds in a very deep way to this sort of commitment, and I suppose that that may be the vindication of this. See if it happens that way. I took a chance; despite the way we ended all those years ago, I trust her and I trust the process we had. There’s no denying though that I can’t make this commitment lightly because $300/month of what could be in the family’s savings will be going to this. So I guess it makes me be serious about it.

I’ve been back again, now that the holidays are done with the question of whether or not to respond to Darlene’s invitation/request in November. My feeling is she may rather let it go than to have an answer that’s other than a welcome to more of her presence in my life. Similarly, I’m weighing how to respond to my dad about the Bill O’Reilly book.

01/17/07

Last night’s dream:

I’m a physical therapist working in home health. I stop at a Fred Meyer to grab a quick lunch, which has turned into a very involved process. I think there’s a cafeteria style line where you can pick up kind of noshing type foods, hummus, couscous and the like. At the end of that line you pay for what you’ve gotten and place an order for food they prepare. Then you have to go through another line and pay for what you’ve ordered and receive it. By that time I found I’d eaten most of the stuff that was on the tray while I was waiting in line, and wasn’t really hungry for what I’d ordered, but still felt obliged to get it. I complained to some FM staff person that I didn’t like the new system, because I tended to take and eat more than I would ordinarily. (I also had a sense with the food out in the open on the cafeteria table that people may have picked things up and then set them back down. I was concerned about contamination.) They received my complaint good naturedly, but I didn’t get a sense it was going to be passed on as serious feedback.

I had to eat quickly because I was due to see a patient. I had a student with me. Then there’s a part about looking for a bathroom. There’s a women’s room that’s a sort of locker-room/boutique, with nice sinks for washing up and shower stalls, but no toilets that I can find. (I can’t remember if this part of the dream happened right after lunch, or if it came later after I’d treated my patient). I met up with at least 2 other cohorts, maybe one of them my student and expressed my frustration and my bladder discomfort to them.

The patient was living in a wealthy apartment style penthouse. Or at least quite high up. Her husband was there, and at least 2 doting daughters. She was a bit (pleasantly) confused, and kept moving from one place to another. Sometimes I’d see that she’d laid down on the floor. At the conclusion of my evaluation I got her settled in bed. Maybe it was then that I looked for the bathroom, in this luxury apartment building…and when I returned she was out of bed again. Tho I’d first treated this with alarm, it seemed the family wasn’t, and they were used to sort of shepherding her back to bed. I was impressed at how easily mobile she was—that she didn’t require more than a light amount of physical assistance. I suggested a social work referral to the daughters and they indicated that they didn’t really like social workers and were doing ok on their own for now. The woman’s husband was tall, very kind, but sort of debilitated himself. I was feeling a little anxious because doing the evaluation had taken a long time and I knew I had to finish—it was getting dark. I also have a brief memory of driving down what resembled a St. Louis street, with the student with me discussing the patient

Just had a talk with Darlene that was pleasant, other than the anxiety of not being able to get off the phone gracefully. I did it on impulse, deciding I really needed to know if Gary’s nephew was going to be at her house before deploying, probably to Iraq. That way I could drop the boys off at her house after visiting with Chuck myself for a while…solve all the necessaries: see Chuck, have childcare for boys, make my appointment and have my decompression time afterward. About the only thing that’s worked out halfway decent is that it looks like Scott’s caught cold and I wouldn’t have been able to send him to school, even if the schools were open.

Why do I take such a negative view of this? I mean, the boys being home. Why don’t I welcome it as an opportunity to engage more with them. Why do I want to shrink away from their frequent hugs and kisses? Why do I have such an aversion to watching a movie with them? Then I feel crummy when Connor says something about how much he loves me, that I’m stuck with him, that he’s glad to be stuck with such a loving mother. When I repeated to him what I said when he was newborn, that I was looking forward to seeing him every day for the next 18 years, he said that he might live here longer than age 18. So he clearly has a deep attachment to me right now. I’m not sure if that’s natural nine-year-old stuff, kind of a heightened attachment to the opposite-sex parent, bordering on romantic in fervor. I remember wanting to feel close to my dad when I was around 10, and mom saying resentfully once that I had him wrapped around my finger. I think I sensed some sort of discomfort in him when I tried to do what he said I could do, talk to him any time about anything. In pondering the body changes of puberty I tried to talk to him about it, but I felt his discomfort and later abandoned trying to seek that level of intimacy with him.

Almost a gauntlet, in a way: something my dad said in a message about believing our country stands for what’s right in the world, and that he would expect his grandsons to do right in defending that. (off topic) If the boys were of enlistment age right now I’d do anything and everything in my power to prevent it. This war is insane, was insane from its illegal beginnings and botched handling—and now we’re throwing shovels-ful of soldiers to try to put out the fire Bush caused. I will not sacrifice my boys to this: the cause of saving Bush’s legacy. Or dying for a hole he’s dug and keeps digging deeper because he’s too proud to cut his losses.

It was thinking about the kind of intimacy I’d tried to establish with my father that made me think of that. Because there are two continuum ends if I wished to respond: 1) say nothing since this isn’t a current issue with the boys this young. He may be dead anyway by the time such a thing would need to be considered. 2) Tell him I would not send my boys to this fight. Of course their own wills take priority over mine, but I’d do everything I could to dissuade them. This would merely provoke a fight, since Dad and I don’t have the level of intimacy it would take to really speak of this deeply. My dad relates to the world, himself, and everyone around him from his turtle’s shell of Shoulds: We should honor our country; we should honor our parents and authority; we should at least profess a belief in god and pay duty to that by going to church. Then there are a bunch of sub-shoulds, like children should clean their plates, children should wear coats, we should give allegiance to our country and leaders irregardless if they are wrong, because our country stands for what’s right in the world. Bill O’Reilly’s book comes from that basic stance. Which brings me to my response to it: 1) just blandly say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion 2) say honestly that I can see that he’s angry, and speaking for a lot of angry people, but I can’t accept his reasoning because I don’t buy in to his basic premise. And the only way I could buy into it is if I’m willing to believe that the only worldview in the world that matters is the US one: which is that the untold destruction we’re causing, the innocent people we’re killing, the hundreds of billions we’re spending that’s resulting in such ruin—is all for what’s good and right: “freedom, democracy”. But it has to be all good because it’s the US doing it! How can the rest of the world possibly see us as terrorists? What traitor would even suggest that others in the world do not see the honorability of our unilateral action?

The peaceful time I bought in putting on a movie is done. They’re both up here, put on the TV which would be an interesting program except I can’t hear it because they keep talking.

~ by kaleidoscoperefractions on January 30, 2009.