priorities we’re not aware of
8/1/07
Wed
1451
Oh here he comes, just as I was about to write about feeling guilty about having nothing for them to do today. Bored on their behalf, because if I were alone I’d be perfectly content; anxious because at any moment I might be required to come up with something and my mind is blank, and I just feel kind of sad for them too, imagining that they’re bored and dispirited. Sad that they’ll remember me as a mom who does nothing and didn’t take them anywhere.
Later
Saw Sharon for a meeting that felt random and arid to me.
I think I probably do need to do more considering of the information I’m getting regarding living with a passive-aggressive man, what that means about me and where my own responsibility lies, the ‘lost’ 15 years and my accountability in that.
8/3/07
Friday 1352
Sharon suggested that maybe, contrary to ‘hindering’ me in my searchings, the boys are helping me—that it may be more efficacious that I merely catch glimpses of ‘it’ around the boys rather than confront it head on. Basically I think what I have to do is to read more of the passive-aggression books and do some more examination of where I fit in. I know these past few days I haven’t dampened any impulse toward passive-aggression on Gary’s part because I’ve been so cranky.
Waiting with Scott is very difficult. He is not very patient with waiting and frequently his discomfort spills over on to me as he squirms and bumps up against me, or suddenly throws his arms around me (with enough force to unbalance me, or even hurt). And I’ve done a miserable job of being patient with him.
So then there are days like today where I’m just not motivated to put something together and we just stay home. Yesterday we went and did, over to OMSI for the omnimax which was a mixed success. Connor enjoyed it; Scott did not and I didn’t really either. The screen is just too in-your-face and the way they project the images you have to crane your neck backward. I already had a headache and the images rushing at you along with the extremely loud, almost painfully so, soundtrack made it unpleasant. It was really uncomfortable for Scott and he spent most of the time huddled up against my arm, or crawling on my lap. In the midst of that I dropped my cell phone, so now have to go back in order to retrieve it. Then Kathy and Vincent came over and I enjoyed visiting with her and the kids seemed fine. Then to Connor’s diving class which ended up being very uncomfortable with Scott’s restlessness.
Again the worry that to Scott, the message he gets from me is ‘don’t be’. So much of what I do is stopping him, and then being frustrated with him when he doesn’t ‘stop’ when I tell him to stop right away. He keeps going and can’t seem to understand that “stop” means “stop” the first time. I don’t want to have to say it more than once. Again, I suspect that we’re in one of those awful dynamics where he’s learned that negative attention from me is better than none at all and so goes the downward spiral. Because it works. It gets attention from me, but the kind I hate. I hate it when I feel such a pique of frustration and annoyance with him. I hate it when I raise my voice to him and I hate it when I feel it’s necessary. I hate the way I feel just before I start to yell at him. He is someone who can bring me to shouting and I feel badly when I do. Yesterday at the pool he sucked the water that pools in the drain of the drinking fountain into his mouth. That’s the kind of thing that makes me want to scream at him and has me heaving these horrible sighs and doing the equivalent of rolling my eyes and otherwise giving the message that he’s such a stupid child and why do I have to be burdened by him.
2117
Collossal waste of time; bummer. I just got obsessed with cleaning out my mail inbox. It won’t be long before the boys are back with Gary and I squandered that time.
I was doing some thinking about narratives and their importance, and the problems that some narratives can bring.
There’s something about the idea that maybe again what we take for reality is merely experience which is mediated by priorities we’re not aware of: to make sense and coherence out of an overwhelming amount of information. And some experience, in light of that, needs to be taken with a light hand and not given too much weight. I suppose that may be the goal of much of spiritual growth, is to not be bound by our narratives—or at least to realize there is some wiggle room in them. It seems that awareness of ‘what is’ is central, and that part of ‘what is’ is the fact that our minds may be fooling us by distorting facts into the shape of our narrative—a sort of spiritual “blind spot” like has been described; and our minds fill it in seamlessly—does such a good job that we are fooled.
Factors that shape our narrative: the environments we’re born into, the way we’re instructed, indoctrinated, shaped by the values and customs of those institutions of our culture: parents, schools, church. And that’s what gave me as clear an understanding as I’ve had yet about this ‘aloneness’ and ‘I Am’ stuff I’ve been thinking about.
I was born with the basic ground of my experience. The part of me that experiences the world. As I’m being raised I’m being instructed, and I’m receiving instruction into a kind of network of belief and custom. When someone is imparting some sort of value, I am applying it to my inner experience. I am assuming that the other person is sharing the same basic ground of MY experience—and now I realize that this may be too large an assumption. So when someone would tell me that I know when I’m doing something wrong because I feel a certain way inside, I am matching this certain instruction to a feeling state inside of me—and they may not really match. Hence the anxiety I would feel sometimes in trying to evaluate my own behavior—my inner experience may have some resemblance to whatever the teacher is telling me, but it didn’t coincide in ways that troubled me. This is the part where I have to realize that I am the driver in my life and at a certain point you have to realize the limitations of what others expect of you. That was my trouble growing up: I was run smack up against a value I’d been taught but it wouldn’t match my inner experience. So I was confronted with a choice of remaining loyal to the value, or to my inner experience. That’s when I would tell myself that I was choosing wrong to choose the experience rather than the value—that my reasons for choosing experience over value were faulty, self-serving, excuses. Where experience would lead to gratification of something that value told me was wrong, I accused myself that I was choosing wrongly in choosing gratification. That choosing gratification amounted to self-indulgence, sin, I guess. Because it seems it is based on the underlying belief that pleasure is bad (unless approved by the culture). My fear was that I was choosing moral weakness instead of “what was right”. And that I was rationalizing doing something I shouldn’t be doing.
Boy, that sort of self-censure sure has gone deep.
