Rebellious Thoughts of a Woman

Abuse In My Past, Not In My Present

Lately I haven’t had many visitors to my site, which makes sense since I am not posting very often. And many of them who do come are looking to read my post on chin hairs. It seems that many many many women the world over are suffering from midlife beards. Oy. But yesterday someone came to the site who was reading post after post on abuse. Which lead me to go to a blog on spousal abuse—something that I haven’t done for a very long time. The post I read there was about how this woman had finally left her husband after he had repeatedly been dismissive of her. I read the “straw breaking the back” post. And that brought me to a deep sense of thankfulness and almost forgetfulness that that was my life in the not-too-distant past, which, thankfully, has no relation to my life in the present.

People say that women have children after their first child only because they forget how painful childbirth is. Regarding relationships after emotional and verbal abuse: you can only have a relationship if you remember the pain—but don’t keep the pain itself alive.

So here I am, 19 months in my rented apartment, 19 months after the house was finally sold, and 19 months since I lived in the same house as the man who tormented me. It is also six months since a friend from the past kindled a spark that lead to love that lead to almost three months of our living together. Three months of creating a relationship that is based on love, respect, concern, admiration, and, alright, quite a tinge of mutual attraction. Not only didn’t I think that I could be in a normal relationship after my marriage, but from the pit of despair I would hear of fairy tale endings and proclaim: “How lovely, but I know that will never be me.”

As I read the woman’s post, I found myself unable to empathize with her—it was a sad story and I was glad to read that she had overcome so much pressure (internal and external) to be her own life-saver. But letting myself sink into the details, and read past posts, and imagine what her life must have been like—and what it was at that moment—no, I didn’t go there. I couldn’t.

Perhaps I have some version of PTSD, where to relive, in any way, past horrors brings to the fore the accompanying anguish and sense of self-loss.

I didn’t feel good that I couldn’t send vibes of compassion out to this woman, that I could merely observe where she was and cheer it, but it felt safe to look from the distance—from my fortress. 

What can I say? I was abused, but it is over—it is a part of my past. Since then I have created layers of life and self that do not depend on that reality: that are independent of it. Since then I have other things, such as chin hairs, to worry about. And now I have a man by my side for whom I pluck those hairs, even if he would never comment on them in anything but an endearing way.

My my life, indeed, can be wondrous, even if once it was so very arduous.

To that blogger: May your life and all those who you wish in it sustain you and keep you fulfilled.

Romantic Weekend in Belfast

“Give us a hug.”

And with that tentative embrace, right after I stepped into the lobby of Belfast City Airport after almost 18-hours of traveling and waiting, and after being identified and identifying successfully, and with my red pocketbook slung over his back because I didn’t have a moment to put it down, we went back 28 years and we went forward 28 years. We went right back to the deep friendship we had already revived in our three months of daily hours-long email and phone conversations, but we also stepped into a romantic sphere that we had, because of our self-confidence-lacking 21-year-old’s and 22-year-old’s minds’, never broached. And so, a path not taken or a spark set ever so gently or a light at the end of a tunnel was brought into being.

And then there were the delicate kisses, or should I say the tentative checking to see if lips fit, if the mind interaction would be joined by its best bud: the body interaction. Indeed.

And with that four days of non-stop talking and walking and laughing and eating and lovemaking began. Yes, it was a wonderful weekend. Not wonderful because, as so many people have told me “I deserve to be happy,” but wonderful because it was in and of itself wondrous, not in comparison to what had come before, but in and of itself. What could be said about a man who not only looks right into my eyes when he tells me he loves me, but makes me feel that way when he makes me laugh, or sits down to eat a leisurely meal in a restaurant he had walked by for years but never went into because he didn’t have with whom he wanted to eat there. And what could be said of a man who doesn’t try to one-up a couple we met at the bed and breakfast where we stayed when they told us that theirs is a true love story because they got together again after breaking up three years ago.

Was it too easy? Should there have been an awkward phase to get over? Or was it that I was never with a man as a lover who was also the person who I felt the closest to, the person to whom I would reveal my secrets and my silliness? Had I never been in love with a friend, a best friend? Was that the secret? Not to want to run to tell anyone about what he said and did and how you felt because the person you want to talk to is there, across the table or across the pillow.

On one of our walks around Belfast, we walked around Titanic Quarter, where the Titanic was built. (A tee-shirt for sale in Belfast reads: The Titanic. Built by an Irishman. Sunk by an Englishman.) I remember when I saw the movie Titanic I thought how improbable the love story was. How, I thought, could a woman go from being with such a nasty, vile man as her fiancé to the loving and tender Jack? Here was my answer: in the man who was sharing with me a bag of chocolate-covered raisins as we sat next to the River Lagan and watched the current pick up and talked in the shadow of the cranes that held up the Titanic as it had been built. Sometimes we women learn from our mistakes. Yes, we do. We learn the difference between when a man says he loves you because of who you are—the good, the bad and the ugly (he did see me in the morning), and when a man says he loves you because he wants something from you.

Where do we go from here? Ah, the deliciously improbable is where. In nine days he will be moving here. This is not a trivial thing, especially for him. Twenty-eight years ago, when I left New York to move to Israel, he also left the states—only to return twice for two very brief visits more than 26 years ago. Without me here, this meltingly romantic man told me, he lost all desire to be in the states. And so, now, he is returning to a person he has loved for all those years and to a place he never expected to return to. And me, who has spoken of despair and lived through my personal hell; me, who was a pessimistic optimist, afraid to think I would ever be happy but afraid, too, to think I wouldn’t be; well, I am in love. In love with a man who is, according to the note his boss wrote for me, “a good guy.”

And after all those posts moaning about men who only want women who are thin or in shape or "care about their looks" or work out seven times a week, I have by my side a man who loves a curvy body--my curvy body.

So here I am. No longer alone. No longer wanting to be alone. I am looking forward to sharing my life with a man, my Kenny, who says to me, “Every day with you is the best day of my life.”

Yes, to be continued.

Life and love after a bitter divorce.

The Fuzzy and Infinite Bead of Plenty

I ended my previous post, a month ago with this paragraph: “How could I not reach out my hand to touch this preposterous bead? It feels as if the ineffable quality that oversees the wonders and ways of the world is presenting me with the most precious bead of plenty—a bead that grows to encompass all manner of well-being, fuzzy and infinite.”

The bead that I was referring to is a man with whom, 28 years ago, I would walk along the daytime and nighttime streets of Manhattan (and one bridge to Brooklyn in a blizzard) being the most open I had ever been with anyone. This man suddenly appeared in my in-box from where he has since snuggled his way into that space I didn’t know existed: a heart untrammeled.

When I started this blog in April 2008, I needed an outlet from all the pain I was experiencing from another man I met 28 years ago: my ex-husband. (Speak about making the wrong choice!) When I began the divorce proceedings four years before that, it was not to clear my decks for another man or even—utterly preposterous—the idea of love; rather, it was to come up for air. For too long I had been stifled: stifled by him and stifled by myself in reaction to him. And the blog, well, I needed to figure out how to breathe again.

First I just poured out in pain. I was seeking to find solace in the opening up, in the discovery of shared pain, in the offering of words of wisdom from survivors, in the providing of comfort to those who only had pain. And then, once I began to find my breathe and my voice, I found that I didn’t just reside in pain. I found that I could write—and think—about things that did not revolve around my life and its downs and occasional ups. I would write about all manner of thing. I liked to think of myself as a columnist (note: I would love to be a columnist) sharing my point-of-view and insights. But always, always there was some new anguish from my ex-husband that I needed to screech out. And now, well it still happens because he has not changed, but I don’t want to dwell on it, I want to acknowledge it and return to the path that my life has taken.

I am, for a moment, without words. Not just that I never thought I would be so fulfilled from a man’s attentions, but that I honestly did not expect more than a freedom of self when I began the divorce journey and the blog journey. Who knows what is beyond, yonder on the horizon, but I know what is not there. What is not there is the pain that has been transcribed here.

In a telling reflection that life is never flawless, this man lives abroad. I will be visiting him for a few days in six weeks—the countdown is on. But when you have two writers unfolding their hearts to and for the other, it is a thing of transcendent beauty. My inbox surely runneth over.

My words, and my thoughts, and my creativity, I have begun to channel to this man as well as to the new book that I have started writing. And so, I guess, I am saying goodbye. Or maybe, because goodbye seems so final and hard, I am saying that when and if I return it will not be as a woman discovering a recipe for lemonade to use the lemons her life dropped into her basket, but it will be as a woman who has recipes for cakes and soups, the sustenance of life. Or maybe I won’t have any recipes to share, just stories that show it is possible to go from the depths of the tunnel where no light can penetrate, to a place that feels darn close to Everest.

Plenty Beads

I used to finger the enough beads that my life was stringing for me. Enough bead after enough bead after enough bead of words and happenings that kept pushing me down, teasing me into thinking that they would end—that there would be a real enough point—but they just kept coming.

And then last June, when the house was sold and I could move out of the oppressive atmosphere, the stringing ceremonies stopped. And now new stringing ceremonies need to be instated. Now I am happily adding plenty beads to charm my days.

---It is pouring outside. What a joy. Once you live in Israel (or any place with a dry season), you can’t but appreciate a summer rain. It is beyond refreshing, it is life-affirming. Rain in the midst of unending heat. Even though I grew up in New York City, city of steamy summer rain storms, that seventeen-year break means that I do not take the soothing rains for granted. It is a blessing to be received.

---In a few days I will be going on vacation—I am taking my daughters to the Pacific Northwest for a week’s vacation. While my older daughter has shed her teenage skin and my younger daughter has grown it, they both wanted to go—or agreed to go—with me on vacation. Either way, it is still such a plenty bead on my formerly bare mother-joy necklace. And while I am not happy that my older daughter has not talked to her father for a while—as a result of his words and actions toward her—I can’t say that I’m not sorry that she has finally seen him for who he is.

---I have sent off query letters to agents for the book I began writing last summer. What a sense of satisfaction. And after the experience of writing this blog and receiving such supportive feedback, I believe that I have developed the type of skin necessary to not give up. Although, of course, I am sending out positive thoughts that this first round will elicit an invitation to send the manuscript and not just form rejection letters.

---And I have begun writing another book. And that also is wonderful. Of course it’s slow going, but I am pleased with the concept (which came to me about two weeks ago) and pleased that I am finding purpose in thinking about it and writing it.

---For three years I used to listen, night after night, to a call-in radio show, Delilah. People would call to say how wonderful their husband or wife is, asking for a song to be dedicated in his or her honor, or they would call, asking for a song that would temporarily soothe their broken hearts. Up until last June I would lay there on my love seat-bed, with the door of my room locked, and cry as I listened to people talking about how lucky they were, and I would cry as I listened to people cry out their pain, seeking a moment’s solace in a song.

I would cry because I could never imagine getting out of the misery that I felt encompassed me. Love and happiness seemed so foreign. How does one go from experiencing the harshness of a relationship that transformed itself into an endless battle to longing to think about someone? And even when people would say that that is precisely what had happened to them, I would be happy for them and envy them, but say, good for them, but that will not happen to me.

And now, now I am finding an opening in my heart for a man who searched for me to tell me that he has loved me since we were friends 28 years ago. How could I not reach out my hand to touch this preposterous bead? It feels as if the ineffable quality that oversees the wonders and ways of the world is presenting me with the most precious bead of plenty—a bead that grows to encompass all manner of well-being, fuzzy and infinite.

Truth Is Stranger than Fiction

How is it that when I am always sure of what I am going to write about, something happens that forces me to completely change my focus?

On Wednesday I drove up to New York to meet a friend to see Carole King and James Taylor perform. It was a wonderful concert: wonderful time with a friend who is great for creating memories with, wonderful seeing my mother a little less drained than she had been the previous week on her way back up to New York, and wonderful that the drives to and from New York were smooth sailing almost the entire way. And wonderful that I went on this one-day adventure after it had changed from a more intentional, extended visit with my mother to a less than 24-hour jaunt. After the concert I thought that I was going to write about how the audience of midlife-plusers couldn’t contain themselves from singing out loud during “Natural Woman” and “Fire and Rain”—moi included. But then something happened the next day that shelved that reflection on how we change and yet how we don’t change. But on second thought, maybe it is still on that but from an entirely different angle.

On Thursday afternoon I checked my work email. My heart did a drop and roll back into place as I read the most unexpected email. It was from a man who I was friends with in the few months I lived in New York between visiting Israel and moving back to Israel in 1982-3. It was a very intense friendship--and no sex or dillydallying was involved. It was this free moment before our lives (I assume on his, I know on mine) took a serious turn. We were free to talk and walk around New York for hours, and doing spontaneous things because we were young and felt the power of our youth and the flood of happiness that invades when you mesmerize and are mesmerized by someone else without really being aware of it or acting on it.

Oh my. I cried for about five minutes in the car as I drove to pick up my daughter and her friend after they saw Eclipse at the mall. 

How do you ever know if you have touched someone? And do you ever know if you have been acknowledged long after your presence isn’t present? Twenty-eight years ago we were companions in an idyllic interlude. And that has been remembered.

In the space of his email I was transported back past the bitterness and disappointments that have tainted me. He brought me back to a time before regrets. Before, as too many people have noticed, my eyes deadened—and then came back to life. Back to being the young woman who listened to James Taylor and Carole King in her room endlessly, being touched by their words but not, yet, fully understanding the meaning from which they were formed.

Just being at that concert, listening to Carole King and James Taylor, transported me back to my youth, but yet kept me so solidly in the present, so did his email. The past and the present. Perhaps I have lived my past more fully than I thought. Maybe there is less to regret than I think. I was fully in my life, experiencing it, not planning it or anticipating it or waiting for it. Perhaps that is the sense that I need to recover; not (necessarily) the silliness of walking across a bridge in a blizzard, but of committing to the preciousness of each moment—and of sharing and creating joy.

* * *

Update on the six-week relationship: It did not last past that marker.

May 16, 2010

In five days we will be without my father for five months.

In two days my older daughter will be 19. (She just found out that she got into the college of her choice—and with a substantial scholarship!)

Bitter sweet.

On this day I have been moved to write again.

Was I silent because I needed to stay in place long enough to be comforted by the stillness?

Was I silent because I could find no path to take?

Was I silent because sometimes silence shows more movement than movement itself?

I’m not sure what I will write about, but that’s okay—that’s what I want. I have no agenda or mission. I feel liberated. I am liberated.

I will be as the peonies that I love in full bloom: bold, open and layered.

Where's My Coffee?

It seems that break-time has descended upon me. As in take a break from writing the blog. Although it seems more that writing has taken a break from me because I have become writingless. In the past few weeks no thoughts or ideas have germinated, and certainly none have grown. I am simply striding along. Yes, I have become a strider. A friend told me that she thinks it has to do with my father’s recent death, and she is probably right. But beyond that, or because of that, of late life has come to feel depthless. Or is it that peaks of happiness seem so remote? Yes, I am to make my own happiness. Yes, I am to make my own adventures and successes and joys. But how do you go about doing that when you have no vitality except in a corner of your mind that is more a reminder of the kernel of self gone by than a piece of current passion?

There are no excuses and no places to hide. There are no battles to be had and survived. There is the ebb and flow. There is just me.

Lately I stay up way past my 9 o’clock bedtime because too often I regret the passage of another day that is simply a notch on a wall and not an experience.

Now I am tired because the end of the day, the end of the weekend, has come and with it no anticipation of relief through sleep. No relief. Just more of the same monotony of experience and thought, and that is so trying and tiring. But how can I make myself push past who I am in order to be someone who bursts forth with excitement? A slump. Perhaps. Or is it a new place? In the happy, happy way we are supposed to think I am supposed to think that this is some plateau before I reach up, up, up to a higher level of fulfillment and satisfaction. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels that I have reached a treadmill quality of life with no buttons to push to change pace or direction.

I didn’t think I had it in me to get this far. I thought that I would only get a sentence or two out, like a “Back in Five Minutes” sign. Does that mean that I am not as blank as I thought? Or does it mean that I am always self aware, even as I seep down, depleted? I don’t want to fight this quietness that is calling for control; I will respect it.

Back when…

What I Learned this Thanksgiving

This year, as in the past four years, I went to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with my brother and his wife’s family. It has become a wonderful opportunity for me to become a part of her family and for her family to become my family, as well as to meet up with my New York friends.

In past years the sympathy factor has been in my direction because I was still in the throes of the bitterness of my life/divorce. But now I have been in my own lovely apartment for six months, and the most visible remnant of the bitter divorce is the court case that's coming up in a week and a half (I haven’t given up on getting from him the $14,000 he owes me), all of which means that I am basically on par with everyone else in the “dealing with life” aspect of things. Which brings me to what I have uncovered or acknowledged: that we are all simply dealing with life. It doesn’t seem that we are enjoying it, rather we are simply handling the things that keep coming at us and we just keep going at it. I wonder, then, if we need to adjust our expectations so that the “dealing with” becomes less of an intrusion into what should be our unending happiness and instead we should understand that life as it’s lived is not just an intrusion but life itself. Would we feel better about our lives and ourselves if we expected the complications and not the beaches?

Most of those gathered round the table are in our forties and fifties, and we are all in the midst of lives that we have found to be ours—none of us can claim that this is the life he or she expected when we were the ages that our mostly teenage children are now. None of us was complaining in the “woe is me” way of the world, but we are all dissatisfied or still hoping for better times ahead or at least times that aren’t so full of pains, and exhaustion, and concerns.

Happiness. What is it? Is it sitting around a table passing plates and platters or is it being untouched on a pedestal? Is it sharing words spoken and heard, or unending attention? Is it sharing stories of aches or being free from compassion? I wonder.

I wonder if now that my house is as in order as it’s ever going to be the time has come to reassess what being thankful means.

Thankful. Full of thanks.

Thanksgiving. Giving thanks.

Thanks, not for what could have been or should have been, but for what is. Is that a new, working definition of happiness?

On Being 48

For a long time I would be content at looking at my face and noting that I don’t look my age and then getting on with my day without mulling over the passage of time and its impact on my physical appearance. And since people would always tell me that as well, I succumbed to that illusion for quite a while. But lately I have been noticing how my skin is different than it used to be. I have a few brown spots on my hands, certainly not like anything those my Aunt Helen had that used to make me fear “old,” rather they make me realize that change has come. The skin of my hands looks like ripples on a lake on a fall morning rather than that same lake on a placid summer afternoon.

I look used.

Now that I’m not living in a little room with no shades and therefore changing quickly in the bathroom, I have a bit more time to contemplate the bigger developments that have occurred. While I was never thin, I was never flabby; since my pregnancies I have held my stomach in (supposedly strengthening the stomach muscles) which seemed to work well for quite a long time. But now there’s more stomach and there’s sag. When I put on a sweater for the first time in a long time the other day I noticed that I’m starting to look like those women who have lost their waists—I have become barrelish—and I don’t like it.

I bought a book recommended by a friend, Strong Women Stay Young, and I will start doing the exercises, so I have no intention of going silently into the night but it has certainly been an awakening, this whole body change thing.

Unlike quite a few friends, I have not yet been touched by menopause; on that account I am still young. But I wouldn’t mind the cessation in monthly action, I mean really, I’m not going to discover a need for a baby at 48 so the whole enterprise can just stop. And it’s not as if I need to make sure that I’m not pregnant, because, you know, I know how the baby-making enterprise happens and there’s no fear of a scare or need for a stick to pee on.

And my thighs, my my, I didn’t know that they could get softer than they had been. They have become real has-beens. Yes, all of me looks used.

Other than the body stuff, the word “retirement” has entered my mindset, as in this thought: I have to work at least another twenty years before I can retire. What’s more, the illusions of my twenties and thirties, and even my earlier forties have been exchanged for a look into the interior mirror. Not that that’s bad because as part of the process I have decided that realistic hopefulness is better for me than vague expectations. Maybe I will finally become the woman of action that I never became with those hopes of being discovered merely because of my being here or at least being supported by an accommodating man.

I’m not quite sure why I’m supposed to pretend that this process has not been noticed and try to make it go away, what could possibly be wrong with continuing a process? Maybe it is fall and the beauty of aging leaves captivates me. The budding leaves of spring and the fullness of summer leaves are surely things of beauty, but who would forfeit the confetti of autumn?

601 Posts on the Blog, 601 Posts on the Blog

Yes, there are 601 posts on the blog. And unlike bottles of beer on the wall, these stay, and are even added to. I started blogging in April 2008; the need to express myself was so great then that there were days when I made two or even three posts. Now, here it is four days since my last post. The anguish and frustration which fueled me in the beginning are still there, but transformed into a more manageable self-awareness and understanding. Perhaps, too, I have been transformed from writing the pain, to being a writer of pain--and happiness (occasionally).

I cannot express how thankful I am for those of you who have come by and read my posts, whether you have left comments or not, because it is what makes me realize that I am communicating, that what has seared me is being heard and contemplated, and, perhaps, has helped someone else.

As always, welcome and thank you.  

The Pit of My Stomach

This morning on my drive to my first Teaching of Writing class I was thinking about my next blog post. I knew that I wanted to write about how different I feel now that I have been living in my own apartment since June 12, but I wasn’t really sure in what way I felt different. Sure, I have been smiling more and I don’t get anxious when I drive home, but I wasn’t sure how to pinpoint and explain the difference. People tell me I sound happier, but I can’t really assess that. It’s like when your kids are growing, you don’t notice it until someone comes for a visit and remarks on how much they have grown or developed or matured. So it felt like that. Until 9:10 this morning. Then I knew.

At 9:10, when I was in class, I saw that exman was calling. Then two minutes later, another call. Then again at 9:19. Then a voice mail message. For the next hour until I could hear the message, my stomach was a pit of acid, a tightness clenching and churning within. And I could feel my face sag and my shoulders droop. That’s what I had been missing. No, not missing because that would imply that I longed for something, no, that is what I had been living without. That is what my life had been cleared of. The minefield that had been my life was cleared. I didn’t have to walk clenched, worried about the next explosion or in fear that no matter what I did, he was going to explode.

Then, when I listened to his message a classmate turned to me and asked, “Are you alright?” because I could not suppress the anguished groan that escaped when I heard his voice and heard what he had to say. There was no curse, there was no insult, it was just his being mean, dictating a custody issue, but it was, as always, him playing to some imaginary courtroom with judge in full regalia. And he stated his name in full for better affect, I guess, for the judge; if he hadn't said it in such a venomous tone, it might have been funny.

A minefield. Yes, surely that’s what I had been living in. But that fist in my stomach, that’s what I have not had, that’s what’s different, that’s the tangible change that I am aware of.

I’m glad it came today, because now I am aware of how I have physically changed, and how I had been physically altered. It was so startling, so obvious: the call, then the tightness. Now I know what to fight, what to not let happen to me again, or at least not let stay with me until I forget how it feels to be normal, to be without a fist within while walking in the middle of a minefield.

How do I feel? I feel calm. Peaceful.

Dissolution of a Marriage

I’m trying to come up with some lessons learned to share, other than not to marry a psychopath, but I’m not coming up with anything. There’s just too much of so much to distill into a list of do’s and don’ts.

In 1985 I couldn’t have foreseen that I was marrying a psychopath. In 1985 I couldn’t have foreseen that the man who was full of promise would accuse me of stealing plastic containers and insult a receptionist at my lawyer’s law firm, and become a virtual joke through his capacity to be evil and petty. In 1985 maybe I did see a glint of “my tribe before all others” but then I thought that it meant that he would protect me and not that he would try to take from me whatever he could. How can you convey the pain of the wrong decision, or the pain of “people change,” or the pain of “no longer have common goals and interests”?

I did not go through this “for a reason” nor did it make me a “better person.” I went through this because it happened, because it is my life, as others live their lives. There is no higher purpose to pain, as there is none to pleasure, it is what it is. And no, I have not become cold and hard, this is the way I have been, taking life into myself and trying to live it without bestowing it with otherworldly qualities.

Rather than being elated in the last few days, I have been tired and bothered by an intermittent headache. Last night I went to bed at 7:30 (mainly because I had two beers because I didn’t want to think, and the beer made me tired), but when I woke up at 10:30 I didn’t get out of bed (except to go to the bathroom numerous times). I just lay there listening to the cars on the highway not far away and music on the radio. I was not really thinking, I was just there, but I wouldn’t call this my time to meditate. Or maybe I could. Maybe I’m going through an invisible wall that divides between the tunnel of “where I have been” to the path (surely not another tunnel) to “where I am going.” Or maybe I am simply tired of life as it’s been lived and now that it is over my body can finally take a break from holding me up.

This stillness bothers me, but I don’t want to fight it. I should probably start going out and doing things, but I find the inertia calming. What is it that I want now that I have gotten the chance to get it?

• I want to do new things.
• I want to be comfortable with who I am.
• I want to be calmer.
• I want to be less guarded.
• I want to touch other people’s lives in a positive way.
• I want to find the balance of motherhood to a teen who is just starting high school and a teen who is on her own.
• I want to be loved.
• I want to love.
• I want to create happiness.
• I want to share.
• I’d also like world peace, afterall my graduate studies were in how to prevent and stop conflicts, so why not.

The Symbolism of a Frozen Pizza

On my way back to the house, I stopped at a supermarket to get a frozen pizza for dinner and some other things for the next few days. In the same shopping center I stopped at Starbuck’s to get a Java chip frappuchino for my at-home daughter. Doesn’t sound like anything special, but to me it was smile-inducing because these stores are in my new shopping center, as in the shopping center near my new apartment—a home. I practically skipped out of the store, and I surely smiled at far too many people inside.

Oh, the joy to walk down aisles that are new to me. To be in a place that is mine, that represents where I am going and not where I have been. So many things encompass a life, there are so many things that can bring happiness and sadness, surely supermarket shopping is not one of them. But what could be better than to feel freedom, wherever it may occur, because that’s what I felt being there, in a new place that I have envisioned for years. Well, not quite the supermarket, but in a new neighborhood of my own—of being on my own.

Now I am back in the house and his loud steps are right above my head, muffling my thoughts. And I can hear that he has turned the water on. And again his loud steps, even with the carpeting. But this invasion into my thoughts will be over soon, so very soon. Tomorrow the movers are coming to move my things and younger daughter’s things to our new home and then on weekends until the closing I will be there with younger daughter, and then, on the same day that the school year ends, so should my association with this house and the day-to-day “living” in the same place as this man.

In the midst of my joy, though, I spoke with my mother who told me that a second-cousin is getting divorced. She has a restraining order against her husband. He has worked on and off, mostly off, for years. And he apparently has a drinking-various-things problem. So while I am about to step out of the tunnel, unfortunately I see someone else in the midst of her tunnel, with it getting farther and farther away from a light source. How, why, how, why does this happen to so many of us? Why are so many of us unhappy in our marriages? How is it that no matter how smart and self-aware we are, we find ourselves trapped in what had been love? Who is to blame? What is to blame?

I might be stepping out of my tunnel, but my tunnel-vision will remain with me to some extent because I never want to find myself in a tunnel again. As long as I remember what it has been like, I’m hoping I’ll be able to better direct my path.  And as long as someone else finds herself in her own dim tunnel, I hope I can offer some degree of solace, even if it is just out into the ether.

Swallow away my fears

If I swallow deeply, maybe I can swallow away my fears.

If I sigh fully, maybe I can sigh away my anxieties.

If I stare intently, maybe I can stare away the things I don't want to see.

If I scream loudly, maybe I can scream away my hatreds.

If I shudder strongly, maybe I can shudder away my discontents.

And if I smile purely, maybe I can smile in happiness.

Blogging Thought Bubble

It finally came to me the other day why I have not wanted to blog lately, neither read nor write. It’s that blogging is a conversation, an on-going conversation at that, and since I am still at my core an introvert, a writer, this constant discussion is counter to what I usually do, or have done. It’s an illusion, this blogging, you think you’re writing, but you’re really conversing. The burnt-out feeling that I had was from too much interaction, not keeping things in to stir and settle, and not giving myself time to observe without formulating reflections. Sure, I’m writing but at a certain point, especially lately, posts have taken on a more conversational tone than a reflective one, and that is what I think has triggered my discomfort.

Perhaps I started writing for an audience and not myself. No, that’s not quite what I mean. Maybe I have been writing to write as opposed to writing to develop thoughts—in myself and the reader. Yes, I think that is what I am thinking. I have not been giving myself time to not write, to have writer’s block (I cannot believe that I am saying this), which perhaps is what I need every once in a while to do some assessing, or at least to let my thoughts catch up to my keyboard. Not that I have any intention of stopping to write, it is, after all, what I have wanted to do since I was 18 when I realized that I don’t have to just read books, I can write them too, but maybe I need to regain that distance from the writing to the reading that enables more intensity—for both the writer and the reader.

Of late I have read too many posts that really are like phone conversations with one’s friends about the kids and the spouse and the in-laws and work and trip plans and diets and and and. But that is not what I want to do—or read (I am setting myself up for desertion here), I really want to write from my depths as I have done for most of the past year (yes, yesterday was my blogiversary) and so I need to release this blogging-discussion bug that seems to have invaded me. I need to get back to writing as an expression of self and understanding of the world, and not just because it's my turn to talk.   

A Spring-Break Break

On Tuesday morning I will be flying to California with older daughter to check out the university that she plans to attend. During that time I will not take my laptop with me because I want to take a break from my routine. A routine that encompasses checking my email too many times an hour, and reading too many articles and blogs that often end up making me feel like I have filled my time but not used it. Not taking the laptop is symbolic of my desire to assess what I want out of my life, see what it is that I am doing that is preventing me, see what I do that is helping me, and come up with more ways and things to do that will make me feel more content and purposeful, and maybe even happy.  

During this time I will try to take a break from thinking about:

THIS BLOG and how it has not met my expectations. I had hoped to be discovered by an agent or editor who would offer me a book deal for my book (Get Your Words Off Me) or a new book, or a job (paying even) as a columnist. I had hoped, too, that I would be a success—according to the numbers. While I have not met any of those goals, I have met others, but still there is a very strong sense of failure. And to counter that I need to reassess what it is that I want to do with this blog and with my writing. By writing I mean “meaning of my life,” because for me that is what writing is: it distills me, it stills me, it defines me to myself. I need to think, too, of other ways to define myself.

In two weeks I will have reached my one year blogiversary. Much has been achieved in this year of which I am quite proud. My writing has improved; even though I still use too many commas, I think that I have depth, style, interest and relevance. I have finally managed to write funny, to reflect a key part of myself. I have written almost every day on a range of subjects; I did not have trouble finding what to write about. I have had insights from cherished readers and much-needed comfort, too. I have come to believe that I am a writer, and not just say that I want to be a writer or envision myself as a writer. But where to go from here? Do I stay here? Do I challenge myself with writing something longer and more developed that could find itself to a bookstore? Of course, the best thing about the blog was that it wasn’t daunting, it was fun to sit down for a couple of hours writing a post (alternating, of course, with watching tv, doing dishes, cooking, munching and supervising my daughters) so that I never felt that I was facing the almighty blank page. Okay, enough thinking about this here, I need something to do this week. 

MEN especially those who don’t respond to my emails and/or my picture. I need to just take a break from being concerned about why someone does not like me and just forget about it. I need to take a breather from worrying about people who I don’t know and who don’t want to get to know me. Talk about a waste of time and an emotional drain.

WORK, or the frustrations of classroom management and my “brusque” personality, and focus instead on what I like about teaching and maybe come up with new ways to interest myself in what I am doing and my students in what I am teaching.

THE HOUSE and how it has not sold in two years. I have done what I could do, the past is past, now I need to charge forward with the new lawyer to get the house sold and get me and my daughters out of this ridiculous situation. But I will neither think of the past nor the present, I will try to restrict my mind to future-thinking. 

ex-husband. Enough said.

What I will think about as I walk along the Pacific Ocean are the people I have met through my blog and your blogs, and how much that has meant to me in the past year. In fact, I will be having dinner with a blogging friend and her family on my trip. Between having bonding time with older daughter who has, of late, come to be respectful and kind to me; trying to figure out our way around LA (even with a GPS system in the car, something I have never used before); trying to plead our case to the financial aid people; and deciding where to go amongst all the choices; I will be will be working on my vision of myself and for myself.

(A Minute to Myself questions will be appearing in its regular every other day schedule during this break.)

I Have Nothing to Wear: Jewelry Department

There may be toxic assets out there poisoning the financial system, but I have toxic assets of my own that are bothering my system. Those poisonous assets would be my jewelry. It’s not as if I have a lot, but most of what I have has been tainted because they were bought with exman. No matter how beautiful something is, or how much it might suit what I am wearing, there is just no way that I am going to put on anything from our time together. Even if I didn’t pick it out with him... wait... no, there is no jewelry from that time that we didn’t pick out together. A sign. Yet another sign. Or is it a sign that we never had much money? Or that I didn’t spend money on myself?

The one piece that I really love is a diamond ring that we bought. It was after he had been a lawyer for about a year. It was a beautiful ring with ruby baguettes on the side of a round diamond. We loved the ring but couldn’t afford it with the diamond so we bought it with a zircon. A few years later he surprised me by buying a real diamond from a friend of his. (For all those not in the know, there is a very big diamond exchange in Tel Aviv.) That is a loved piece of jewelry. I think that I might even wear it in the future, when I am out of this house and the heat of hurt.

The few necklaces and bracelets and earrings that I have are history. I don’t want to recall the trip to the village in the north or the birthday or anything like that. Those assets shall be saved for the girls. The horrible platinum and diamond ring that he gave me for my 40th birthday I am still deciding what to do with. This ring is symbolic of the turn from my compliance to my non-compliance. This is a man, shocker here, who was never satisfied with a gift. (Did I tell you about the time I got him kayak lessons only for him to ALMOST drown when he overturned his kayak and got stuck in it? No comment.) So when I told him that I didn’t really like the ring—as he had done countless times in words or actions to countless gifts from countless people—he almost lost it. Lost it in the sense that he was so hurt, hurt in his big little ego. I told him I would reconsider. In the end, I said, yes, it is lovely and I will keep it. That was the second-to-last time I bent to accommodate him—wanting to accommodate him. (The last time was when we went to marriage counseling because I was already too broken in the marriage, I knew that it could not work, but I did it hoping to ease him into the reality of divorce.) Maybe I’ll sell it and donate the proceeds to a woman’s shelter.

Over the years since the divorce I have gotten some small things for myself, but nothing that became a layer over the old stuff. So when my temple announced that it was having its second annual arts and crafts fair with artists from Israel I knew that that was where I could find a necklace that would leapfrog past the old necklaces. And so, on a Sunday a few weeks ago I searched for a necklace that would be my Israeli necklace that would connect me back to Israel but without exman’s shadow.

I bought a silver necklace with pearls, clear beads, and a silver pendant. It is now the necklace that I can finger as part of my fidgeting repertoire. The pendant has a habit of twirling around, and I now have the habit of touching it to see if it is in place. I have a necklace now with which I interact reminding me, perhaps, that things and people need to be attended to and not taken for granted. Most importantly, oneself.

At the Diner

On Wednesday afternoon I had an interview that was required for a teaching of writing class that I hope to take for four weeks this summer. I think it went well since the director told me at the end of my individual interview (most of the interview was with four other teachers) that he would like me to take the class, he then proceeded to tell me that my school district doesn’t foot the entire bill. Well, there goes more of the lovely tax refund that I already received because I filed early.

After the interview I was not ready to go home. I wasn’t ready to leave behind the public persona, the respected colleague and professional, the woman who made people laugh and say, “Yes, I see what you’re saying,” and the woman who seemed so confident and smart, full of ideas and, yes, in control.

I didn’t want to go to the House of Bitters so I decided to eat out, at a diner. I love eating at diners; I think this stems from being a New Yorker and the fact that I eat out often by myself and in a diner I feel fine with my book and my “One, please” answer to the “How many?” question. I was quite pleased when I remembered that there was a diner nearby, so I went there.

When I pulled into the parking lot I watched as a mother and daughter got into an SUV with Pennsylvania license plates. It was at that moment that I remembered that this was the first place we ate in as a family when we moved to Virginia. We had just driven down from New York City and we were all grumpy and tired; we didn’t recognize any restaurant chains, so the word “diner” sufficed for us.

Now I went in alone and was seated in a mini booth. After giving my order I looked across the room and saw a young couple bow their heads together and say grace. Then a much, much older couple came in. The husband bantered with the waiter; it was a diner so he assumed the waiter spoke Greek. The wife laughed as her husband recounted the scene to her right after it happened, with her there, as if she hadn't been there. And the way they spoke, as if in roles, I thought that they must have been doing this same thing for decades.

Across the room was a group of friends. One woman was the loud conversation hog. When she wasn’t talking she wasn’t listening and she was jiggling her leg. I thought that she would probably be one of my co-teacher’s students and I would probably be telling to be quiet all the time. And there was the woman talking on the phone very loudly about the purchase of a French-door refrigerator and its placement in her kitchen. I told myself that I shouldn’t be more annoyed at how loud she was just because she was on a cellphone and not in a live conversation, but that was hard to do.

While I ate I read a special Valentine’s issue of the Washington Post Magazine with short stories that I had in my pocketbook for a while. The story that brought me in was about a couple that had split up after their daughter died in Thailand on her wanderlust trip; I think it was called “10,000 Steps.” Of course, since it was the Valentine’s issue the couple got back together in the end. But before the re-coupling, the woman decided that she needed to do something to get out of her funk—so she decided to walk. The 10,000 steps came from her reading about pilgrimages people take to reach different temples in Thailand. At the end of the story she finally takes a walk that is 10,000 steps and she arrives at the playground at the school her daughter had attended and there is her husband. The thought bubble that popped into my head at that point was that the pretty symmetry of stories does not have their corresponding symmetry in life.

Then I realized that I was living the symmetry. There must have been a reason for me to be back at that restaurant with that thought in my head. Almost nine years ago I was starting something new with my family. Now, now I am starting something new on my own—the class (if I get in) or what I will do in its stead, because I know that I will do something new this summer (because I need it for me, and for my license renewal). Is the meaning then that there are new and exciting things for me to do and be involved in, and that they are not just in the past? Is the meaning that my life is a series of short stories and not a novel?

The next time that I go to that restaurant I should remember when I was last there; it would have been when I was by myself, living and embellishing my life through the lives of others and my own.

Israel Story: Making Aliya (Moving to Israel)

A few weeks after I graduated from college at twenty, unable to think of what I wanted to do with my English degree and my desire to write but not actually doing any writing, and unable to wear one of those padded suits and string ties that were de rigor for professional women in those days, I took off for my version of a Grand Tour. I lived on a kibbutz in Israel for six months and then travelled in England, Scotland and Ireland for a month before returning to New York.

It was in a college dorm in London where the shape of my life was to find form. As I took a bottle of juice out of the sink which I had transformed into a refrigerator by filling it with cold water, the following thought bubble entered my head: “If I am not going to live near my family [I always knew I would live someplace other than where I grew up], then I am going to live someplace where my living there gives meaning to my life.” And with that my decision to move to Israel came into being.

What’s especially interesting is that my being the dunce in Hebrew classes when I was growing up did not sway me from this decision. For years of twice-a-week Hebrew school classes I was able to retain the ability to read five letters and two words: abba, father, and beit, house. I had friends who aced the aleph-bet, and who had gone on trips to Israel in a kind of perhaps-preparation for moving there if they so desired and if their parents so desired for them, but me, no preparation.

The only reason why I even went on the six-month trip there was because I was too scared and nervous to go to Europe on my own, and this would give me six months without worrying about where to sleep and where to go. I figured that I would find someone to travel with on the kibbutz, or, if I was lucky, someone from Australia with whom I could live back in Australia. (Every since I saw the movie Walkabout I thought that Australia would become my home territory.)

So there I was, at 21 deciding to become a citizen of a country I barely knew and where I didn’t know anybody beyond the acquaintance level. But I did know that I was pushing my life past the “me” expectations that were bogging me down. I was afraid of losing myself in a life devoted to acquisitions and days filled with inconsequential actions and thoughts, I yearned for meaning. Unable to figure out how to create the meaning myself, I did the next best thing and boarded a plane. I found meaning in every word uttered in an ancient language that created a bond going back millennia and in every path traversed that had been the site of defeats and celebrations still remembered. I created myself in a place that comforted me as much as it distressed me.

Growing up in New York City was wonderful, but the experience of living in Israel was different. It really did force me out of myself and my interests (which New York certainly doesn’t do, if anything, it forces you deeper into yourself), and made me see life as a community activity, or rather life as requiring community.
Maybe this is what people experience when they move to their family’s “old country.” They become aware of a duality: self and continuity. This is surely what I needed, and once again long for. But now, now that I am back in the states I don’t expect to act on my wanderlust again, I need to find a way to bring that feeling into my life—and my daughters’.

It’s not just in the foods or the holidays; it’s in a sense of self that is unmasked. Maybe that’s it, being clear that who you are is not just you, it is you as the latest version of those who have come before and who have unwittingly participated in forming you. It is seeing the self as a variation, not a unique model, that brings comfort and the ability to truly create, or to create truly.

I Am Woman, Watch Me Shovel!

Wednesday was an official snow day, that is a day off without having to take a day off.

In the middle of taking an early morning walk (I couldn't go back to sleep after hearing the words: "school is cancelled today" at five am) I realized that none of the men at the end of my little private road were going to do anything about the snow and ice that covered our road that does not get plowed since it is a private road. Usually the neighbor takes out his snow blower and does his driveway and our driveway and the whole road—up the hill—to the neighborhood road. (The distance must be about the length of two football fields.) And since I have had it waiting for people to do things that might benefit me, I decided to just shovel it myself. I had no intention of having my car being stuck in the garage another day, even if tomorrow ended up being another snow day.

And so, out came the shovel, and out went my non-conditioned body to—over the course of about five hours with significant breaks when I felt I should not risk a heart attack to make a point, take a stand, and do what needs to be done with help from no one—shovel two tracks up the hill for the tires of my car.

I will refrain from repeating the utterance that came to mind when exman drove up the road that I had just cleared after much toil. But after that "comment" I repeated to myself that I had cleared the road for myself and that’s what counts, not that it ended up benefitting him. 

When I finished I drove my car through the beautifully cleared path up the hill and parked it on the side of the neighborhood road that gets far more traffic than my road with its four houses, two at the bottom of the hill, one in the middle with the retired couple for whom I retrieved their paper this morning because it was too slippery for the man of the house to drive his car up to the mailbox, and the couple towards the top who have never so much as shoveled or de-iced a centimeter of common road, even when the part in front of their drive was the iciest part of the road. And exman, once a leech always a leech. I don't know why neighbor man or his son did nothing, but that is not my concern--I am.

It feels good to have been outside, to have one-upped exercise because I moved my body for a purpose, and to have accomplished something that I thought would be too big a task for me to accomplish alone. Give a girl a shovel and I'll show you a clear path.