Untethered

My office is moving to a new location.  So we all packed our stuff Thursday night and worked from home Friday—on Monday morning we’ll show up at our new home ten miles away and settle in.  I had often envisioned the scenarios in which I might pack up my little cardboard box with the photographs, mementos, plaques, coffee cups and pathetic spider plant that has somehow managed to stay alive all this time, not due to my own benign neglect but rather due to the efforts of our admin who has a kind heart.  The scenarios I usually imagined were of the pink slip and the take this job and shove it variety.  But in the end I packed my box in a much less dramatic exit, simply to move to a new town.

Still, it brought back some memories of the time I was laid off in November 1989, when I packed my little box in a shocked daze when I was booted out of my high tech job after 9 years.  Back then I hadn’t yet learned the signs and portents of impending layoff and so even though we’d had multiple painful rounds at my company and co-workers were dropping like flies all around me, I was still pretty stunned when it finally happened to me.  I was in good company—a large crowd of us headed over to the Outback Saloon and drank heavily, then I drove myself home, weeping all the way.  It was almost Christmas time, I was the sole support for my little family which consisted of one Mr. Mom and two kids aged 1 and 3, and I was driving home bearing the holiday tidings that I was out of work.

In the days that followed I made looking for work my job—spending 8 or more hours a day networking, fine-tuning various versions of my resume, writing cover letters, poring over want ads (we had want ads then—which were published in the newspaper), going to support group meetings, making cold calls, worrying.  Each morning I would walk the kids over to the pre-school a few blocks away and linger for the excellent coffee brewed by Laurie the pre-school teacher, delaying as long as possible the time when I would have to hunker down for the day to bang my head against the wall of unemployment.  One morning Laurie gently informed me that she had a job teaching pre-school and that it was really not okay for me to hang out trying to have conversation and cadging coffee refills while she was trying to teach the kids their colors and shapes.

After that cruel but necessary rejection I went straight to it at my computer each morning, doing everything in my imagination and power to find work, striving to quell my rising panic and endless fears:  we wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage we would end up penniless in the street my children would be dressed in rags we would wait in soup lines for our supper we would end up sleeping in the car.

After about 7 weeks, just as the severance was drying up like a Colorado creek in August and the paltry unemployment benefits were about to kick in, I was lucky enough to land an unadvertised job through a connection, and oh what a gigantic relief that was.  I remember those days often when I hear about the unemployment rates now, and I’m filled with a deep empathy for all those who are desperately seeking work.  Here’s hoping the economy turns around soon.  Meanwhile I am so lucky to remain employed, and so grateful.

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain

One of the prime goals of parenting is to become utterly dispensable—to end up with kids who are independent and confident and who fearlessly question authority, including yours.  And an inevitable step on this path involves having your own kids realize your utter fallibility---the terrible truth that you are sometimes (may chance oftimes) dead wrong.

I’ve been thinking again (with love) about my own father, a strong personality and a man who did not easily admit error.  When he got an idea in his head it was almost impossible to change his thinking.  Even in my thirties I still avoided crossing him and put up with various eccentric and ill-advised behaviors from him rather than take that one giant step.

 

I’ve also been thinking about my ongoing battle with the voice in my head that relentlessly reminds me I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m an impostor, a failure, yada yada yada.  I recall the day when I proudly told my father I’d been promoted to director at work.  His initial reaction was undisguised disbelief.  He could not accept that I had managed to get this promotion or that I would be able to do the job without failing.

Now, many years later, it occurs to me that the voice in my head questioning the validity of every move I make is my father’s voice:  The Great and Powerful Oz.  And the terrible truth is that there was only a man behind the curtain, a man who was sometimes dead wrong himself, and man who was insecure in his own life and work, damaged by his own father’s disappointments and held back also by the culture of his time which had no room for the idea of a woman like me rising to such a role.

It’s a shock for a kid to finally admit that the parents are human.  Much as it was a shock for Dorothy and her companions to discover that the Wizard of Oz was not so great and powerful after all and they were going to have to find their own solutions to their various problems.  Here's hoping I applied some of what I learned to my own parenting role and to some decent degree restrained myself from excessive hovering, questioning, doubting and dominating.  I hope I’m doing a good job of letting my kids go, letting them rise to their individual occasions, allowing them to seize their autonomy and independence sooner rather than later.  We're not in Kansas anymore.

Been There, Shrunk That

At M’s recommendation I read an article in the NYT Sunday magazine called “My Life in Therapy” by Daphne Merkin, about one woman’s 40-year epic with psychotherapy—all her hopes for how it would fill the terrible holes in her psyche and finally give her the love and attention she never got enough of from parents and lovers. She describes a sometimes amusing, sometimes harrowing sampling of a wide range of therapies from age 10, including classic Freudian psychoanalysis which I frankly have no earthly use for since I’ve always believed it was demeaning and disrespectful to women (and probably men as well) and seemed more likely to keep people stuck in the past focusing on the inevitable imperfections of their childhoods.

My own experiences with therapy have been numerous. I too was taken to see a woman who was probably a psychiatrist when I was around 10 years old and had suddenly decided I hated school when previously I had loved it. The root cause for this was that I was having difficulties with arithmetic, and this was the first time in my brief school career that I had found anything in the classroom remotely difficult. However, I didn’t talk about this during my session. Instead, I told the attentive white-haired lady about the recurring dream I was having in which I was arguing with a talking skull, and how I had eventually learned in the dream to wake myself up by pushing the skull away with my hand and uttering a “bad word.”

“What was this bad word?” asked the psychiatrist.

“I can’t say it out loud.”

“You can say anything in here.”

“Shut up,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she responded with surprise, since up to this point I had been a very good little girl in the session.

“Shut up was the bad word—we’re not allowed to say ‘shut up’ at our house.” And indeed we weren’t—it was literally considered an unacceptable word in our household.

Later in my 20s and 30s I struggled with shifting moods and depression, and a few severe cases of a broken heart along with a profound fear of failing at school and later at work. I drifted from one therapist to another with little or no progress in my estimation. It was only the year after my mother died, in 1999, that I was forced by a vicious darkness of the soul to do real work in therapy in order to survive that grief and the several more that followed. My therapist then told me that there was no way out but through…and introduced me to the cognitive behavioral therapy. And from that point, I did find a few good therapists who helped me make some progress; I also began reading a large number of books on my own, centered around letting go of rumination about past and worry about future and focusing on living more in the present. And also paying more attention to that blathering negative voice in my head and how to step outside its influence and talk back to it (even telling it to “shut up” on occasion).

Can therapy be an addiction? This is suggested in Merkin’s article and it likely can be, but for me it was more like a journey that simply took a long time and that in the end was productive. It just takes time and experience to finally wake up and see through the fog to notice what’s really going on and how much power you hold in the search for serenity.

Daphne concludes the article with: “Therapy gave me a place to say things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world—and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts.” I agree—in other words, it helped me find my voice.

She also says therapy “provided a space for interior examination, an education in disillusioned realism that existed nowhere else in this cacophonous, frantic planet.” Agreed again—in other words, it helped me wake up.

What about your experiences with therapy good or bad?

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life is but a Dream

Ever drifting down the stream--

Lingering in the golden gleam--

Life, what is it but a dream?                    

                        Lewis Carroll

I’m plowing through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series this summer and just finished book four, “Wizards and Glass.”  A key theme and phrase in these books is “there are other worlds than these,” and there are many instances in the series where characters move in and out of worlds and times in a dreamlike fashion where death is not an absolute and people are never quite who they at first appear to be.  Also, I recently saw Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a thief who can move in and out of his own and others’ dreams—but when can he be absolutely sure he’s not dreaming?

In both of the worlds created by these fantasies a person to some degree is able to choose his dream.  In the Dark Tower, Roland the Gunslinger seizes  opportunities to move between worlds (or are they dreams after all?) in his obsessive search for the Tower.  In “Inception,” DiCaprio’s Cobb character moves between dream worlds as easily as pressing a floor button in an elevator, choosing to invade the dreams of others and even plant ideas in those dreams with dangerous and tragic results.  In the end he must choose to return from a dream he’s having trouble letting go of but which he knows is destroying him.  And in the end, is his chosen world just another dream, albeit a happier one?

It seems our experience of life is defined by our perception of it, so we can choose our dream—but it’s so damn hard to keep that in mind (as is the case when you are actually dreaming, especially during a nightmare).  It’s difficult to be mindful that we have far more space and choice than we perceive, and that we can choose to swim up through the murky water toward the surface and the light rather than succumb to the illusion we’re drowning. 

The other thing it’s hard to keep in mind is that everybody else is in their own dream, in various states of unconsciousness or wakefulness, and that their dreams are not yours, or vice versa. 

Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface.  If we’re not awake enough, we box ourselves and other people in with assumptions, “truths,” “limitations” that are not real.  If only we could have a way to jog the memory like Cobb does in “Inception”--to spin the little top to help us see what is real.  On the other hand, if we’re happy and at peace, isn’t that all the real we need?

Are Men Less Adaptable?

M and I read and had much discussion about an article recently in the Atlantic called “The End of Men” by Hanna Roslin. It was about how American women (and actually women in other countries as well to some degree) have actually become the dominant gender in our culture in many ways. For example, more women are now managers in the US (although I can attest this is still not true in high tech). Moreover, countries who allow women to participate in business are measurably more successful financially than those who do not. More women than men are earning college degrees now; in fact, some private schools are so concerned about keeping the gender balance on campus that they’re applying a form of affirmative action and relaxing certain expectations so as to be able to accept more men.
Women are marrying much later in life and more women in their 20s are questioning the value of long-term relationships with men their age, not seeing these guys showing much readiness to be equal breadwinners. They are making sure they themselves can earn their own way and in many ways saying that they don’t need men to have happy, fulfilled lives.

I’ve lived most of my life in what used to be called a “role reversal”—my husband stayed home with the kids and I earned the money to support us all. (When I mention this arrangement to others it is amazing how many men say, “Oh—I always wanted to do that.”) At the time M wanted to write and believed he’d be able to find the time to do that at home and take care of the kids and run the household. Easier said than done, as any stay-at-home parent will confirm, but we were new parents and we didn’t know. I had entered high tech and was making a pretty good salary for that time, more than I’d expected to be making with a BA in English. My hopes to teach English in high school didn’t work out, since jobs in education were scarce back then.

Unlike many “Mr. Moms” I’ve heard about, M took the role very seriously—ran the household, did all the cleaning, planned and cooked all the meals in addition to raising our two children and making sure they got where they needed to go for pre-school, elementary school, piano lessons, softball practice and more in our trusty Dodge Caravan. M and I have always had a very equal relationship and made all our decisions in every area together. It has been a good partnership.

But I’m not sure most men are prepared to do that despite their expressions of interest in it, and I hear that many who have ended up unemployed at home while their wives work have not adapted in such a way as to pick up some of the housework and cooking so that work overall is equally shared. So in that case, the imbalance and unfairness is unacceptable, especially to young women these days who see their way clear to living completely independently of men and having complete freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want, including having children by themselves if they wish.

And if this is starting to happen as the norm it is a huge shift in culture.

Reinforcing this is what I have often observed over the years in my work--that when change and adjustment and adaptation to current conditions on the ground are needed, it is often a core group of women who step in, collaborate, help each other often reaching across organizational boundaries, finding the new path to make it happen.

Many reasons were offered in the article for why men are not the kings of the castle they used to be. Modern businesses call for more social intelligence, more collaboration and communication skills, to balance the competitiveness. Men turn too often to competition first and foremost, and do not seem to draw on the other skills where they would work best. Also, the suggestion is made in the article that men are less adaptive to the constant and inevitable change in business today than women are. More men than women are unemployed these days since some of the hardest hit job categories are primarily male-oriented, construction and manufacturing for example. And when men find themselves booted out of a job that then completely disappears, they seem less able to see the paths to reinvent themselves, to adapt to new careers and learn new skills.

You might think, as a woman, I’m glad to see this. But I’m not. My long-time relationship with M is based on equality, respect, and a refusal to be boxed in by assumptions about what our roles should be. In other words, we have both adapted and continue to adapt to a wide variety of changes and this is why we are still a happy couple. That is not to say we haven’t had our difficulties and had to adjust to major changes (the empty nest is so very empty at times, not to mention the changes that deaths in the family can bring). But we have continued to make it work and learned a lot along the way. I hope my son and daughter both find someone they can share this kind of relationship with. I also want them both to be able to have strong, productive careers that give them satisfaction and the feeling they have accomplished good work.

Meanwhile, gentlemen, please don’t underestimate what women have to offer-- and how about paying us an equal wage for equal work? That would be a good change.

Skullcandy

Last Sunday I decided to venture out and buy a pair of headphones for our home PC so that when I wanted to listen to music or video clips while I’m on the PC in the family room, I can freely do that without having to worry about disturbing M while he’s reading or watching TV.

So we went to Best Buy and got some advice from a patient young man, very tall, very skinny, a huge mass of long, golden brown curls haloing his head. Since I’ve never owned headphones before (I know, hard to believe), I had amusing questions for the young man like, “do you think that little hole in the front of my computer speaker is for earphones? How can I be sure?”)—but he answered all my questions with a bemused look (you can also plug these headphones into the similar little hole you will find in the IPod you have). He warned me that the earphones were quite powerful so I should take care not to blast my ears to kingdom come on the first try.

I wanted something fairly inexpensive since I had no idea what I was doing, but of high quality that would shut out ambient sound pretty well so that I don’t have to hear the Nuggets game in the background when I’m listening to Joni Mitchell. I ended up walking out with the somewhat age-inappropriate earphone brand “Skullcandy”, thoroughly secured in snappy clear and black plastic packaging decorated with ominous looking skulls. The brand name has made me feel slightly more dangerous than I have any business feeling, I think. 

I went home and plugged these headphones into the little hole in the speaker without incident, and then (being careful to keep the volume low at first), tried listening to a song I had recently downloaded to iTunes, Bonnie Rait and John Prine’s version of John’s “Angel from Montgomery.”

Wow. It was wonderful.

Now I understand better why my kids make sure they have music wherever they go, in the current age a possibility when previously it was not.

The music came through beautifully, in all its nuances and glory, and I was left wondering why on earth I had waited so long to treat myself to this “skull candy.” I was so transfixed that an annoyed M had to stand right in front of me waving his arms to get my attention—he’d been trying to talk to me from behind, and I hadn’t heard a thing. In the classic teenage move I lifted up one of the earphones and said, “WHAT??”

Anyway—lesson learned. This was another reinforcement of the importance of treating my brain regularly to new experiences and sensations—great music, books, art, nature, conversation. What else have I been unwittingly starving for? And what are you starving for?

Remember what the dormouse said,
Feed your head. Feed your head. Feed your head.

                        "White Rabbit" - Grace Slick

Finding My Voice

                                                 Maggie Kuhn

  

After a long blog drought it struck me on a hike today that what I wanted to write about was finding my voice.  Have I finally found my voice after these many years, or not?  And what does that really mean?  To me it means speaking the truth out loud, clearly, kindly, rather than “stifling myself” constantly.  I stifle myself because of fear—fear of rejection, of authority, of dismissal, of my own sense of worthlessness.

I think finding my voice is not a one-time achievement but an ongoing quest.  I’ve won some battles in this respect but I’ve not won the war, since I often still have to drag myself kicking and screaming to the point where I’ll speak up even when it is absolutely warranted.  Part of me firmly believes that if I actually spoke my mind clearly, honestly and kindly at every opportunity that there might be such a radical change in my life that it would become unrecognizable.  Often it seems ever so much safer to be satisfied with the sounds of silence (Paul Simon had much to say on this topic).

But more and more I’m noticing physical reactions to my forced silences that might be strong hints that I really must speak out more—reactions like insomnia-producing pain from my jaws due to the clenching and grinding I’m unconsciously doing day and night. 

A wise woman asked me recently if I was singing these days.  I am not—even though the songs and their lyrics were always a source of joy and a way I could express deep ideas and emotions in my life no matter what was going on.  So the other night I got out the songbooks, pulled up a chair on the back porch, and told myself I only had to sing three songs and then I could quit if I wanted.  Of course, I sang many, many more—folks songs, spirituals, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, John Prine.  It felt good.

At work and in my personal life, I’ve often kept my silence rather than be shut down or dismissed.  I think it’s dismissal that’s most painful; it feeds into my thought patterns about losing another person’s love or esteem.  But in my saner moments I know that someone else’s dismissal of me or my ideas is often much more about them than it is about me.
 

When I was young, my father (who I loved dearly) had particularly strong ideas about a child’s behavior.  A child was to be obedient (even though he himself was not in his own childhood, as his stories revealed).  Above all, a child should not “talk back,” but should show respect for her parents.  At times I was chastised for talking back when, in truth, I had no idea that I was guilty of this nefarious and disrespectful deed.  If I did talk back there were usually consequences that to me seemed devastating—mainly "the look" or angry yelling.  I’ve never been able to tolerate being yelled at without becoming incredibly upset about it—and so I’ve developed a variety of techniques for avoiding yelling and conflict of any sort. 

Many of these techniques can be used constructively—diplomacy, fairness, kindness, strong listening skills, excellent verbal skills, empathy.  But in the end it is only with great willpower that I’ve steeled myself over the years to “talk back” to those who have power over me.  I have to overcome a myriad of unpleasant physical reactions, including tears, trembling, a shaky voice, clamminess, hot flashes and a sinking stomach.  Not to mention the catastrophic mental responses like fear that I will lose the love or esteem of the person I’m confronting, questions about how important this issue really is (when weighed against my very survival), questions about whether I am perhaps dead wrong about this particular issue after all, and fear that speaking up at this juncture will irrevocably destroy the relationship and the person I’m confronting will lose respect for me or never speak to me again.  To someone who is not familiar with this kind of conflict avoidance, these fears must seem incredibly neurotic.

The interesting thing is that often when I finally force myself to have a conversation with the person in question I find that they have a perfectly reasonable response, or at least a response that does not result in the end of the world as I know it.  Of course, this isn’t always the case, and sometimes I have battles that leave me the worse for wear or that lead to more trouble for me.  But even then I usually feel as though they were battles worth fighting in the end—words worth saying for my own self respect. One of the first confrontations of this sort I remember daring to have in my life was, not surprisingly, with my father.

I was around 21.  My father had decided he didn’t want to “subsidize” my “shacking up” with M any longer.  I was finishing school and my parents were still paying some of the expenses, although I had a job.  I was living with M (we would not be married until many years later) and we were absolutely in love.  We are still together today, 39 years later.  Despite all my efforts to avoid confrontation on this, it was clear that I had to stand up to my father.  I was shaking so hard I could barely speak, even though it was a hot summer night on the deck looking out on the deep green, firefly-lit Indiana woods.  My mother fluttered around in the background like a firefly herself as the confrontation became more heated.  I had learned many of my confrontation avoidance techniques at my mother’s feet and I realize now she might have feared she would lose me somehow if the confrontation continued.  But I gathered together every inch of courage I had and told my father that if he was suggesting I choose, the choice would not be in his favor, and that I would support myself from now on in order to remove money from the equation.  The consequence:  voices were raised but the world did not end, and over time my father came to respect, trust and love M.

Many confrontations have happened since then—usually with far more angst beforehand than they deserved and with much better outcomes than I had expected.  And so, I have found my voice—I just have to keep finding the courage to use it.

People talking without speaking

People hearing without listening

People writing songs that voices never share

And no one dared

Disturb the sound of silence

                                                Paul Simon

Do you have a story to tell about finding your own voice?