*The following is from 2010, thirteen years ago; I found it recently on a flash-drive I found in a tin in which I keep small but important documents, like my vaccine record for Covid (I was boosted this week). Since writing this, any number of specifics in life and in the world have changed, including the death of the lead singer of Linkin Park, Chester Bennington. Bennington committed suicide in 2017, after a series of physical setbacks, a long struggle with substance abuse, and the darkness that accompanies all of us who were sexually abused as children. As I have dug deeper into yet another local predator uncovered these past several weeks, the sadness, the immensity of the derailment of entire lives due to the selfish acts of adults and even older children (Bennington’s abuser was ‘an older male friend’, my childhood rapist was my sixteen year-old cousin), haunts me, punishes me, keeps me up at night, and I return yet again to the mantras that help me make it through: may the whole world know peace and healing. I am safe, happy, whole, healthy, and I am loved. It helps, but – it’s not always enough. Friends. My friends help keep me hopeful, my friends and the multiple generations of women, and men, who are younger than myself lift me up. I believe that the gens in their teens, twenties, and thirties now are healthier still, by far, saner too, kinder and more loving, than any generation prior. They are the future; they are my hope. Thank you for reading.
‘Lift me up, let me go’ are words from a song I’ve been watching on VH1 lately, by a group I’ve never heard of before, Linkin Park. This is not surprising, my not having heard of them, nor is it clear to me what is being lifted up or who as well as what or who is letting go or what the entire video is all about period (they’re floating through water some of the time or getting heavily splashed although looking at the album cover, I might be mistaking water for fire, hmmmmmm – should I wear my glasses while watching early a.m. TV?) but I have been caught by the tune, which is the point after all, of showing ones music on TV, catching people and inserting your songs in their heads where they can’t, in fact, let go, thus forcing them to buy the album, which I have in turn done. Damn them, damn them!
I don’t get the words, entirely (and the album liner notes are no help, unreadable as they are for the most part) but I like the music. I haven’t watched VH1 or MTV for years; there’s too much irrelevant ‘reality entertainment’ to be found there and way too many commercials for things I don’t want or need, mainly acne meds in the mornings when the music of music television is actually being played. Yet lately I am to be found sitting on my settee, drinking my black as night tea with soy milk regardless of how I long for half and half, yet I am lactose intolerant and, let’s be honest, trying half-heartedly to lose weight. Sometimes I sit there for as much as an hour, even two on a day when I don’t need to be anywhere and can wait for the NUMBER ONE VIDEO IN AMERICA that YOU (no, not I) voted for. They take forever (two hours is a mini-series) merely to count down the top twenty videos of the week; they show plugs for other MTV or VH1 shows and the endlessly repetitive commercials, over and over again during the hour (would you really buy car insurance on line from a company called ‘the General’ whose commercials are clearly made on the super cheap?) until my saturation point is reached and way, way beyond. And yet, there I sit, yearning for music, healing music, distracting music
My father died recently – this year, six, seven months ago – and I have more time on my hands, time that used to be spent taking care of him, his house, his dog, his groceries. For the time being, since the work of clearing and cleaning his house is over as well along with the settling of his estate, I am floating, floundering, flopping, watching Linkin Park and Rhianna and Pink do their thing on the boob tube. I am feeling the space he left, the gaping cavernous space of his non-presence. I am filling it, in the mornings, when I would take him his breakfast and walk his dog, with MTV and VH1. I am digressing back into my thirties, not. And yet, still, sometimes it does feel as though I am.
I feel like a boob, in the non-breast sense. I have trouble completing thoughts and finding the words for a thing I am holding in my hand or for something I saw earlier in the day. Without my dad, in mourning as I now am, my world is so utterly and completely changed, I can almost not function. The summer passed in a blur; I drank a lot of gin and spent as much time as I could near water but my body was worn down and out after 6 months of taking care of a dying man I adored, taking care of his dog, his household, his doctor visits, scheduling his hair cuts to be done at home, his personal effects (OMG please give me the strength to throw away everything I own before I die!), his funeral, his friends, his relatives, his other siblings, and finally his children – my siblings with whom I promised him I would not fight when he was gone, fight over money, over stuff, over the past, the imagined and other hurts, whatever.
Six weeks after his funeral I went to Fire Island for a week break of sorts, leading up to the Saturday wedding of a friend I had introduced to her groom; he was my tenant, a classy, good to the marrow kind of guy; I’d always dreamt of match making, finally getting my wish with their relationship and this celebratory occasion. The heat was intense, too much for pale skinned, thin skinned, still deep in mourning me. I spent the afternoons in the house the bride rented for me and our closest mutual friends reading or napping, sweating and fretting in the stillness of a hot as hell August day, trying to regain my equilibrium, something that eludes me still. I drank too much and ate too much and was uncomfortable in every single cell of my body, filled with emotion I felt I could not freely express in this happiest of times for my dear friends even while I did cry, often and with gusto, given the chance, the privacy or the right reason, another kind friend’s ear. And I know now, at fifty-one, that am an introvert, liking a small world, my world, dreading parties and large social situations, a truth that left me hoping I could get through the weekend gracefully and return to my mourning life, quiet, peaceful and mine, alone.
And I am volatile, one moment happy as a clam, the next down in the dumps or at least contemplating going there. Happy to sad or angry in four seconds or less, less, when I am this discombobulated, this lost. This is my new life; my life without my dad. I cry every single day. I mourn. I grieve. I fumble and stumble when the disorienting fog of loss and mourning swamps and sometimes, not always as I hold it at bay, overtakes me. I keen and wail, keen and wail, mostly when I have turned out the lights and my mind, not distracted by books, movies, TV, begins to wander. I flash suddenly on that day, the day of his death, and what I found, him, my father, dead. I took my time getting to his house, hesitating on the endless round, another long day, of chores that lay ahead, calling him just after seven a.m. to see if a muffin was an acceptable alternative to his usual bagel with butter and a coffee. He did not pick up and I felt a sense of dread and foreboding, eventually deciding that he was okay, just on the toilet or for some other reasonable reason unable to get to the phone, and me, because he was dragging his oxygen tank or having trouble maneuvering it around.
Having left the muffin on the kitchen table, knowing the house was too still and his dog unusually quiet, subdued, I entered further, calling out ‘Dad? Daddy?’ – fearing finding him half-dressed, on the can, not wanting to embarrass both of us although earlier in the course of his last months I had helped him off the toilet, helped him clean himself and pull up his pants; he was embarrassed ‘you shouldn’t have to do this’, but I was not embarrassed or disgusted, only determined to get through this without tears, sad for him, for us, in that tiny room off the hall; love knows little shame in such moments.
And so I went on, that morning in May, deeper into the house, to find my father flat on the floor of the big bathroom, obviously dead, face down and hidden, pants down too, right where he had fallen. I thought I had wanted this moment, to be free of the burden of his illness and care and I did want it, yet I knew nothing, nothing, of what truly lay ahead of me, in that life without my father, my dad, my dear beloved pop.
I screamed my head off. I walked through the house, I returned to the bathroom, I knelt down next to him as best I could, I hugged him as best I could (the room is long and narrow), I rubbed his back, calling him honey and dear, daddy, I cried out over and over daddy, daddy, daddy!, called him sweetie, screamed some more – wailed, keened, screamed, paced, screamed and called my brother, who lives nearby to scream and wail some more. He could not, at first, understand me. He arrived, breathing deeply and unevenly, in distress, and we embraced; he pulled my dad’s pants up while I stood numb in the kitchen; he called the funeral director or did I do that? It is no longer clear. I called hospice while he left to get his wife at her job. I cried more, screamed a little more, walked his dog all the while sobbing, felt the world tilt out of whack, definitely out of my control, as if it ever had been in it, which it hadn’t. These kinds of mornings, these kinds of events, remind us of just how little we are in control and do us a service, hateful, hateful reminder, in so doing.
The Catalyst~ lyrics by Linkin Park
God bless us everyone We’re a broken people living under loaded gun And it can’t be outfought It can’t be outdone It can’t out matched It can’t be outrun No God bless us everyone We’re a broken people living under loaded gun And it can’t be outfought It can’t be outdone It can’t out matched It can’t be outrun No And when I close my eyes tonight To symphonies of blinding light (God bless us everyone We’re a broken people living under loaded gun Oh) Like memories in cold decay Transmissions echoing away Far from the world of you and I Where oceans bleed into the sky God save us everyone, Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns? For the sins of our hand The sins of our tongue The sins of our father The sins of our young No God save us everyone, Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns? For the sins of our hand The sins of our tongue The sins of our father The sins of our young No And when I close my eyes tonight To symphonies of blinding light (God save us everyone, Will we burn inside the fires of a thousand suns? Oh) Like memories in cold decay Transmissions echoing away Far from the world of you and I Where oceans bleed into the sky Like memories in cold decay Transmissions echoing away Far from the world of you and I Where oceans bleed into the sky Lift me up Let me go (x10) God bless us everyone We’re a broken people living under loaded gun And it can’t be outfought Can’t be outdone It can’t out matched It can’t be outrun No God bless us everyone We’re a broken people living under loaded gun And it can’t be outfought Can’t be outdone It can’t out matched It can’t be outrun
*I’ve never read the poetry of Frank O’Hara, but stumbled across this last week, and love love love it, sharing it with you because…love. & yes, the title is Animals.
My BFFs and I are not fuddy duddys, I swear. And, recently, on one of our regular zoom calls, two of the four of us voiced serious skepticism and downright fuddy-duddiness regarding the whole ‘pronoun thing’. As it happened, I had just been reading an excellent book, Good Girls by Hadley Freeman, subtitled A Story and Study of Anorexia, in which I believe she makes a great argument for getting the fuck over ourselves re: pronouns, respecting peoples’ choices (which we should all do regardless,but still, make the argument, GF). Freeman is a journalist and recovering anorexic; she does a deep dive into body dysmorphia, which is on the rise among all children, but which is particularly acute and increasingly prevalent in teen and pre-teen girls. We’ve moved into an age wherein our youth, especially girls, are bombarded on line by body image insanity (advertising, influencers, pornography, air-brushed and filtered photos of everyone on the planet who has access to the web, etc.), and – Freeman extrapolates – are often caught like deer in headlights, frozen in an impossible position at age twelve or thirteen or fourteen: that’s how I’m supposed to be??!! And, as a result, more often than in any other time in our history these young girls are opting to declare themselves non-binary because having seen what’s required to be female (a maze inside a pyramid inside an optical illusion inside an impenetrable tower of insanity), they’re concluding ‘Nope. I won’t, I can’t comply with the (binary) choice before me.’ They are saying, in essence, that they do not want to be “a woman” whatever that is according to the societal norm of the moment, not to mention the pressure within their human families, where all too often female children are pressured to be not only thin but to also model a way of being that is compliant, overtly feminine, and well-behaved: good girls.
This made and makes sense to me. I grew up in a household with an obese mother who hated her body, and with an older sister who was anorexic and bulimic, which I witnessed from age nine until I was twenty-four, all from the standpoint of complete ignorance, but knowing in my gut that something was very wrong. No one knew much about anorexia and bulimia in the 60s and 70s, or the 80s. Diet culture was in full swing, and showed (shows) no sign of abating. Both of these options of how to be a woman were untenable to me, and in my late twenties after almost a decade of therapy, I finally acknowledged that I needed to do some serious work on how badly I felt about being a woman, being born a woman, as well as having been raised in a family with absolutely horrid role models, in a culture (a maze inside a pyramid inside an optical illusion…) in which I was clearly an affront to men and women because I was intelligent, assertive, and female, while also being treated like a piece of meat by nearly every man and a threat to far too many women I encountered from my earliest childhood.
My mother and my sister were both so angry. So was I. Angry, confused, and flummoxed. I gravitated toward my dad because he was charming and funny and not angry, but he also objectified me, and women in our community; he was also addicted to porn. What’s a girl to do, especially a girl who has been sexually assaulted as a child, and who clearly doesn’t fit the conventional mode? How about checking out, in my case not being a ‘they/them’ but by sinking into depression, and being deliberately unconscious about my body and choices for much of my teens and well into my twenties. Both of my sisters were angry, and both acted out in various ways punishing my parents once they had children of their own by withholding their kids from contact at various periods, for years at a time. It seemed to me then and now that acting out as I did during my teen years – by doing shit I thought was perfectly normal because they were (drinking, dating, dancing, staying out late) – was a better choice, and certainly less painful for my poor parents, who like so many in their generation were completely unprepared for the vagaries of their Boomer and Boomer adjacent kids. But. The message I got was that my version of being a female teen was wrong. My sisters were good because they stayed home on the weekends, didn’t play all those sports, didn’t date or had one steady (my little sister), a boy of whom my mother approved because his father was a Doctor. Even my older sister’s anorexia was a good thing, dangerous, maybe, but she was thin, and thin, low energy, mostly silent and complaint (except in that one teeeeeeeny area: food) at a nice round size zero is good, is feminine, is better than big energy, loves boys, messy, loud, athletic Moj.
As women have made huge strides in equity and equality over the last fifty years, so has the backlash hardened to protect and project ‘traditional’, conventional standards and norms regarding everything defining female. Toys are more gendered now than they were fifty years ago; on-line doxing and threats against women are a constant reality of life for women and girls; pornography is ubiquitous; the onslaught of images girls and boys are faced with, both real and faked, is endless. If a percentage of girls want to separate themselves, take a break from the pressure to be whatever the current model of female is, can you blame them? Having read Ms. Freeman’s story of anorexia and drug abuse (they often go hand-in-hand as do anorexia and autism), and having watched my elder sister go through all those years of self-punishment, punishment that continues in a different, less acute form to this day (she is sixty-seven, and is a size zero), I think a little courtesy, flexibility, and open-mindedness and patience regarding pronouns is a helluva lot better for girls, and for us all, while they figure it out, and – I am so hopeful about the younger generations – figure it out they will.
I say often and often that I’m not sure I would’ve survived high school in the internet age. The world is changing, and if our sons and daughters want to embrace a new way of defining themselves, especially given the vital, oft ignored aspect of their mental health at a time when hormones are raging 90mph, isn’t that their job, that of separating from their parents’ generation in new and different way to meet this new and different world? Yes, I believe so. They are us, we are them, and they are ours, after all.
Hell yes – Go, Fricking POLAND, where almost 74% of voters turned out to resoundingly reject the conservative, Catholic Church affiliated, white-nationalist-leaning creeps of the “Law and Justice” Party. Famously anti-woman in their policies (you got the whole Catholic Church leaning, right?) as well as anti-immigration, and anti-humanism, and dangerously open to Putin – although the government did initially respond to the invasion of Ukraine appropriately, and heroically. The concern, however, has been that Poland, which borders Ukraine and Russia-leaning (Russia-dependent?) Belarus , could go the way of Hungary under Orban; that means authoritarianism, including the death of a free press and free exchange of ideas including protests at institutions of all kinds, and the eventual death of democracy itself. Nope. Deep breaths, breaths of relief for the Polish people, women and girls especially. Yay.
Less hopeful or good is the on-going war in Israel-Gaza. A long history of being chopped up by colonial powers, deep-seated hatred, mistrust and pain, and entrenched power brokers who do not want Israel to exist, refusing to accept reality and willing to risk their own citizens in order to – make a point by way of terror? Ditto a refusal to accept the need for a Palestinian state. Ghettoizing an entire people is never going to work in the long or short run. JHFC. President Biden is traveling there as we ‘speak’, and here at home a six-year old American child whose parents happen to be Palestinian was stabbed to death in an anti-Islamic hate crime, with anti-semitic acts having risen by three-hundred percent recently. THREE-HUNDRED PERCENT. Unacceptable.
The average turnout, FYI, in U.S. Presidential elections hovers around 55%. So, kudos to the Polish people. And may we do better, in 2024, and every single election going forward.
May the whole world know peace and healing. May the whole world know peace and healing. May the whole world know peace and healing. And, the latest vote for Speaker of the House – THIRD IN LINE for the PRESIDENCY – will be held at noon. May the whole world never know Jim Jordan as speaker. May the whole world never know Jim Jordan as speaker. May the whole world never know Jim Jordan as speaker. Amen.
Sons’ Day, Daughters’ Day, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day ~ FFS when will it stop, please make it stahhhhp!!
While I am happy to see folks celebrate their progeny, opportunities like the recent week’s sons’ and daughters’ days on Fakebook really pushed me toward my edge. Many, many, maaaaaany of my friends and acquaintances post a near constant stream of photos of their children and grandchildren, including on days that aren’t designated as ‘special’, posting to the point where, when I meet these children in public, I have to stop myself because I think I know them, and vice versa. I don’t know them, and they sure AF don’t know me. It’s weird, disconcerting, and can somebody make it stop, please? Not the assumption of acquaintance I feel – but the oversharing of children on the internet; JHFC, does no one believe in keeping shit private – including the faces and all too often semi or wholly unclothed photos of their children and grands? I cannot even begin to imagine the depth of pain I would feel, at twelve or thirteen, say, to see that my mother or father had shared photos of me almost daily for years, using me for content, however innocently or lovingly done. Ick. Because no matter how sincere the love and desire to share, posting on a daily and even hourly basis nourishes cannibalistic platforms deliberately designed to eat you (metaphorically) by the companies who own them. These companies build their social media platforms to establish and feed an addiction to ‘likes’ and ‘loves’ and comments – to attention, period, platforms from which they harvest your information, your faces, you, your children and grandchildren. They are cannibals. You and your photos are the buffet upon which they feed and enrich themselves. Eat the customer! The damned platforms are free, after all, and we’re hungry.
Okay that’s my rant. My first rant. My other rant, my other point is that more and more people are deciding not to have children circa 2023. More American are living a child-free life on purpose, and this rising demographic is, if they’re like me (one of their elders!), a tad fed up with the dominant culture’s focus on family as the be all and end all of life. It ain’t. And, we’re fed right-the-fuck-up with the hypocrisy of a nation that continually talks big about loving children, prioritizing children and their needs, supporting families, all while failing at every single turn to live up to those claims. Guns are the number one health threat for children in the U.S. as of 2022. We have no federal laws creating a national family leave policy. The U.S. House (deeply dysfunctional) and Senate (sclerotic at best) just refused to renew the child tax credit established during the pandemic, a policy and budgetary choice that lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty. Well, we don’t want that! Freeloaders! We live in a country that pretends to love kids, but continually fails them and their families, prioritizing our defense budget, corporate tax breaks (including corporate agriculture), and the wealthy over future generations.
Having children, if you want them, is a wonderful thing, or so I hear. It’s also very, very challenging, expensive, confronting, and complicated, like a lot of what is worth doing if you like doing, even if you enjoy challenging shit, like climbing rock walls or marriage, for example. I am continually confronted in my small rural community how many people truly and deeply love their kids and grands. I am also confronted on a regular basis by the plain fact that there are many, many children in my community and county who are and were not wanted; the numbers of children in foster care, or seeking it, is staggering locally and at the national level. These kids are in situations that are harmful and dangerous, part of the many dysfunctional families that no child should be born into, let alone be raised by.
Living the child-free life is great. It’s great. Just sayin’, and that choice – which I acknowledge some individuals come to reluctantly, painfully, due to health challenges – should be respected and even celebrated, although not with any social media bullshit or recognized holiday, please! The evangelicals and conservative Catholics would have a cow, which almost makes trying to establish a child-free holiday worth the trouble it’d be, but no.
