in august my fingers traced your wrist and
awakened globe and glow
crouching copper
crouching flame.
recalling:
that horizon was
a sunspill veil over hills
of naked plain. hips and waists
pale gold spun
and rolling.
rolling land and rolling. and
it was heats crested
under cover of fire opal and flashing light.
under coral breeze.
that scape was sunset moonrise and
now you. curving calves and shoulders
back alive and open space and
in august we were close.
then dusk. trace us and
that wheat-scented sky
August 14, 2012
pretty words of trauma
I am divorcing right now. Soon I will be a divorcee. Being a word freak, I do think the word divorcee is pretty, kind of like the word nee, but the fact is, being one or the other isn't exotic. It is like saying you lived through being run over by a semi-truck and are prettier and healthier for it. It really can't be polished up. So lately the writing I do does not often find it's way to this place, and when it does, it isn't overtly about "me": I don't usually post about divorce, per se. Or parenting, really. Or deciding to live and then living in a way that is speakable, say-it-to-their-faceable, conscious (as conscious as we can be, we humans with our tricky slippery brains). But lately the lawn has grown thick with weeds, and the daisies are few and wilting, and if I don't purge the soil of these unwanted things their presence may calcify and then I fear no hammock or trellis or other small edens can possibly arrive, because I will have dry dirt with only the hardiest of invasives thriving. A place where nutrients and lush can't be, a place hard-packed. Everything bad will flow off, and too everything good that I want to absorb, and relish. And I don't want that.
So during the long and in my case hideous process of divorce I have discovered a few things about myself, some of which have been surprising and not in a good way, and other things have been discovered about others, sometimes too surprising, and not in a good way. There have been realizations about friends and family and estranged partners, and so on and so forth (it is a long process), but the thing that has come clear throughout all this and that I wish to write about today is what I have discovered about having small people live with you who originally came from you, but aren't you, and what it means to parent through.
I've always thought about parenting. There were never assumptions on my part that I would either be married or have children. In fact, for the majority of my life I didn't think I would ever do either. And then I changed my mind--but it wasn't without deliberation. I had thought about it. For myself, I can't imagine not thinking about it. It is a funny thing to believe in self-determination: is it a deceit? Is it smoke and mirrors to believe that we have full power over ourselves if we are active in making choices, given we can never really calculate ahead of time or understand deeply after the fact the meaning of the choices others are making, and that will influence us? Or if we wish to go further-meta, we must see that we cannot really calculate ahead of time or understand deeply the meaning of the choices we ourselves are making, or the nature of our own motivation. At what point are we in fact simply reacting? Is this a different conversation? Is this the same conversation?
But I remember asking friends at some gathering or another how their feminism informed their parenting, and being met with universally blank stares. I didn't know at the time--or even now--if members of the group were stunned (but it did look like it and responses did not come forth, even eventually, as the conversation shifted almost instantly--but to me not imperceptibly--to potty training or snack-time or the woes of napless days) and if they were, was it more by my assumption that they were feminists, or by my assumption that their parenting was informed by anything at all? It was a disappointing and obviously unforgettable non-conversation, for me. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was 11 years ago. I knew I did not want to just bounce along, I wanted to steer my own craft, in parenting, as much as could be done. I felt alone in this desire for determination.
So one thing we do not get to predict as we are getting married and having babies is how exactly it will all unfold with all the new x-factors, and how we will manage to parent through it all--even when it is done/over/finito. What is correct? What is traumatizing? It isn't like I can turn to my partner--though perhaps some can--to agree on a way we feel is best, as a "we", because in fact we never did have that joint we-platform from which to spring. But, conveniently since we can't predict everything, and in fact as it turns out, reacting in this situation and then self-reflecting can be very informative. The parallel is of the mother who lifts the truck off her baby, or pulls the buggy off the tracks only seconds before the train screams past, or whatever it was--and then thinks. That superhuman power that comes to us in defense of our children (a daisy, by the way) first, followed by thought, comes in to full play during a divorce, and is manifested in my case at least partially by having to protect my children by protecting myself. To protect oneself in this circumstance means to understand and be able to tell oneself. This may not make sense. But it does.
There is an ongoing discussion, clearly, in a custody battle, about parenting (which turns out to be an umbrella term for every breath any person in the family dares in- or ex-hale---it's a catch-all. Really.) If there is a philosophy buried somewhere deep inside a parent, it will come out. If there is anything informing the decisions that a parent is making at any time of day or night ("...and why did you let your children walk home from school?), that informing thing will be demanded by others and will be scratched from the subterranean and articulated by oneself, and made official and put down on the record and used forevermore against (or for) one. It is a fraught time.
So the other day I cried in front of my children. And I was chastised for this doing. At which point, being me, I felt the need to examine my behavior and figure out if I had in fact done wrong. (It's possible.) Now, going back to the previous paragraph wherein I say that we cannot honestly understand our motives, as human beings, we are going to skip that part for now and just stipulate that examination is going to help as much as it possibly can, and that that help may be somewhat limited. But it's all we've got.
There is the school of thought on the matter of emoting negatively in front of children which says it scares them, it makes them feel they have no protector, it causes them to feel sympathy or the need to take care of the care-giver who is upset and/or crying, it is not the children's place to see a parent feeling vulnerable, as it exacerbates their own natural sense of vulnerability. It places the children in the middle of what they perceive to be "sides". Arguing in front of children is seen as similarly irresponsible--it is frightening, exposes them to ugly, teaches poor conflict resolution (if the conflicts in the argument are being resolved poorly, then I agree), etc.
And I am of a different bent altogether. While I do not choose for my children to see as much ugly as there is in this world, also I do not believe that all conflict or sadness or difficulties that adults (or children) experience is unhealthy to witness, and in fact, that the lack of witnessing these parts of reality is potentially very, very harmful. What kid needs to grow up thinking every garden has daisies, and that they just grow that way, without any struggle? A kid who grows up that way grows up delusional. It seems to me that raising a delusional kid is the worst wrongdoing of all.
So I was accused of damaging behavior, and had to think about it. I chose not to focus on the evolutionary purposes of crying, and to focus instead on this tiny thing: at that time, I was So Sad. I was profoundly, unspeakably, gut-twistingly sad. and: What then? If it were that I could calmly think at that moment (which I argue that I could not), and decide, "hm...how shall I react to this new kick-in-the-gut?"...perhaps I could have chosen to leave the house, leave the room, suck it up. I think I would have reasoned "to be", but the truth is I did not reason, I just was. That is the verb. To be. Not "to do". To be. The difference between "to be" and "to do" has become distorted, in English, which is too bad on many levels, and right now I want to lodge my complaint of that fact and clarify that "to be" is the verb I choose for describing myself the other night in that situation. That's the difference between some and some others--there are be-ers and do-ers. I'm a be-er. And so the question flips to what we show our children of ourselves. Some would say I was selfish, and should have thought of the children at that moment. At some level maybe I did, but really, I am a be-er.
And I think that is OK. Even in retrospect and even with reasoning. In this situation we are talking about my having been sad, and what I did with it. It may be my left brain speaking, but here is what I have come up with:
That I cried in front of the children was not cruel, was not a mistake, and was not even regrettable. I was showing "human" during a shitty piece of what it is like to be human. A few moments later I was not crying. And the next day I was not crying, and then was showing another part of "human". We cry. We have shitty moments. We have euphoric moments. Unless we are robots, it is ok to feel, and then what do we do with it? Happy or sad, we call on friends. We call on family. And guess what? They are there for us. We ask for help where we can get help. And help is there, we do get help. We are not alone. We are disconsolate for awhile and then consolation comes: we accept hugs from our children and we tell them yes, we are sad, but it is just a moment, it will pass, and all will be OK. We remind our children that everyone feels, and this includes feeling good and bad. We tell them that as the good passes, so does the bad, and it all comes around again. Emoting is not impugning, and that night it was certainly not planned, certainly was genuine, and was not placing anyone anywhere except smack in the middle of living.
Absolute Truth: My children are compassionate people, with universally high emotional intelligence. I do my very best and am vigilant about teaching them that as they are not responsible for the moods or happiness of other people, others are not responsible for their happiness or moods--and I do this as a way to scaffold their entry into a world which will push things upon them and add emotional pressure and will be ruthless to their individual wellbeing. I do this so that they do not look at the face of someone who is important to them and see disappointment when they express their preferences, and have that disappointment control them. I do this so that when they are asked to do something they do not wish to do, they can refrain and feel good about themselves. I do this so that they do not always feel that their value comes from someone else saying that they have value. They must learn where their skin ends and that of others begins. (Maybe I should draw them a vividly colored Venn.) They must.
And so I cried and they saw sadness and because they are intuitive, but also because they are children, they do worry. They are children. They have no idea what is going on. They have questions. They have desires. They want this to be over with. It is taking forever. It is the proverbial car ride with no end in sight. They worry about each other, themselves, us, the dog, everything. Nothing will stop that except answers, and an end to this. My laughter does not cause them to feel hilarity, and nor should my crying cause them to worry about me. But I do know it is a process.
Absolute Truth: They see me picking myself up off the ground and they see me get knocked down again. They see me get up again. They see me getting up again--this should cause, and eventually will cause--them to worry less, and to see that human beings--themselves--are resilient, and strong, and dignified. I will never cause my children harm knowingly, and think about it a lot. For all the good that does. But as well, I cannot and will not and would not put them in cotton batting, in order to remove that one central lesson that we each need to learn--!!Get Back Up!! !!Get Up Again!!-- in order to bleach and pad their lives today.
But our children--They see us. They hear us. They watch us. None of us need interpretation or amplification of our qualities to be seen by these small people. The are sentient and intelligent and discerning and do in fact have opinions and souls of their own, they are in fact people of their own, they make decisions and choices on their own, and they are not just clay to be molded or paper to be written upon. This viewpoint is fundamentally different from that of others, I know--to me this instance of my crying having supposedly directly traumatized the children illustrates a quite limited understanding of the personhood of children. But this point goes back to self-determination and will be lost on those who see themselves as at the mercy of the elements around: as they see themselves the result of everything and everyone else, so do they see their children.
And I don't buy it. We have to be ourselves as much as we can, and live in a way in which we can be OK with that. Because it is all OK.
So during the long and in my case hideous process of divorce I have discovered a few things about myself, some of which have been surprising and not in a good way, and other things have been discovered about others, sometimes too surprising, and not in a good way. There have been realizations about friends and family and estranged partners, and so on and so forth (it is a long process), but the thing that has come clear throughout all this and that I wish to write about today is what I have discovered about having small people live with you who originally came from you, but aren't you, and what it means to parent through.
I've always thought about parenting. There were never assumptions on my part that I would either be married or have children. In fact, for the majority of my life I didn't think I would ever do either. And then I changed my mind--but it wasn't without deliberation. I had thought about it. For myself, I can't imagine not thinking about it. It is a funny thing to believe in self-determination: is it a deceit? Is it smoke and mirrors to believe that we have full power over ourselves if we are active in making choices, given we can never really calculate ahead of time or understand deeply after the fact the meaning of the choices others are making, and that will influence us? Or if we wish to go further-meta, we must see that we cannot really calculate ahead of time or understand deeply the meaning of the choices we ourselves are making, or the nature of our own motivation. At what point are we in fact simply reacting? Is this a different conversation? Is this the same conversation?
But I remember asking friends at some gathering or another how their feminism informed their parenting, and being met with universally blank stares. I didn't know at the time--or even now--if members of the group were stunned (but it did look like it and responses did not come forth, even eventually, as the conversation shifted almost instantly--but to me not imperceptibly--to potty training or snack-time or the woes of napless days) and if they were, was it more by my assumption that they were feminists, or by my assumption that their parenting was informed by anything at all? It was a disappointing and obviously unforgettable non-conversation, for me. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was 11 years ago. I knew I did not want to just bounce along, I wanted to steer my own craft, in parenting, as much as could be done. I felt alone in this desire for determination.
So one thing we do not get to predict as we are getting married and having babies is how exactly it will all unfold with all the new x-factors, and how we will manage to parent through it all--even when it is done/over/finito. What is correct? What is traumatizing? It isn't like I can turn to my partner--though perhaps some can--to agree on a way we feel is best, as a "we", because in fact we never did have that joint we-platform from which to spring. But, conveniently since we can't predict everything, and in fact as it turns out, reacting in this situation and then self-reflecting can be very informative. The parallel is of the mother who lifts the truck off her baby, or pulls the buggy off the tracks only seconds before the train screams past, or whatever it was--and then thinks. That superhuman power that comes to us in defense of our children (a daisy, by the way) first, followed by thought, comes in to full play during a divorce, and is manifested in my case at least partially by having to protect my children by protecting myself. To protect oneself in this circumstance means to understand and be able to tell oneself. This may not make sense. But it does.
There is an ongoing discussion, clearly, in a custody battle, about parenting (which turns out to be an umbrella term for every breath any person in the family dares in- or ex-hale---it's a catch-all. Really.) If there is a philosophy buried somewhere deep inside a parent, it will come out. If there is anything informing the decisions that a parent is making at any time of day or night ("...and why did you let your children walk home from school?), that informing thing will be demanded by others and will be scratched from the subterranean and articulated by oneself, and made official and put down on the record and used forevermore against (or for) one. It is a fraught time.
So the other day I cried in front of my children. And I was chastised for this doing. At which point, being me, I felt the need to examine my behavior and figure out if I had in fact done wrong. (It's possible.) Now, going back to the previous paragraph wherein I say that we cannot honestly understand our motives, as human beings, we are going to skip that part for now and just stipulate that examination is going to help as much as it possibly can, and that that help may be somewhat limited. But it's all we've got.
There is the school of thought on the matter of emoting negatively in front of children which says it scares them, it makes them feel they have no protector, it causes them to feel sympathy or the need to take care of the care-giver who is upset and/or crying, it is not the children's place to see a parent feeling vulnerable, as it exacerbates their own natural sense of vulnerability. It places the children in the middle of what they perceive to be "sides". Arguing in front of children is seen as similarly irresponsible--it is frightening, exposes them to ugly, teaches poor conflict resolution (if the conflicts in the argument are being resolved poorly, then I agree), etc.
And I am of a different bent altogether. While I do not choose for my children to see as much ugly as there is in this world, also I do not believe that all conflict or sadness or difficulties that adults (or children) experience is unhealthy to witness, and in fact, that the lack of witnessing these parts of reality is potentially very, very harmful. What kid needs to grow up thinking every garden has daisies, and that they just grow that way, without any struggle? A kid who grows up that way grows up delusional. It seems to me that raising a delusional kid is the worst wrongdoing of all.
So I was accused of damaging behavior, and had to think about it. I chose not to focus on the evolutionary purposes of crying, and to focus instead on this tiny thing: at that time, I was So Sad. I was profoundly, unspeakably, gut-twistingly sad. and: What then? If it were that I could calmly think at that moment (which I argue that I could not), and decide, "hm...how shall I react to this new kick-in-the-gut?"...perhaps I could have chosen to leave the house, leave the room, suck it up. I think I would have reasoned "to be", but the truth is I did not reason, I just was. That is the verb. To be. Not "to do". To be. The difference between "to be" and "to do" has become distorted, in English, which is too bad on many levels, and right now I want to lodge my complaint of that fact and clarify that "to be" is the verb I choose for describing myself the other night in that situation. That's the difference between some and some others--there are be-ers and do-ers. I'm a be-er. And so the question flips to what we show our children of ourselves. Some would say I was selfish, and should have thought of the children at that moment. At some level maybe I did, but really, I am a be-er.
And I think that is OK. Even in retrospect and even with reasoning. In this situation we are talking about my having been sad, and what I did with it. It may be my left brain speaking, but here is what I have come up with:
That I cried in front of the children was not cruel, was not a mistake, and was not even regrettable. I was showing "human" during a shitty piece of what it is like to be human. A few moments later I was not crying. And the next day I was not crying, and then was showing another part of "human". We cry. We have shitty moments. We have euphoric moments. Unless we are robots, it is ok to feel, and then what do we do with it? Happy or sad, we call on friends. We call on family. And guess what? They are there for us. We ask for help where we can get help. And help is there, we do get help. We are not alone. We are disconsolate for awhile and then consolation comes: we accept hugs from our children and we tell them yes, we are sad, but it is just a moment, it will pass, and all will be OK. We remind our children that everyone feels, and this includes feeling good and bad. We tell them that as the good passes, so does the bad, and it all comes around again. Emoting is not impugning, and that night it was certainly not planned, certainly was genuine, and was not placing anyone anywhere except smack in the middle of living.
Absolute Truth: My children are compassionate people, with universally high emotional intelligence. I do my very best and am vigilant about teaching them that as they are not responsible for the moods or happiness of other people, others are not responsible for their happiness or moods--and I do this as a way to scaffold their entry into a world which will push things upon them and add emotional pressure and will be ruthless to their individual wellbeing. I do this so that they do not look at the face of someone who is important to them and see disappointment when they express their preferences, and have that disappointment control them. I do this so that when they are asked to do something they do not wish to do, they can refrain and feel good about themselves. I do this so that they do not always feel that their value comes from someone else saying that they have value. They must learn where their skin ends and that of others begins. (Maybe I should draw them a vividly colored Venn.) They must.
And so I cried and they saw sadness and because they are intuitive, but also because they are children, they do worry. They are children. They have no idea what is going on. They have questions. They have desires. They want this to be over with. It is taking forever. It is the proverbial car ride with no end in sight. They worry about each other, themselves, us, the dog, everything. Nothing will stop that except answers, and an end to this. My laughter does not cause them to feel hilarity, and nor should my crying cause them to worry about me. But I do know it is a process.
Absolute Truth: They see me picking myself up off the ground and they see me get knocked down again. They see me get up again. They see me getting up again--this should cause, and eventually will cause--them to worry less, and to see that human beings--themselves--are resilient, and strong, and dignified. I will never cause my children harm knowingly, and think about it a lot. For all the good that does. But as well, I cannot and will not and would not put them in cotton batting, in order to remove that one central lesson that we each need to learn--!!Get Back Up!! !!Get Up Again!!-- in order to bleach and pad their lives today.
But our children--They see us. They hear us. They watch us. None of us need interpretation or amplification of our qualities to be seen by these small people. The are sentient and intelligent and discerning and do in fact have opinions and souls of their own, they are in fact people of their own, they make decisions and choices on their own, and they are not just clay to be molded or paper to be written upon. This viewpoint is fundamentally different from that of others, I know--to me this instance of my crying having supposedly directly traumatized the children illustrates a quite limited understanding of the personhood of children. But this point goes back to self-determination and will be lost on those who see themselves as at the mercy of the elements around: as they see themselves the result of everything and everyone else, so do they see their children.
And I don't buy it. We have to be ourselves as much as we can, and live in a way in which we can be OK with that. Because it is all OK.
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