Tuesday

Enough introspection and feeling down. At least for the time being. On Tuesday Obama will be taking over the reins and one of the first things he will be doing is closing Guantanamo. Yea, Barack!!! I watched the election results with my son, and like so many Americans, I was in tears of disbelief and joy. In the past couple of months, I have become more accustomed to the idea that he really is going to be our next President so the disbelief has subsided. The joy faded into the background for a while as the country sank even deeper into trouble, but I feel it re-surging and am so looking forward to seeing him sworn in. I come from a country that is mired in pomp and circumstance, so frills and parades leave me mostly unmoved , but this time I am going to bathe in as many scenes as I can. I am shrugging aside the occasional fear and doubt, the vague sense that we are in too much of a hole in so many areas that we cannot climb out in a reasonable length of time. Obama is surrounding himself with highly intelligent, knowledgeable, and experienced people, who appear to have feelings of warmth toward their fellow human beings on this planet. He is young, brilliant, confident, and empathic. And he knows enough to know what he doesn't know. I am not going to be cheated of my optimism by some all-too-familar skepticism. I am going to enjoy and celebrate and nurture my hopes and beliefs. I believe in him.

2009

A new year, a new attitude, a new belief system - not much to ask for! But I'm working on it.

In my favorite magazine, The Sun, I came across this beautiful quote from a Buddhist monk: "If it shouldn't be this way, it wouldn't be this way." How wonderful, what a great way to encapsulate acceptance. Like so many of us, I often think that what we are sent in this life has meaning and lessons for us. I certainly grew from taking care of my son when he was hospitalized so frequently as a baby and young child. Now I think it is time to revisit that state in which I was able to accept what was sent and exist peacefully within it. I can already sense a trace of calm that was elusive before. Whether it will last, I don't know, but it is a welcome relief. Giving up the struggle and the discomfort will be a blessing, if I can achieve it. Just sitting in it, rather than striving for something different.

I never was one for New Year's resolutions, but maybe now is the time...

I am sitting here alone. I just read a post by a friend who writes a wonderful blog, and this time she wrote about having community and friends. She talked about the supportiveness and the importance of participating in those friendships. I've lived in this city for 28 years. I haven't created a deep community like she has. I'm not sure I know how. My previous post referred to how I found that I have friends who love me - and I do have them, I know I do. But they are disparate and few. I should count myself lucky to have them, and I do, I do. They are special to me. But in the end, I am alone. I want so much to look for support, but I dare not. I know what they will say and it's not what I want to hear. I can't even bring myself to write here, where I am almost anonymous, about the thing that is bringing me pain. It feels disloyal, and I am fearful of advice or counsel I would get were I to reveal it. So I am sitting alone and sad. Seeing no end to the sadness. I don't like myself when I am like this. I am not proud of myself. If I were to offer myself advice, I would tell myself to do what I don't want to do. What I won't do. So there is no help for it. I just have to endure. People I work with and know casually think I am upbeat and happy. Sometimes I am. And I do a good job of pretending, I always have. Then I get in my car and the tears come on the drive home. And then I rattle around my home, finding things to do, to try to make the time pass.

Come Friday, my circumstances will change, and I think, I hope, I trust, I will start to do better. Then the circumstances will change back, and I will be alone again.

Sometimes I think I am a complete idiot. But other times I am more compassionate to myself. The softening I wrote about in my earlier post has vanished, and I am hurting again.

Return Again

I have started so many entries and then discarded them since my last post nearly a year ago. I don't even know if anyone will be reading this, so if I treat this merely a note to self, maybe I'll finish it.



Work is over for 2008 at the end of next week, and I will have a couple of weeks to wind down and contemplate the last 12 months. The largest event for me was dodging a bullet. My surgery to have part of my colon removed, which resulted in a finding of cancer in the piece that was taken out. No further treatment necessary. I am blessed. And in the process, I felt so loved, by my sons, by my lover, by my friends and family. By my co-workers.



In the last year, I have lost a friend - the person I described in the last entry - but it was clearly coming to an end, and I do not mourn the loss. It was a wonderful friendship while it lasted, but it's over, and that's that. This year, I have reconnected with an old friend, developed deeper connections with others, and my relationship with my lover has grown and flourished, despite the challenges that beset us from time to time. There is in our relationship a characteristic that is painful for me, but that is so much a part of who my lover is that it is my task to develop an acceptance of it, rather than his task to let it go. I understand that. I knew it going in. He has never been anything but honest. And we have worked over the time that we have been together to find the best way to manage things between us. Just as we are deciding to get some counseling, I am feeling a shift that is softening the pain, and that is such a relief. I believe that counseling will still be a good thing, but this opening of my heart will make it work so much better.

Random Thoughts

• This evening, I had dinner with the friend who was the subject of my last post. We caught up with each other's news and talked as if nothing had happened. But it was all very superfluous and I don't know if we will ever get back to where we were. That's ok. It is what it is. No discussion of what had happened or how we expect things to be. Maybe it was cowardly on my part not to have brought it up. Or maybe it is better just to let things evolve organically. We shall see...
• I traveled to my native land to visit family and friends over the holidays. Took my lover with me and he met everyone. Said he understands me better now, having seen me in my natural habitat. Very conservative and traditional upbringing, a far cry from some of my current activities. Made me (and him) realize what I am surmounting when I throw off those old experiences. One of the people we spent a couple of hours with was my very first boyfriend, a man who came out as gay some twenty or so years ago. How hard it must have been for him growing up, especially in that conservative atmosphere. I wonder how it was for him taking me out when we were both thirteen or fourteen. He seems much more at peace now than when I knew him. I also met another friend whom I haven't seen in over thirty years, but I would have recognized him in a heartbeat. He has lived a very exotic and varied life, with one of his accomplishments being that he was the screenwriter of a major Hollywood movie, a film that was highly successful. He has also done other, more altruistic things on a large scale, and is just finishing up six months in France where he decided to take his family so they could have an experience of a different culture and language. I know I have achieved something in my life, but his adventures make mine seem ever so puny! But I am one with most of the rest of the world, he is the one who is extraordinary, I have to remember that.
• China has banned plastic bags! Good for them! I remember taking string bags, or pulling my mother's basket on wheels to the shops when I was little. Nothing wrong with that. It would be great if we could go back to reusable shopping containers. I bring two capacious bags with me when I am grocery shopping, but I need another one, I think. I always end up having to get an extra "plastic-or-paper."
• My ex-husband is being treated for cancer. My sister has to have a five-hour operation on her gums. My lover's father has to have surgery at the age of 85. My father can't hear right now and my mother is in a nursing home. I need to stop taking my health for granted.

Friendship

I was close friends and best friends with her for 12 years. I shall call her Sue, just so I can talk freely. She and I met in a writing class and became increasingly close as we both weathered problems in our lives. I admit, I went through more than she did and eventually, after not wanting to ask for help from anyone (see previous post!), I learned to ask her for it when I needed it. Beyond that, she seemed to thrive on giving it, often volunteering to support me when it wasn't asked for or necessary, but it sure was nice. I wasn't used to it. She saw me through my divorce, my depression, my return to school, my return to work, my hysterectomy, and, ultimately, my return to the world of dating and relationships. I saw her through family problems and her return to school. We went shopping together, to movies, and hung out. I spent most Thanksgivings with her, and she came with me on a trip to Britain a few years ago when I went back to visit family and friends.

Last summer, I called her from my lover's home which is 400 miles from mine, and asked her if she would be able to pick me up from the airport when I returned. She declined, with an edge to her voice I found unnerving. She said, "We have to talk." We arranged for her to come over the following week. I became increasingly anxious, with reason, as it turned out. She walked in my front door, handed me the set of my keys she had been keeping, and a hat I had lent her two years ago, and announced, "We're done." We sat on the couch, and she detailed a series of hurts that had accumulated over the past couple of years. I am not perfect, and acknowledge (as I did then) that I had not behaved well on a couple of occasions. I have anxiety and can be very needy sometimes. With other things she raised, I could not see what I had done wrong. She also had some negative things to say about other people in my life. It was a brief talk. She ended by saying she didn't want to shut off our friendship forever, so she wanted us to get together at the end of the summer. We arranged a date, and as she left, she warned me, "You had better show up. If you don't there had better be blood or death as an excuse."

I was dreadfully hurt, not understanding why she had brooded over these issues for so long without raising them. I also felt guilty, realizing that the times that I had hurt her were very much my fault - at least the times for which I accepted culpability. But my overwhelming sense was of being utterly ambushed. I had no idea she was nursing these feelings. I was angry for a while, then gradually, as the summer wore on, got a little inured to the feelings, and more used to her absence in my life. This, after we used to speak several times a week. Early in September we met as agreed. I wept as I hugged her, saying, "I didn't realize how much I missed you." We had lunch and the conversation was strange and stilted. There was a very minor reference to our rift, then we caught up on each other's news. At the end of lunch, we agreed to see each other again, in fact she wanted to ensure we saw each other at least every two weeks. But it hasn't happened. It just wasn't the same. I didn't trust her any more. And she had got on just fine without me.

We have seen each other a couple of times since then, but the friendship is dead, for all intents and purposes. I miss it, but not as much as I might have expected, had anyone predicted a year ago. I feel guilty (a default state for me!) that I hurt her. I feel guilty that I haven't tried harder to resurrect the relationship. Other friends have urged me to keep trying, remembering how close we used to be. But I have no inclination to do so. It's over. I'm not sure I could ever trust the friendship again. And I don't want to. A friend recently sent an e-mail that had the following lines:

"Some people come into your life for a SEASON, because your turn has come to share, grow or learn. They bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it, it is real, but only for a season."

I'm not sure if he wrote them himself, or if he found them somewhere, but they really struck a chord. "Sue" was my friend for a long, lovely, sweet season. Now it's over.

Reading

I surrender!! I am surrounded by so much reading material, and I am never going to get through it! I canceled my subscription to The New Yorker because a) my boyfriend gets it and it seems silly to duplicate it, and b) reading it all weekly was just too much. There was no time to read anything else - or if I did, I couldn't get the magazine finished. But now he has brought me all these back issues and I keep looking at the pile, knowing there is no way in hell I will ever get through them all. Waiting for me are the following: American Pastoral by Philip Roth; an obscure book by E. Annie Proulx; the next book for my book group (A Question of Upbringing, by Anthony Powell); the most recent edition of The Sun Magazine, the rest of the current book for my book group (The English Teacher by R.K. Narayan); America: A Prophecy, by Sparrow; the book I realized will not be ok for my next selection for the book group because it is short stories and they are not allowed (Drown, by Junot Diaz) but I want to read it myself anyway; archy's life of mehitabel; Eric Clapton's autobiography; a photo essay about Burning Man; all of the Best American Short Stories of 2007 save the first three (which I have actually managed to read); and O. Henry: Complete and Unabridged. Coming in the mail are two books I have ordered and am considering for my next selection for the book group: Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena Maria Viramontes, and Trumpet, by Jackie Kay. I am already inclined toward the former, because it is only 176 pages.

This list does not include all the books and magazines I would like to read when I hear about them or even notice on my shelves that I haven't got around to reading yet. Nor does it include all the stuff I SHOULD be reading for work. Or the daily newspaper, which gets short shrift (apart from the crossword) these days.

I may have to quit my job.

Help!