Infectious Madness by Harriet Washington

[witzend]

husband's mother is a cat hoarder, and it's unclear to me whether her mental illness started before or after she started stealing cats from the street and allowing them to run wild through her house. Her home has always been filthy so far as I know, but husband says that when he was a boy she was working, though not terribly intelligent. I've seen her grade school report cards, and even then they were trying ever so gently to tell her parents that she was a very sweet girl but "slow". I know that she has been diagnosed Borderline (BPD) many years ago, and is now suffering from paranoid delusions, so toxoplasmosis could certainly explain a lot. Those symptoms have been going on for 40 years or more now, though, so I imagine that her brain has been permanently damaged and there is no hope.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I was ....angry. Anger is an important emotion in recovering, but I do not like to stay there, it is low level, base thinking, cro magnon, if you will. Anger is at it's beginning, motivational, taking us to our deepy dark places investigating our swirly-whirlies, but not a place to linger, for it is destructive to ourselves, and those around us.

I have been roaringly angry since I elected to uncover and heal the broken places so I can achieve internal locus of control instead of forever worrying about what someone else needs or is thinking. I swear, I was so angry again yesterday. I needed to call Direct TV. And oh boy, I just hate that stupid recording. And I was tired from the trip and whatever, but still. I was just shocked at the persistence and ridiculous intensity of my anger at that stupid robotic voice. Roar. I was so frustrated. At one point in my private thinking, I was word searching for worse bad words to think.

?

I just told myself "ROAR All the bad words I know!"

That is how I thought about it.

Angry and searching for words bad enough to describe it and an attitude to display it and everything to do with anger all together is so stupidly wasteful and yet, there I was. All outrageously angry over nothing.

Ha!



Exploring my own anger has been the strangest thing.

I too worry that I will be stuck in it but I think what happens is that after awhile we just choose something different. Some way of seeing the thing that once made us so angry we actually had to word search for bad enough, ugly enough words to express it. (!)

Like I was doing yesterday.

What a strange thing.

I will keep reporting back on that one. I would like internal locus of control where anger is concerned, too.

All right, so now I need to go and read the rest of this thread to see what else you all have been up to while I have been away.

Cedar, my Mother watched him ringing her hands, but silent.

Oh, roar Copa. I am still so angry about it, when I think of the position of responsibility that man held, and of the way he used his access to you.
I wish you had been brought up by a gentle, intelligent man who understood you value.

Not a weak and broken man.

My father was gentle, intelligent...but he did not understand my value, either. I always had the feeling he was amazed at me. But he did not defend me when my mother decided to play her games.

He did not defend, he did not reach out, he did not stand up for me.

For us, the task is to realize we did merit protection and cherishing. Our fathers should have been deeply in love with us, and I don't mean in any wrong way.

Theirs was the loss, or the lack of courage.

My father did love me. He did not love me enough.

It's that anger thing, you guys. I want to see where this thinking leads. I can do that here because we are anonymous. In all of my life, I have never allowed myself to think badly of my parents or sibs. I would not see what was, and would believe we would all do better and proceed on that basis.

Had I demanded more, it is likely I would have received it.

Or, been shunned sooner.

Which at least is honest.

Since that has always been my default setting, I imagine I will come back into balance in that way. I am no longer afraid of my anger. It is so ridiculously all encompassing and yet, somehow so useless a thing. You should have seen me word searching for more, and better, bad words yesterday! To talk to some stupid robot at Direct TV.

?

For heaven's sake.

Her home has always been filthy so far as I know, but husband says that when he was a boy she was working, though not terribly intelligent. I've seen her grade school report cards, and even then they were trying ever so gently to tell her parents that she was a very sweet girl but "slow". I know that she has been diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder (Borderline Personality Disorder (Borderline (BPD))) many years ago, and is now suffering from paranoid delusions, so toxoplasmosis could certainly explain a lot. Those symptoms have been going on for 40 years or more now, though, so I imagine that her brain has been permanently damaged and there is no hope.

Isn't that something, Witz?

They say too that a part of it could be that we are too clean. There is some beginning research about whether exposure to allergens before our first birthdays protects us from developing asthma later in life. That if we miss that window of exposure, we will experience an immune response if we are exposed to certain fungi and etc as adults.

The exciting thing is that once we know the how and why, we may be able to come up with cures. Asthma, depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), bipolar, schizophrenia, no more fearsome than syphilis is, or rabies is, now.

What an extraordinary thing.

Witz?

Hello, there.



Cedar

 

[New Leaf]

Hi Cedar, so nice to hear from you. I hope your trip was not too bad. Traveling does take a toll on our minds and bodies.

I too worry that I will be stuck in it but I think what happens is that after awhile we just choose something different. Some way of seeing the thing that once made us so angry we actually had to word search for bad enough, ugly enough words to express it. (!)

You know your musings here have made me want to research more about anger. I have just found in my life, when I am angry, nothing good ever comes of it? Also, my hubs comes from a history of domestic violence. In our younger years, rage would come out when he drank. This is how I can relate to Feeling, as she wrote of her fear when the electricity went out. When my husband went through his drinking years, I would lay in bed and be consumed with worry and stress over "who" would be coming home. I would startle over the smallest noises, the refrigerator motor, thinking that was the car pulling up.
Rage, anger. Levels of consciousness. My husband has improved much since then, but there is still that deep anger underneath the skin. I call him the "Extreme Chinese Waitress". No offense to Chinese people. My hubs is part Chinese. The language even sounds angry. Short choppy words that seem to have to be spoken fast, and loud, very loud. The intonations are so different, so intense. When I go in to Chinatown to shop for vegetables, I must be ready to be pushed, shoved and cut in front of. If one is not aggressive, one will be excluded. There is not much to etiquette and politeness. Get your vegetables on the scale quickly, before some old cantankerous lady jumps in front of you, hurriedly waving her money at the non-smiling cashier. You best bet if you are paying and take too long getting your money out, there will be lots of sighs and foreign words shot your way.

Do you go for Chinese food Cedar? Here in Chinese restaurants, my experience with the waitresses has been interesting. I endeavor to try to make them smile. They come to the table and say "May I take your order?" In choppy broken up English, with Chinese intonation. If one is not familiar, it can come off as rude, but they are not being rude, it gets lost in the translation and tone, the delivery comes off as- WHAT DO YOU WANT? HURRY UP! YOU ARE WASTING MY TIME!

This is the hubs-the extreme Chinese waitress. He never has time to slow down, not driving, not cooking, not for anything. If I ask him to do something, he heaves a great sigh. Then it begins like a frenzy. He'll do it, but it is always intense working with him. He gets the job done, but has zero patience or tolerance for fumbling. It comes off as anger. He talks in short, loud, bursts and sounds so angry. "Why are you angry?" I ask. I'm not ANGRY!!!! He asserts, angrily.

I think that this is enough tension emanating from one person in a house.

Think of Walter Matthau in "Grumpy Old Men"-that is my hubs, only Chinese Hawaiian. Jackie Gleason, in the "Honeymooners", Fred Flintstone. He can turn this off, my coworkers say, "Your hubby called, he sounds so nice." (We chat about our significant others, they know the extreme Chinese waitress bit) "Are you sure that was him?" I quip back.

Yet I come home from work sometimes and he is watching "Say Yes to the Dress" a show about brides to be and their families searching for the wedding dress. Hmmmmmm. He went through a period of watching Chinese soap operas with English sub-titles. I sat through one and realized that the heroine cried at least every three minutes throughout the show.....which is interesting because he can't stand crying.

If I delved in more deeply in this subject of the hubs here, I think I would be opening up another question for the FOO chronicles; "Do we Marry our Father figures?"

I will keep reporting back on that one. I would like internal locus of control where anger is concerned, too.

Maya Angelou wrote -"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean."

I know anger does have it's place, Maya Angelou spoke on channeling anger to write, dance, make art and fight for a worthy cause.

Thinking on this, I may be short changing myself, not allowing myself to be angry. It does have it's place.

More research is merited.

Oh, roar Copa. I am still so angry about it, when I think of the position of responsibility that man held, and of the way he used his access to you.
I wish you had been brought up by a gentle, intelligent man who understood you value.

Yes, every little child deserves to know and be shown they have value.

My father was gentle, intelligent...but he did not understand my value, either. I always had the feeling he was amazed at me. But he did not defend me when my mother decided to play her games.

Likewise, I had no defending from my siblings. I was the one who had to ignore the mistreatment. Yet, as I write this, I feel guilty, as if I am speaking badly of my parents. They did the best they could and I love them dearly. In this instance, they were wrong. There I said it. I think I learned to become invisible, why does the term- persona non grata keep popping up in my head?

For us, the task is to realize we did merit protection and cherishing. Our fathers should have been deeply in love with us, and I don't mean in any wrong way.

Yes. Dad used to tell me as I showed him my report card (mostly A's and a couple of B's)
"Let's make these B's, A's."
I don't think that I realized how disappointed I was for a long time. There was no praise. Around middle school, I threw in the towel. I was done, there was no pleasing him. Or me.

That makes me feel empty now. As he was aging, ill and deep inside of himself, when I journeyed all the way home and he wouldn't talk much I had the same feeling inside. Empty. Full of love for him, but at the same time....empty.

Had I demanded more, it is likely I would have received it.

Or, been shunned sooner.

Which at least is honest.

Demanding worked for my sister. It just wasn't/isn't in my nature.

They say too that a part of it could be that we are too clean. There is some beginning research about whether exposure to allergens before our first birthdays protects us from developing asthma later in life. That if we miss that window of exposure, we will experience an immune response if we are exposed to certain fungi and etc as adults.

I am definitely at this point not worried about being too clean. UGH, lots to do to spiff up the old abode.

It saddens me that some children will never know the joy of making mud pies, rolling around in the grass, building sand castles. Petting a cat or being licked by a dog.

Everything is anti-bacterial. Crazy.

I hope Cedar you have a lovely break.

It is always a pleasure to chat with you all, over cyber space.

Roosters are beginning their cacophonous morning symphony. Time to get going and get the boy up for school.

Have a fabulous day friends.

ROAR

Leafy

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

"Do we Marry our Father figures?"

I've read that we marry a compilation of those who raised us. We do this, not to continue in the sickness, but to triumph over it.

We all are so courageous, and brave.

I have been married 41 or 42 years. (Forever. I have actually been married, forever.)

:O)

I think a "good" marriage is one where no one leaves. There are issues to be worked through. It seems to me that once the issues either are worked through, or it is learned that they cannot be worked through in this relationship, that is when interest in the relationship fades.

But I am the only one who thinks that way, I suppose.

I forgot where I was going with this. I am trying to hurry.

roar

I loved the part about the Chinese waitresses and you are absolutely correct.

In our favorite Chinese restaurant, the help all swore at one another (or maybe, at us). The food was good, but the experience was stellar.

I don't know whether you read my post about word searching for bad words to be angry with. I will have to learn Chinese.

:O)

That is a joke.

I need to begin setting things in order, here.

We found dead palmetto bugs. Anywhere else, these are called a variety of cockroach. They are huge. Like three inches long or more, as adults. Plus, they fly.

So, I really do need to go and tend to things, here.

:O)

The were all dead. Spraying for bugs is done routinely, here.

Thank goodness.

I need a Chinese swear word to describe my anger at these nasty palmetto bugs / tropical cockroaches.

What would your D H suggest?



Cedar

 

[New Leaf]

Hi Cedar,
There are not too many of us long time married folks out there. Yes {forever} we are 35 years married.

I have been married 41 or 42 years. (Forever. I have actually been married, forever.)

:O)

I think a "good" marriage is one where no one leaves. There are issues to be worked through. It seems to me that once the issues either are worked through, or it is learned that they cannot be worked through in this relationship, that is when interest in the relationship fades.

But I am the only one who thinks that way, I suppose.

Always issues, especially with mixed cultures. I don't know of anyone who has had the "happily ever after" relationship- darn Disney, all their fault we were supposed to marry Prince Charming and be happy all the time. Harrumph. Actually, I was thinking of the examples we had through the entertainment of the mid 50's and 60's of married life. My Dad back then loved Jackie Gleason, we watched him gosh, was it Saturday nights?

My hubs is not as talkative, but he is intense like Ralph. We have had good times and bad. We took an oath, for better or worse. Here we are, 35 years later and learning to care for ourselves and each other all over again after the craziness with our beloved G-F-G's.

I loved the part about the Chinese waitresses and you are absolutely correct.
In our favorite Chinese restaurant, the help all swore at one another (or maybe, at us). The food was good, but the experience was stellar.
I don't know whether you read my post about word searching for bad words to be angry with. I will have to learn Chinese.

I think it is stellar as well. To see different cultures, hear the language and witness the interaction. You wouldn't even have to say a bad Chinese word, just the intonation works!

I am glad my parents taught us to respect and embrace ethnicities other than our own. My Dad loved that Hawaii was a melting pot, and that we had such an opportunity to move here.

My hubs was raised more Hawaiian than Chinese, his Mom had the Chinese intonations. Her talking was mostly at a shouting level, she was funny, and boy could she ever cook!
Hubs speaks English pretty well for a "local" boy. Pidgin English is the colorful, all mixed up language that you may have heard of. I can break in to it, having lived most of my life here. Pidgin English with a Boston accent- interesting stuff.

We found dead palmetto bugs. Anywhere else, these are called a variety of cockroach. They are huge. Like three inches long or more, as adults. Plus, they fly.

So, I really do need to go and tend to things, here.

Yuck, we call them B-52's. They come out of the walls and fly during hot, humid weather.

When I was very pregnant with my first, unable to sleep under the weight of my belly, and the heat of the night, I lay awake and heard the familiar sound of the ginormous flying cockroach.

I was paralyzed with the thought that this thing was flying in my bedroom, and I could barely move just to turn over, how would I escape it if it came near?

Pac, pac, pac, pac, the hapless cockroach flew, bumping into the walls, the ceiling, the light fixture like a pinball, in a frenzy. Just when I decided I needed to get up and turn the light on PAC!!! that evil, vile, disgusting, serrated scratchy legged, two inch B-52 dropped at guillotine speed right onto my neck! My hormone heightened super senses felt the insult spreading from the filthy varmint on my tender neck to my very inner being, instantaneously I grabbed it and hurled it across the dark room. PAC, it hit the door, and I grabbed the hubs and shook him awake, still reeling from the disgustingness of it all. BLEK, the memory of it still makes me want to VOMIT! Yuck factor beyond the Richter scale.

I need a Chinese swear word to describe my anger at these nasty palmetto bugs / tropical cockroaches.

Yes a very strong appropriate Chinese swear word, or any other language will do!

Nasty, nasty creatures.

Hope you were able to stomach the clean up. eckkkkk!

Good night to you Cedar, sleep tight!

Leafy

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

We took an oath, for better or worse. Here we are, 35 years later and learning to care for ourselves and each other all over again after the craziness with our beloved G-F-G's.

You know Leafy, I think both D H and I sort of expected the day would come when we would be divorced. Then, we had those pretty kids and everything was all sunny all the time and so, no one went and got a divorce. We would like, have everyone over for dinner, or host a family reunion or some other positive, equally stressful thing instead, and then, fight about who has to bring the chairs back.

And life was pretty good.

Then, first one and then, the second, child went off the rails and how we made it through that, I will never know. D H did the saving of the marriage. Probably he had those times when he didn't want to be married to me anymore, either. (Here is a funny story. So, the kids were so in trouble, and oh, man, I hated my D H, and my life, and every single thing. So, I was lying there wide awake thinking nasty things, right? And I decided to turn over so I could glare at my D H in his sleep. But when I turned over?

Guess who was already glaring at me.

So, we glared at one another for something like two seconds.

So...that's married.

:O)

***

Everyone always says it is love and blah, blah. Marriage is a serious business. It matters very much that the male be ethical.

I sound so strange, but I think you know what I mean.

He must be trustworthy. Yelling and honest is part of that, as long as listening is part of that, too. Then, both people in the relationship grow.

I think that is true.

***

But without the kids and those dreams...I don't know. I didn't have a heart for my marriage. I had been a mom at home. That is what I wanted, and I was so happy living as the mom at home. When everything fell apart, there was no longer a reason for me to do anything I had done, before. There was no one to eat the cookies, no reason to create dinner, no sunshine at all in that house. So I made all kinds of changes, and D H stayed right with me through all of it, and isn't that something.

Oh, he was so mad when I went back to school!



Living with my D H through all that we have has taught us...I don't know. It's like, catching the other guy's back, every time, without fail.

Only it doesn't look much like catching, sometimes.

One time? My D H was so tired of hearing about my sister and my mother that he threw our dinner right over the deck railing.

?

And this is an Italian person.

They are fixated on dinner; dinner is second only to breakfast, in the eyes of my Italian D H. My D H has a temper, and a tendency toward verbal abuse. Like Jackie Gleason, in the clip you posted for us, Leafy. This is why we chose the men we did. To live the questions, to examine all of it right up close, and heal.

So I say, "Is that really how you want to talk to your own wife?"

Or I say, "What do you mean?"

Plus, my D H was never afraid of my mother. He just never took her seriously, and I was safe from her, under his wing. After my father's death, my mother became so nasty and cutting and determined to have it her way that even D H took notice.

The point I am making I think is that we chose our mates because we are confronting and working through issues we have decided to face. The problem, for those raised in frightening ways, is to determine the difference between a mate who is loud and obnoxious (sometimes) and a predator. Yelling is one of D H favorite things. I think it is the way he was brought up.

But I am not Italian.

Sometimes, I say: Could you just not yell about whatever it is right now? AND DON'T YELL AT MY DOG, EITHER. And no, it is not okay to yell at the cat."

I don't believe I much care for this yelling all the time stuff. And when that happens, then I think about leaving, very much. So, my D H stops yelling or I stop listening or whatever it is. It's like my avatar, in a way. "Gimme yo shoes." (And did you know Leafy, that red shoes are a symbol of the power of a fertile young woman? Oh, yes.) And I'm like, "D H, please."

And so, everything turns out to be nothing, at all.

I like being married to my D H, very much.

That is where the question of ethics comes in.

You have been with your D H for so long a time too, Leafy.

He must be a honorable man.

Marriage is a mystery. I never understand my D H motivation. He doesn't get me, either.

But here we still are.

And my favorite place to be, in all the world, is right next to my D H. That feeling of him, right next to me. How goofy is this?!? And we hate each other and we love one another and it is just an amazing thing, to be married to my
D H.

Marriage is a bright and black and bright again thing.

My D H has made me very strong.

Why he stayed with me all these years, I do not know.

It is a difficult thing, to describe a long-term marriage and how and why it works.

You wouldn't even have to say a bad Chinese word, just the intonation works!

No more word searching?!?

Kewl.

My hubs was raised more Hawaiian than Chinese, his Mom had the Chinese intonations. Her talking was mostly at a shouting level, she was funny, and boy could she ever cook!

I love D H mom, too. Italian ladies are so crabby and entitled. They don't love you hearts and flowers. They love you real. D H whole family is that way. And they fight and make up and everyone wants to be there for Christmas.

And the most important thing, when they get together, is the food.

I am serious. It took me the longest time to understand they meant it, when they wanted to know whether the sauce was boiling or smiling. To smile, when you are spaghetti sauce, is to be just above a simmer.

Did you learn to cook Chinese too, Leafy?

I have learned to cook Italian...but I still do wrong things like put oil in the pasta water.

Who knew?

And D H mom gives me a look and says: "What you doing."

Just like that.

No intonation.

For heaven's sake.

D H mom is older, now.

Hubs speaks English pretty well for a "local" boy. Pidgin English is the colorful, all mixed up language that you may have heard of. I can break in to it, having lived most of my life here. Pidgin English with a Boston accent- interesting stuff.

Ha! I love this story. As you read Copa more, you will see where she slips into the brilliant feel of Spanish, though her words are English.

and turn the light on PAC!!! that evil, vile, disgusting, serrated scratchy legged, two inch B-52 dropped at guillotine speed right onto my neck! My hormone heightened super senses felt the insult spreading from the filthy varmint on my tender neck to my very inner being, instantaneously I grabbed it and hurled it across the dark room. PAC, it hit the door, and I grabbed the hubs and shook him awake,

Ew, Leafy. You were brave. I would have been out of bed so fast. And
D H would be waking up all disoriented. And shouting, "What! What!" And I would go: "B B B BBuuuugggggg! Oh, roar, a huge bug was right on me!"

And D H would go: "What you doing."

Just like that.

No intonation.

Huh.

That actually happened to us one time, with a bat. Not that the bat got on me. But he was definitely in the vicinity. I kept waking D H up going, "BAT! There's a BAT in our room! A BAAATTTT!!!" And D H kept trying to go back to sleep. And then finally the bat swooped low enough for D H to feel him, too!

You never saw a man leap out of bed so quickly.

So, D H goes to get the fish net we keep to catch bats with.

And he couldn't catch it, and the more upset everyone got, the faster the bat circled and circled the room. So, D H starts yelling about why the cat was not catching the bat. And what good was she if she couldn't even catch a bat, anyway. (It is that same yelling problem we were discussing earlier, right?)

So, the cat gives D H a look, jumps off the bed, and leaves the room.

And D H and I are left alone with the freaking bat.

It was just so funny.

I am thinking we must have caught the bat. This all happened when I was much younger and cuter. If it happened today? D H would pretend to be asleep. D H is like, the best method actor ever. Even when I know darn well he's awake, he stays staunchly, absolutely asleep.

Huh.

Today? I would have to catch the bat, myself.

Seriously.

Hope you were able to stomach the clean up. eckkkkk!

Oh, the clean up is coming along beautifully! We have ants, too. They are everywhere in the kitchen. I cannot imagine what is different about this year. But everything is beginning to look pretty, again. It will take about a week to ten days, and we will have all of it back in order.

I am Spring cleaning as I go through each room. Today is the kitchen and the laundry room.

:O)

Feeling, I tried to respond to your post the night you were so frightened when the lights went out. We had already disconnected our internet though, so my response would not post and was not saved.

How are the nights for you now, Feeling?

Copa, you must be working in the other house. I think the last thing I read was that you had taken down old wall paper. You will fall in love with this renovation I think, Copa. It's fun to realize we can do these things.

I am happy for you. But I miss you.

:O)

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Likewise, I had no defending from my siblings. I was the one who had to ignore the mistreatment. Yet, as I write this, I feel guilty, as if I am speaking badly of my parents. They did the best they could and I love them dearly. In this instance, they were wrong. There I said it. I think I learned to become invisible, why does the term- persona non grata keep popping up in my head?

Leafy, there is information on FOO Chronicles on the black sheep. In a dysfunctional family, there will always be a black sheep. It has so little to do with the child seen as the black sheep. Black sheep is a role assigned in dysfunctional families. There is information too, on FOO Chronicles, on the rigidity in roles assigned in dysfunctional families. Everything is so chaotic that there is no role fluidity. No one can be themselves. One is bad, one is good, one is ignored ~ whatever it is that serves the dysfunction, that is what happens to the people in that family system.

Persona non grata.

Do some research on the black sheep role, Leafy.

That's just breaking my heart.

Invisible, when you were a beautiful little girl with a world of potential, made to serve instead a role so the family could lurch through life with their dysfunctions intact.

roar

I am glad you are standing up, now. I don't understand either why sibs stay in the same roles we had when we were little kids. I did it too, though.
It was the strangest thing, Leafy. As we went through uncovering and facing down traumatic things through these past months on FOO Chronicles, one of the most surprising things to me was that things had been so awful. Especially with my sister, but with each of my sibs, things had always been so weirdly out of balance. I didn't know any better. I was so surprised. I realized I had excused every weirdness because I believed we could do it. We could make family out of what was left, if we tried. But it seemed the old games were roaring along full strength. They were so familiar to me that I didn't see the wrongness in them.

Good, good for you Leafy, that you can see clearly what was not right. Once we know what we did have, and once we realize that the little girls (or boys) we were grew up emotionally starved, then we can think about what we needed and did not receive.

Then, we can provide that for ourselves. In the beginning, we learn to stop judging ourselves as we were judged, in our families of origin. We learn to hold ourselves with compassion, and to see our loneliness, and our incredible courage. For me, there was so much contempt, in every aspect of self, boiling away. It was very difficult to face it down. Each time I uncovered something (and it would begin with something similar to what you are describing, Leafy, with the phrase persona non grata) I would return to the imagery or the phrase again and again. Over a few days time, sometimes longer, the feelings, so long frozen, would burst through. I had been reading Brene Brown (a shame researcher). Her advice is just to have the feelings. Name them if we can. Don't try to get away or change them or make it better or apply a prettier label. It would take about three days, and I would feel not only better, but stronger and more certain in every area of my life. It truly is as though we reclaim the energy devoted to keeping ourselves protected from feelings the little girls (or the little boys) we were when it was happening to us could not face.

So, we went numb.

It's been a difficult few months in some ways, but each time I have been able to stay with it, the resulting freedom, or largess, or largeness, was worth it. I dreamed and dreamed, through this time. A Victorian mansion that somehow became mine. I was so afraid of so much that was in it. Drawers and claustrophobia and spooky things.

And one day, I realized I dreamed of that very house very often.

It was the strangest thing. What I've taken away from all of it is that we are meant to be whole. It's like, if we give ourselves permission to feel now what we were too little, then, to understand, we give ourselves permission to process the material, and to heal.

It still hurts so much.

I cannot imagine what it must have been, to go through it as a child.

We will be here as you come through it too, Leafy.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Copa, M needs to understand that you do not know yet how to do what seems so simple to him. Just as he would never, in a million years, be able to step into the professional role you held easily, you cannot be expected to know how to strip wallpaper or do other things you have no experience in. D H and I have such a hard time working together, too. We do best if D H lets me think it through and make mistakes, and accomplish whatever it is on my own time.

And in my own way.

Of course you are going to make mistakes.

M needs to hold you with the same compassion you would display for him, if he were suddenly supposed to know how to be the person with the doctorate.
Like, Monday he was himself, and Tuesday, he was the guy with the doctorate who is supposed to know everything you know. He would need time, just as you do. It isn't that you don't remember. It is that you are learning a new language, and not getting the nuances.

M needs to be patient, and encouraging, and he needs to be the teacher. The time he devotes will be repaid a thousand fold, as you learn how to do this.

It isn't that M is doing wrong, Copa. It is that he is not doing right. We expect more from those we love. He needs to be your teacher in the same kind way you would teach him, if he suddenly expected himself to perform in your work.

Cedar

 

[New Leaf]

Hi Cedar Love your story of your life with D H.

You asked about my D H, okay so D H is an acronym? I am thinking it is very appropriate, Dear Heart, DuH, Damn Husband, etc. Looking at this in preview D-H becomes "husband" like writing G-F-G without the - becomes difficult child. Excuse my non-savvy here.

Married life is definitely not the Disney definition. It is hard work, sometimes it is hell, other times heaven. Big differences in culture and family.
If I knew then what I know now, I would have RUN!
Fast and far, far away. But I didn't, and here I still am.

The point I am making I think is that we chose our mates because we are confronting and working through issues we have decided to face. The problem, for those raised in frightening ways, is to determine the difference between a mate who is loud and obnoxious (sometimes) and a predator. Yelling is one of D H favorite things. I think it is the way he was brought up.

I believe what you wrote as true, and it is all a part of that old patterning theme. The hubs and I started out as friends.
I loved him before I learned how to love myself.
I made a commitment, I should have been committed!

Hubs had a very, very difficult childhood. His father was well loved by friends and family, but very abusive to his mother, and his children.
I was thrown into a world so different from my own. Out of the frying pan into the fire. That is a long, long story.

He is strong and tough around a very soft heart. He is a hard, hard worker. I have to read between the non spoken words to know the love he has for me. Through all of these years, all of the good times and bad, I think we understand each other, well sort of, we understand that we are two very different people. It doesn't get easier.

We are like comfortable old hiking boots, the tread is all worn out and the laces are frayed, but there are many more trails to walk.

I almost wrote trials. Huh.

Sometimes, I say: Could you just not yell about whatever it is right now? AND DON'T YELL AT MY DOG, EITHER. And no, it is not okay to yell at the cat."

I don't believe I much care for this yelling all the time stuff. And when that happens, then I think about leaving, very much. So, my D H stops yelling or I stop listening or whatever it is. It's like my avatar, in a way. "Gimme yo shoes." (And did you know Leafy, that red shoes are a symbol of the power of a fertile young woman? Oh, yes.) And I'm like, "D H, please."

And so, everything turns out to be nothing, at all.

I like being married to my D H, very much.

Funny, my Mom and Dad were not yellers.
Here I am, with the extreme Chinese waitress.
The old me, used to get all uptight and fret over his antics, silly.
I finally realized that it wasn't up to me, that it was just him, being him.
So, don't try to talk to him while he is fixing the car, or watching football, or doing anything, because he just cannot multi-task like that.
When all he could do was grumble about my cooking, " Here brah." Handing over the spatula, "YOU do the cooking then!"
I don't argue with him, he is a big baby. There is no winning, just circles. Best to just walk away and let the air clear.
Good thing I have my hobbies.

When our two G-F-G's were coming and going through the revolving door, our house started looking like a refugee camp. Small, our house is. Three bedrooms, two baths, 1100 square feet. At the max capacity, we had ten people living here. I accumulated bureaus, bunkbeds, etc. I recently said, that's it, no more revolving door, we are done, I am reclaiming our living room.

No budget to redecorate. Oops paint at Home Depot is cheap. Now for a couch. Had a great idea to break down boys bunkbed and use the top section for a couch- cover bolsters, add pillows and voila! Couch!

It was not the typical bunkbed, it had to be cut apart.

When to recruit the Hubs to do the man work of sawing the top off? Risky business, getting the Hubs to do something. It won't be met with "Sure Honey, what a great idea!"
My hubs mumbles under his breath, loud enough for me to hear that he is griping, but soft enough that I cannot make out what he is saying.

There is no in between, I get mumbling, or yelling.

Up he gets from his chair. Here comes the frenzy. Knit brow, determined, he is a man of action. Don't get in his way, and do things before he asks you.

Sorry brah, I forgot to download the telepathy app.

He is shouting at our son, "Get the extension cord, and the light" he is in his "get it done" mode. No time to think or talk, or say please, just do it. Chop, chop. I feel myself tensing, here we go. Excited that my vision will be accomplished, yet anxious because there will be a saw involved, and probably not the right one, and it will be done in haste. It is too late to change the course. I have some dread, here comes the circular saw, a tool usually used on a table, he will use it sideways, sawing the bed posts apart in the bedroom. This is a man on coumadin. I try not to think of the horrific possibilities of limb loss. He is saying to my son and I, "Here, you hold this board here, so I can make a straight cut." I am like "You want me to put my head and my hands next to that thing?" Pointing at the menacing saw that will be improperly used. He is in full extreme Chinese waitress glory. "What- you- like- me- do?" My heart pounding with the tension and chop chop, haste, yelling, I went into a Red Fox dissertation from Sanford and Son, "Oh my God, I can't do this you are giving me a fricking heart attack!" Clutching my chest I walk out of the room. "Yah-ok-you- just- go- then!" He shouts. I sit out in the living room heaving sighs, trying to calm myself down. Whirrrrrrrrrr, sounds the saw from the bedroom.

No limb loss, it is done. It took a riot act to do it, but it is done.

You have been with your D H for so long a time too, Leafy.

He must be a honorable man.

Marriage is a mystery. I never understand my D H motivation. He doesn't get me, either.

But here we still are.

Yes, he is an honorable man. He is Oscar the grouch, Shrek, Archie Bunker (minus the racism), Walter Matthau in "Grumpy Old Men", Cookie Monster, Animal from the muppets, Lurch from the Adams family. All rolled up in to one. Underneath all of those characters is a vulnerability, a loyalty that makes us love them. And I do love him, my neanderthal.

And my favorite place to be, in all the world, is right next to my D H. That feeling of him, right next to me. How goofy is this?!? And we hate each other and we love one another and it is just an amazing thing, to be married to my
D H.

Marriage is a bright and black and bright again thing.

My D H has made me very strong.

Why he stayed with me all these years, I do not know.

It is a difficult thing, to describe a long-term marriage and how and why it works.

I love how you describe this thing, marriage. I could not imagine being with anyone else. We have grown so accustomed to one another.

And the most important thing, when they get together, is the food.

Italians and Hawaiians are very much alike in this aspect. Everything is centered around food. Hubs has a HUGE family. We have a giant reunion every two years, organized by the family counsel. There is camping and activities, and every kind of food imaginable. People come and go, sing, dance hula, tell stories, it is amazing.
It is not only the food that is important, but the love that goes into the prepping and cooking of it.

Did you learn to cook Chinese too, Leafy?

Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian. It is hard to be in shape here, the food is so ono (Delicious, tasty, savory; to relish, crave; deliciousness, flavor, savor).

I am thinking we must have caught the bat. This all happened when I was much younger and cuter. If it happened today? D H would pretend to be asleep. D H is like, the best method actor ever. Even when I know darn well he's awake, he stays staunchly, absolutely asleep.

Huh.

Today? I would have to catch the bat, myself.

Seriously.

Hubs is a great pretender also. I would be the bat catcher as well. The high pitched screaming, eek it's a mouse, jump on the chair damsel in distress would have no affect. I have had to learn to fend for myself. It is a good thing. I can take care of myself. Hubs, on the other hand wants to make me his secretary. He calls me at work "Uh, can you call Dr, so and so and make me one appointment?"

That's the rare times I hear him actually "talking".... on the phone. I half jokingly tell him we should get plastic phones, so he can talk civilly to me in the same room.

Oh, the clean up is coming along beautifully! We have ants, too. They are everywhere in the kitchen. I cannot imagine what is different about this year. But everything is beginning to look pretty, again. It will take about a week to ten days, and we will have all of it back in order.

We have a series of ant colonies rotating through the year here, ant wars. Teeny tinies give way to black ones, then non biting red ones, then nasty bigger black ones that like to nest in electronics. UGH. Tropical living means bugs. I have found a great non-toxic remedy called diatomaceous earth. Food grade. I buy it from the local feed store and put it in my cabinets and drawers, by the baseboards. Good stuff. People actually dissolve it in tea, or juice to keep parasites out of the gut. Interesting info on the internet on it.

I am excited for this weekend. I have resolved to get going and clean up too.
Put things in order.

Then, I should like to drive to the east side of the island, where the forecast is calling for high surf.

There is such beauty to the power and chaos of the ocean.

Hope your weekend is full of adventure!
Leafy

 

[New Leaf]

Leafy, there is information on FOO Chronicles on the black sheep. In a dysfunctional family, there will always be a black sheep. It has so little to do with the child seen as the black sheep.

I have never really thought of myself as the "black sheep". I shall have to research and process this one, Cedar. It kind of surprised me, actually. I was the "good" child. I remember once my Dad lined us up for a lecture and a "confession". My brother and sister pulled the "wasn't me" card, I could not bring myself to lie to my father, and broke down in sobbing tears, telling the whole story. I think that was part of my troubles with my siblings, I was not in cahoots with them.
We had a lot of freedom as youngsters. We could ride our bikes, explore the forrest, go to our neighbors.
I must have been the third wheel, where brother and sister were concerned, the annoying baby sister that they had to take with them.

In my teen aged years, I was a hellion. I became a Difficult Child. Child of the seventies. The imagination can run wild with that one sentence alone.

I think there is much to be said about birth order. Somewhere here, there is discussion about pecking order in the animal kingdom. I think it is much the same with siblings. There is a pecking order. Since my sister was such a strong personality, so dominant, she was calling the shots. We were not supervised like children of today. There were no organized sports, we were entrusted to roam free, play childhood games.There were no adults watching our every move, looking after us. Sister, did and still does have an amazing sense of herself, what she wants, a need to control. This played a large part in my development, I think I got swallowed up. She was ALPHA.

As I step out of the underling role now, it jolts her.

There is information too, on FOO Chronicles, on the rigidity in roles assigned in dysfunctional families. Everything is so chaotic that there is no role fluidity. No one can be themselves. One is bad, one is good, one is ignored ~ whatever it is that serves the dysfunction, that is what happens to the people in that family system.

You know Cedar, I do not know of any "Functional" families. Do you? I know of families that on the surface seem to have such a wonderful life, their kids are doing great. I am sure there were and are moments of dysfunction that I have no idea of.

Looking back at my past, in trying to discover what makes me tic, I see that my parents were trying their best to be parents in a quickly changing world.

Maybe it is something in my post to Believe, who is agonizing over her Difficult Child, whether or not her affair and leaving her husband resulted in her sons problems as an adult with drugs.

It comes back to my Dads favorite saying "it is what it is."

The simplicity and the complexity of that.

Deep, underneath our lives stories and our experiences with our Foo, there are reams of psycho analyses, scholarly explanations of what makes people act as they do. That's the complex.
The simple is, we are all imperfect humans. Trying to live our lives as best we can, under different circumstances.

Woven in between that is this wonderful, crazy, unpredictable world full of unique individuals trying to find their own way.

My two G-F-G's can recount stories to me of mistakes I made, and regrettably there is much truth there. But I tried, Cedar, damn, I tried to be a good mother. All I can tell them is that I did the best I could under the circumstances, that I made mistakes, that I couldn't go back in time and change anything, that I am sorry, but their life is their life, their choices, their choices.

It is the same thing my sister posted on Facebook (without the apology).

I think my Mom was so caught up in being the perfect wife (she tells of ironing my Dads boxers, and sheets for God's sake!), keeping the perfect house, caring for us, she did not look beneath the surface of things. My Dad was a hard working man, former Marine, he liked his home to be "just so." How can a household of six very different people be "just so?"

In between my memories of teasing and torment from my siblings I have some very vivid memories of wonderful family times. In all of that, for some reason, I did not learn to have a strong sense of self.
Which came first the chicken or the egg? Was it dysfunction, birth order, or was there some intrinsic part in my personality, that made me more vulnerable, more sensitive? Did this come off as weakness? Did I eventually become persona non grata, or was I born with the emptiness?

Invisible, when you were a beautiful little girl with a world of potential, made to serve instead a role so the family could lurch through life with their dysfunctions intact.

Pecking order. Good lord my sister was a tough cookie. I think my Mom gave into her, just to get her to shut up. It was easier. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Especially with my sister, but with each of my sibs, things had always been so weirdly out of balance. I didn't know any better. I was so surprised. I realized I had excused every weirdness because I believed we could do it. We could make family out of what was left, if we tried. But it seemed the old games were roaring along full strength. They were so familiar to me that I didn't see the wrongness in them.

I wonder what will become of us when Mom goes. Family is so important. But I see many examples of the elders in families dying, and the traditions and gatherings die with them. Little sister married into a big, loving close knit Irish family. They are constantly getting together for holidays. She laments that we are not the same, and we aren't the same.
We left, moved to Hawaii, there was no family here. We were not raised to be close knit. We were left to kind of raise ourselves in many respects, our individuality was applauded, and still is.

we can think about what we needed and did not receive.

Then, we can provide that for ourselves. In the beginning, we learn to stop judging ourselves as we were judged, in our families of origin. We learn to hold ourselves with compassion, and to see our loneliness, and our incredible courage.

the phrase persona non grata) I would return to the imagery or the phrase again and again. Over a few days time, sometimes longer, the feelings, so long frozen, would burst through.

It truly is as though we reclaim the energy devoted to keeping ourselves protected from feelings the little girls (or the little boys) we were when it was happening to us could not face.

So, we went numb.

I am familiar with this numbing, in myself, and definitely with the hubs. He withstood some horrible times with his FOO.

The struggle to forget/remember what was deeply buried as a result of the child coping skill of numbing. Baggage. Rinse and repeat. Patterning. I have acted it out in my life, not knowing what I was doing, until retrospect hit me in the face with it. This is why I go back, to understand. It does not put me in the category of blame seeking, because I take responsibility for my choices. I do so want to grow and to prevent myself from making bad choices based on the old role, persona non grata. Invisibility, self doubt, low self esteem. What a delicate balancing act life is, important to love ourselves, but not overmuch, that we become selfish and self serving!

What I've taken away from all of it is that we are meant to be whole. It's like, if we give ourselves permission to feel now what we were too little, then, to understand, we give ourselves permission to process the material, and to heal.

Yes Cedar, healing. Permission to feel. As children, how could we grasp that? Left to our own devices, and our siblings around us, how were we to defend ourselves? How was I to get out of the pecking order selected for me, while still in the flock? If my Mother couldn't find ways to overcome the dominant traits of my sister, how in the world could I?

You know whats funny Cedar? In connection with the two discussions here about the hubs and FOO, when my sis moved over here lock stock and barrel in the hopes of us having a "happy ever after relationship", the hubs did not object. While sis was freshly arrived, I had a pre planned weekend trip to an outer island. Unbeknownst to me, the hubs invited Tornado, Volcano (Difficult Child and insignificant other) and the three grands over. They are a havoc wreaking,loud, stampede through the house, crazy, chaotic blur.

My sis, after years of living on her own, full of her "I'll be the Aunty and Great Aunty and straighten them out" visions..... retreated to her room, shaken and horrified.

That was her basis for leaving the dream.

"Oh my God, it's a mess" she said, "Why didn't you tell me" (Of course I told her a thousand times over, she was my go to.)

I did not understand why the hubs invited the tribe over, he was not in the habit of doing that.

I now deduce, in his infinite Neanderthal wisdom, that he knew my sis was domineering, and the dream was not going to work, so he quickly extinguished it with the reality of my crazy D-C and her children.

By inviting them over-he exterminated my Sis from our house.

Huh.

We will be here as you come through it too, Leafy.

I am glad for your friendship, wit, intellect, support, and camaraderie!

There is a saying "Friends are the family we choose."

We all have sad, hard experiences with sisters, I think we are finding over cyber space that we have found awesome substitutes!

Leafy

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Damn Husband

Ha! It means Dear Husband. Back in the day when we called our troubled kids Gifts From God (difficult child) we called our husbands D H. We cannot put the letters together anymore without spaces, or the initials are changed into "husband" or "difficult child".

The hubs and I started out as friends.
I loved him before I learned how to love myself.
I made a commitment, I should have been committed!

My D H and I are different in every way. I would never have been able to be friends with my D H. He draws me, fascinates me, and he always did. I feel like a baby duck, sometimes, imprinted on my D H.

Seriously.

Quack.

***

Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian. It is hard to be in shape here, the food is so ono (Delicious, tasty, savory; to relish, crave; deliciousness, flavor, savor).

I have never eaten in Hawaii.

So, do you know the taste of "umami"? It is MSG. It comes from seaweed. Recently, it was designated the fifth flavor. (Sweet, sour, salt, bitter (?) and...umami. It enhances whatever food it is used to season. It seems to have no taste of its own, but to dramatically deepen the taste of whatever we use it with.

I would love to hear more about your style of cooking, Leafy. I would like to know what is your favorite dish. I would like to know, if it would not be too presumptuous, what people in the culture where you live eat for breakfast.

What do you snack on?

Do you drink coffee, or tea?

How extraordinary, Leafy.

I read James Michener's Hawaii. I remember that the hugeness of the queen was a status symbol, and I remember how much she loved the small man who was her consort. And poi. And typhoon, and the legend of how the Hawaiian Islands had come to be settled by small group traveling in canoes hewed from the centers of trees. And the sharks, seen as gods.

And the missionaries, forever angry and so rigid and ungenerous.

And was that the novel where the Oriental mother named her children after the continents? Asia, Australia...I don't remember the others. I think there were five children.

Have you lived there for a very long time, Leafy?

I think Hawaii would be a lovely place to live. I once knew someone who loved it there so much that he just up and moved there, to Molokoi, where there once was a colony for lepers.

This is so much fun to think about, Leafy. No wonder your sister was such a biatch. She was probably so green with envy.

Good.

She should be.

:O)

This is entirely fascinating, to me. Copa lived in Brazil for a time. I love to hear her stories, too.

***

I wholeheartedly agree with your contention that we learned to love through our D H. For me, I would add that we learned the surprise, and the no option but love that loving means, through falling in love with our children. It has always been so easy for me to walk away.

I could not walk away, could not stop loving, could not be invulnerable, to my children. I just could not; not in any smallest thing. I had a horrible time with detachment theory. But then, I realized I was not loving my kids into strength. To the contrary, what I was teaching them was that if the story was bad enough, I would pay.

It is a fearsome thing, to love someone that way.

That is why I love the song Halleluiah, especially as kd lang sings it. Love is so surprising a thing, so painful a thing. Copa writes about falling in love with her child too, and about loving the intensity of it and being caught in the horror of it, sometimes.

Italians and Hawaiians are very much alike in this aspect. Everything is centered around food. Hubs has a HUGE family. We have a giant reunion every two years, organized by the family counsel. There is camping and activities, and every kind of food imaginable. People come and go, sing, dance hula, tell stories, it is amazing.
It is not only the food that is important, but the love that goes into the prepping and cooking of it.

Oh, wow. I have this huge longing for family dinner. How I would love to participate in your dinner. I agree with all my heart that it is the love that goes into the preparation that matters, and the anticipation, and the stories that run the generations.

You are fortunate in this, Leafy.

I am happy for you.

When my oldest two grands were little, we had a Story Rock. We still have it. The girls and I went out and found and chose it. It has lots of sparkly mica in it. We told so many stories holding that Story Rock! When they were still very little, I told them the mica was the magic of the stories we told while we were holding the Story Rock. Even D H mom told stories when the family was come together. It was so much fun. One of the best things ever, that Story Rock.

Only the person holding the rock was allowed to speak.

It was so much fun.

Ha! What a lovely series of memories you've awakened, Leafy.

:O)

Cedar

 

[Copabanana]

You guys, I have a connection to Hawaii, too. But I have never been there.

When my parents divorced in about 1956 my father became a merchant marine, a pastry chef. He worked for American President Lines and Matson passenger liners and went to Hawaii and places like Yokahama Japan, Fiji Islands, Hong Kong and Australia.

His second wife, Emily, was Korean/Polynesian. I think she was from the big island.I had a half-brother who died when he was 32. I liked Emily a lot but never saw her again after I was about 10 or 11. My Dad disappeared for about 5 years. He was living in Honolulu with Emily and Billy.

When my father left Emily he took Billy with him. He was 3 years old. I do not know if it was with Emily's consent or not.

I always wondered if I should have tried to find Emily to tell her Billy had died. But decided that would be mean. Everybody is dead now.

 

[Copabanana]

When everything fell apart, there was no longer a reason for me to do anything I had done, before.

That is what happened to me when I got so sad after my mother died. Except it encompassed every other thing I had done except lay in bed and buy online, while listening to CNN on satellite radio.

I know you all must be getting bored with my routine, but I, unfortunately have not.

There was no one to eat the cookies, no reason to create dinner, no sunshine at all in that house

I know, Cedar. But you got through it and became who you are today. Like I will be soon.

So I made all kinds of changes, and D H stayed right with me through all of it, and isn't that something.

Yes.

Oh, he was so mad when I went back to school!

Except not that mad because after all he paid. He didn't have to.

One time? My D H was so tired of hearing about my sister and my mother that he threw our dinner right over the deck railing.

Good for him. They would give anybody indigestion.

I love D H mom, too. Italian ladies are so crabby and entitled.

When I grow up I want to be this way too.

I used to have a kind of boyfriend. Pavlos from Greece. I still think about him after about 35 years. He used to say I acted spoiled. I was secretly so pleased. I bought a sterling silver charm that says Princess. After I become y and entitled I will be on my way to be a Princess. Except all of my jewelry is being sent to my son because it got off track when I sent his baldness shampoo.

I kept waking D H up going, "BAT! There's a BAT in our room! A BAAATTTT!!!" And D H kept trying to go back to sleep. And then finally the bat swooped low enough for D H to feel him, too!

You never saw a man leap out of bed so quickly.

That happened to me, too. But I have repressed the trauma of it and cannot remember the context.

I am happy for you. But I miss you.

I miss you, Cedar. Actually, the wallpaper was the only work I did. But I am going every day to bring M his lunch. He is behaving better.

Copa, M needs to understand that you do not know yet how to do what seems so simple to him.

I wish I could tell you I was working, but I am mainly returning all of the junk I have bought.

Cedar, I will get to the rest of your M post later. I have not been getting the alerts from this thread so I have to catch up. Lucky me.

I have a tropical bug story too. I went to Puerta Villarta when I was about 28. I was hanging out with this other American, a businessman, who I was disinterested in, but was interested in companionship. That is to say, he was interested in companionship and I was interested only in company.

So we bade each other goodnight. I went to my room and in this tropical resort with a thatched roof, and a bug the size of a large bird was there on the wall. I can see it right now. I had not a second thought except to go get the man in his room to deal with the bug.

He thought it was a ploy to get him to come to my room for companionship. It was a huge deal to convince him it was just the bug. He was very irritated and expressed I was a tease. I said, whatever, but please help me with the bug.

You know that kind of attitude? I felt at the time that he was right. That I had no right leading him to believe that I wanted anything more than a bug killer. And knocking on his door at night promised to be more. It was not.

It was a big big bug. What was a girl to do?

I am trying to see where the cadence of my writing seems Spanish. And cannot. I wonder if it is like this: For a bug, it was big.

COPA

 

[New Leaf]

For you warrior sisters, the video is grainy, but the hula depicts strong women. This is from the famous Merry Monarch hula festival in Hilo,Hawaii, where your family hails from Copa. What a mysterious and wonderful coincidence. Genealogy is very important to Polynesians, your ohana (family) would like to know that you are their Aunty.

ROAR!

 

[Copabanana]

Thank you, New Leaf. This is beautiful.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Always issues, especially with mixed cultures. I don't know of anyone who has had the "happily ever after" relationship- darn Disney, all their fault we were supposed to marry Prince Charming

So, I watched the Marlon Brando clip posted on P.E.

I am still toasty warm.

:O)

But...I remember that kind of passion. Remember being that young? It was enough just to have it, just to ride that out; there was nothing to compare it to then, and there is nothing like it, now. Then come babies and living and not being the prettiest thing because for children, we must become the most stable thing. It's like voyaging across waters of so many different colors, living a life.

White sails, snapping in the wind; the water deep and scary or breaking and shining and catching the sun.

D H has always said: Love happens over time. In the beginning, it's chemistry.

I was so offended about that.

But now that the chemistry part is pretty much gone? I think he must have been right, all along.

I know what you mean though Leafy, about wishing for more. D H and I are forever falling out of happiness and into hatred. That is, as I make very clear to him, because my D H is a jerk, sometimes. I am serious. D H can be loud and verbally abusive and pretend he doesn't know it when of course, he knows exactly what he is doing. In the beginning of our marriage, I needed that exact kind of man. Someone I could come into balance around; someone who would tell me what was the matter with me so I could address it. This is the essential question we are left with when we have been raised in abusive family systems, whatever else is floating around in there. But no matter how fast I danced, how much I understood, how often I forgave...my
D H was who he was. He had been brought up in a certain culture, too. They say that for Italian men, there is the Madonna, and there is the Whore.

I am not sure what the imagery of the beautiful whore washing her feet in the sun meant for me, but part of that imagery had to do with reclaiming the Whore; with cherishing her attentiveness to loving and appreciating her own beauty for herself. In some way having nothing to do with a man, or with anyone watching or not watching. The snapping, buzzing neon sign.

The dust, and the heat.

And none of that matters to the beautiful whore (Susan Sarandon) because she possesses herself. And no matter how many times she sells herself, she has never sold herself, because she has incorporated and cleared all the negatives surrounding whatever names others have assigned her to believe.

She knows a different truth.

I love that imagery.

I have been washing my feet like crazy, you guys. And putting lotion on them.

And I think about that movie, when I do that.

I can feel the sun in it.

***

For a woman to incorporate that kind of thinking (Madonna/Whore) in a man, she has to be very certain she is her own Whore. Her own Madonna. Her own self. There needs, I think, to be such value for herself in the woman that she can disbelieve whatever fantasy the man has grown up believing about women.

Just as we need to come to grips with the truth that our husbands are not heroes who are never frightened, are people who sometimes don't know what to do, either.

And who need to be loved just for themselves, sometimes.

That is how my D H and I fell into this family kind of love, but with a bullet, I think. The steady, sometimes shocking, erosion of illusion. And it's like you look into someone's eyes and say:

"Well, hello there."

"Have you been here, the whole time?"

And there is a real person there, under everything I believed about him and about me, and I love him so much because he taught me to love myself. I had to stand up to my D H or I could never in a million years have stood up to my mother and my family of origin. I am still tumbling into nasty, surprising true things about the way my family of origin worked.

How did I not see it?

Everything was forever a defensive/protective "That is my mother." Or, "That's just mom. Or, sister. Or, brother." They really did commit the craziest actions, say the craziest things. It was as though I had committed to understanding and forgiving thoughts and words and actions that were wrong from their inception...but I don't know why I did that. As we have gone through these past months on FOO Chronicles, there were so many times I felt shame at who they were and at who that made me.

Maybe that is what I did not want to see? Or why I refused to believe they could possibly mean to do what they were undeniably doing?

Or maybe, I was too afraid to confront them until I could love or at least, accept and feel protective enough of myself, and of that little girl I was, to survive the condemnation that would surely come if I were to cross them? And that is why I did not let myself see that there was no loyalty there, no cherishing. That in fact, there was a corrosive ridicule and a kind of destabilizing, decentering labeling.

"Just don't think, Cedar."

Contempt.

Much of what I have accomplished would not have happened had I not had Copa and Serenity and IC and all of you to witness for me, and to keep me honest with myself. But in the beginning, it was needing to stand up, to gather my forces, to declare my own name before my D H that made me strong enough to interact with my family of origin, at all.

So Leafy, this is my long, chain of consciousness way of explaining what I understand about why we choose males who love us but do not love women.
(This is where I generally launch into my feelings about the misogyny permeating every aspect of all of our lives. While I won't go into it at length, that it exists, that it is real, affects us all, male and female, alike.)

I am like, exquisitely keyed into misogyny in a male. I mean into the flavor of the misogyny for that particular male. And it will be there. And in a female, for that matter, because we believe so much that is hateful about ourselves, too. For instance, think about the clip with my chill amorata Marlon Brando and that woman. The woman is presented as powerful/powerless; as slinking, and somehow, ugly in the face of her desire.

We miss stuff like that, all the time.

If we begin to watch, then we will see. That too is an area of healing for all of us, male and female, alike. We need to heal into compassion for ourselves
and our mates and our kids. We all are doing the best we know, and none of us really does know.

***

So, I am thinking again about allowing my family of origin forgiveness, or trust, or belief in them. In reality, I had no right to do that. To lose even one felicity is to be robbed of more than we have a right to spare. (That is Charles Williams, of course. Descent Into Hell.) I needed to wake up, and stand up, not even so much to Family of Origin, but to and for myself. I needed to say what was true, and to see the ugliness that was true and stop ignoring what was happening because I was forever believing it would be getting better oh, just any minute, now.

To heal takes such a long time.

Cedar

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

He is in full extreme Chinese waitress glory. "What- you- like- me- do?"

Ha! I love this story. I think it is a man thing, to do whatever it is in the most dangerous way possible. One day, our neighbor stood, in the lake, on an aluminum ladder, cutting an overhanging branch with an electric chain saw. He was like, "I'm fine. It's grounded."

And he did not die, either.

"What-you-like-me-do?!?"

I love this.

Chinese waitress.

:O)

Yes, he is an honorable man. He is Oscar the grouch, Shrek, Archie Bunker (minus the racism), Walter Matthau in "Grumpy Old Men", Cookie Monster, Animal from the muppets, Lurch from the Adams family. All rolled up in to one. Underneath all of those characters is a vulnerability, a loyalty that makes us love them. And I do love him, my neanderthal.

Between D H and me, he is Bert.

I am Ernie.

We have a series of ant colonies rotating through the year here, ant wars. Teeny tinies give way to black ones, then non biting red ones, then nasty bigger black ones that like to nest in electronics. UGH. Tropical living means bugs. I have found a great non-toxic remedy called diatomaceous earth. Food grade. I buy it from the local feed store and put it in my cabinets and drawers, by the baseboards. Good stuff. People actually dissolve it in tea, or juice to keep parasites out of the gut. Interesting info on the internet on it.

We have a feed store, here.

I will try that, Leafy. Thank you. I will put some in my tea too, just in case I have any parasites. First, as you suggest, I will research it on the internet, to be sure that would be an okay thing to do.

The ants seem mostly to be gone. But this morning, there were some in the dishwasher.

?

I know anger does have it's place, Maya Angelou spoke on channeling anger to write, dance, make art and fight for a worthy cause.

Maya Angelou is one of my heroes. She was important to my healing, in that I called her to witness for me when I could not stop seeing myself being abused through my abuser's eyes. I could not see the wrongness in what was happening, in what happened. I have read Maya, and seen her on Oprah, and know she is proof positive that we can reclaim ourselves; she has not given birth to a daughter. She mothers many black women. I think she would mother me too, if she knew. So, I felt okay to envision her as my witness in traumatic remembering.

It worked.

Maya knew it was wrong, what happened to me.

So, I could know it, too.

I believe it is important for us to come to see through our own eyes. That is how we reach internal locus of control. Anger is part of that. When we were hurt, the reason we were not angry then at what was happening to us is because we believed ~ in the heart and core of ourselves ~ that our abusers knew us; knew we deserved nothing better.

We carry that understanding at the core of us, I think this is true, to this day.

Something so wrong, something we are not aware of, that "made" our own people treat us badly. We needed, I think, to make a choice: Is there something the matter with us, or is there something the matter with the parent? It is way more scary to think the parent is not the strong, stable person your survival depends on.

By default, we took the hit.

That is why I say all the time that we need to learn to see those incidents of abuse ~ whether from a sibling or a parent or a friend or a stranger ~ through our own eyes, and never again through the eyes of the abuser.

The abuser's eyes justify his or her actions through some version of contempt. In our powerlessness, we came into agreement with that. There was nothing else to do.

We were little kids.

That is what I found, as we went through the process of self-reclamation here on FOO Chronicles. Once we can see through our own eyes, we come legitimately into internal, versus external, locus of control.

We were used in the service of something ugly; of some power over ugliness. Once we see it, we are free.

Maya has been very important to my process. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Women Who Run With the Wolves), Charles Williams, Frank Herbert.

The black lady from Matrix, who is surprised by nothing.

Cedar

 

[New Leaf]

Thank you, New Leaf. This is beautiful.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

He was living in Honolulu with Emily and Billy.

When my father left Emily he took Billy with him. He was 3 years old. I do not know if it was with Emily's consent or not.

I always wondered if I should have tried to find Emily to tell her Billy had died. But decided that would be mean. Everybody is dead now.

I'm sorry everyone is gone from you now, Copa.

I loved what New Leaf said, about your being an aunty. Beloved, already.
I would be so pleased and happy for you, if this could be so.

I know you all must be getting bored with my routine, but I, unfortunately have not.

Oh Copa, I think you have made amazing progress. Remember how scary it was, in the beginning, just to admit how things were? You have been brave, Copa. Remember the Kennedy quote?

"Let me win. If I cannot win, let me be brave."

You are doing so well, Copa. You are carrying so many traumatic events, so much loss. You need this time. One day, you will be done. Out of bed you will come. But how wonderful to have had such a nice, safe bed to come back to.

A small mercy, Copa.

And perfect.

I used to have a kind of boyfriend. Pavlos from Greece. I still think about him after about 35 years. He used to say I acted spoiled. I was secretly so pleased. I bought a sterling silver charm that says Princess. After I become y and entitled I will be on my way to be a Princess. Except all of my jewelry is being sent to my son because it got off track when I sent his baldness shampoo.

There are times when I am very sure we are stronger than we know. It took rescuing a mother approaching the end of her life, it took following an addicted or emotionally disturbed child into Hell and walking through it with them. It took turning a child out and living from some hellish, echoing place where there is no right answer ~ these are the things that broke us.

Everything else, we took brazenly in stride. We may apologize routinely...but there is a certain strength in that. We take responsibility as a matter of course. Our apologies are not "Help me! Oh, someone help me.", so much as they are "I can help; I can change; I can see without flinching. We can do this."

So...that would be King, Copa. Not Princess, not Queen.

King.

Leader with an open, loving heart.

I understand the Princess analogy too though, Copa. Remember the poetry?

In a far land of witches and ogres
in a time of Princesses on strings....

Except not that mad because after all he paid. He didn't have to.

Oh yes, Copa. This is true. It was the first thing I had ever done against my
D H wishes. Son and D H were so upset with me for "going off on a tangent".

Daughter was like, "Good for you, mom."

My mother was so hateful about it; my father, so...not proud so much, as a sense of quiet triumph.

I loved my father.

He was a good man.

He thought it was a ploy to get him to come to my room for companionship. It was a huge deal to convince him it was just the bug. He was very irritated and expressed I was a tease. I said, whatever, but please help me with the bug.

You know that kind of attitude? I felt at the time that he was right. That I had no right leading him to believe that I wanted anything more than a bug killer. And knocking on his door at night promised to be more. It was not.

This man was a terrible jerk, Copa. I wish he had laughed and come right over and taken care of the bug and behaved like someone with an ounce of integrity instead of a jerk.

I wonder why they do things like that?

Your Spanish cadence comes out in your fiery, Copa. It has to do with some blazing thing, and with brevity.

Like a glittering rapier versus a heavy steel sword.

It was a big big bug. What was a girl to do?

I don't know what I would have done, either. I am very sure I would have gone to get the man, too.

How rude of him to have been such a self-conceited jerk.

I caught a flying squirrel in a mayonnaise jar once when D H wasn't home.

The cat had him trapped in the bathroom. So, I put the mayonnaise jar on the floor next to the toilet and chased him toward it.

But I would not be so brave with a bug.

Something about all those legs.

Ew, Copa.

What a terrible choice: The bug, or...the creepy little man with the thoughts that drip and fester and run.

Cedar

 

[New Leaf]

So, do you know the taste of "umami"? It is MSG. It comes from seaweed. Recently, it was designated the fifth flavor. (Sweet, sour, salt, bitter (?) and...umami. It enhances whatever food it is used to season. It seems to have no taste of its own, but to dramatically deepen the taste of whatever we use it with.

Ohhhhh MSG. I am terribly allergic to MSG. I found that out, later on in life as I ate Chinese food-Chinese put MSG in everything. Now, the food industry has discovered it, how it enhances taste in our very tastebuds and makes us eat more. I have some research on MSG due to my allergy to it. It causes my lips to swell, then my heart races. I have arthritis and when I mistakingly eat MSG (it is literally in everything now) my joints scream at me " YOU have eaten MSG!" If you look into it Cedar, you will see that the MSG industry has used all kinds of tricks to get it into foods and disguise that fact. I read an article stating that there are over 500 acronyms for it- uckkkkk.

I would love to hear more about your style of cooking, Leafy. I would like to know what is your favorite dish. I would like to know, if it would not be too presumptuous, what people in the culture where you live eat for breakfast.

Oh there are too many to eliminate for one qualifier. Favorite foods have much to do with weather, or mood, or scents, or memories don't they? I shall have to think about that one. That might be an entirely different topic for the water cooler section.

Breakfast. With so many cultures here, that is another vast topic. The hubs favorite memory of breakfast is fresh apple pie, hot out of the oven. Huh.
Rice is an important staple here, not Uncle Bens with butter, but heavy, sticky rice the way Japanese and Chinese eat it. I would say, the all time breakfast on a weekend is eggs, rice and breakfast meat. Bacon, sausage or eww, spam. Believe it or not, spam is a big thing in Hawaii!

What do you snack on?

I am trying to be better about snacking. In our school office, folks come in with all sorts of yummy treats. Cookies, cakes, chocolates. The Japanese have a tradition of gift giving that has become cross cultural here called omiyage. It means when people travel, they will bring back foods unique to the area. Each island has their food, Molokai has a bakery famous for Portuguese bread, a round loaf of tender, feathery, light goodness. Now it comes with different flavors in the center-strawberry and cream cheese, cinnamon, blueberry. Yum. Maui- one must try mochi, a gooey, rice based sweet. Kauai is kulolo, made from taro and molasses. Big Island has a chocolate shop and also shortbread cookies dipped in dark chocolate. When one travels to the continent where there is Trader Joe's, a food gift from there is a must. I brought back Italian macaroons from Mikes Bakery in Boston.

The ladies in my office are trying to keep in shape, so we have requested fruits as treats! We have a challenge, our baker in the cafeteria constantly brings up yummy treats she makes from scratch.

I really like dark chocolate and now that they say it is good for us......

Do you drink coffee, or tea?

I am a coffee drinker, but am transitioning to tea. How about you?

I read James Michener's Hawaii. I remember that the hugeness of the queen was a status symbol, and I remember how much she loved the small man who was her consort. And poi. And typhoon, and the legend of how the Hawaiian Islands had come to be settled by small group traveling in canoes hewed from the centers of trees. And the sharks, seen as gods.

And the missionaries, forever angry and so rigid and ungenerous.

And was that the novel where the Oriental mother named her children after the continents? Asia, Australia...I don't remember the others. I think there were five children.

Have you lived there for a very long time, Leafy?

I read Hawaii when I was in High School, then they came out with the movie, Julie Andrews played the wife of the missionary. I didn't know much about Hawaiian history back then. It really was not taught. The Hawaiians had an awakening of sorts in the 1970's starting with a movement to save areas designated for development.
It is a sad story for my husbands people. Indigenous people have a tremendous battle when colonized. They were branded as pagans by the missionaries, but the missionary movement actually is credited with preserving the language, because it was oral. The Hawaiians were nearly exterminated, genocide. The language, hula, surfing, religion, medicine was banned. The people were forced off of their land by all manner of injustice.
The very word for land -aina- literally means "that which feeds", not only feeding the body, but also the mind and spirit.
We are very fortunate that there were practitioners who lived in the outreaches who preserved the chants, stories, hula.
There has been a resurgence of the culture, the people and it is a beautiful thing.

I had a horrible time with detachment theory. But then, I realized I was not loving my kids into strength. To the contrary, what I was teaching them was that if the story was bad enough, I would pay.

It is a fearsome thing, to love someone that way.

Yes, Cedar, I know exactly what you mean. Hawaiian culture, family is everything. It is very foreign to detach. This has many ramifications for me.

When my oldest two grands were little, we had a Story Rock. We still have it. The girls and I went out and found and chose it. It has lots of sparkly mica in it. We told so many stories holding that Story Rock! When they were still very little, I told them the mica was the magic of the stories we told while we were holding the Story Rock. Even D H mom told stories when the family was come together. It was so much fun. One of the best things ever, that Story Rock.

Only the person holding the rock was allowed to speak.

It was so much fun.

This is a beautiful tradition, Cedar. Thank you for sharing that with me.

I love rocks.

There is a power and energy to them.