It's only Tuesday? Good grief. I need relief.
How far to Dodge?
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Monday, May 15, 2006
Mother's Day
Yesterday was Mother’s Day. It’s always an awkward day for me. I am a parent, but not a Mom. I have a child, but she does not have a Mother.
Katherine, my (step) daughter, is 17. We’ve been together since she turned 10. Before that she had her real Mom, Rhonda. But Rhonda died just a few months before Katherine’s 10th birthday, and after that, I married Katherine’s Dad. It’s a lot for a kid to absorb. It’s also a lot for an adult to absorb.
Katherine and I have a good relationship. We’ve had to work on it though. We didn’t “fall in love” the way her Dad and I did. Our love for one another was more intentional. We learned to love one another. We looked for reasons to love one another. And we found them.
That’s not to say I wasn’t crazy about her when we met. I was. I remember thinking she was one of the coolest kids I‘d ever known. But it’s a different sort of relationship you build when there are more than 23 years difference in your age and there is no physical chemistry to bond you when the going gets rough.
I used to worry myself sick over whether or not I had the “mothering” instinct. After having lived by myself for nearly 10 years, I was fairly set in my ways. And my ways didn’t include watching The Lion King for the 100th time or stopping by McDonalds for a burger and fries. I tried to enjoy it. I tried to be caught up in the “wonder” of her excitement. But I often failed.
Thankfully, Katherine is a very mature kid and she always has been. Since I’ve known her I’ve been blown away, oh at least a hundred times, by her insight and understanding.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that she is really a kid. Often I look at her and think she has raised herself. I think she might be a very old soul, inside a child’s body, who is just waiting for the body to grow so she can fully express her wisdom. And she patiently endures our “parenting” while she waits for her body to grow.
The other day she picked Sam and I up from the airport after having stayed home alone for several days. Sam was doing a fair amount of passenger seat driving when she finally told him, “You know Dad. I’ve been driving for nearly a year now without you in the car. And I did get here to the airport without any help or advice from you whatsoever. But don’t worry about it – because I think your worrying is cute.”
See what I mean?
And sometimes I think she is raising me as well. I’ve learned so much from her in the last 7 years and it has come mostly from just watching.
So I guess what I am trying to say is that in spite of my somewhat suspect mothering instinct, the job of “raising Katherine” has been remarkably easy. Which is a good thing of course. Because if it had been really hard, who knows how things might have ended up.
And so on Mother’s Day, I have a lot to be grateful for, and yet it is typically a very awkward and uncertain day for me.
It’s a day on which I want to tell the whole world, “Yes! I am a Mother! I have a child! A daughter! You should meet her! She is so great!” I want to rejoice in the fact that I have been blessed with this amazing kid in my life, that I have been given the chance to be a Mom to this amazing kid even though I have never given birth to any children of my own.
But it’s also a day where Katherine finds herself feeling profoundly motherless. She knows I love her. She appreciates the role I play in her life. But on this day more than any other, she feels the deep and profound loss of knowing that her real Mother is dead. And on Mother’s Day of course, she wants to honor her Mom. And that is not me.
She gives me a small gift, and a non Mother’s Day card. And I accept, but feel like an imposter.
For the other 364 days of the year, things will be fine. I know this from experience.
But on this day, we’ll do this dance with one another to get through the day. She harbors her sadness, sheltering it from me because she doesn’t want me to be hurt. And I harbor my sadness, sheltering it from her because I don’t want her to feel it as a burden, or worse yet an obligation.
And the day passes.
Katherine, my (step) daughter, is 17. We’ve been together since she turned 10. Before that she had her real Mom, Rhonda. But Rhonda died just a few months before Katherine’s 10th birthday, and after that, I married Katherine’s Dad. It’s a lot for a kid to absorb. It’s also a lot for an adult to absorb.
Katherine and I have a good relationship. We’ve had to work on it though. We didn’t “fall in love” the way her Dad and I did. Our love for one another was more intentional. We learned to love one another. We looked for reasons to love one another. And we found them.
That’s not to say I wasn’t crazy about her when we met. I was. I remember thinking she was one of the coolest kids I‘d ever known. But it’s a different sort of relationship you build when there are more than 23 years difference in your age and there is no physical chemistry to bond you when the going gets rough.
I used to worry myself sick over whether or not I had the “mothering” instinct. After having lived by myself for nearly 10 years, I was fairly set in my ways. And my ways didn’t include watching The Lion King for the 100th time or stopping by McDonalds for a burger and fries. I tried to enjoy it. I tried to be caught up in the “wonder” of her excitement. But I often failed.
Thankfully, Katherine is a very mature kid and she always has been. Since I’ve known her I’ve been blown away, oh at least a hundred times, by her insight and understanding.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that she is really a kid. Often I look at her and think she has raised herself. I think she might be a very old soul, inside a child’s body, who is just waiting for the body to grow so she can fully express her wisdom. And she patiently endures our “parenting” while she waits for her body to grow.
The other day she picked Sam and I up from the airport after having stayed home alone for several days. Sam was doing a fair amount of passenger seat driving when she finally told him, “You know Dad. I’ve been driving for nearly a year now without you in the car. And I did get here to the airport without any help or advice from you whatsoever. But don’t worry about it – because I think your worrying is cute.”
See what I mean?
And sometimes I think she is raising me as well. I’ve learned so much from her in the last 7 years and it has come mostly from just watching.
So I guess what I am trying to say is that in spite of my somewhat suspect mothering instinct, the job of “raising Katherine” has been remarkably easy. Which is a good thing of course. Because if it had been really hard, who knows how things might have ended up.
And so on Mother’s Day, I have a lot to be grateful for, and yet it is typically a very awkward and uncertain day for me.
It’s a day on which I want to tell the whole world, “Yes! I am a Mother! I have a child! A daughter! You should meet her! She is so great!” I want to rejoice in the fact that I have been blessed with this amazing kid in my life, that I have been given the chance to be a Mom to this amazing kid even though I have never given birth to any children of my own.
But it’s also a day where Katherine finds herself feeling profoundly motherless. She knows I love her. She appreciates the role I play in her life. But on this day more than any other, she feels the deep and profound loss of knowing that her real Mother is dead. And on Mother’s Day of course, she wants to honor her Mom. And that is not me.
She gives me a small gift, and a non Mother’s Day card. And I accept, but feel like an imposter.
For the other 364 days of the year, things will be fine. I know this from experience.
But on this day, we’ll do this dance with one another to get through the day. She harbors her sadness, sheltering it from me because she doesn’t want me to be hurt. And I harbor my sadness, sheltering it from her because I don’t want her to feel it as a burden, or worse yet an obligation.
And the day passes.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
It's easy to do the right thing, when the right thing is easy to do.
I had lunch with my brother last week. He and I are definitely related. Not only do we look alike, but we have many of the same mannerisms, we struggle with many of the same issues, and of course we share the same history. Our relationship has always been intense. I’ve always said there is no one on this earth who can, in an instant, make me laugh harder or hurt me more intensely than my brother. We know each other more than I think we like to admit.
There have been whole years where we have gone without speaking to one another. We share the same quick temper and when those tempers flared, angry words were exchanged, lines in the sand were drawn, and in the after math, it was just easier to let the days pass than to make amends.
There have been many more good times than bad, however. We’ve spent hours and hours in intense conversation, discussing and analyzing our most important relationships and trying to make sense of the often strange dynamic that exists within our family. And there have been many more hours spent exchanging new music, sharing book and movie recommendations, trying out new restaurants, and going to concerts together. For most of our lives, we’ve been a team.
Of all the things I love about my brother, one of the things I admire most is his emotional complexity. His inner life is rich and complex and often complicated, and that’s not something he shies away from. One thing we share in common is that we both live with a voice in our heads that questions or criticizes nearly every thing we do. It’s exhausting, but because we have each lived with it for so long, it feels natural. One of the by- products of living with this voice is a propensity to worry. We are masters when it comes to stewing about things. And when it comes to an anxious stomach or a sleepless night – we’ve got it nailed.
So when my brother told me over lunch last week that he’d been unable to sleep for the last several days, I instantly related.
“What’s going on?” I asked. My brother began relaying his story.
Several days earlier, he had returned from lunch to his office and decided to park on the street rather than in the employee parking lot. He’d found a tight spot and carefully eased his car into it. As he returned later that afternoon, he noticed a parking control cop with lights flashing near where his car was parked. As he neared, he realized the officer was parked right next to his car and appeared to be inspecting his rear bumper. A woman he vaguely recognized as a fellow employee hovered nearby.
“This your car?” the officer inquired of my brother.
“Yes.”
“You park it?” he went on.
“Yes, why?”
“Well, it seems you banged up the car behind you pretty good trying to squeeze into that spot. You remember hittin’ the car behind you while you was parkin’?”
“No,” my brother answered, becoming alarmed.
“Well your paint‘s all over this lady’s bumper, and as you can see, you crunched her up pretty good.”
As it turns out, my brother had just touched up the paint on his rear bumper the night before, and sure enough, the fresh paint was on the front bumper of the car behind him. He knew he had tapped her as he’d edged into the spot. In fact he’d backed up until he felt his bumper touch hers before he started pulling forward again. But he knew for certain he hadn’t “crunched” anything.
He looked hard at the car behind him, and then more closely at the lady hovering nearby and quickly realized this was not headed in a good direction. The car in question had clearly been in an accident, but not one he had caused. He suspected the driver was looking for someone with insurance to pay for an earlier fender bender.
Now here is an interesting thing about that voice that lives in our heads. It can be our own worst enemy, taunting and nagging us till we want to throw our selves in front of a moving bus just to get it to shut up. But let someone else criticize us, or even hint at the suggestion that we’re wrong, and that voice jumps to our defense with the power of a ninja.
“What? You’re not going to let them get away with that are you? Do you see what that woman is trying to do? She is trying to nail you! You are being screwed, my friend. S-C-R-E-W-E-D!”
Thankfully, we’ve both learned not to listen to everything the voice suggests, but sometimes it’s just easier than others to ignore. This, it turned out, was not one of the easy times.
My brother got angry. He got defensive. He lost his cool. And before he knew what hit him, he was sporting not one, but two tickets – one for hitting a parked car and the other for parking more than 12 inches from the curb. And he had his very own date with a judge to chat about it further.
My brother was furious. He was angry at the owner of the car, he was angry at the cop, and he was angry with himself. For the next several days he stewed about it, playing the interaction over and over in his mind. He thought about what he could have said and done differently. He thought about how badly he’d been wronged. And in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep because his mind was racing, he thought of revenge.
He knew his anger was wasted energy. He knew he was only torturing himself. Yet he couldn’t seem to let it go.
The day before our lunch, my brother saw the woman’s car parked on the street. Although he’d been looking for it, this was the first time he’d seen it. His fury rose. There was no one in sight. It was a perfect opportunity for revenge. He imagined the deep gash his key would make across her door. His heart raced. He pictured her frustration when she returned to her car to find all four tires flat. His palms began to sweat. He imagined the satisfaction he would feel at knowing he had been vindicated.
And then, in a moment that he described as feeling “other worldly”, he reached into his pocket, dug out some change and began feeding her parking meter. He emptied his pockets, and then went back to his car to get more. He fed the meter with every bit of change he could find, filling it beyond its limit.
My eyes brimmed with tears as I listened.
“I couldn’t imagine how that could help,” he told me. “I only knew I didn’t want to continue feeling the way I’d been feeling. I did it with faith that an act of generosity would be more powerful than an act of revenge. But in the moment, I really, truly, couldn’t believe it was anything other than ridiculous.”
I asked him how he felt now, 24 hours after having fed her meter. “I feel better,” he said. “I slept last night.”
This very rarely happens to me, but I was at a loss for words.
It’s easy to do the right thing when the right thing is easy to do. It’s much harder when you are feeling hurt and angry and your mind is itching for revenge. And it is nearly impossible when your faith feels empty because you can’t even imagine, let alone believe, that your actions could make a difference.
I believe my brother to be a giant of a person. And I couldn’t love him more.
There have been whole years where we have gone without speaking to one another. We share the same quick temper and when those tempers flared, angry words were exchanged, lines in the sand were drawn, and in the after math, it was just easier to let the days pass than to make amends.
There have been many more good times than bad, however. We’ve spent hours and hours in intense conversation, discussing and analyzing our most important relationships and trying to make sense of the often strange dynamic that exists within our family. And there have been many more hours spent exchanging new music, sharing book and movie recommendations, trying out new restaurants, and going to concerts together. For most of our lives, we’ve been a team.
Of all the things I love about my brother, one of the things I admire most is his emotional complexity. His inner life is rich and complex and often complicated, and that’s not something he shies away from. One thing we share in common is that we both live with a voice in our heads that questions or criticizes nearly every thing we do. It’s exhausting, but because we have each lived with it for so long, it feels natural. One of the by- products of living with this voice is a propensity to worry. We are masters when it comes to stewing about things. And when it comes to an anxious stomach or a sleepless night – we’ve got it nailed.
So when my brother told me over lunch last week that he’d been unable to sleep for the last several days, I instantly related.
“What’s going on?” I asked. My brother began relaying his story.
Several days earlier, he had returned from lunch to his office and decided to park on the street rather than in the employee parking lot. He’d found a tight spot and carefully eased his car into it. As he returned later that afternoon, he noticed a parking control cop with lights flashing near where his car was parked. As he neared, he realized the officer was parked right next to his car and appeared to be inspecting his rear bumper. A woman he vaguely recognized as a fellow employee hovered nearby.
“This your car?” the officer inquired of my brother.
“Yes.”
“You park it?” he went on.
“Yes, why?”
“Well, it seems you banged up the car behind you pretty good trying to squeeze into that spot. You remember hittin’ the car behind you while you was parkin’?”
“No,” my brother answered, becoming alarmed.
“Well your paint‘s all over this lady’s bumper, and as you can see, you crunched her up pretty good.”
As it turns out, my brother had just touched up the paint on his rear bumper the night before, and sure enough, the fresh paint was on the front bumper of the car behind him. He knew he had tapped her as he’d edged into the spot. In fact he’d backed up until he felt his bumper touch hers before he started pulling forward again. But he knew for certain he hadn’t “crunched” anything.
He looked hard at the car behind him, and then more closely at the lady hovering nearby and quickly realized this was not headed in a good direction. The car in question had clearly been in an accident, but not one he had caused. He suspected the driver was looking for someone with insurance to pay for an earlier fender bender.
Now here is an interesting thing about that voice that lives in our heads. It can be our own worst enemy, taunting and nagging us till we want to throw our selves in front of a moving bus just to get it to shut up. But let someone else criticize us, or even hint at the suggestion that we’re wrong, and that voice jumps to our defense with the power of a ninja.
“What? You’re not going to let them get away with that are you? Do you see what that woman is trying to do? She is trying to nail you! You are being screwed, my friend. S-C-R-E-W-E-D!”
Thankfully, we’ve both learned not to listen to everything the voice suggests, but sometimes it’s just easier than others to ignore. This, it turned out, was not one of the easy times.
My brother got angry. He got defensive. He lost his cool. And before he knew what hit him, he was sporting not one, but two tickets – one for hitting a parked car and the other for parking more than 12 inches from the curb. And he had his very own date with a judge to chat about it further.
My brother was furious. He was angry at the owner of the car, he was angry at the cop, and he was angry with himself. For the next several days he stewed about it, playing the interaction over and over in his mind. He thought about what he could have said and done differently. He thought about how badly he’d been wronged. And in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep because his mind was racing, he thought of revenge.
He knew his anger was wasted energy. He knew he was only torturing himself. Yet he couldn’t seem to let it go.
The day before our lunch, my brother saw the woman’s car parked on the street. Although he’d been looking for it, this was the first time he’d seen it. His fury rose. There was no one in sight. It was a perfect opportunity for revenge. He imagined the deep gash his key would make across her door. His heart raced. He pictured her frustration when she returned to her car to find all four tires flat. His palms began to sweat. He imagined the satisfaction he would feel at knowing he had been vindicated.
And then, in a moment that he described as feeling “other worldly”, he reached into his pocket, dug out some change and began feeding her parking meter. He emptied his pockets, and then went back to his car to get more. He fed the meter with every bit of change he could find, filling it beyond its limit.
My eyes brimmed with tears as I listened.
“I couldn’t imagine how that could help,” he told me. “I only knew I didn’t want to continue feeling the way I’d been feeling. I did it with faith that an act of generosity would be more powerful than an act of revenge. But in the moment, I really, truly, couldn’t believe it was anything other than ridiculous.”
I asked him how he felt now, 24 hours after having fed her meter. “I feel better,” he said. “I slept last night.”
This very rarely happens to me, but I was at a loss for words.
It’s easy to do the right thing when the right thing is easy to do. It’s much harder when you are feeling hurt and angry and your mind is itching for revenge. And it is nearly impossible when your faith feels empty because you can’t even imagine, let alone believe, that your actions could make a difference.
I believe my brother to be a giant of a person. And I couldn’t love him more.
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