My Grandmother

My grandmother was one of the most manipulative and difficult people I have ever met.  People chuckle knowingly when I say this, I think because they picture some kind of Archie Bunker-grumpy-but-full-of-character type.  They think I'm being hyperbolic or humorous.

They do not understand.

My grandmother would offer you condescending praise to your face and then cut your feet out from under you with horrifying criticism a minute later.  She would say vicious things about you behind your back and then deny them vehemently when accused; she would turn the words back around on you as if you were the one who did the offending.

My grandmother was despicably narcissistic.  She dominated conversations and belittled everyone she encountered.  She might ask you questions about yourself, but only as a means to turn back to her own stories, or to gather ammunition with which she would shoot you later.  She only heard what she wanted to hear, and had the memory of an elephant.  She would hold something you said as a fourteen-year-old against you for the rest of your life.  She really didn't care if she hurt you.  She hated children because they were boring.

My grandmother used money to own people.  She would hold out sparkly, shiny things that you needed or wanted very badly, but only in exchange for behavior or time, as dictated by her.  She would give things and then take them back, or criticize how you used them, or berate you if you gave them away.  She created toxic forms of emotional slavery and guilt.

My grandmother was racist, classist, and homophobic.  She used tips to control waiters, and was unconscionably rude to them and other people she considered "help."  Going out with her was a lesson in mortification.  She overpaid for items and handed out one-hundred-dollar bills, but if you got one of those payments, it meant you were indebted to her, and she never forgot a debt.  If you defaulted, it was because you were a stupid asshole/Chinese/a dumb girl/a Jew/naive/retarded.

My grandmother drove away almost everyone who loved her.  She did not know how to show love herself in a way that made any sense.  She scarred most of my family in ways they struggle to overcome.

I feared my grandmother for most of my life.  I was also embarrassed by her.  And she made me angry a lot of the time.  I left Boise right after college because I worried if I became a teacher here she would show up to my classes or be in my boss's office, manipulating and controlling and ruining my life.  I wanted independence more than anything, and so I left.

She hated me for leaving, for a long time.

When we moved back here last May, the grandmother I knew my whole life wasn't there anymore.  In her place was a worn out old lady, slowly dying.  The racism, controlling behavior, and narcissism were still on auto-pilot, for sure.  But there was also a simplicity, a sweetness, a reversion to child-joy that existed alongside that old self.

I would come in her room to find her sleeping, and gently rub her hand until she woke up.  She would smile like there was nothing better in the world than finding me standing there.  She wanted nothing more than company.  She wanted to know about me and my family.  She laughed a lot, at herself and the world, and not in a mean way.  Her mind was going, thank God, and in its place I had a glimpse of who she might have been had she not been angry every day of her life.

Yesterday, my uncle went to check on her and found her on the floor, beside her bed.  She had fallen, and she died there, on the floor.

My grandmother was hilariously funny, a performer, a clown, an actress, a singer of great talent.  She showed up at many of my volleyball and basketball games as a kid, with no warning, and belted out the "Star Spangled Banner."  She had a giant laugh, unmistakable, infectious.  She was magnetic, and you wanted to hear her stories.  She traveled all over the world.  She had incredible adventures.  She sang "Sunrise, Sunset" at my wedding and, on one trip we took to Buffalo when I was an awkward junior high teen, she got into a crowing contest with Howie Mandel at a hotel breakfast buffet.  She won.

My grandmother was generous.  She always gave me money, every time I visited.  She loaned everyone in my family money, or gave them money.  She made sure we had money for cars, houses, and schools, or to pay off debt.  She paid for me to go to Washington, D.C., when I was in junior high, and visited me in Europe when I was studying abroad.  She took me and a friend on a hellacious but incredible road trip to Disneyland when I was a kid.  She paid for my Costco and AAA memberships for years.  She took me with her to McCall to visit friends most summers when I was growing up, and my happiest childhood memories are from there.  She bought my girls Kindles for Christmas a few years back, and was constantly trying to write them checks, even when she was low on money herself, near the end.

My grandmother was an iconoclast.  She was shaped like a blueberry, had riotous black ringlets that framed her face, and she dressed like a gypsy cowboy in polyester bendovers, decorated with reams of gold necklaces and beads.  She wore wigs.  She always looked like she had a Halloween costume on, but those were just her normal clothes:  muumuus and flip flops.  She had a membership at the country club, and would show up there, loud and bossy, doing belly flops off the diving board just to shock all the entitled assholes who liked their world quiet and tidy.  She hated men who thought they could tell her what to do.  She worked as a miner, living out of her camper, for a long spell in the seventies.  I think those were probably the happiest times of her life.

My grandmother was an entrepreneur.  She loved to say that she was fired at the only job she ever got.  She used an inheritance to buy properties in Boise, and owned a motel, and a medicine delivery business.  She took care of all this like her life depended on it, and had a strong work ethic.  She also partied very, very hard and made all sorts of exciting and painful mistakes.

My grandmother got to die in her house, like she wanted.  On Sunday, she had brunch at her country club, with some friends, and then had a drive around the North End, the most important place in the world to her.  I like to think that she died soon after, on my daughter's birthday--life and death seeming to always come and go together--and that she didn't suffer, but lay unconscious while the last difficult breaths left.

That's what I'll choose to believe.

Coupla Things

Last year was crazy for us--you've probably picked up on that by now.  We moved and had to deal with living on less than half what we were making before.  I handled that pretty badly, and although we had some awesome times last summer, I also felt like there was a whole lot of constriction going on.

Every week it felt like I had to figure out something to "cut" from our budget or from our lifestyle.  I hated that.  I cried a lot.  I said many mean and inappropriate things to many people, and especially to E.  I was also very mean to myself.

What I can see more clearly now is that we had some serious lifestyle inflation happening there for a long time before we moved here, and also had developed a lot of coping mechanisms for being two working parents in demanding careers, no family (of origin) nearby, and a resistance to asking for help.  We really got into the habit of paying for most things--doggie daycare, childcare, food, house cleaning, entertainment.  Because that was how to survive.

I guess there's nothing wrong with that per se, and I'm grateful we had the means to do it.  But moving here I've learned there are lots of other ways of doing things, and that those other things can lead to something that looks a lot like connection and happiness.  I had really got to thinking I couldn't be happy without all that noise.  And though I'd love for us to be making a little more money than we're making now (that's the plan, too) I also wouldn't go back to the old model--both of us stressed and exhausted and not fully living our lives--either.

There's some clarity developing around what I don't want, is what I'm saying.  I don't want to work all the time, and I don't want E. to work all the time.  I don't want to feel financially precarious, but I don't need all the "goodies," either, if that means I'm just coping.  I don't want to veg out on shopping just because I feel sad and can't figure out why, and I have really been thinking about my choices to self-isolate and my loneliness habit.

But what I've ALSO been thinking about, and taking classes on, and doing a bunch of work around, is figuring out what I do want.  That's harder.  Way harder than I thought it would be.  But, the good news?  It feels a lot better than focusing on constriction or dwelling on what's going wrong.  It feels like cake on a mother fucking platter after a year of starvation diets.

Here's what I've learned about what I want:

I want to belong to a community of people that I can ask for help and who ask me for help.

I want people around my dinner table and parties at my house.

I want my girls' friends to just come on over and be over here a lot, and I want to be able to call their parents and say we need a night out please take our children away, gah.

I want my brothers and sisters to drop their kids off at my house, and I want to take my kids to theirs.

I want lots of time for writing and being outside and for cuddling and watching tv and reading.

I want to travel.  I want to go camping.  I want to do scary-exciting things I haven't done before.

I want to be surprised, and create surprises for other people.

I want to make choices at work that set me up to do what I love doing:  writing and working with students.

I want to keep figuring shit out myself, either in classes, or on trips, or in groups with others.  I want to be a student.

I want to set up a sweet, delightful life for my family.

I want beauty, and treats, and the space to enjoy both, rather than managing clutter and suppressing cravings.

I've been thinking about this list a lot.  I had to make tons of other lists in order to get here.  Lists of things that I like to do, ways that I like to feel, divine experiences, gratitudes.  Lists of who I'm angry at and why and how I can forgive and get over it and get on with it.  Lists of things to let go of.

What I haven't been doing is making to-do lists.  Oh, I have a master task list, sure--I have a bunch of projects always going on at work and it's useful to keep general tabs on due dates and stuff.  But I used to live every day by a very detailed to do list.  Oh my God, that was my religion.  I could have given you a seminar on the topic, and if you asked me, I probably did.  I'm sorry about that.  How incredibly boring.

I mapped out my life in fifteen-minute increments, treated things I wanted to do as tasks to be crossed off, scheduled in "personal" time and time with the kids, time to pray, time to take a bath.

Lord, it was a sickness.

Here's the coupla things that I think have cured me.  What I really want in life is to

make magic

and

make space

That's it.  That's all.  Everything I want from the list above fits into one of those two things.  And, I'm trying to use these two things to make decisions in my everyday life.  

This is taking some time as I'm mostly used to doing things because I think I'm supposed to do them, not because I want to.  Here's how I operationalize it (which is a fancy of way of saying here's how it looks in action).

Someone asks me to do a job at work.  That job might come with extra money attached, which we could sure use.  But make money is not one of the two sentences above.  I make money, of course, but focusing on that first, as the objective, makes me feel all tight and unhappy (see "constriction" above).

What I'm saying is if that job doesn't allow me to make good connections with students (which feels like magic to me, in a work sense) or work on a topic that truly floats my boat (intellectual magic) or open up space in my schedule, Ima say no.

Or, another example:  I used to really dread holidays.  Easter?  Bah.  What is that holiday even for (I mean, if you're not totally into the Jesus thing).  And you know how I feel about Halloween.

But guess what?  If my job is to make magic, holidays become super important opportunities for me to build the life I want.  Take St. Patrick's Day this year, for example.  Usually, St. Patrick's Day=meh or some weird approximation of drunken frivolity which I just don't get.  But my words are make magic, so I ordered some silly leprechaun kit for $17 online, and I stayed up late on March 16 to hide all this leprechaun stuff all over the house, and sprinkled green glitter in the girls' hair while they were sleeping, and we all had the greatest time doing the treasure hunt in the morning, for ten minutes before school.  The girls talked about it all week, and they are too old to be believing in leprechauns, but who cares.  They loved it+I loved it=magic.

I don't have time or energy to make magic if all I focus on is work and cleaning the house, though, so I also have to make space.  Because space=freedom.

Operationally, that has meant another round of clutter-busting so that I don't have to clean so much.  More space in my house has made me feel weirdly optimistic about the future, too.  Making space also has meant another round of trimming down activities and commitments so I have more space in my calendar.  Because everyday I want to choose what my day is going to look like, at least a little bit, apart from what a calendar and a list say.

Both of these activities have meant violating some "rules" I thought I had to live by when it comes to "stuff" and "commitments" and "good habits."  So I've been making some mental space, too, for new rules.  Mental space to try some new things outside my comfort zone, too, like shamanic healing and self-help classes.  Which has actually been super fun.

So far, I'm still kind of sucky at the operationalizing.  I've been working too much and haven't had time to plan some things I have in mind, or to have more fun every effing day than I've been having, which is another goal (and not a very high bar, I might add).  But I'm getting there.

Very refreshing, these coupla things.  Mother fucking cake on a platter.

Parenting Done Hard

We live just a few blocks from downtown Boise, and the girls and I were walking to a coffee shop a few weeks ago when an older homeless woman stopped us and asked for money.  I had heard her spiel before and had given her a few bucks once.  I was about to thank her and move on because we didn't have any cash, but Nolie held fast to my hand and wanted to listen to the story.  The woman said something about having been in a car accident, and losing all of her property, and needing surgeries that had used up all her money.  I told her we didn't have any money and we walked away, but Nolie yelled back to her that she was sorry about her troubles, and then she was quiet for a few blocks.

I'm going to do a fundraiser for that lady, Mama, she said.

Oh, man, I hate these moments as a parent.  Because you know there are some big headaches coming, and it's just so hard to explain all of that.  So you're either headed toward an argument, or just saying no, or borrowing trouble.

But one thing I've learned is that, rather than give the lecture, it's best to just go with the flow.  So I listened to Nolie's plan and didn't tell her no.  Even though I was thinking:  how will we ever find that lady again.  What are you going to tell people about this lady.  What if she's not telling you the truth and you find out and then we have to talk about Humanity.

I didn't say any of that, though, because most of the time, when the kids have plans like this--like that they are going to buy a giraffe and charge their friends money to see it--I just let them go on about it and know they'll figure out on their own that it's not going to work out.

Nolie is persistent, though, and she didn't give up on this particular idea.  She came home and emptied out an old apple sauce jar, washed it out, and took it to school.  She pitched her classroom on donating to this lady, and then pitched her GATE classroom, and has pitched almost everyone we have met over the last month.  I notice that the spiel has become increasingly grim, with the lady's family dying in the crash and her having a broken leg and stuff, and I don't think that was in the original story, but now I'm not sure anymore, either.

Based on the spiel, though, all of Nolie's classmates brought some change in, and her teachers threw money in the jar, too.  Nolie is galvanized by this response.  She continues to collect more money.  She totals it up almost every day.  My stepdad, who was over for dinner the other night and is somewhat cynical about this kind of thing, heard Nolie's spiel and told her the homeless woman was probably lying to her.  We talked about how we decided this didn't really matter but we were supporting Nolie anyway, and then he threw five bucks in the kitty, which says a lot of good things about his character, if you ask me.

All told, she collected forty bucks.  Not bad.

But so now Nolie has been nagging me for a few weeks to go and find the lady, and ugh, I'm dreading this part.  Nolie has her little ziplock with all these single dollar bills and quarters, and we're walking around downtown, past the church where we met the lady, just hoping we'll run into her, which is a pretty ridiculous plan.  We find this guy,

the only guy who is outside the church on Easter Sunday rather than inside, and we explain the problem to him.  He is super kind, and gives some good ideas, like coming to their homeless lunch (three weeks from now) and trying the library, where he tracked down a homeless guy himself once.

Nolie was bummed.  She really had in her mind we'd just find the lady waiting there for us.  She really wants to be the person who presents this lady with the money.  Who doesn't think this, in some form, at some point?  Who doesn't have the hero fantasy?

We moved on and got to the end of 8th street, and there was a homeless kid that I'd seen on this one corner--it's kind of his perch--and we go and ask him about the lady.  He knows who it is immediately, but looks at Nolie and tells her the lady is lying, she wasn't in an accident, she was "just another homeless, like me."

I could tell he wanted us to just give him the money, and the thought crossed both my mind and Nolie's.  But we just thanked him and started home.  I didn't ask him if I could take his picture, and I didn't push her to make a decision right then.

Nolie was quiet on the way home, again.

I feel kind of cheated, she said.

I nodded and said, yeah.  But it doesn't change the fact that you're trying to do something helpful, and it might not change the fact that she asked us for money and probably needs it.  Still, I said, you could probably decide to donate this money to a homeless shelter instead, if you wanted.

Or I could give it back to everyone who donated, she said.

Yep, I said.

But that doesn't sound right, either, she said.

Right, I said.

Anyway, there's no good ending to this story, yet.  Nolie's going to think about it for a while, and we'll try again to find the lady.  The whole thing has been kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest, and is why I didn't want to let her collect the money in the first place.  I don't have clear answers for her about the right thing to do in this moment, and also have to trust her to make a good decision, and then support her doing it as best I can.

On the other hand, it's got her thinking, doesn't it?  She has to think about who she wants to be in the face of uncertainty, and how to act when the other person's character or intentions aren't clear.  And isn't that a good experience to have?