Category Archives: Woman of a Certain Age

Neither crone nor cougar

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Humor has two homes – pain and happiness. Great happiness. Happiness that is secure to the point of silliness. But even that happiness has to have in it the spice of pain to give it tang. Otherwise it is Disney with plastic gravitas, angel food cake without strawberries, sensible shoes in brown, and blandness masquerading as naiveté.

IMG_1952The question is: when you are a woman of a certain age, what are you? Society is still figuring this out even as we women of that age are living it.

We are, in fact, changing the paradigm. We are no longer crones, though we have immense wisdom. Scary wisdom. Be afraid.

And, sorry, but those of us who are in shape are not all cougars. You may be attracted to us, to your immense bafflement, but we don’t wear leopard skin Spanx and most of us are not trying to seduce boys. If they get seduced, it’s their own problem, not ours. We’re interested in lovers who are not afraid of us and who know the depths of love because they have depth in themselves. Otherwise stay away.

Being “a certain age” is a no-woman’s land of just being who we are. A tad unfair. Teenagers have prescribed roles, millennials have prescribed roles, young parents have prescribed roles, people of middle-age have their prescribed crises, and then there are women 60 and over.

We have made it through marriages, divorces, betrayals, illnesses, children, disappointments, poverty, prejudice, injuries, and successes. We have made it through being beautiful and being ugly. We have made it through seeing that the world will not be devoid of pain – ours and others – in our lifetimes. We have made it through seeing what our work has or has not done to change the world for the better.

We have forgotten more people and more lovers and more crises than any other group, and we savor beauty and remember EXACTLY what and who we should remember. When my granddaughter at 4 years of age sings out “Let It Go,” she has no idea that we say this to ourselves every single day. Every time we look in the mirror, every time we feel pain, every time we want to cry. We let the tears come, and then the laughter. We KNOW how to “let it go.”

photo 9And one day we stop worrying that we don’t have role models except Gloria S. and Tina T. and Elizabeth (Warren), and a few others … oh, wait, there is a list! Yes, of course, and each is uniquely herself.

And we are suddenly able to be goofy in the face of what is and what was – and not because we mumble to ourselves or don’t know any better. No, it’s because we do know. We have learned how important “goofy” is. It is freedom not to be a crone, not to be a cougar, but to be magnificently ourselves.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

 

 

Storage Capacity: an unfolding

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My storage capacity is overflowing. Before anything new can come in it seems something else must go out. Or I have to go to systems control and obtain more capacity, a mysterious process that comes from the clouds.

Should some of my archives be deleted? There may be useful material embedded next to what is now trash.

It would be easy to decide what is other people’s trash – anything having to do with hate or belittlement of themselves or others. It’s not so easy to decide what is one’s own trash.

Oh, that’s a sweet memory even if it makes me sad. Oh, and that resentment surely has protective value in case I am ever again in that exact same situation in that way with that kind of person.

And what about that glorious moment of vanity when I and my world were young? Wasn’t that fun and wasn’t I spectacular?

But I don’t want to review everything in order to select what can stay and what should go. It doesn’t seem efficient or the point.

Yes, I understand my processing has slowed down here and there, and that I have a few software glitches, but I have workarounds. My operating system is basically sound. There are ways that it is more sensitive and responsive and discerning than ever before. It’s just that it is so full, and has started self-deleting, people’s names especially.

For decades I could increase my storage capacity by changing my perception of what I am capable of, expanding my emotional depth, and allowing breakage of my perceived reality so that a larger reality could replace the smaller one – so that my storage held more beauty, more pain, more compassion, and more nuanced and complex truths.

But is there a time when the sheer epic size of the myriad facets of being alive among other humans and animals and plants and songs and wars and love and art calls for compressed data rather than enhanced data, for haiku rather than saga, for the porcelain vase rather than the pieta, for a sonata rather than Wagner?

I see in the vase a world with history, passion, intent, and occasional breakage. I hear in a single flute as deep a message as that of a full symphony. I experience in a gesture such life that I am in danger of being overwhelmed by a chaos of many gestures – more evidence of a capacity at its limit or of a system operating at its fullest?

I can no longer process war, I can no longer process violence, I can no longer process guns and the other ways we kill each other. I can hardly process the face of another mother or father or child in anguish, though I certainly try. There are reasons we watch cat videos. They are manageable.

We are, I see unfolding as I write, all going through our lives with overloaded storage capacities. Files on love and peace, and how to have both, are submerged under files on survival, distraction, ambition, and voluntary ignorance. Love doesn’t get enough hits.

But love is there if we use our search engine – and with time, many of us search for it. With time, we know the universe is incomprehensible. With time we know the ranges of morality, we know life is a tragicomedy, we know every child needs protection and opportunity. We know one unnecessary death is a tragedy. We know that hundreds and thousands of unnecessary deaths is NOT a statistic. It is hundreds and thousands of tragedies.

We are humans, not computers. Blood runs through our veins and irrationality enlivens our visions.

In the vase I see the world. In the haiku I hear the millions. In the touch of my grandchild’s cheek I feel the precious lives of all children. It is enough to fill me.

 

Pockets

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Some people place you in their side pocket among their keys and billfold to take out only when you are useful to them, without care if you have been scratched, rumpled, or torn.

Others in their breast pocket, more tenderly, to be taken out like a small shiny object, perhaps of use as a secret talisman, or to be shown as borrowed i.d. to gain them entry into someone else’s esteem.

Still others place you in a purse, back pack, or computer bag jostled among their history of ticket stubs, old lipsticks, used tissues, and aging agendas to be rediscovered by happenstance when they search for someone else’s business card.

There are no pockets in someone’s heart. To be there your host had to have been willing to feel your essence and let it pervade their own. When that happens, your perfume will linger forever. If they let you know depends on who they are, what they understand of beauty and rarity, and how they tend love.

The Nature of Love

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When I lived in a radical religious commune in New York State, the nature of love was our koan. It seemed important. The overarching mantras in the air were God is Love, God is One, Love is All. Somehow the nitty gritty of good and evil, the daily in your face of what to do when a rat breached the flour bins, was ignored. Was the rat a “not God”? Were we supposed to set up a separate feeder for the rat to show OUR love? Well, we were pretty bananas, but not that bananas.

It was further complicated by the language issue. The “old family,” mostly young Jews from NYC with advanced degrees who had been with the leader since he sat in silence in Central Park, spoke in sign language, lyrical hand and arm movements original to the group. (I refuse to say “cult.”)

Not only were we a quiet people but we were an earnest people wishing full immersion in the Love that is God that is One that is All. As such, negative forms of speech were frowned upon. Spoken language could get quite contorted if you felt someone was slacking off in the kitchen or garden or on a building project – and sign language only allowed for beauty. “No” did not exist.

I never learned more than a few sign words, having arrived late and leaving after a half year, but I, too, longed for full immersion. My previous experiences placed me immediately in a certain category of seeker. I arrived older than most and jump-started.

No drugs were allowed, sex was discouraged, and couples frowned up (though there were several). Besides manual labor, we sang, danced, and meditated – those words are not adequate! – and I learned unanticipated skills such as how to walk through woods in blanketed darkness, how to sleep on snow at -30 degrees to escape singing and dancing, and how to give gifts fully and without attachment. The last has stood me in good stead.

I also had (albeit concise) conversations with Hindu gurus who visited me in dream states and who had, well, died decades before. I’d never heard of them and they came without summons, and it was intense, and sometimes amusing. But that’s a different blog, and it would make most readers think I was a nutcase, and it doesn’t really matter because what matters is: do you love well?

Loving well is the life lesson, the work that separates wannabes from pilgrims.

Love, like light, is both substance and wave.

Love is the substance of action. It is getting off your bum and making someone’s life better.

Love is the wave of essence. You were born out of this essence. It is your true home and self.

And THERE’S the rub. In our physical bodies and unique minds we seldom experience the pure essence of love, let alone Love as All. In linear time and space, we strive nonstop to position ourselves anew in a world of clash and clang and rivalry and fear and striving to be something more, or larger, or stronger, or safer, or more attractive.

I don’t know that there is a way around this, at least not an easy one. God may be All, but our daily “all” is fractured and sieved and chopped and filtered. We perceive and navigate an infinite number of tidbits, thinking if we reassemble them and ourselves, life will be better. And if we rearrange well, it is usually true. Good housekeeping has value. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” and all that. Such work allows for progress in the conditions of life on this earth. It is where the dynamic between good and evil is defined and enacted. It is, at its best, Love as action, Love in action.

At the commune the numbers soared when the temperatures rose. The summer I was there one visitor was an astrophysicist who never looked at the stars.

Let me back up. That summer the family was in a sort of peril as the leader renounced a decade of Hindu “God is All” for Born Again Christianity with its split world of good and evil. It turned out that someone had given the leader (well, “Freedom” was his name and he wasn’t actually “worshipped” in case you are worried) a transistor radio. Alone in his yurt, he listened to Christian radio. My guess is he was vulnerable from living off canned white asparagus for several years.

On re-entry from a decade in the stratosphere of “Love is All” he split into three personalities – God, Freedom, and the insurance salesman he had been earlier. They had different voices and talked to each other. One night at meditation, listening to their dialogue – monologue? – we started giggling. I would say the “game was up” but it wasn’t remotely like that. We provided a safe place over the next months while he reconstituted. For the most part, love prevailed, including his leaving the land, and the commune becoming a Zen center.

But before he left, Freedom asked the astrophysicist if he ever looked at the stars, and he had to say “no.” It was not where he was looking for truth.

What are twinkly lights compared with abstract mathematical theory? What gets us to essence beyond definition, form, and formula? Can we open to answers in the silence instead of the clang and clatter? What is the role of awe?

If we cannot comprehend the universe, is it no wonder we cannot comprehend the immensity of Love with our limited minds, our containerizing minds, our judgmental minds?

Can we lay down the reins and, like an old horse, find our way back home?

 

 

Returned: one angel’s wing

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[This blog, be forewarned, speaks of hope. It was written, unabashedly, in the face of the harm, cruelty, and violence humans do to each other.]

IMG_3536Five and a half years ago I lost an angel’s wing. I also lost a husband, a house, and my trust in the bulk of humanity. 

I stopped grieving the husband two or three years after he told me of his separate parallel life.

The house I never missed. It was a McMansion that fought back hard against my attempts to make it human-friendly. A truckload of furniture would arrive – soft sofas, curved wood rockers, Afghan rugs – and, once they were unloaded, I’d look around to find in which room they had disappeared.

We originally called the house “The Stage,” recognizing it as a phase my husband seemed to need to go through. He never got through it, he loved that house.

As for my trust in humans, it will never return to fuzzy-edged naiveté. I live by: I could be betrayed, heart-broken, forgotten, and cheated on at any moment, but that’s not an adequate reason not to love and embrace joy.

In any case, any bitterness has been replaced by a manageable sadness, patience, and loving acceptance. The book of humans could be titled “Varieties of Foibles.” We don’t even treat ourselves, let alone others, as we would like to be treated.

And poignancy is an okay quality to live with. Its merging of joy and pain is spot on with the truth of life.

While the house was an obdurate beast, the garden we designed together was breathtaking – pockets of restfulness, a (recycling) creek with two dams, koi fish, water lilies, lotus, Siberian irises, a mediation house 9 feet off the ground with glass walls and a steeple of copper, and the green grass circle where we were married standing on rose petals.

The angel’s wing (Carrara marble) was in the garden. When I had the opportunity to claim some furniture and art from the house, I didn’t have the presence of mind to remember the garden. It was a hit and run mission (legal and with written permission) – and it was unbearable to point my finger at items I wanted and needed (I had nothing) while his financial manager took photos and made a list.

Last week, five years overdue, the wing returned to me. The house is being sold. I wrote and asked for the wing. He didn’t say “yes” directly, but copied me on the email asking a friend to pick it up and deliver it to me.

IMG_3520The wing sits close to a statue of a seated woman titled “Waiting for an Angel.” I did manage to get her five years ago. She has waited all this time. Some things meant to be yours return.

They are together in my garden and today my first iris bloomed – an old-fashioned purple bearded iris of the kind my mother grew. It is among allium, and peonies that will bloom soon, and a lilac bush that bloomed  two weeks ago.IMG_3529

 

The foibles of humans make good things more tender than they might otherwise be. Life wants to be wonderful. Or maybe the return of the wing and the hope it embodies – angels do visit earth – is making me a little drunk.

 

 

Passion, a steed

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You can lead passion to rationality
but you can’t make it drink.

It may bow its head or rear up, meow or whinny,
but it will not drink.

The size of its obstinance does not matter.
Passion, any size, does not drink rationality.

We brush our teeth and tie our shoes, it does not.
We read our mail and change our beds, it does not.
We pay our bills and make coffee, it does not.

Passion drives us mad banging against the bars
and searching for the key to escape.

Passion rode us on its back long ago, or only yesterday.

It remembers, and will not let us forget.

You lose, Balducci’s

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Dear John, … oops, I mean, Dear Balducci’s,

Sorry, it’s just my frame of mind. You see, Balducci’s, I have changed, and you have not. The thrill is gone. Whole Foods has more than 30 different kinds of goat cheese, not counting goat cheese crumbles, goat cheese slices in individual wrappers, and goat cheese ravioli. When I looked a couple days ago, you had only three kinds of goat cheese. You don’t meet my needs anymore.

Even when I looked for spelt bread, nada. I told you about this years ago, but you wouldn’t listen.

And Whole Foods, well, 14 different kinds of cold-pressed veggie and fruit juices! Your soy-based Odwella is so, well, yesterday.

Oh, and your lack of tofu. OMG, Balducci’s, one kind? Whole Foods has nine kinds of tofu – count ’em, nine. How am I going to make perfect smoothies with “firm” tofu? I need “soft” tofu. Got that? Soft, I’m into soft.

It was lovely while it lasted and thrilling at the beginning but now I need more. I need different goat cheeses, and non-gluten breads, and … and, oh, yes, what is that about, having only one brand of coconut water and then only in some dinky small size? Don’t you know me better than that?

This is a different era, Balducci’s. Whipper-snappers like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s may, like you, be expensive to maintain, but they know what I like.

Sayonara.

. . . .

Amateur (and over-simplified, but true) treatise on Capitalism with a focus on the good part:

The best part of capitalism is that it speeds up evolution of products that improve (real or imagined) our lives through health, enjoyment, science, and more. Great ideas, well executed, survive and thrive. The life blood of capitalism is innovation.

The worst part of capitalism is that it cannot be depended upon by itself to provide for people who have few or no resources to begin with. The trickle down concept is an balm for those who have a lot and want to keep it. There’s no trickle to those who really need it.

This is why affordable care for all is imperative for a healthy nation, including a nation that wants to be economically healthy. We’re getting there, despite resistance.

Now, if the US only provided education for all. What’s up with not having affordable education at the university level for people with moderate and low incomes? Oh, right, we’re shortsighted. I’m sorry, probably that should be, “Oh, Right, you’re shortsighted.”

While we’re at it, couldn’t we invest in people before they’re incarcerated? Think how much money it would save. Ounce of prevention, and all that, not to mention caring for your brother and sister.

But let’s get back to the good part of capitalism, because there is one, and it is innovative, value-based products that drive progress and economies.

Two simultaneous and countervailing forces are at work – greater and greater complexities and more and more simplicities. The most common example is: computers are infinitely more complex and, even for older people, easier to use.

The ex-husband of mine who was an entrepreneur spoke of “efficiencies.” That is, to be successful in the marketplace you needed to offer a product comparable to your competitor’s at a lower price or offer a better product without pricing yourself out of the market. (Balducci’s is doing neither of these and the customers were few and the employees grouchy. Balducci’s has lost business efficiency. Let’s hope it changes fast. Capitalism is about survival of the fittest.)

The most fun of these two “efficiencies” is introducing a new product that hits the world with impact. Rajiv Salimath, founder and CEO of Haggle, speaks of this as “perturbation.” He believes that to be outrageously successful you need to “perturb” the status quo, to offer people something that will change their lives in ways they want even if they never thought of it before. You need to inspire them, to reconfigure their imaginations and desires, which influences how they spend their money – which, in turn, can change the marketplace. Haggle, a young start-up originating in New York, may just change the marketplace.

Haggle gives consumers the power to instantaneously and seamlessly negotiate discounts based on what they bring to the seller. Example: participating restaurants compete to give you discounts custom-made to factors such as how often you eat out, the kinds of food you eat, what you usually spend, and how many people you bring with you. Your discount comes within seconds of your clicking into your app that you want, say, Indian food within a ten block radius.

The trajectory is envisioned to extend soon beyond New York, and to incorporate businesses such as gyms and clothing stores. The app is available for your iPhone or iPad through Apple store now. Check ’em out!

There is a balance – an efficiency, if you will – for capitalism that needs to be achieved, where survival of the fittest is not applied to humans but to products and goods. Being nice to everyone makes for healthy societies where all citizens have what is needed to participate in a viable economy – and be pleasantly perturbed, whether by an array of goat cheese or by having the personal power to get custom-made discounts because of how important you are to the seller.

 

Beyond Catfish: holding it together

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[This blog, like some other recent ones, should probably be put in the category of “insomnia musings” except I don’t want to give the insomnia that credence in the hopes it will crawl back into its agitated corner.]

On the cusp of turning six years old my grandson asked me what holds atoms, as in one single atom, together. “Why don’t the electrons, protons, and neutrons all fly away? Is it gravity? Or, . . . or maybe magnetism?”

I muttered something about the weak force or the strong strong.

Ben: “Yes, but is the force gravity or magnetism?”

Me: No, it’s different.

A couple minutes later, Ben: “Okay. Well, what holds atoms together, like atoms that are alike? Like why doesn’t that truck fly apart?” (We were at a stop light next to a furniture delivery truck. Many of our best conversations are in the car.)

Ben was not asking about nuts, bolts, and axles. He was asking how are we held together “. . . or a leaf, or a tree, or a house. Why don’t they all fly apart?” I have often asked myself the same question. I contend that the difference between humans and other species is that we are aware that only something unexplainable stands between us and oblivion.

By the time he was eight, my older brother would fish, sometimes with me, in the teeny creek through the north meadow where the cows pastured. Catfish. Ugly critters that ruined my taste for fish for decades.

Fishing is a silent endeavor, even putting the live earthworms on the hooks. He taught me how to do this, the curve and threading of it, and I tried not to show how squeamish I was. The memory of wet fat “night crawlers” with the grit of dirt on them is sealed into my sight and touch.

He had a red and white plastic bobbin that fulfilled its job description by bobbing in the muddy water until a fish on a hook pulled it under. Mainly you stared at the bobbin and kept your silence.

photo 2Les took me fishing again when I was in my mid-50s. We took his boat out on the Saylorville Lake north of Des Moines and used radar to sight the fish deep below. I don’t remember what kind of fish we caught that day, but they were larger and prettier by far than the fingerlings of our childhood.

My brother, who died too young, attended church, but he also believed in the religion of fishing during the summer and the winter. He and my sister-in-law took early retirement from teaching and moved to a small town in Minnesota where their home was a couple blocks up from the Mississippi River. He was a serious ice fisherman.

We try to hold ourselves together through systems of belief: morals, ethics, religion, cultural rituals.

We try to hold ourselves together through personal identity: conservative, liberal, entrepreneur, nerd, millennial, elder, sports fanatic, freedom fighter, intellectual, poor, rich, traveler, professional, artist, parent, lover, teacher, fisherman, blogger.

We try to hold ourselves together through rules: legal codes, constitutions, oaths, grammar, proper attire, contracts, marriages, manners.

That is, we try to moor ourselves to tangible things – and self-concepts – so we don’t fly apart. We try to hold ourselves together by saying we are our particulars: we are musicians rather than music, we are poets rather than poetry, we are eyes rather than sight, we are fishermen rather than the taste of fish.

It doesn’t work, and it is not accurate because we are the music and the poetry and the seen and seeing, the fisherman and the taste of fish. The experience of music and poetry and sight and taste do not exist without us – and they are nothing but experience.

There can be no words for the Thing of us – the force if you will – that holds us together because the Thing of us is the whole of us, while words are inherently separating and dividing. A word cannot define something without excluding everything else.

So we line up series of words in the attempt to comprehend who we are, but it is like describing cake as flour, sugar, eggs, and water that have been mixed together and baked.

Yet if we have not words – rules, beliefs, self-identity, rites – we get scared and can fly apart. We rely on descriptions of ourselves to keep us manageable to ourselves, to keep our minds from being blown. And it is okay. We need time, we need safety of belief, we need science for progress, we need to fish, we need to ask about atoms and be satisfied that the words “strong force, weak force, gravity, and magnetism” have meaning and bring order.

The red and white plastic bobbin tells us when there is a fish on our line. With time we bravely move to larger and larger lakes where we employ radar, attempting to penetrate the muck.

Sometimes we even land a fish. Sometimes we even catch a glimpse of why trucks don’t fly apart. On rarest occasion, if we are silent enough, we catch a glimpse of who we are beyond words.

 

3:15 am, and counting

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Insomnia is the realm of questions, not answers. Sleep brings answers, solved in the deep peace of timelessness free from bits of this and bits of that. Insomnia is a noisy carnival without the joy. It is a place that at its best echoes back to your many questions that humans are unfathomable. In insomnia we are not glorious, we are skin, bone, muscle, sinew, and digestive and pumping and cleansing organs that house the determination to live. Insomnia keeps us awake for the dark night of the soul, which to my mind is partially caused by lack of sleep.

Unfathomable, that’s what we are. It could be a song, a waltz. A waltz over the troubling facts of the portfolio of humans on earth. We love, and we kill. We desire, and we plunder. We create beauty, and poison ourselves with hate. We set up national, cultural, familial borders and defend them to our detriment. We are savage beings who want to adore each other but are afraid.

Our rages and our fears lead us to pipelines that will – you know they will – leak; to recycled genocides; to trampling on the weakest of us as the “natural order”; to overuse of satire and condemnation; to confusing work with progress. We are small things with large hearts. We are blind things homesick for beauty, especially our own. We are deaf creatures who hear unsung music in our fibers.

Insomnia is a place of anxiety where scale is not recognized. That large black dogs are the last to be rescued from shelters feels almost as sad as that killing has resumed in the South Sudan, and the fact that I know by name large black dogs who have not been rescued through their photos on FB but know not the name of a single Sudanese is profoundly sad, but not proportionately so.

It’s where unanswered emails are suddenly remembered and are disturbing, but no more so than that the protagonist in the book I’m reading is losing his lover.

It’s where the question of getting up for yogurt with some fig jam has the gravitas of the future of the Ukraine. (The yogurt question looms large.) Things are not to scale and the “here now” and the “there now” – even the “there then” – vie for your attention as equals: “Me, me, look at me.”

One’s cells tingle in mild panic: “Hey, we have to work tomorrow, will you just turn off the switch?” The ringing that is in all our ears if we listen to it is louder between 1 am and 5 am, juvenile locusts, still sopranos.

We are unfathomable. The best thing, perhaps the only good thing, about insomnia is that sometimes you remember those you have recently lost (like your mother), those you love and who love you even through the dark and unstated, those who need you and you must remember to tend when morning comes, and that in the churning over of humans – that toothed conveyer belt of time – there is a goodness, quite aside from the startling gifts of genius and art and science.

There is a goodness that, as yeast rises daily bread, will help us rise again, not only at the light but towards common good. It is packed in there with the bones, muscle, sinews and the rest. How that works, who knows? Insomnia brings no answers, only tenacity.

Girls v. Boys: who’s manipulating whom?

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I know little girls can manipulate with those innocent smiles and conspiratorial whispers that tickle your ear. I’m fully aware. But a couple days ago my six-year-old grandson did a classic male manipulation of my four-year-old granddaughter that I have not been able to get out of my head, not because I wasn’t familiar with it but because I am too familiar with it. I just didn’t know it started so young. It means the job of nurture to smooth out nature is harder than I ever imagined.

image

This blog may not pertain to, or even make sense, to some of you. If so, think of it as a missive from an alien planet, and consider yourself lucky.

Anyone who know me knows I am smitten by my grandson. I call him “my super nova.” I adore his dreamy math-obsessed mind. He is wry, sensitive, and sometimes completely out of it. Even so . . .

The situation was: both children were in my care, we had arrived to NYC late the night before, it was mid-morning and they were eager to get out into the city. As I hurried to do some unpacking and breakfast clean up, their physical push-and-shove (with age-appropriate giggling) was edging towards getting out of hand. I told them to take it into their bedroom.

The laughter turned to ominous shuffling sounds. Josie started to cry and came out, incoherent with sobs. Ben rushed by without looking back. I heard a door slam.

Me: Where are you hurt?

Josie couldn’t talk.

Me: Point to where it hurts.

Josie shook her head “no.”

Me: What happened?

Sobs and hiccups.

Me: Were you scared?

Josie: He. . . he. . . Ben . . . (incoherent) . . . I couldn’t get up, . . .

Me: Were you under the covers and he held you down and you got scared? (No gramma intuition here, this is classic kid stuff.)

Josie, shaking her head “yes”: But I’m not hurt. Ben didn’t hurt me, I’m not hurt.

Me: You were only scared.

Josie: Ben didn’t hurt me.

Me: I understand. Maybe we should tell him that. . . I look around . . . Where is he?

Josie: He’s in your bedroom. That’s what he does. He walks away and goes into another room and shuts the door.

Me: Really?

J: Un-huh . . .

After a few more hiccups, we went to my bedroom door. It was locked.

Me: Ben, you cannot lock me out of my own bedroom.

Josie: I’m okay, Ben, you didn’t hurt me.

There was silence on the other side of the door. Josie repeated herself. I was aghast and annoyed. She was petitioning him at a door he locked against her after he frightened her to tears. That happens when you think you are suffocating.

Ben, clearly realizing locking my bedroom was beyond the limits of acceptability, opened the door and rushed by us to their room, muttering. He took a stance with his back to us and continued to mutter.

Josie and I stood at the doorway. She whispered to me: He’s saying ‘Josie doesn’t like me, nobody likes me. I’m always to blame.’

Me: He is?

Josie: That’s what he always says.

She was perfectly composed, relating a fact. She knows the routine. My six-year-old beloved grandson knows how to turn wounding his little sister into his being wounded. And she accepts that she is to tend and reassure him. She really wants to know he is okay and happy.

imageKnow what? She wins. Her advanced emotional IQ allows her to wrap her head around her feelings and his feelings. It might not change this common male-female dynamic as she grows up but it gives her more knowledge from which to make decisions that care not only for his welfare but for her own.

I don’t imagine for a second that Ben didn’t fully experience his version of events as real, honest, and true. I’m sure he did, and that he felt like he was abandoned and cast to the bottom of a dark well while Josie, the little darling, got all the sympathy.

I accept he was in misery. I just don’t accept that his emotions were based on facts – or that stomping into another room, locking the door, and being silent for an extended period while his sister was petitioning him was necessary or helpful.

imageBut he was successful. He deflected the possibility of being blamed into that he was the wounded party.

HOW FAMILIAR IS THIS? Aaaarrrgh.

And I was suckered in alongside Josie, thinking “Poor Ben. How can we make it better?” My grandson snookered us both.

Okay, many of you reading this will say, it’s only an older and younger child thing – or maybe Josie was a wimp. The girl is not a wimp, she is rock solid. Furthermore, she knows not only where her socks are, she knows where his are. She knows where everything is in my kitchen, bathroom, and closet. She dresses herself in mesh tutus, tights with holes at the knees, and dirty tennis shoes. She knows who she is, and that includes being her brother’s keeper. She adores him.

imageBen also adores her. They are emotionally intertwined. Pick on one or the other and you’ll have to contend with both of them.

But, hey, why couldn’t he have come to her, asked if she was okay, and said he was sorry and meant it, maybe even dried her tears? And we could have talked about how to keep rough-housing under control in the future. Why couldn’t he? Why not?

Okay, I have seen him saying “It was an accident, Josie” before leaving the scene. I’m not 100% fair here. I ‘fess up.

And I’ve known of women who are manipulative and take advantage. I’m especially acquainted, secondhand, with mothers who emotionally terrorized their sons from childhood on. These crazy-banana women make it hard for the rest of us.

But to the point, while I’m sure women also do this to men, it is a common male-female dynamic as Ben did it to Josie, and as Josie accepted it. After witnessing this dynamic as an on-site play between little people, I dreamt for the first time that I verbally decimated my third ex-husband. I always could have but even in the worst of it, I chose not too. Finally, after five and a half years I was willing to reduce him to ash. It was a little scary. In real life you cannot reconstructed people who are ash left on the floor. Good thing it was a dream.

The central question is, knowing your skills of coping and forgiveness are larger than those of a beloved person who wounded you, what choices do you make when they blame you? We each find our own answers to that.

Josie is already finding them. Brava, little girl. Keep exploring and embracing, and protecting yourself. Gramma’s got your back.