Wisdom (Such as It Is)

“It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else’s eyes.”
-Sally Field

 

I am who I am.
Nobody said you had to like it.
~~ Unknown

 

So I just had my 40th birthday, and my friend Michelle asked if I had any wisdom to share. I just shrugged my shoulders at the time, not feeling very wise. But my friend is in her 20s and says that she feels like “she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” (Forget that she’s likely the most intelligent, diligent, mature 20-something person I know.) Maybe her realization that she doesn’t know what to do is a sign of maturity and intelligence.

I’ve been thinking about her question and about the things I’ve learned. I don’t know if I would call it wisdom, but it’s more like a series of lessons that I’m still learning as I grow up and older. The two quotes above, which I just stole from other people’s status updates on Facebook, sum it up pretty well. So much for “my” wisdom. But let me expand.

Don’t wait for a sign. No one else is going to tell you what’s in your heart or what will make you truly happy. But we’ve been taught (most of us) to look for outer approval and acceptance as a sign that we’re doing the right thing. This way of being in the world keeps us at peace with a society run by the status quo. Get along. Be nice. Get all As. Be the best.

But the best what? A nice what? Get along with whom? A bunch of people you don’t like anyway?

I guess my wisdom comes from knowing I can do all the things people say not to do and survive it. I left a well-paid, soul-killing job so I could have space to figure out what I wanted to do with myself. My husband encouraged me, but very few others did. Who could blame them? It made things a lot harder in a lot of ways. We lost a full-time salary, and I had no plan, no idea what was next for me. I walked dogs and waited tables and tried painting and a little writing and mostly banged my head against the wall. My in-laws frowned on it, wanted me to stay a technical writer and become a Baptist and come to church every Sunday, which made my relationship with them very strained. My own father worried that I was joining a cult. He made fun of my artistic explorations. Plus, I was used to being financially independent. Now I had to ask for my allowance every week, like a kid. It was NOT the easiest or maybe the “wisest” choice. But it led me, eventually, to graduate school and motherhood and a very fulfilling life. I had no idea it would, at the time. I just had to trust my gut.

I went on a three-month cross-country trip by myself. It cost ten thousand dollars. For half the cost, I cashed in part of my 401K. For the other half, I went into credit card debt. Not very wise by most standards, even my own, but I don’t regret it at all. It was worth every penny. It was worth the hours of driving, the sore shoulders, the depleted bank account. I didn’t worry about how it was going to happen. I just knew I had to do it.

I went to healing school for five years. My father, as I mentioned, thought I was joining a cult. It was a four-hour drive into the urban wilds of northern New Jersey four to five times a year, to stay at an expensive hotel and learn Integrated Kabbalistic Healing from a Buddhist Jew. The tuition was so expensive, we used our home equity line to pay for it. It sounded crazy, but I had to go. That class, and the friends I made in that class, opened my heart and healed me in ways I can’t even articulate, and I’m endlessly thankful for the experience.

All of these decisions came after my mother’s death. A big realization I had as we watched her die of cancer is that none of us has enough time. None of us. A hundred years is not enough, and we’re lucky if we last that long. There’s just no time to waste fretting about what other people will think or how much something will cost. If you really, really know in your heart what you want, you have to follow it. And no one is going to congratulate you for coloring outside the lines. For most people, that’s too scary. The path of least resistance is a road to hell, paved with the best intentions of staying safe.

But we’re not safe. Not in the way we want to be. On my fortieth birthday, I had a wonderful evening of delicious food and laughter and good friends. Twenty-four hours later, I was puking my guts out on the white linoleum of the ER lobby floor. Maybe it’s a kidney stone. Maybe it’s a stomach bug. I don’t know. But you know what? You never know. Nobody likes to think of 9/11, but one reason why is that those terrible events reminded us that we have no guarantee on tomorrow. None of us does. You can play it safe your whole life, socking money away in savings, staying at the same job for forty years to get a good retirement, get married to the one who feels secure but who doesn’t make you laugh. Then a plane flies into your office building, and you’re just another part of the tragedy.

I’m not making light of the suffering. Quite the opposite. We do suffer. We will suffer. We will lose the people we love, and we will get sick, and we will lose things dear to us, and we will die. Being human is not for the faint of heart. So don’t waste time on people (or jobs or worries) that make you hold your breath. Get out there and fill your lungs. While you can.

That, for what it’s worth, is my wisdom.

Orbiting Pollux

My father was a Gemini, born on May 26, 1939. The stereotype of the sign is the life of the party, the gregarious entertainer, but also the split personality, the Twins.

The twins of Gemini have names, both as characters in mythology, and as stars in the constellation of Gemini. Castor and Pollux were, interestingly, half-brothers, as well as twins. Castor was the son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta. And Pollux was the immortal son of Zeus. According to myth, when Castor died, his brother asked to share his immortality with him, and Zeus created their constellation. The star Pollux is a red giant, and its one satellite is the only orbiting planet we know of outside our own solar system.

Pollux and Castor were warriors, but Pollux was the harsher of the two. He was a boxer, and is said to have had metal hands. (Not someone I’d like to box.) Both twins are associated with horsemanship and are considered the patrons of travelers at sea. (They certainly dropped the ball in 1912 when the Titanic sank. And what about the Italian cruise ship that just rolled over and sank?) In seafaring lore, the twins get credit for what is known as St. Elmo’s Fire, or sparks from the tops of masts on ships in an electrical storm at sea. Sailors considered the glowing flames a sign that Castor and Pollux were watching over them.

I never knew which father I would get when he came home from work: the nice dad or the evil dad. As an adult, I learned that the nice dad was usually drunk. The harsh dad was the dry drunk, the boxer with the metal hands. He was, frankly, a soft-hearted man, and ashamed of it. My grandmother told me that her oldest son, Fred, would grit his teeth and ask for more when he was punished. “But your father,” she said. “It just broke his heart to have anyone upset with him.” I often saw that, in his relationship with my mother. She told me she could never stay angry with him because he was always so contrite and sweet. Maybe it’s better that he was 4-F because of the Polio. Maybe the military would have broken him. In any case, he considered this tenderness a weakness, one he tried to conceal with muscle and braggadocio—not always the best combination when dealing with a daughter.

He had his moments, though. The day I graduated from high school, I was slated to give a speech. My boyfriend at the time was visiting from out of town, and we argued all day. I was terrified of graduating and going off to college on my own. I couldn’t sleep. As we prepared to leave the house for the graduation ceremony, my parents planned to drive separately, leaving me to ride with my difficult boyfriend. I panicked, hyperventilating and sobbing. My mother, at a loss for what to do, shook me by the shoulders and yelled at me to stop it. Which only made me cry harder. She finally called my father into my room. He didn’t say a word. He just sat next to me on the edge of my bed and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. Slowly, he rocked me back and forth. “Shhh,” he murmured. “Shhhh.” Eventually, I calmed down. My deep, jagged breaths started to even out, and we all heaved a sigh of relief. I rode with Mom and Dad to the ceremony, and I gave a great speech.

Now my father is dead. All of his warmth and tenderness and laughter are gone, along with his cruelty and alcoholism and self-hatred. He was, after all, the mortal twin, Castor. I am left with memory, old stories, boxes of photos and letters. These are Pollux. And myself. I carry his genes, and in that, I give him a form of immortality. I passed them on to my son. I see his eyes in my own, his temperament in my own. Some of it I like, some of it I don’t.

But a few days ago, my son, who is nearly two, fell out of his crib for the first time. We think he may have been trying to look out his window and fell out. We’re not sure. The baby monitor is not that helpful. All we knew was that he was crying for a long time. It took us a few minutes to realize it wasn’t just his occasional fussiness. I asked Brian if it could be hunger or an injury. He went into Jack’s room with a bottle of milk and found him standing on the floor by his bookcase, sobbing. He brought him out, and I held him, feeding him the milk. Jack kept fussing and crying on and off for the next several hours. He wouldn’t go back to sleep. He started shaking. We checked him for injuries. No blood, no bruises or bumps. He could move around OK. All I could do was lie beside him, petting his back and singing “Sing a Rainbow” over and over and over again. Every time I stopped singing, he started crying again. Eventually, he fell asleep.

The next morning, we took him to the doctor, since he still seemed unusually fussy. Jack has already learned to associate the doctor’s office with shots, and he got even more upset. The doctor said they could do a CT scan to check for damage or a concussion, but Brian said he couldn’t take any more of the crying. Jack’s sobbing was bringing tears to Brian’s eyes, and the stress for all of us was doubled. The only time Jack calmed down was when I sang the rainbow song to him, which I repeated over and over, rocking him back and forth.

Well, we could take him home and keep an eye on him, the doctor told us, and just bring him back the next day if things didn’t improve.

Luckily, they did improve. By lunch time, Jack was laughing and singing along with me, supplying the essential “O” in the chorus of “Old McDonald.” He was still a little shell-shocked for the next couple of days, but now he’s running and playing like his usual self. And I came through the ordeal with a sense that I have inherited from my father a very special and important gift. In a dark time, the tender Castor came in, giving comfort and calm seas in a storm. But he could only do that through Pollux, the part that lives on. Me.

On the Mountain

My husband, Brian, is a mountaineer. I’m not talking about the cute mascot-y kind of mountaineer. He didn’t go to Appalachian State or WVU. He actually climbs mountains. That’s what he does. Go figure.

I, however, do not climb mountains. Instead, I write books. And there are more similarities between the two activities than one may initially think. Here’s a story to illustrate:

In the fall of 2005, I took a solo cross-country trip. Brian met me in the Seattle area, after a summit attempt of Mt. Rainier (his, not mine). The day he was supposed to reach the summit, it was pouring rain. (Shocker: the Pacific Northwest in October, and it’s raining.) It was also the day I was supposed to meet him at the trailhead, near the visitor center in Paradise, Washington. Yes, that’s really the name of the town. Friends who lived in nearby Graham drove me out there, and we waited for a while in the socked in visitor center, looking at fog. After about twenty minutes, a voice came over the intercom, announcing that “the mountain is out.” We rushed to the windows.

For five beautiful minutes, the gray clouds opened up and revealed the glaciated summit of Mt. Rainier. What was rain at five thousand feet was snow above us, and the blue-gray rock and white snow popped out of the gray and the dark green of evergreen trees with a hazy blue background. I took a dozen photos: different angles and light settings. I got some really amazing shots, even with my poopy little camera. Honestly, it’s hard to take a bad photo of Mt. Rainier. It really is so majestic, so old and wise and mammoth.

After a little more time, after the mountain disappeared behind another fog bank, we gave up waiting for Brian and asked about his group at the information desk. “Oh, they didn’t make it because of weather,” the man told us. “They left a couple of hours ago.” Wait. Didn’t make it? Didn’t make it? “They came back down at the halfway point,” he explained. Sigh. They didn’t make the summit. Not “they didn’t survive.” OK.

We drove back down the road to the bunkhouse where Brian and the other members of his climbing party were staying. No Brian, no group. “Oh, they’re up the road at the Copper Creek Inn for lunch,” the scruffy man at the outfitters told us. We drove the few miles up the road. Copper Creek was empty. A woman in a stained white apron swept under the tables, their upturned chairs kicking their legs into the air. “Oh, they left about twenty minutes ago,” she told us. What? We must have passed them on the road.

I started to cry. I hadn’t seen my husband in three weeks, and now, strangers I would never see again knew where he was, and I didn’t. I felt powerless and frustrated. We drove back to the bunkhouse, walked into the little cafe, and hoped to call Brian’s cell from the pay phone in the corner. I stared for a moment at a tall, lean back before I realized it was Brian. I ran to him and threw my arms around his middle from behind, holding on for dear life, the tears starting anew. Without turning around, Brian grabbed both of my arms and squeezed. “Hey, it’s you,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice.

As it turned out, Brian never saw the mountain. He was as socked in as we were, and above a certain altitude, the rain was snow, a blizzard. “The wind was so hard, we were leaning forward at about forty-five degrees, just to stay on our feet. The snow was blowing sideways.” He and his group had spent the night at ten thousand feet, in a climber’s hut called Camp Muir. When the guides tested the weather in the early morning, they knew it was too dangerous to attempt the summit, so they hiked back down the mountain in the blinding snow. All that time on a mountain he never saw, because he was too busy trying to climb it.

I showed him my photographs later. “Wow, so that’s what it looks like,” he joked. I framed an 8×10 print for him that Christmas. The following summer, Brian tried it again, and this time, he made it. It was a benefit climb for the American Lung Association: the Climb for Clean Air. Brian took a Tibetan prayer flag with my mother’s name on it to the summit, at 14,410 feet. Mom had died of lung cancer. This time, the weather was clear and beautiful. Brian came back with a vicious sunburn, having spent the training hike day out on the snow without sunscreen. He made it back safely, and he’d had fabulous views from the top. But I still had better photos of the mountain itself, Mt. Rainier, the mountain I inexplicably refer to as “she.”

Is there a metaphor here? Why, yes, there is! I’m so glad you asked. The other night, we had a long conversation about our “vision” of the future. For the first time maybe ever, Brian has a clear picture of where he wants his life to go. He wants to be a mountain guide. He’s going to be a mountain guide. He asked me about my vision. I shrugged. I’m usually the one who talks about visualizing a goal and setting an intention to meet it. It worked for so many important things in my life: a house, a partner, a graduate school. Now what?

I’m in the midst of writing a thesis. So far, it’s 120 pages. I’ve recently realized that a bunch of material I was going to include about my dad is going to have to evolve into its own animal. It’s not part of this thesis. It’s something else, something new. So now I have another book to write. As a writer, this is both good and bad news. If you are a writer, you know what I mean. At once, it’s:  “Yes! Another idea! Another project! Something to work on!” and it’s also: “Oh, no! I have to go through this whole process again? But it’s so hard! No-o-o-o!” It’s too hard. I can’t keep doing this. I cannot take another. step. up this steep, ridiculous hill. The wind is howling. The snow is blowing sideways.

I’m on the mountain. I just plant one slushy boot in front of the other, and I slog along the best I can. I can’t see the summit. I can’t see stunning vistas. I can only see my feet. One silly, stupid word after another. Maybe I’ll end up backing down and starting over. Maybe I’ll make it to the summit this time, or the next. Other people may look at what I’m trying to do and see only fog, or maybe they’ll see something beautiful. I don’t know. Because all I can see is the path in front of me: rocks and snow and the occasional marmot. Once the journey is over, I’ll look back or over my shoulder or up our out. Maybe then, I’ll have a vision of my future. But right now, I need to get up the mountain. Right now, I can only look down and keep going.

I hope, when I come back down, Brian will be waiting for me in the coffee shop. I hope to hold him and say, “Hey, it’s you.” Here on the jagged landscape of an unfinished book, I feel lost to him, far away. But he came back to me. I’ll come back to him, too. And I hope he’ll hear the smile in my voice.

Thanks for Nothing

• OK, so I’m feeling a little bitter, right now. But I’m writing this post as an attempt to work toward a larger definition of gratitude. Dictionary.com says: the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful: He expressed his gratitude to everyone on the staff. Not very helpful. Let’s try “grateful”:
• 1. warmly or deeply appreciative of kindness or benefits received; thankful: I am grateful to you for your help.
• 2. expressing or actuated by gratitude: a grateful letter.
• 3. pleasing to the mind or senses; agreeable or welcome; refreshing: a grateful breeze.
• OK, that’s a little better. That’s what I usually mean when I say I’m thankful. I’m thankful for the good stuff. And don’t get me wrong. Despite my bitterness, there’s a LOT of good stuff. I love my husband, and he loves me. My son is growing and healthy and learning to talk, and he makes me laugh and cry every day with his verbal experimentation and sweet heart. I am part of an active and thriving writing community full of amazingly talented, caring, and supportive people. I am guided by wise and encouraging mentors and teachers. It’s currently 65 degrees and sunny outside my open windows in a comfy house that I get to work and play and sleep in. I am safe and healthy. The people I love are mostly safe and healthy, too. Those who are not at 100% capacity are getting the help and support they need, and ask for more when they need it.
• But what about the OTHER stuff? That needs air time, too. I am a human being, and as such, I am subject to a whole range of experiences and emotions. To limit those experiences and emotions is, in a way, to limit my humanity. And I’m tired of doing that. Literally. Doing that, pretending to be happy when I’m not, or young when I’m not, or a party animal when I’m not, that’s exhausting. I’m too old for that shit. I need to be all of who I am, and I need to honor even the yucky stuff. Even–even be grateful for it.
• I just took a deep breath. My father is dead. When he was alive, he was a chain smoker, an alcoholic, a storyteller, a charmer, a liar, a singer, a jerk, a loud laugher, and a hero. He used to host us every Thanksgiving. He made hunter’s stew, a dark wine broth with venison and goose meat, potatoes and carrots. He hated turkey, so Thanksgiving was always an adventure with my dad. I am currently learning to be thankful for all of his weaknesses and foibles, the things that pissed me off when he was alive, mostly because now they’re gone. And I never thought I would miss them, but I miss them, because they were part of who he was. And I miss him. I miss him awful.
• My mother is also dead. When she was alive, she was passive-aggressive, artistic, self-pitying, constantly ill, and the most patient and forgiving soul I knew. She’s been gone for nearly eleven years, and I still miss her. I never won’t. I miss her knitting sweaters and afghans for me. I miss her sense of humor, the dirty jokes and songs she used to tell and sing. I miss her handmade wreaths every Christmas. I miss her rice pudding and the green-gray-blue of her eyes, which I can now see in the eyes of my son. She used to start a new conversation just as I was leaving the room to go to the bathroom. She painted great seascapes and grew amazingly lush plants and flowers.
• In missing these whole, imperfect people, I’m learning to be thankful for the wounds as well as the gifts they gave to me. My parents’ respective diseases created patterns in our family and in me that eventually led me to therapy, homeopathic treatments, energy work, and healing school–all things that have enriched my life and made me a more open-hearted and grounded person. I paint, like my mother painted. I write, like my father wrote. I tell stories and I sing. I do not smoke. I do not drink very much. I have made my choices, as they made theirs. And all of it–even the shit–made me the person I am today. Hemingway says that life breaks everyone, and some are stronger in the broken places. So I’m thankful for my strength, even though I had to earn it the hard way. (Is there any other way? I don’t think so.)
• But now I have no parents, no family to spend my Thanksgivings with, no one to annoy me and drive me crazy and make me wish I’d stayed home and avoided the traffic. How can I be thankful for that?
• I’m not sure, but I wonder if Brian’s family has something to do with it. His parents are both still alive, the only grandparents Jack will ever know or remember. This year, we’re spending both Thanksgiving and Christmas with them, with Jack, so that we can all be together. At Thanksgiving, we will even see Jack’s great-grandmother, who is 91, and his great-great-aunt, who is 97. No longer do I resist these visits, because even though they’re not the family I grew up with, they ARE Jack’s family. And I want him to know them. We won’t need to dash from one family’s house to another. We won’t need to fret about hurt feelings and lonely relatives. In a way, that is a big relief.
• Not sure yet if I can be thankful for the space left behind by my parents. I hope that in this space, I can write and live and raise my children and love the life that I create. But it’s still a pretty big nothing to be thankful for.

What I Learned on My Fall Break Vacation

Here’s a list of things I don’t miss about Florida:

• Gigantic flying cockroaches (because they’re also here!)
• Sharks at the beach
• Hearing the drug runners idling their boats down our canal after dark with the lights off
• Alligators in the yard
• Sand burrs
• Fire ants
• Turning on the air conditioning on Christmas day
• People selling LSD to kids at my Catholic school
• No see-ems, which are like mosquitoes, only smaller and more aggressive, little gangster vampire bugs
• Living in a county where the median age is 57, and I’m 9
• Having a higher IQ than my third grade teacher
• Barnacles
• Riding around with my babysitter and all of her friends, who are all smoking pot with the windows rolled up, and me in the backseat, trying to breathe through my jacket sleeve
• Hot sand
• Legally blind drivers on the highway
• Beach water the temperature of a bath tub
• My mom being sick all the time, and my dad falling in the shower again because he drank too much.

Until a few weeks ago, here was my list of things I did miss about Florida:

 

 

 

But over fall break, I traveled to the Gulf coast of Florida and spent some time. So now I have a few things to add to that second list:

• Beautiful sunsets over the water
• Gulf shrimp
• Fruit trees in the yard
• Dolphins playing out in the bay
• The smell of citrus blossoms
• St. Augustine grass
• Really good Cuban food
• Sand the color and texture of baking flour
• Flamingoes
• Birds of paradise
• Gentle green waves that I can wade into without being knocked over
• Perfect shells
• Bright art-deco architecture
• Spanish arches and red tiled roofs
• My mom and dad, as imperfect and crazy-making as they were. They were fun and played music and held me and sang. Yep. I do miss them.

Fear and the Unknown

When we moved into the house where we now live, we bought a washer and dryer set on craigslist for $75. They both work, but they’re old and rusty and really loud.

The other morning, I had a load of laundry started, and Jack and I went upstairs to explore his dad’s office while Brian was taking a nap. We fiddled and poked around for a while, and as we started coming back down the stairs, the washer shifted in its cycle to something more cacophonous than its previous setting. Jack clutched at my leg and whimpered. It took me a minute to realize what was bothering him, and when I figured out it was the washer, I patted his shoulder and said, “It’s OK, boo. It’s just the washer running.” He didn’t budge.

Because frankly, he didn’t give a shit. He didn’t care what was making that godawful racket. He just didn’t like it. I had made an interesting error. I had assumed that he was afraid of the unknown, that once I reassured him and told him what it was, he would calm right down and blithely plop down the stairs. Shows what I know.

At the time, I was impatient with him and his fear. I sighed, picked him up, carried him down the stairs. I may have even called him silly. He clung to me until we reached the bottom of the stairs, and I shut the door to the garage to muffle the noise of the washer. Only then did he release me and get distracted by his bevy of toy cars in the family room. “Cah!” he shouted happily, as though he had feared never to see them again.

But who’s the silly one? I assume he’s afraid of the same things I’m afraid of? Just because the Unknown (capital “U”) is my biggest fear doesn’t mean it has to be his. He’s only eighteen months old. Pretty much everything is unknown to him. He doesn’t know yet to be afraid of the dark. He doesn’t worry about the future. He doesn’t even know what that means. And he barely has any past at all, so that’s not bothering him, either, most likely. He’s fully in the present moment. And he knows what he doesn’t like. That loud damn washer. He doesn’t care what I call it.

I could learn a few things from this kid.

Layers and Layers

“There are layers and layers of being left,” she said to me on the phone. I heaved a ragged sigh. A low moan escaped and cascaded down out of my mouth, down my body. Then another. So much sorrow. So much grief. I realized that what I was feeling had to do with my fears for my husband, yes, but deeper than that, the aching hole left by my father’s death. He, after all, is the one who has left forever.

My husband has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). It was self-diagnosed years ago, thanks to Internet research, and his family doctor prescribed Lexapro. That was just a few weeks before we started dating. Before that, he had thoughts of suicide. In previous relationships, the anxiety haunted him. He once threw up at the dinner table, and his girlfriend had to apologize for the mess. His particular version is an obsessive thought loop that usually goes something like this: “I should love this person. Do I love this person? Sometimes she annoys me. Does that mean I don’t love her?” Then his brain tries desperately to prove to himself that his feelings are real, and valid. But the overactive hypothalamus keeps telling him something is wrong. Unless he’s taking the meds.

When our son, Jack, was born, the thought loop was about loving the baby. I had had a Caesarian section, and Brian was the primary baby carrier for the first couple of days. Those two days in the hospital, he barely slept. He ate Slim Jims and sugared orange slices. He suffered from nausea so strong that he dry heaved several times a day. Brian had gone off his meds, thinking he was OK and didn’t need them. He discovered in those first few days of our son’s life that he did, indeed, need them.

This year, something different happened. The meds didn’t help. The new set of meds didn’t help, either. The panic set in, clenching his stomach. Terrified one afternoon, Brian began to sob. It scared the baby, who cried. Which made Brian cry more, because he realized that he was frightening his own son. Jack howled, reaching for me, trying to escape his father’s arms. We called everyone we knew and begged for someone to watch Jack while I took Brian to Urgent Care. It was Labor Day weekend. Everyone was busy. We finally called a friend who was able to come, but by then it was after eight, and all of the urgent care facilities were closed. We drove to the hospital emergency room. The lady at the front desk told us that if she got us on the “fast track” line, it would still be two to three hours before we could see a doctor. And it was an emergency room: busy, hectic, loud. It made us both more anxious to stay than to leave. So we left.

On the drive home, Brian apologized. “I am so sorry,” he said, over and over again. I tried to reassure him. “I’m sorry, too, honey. This isn’t your fault. You don’t deserve this. It’s not fair.” I almost added, “It’s not like with my dad, who was an alcoholic, who chose to drink.” But I stopped short. My father was an alcoholic. Yes, at some point, he made a choice to drink. But once he started, I’m not so sure he had much control over what happened to him. It shed a new light on the man I thought I knew.

I’ve derived a lot of energy from being angry with my father, for resenting him for his weakness, his dependence on alcohol. I swore to myself that I would never marry an addict. I would never live that way again. I had firmly decided not to be my mother: codependent and apologetic. I’ve seen that story before. I know how it ends. I’m not interested in seeing the sequel.

So, instead, I fell in love with a man with a disabling anxiety, a condition that makes him as absent and unavailable to me as my father was for my whole life. The distinction I have been making is that Brian suffers from a physical malady, a disorder that requires medication. But according to the research, alcoholism is also a physical condition, resulting from a combination of genetic, environmental, and constitutional factors.

My father did quit drinking, once. I was a sophomore in high school, and he got a DUI ticket on the way home from a bar. He was court-ordered to six months of Alcoholics Anonymous, which my mother attended with him. He was embarrassed and ashamed of himself. And he also saw people at those meetings who were much less functional than he was. I’m sure he told himself, “Well, I’m stronger than those people.” And he was, for four years. He quit drinking, cold turkey. He did his time at AA and then stopped going to the meetings. He served alcohol to guests at parties, but as far as I knew, he didn’t drink again.

Until my sophomore year of college, when his mother had a heart attack, then a fall, then a series of small but debilitating strokes and other setbacks, which ended up making her bedridden for the next five years, until her death. When Grandma got sick again, so did Dad. And he continued to drink heavily until the week he died. (He told the Hospice nurse that he usually had between six and eight drinks every night.)

All this time, I believed it was his choice to leave me, to ignore my mother, to spend every night at a bar or the Elks lodge. But as I watch my husband, as I see his tortured face and hear his apologies, I wonder about choice. I wonder about the hell our own brains can put us through. At one point during this latest episode, Brian said he felt like he would never get help, would never get better, would have to be institutionalized. He could only lie in bed, paralyzed, begging me to sit next to him, not to leave the room. The psychiatrist did, actually, consider sending him to the hospital. But she decided to try one last medication to see how it worked. Within twenty-four hours, Brian could eat again. He still had bouts of anxiety, but they weren’t as debilitating. After two days on the new medication, he went for a three-mile run.

I sobbed into the phone, and my dear friend Debbie listened, gave me space to cry, to grieve. Once I’d spent my despair for the moment, she talked me through the advantages of having Brian going to the hospital. They’ll check his vital signs, she said. They’ll test his blood levels. They’ll be able to find out why this is happening, why he hasn’t been able to respond to the medication. I took deep breaths. She made sense to me. I agreed. Then the new medication started to work. The next morning, Brian walked out onto the street as Jack and I returned from a walk. I felt like I was witnessing a miracle. I wanted to snatch the baby up and run to Brian, but Jack has had enough frights lately. So we crept toward him at a toddler’s pace, and then when we reached him, I held him so tightly he had to cough and say, “Hey.”

You Can’t Handle the Truth

I just got back from a great party, where a small subdivision of the group, including myself, discussed the ethics of non-fiction. OK, we’re dorks, whatever. But it’s important to me, as a non-fiction writer, to be clear about readers’ expectations and my own intentions. My contention is that if you’re promising, as the writer, a true story, you must deliver a true story. No fabrications. No embellishments. Greg Mortenson’s book Three Cups of Tea, which I’ve read and love, came up. Apparently, some of the events in the book have been exaggerated for the sake of the story. Mortenson’s Website now claims that the book is based on real events. Well, I said to my friends, I don’t think I would call the book non-fiction, in that case. Some of my friends differed with me, giving a writer license if they craft an effective story that resonates with the reader. It is possible, they argue, to write something true, whether or not it’s factual. And to a certain point, I agree. I’ve read many great novels that have been true for me, if not factual. But there’s the rub. They’re novels. Fiction. They don’t pretend to deliver factual information. You know, as a reader, from the get-go, that you’re reading a tale.

And I’m generally fine with memoirs and other works of creative non-fiction imagining a scene or speculating on a history, as long as the writer is up front with the reader about his or her intentions. For example, I doubt that Jeanette Walls could remember in such exact detail conversations that occurred when she was three years old, as she portrays in The Glass Castle. But that doesn’t bother me. I trust that she’s conveying the conversations as reliably as she can, given the slippery substance of memory. Dave Eggars’ memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius also takes liberties, with scenes from pure fantasy. But he cues the reader to play along, and we know it’s a game of sorts, so we do. But my main problem regarding this issue has to do with transparency. If I feel that a writer is trying to trick me into believing an event actually happened when it didn’t, I feel betrayed, at the end of the day.

Blah, blah, blah. A bunch of literary mumbo-jumbo, right? Well. I’m writing my thesis, which is non-fiction. Part of my story is about my dad, his life and history. According to dozens of conversations and stories over the years, Dad was an operative for the CIA during the 1960s. He flew a two-seater plane in Laos. He monitored Soviet oil shipments from London. He did some kind of arms dealing in the Bahamas. He told me bits and pieces of this history, usually at my urging, over the course of my whole life with him. It is as much a part of him as his limp, which he had since surviving polio in the 1940s. I knew all of this to be part of who my dad is. And as time went by, and after my mother died, and after his work became de-classified, he told me more. He told me about the Laotian bar owner who tricked him into eating a poisonous spider because he liked spicy food: “Oh, you like spicy food? Try this!” Hooo-ee! What kind of pepper was that?! “Oh, that no pepper. That spider!” Until he died, Dad refused to eat any Southeast Asian food because it reminded him of those years in Laos.

Now that he’s gone, I thought I could probably include some of this information in my thesis, acknowledging that I don’t have all the facts and may not have remembered details accurately. Then I talked to my dad’s younger brother, who doesn’t believe any of it ever happened. He has a completely different timeline for my dad’s whereabouts in the 60s. He does remember Dad mentioning the London job was a CIA cover, but he doesn’t believe it. He has a list of other jobs Dad had, other places he was, during those years. He says, as a retired Naval officer himself, that there was no way Dad could have been trained to fly so quickly, and that the Ravens (for whom Dad told me he flew) were all active-duty Air Force pilots. Sure, my uncle was only a teenager when all of this was going on, but I wasn’t even born yet. So, what now?

At first, I felt disillusioned, like my father had been lying to me about this exciting life he never led. Then I rebelled. I have a book of my dad’s, titled The Ravens, in which there is a group photo including someone who looks just like my father, in the lower left corner. I also know a former Air Force pilot who did fly with the Ravens, and he admits that some of the pilots were CIA “contractors.” I can also e-mail an old family friend who worked with Dad in London. There are enough ways to check the story, that I am prone to believe it.

But ultimately, I have come to a place where it doesn’t matter to me if the facts are accurate or not. For me, it is true that my father did all of those things. He has woven them into the tapestry of himself, his life. Whether he borrowed the thread seems irrelevant to me now. I’ve said this before: My dad was a difficult person to know. He was full of contradictions and evasions. Always. Even about stuff I knew really happened. I’m convinced that everyone who ever knew him saw a different person. So, in my uncle’s universe, Dad never flew a plane, had never been to Laos, had never worked for the CIA. My uncle knew another person, another history, and that’s fine, that’s his.

But these stories are part of my life, factual or not. They are part of my relationship with my dad. They are, in a very real sense, true. So this is the man I will write about. I’ll be honest. I’ll admit to my own doubts and to conflicting stories. But the story I will tell is mine.

Forgiveness and Ogres

“Ogres are like onions. They have layers.”

Donkey tried so hard to find something more pleasant with layers that Shrek could use as an analogy. But parfaits don’t do the trick. Not for ogres.

And my dad, for sure, was an ogre.

He wasn’t giant and green, but he was tough and difficult and slippery. I was often careless of his feelings, and even occasionally cruel – casually so, which made it all the more cruel. And as many times as I tell myself that I learned these things at his hands, it doesn’t make mine clean. A biting remark, a quick comeback, those were valued in my household, growing up. It was a sign of intelligence. There was the time that a friend of the family had a sick baby who had lost a lot of weight. An overweight kid, I said, stupidly, “Was he even skinnier than me?” And my father answered, “Yes, just skin and blubber.” He laughed at his cleverness. Then there was the time, years later, after my mother had died, that I told him to quit his whining when he wanted to know when we would come out to visit him again.

There were so many of these times. And chronically, just the fact that I always came last in the list of priorities. Work was first, alcohol and related activities second, Mom third, and me last. Not surprising, then, that when he was dying, I focused all of my attention on the baby, moving, and classes. It seems pathetic and corny, but the lyrics to “Cat in the Cradle” pretty much summed up my relationship with my dad. He was too busy for me, and then I was too busy for him. Like, somehow I got even with him. I got my revenge. Very clever of me, eh? So, why don’t I feel better?

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about forgiveness. I think it’s a lot easier to talk about than to do. And I don’t know if it’s all that beneficial, frankly. I mean, if I can’t forgive him, I can’t forgive him. I can’t force myself to ignore the pain and anger and resentment that riddle my relationship with him. I need to work through all of that, or at least acknowledge it, before I can do anything else. One of the meditations I learned at healing school includes the line, “Don’t be too quick to make peace.”

I’m also learning that it’s not a one-time, quick-fix kind of event. I’m thinking now of a line from Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees. After Lily finds out the truth about her mother leaving her, and her own role in her mother’s death, she has a long period of mourning. She says that some days are better than others, but that sometimes, she has to start all over again and forgive them both–herself and her mother.

So I guess that’s where I am, now. I feel like one day I’ll be really close to feeling forgiveness, to understanding my dad’s limitations and my own. And the next day, I’ll be knee deep in the muck again. It’s a process, I guess, of slowly peeling away the dried up layers of bitterness and old grudges to get to the sweet middle of the onion. Not everybody likes onions, Donkey would say. And frankly, I’m not that fond of them, either. They sting my tongue and make me cry. But with ogres, there just can’t be any other way.

Doing It Wrong

Yesterday was my dad’s birthday. He would’ve been 72. But he’s not, because he died nine months ago, yesterday. So on one day, we got a double-whammy: his birthday and the nine-month anniversary since he left the planet. It has just been over the past week or two that I have felt like I’m even grieving. I told my therapist that I must be doing it wrong.

She is kind. She is also a grief specialist. She says, no, no, I’m not doing it wrong, no such thing. But I just read a grief memoir by Meghan O’Rourke, called The Long Goodbye. In it, she talks about her research of grief, and the difference between “normal” grief and “complicated” grief. She says “normal” grief peaks in the first six months. Well, in the first six months after my dad died, I was raising an infant and going to graduate school and trying (and often failing) to resolve my dad’s affairs: debt collectors and lawyers and phone companies and furniture auction houses. I also organized his funeral. I couldn’t have done any of it without tons of help, but during most of it, I felt very alone, because, well, I’m it. No siblings. No parents, anymore. Just me.

Still, the grief has come in sharp, short stabs. One night I’ll sob for an hour, and then I won’t cry or even really think about it that much for a couple of weeks. Maybe what I am experiencing isn’t “normal” grief. Maybe it’s “complicated” grief. That would make sense. My relationship with my dad was a lot more complicated than that with my mom. And my life is a lot more complicated now than it was when she died. I don’t know. Then last Wednesday, Brian said something about how good it was that we kept all of these old pictures of my dad, because I can show them to Jack and tell him about his grandfather.

I wept. I sobbed. I exploded. “I HATE that I have pictures. I HATE that I’ll have to tell him stories. I HATE that that’s the only way Jack will ever know anything about either of my parents.” I cried for a long time. And for the first time in a long time, I let Brian hold me. It was, frankly, one of the sweetest experiences of my life.

And speaking of sweet experiences, I now have a toddler who’s starting to talk: juice, ‘nana, outside (which he says as “tide”). Last night, after dinner, Jack and I were in his sandbox, playing. At exactly 6 pm, when friends in Virginia were releasing birthday balloons and bottle rockets in my dad’s honor, Jack looked up at the sky and reached out his hand.