Under Construction

I’ve written before how most women juggle multiple balls – relationship, children, work, self, friendships – at any given time. I’ve admitted to dropping one or more of the balls, but that the most dropped ball is “self.” I often get caught up in trying to take care of everyone and lose sight of me. Now, I’ve learned that I’ve also dropped the “friendships” ball and it is hidden somewhere behind the sofa so that I may not be able to retrieve it again!

I e-mailed two good friends of mine yesterday – I’ve known both women for 8 years now – with the subject line “I feel abandoned.” These are ladies with whom – up until a few weeks ago – I would engage in a three-way e-mail communication several times a day, just sharing random thoughts. One of them did not respond to the e-mail; the other sent me a long response basically stating that they had not abandoned me, I had been so involved in my own life that I had pulled away from them.

At first I felt offended; but I’m wise enough (ha!) to know that when you hear a truth, your ego will often rise up with the “oh, no, she didn’t!” reaction in order to divert your attention from the truth. So, I removed my fingers from the keyboard, before I could respond in a way that would do lasting damage.

Then, as the icing on the cake, I sent an e-mail to another friend – this one I’ve known for 25 years – about Brendan’s birthday party and got an e-mail back saying that she would love to come, but she was having a party for her daughter the same day. But she didn’t invite me and hadn’t even mentioned it until I brought up Brendan’s party.

Here I was, patting myself on the back because I had managed – since September – to get up on time, pack my child’s snack for school and have him there on time (most days, anyway – I’m not perfect, you know); when, in fact, my friendships were collapsing around me. Today, I had to face the unsavory truth that I have not been a good friend. I have not e-mailed anyone in a while; I don't call to check up on my friends; and I don't remember the last time I sent a birthday or Christmas card. The sad part is that not only have I not been a good friend to the ladies who have held me together when I was falling apart (one of them even got on a plane with me to chase my then boyfriend down on vacation because I thought he was cheating on me), but I just haven’t been good to myself lately. I really have been engrossed with the minutia of everyday life. Truth be told, I am tired of it. I am tired of the lunches, and the laundry, and the cooking, and the cleaning. I feel like I’m on one of those wheels that the hamsters exercise on. I realize that the reason I feel like this is because I have no other life! I know that if I saw a movie with a friend now and then; or met up with someone for a manicure and pedicure; or for a chat and a cup of coffee; or even just keeping up my e-mail correspondence, I wouldn’t feel so bored and isolated.

I honestly don’t believe that life is meant to be depressing or boring. So, going forward, I intend to be a better friend. I truly hope that the “friendships” ball is retrievable. And I hope that my friends can understand that their girl is not a finished product – I am the first to admit that I am “under construction.”

The Unloveable

For most of my life, I have not felt loved. Worse, I have not felt love-able. My parents were neither affectionate nor effusive. They never said “I love you.” They never hugged us or kissed us. They didn’t tuck us into bed at night or say “I’m proud of you” if we did anything noteworthy. By the time I was seven, my mother cut off any physical contact with my father, like kisses goodnight or sitting on his lap, because she had seen too many instances of incest in the Honduran community and she wanted to remove any “temptation.” My mom was also of the opinion that a child would be “spoiled” if showered with attention; my dad left all the child-rearing decisions – insofar as it related to us girls – to my mother.

On one hand, it was good that my mother ruled with an iron fist, because my sisters and I avoided the pitfalls that surrounded us in the projects where we lived. All around us, the girls were dropping out of school and getting pregnant. And while we probably would’ve have sought out the attentions of young men to fill the void of love we felt at home, my mother timed our commute to and from school, was on good terms with a welfare mother on our floor (who watched everything we did and if anyone entered the apartment while my mother wasn’t there) and had a voice-activated recorder on the phone in her locked room that taped all conversations on our telephone line. Simply put, we had no opportunity to become sluts.

Growing up that way comes at a price. For many years, I harbored a deep-rooted belief that no one loved me and was convinced that no one could love me. I felt unworthy and ugly. I mean, if no one in my early life had – and who better to love you than your mother, your father, your family – then why would anyone in my later life? As a result, I always felt that any man I was with had an ulterior motive for wanting to be with me. The first time that I have felt true love – given and received – was when I had Brendan.

In recent months, I began feeling a sense of stagnation. Life was not bad, but not great. The fact is that I feel a yearning, a longing for something, but the something is fuzzy, not clear. I feel like there is more to be done, but I’m coming up against an unbreachable wall that will not allow me to do it – whatever “it” is. I knew that there was something I was meant to learn, something I was meant to understand once and for all. Whenever I get into these depressive moods, I try to pray or meditate them away. And so it was that I bumped into Michael Bernard Beckwith’s “Life Visioning Program” on CD. I won’t describe the whole program here, but it entails asking the “right” questions for personal growth. He recommends not asking “why” questions (those are my personal favorites: Why me? Why now? Why? Why?), but “what” and “how” questions. What must I become in order to manifest my vision? How must I grow? What must I change about me? What is it that I need to let go of? Once you ask the question, you should mediate on them and let the Universe, your subconscious, God, or whatever you want to label it, will give you the answers.

I asked the questions and … nothing happened. (Did you expect the skies to part and God to give me the answer??) I was truly frustrated. I copied the discs onto my I-pod and sent the originals to my sister, thinking that perhaps, she’d get better use out of the program. Maybe I had done it wrong.

That night, as I tucked Brendan into bed, I kissed his forehead and said, “que sueñes con los angelitos, Hijo” -- “Dream with the little angels, my son.” And I stopped. That was odd. I never say that phrase to Brendan. I almost always say “goodnight, Baby. I love you.” But I remembered the phrase well – when my mother wasn’t working nights, she would be in the living room watching her telenovelas, my siblings and I would line up at the living room door to say goodnight. As we kissed her cheek, she would say to each of us, “que sueñes con los angelitos negros” – “dream with the little brown angels.” Odd, indeed, that I would say that phrase.

A few days later, I was going to a seminar when the answers struck me. Seemingly out of the blue. Memories came flooding into my brain. There was my older cousin, Adora, caring for me when my parents came to the States. She was carrying me on her hip, so the hot sand would not hurt my bare feet in Honduras. My head lay sleepily on her shoulder as she carried me. She was smiling and planting feather-light kisses on my forehead as she walked. There was my oldest sister, Elsa, playing "school" with me in our bedroom in the projects. She was teaching me English words. There I was, feverish and coughing, during a bad winter soon after we’d moved to the South Bronx; and there Elsa was again, rubbing Vicks into my bony chest to ease the cough, then leaning me against her and covering me up with sheets. Elsa yet again, at the book fair at our school; my mother hadn’t given us enough money to each buy a book, but Elsa had found me and was handing over her few coins so that I, at least, would get something I wanted. I saw me at around 8 years old waking in the middle of night with a nightmare and having Elsa, who was only 5 years older than me, rub my brow until I fell asleep again. Now, it was my brother, Arles, holding me in his arms, shielding me from our mother; she was trying to get at me because I had not ironed my uniform jumper properly and we were going to be late for school. She was screaming and frustrated; she pounded furiously on Arles’s back and arms, but he would not let her get to me. Even my mother made some positive appearances; she had taken time off from her day job to take me to the dermatologist – in times of stress I get severe bouts of seborrheic dermatitis. My mom again, getting up early to braid our hair before school, even though she’d worked at her night job and must have been tired. And last, my dad, making the car “dance” to music by stepping on and releasing the brakes, so my siblings and I could laugh; taking us to the movies to see the Mexican actor “Cantinflas” in his latest comedic escapades while my mother worked; and driving two hours to the beaches of Long Island each Sunday during the summer so we could see something other than projects and crackheads.

Then the inner knowing came: I had been loved all along. Perhaps I hadn’t known it, but I had been loved. Then the same inner voice implored me to look at my life in recent years. How my mother and my sisters had driven to Buffalo to help me move from one apartment to another. How, after I had carbon monoxide poisoning and was afraid to sleep, Elsa -- who was the working mother of two young boys at the time -- stayed up the whole night watching me to make sure that I would wake up. The voice said to see my mother in her perpetual penance: cooking my favorite meals, calling to see how I am doing all the time, saying “I love you” to my son. To notice how my husband has lived up to his vows of in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer. And all my friends who care for me for no reason other than they care about me. And I felt a sense of peace. A sense of belonging unlike anything I had felt before. And I knew – I know – that everything will be okay. That I will do whatever it is that I am meant to do.

Behind the Curtain

I think The Wizard of Oz is one of the best books ever written. Unlike most people, however, I don’t think the best parts are those that come after Dorothy discovers that the Wizard is a sham. Once she opens the curtain and exposes the balding little man working strings and levers to make the “magic” happen, it is not the beginning of an adventure, but the beginning of the end. At that point, she loses hope. There will be no wizard who will save her; no white knight. Then and there she knows that she’s going to have to save her damn self. The winged monkeys and the wicked witch are just distractions. At the end, it’s just a girl and her shoes.

I started thinking about The Wizard of Oz the other day after a conversation with Big Bren. Brendan had gone to bed and we were laying about, just killing time. I was on our bed, in my flannel pajamas, doing what I always do in the evening before bed – reading the gossip rags on line. Suddenly, the conversation turned to how I had been 10 years ago, when Big Bren and I first met. Smiling, he said, “I like you better now. You’re more real. I’ve made you into a woman; you know, a wife.” For a minute, my blood ran cold. Not that I don’t like being a mom and a wife; I most definitely do. But I feel like I had to kill my inner wizard to become that.

In some sense, Big Bren is right. When we met, I was a completely different person. I would work at the firm until late in the evening, then go hang out with my co-workers at some posh restaurant or bar. All my clothes were designer and I thought nothing of spending $1,000 on a handbag. I had a personal trainer at the local gym, and a standing appointment on Tuesdays with a Russian aesthetician named Anya, who gave me a mani and pedi and made sure that my various parts were plucked and/or waxed to my satisfaction. I had a closet full of lingerie and I could not walk out of my apartment in the morning if my bra and panties did not match. What can I say, I was a bit of a pretentious twit. But that was my curtain; everything that anyone saw was simply the projection -- the show -- that I was putting on. None of it was real.

I don’t know when my wizard died (let’s face it, that old me ain’t making a comeback). A piece of her died when I got carbon monoxide poisoning in the Murray Hill apartment that I rented for more money than I could reasonably afford, because I convinced myself that I just had to live in Manhattan. I was removed unconscious from that apartment in my fabulous Victoria’s Secret underwear.

Maybe she died when I started suffering stress attacks after the carbon monoxide incident and I couldn’t sleep for fear that I wouldn’t wake up. It’s hard to think about matching underwear when you’re falling apart psychologically.

No, I don’t know how or when it happened. Big Bren did not ride in on big white horse to rescue me. There was no knight in shining armor. We just took one step at a time. It feels like I just woke up one day, wearing no make-up, with unshaved and unwaxed body parts, stuffed into flannel pajamas. It wasn’t something that I planned or even wanted. And, yet, it is more real to me than anything I have ever lived before. When my little guy rains kisses on my face, it’s worth more than a million Gucci bags. When I put my head on my husband’s chest at night, he doesn’t care that I haven’t had a manicure in a month.

Sometimes, when “real” life threatens to overwhelm me, I wish I could click my heels three times and go back to that life – it seems so easy, so glamorous, in comparison to my reality today. But I know, as Dorothy came to learn, that there really is no place like home. Right now, there may be more dish-washing than Broadway plays and more laundry than pomegranate martinis, but, at the end of the day, it is the place that I call home.

Happily Ever After

I was researching a project when I came across a website called divorcerate.org. According to divorcerate.org, the oft-quoted “50% of all marriages end in divorce” is actually inaccurate. In reality, between 40 and 50% of all first marriages end in divorce. Second marriages have a fail rate of over 60%, however; while third marriages dissolve more than 70% of the time.

The statistics feel wrong to me. I mean, I can understand first marriages failing – people are often young and idealistic when they first marry. They think that love and marriage will be some sort of fairy tale and fun all the time. When they discover that isn’t the case, disillusionment sets in. But you would think that second and third marriages would involve older and wiser people.

I dug a little further, just to see if the first website was corroborated. I found that there are numerous websites dedicated to this topic and all of them agree that subsequent marriages do, indeed, have higher fail rates than first marriages. The psychology-based ones aver that after a failed marriage, most people do not seek solitude, but rather look immediately to enter into another relationship in order to validate their worth and attractiveness. They urge readers to instead study the first marriage and try to figure out what went wrong before committing to someone else. Other sites believe that, after failing the first time, partners are not as invested emotionally – they already know that “happily ever after” does not exist.

This all holds a lot of interest for me. You see, I was married to someone else before I married Big Bren. When I married my first husband, whom I shall call C, I did so for all the wrong reasons. C was my college sweetheart. He was a wonderful guy, but a wounded man. His life read like a novel. His father, who was married, had an affair with a young woman in his village. When she became pregnant, her family threatened to disown her unless she got rid of the child. As this was in the 1960’s and abortion was not readily available in Guatemala, his mother did the next best thing: she gave birth to him, then left him on his father’s doorstep. His stepmother, who was childless, took him in and raised him. But – perhaps out of anger at his father – she never let him forget that he was the product of adultery and that his birth mother had not wanted him. As a result, C had serious abandonment issues.

I started dating C when I was 19 and he was 22. By then, he had already gotten a girl pregnant, who had – ironically – left him with the child and fled to California. I was undaunted by the fact that he already had a kid; it made him more mature in my eyes. I was also unphased by the fact that his ailing stepmother lived with him.

By 21, though, I had decided that I was going to law school and that I was going to do so outside of New York City. C suffered a meltdown. The sweet guy whom I fell in love with turned into a passive aggressive a-hole. He would make dates and not show up. He didn’t return phone calls. In my desperation, I offered him the one thing that I knew he wanted: a commitment.

We got married secretly in the City Hall by my law school (until today, only 5 other people ever knew we were married). For a while, things were good. He would drive up to see me almost every weekend. We spent hours on the phone every night. Soon, though, I started to see that I was missing out on the whole experience of being away from home for the first time in my life. My friends were out clubbing every night. Although I have never been a drinker, I loved to dance, so, I started to go with them. And I started to meet other people. People who were in law school, like me. People who did not have children. Or sick parents who would, necessarily, have to move in with us.

I don’t know exactly what happened to us. I do know that what he’d always feared came to pass: I abandoned him. First, physically, by moving away and then, I began to pull away emotionally. He resorted to what he always did when things were not to his liking – he ran away. As soon as I graduated from law school, I filed for a divorce. I wanted an annulment, but I could not bring myself to say that he defrauded me into marrying him. I knew well enough what I was doing. I later learned, though, that while I was out dancing, my husband was cozying up to another woman and had had another child, so I would’ve had grounds after all.

One thing I can say with certainty is that the statistics and the psychologists are wrong in my case. I did not rush to marry the first man who asked after my divorce. In fact, I did not marry Big Bren until five years later. But it makes me wonder whether I “fixed” what was wrong the first go round. I honestly do not know. Was I just attracted to the walking wounded? Over the intervening years, I have learned that there is no cure for the wounded when they won’t admit they’re hurt. I’ve also learned that if you don’t face that which you fear, it will rear up and bite you at some point. Other than that, I guess only time will tell.

The Roar Within

No one likes to hear anything negative about him/herself. Who wants to hear that you're lazy? Or a slack-off? Or will amount to nothing? Yet, we often say these things, or worse, to ourselves.

I decided to sit and listen to my inner dialogue one day and, I must say, I was appalled at what I heard and felt. I found myself wishing for something, visualizing myself having it and then, almost immediately, clamming up in fear, internally shaking my head, saying "You'll never get that. Why should you, with all your issues, be so blessed? Do you know how many people want that?" It is as if even before my dreams can get off the ground, I cripple them by telling myself that I am unworthy or undeserving of having the things I truly want.

Armed with this realization, I now "erase" my last thought and say "well, why not me? Someone is going to get it, it might as well be me." It is an exhausting process, yet that seems to be the only way to interrupt my programming.

I don't know why I am programmed this way. It would be great if I could lay blame on someone else (my parents, perhaps), but, truth be told, I have always been saddled and ridden by fear. I wish there were places one could go for mental reprogramming. (And, no, I don't mean a psychotherapist). I mean an actual place where you walk in with all your psychologic bugs and mental viruses, frozen on one screen of your life, and come out with the slate wiped clean, your heart purring gently and your mind ready to take on the world. Wouldn't that be wonderful?

The Love of Money

Many people have family karmas that they spend their lives working through.  Some have a history of abuse that plagues them throughout their lives.  Others have good karma like excellent business acumen.  My family karma has to do with its relationship to money.

My whole life, I've heard stories about my grandmothers (on both sides) struggling mightily to survive financially.  Both had been abandoned by their respective husbands with children to feed.  In her quest to find another breadwinner, my maternal grandmother fell indiscriminately into the arms of other men.  One of my aunts tells the story of being about 13 years old and having one of her putative stepfathers try to rape her.  My paternal grandmother, who fancied herself still in love with the bastard who left her, relied on the kindness of relatives to put food on her table.  In both of my parents' cases, they had to leave school while still at the elementary level in order to go to work.  Those early years left an indelible imprint on my parents' financial psyche.

There are two things I remember most about my own childhood:  (1) being encouraged to excel educationally so that I would never have to rely on a man financially; and (2) my parents having money, but refusing to spend it (sometimes, even on basic necessities). 

I know that my parents had money:  

• They both worked and they prided themselves on the amount of money they each had in the bank (in separate accounts).  
  
• Whenever a relative needed a visa to come from Honduras, the family looked to my parents to provide the Affidavit of Support and proof of money in the bank.  
  
• Every once in a while, my dad would take some of his cash and spend it on some electronic gadget.  We were the first family I knew who had a remote control television.  We were also the first to get a VCR and a large screen t.v.  
  
• My mother preferred to spend her days off shopping.  She hit all the bargain basements (back then Spring Street, in what is now known as SoHo, was a hot spot, as were 14th and 34th Streets).  For groceries, we would go to Washington Heights, where all the ethnic foods we ate were sold for cheap.  
• The four of us went to catholic school, whereas most of the kids in our neighborhood went to public school (that gave my parents bragging rights). 
• Every weekend, some relative or friend was over asking to borrow money.

Despite all this "abundance," my starkest memories arise out of what I can only describe as my parents' cheapness.  I remember walking for blocks in bitter cold without gloves and without a proper winter coat; the walking because my mother did not want to pay bus fare for all of us and the cold because she didn't think it a priority to provide us with gloves or thermal underwear or even sweatshirts.  We each had one pair of shoes that took us from Summer through Winter.  She did not believe in buying sneakers and rarely did we have Winter boots (unless she found them on sale).  I remember walking to school in the heart of Winter in a short jacket and my uniform jumper, my legs bumpy and ashy from the cold because I didn't have a single pair of tights.  The nuns, thinking that we couldn't afford to buy more appropriate clothing, would sometimes give us clothes that had been donated to charity.  My father gave/gives gifts only at Christmas -- birthdays come and go without so much as a token.  I also remember being short $1,000 for my last year's tuition at college and, with trembling knees and downcast eyes, asking my father for a loan.  ... And having him say "no" with a smug expression on his face and walking away from me.  Then giving the same $1,000 to my uncle so he could go on vacation to Honduras.  I recall my mother stuffing her wide feet into shoes many sizes too small and definitely too narrow, because that is what she said she could afford.  That effected me so much that the first thing I did upon collecting my first paycheck as a lawyer was to take her to Bloomingdales and buy her a pair of shoes that fit.  In my mind's eye, I can still see my father's station wagon, so old and worn that there were areas by the back seat where there was no floor.  You could never take a nap for fear that you would accidentally fall into the hole.

Yet, whenever we went someplace where any of my parents' family or friends would see us, they took care to dress us to the nines.  We had matching outfits for just such occasions; we looked like members of a musical group.  

Over the years, I have struggled with the dichotomy of my family karma.  I love money and loathe it all at the same time.  I work hard to be financially successful, but do not want my family to base my "worth" as a person on my net worth.  I love my mother, but I hate it when she gives me kisses after I've handed her a wad of cash, where she doesn't bestow kisses for any other reason.  It bothers me that every outing with my family is marred by discussions about how much money they gave this relative or that relative to assist in some financial crisis; or more likely, it is usually how much such relative needed or asked for and my family refused to give.  It annoys me when our family gets together and the only thing my relatives can talk about is how much I make or that sibling makes -- the implication being that we, as "professionals," are somehow better than those who may not command our salaries.  I am but a lawyer, not Donald Trump.  I still have bills to pay and a family to support.

So I keep reading books.  I keep meditating and praying.  And I keep hoping, hoping, hoping that one day I will break free -- once and for all -- of the financial drama, the scarcity mentality, and the family karma that has shadowed me until now.

  

Fighting Through Fear

Fighting Through Fear

My whole life, I have done everything through a cloud of fear.  At times, the fear paralyzed me and kept me from moving forward.  Other times, the fear motivated me -- catapulting me into something that turned out for the best, although I didn't know it at the time.

I earned good grades through fear.  Fear of disappointing my parents, my teachers, my self.  But the fear also kept me from excelling.  I thought:  "If I study really hard and get the same grades, what does that say about me and my intelligence and my ability?"

I worked from fear.  Fear of not having money.  Fear of not being able to pay for school.  Fear of having to ask my parents for help.  Yet the fear of success has kept me from earning what I am worth; what I know I can earn.  I fear not being worthy of making more money.  What if I land my "dream job" and fail at it?  What if I cannot keep up?  What if -- gasp -- I am "found out"?

I even married in a haze of fear.  Fear of being an old maid.  Fear of being a single mother.  Fear of never finding my soul's mate.  But love found me through the cloud of fear and gave me a partner who understands my skittish nature.  Someone who held my hand in the face of a potentially terminal illness.  A man who unabashedly lost more sleep over my perhaps impending demise than even I did.  Someone who -- like me -- pretends to be hard, but hides a soft spot for the people he loves.

Fear has not given me anything.  As my constant companion of the past 38 years, it has burdened me and made my load unnecessarily heavy.  So I renounce you, Fear.  I renounce the twisted gut and aching heart.  I renounce lowered expectations and deferred dreams.  I renounce cubicles and nine to fives.  I am an eagle; it is time to soar.