It’s the psychological response, the baggage from dealing with her for years politely and patiently. Headstrong, she pushes me for a response, for an acquiescence. If not directly, through an arsenal of vocalizations I have been trained to internalize. What pleases her. My explanations don’t matter. Rather than face her, I hide. Because I don’t have anything to do that’s not based around her, so it would, from her point of view, seem.
And indeed, all I can do now is barely take a yoga course, keep the errands together, serve meals, organize the appointments, barely write anymore.
She can’t help it. Now more than ever. A victim, like we all are, of our moods.
But she remains who she is, in need of a social life.
She is a toxically nervous person, ready to brew up anxiety at any moment. “You’ve ruined the evening,” she says, if I appear to be impatient as we come up the final concrete steps to the apartment after going out to dinner.
This has probably left a scar over my life, and certainly I could have gotten myself better organized to find a better career than joking around, wasting years drinking with a bunch of waiters and the lonesome, (a situation from which I wonder if I will never be able to recover from) without the baggage of her demands on my attention, on top of my own anxiousness.
My impulse now is to hide from her, to meditate, and the first thing she does, the first thing out of her repetitive mouth, "what are we doing for fun today," to me, sets the whole thing up. If I don't please her, then she will explode on me, eventually. Or we'll get through a few things, than as we are heading home, after an hour ride, and groceries and the wine shop, "oh, are we going straight home?..." her little body and her big head tensing up at the thought of it, winding back up again, the string of the bow pulled back. Anger. Dissatisfaction.
The feeling of shame and unworthiness, the diminishment, keeping me from blossoming, from stepping forward.
She takes her stance, she's always right, the boss, the complainer. The counter is wet, she tells me, as she comes down in the middle of the night to wander to the back door and stand at the countertop where she eats Saltines with almond butter, from where the cat is fed from the opened cans. Yes, Mom, I just did all the dishes, then I wiped the counter off with soapy water, and I just wiped it with a Clorox Wipe to sanitize it. Well... she says, leaving that hanging. She doesn't like how I'm telling her what I accomplished, the suggestion of the work I've done that she is unable to notice. Well, don't give the cat any poisons. I won't, mom. I wrap up the full tall kitchen plastic garbage bag out of the can. She goes back to look out at the dark from the kitchen door, with the outdoor light on, underneath an orb spider's web. "I wish I were dead," she says. I repeat it. "I wish you were dead." How dare you! Mom, that's just the message you're sending out to the Universe, and I can hear it. I'm just repeating it so you hear how it sounds. I don't want to hear it either.
Not saying a word, beyond, I'm never coming here again, she gets ready to walk back upstairs, thinking in the hallway by the bathroom sliding door. I call after her, mom, how are you, do you need anything. I'm sorry, that's just what you said. She walks away. Okay, fine.
We have to start. Somewhere. I have things to do. My life’s work is not disposable. We have to start, somewhere, out of this rubble.
I go up the stairs from the bedding in the basement across the floor. It's a new moon. A chance to get some work done, to get a good pattern going again.
I get mom to take her pills. I heat up a slice of pizza for her, and I make a fresh pot of green tea, sliced turkey on an Ezekial sprouted-grain English muffin with onion and tomato.
With the new moon you have to start in and work.
Maybe writing isn't work. Maybe it just a way of keeping sanity.
Mom can't remember that we went for a ride, along the lake, with the wind blowing. What are we doing for fun today? Well, mom, I have some work to do. Besides keeping clear of ragweed pollen…
What do you have to do for work, she half scoffs at me, emphasizing, "you." Poor you, the slouch. Maybe she's right to think of me as such, though I didn't start out that way.
Well, mom, actually, I have a long list.
I cough, the chest congestion loosening. Take you to the TB clinic. She sits at the table now, lowering. Getting ready to pick at her head. She'll go into the living room to her Eames Chair. I'll blow my nose, and hear her slap the newspaper or the book, making a huffing noise if I make any such a clearing noise.
Okay, mom, don't forget to brush your teeth. Who left you in charge of my teeth! Well, if you don't want to have to go to the dentist...
I take my laptop from the shelf below the counter, having brought my mugs downstairs. I'm going to go down to the basement and do a bi of work, mom.
"I’m ROTTING!" she shouts at me, after me as I rise from the table to pour out some lemon water tea into one of the morning cups, green in the other, to wake up.
Mom, have patience, relax, don't get angry with me and later we will go out for a drive.
That's all I do is be patient! she says, raising her voice. Okay, mom, please, give me twenty minutes...
Yes, you're rotting, right, I say to myself, down in the basement, thinking of where my own life may be headed.
I have to be careful even of what I say.
(And later, out for the obligatory ride I'm not so very happy about, she does not even remember her aggressiveness, about her saying that she's rotting here, how she shouted at me...)
There's always an element of fear, being who you are. You feel that people are looking over your shoulder at you, and maybe indeed they are. I should have established rules, when I got here in November, carved out the time for myself in the daytime.
I should have, a long time ago, listened to the general rules of decent hard working society, not engaged at all in any solitary solipsistic pursuit of creativity, art, journal, what have you... I was stubborn, and now I see why everyone shook their heads at my foolishness. I know they are right now. I can never be happy at this point. Too poor. Too much water and years under the bridge, energy and vigor tossed away...
I can understand her anger, but that just makes it worse. I must draw up a list of things to do. Get going in a new direction.
Just taking some time for myself is helpful, even if it's only the fifteen minutes of writing this palaver. It helps push away the thoughts that I am a complete bum and all that sort of thing for needing to write.
Ever since I found myself thought of as being inappropriate with the Princess, finding the New York City crowd at college a bit rough... It's a hard thing to get over. I'll always feel guilty, and bad, and of course it's all my own fault, how can it be otherwise. You never get over it, really. More on that later, about how my psychology was already set up to seek a lack of selfless intimacy, of rejection.
A shame that had already started, already bleeding over into issues of intimacy and self confidence.
So, down in the basement. It's better to hide, to get away with making tea and then duck back down and not even engage with her. Put a package of peanut butter and cheddar orange anatto colored crackers for her out on the counter. You hungry mom? No. Okay.
Down in the basement, at least you can peacefully write out, mentally, a grocery list.
But my mind is thick today, from yesterday's ragweed, and staying up chatting over wine with an old friend, Jennifer, about her New York City stuff with Con-Ed, NYFD, the Polish super who gives her a hard time, the flooding, the smoking power strip, the refrigerator not cooling saga, the smell of the Raid the Dominican maid treated it with to kill the fruit flies… Again, not much energy to hold my head up. I've done nothing in life, I have nothing now, and nothing is hard to build upon.
At least it's raining today, that will help, washing the ragweed pollen out of the airs, tamping it down, as I pursue my little writings here, wasting the talents I have, or might have once had, but falling into a Buddhist state, so I thought, of passivity, that the Universe would all help me be what it intended me to be. Except as I fend off mom every day I get pretty depressed, and life is all washing away, like a departing wave running back out, receding with the tide, and what have I accomplished... nothing. The hopeful piping plover birds of life running to the edge of the foam, picking with their beaks down, then running back with the surf, without being fully understood at the time. And this is true of the last however many days... the ragweed effect. Crucifying.
And then I feel bad for not getting anything done amidst all the distractions. The Toyota Airbag recall. Seeking out a doctor locally who might take Medicare, how long has it been, I could use the blood work and checking on a few things, a tender sort of lump in the breast tissue. The Medicaid application and the lawyer. Sweeping the floor. Playing out at an open mic night, just to have something to do, beyond the constant mom, the solitary confinement? The grocery store? But the head feels full. And just then I hear mom flush the upstairs John, the water rushing through the PVC pipes here, and so she'll be coming down the stairs above me, the slow measured creaking. And I can't face her quite yet. She'll flush the toilet again, and usually a third time too. Maybe the cat will come downstairs to be fed, to be let out. She'll probably call my cell phone.
I feel like crap.
My blog, this thing, it gets about 35 views a day, over the last week. Who knows who reads it... Friends. At least I met a number of good people while I toiled away behind the bars.
Take up being a travel writer, was the suggestion of a young woman who wrote a book by the title, "Behind Bars." About being a youthful attractive female bartender in New York City.
At least mom is not calling out yet, and I hear her in the kitchen. It could be worse.
But why.... why can I not solve my problems... It was wise all those years in DC, not having a girlfriend, who I would have had to abandon. At least the Universe let me play that one right, but a hell of a way to think.
I call, from my cell, up from the basement to check in with her in the kitchen a floor above me, hearing the chair creak at the table, and she is actually calm and even okay. Oh, I’ll be alright, she says, when I tell her the nice person from Meals on Wheels came. I just had some cheese & crackers, she tells me. And she gets I’m not feeling so hot, and when I suggest to her that she takes her pills, laid out earlier on a little paper plate, she asks me to hold on, and takes them for me, down the hatch. Thanks, mom. (A different story from last night.) She has that old warm Irish familiarity sound, and that's good.
So you’re not feeling well? No, the wind yesterday… at least it rained today. Yes, and soon it will get cold again. Yes, Ted, you’re not living in a perfect world, she says and we both manage a chuckle. Back to be the old friends we always have been. Okay, I’ll see you soon. I might be upstairs, she says. Yes, I know where to find you. Are you warm enough? Yes, she says with a smile, but this sweater is itchy.
I hear her go to the front door, “here, kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty,” rattling the storm door handle, then repeating the call, like the Bedouin women in Lawrence of Arabia watching their husbands in the red valley ride off to battle on their steeds and camels, calling their high pitched shrill war cry.
The cat’s paws click soft across the floor with the tips of his kitty nail claws making his own little statement as the world carries on, school back in session, everyone back to their offices and their trades.
And I’m vaguely proud of myself for choosing a wiser way to engage her while remaining helpful so as to not completely waste this hour and moment.
Just to not have that pressure, on top of all the other pressures of my general situation…. It feels like a huge relief, even if temporary.
I guess as I went off to college, in mythical Amherst, I felt some call to be however I could a writer. This causes me chagrin and great embarrassment. Not to be tried, if you aren't an aristocrat, already a success at writing, or an exemplar of the issues current to the times, not to attempt if you are not professional organized in the language of the economy and the commerce of the land.
My life had stood, a loser’s, in corners, loaded, until the owner, the overlord, the great soul, the owner took me up and away, putting me to use finally. Maybe that’s a piece of what Emily was saying.
Do you have to be in a situation in order to get it, that state of affairs, one you never wanted to have to see. But the offence cometh, as Lincoln, her contemporary, wrote.
I go up and make a second steeped pot of tea from the long dragonwell leaf. Empty my little container that I use for comfort while hiding in the basement. Mom is quiet, upstairs, not acting up. When will I have the courage? Yesterday didn’t go easy.
If we go out to the open mic, there will be wine… The vineyard out in Fair Haven.
And the news, no more unemployment to add to things, and getting mom anywhere isn’t easy.
She knows we are leaving soon, I have the guitar in the case, out to the car… We’re about to turn onto Route 7 to head west efficiently when she tells me she needs to go to the bathroom.
We go out there, mom on me, slow down, slow down! please slow down! anxious from the start, and then a half an hour later there's the winding road on the other side of the bay, and I miss the road, in my nerves, turn around, and then we're coming up the gravel drive with the vines on both sides of the road and the pond.
But I notice, a compliment I put out there feeling the relief of arriving too late to play at the big barn open mic night here, having ditched mom, having found acceptable wine and something to eat, and hospitality, has sort of soured half of the new friendship, in that the woman singer of my new friend thinks from what I said, off hand, but ill aimed, not with the meaning she thought, is pushing me about how and if I really am attracted to her. She's a school teacher. I made a little friendly joke about how kids like their teacher teacher.
I get up and play anyway, but I can feel the nerves pushing me, and mom has spilled my first glass of wine anyway, etc., so I get into the habit of going back to the bar to get myself another pinot noir, then I get up and play, first 40, U2, as an incantation, a challenge to my singing, and then a song about ghosts howling about the house at night, a Pogues song, and then another Pogues song, the one I play like a mantra, about a Rainy Night in some city place when you're a kid from rural Ireland and life is going crazy on you. Not all of which I finish, before talking to the small crowd with my nerved up jibber jabber.
It takes a lot of pressure, to get us out there, for me to unhappily get mom and the guitar case out from the car and settled after the tedious drive, and mom won't remember the drive back in the night, you're going too fast, melting down, in an ugly way, including my gut reaction, unskillful, and then me drinking more and hiding.
The terror of having no more unemployment funds hits.
I consider signing up for an extended yoga class. That helps. A little project to think on and dream about, maybe carry it as far as you can, despite the odds and the cost, which is what it should be, no more, no less.
But the pressure...
Take care of yourself, your center first, and then you'll be able to help your mom, yoga man, founder of Ashaya yoga, coming highly recommended to me, Todd Norian says.
I get through Friday, then Saturday at The Press Box I don't even want to touch the glass of Chianti I ordered, only have some over the rocks before we leave. But later on with the oven cleaning project and a need for some space I open a twist off Pinot and have some, idle humor, The Death of Stalin on Netflix, after I'd curiously already started on some silly sketches of me doing my Russian character which I do with the wine, waiting for the EZ Off oven spray to sink in. I was putting a frozen pizza in the oven, after adding pepperoni, fresh mozzarella, sliced onions, fresh basil, but as I went to put it into the oven somehow I spilled it, this is two nights ago, and I did indeed yell with frustration there in the middle of the night, defeated by allergies and circular arguments and conversations with mom running in my head and knowing I need to make a drastic change, hopefully the Tantric yoga theory... When I retrieved the crust and the basic set up from the still hot oven, did my best to clean up the fallen pepperoni, etc., spilled everywhere, when I build up another pizza, turn the oven back on, smoke comes pouring out of the door of the stove, so I turn it off. I'd already put the fire detector alarm thing outside, taking it down from the wall. There was an earlier incident when the class pan I was cooking a meatloaf which cracked while in the oven, and the leftover spill residue at 425 temperature sets off the detector anyway
I wake with horrible regrets. With all my college boy knowledge, having studied with Henry Steele Commager and Benjamin DeMott, Pritchard, Sofield, Kateb, and so on, complete luminaries in their fields, how did I end up not even bothering with trying to educate other people, at least in a public high school, or something like that. And look at where the country, our nation, is headed now, into a disbelief that government can do anything for you, and on from one lie to an even bigger one and a bigger one beyond that, that elections are rigged.
Mom is contentious as I get her something to eat. "I'm just a stupid woman, what would I know," she says, when I try to explain to her how yesterday was 9/11, and that my brother might be coming up for a high school reunion, just the same weekend my intensive yoga course is to begin.
So I wake, and the only thing I can conclude is that it's the wine, the drinking, the over the years wasted treading water in the stupid bartender world, nothing to show for it, nothing. No longer placed in the training of intellectual pursuits and the refinement of knowledge, instead, the life of a beast.
But I wonder, the rolling ball of shame and guilt that got me here, led me along all this while, the feeling of never being right, never being good enough. It's as if I've been subjected to something, a kind of slow long-lasting abuse, telling me that the things I do as a human being incarnated in this world are somehow wrong, quite wrong in fact, if I were to be making the decisions of a perfectly led life of perfect choices...
The things that undermine your own self-confidence, that lead you to accept the abuse of creepy people who say creepy things about the things you do. While professing to have your best interests at heart, they undermine you, picking away at the created being you are.
(Or maybe they see, albeit while still being creepy, a Truer you, the one that could be freed from the burdens of the judgmental...)
And so any moment of drama, in life, in family, is the manifestation of your inner psychological make up and all the battles therein.
We are broken as we enter the world, in order to be conscious. My childhood recurring dream on the long smooth straight road, suddenly broken… monstrous forms looking down in upon your brokenness.. Dreams that remind me of the real life endings of James Dean and President Kennedy. Descending the long desert Paso Robles straight highway, the perfect eggshell silver Porsche Spyder low open racing car running perfectly below you, the comfortable cockpit, the hum of the engine, the roll of the wheels along the smooth road, an open sky above, arid flat lands stretching out below, hills in the distance, then suddenly, reaching the valley, the car coming toward you turning in front of your way, not seeing you… The perfect open Kennedy-blue Lincoln limousine… then laid out on the leather upholstery seat, consciousness of life waning within a broken skull. I wake as a child in pain, psychic, and then also strange recurrent leg pains. Life is not always a joy, it asks of you, it tortures you to endure, doesn't it, you find out even as a kid.
And when we wake again, clearer, one sees all the things that have kept him in a place of shame, the lens he is given to see through and interpret life with, that his own intimate wishes aren’t allowed without judgment and interference, intrusion.
I get goaded into taking her to the usual dinner place, after shopping for the groceries. We're back in the townhome apartments, the usual parking space. She stays in the car, uptight, entitled, her thick head held up, the AC on, with her newspaper, as I go in and put things away in the fridge, the sliced off-the-bone turkey breast, the chicken tenders, the lemon and the spinach. Cans of cat-food, liter of soda water, I leave in the shopping bag. Her Pepsi. Back out to the car, after peeing. Off we go. “You left me right in the direct sunlight,” she comments. What took you so long?
We get there, bearing her aimless walk along the covered deck, to the door as the waitresses bring the trays in and out. We get sat, Chardonnay for mom, who expresses that oh she’s ready for it, heh heh heh. Ha ha ha. I’ll have a soda water… food arrives, as the couple, retirees we’ve befriended come in. We’ve spoken about meeting up for dinner soon. Okay, I’ll have a glass of wine. That’s how it happens. Now I am performing again. Caught up in it, just as I am when I tend bar. Put on an act and everyone will be happy. And then I can do all my own little lies and bad habits, escapist dopamine seeking…
I feel shame, the great discomfort over this little old strong out of control personality, pushing me quite beyond what I feel comfortable with…
I have a second glass. The fish fry piece of haddock is dry, tough. Another squeeze of lemon, a brush of the institutional soybean oil tartar sauce, mom content with chicken fajita, but puzzled by it, asking me if I'd like some, no, I'm okay mom… We make plans with our friends, dinner later in the week. Later I'll find out he went through the riots at Attica. PTSD.
I get mom home. After two glasses of wine, though, I’m beat. Drunk, more than I should be, feeling my immune system compromised further. Hide from her… pass out in the basement with the dehumidifier churning away. Feeling intoxicated, the sweet rotted fruit of the grape now in my system until my tired body can process it as I sleep, passing through fitful states of dream, intimacies with dreamed females I know immediately upon wakening, I’ll never enjoy, and why exactly I don’t know.
And when I wake, what joy will there be, when wide awake at midnight, out of synch. Dishes from earlier.
Low self-esteem, the continual need to drug myself, to please away the ones who participate in my shame.
How I manage to hold it together now I do not know, but that I’m drawn toward yoga, just to breath.
Take the leap of faith into the strange alien career of the yogi? Meditate while my own earlier life falls away along the years it ate up?
I pour a glass of Montepulciano. I’m reading my yoga book. I clean the kitchen, the fridge, the clutter, the dishes. I read more, heat up a hamburger Jacques Pepin style, read. Usually I’d finish the bottle, but I stop.
Restless back to my cave for sleep just before it gets light out.
There’s an open mic night out in Sterling, but I am changing my focus, in order to get to a better place. There’s certainly nothing wrong with music. There’s nothing wrong with wine. But that I’ve used it so long to mask my guilt, my shame, my unhappiness, my inhibitions to perform as I might really want to, and maybe now I just want to be a bit healthy, save a deeper part of myself through studying yoga, and not just go along all the time, often with people who may seem friendly, but don’t have my interests at heart.
On the other hand, boredom is threatening, pressing in, leaving me without a purpose near or far.
Yoga.
Thursday dinner, I can’t bring myself to face mom til the afternoon, to get her ready. What time? What time…. What to wear…
I enjoy myself. Mom’s in her little zone…
Friday… again to the regular place. We have to sit at the bar, mom and I… We get through our ordering, and the first glass of wine, and the guy next to us, a slender man from the town down the road, his wife is tending to her dying parent over at the hospital. One over from him there's a hearty guy, inform out of town, working at installing control equipment at the electric power plant. I end up drinking a shot of Tito’s vodka with him later. He's a Polish American man from Queens, and we talk of Polish history and stuff, and here I go, poisoning myself again in my great inability to make a clean un-rattled decision, one not pulled down upon by large angry demanding personalities.
Mom finds her peaceful saintly mode talking to the cat. Turning from her contention with my services as entertainer, dishwasher, chef... "Such a good kitty, such a good kitty, oh, such a good kitty..."
The confusion time of “sundown” coming earlier now, when her mind turns to insisting that her home is over there, a few houses up, up the road a piece, she can’t walk home now in the dark, where am I staying tonight. And if the cat is out, as is his want, he falls into it too. Mom, I say softly, he’s just outside, out back on the neighbor’s stoop. He’s fine, he knows how to get home… But this contradicts her, and she starts sobbing, why do you do this to me. I look at her. It’s not her fault. I get up from the table and call him, and I hear him raise his little meow of acknowledgment, taking his time as he comes into the light. Then I’m holding him, and bringing him to mom, and immediately her crying stops, cooing to the cat. But then switching back into a lesser form of panic mode.
And I get more use to how I see things always through my shame, always with the devil’s voice, “come on, why don’t you join in…”
Through the lens of shame every choice is difficult. Intimate wishes only meet with pain, by the habit pushed on you. You do things to reinforce rather than break from…
Until kindness comes along. My father having departed, and he too took me as a failure, I'm afraid, as one of a more Bohemian kind of a lifestyle, a country club drinker after my initial great seriousness as a student when my reading slowed, a momma's boy, stuck realizing the burden, turning to the family weakness for the soothing drink and the social hour.
I try to get psyched up for some yoga, down here in the basement. It’s not the same as venturing out into the yard to do my routine, before the ragweed pollen…
The rest of the weekend goes by. I drive mom by the lake, a beautiful mid September day, warm, golden, an Eden of Green and blue water, well kept houses, or the attempt at least, as we get angrier and angrier with each other, worries in my head, waiting to go to the six o'clock party I have no idea what it will be like, except it's a home art gallery and they are Facebook friends through the open mic circuit. Mom gets grumpy at it, I drive her home, I go back there, meet a nice gal from Iraq. Then the great Porchfest, except mom can't handle it. She doesn't get it. "When are we going to eat?" "I don't know how long my bladder can hold out." She looks around as we sit in chairs, and I admit, it doesn't feel right. Okay, but let's at least try. I get her back in the car, with the folding chair, and the beverages. We're getting a late start on the musical acts that started at 1 PM. It's an even more beautiful day, and this all feels awkward.
We get down to a good spot where my friends are playing, on the front step piazza of a grand Italianate kitty-corner to the main green space park here, but we barely catch the last two songs. We go through the embarrassment of saying hi, and then I get mom back o the car, about a block and a half. "My heart is hurting!" she shouts at me. And I try my best to get her across the street, almost pulling at her. Frustrated, I take her home. She wants to go the usual sports bar place, but I'm feeling almost livid, for having to miss out. I have a child to deal with now.
Monday, I wake up, the party's over. Mom's bank account is low. I haven't made a decision about the yoga class, and should have registered Friday. I was up reading late one of the assigned books, but it strikes me, what is yoga but a cult, at least the way it might lean here. Tales of the ashram. The guru, acting within his own cultural standards, having affairs…
The fleas came in over the course of a cooler and then a rainy day, as I was assessing whether or not to try to go to the vineyard for open mic night, taking mom along, and it was Yom Kippur. I'd neglected to find the cat's flea collar, and I'd just read about the Fipronil chemical in the Frontline you put on the cat's neck, between the shoulder blades at the base of the skull after parting the fur, so he can't twist around on lick.
In the night, out of desperation, I found a lower grade of flea and tick treatment, Advantage II, without the Fipronil of Frontline and the potential for nerve damage, guiltily squeezing it out carefully at the base of the cat's skull then disposing the little plastic vial wrapped in newspaper. The next day I fought with mom and found some flea powder for the carpet upstairs where I slept in mom's study some nights, as ragweed season went on and on. The cat hadn't even joined me for more than an hour one night, but then I was catching them between my fingers and drowning them holding them down in a mug of water, taking a pleasure in it. The same was true of the basement, where he had come down the stairs to prowl and have some company, lying stretched out beside me on the little throw rug carpet on the cement floor right next to the air mattress as I fell asleep. There I could catch them too and drown them, but also press them into the cement floor.
This was all a distraction, and finally when it was Thursday, after consulting with my yoga friend Betsy over the phone as she came back from a family wedding out West, an expert, the night before, when I had to decide, so, I did, I signed up for the 32 hour class, with the potential of continuing on, for more money of course, into a two hundred hour teacher training course in Ashaya Yoga out of West Stockbridge, Mass., via the computer and Zoom. But I felt stupid about that too, buyer's regret, my usual half assed effort, a bit too late, disorganized, but at least moving forward now.
And in a day or two, after all that thinking and not being able to make a decision, then finally doing so, really feeling poorly in my head, I attended the first evening. And while skeptical at first, but still with a very positive feeling about the man who's founded this branch of effective yoga, who told me, look, you'll be able to do a better job and taking care of your mom if you go through the course, the chanting, the showing up for morning asana, the healthier lifestyle... And for the first time in a long time, I felt what it was like to really engage, by choice, given my sense of self, in the world, challenging myself, taking a course, which was quite a hard thing to do.
Siblings are simply different. Like the Buddha's choice, one becomes a wise ruler king, very organized, always busy, and the other becomes, follows, the other path of spiritual sort of leader, if you will, the dutiful initially reluctant but scientifically inclined individual who strives, after seeing all the suffering in the world, that to become awakened to the true nature of reality is the way to go. There's no real misunderstanding, or contention, it's simply how nature works itself out, hopefully for the better, as the Universe, Creation, God/Goddess, powers that be, have your back and everything is as it should be when you open your eyes. A great appropriateness.
That's just how it goes.
The first full day, a sunny Fall Saturday, taking the class down in the basement, there were three sessions, first chantings in seated position after breathing pranayama exercises, then the silent mantra, then a break, then serious pose work, then another break, and then even more pain. As mom creaks upstairs in her Eames Chair, making me nervous... By the end, and after getting dinner on the table, mom made no objection to my taking a little bit of a nap, and indeed I went up and laid down for a long time, until it was well past becoming dark out as my muscles sorted it out. At least I felt good about myself waking up early and seeing the dew on the lawn as the sun rose up over the poplar trees and bushes and other woody things after the cool night.
All that dissatisfaction had worked its way in on me. Unemployment for the pandemic period had come to end, and I felt good about nothing. But at least there was the yoga and the Non-Dualist Shivastic Tantra helping me out with a message of acceptance, even as nothing made sense, or looked right, and all those years I had wasted so lazily and shamefully not applying myself, and now look what I got, nothing, a liability to myself and family...
The restaurant too is a betrayal, unless I suppose you're the chef or the proprietor. 35 years like that, before beginning to finally, at this very late hour, apply myself, get up early with the dewy school Autumn light. It's you betraying yourself, really, playing before a crowd, part clown, but working away at a real job... but a huge waste for all your talents. The drinking, my own pain numbing betrayal, not wanting to face cold reality, putting it all off another year, however artistically…
The only thing to salvage from it, for me, I don't even know, not sure... The wine tasting? The talking to people but that all disappears and no one remembers anyway, leaving you alone out in the cold without anywhere to go, nothing to fall back upon but family... because you didn't take care of yourself, and it just got worse and worse and worse...
The first day after the weekend yoga classes, waking sore, pain wrapping the shoulder muscles, stiffness in the strings of the legs, tightness, not unlike the feeling of waking from a busy night at the bar... what hit me, a train or a bus? The head still woozy.
I do my chanting of mantra after warm up of five basic yoga poses as recommended by Ashaya Yoga and Todd Norian, who I've come to immediately like very much. Then the silent mantra, as I sit crossed leg on the pillow, Ham Sa, then the pranayama exercises, as mom makes her calls upstairs, help, I need help, oh, where are you bastards, help... But by the tone I can tell, it's just her drama, and she's probably had a little taste of wine. I hear her in the kitchen, doing something with the toaster oven, beep beep beep, who knows.
It's lonely today without the group, being put through the paces, even if it is on the computer screen via a Zoom meeting. It's not the same, as I attempt to engage with the spirit, to find some peace of mind to proceed, after the clarity of the yoga spiritual weekend.
I feel hollow. Bereft of the community that was growing, the engagement that was set.
I made toast last night for mom, with cheese, then a slice of tomato, then a little dab of fresh mozzarella and a basil leaf, heating again, when she came down at five in the morning after her earlier unhappy wandering. Delicious, she said. For the second straight day, after the yoga I was so sore and exhausted that I fell into long sleep naps, retreating from the pain all over my body, surrounding my bones in a vivid way.
Start a yoga journal, a new day. Make your notes about finding your self-esteem, stepping away from the habits of being overly humble.
The stone that the builders rejected becomes the first corner stone. You would never be set upon the spiritual path if that were not to happen to you, if something didn't go not quite according to plan or to the normal expectations.
And knowing this, I fear what the rest of the story might be, as the metaphors are there, the old tales, The Rejection at Nazareth, his old townspeople taking him to the edge of the bluff the town is built upon to cast him off, even his own family trying to restrain him... The Buddha's first four fellow mendicants shake their heads at His first teaching.
Failure is painful. But you have to accept. You have to grow.
Up in mom's room, as I get organized for the day, I see the credit card we use, and the clear plastic that protects my driver's license, removed from my wallet, and no wallet to be seen. And to prove that I am no guru I begin to get worried, and then frustrated, and then angry, as I look around at mom's piles of books, some of which were already stacked there, some of which seem to have slid off her bed. I get impatient, mom, it's no joke to lose your wallet. I'm sorry. I put it in a safe place. So safe we can't find it now.
Ten minutes later I find it there on the carpet, not far from the one I put down some flea powder on a few days ago, under a local newspaper from two days ago on the carpet by her chair in the living room.
And what's this Tantric spiritual thing anyway... And if you don't become a scholar on a particular path into academia, using your mind at least, what do you go and do with your spiritual elements?
I don't have a plan. Everyone wise and accustomed to the practical ways of the world knows this.
The women in my support group, one a pretty woman from up near Toronto, who works as a therapist in a hospital trauma unit, god bless her, shares the story in our break of how her mom passed away a couple of years ago, after suffering from chronic illness, which the mother contracted bearing her as a child, and so she too knows how to be a people pleaser, low self esteem. And when I said, oh, I feel so bad for all my bad behavior and f-ups and not being a college professor like I was cut out to be, she sweetly offered, "we are in the right place right now," and that it was all meant to be so that I could be here with the other good people finding a balancing spirituality in the yoga as led by Todd Norian. Who in a way, vaguely reminds me of my father, having the lines of a Central European in head shape and body and mannerism.
We all have a story to tell, is the point. If he hadn't been betrayed, then again, he wouldn't be where he is now.
I didn't realize how lonely I feel, not having a group of like minded people as the yoga course... I missed that boat, of belonging, trying to fit in with everyone else, trying to cater to whomever should come in, on hand and foot, literally.
As far as a good group to belong to, moving forward together, challenged, working, brains forming new connections, new synapses over new languages, new friends, with mutual interests. Who knows, the theater! Marine ecology, law school into whatever, working at a publishing house... I missed it all.
But I got distracted.I folded, and called my work as a barman a sort of missing spirituality, without much of a pay off, a use of patience, and that can only go on so long.
The restaurants sort of ran out for me as allowing me a peer group, after the first years of being in it. That hurts to look back on it, and see that I was never really at an equal standing, too full of humility, thinking that was what Jesus was, is, about, when you have to be a leader, present yourself with the self esteem necessary to find your path and not just go around with the victim ego, the ego of least accomplishment.
Mine is a profound problem, added all up, and maybe that's a good thing the problems are so wide spread and inclusive. It has to come to that, to come to this, I guess, as it does for many, before they can honestly assess their lives.
Okay, so... I'm still sore. After the wallet crisis I sit in the kitchen for a little bit. All the Pepsi bottles partially empty, from her bedside table, I've brought downstairs. I'll dump them out down the drain, unless they still have fizz, and then in a paper bag to collect for the five cent deposit. The fruit flies Drosophila are getting fat now and lazy, sitting upon the lip of any glass that contained wine, hovering about in the corner by the red open plastic mesh bag of local onions on the counter by the spices and the teas and cutting boards and plates for hot pots to be set down upon. I'll put fly paper up later. They seem too smart for that now, as they are still elusive, the fat little wise fruit flies.
Mom's dropped off head back a bit into a nap, after her morning wine and the frozen pizza she took it upon herself to cook in the toaster oven in toaster mode, instead of 14 minutes in a 425 oven, and the cheese top I see is browned indeed. A kind of hard tack, but she has eaten some of it. There's a tumbler with white wine in it on the table by the chair. There's a cup or two of it out here in the kitchen, prowled over by the fruit flies, and I put them away in the fridge. An open can of cat food, with the thin lid placed back on top of the contents. And I feel hugely disoriented, as if the new island you'd finally reached after years of struggle and being lost out at sea, after spending a time walking upon its solidity, enjoying a sense of destination, as if it had all disappeared, vanished into thin air.
But yet, I did my chants. And the silent mantra. And the pranayama breathing techniques, and the few basic poses, five of them, that set you up for seated meditations, cranking my body along against the great soreness pervading my entirety.
Anyway, I've got my grocery list for the early part of the week, and I've made polite contact with the local printing service owner to print up the manual from the yoga teacher, available later in the week, and I've discovered what I'm afraid to be the last of the checks from Mutual of Omaha for the additional income of $800 each month in the mail box, better late than never, on my little barefoot walk along the front of the townhomes out in the light.
Again, I've fallen into the why bother mode, what am I doing here anyway, but keeping mom entertained as best I can. Groceries. Newspaper, an errand or two. Take care of the additional problem of the week, like the fleas... Not much energy. Wait until mom starts to protest enough about how she never has any fun, okay, mom, I give up, I take her out to dinner. And that's what ends up happening, after a quick run to get some aduki beans at the health food store, getting the usual, "how long are you going to take..."
So we get to The Press Box, the north end of a beautiful old store house from back when Oswego was full of railroad tracks and brick mills and store houses and commerce, lumber, salt, corn starch, all sorts of things. I aim mom, yes, mom, bring your cane, yes, up the ramp, along the patio, under the overhang that's been there ever since the building came into being. A few new faces, young ones, college girls, ushering us in.
We sit at the little two top in the back right corner, by the raised platform the wood stove sits upon, after being greeted by the eldest daughter of the boss, who just had a ten and a half pound baby boy four months ago.
And it occurs to me. Why weren't her psychologists more helpful? How could they not see it?
It's like it took me the pain of doing yoga to see it myself. How as a child, a little kid, she felt, in her own words, responsible for her mother's well being when her father would come in. "I'd stay up nights..." she says, and I've heard the stories many times. "in order to protect her from him..." The conversation started about what a brute my grandfather was, sometimes, frustrated, as he was, knowing himself to be talented, missing out on the great call up to World War Two because of his eyesight and his feet, never getting to be the journalist he wanted to be...
Mom, that's not a role you should have had as a child... How old were you? Six, seven?
It went on for years. I'd stay up at night. Protecting my sister. Waiting for him to come home at night...
No wonder.
You should never have had to deal with that. Didn't your shrink help you with that? What did she do?
So once you see it, you can't not unsee it. All the frantic panic, all the carrying on, all the emotional volatility, the complete inability to relax or to not try to control after the slightest upset to her wished plans for the day... The huffing, the sighing, the banging, the clomping of feet, the hysterics, the clutter, the hoarding, all trying to control the beasts of her childhood. Her sort of dismissive pass on her sister, "she got everything, my dear sweet sister..."
And now I see it, yes. And how if not burnout I've finally reached a place, "no, this is not healthy for me." I don't need to be pushed all the time, thrown into that sense of impending disaster and drama...
What was missing, I suppose, was my understanding, my sympathy for her, which too has been exhausted in these circumstances. Worn out like a cigarette down to the burnt butt ash end.
She can't help it, but that fact doesn't offer much help to me, because she is still and will be hard-wired just so to the very end, the creature of panic, of a growing aggressive male-like vigilant dissatisfaction.
I look at her over my burger, no bun, her lemon pepper chicken with zucchini and wild rice, her glass of white, my glass of reluctant red with a glass of ice on the side. And I see all the defensively aggressive things she says, "oh, did I hurt you..." "you hate me," for what they are, coming out of that hurt scared child of many emotions. I can say now, "mom, you're only saying that out of the situation you were placed into in your childhood."
And all the positive things she tries to offer me on the ride home, oh you're such a good driver, are out of a fake placation habit, a wishful smoothing the drama over but knowing it will come again, as it does almost every night so that she has to stay up. Oh, you're such a good driver... Oh, I don't how you're doing it, but you're getting us there... I get her inside, and go for a nap down in the cellar after taking care of a few things, noting the dirty plates from the earlier part of the day, sitting in the RubberMade tub.
Yesterday evening, Tania Ramalho is moving to Alb., New Mexico, a little acknowledgment of our friendship, mom's former colleagues. I bring wine, we have some of Sharon's banana chocolate cake. Spiders. Deborah Stanley leaving. How is New Mexico. I ask, can we do anything to help? The moving truck comes tomorrow at one.
Mom keeps repeating the same thing, over and over, about if any of them will be the next president of the college. No, mom, they are retiring. They aren't interested. My temper grows short as we drive back in the dark. No more unemployment. What do I do with my stuff, my apartment. Barbara, showing me the yoga room accommodations down in the basement, she says to me, the situation is not sustainable. She's the ordered logical one in the relationship. It's easier to drive a moving van up Route 81 in October rather than wintertime. Yeah... She's right. I'm not sure I can go back there, to my old DC life, which then leads to the question in this unending series of Catch-22s, what would I then do for a living... But she's right. None of this is sustainable.
So I get up, even facing the helping friends move, taking mom along, of course, they are her friends. What do with any day? It's always a problem. I take mom for a ride, I get errands done, we see the old Fort and the Lake, we see the big red ship parked at the cement end of operations, we go back through town, the Paul's Big M little supermarket, then back close to the townhomes, near the junk guy who took us on the great four wheel open buggy ride through the swampy areas to show us all the wildlife, who has had to clear out a pipe, a dead baby beaver in it, so that the basement won't flood, just past him the power relay station where the beavers had dammed up the pipe under the railroad tracks, the big pipe replaced with a bigger one... We walk back to the car, "I used to walk here when I was a kid..." she repeats, we get back to the parking lot, and mom says, oh, I thought we'd go out to some nice little place for lunch. I don't even answer. The end of the month is coming.
It's important. I do my chanting, namah shavaya, my breathing and puffing exercises, "skull scrubbing," which is actually a fine description of it, who would have known, after stretching the basic stretches, and it just has such an effect, a positive one. Breath in, breath out, Ham Sah... Then five minutes to relax into corpse pose...
Thou art that which is, an individual, indistinguishable, part of the Universe, turning back on itself to discover the beauty of its own creation...
After lunch on Wednesday, the 29th of September, after I get my sadhana calming routine in, we go over to Tania and Barbara's house over by the university to help with the packing. Moral support. Mom brings her book along. We get there about 2:30.
As the truck gets packed, mom spends time inside on the cushiony couch, with her former colleagues, who now that, politely, she repeats herself, quite often. I engage with the men, Barbara's son, in particular, a musician and a master of the recording studio.
Leaving, mom feels a neediness. "I've messed up my life, I should have been engaged with them," the bustling energetic group that doesn't sit around just reading books and talking to herself all day long. Well, mom, I think to myself, you're 82 now. You've made your choices, you've lived your life.
And every day I feel forced to placate her, and can't get anything done. She says she needs to go out to some little place for lunch... Okay, Mom. The Press Box is closed, so we try the hotel restaurant, sitting at a booth near the bar, a new menu... Mom is extra fragile today. She looks at the menu, stymied. She reads off the entree page. Cajun Chicken fettuccini... Mom, that's a pasta dish. Fried seafood platter... No, I want the Grilled Alaskan Salmon. Okay, mom. Don't rush me. I order our wine, there's no way, it seems, I can go through this without a little juice. Did you order food? No, mom, I ordered wine. Broiled seafood entree.... I read her the description, not changing the words at all, just reading them out loud, taking a glance over at the bar, a pretty woman with her back to us, with her boyfriend and two other males having beers.
You hate me. Later at the rest room she leaves her cane in the stall. I have to go in and help her retrieve it. I used the men's room, came out, find her wandering in the lobby... I couldn't find the restroom, she says, angry at me. Mom... I ushered her in the outer door of the Ladies Room. She couldn't make it through the inner door. Four five glasses of wine later, we depart, full of animosity toward each other, but for a few breaks in the clouds.
Today, Thursday, September 30, James Dean Death Anniversary, Mary is taking mom down to Fulton for lunch at the Half Moon Cafe and then the hairdresser. I get a three-hour break, but I have to get us to 11:45. I'm up, get yesterday's dishes done. Make a pot of green tea. I'll be able to get back downstairs and do the sadhana in peace. Mom comes downstairs, still wearing her clothes from the last two days, a petticoat with a trailer. She doesn't want any Pepsi this morning. Mary's taking her out and she doesn't want any liquids to fill her bladder...
I had an inkling yoga would save me, would get me through the whole crisis, as long as I could do it.
Signing up for a class was a great idea, in fact, but with days off, and having to come back to the reality of mom's constant presence, is as much as a downer as the yoga is positive and life-affirming, changing.
Mom is so full of sound as sits downstairs. She picks up the paperback E.B. White little book of essays. The cover has fallen off. The first fifteen pages are detached. She picks it up. Mom, it's falling apart. I take care of my books! Mom... So what if it's falling apart. We're all falling apart. Mom, you have lots other books to take with you if you want. Why did I leave it out, even out, out on the couch where she could see it. The disagreement breaks the short spell of my being able to tolerate her company. True, I am jumpy. The rent is due. I don't have a job, nor a career, and she thinks she has is bad, take a look at me, sweetie. The funds in her bank account sink lower at the end of the month now.
Be careful for what you wish for, Dharma Bum. You'll end up like Kerouac in his mom's basement, trying to protect himself from the craving appetites of the world, in the way you have construed it, not as a scholar, living as a rough peasant, fooling. Fooling yourself, when you should get serious and really read the Bhagavad Gita and get serious about it, what a human being is supposed to do, become a soul in soulful being, everything in this life on borrow, no need for any extra sensual stimuli which would only distract us and lead us to be around other people, craven types, who we have the craving for pleasures in common with and end up being led to highly unfortunate lives, instead of investing in knowledge and learning with the one earthly life they have here.
Don't be a writer. Be a leader.
