August 2006

I am 47 today.

This may be the first birthday in over a decade that didn’t depress me. It’s not like I’m looking forward to the external fruits of aging (more like dried fruits these days ), but rather it seems not to matter so much anymore.

It’s as though I have this hidden formula for anxiety about time and its passing. The formula reads:

perceived distance from dreams X age in years = anxiety quotient

So, since I am less anxious (FAR less anxious) than I was on my 46th birthday, one can conclude the following:

1) The value of a single year is LESS than the distance I’ve travelled towards what makes me happy over this past year.

2) I am closer now to a life that is fulfilling.

This is good news to me, because the power of “one year older” has held sway over me since I was 35, and the biological clock started to tick (I wrote this song when I was 36).

After all that IVF nonsense, the hormones, the costs, the broken promises, and the failed technology, my husband and I got to that stage of acceptance, and moved on to an unexpected stage of embrace: DNA did not matter, but being a parent did, to both of us.

So, we went down a new road towards adoption, and never looked back. Our son, Blake, is just beyond belief, he is so wonderful. He has given both of us, intellectual drifters at best, and adult ADD victims at worst, a sense of purpose and direction. Noel and I have always been pretty good at defining Point A: Where we are now, and all its discontents. But, Point B, and getting there, was frequently determined using another formula, with a flaw:

(Noel’s unhappiness X Cathy’s unhappiness) = Discontent Quotient

If Discontent Quotient > 0, MAKE A BIG EXPENSIVE CHANGE LIKE MOVING

So, two people who had been perpetually discontent, moving from pillar to post in search of elusive happiness, suddenly found ourselves in charge of a third life that actually has a decipherable trajectory: towards Blake’s health and happiness. That simple change, the responsibility to our child, and as an adoptive parent, to his birth family, informs our every choice.

So, although each of us does bitch a bit, Noel’s commitment to education began when Blake was 4 months old, and he will graduate from UVA this spring, a Distinguished Scholar, well-positioned for the PhD program. My commitment to being a decent, stable, mother and breadwinner has provided me with a stability, albeit somewhat monotonous, but always challenging, that I had not had during my starving artist years in New York City and Brooklyn.

That, plus we are applying for adoption of a girl from Ethiopia this year, and are now well on our way.

My dream of being a Mom, and a darn good one, having a son, and a daughter, are more and more real.

I had years of keeping my options open, not wanting to commit to anything that may close a door. But, time closed the doors when I wasn’t looking. I won’t be a famous songwriter, or famous, or rich. My husband will not be a famous movie actor, something he was on the path to years ago. But we will be parents, we will be a couple, we will share love, and we will move on from here. No wonder I’m not anxious.

My job is undergoing a metamorphosis due to shakeups in the administration. My job description may change drastically, in short order, but I have not been given the details. Just hints, ideas, shadows of what is to be.

This is a strange time. I had not realized how much my identity was tied to this “day job” of mine. In New York, I was far more active in my creative life, so the day job description didn’t really affect my self-image much. I just always looked for something with maximum income and flexibility so I could pursue other things. But, as a mother in the suburbs, other things are not there. The time I once spent writing music, rehearsing, or hanging out with friends has been replaced with time playing with my son (I adore being a mother, and I’m good at it), doing laundry, talking with my husband, and the other things that make up married domestic life.

As a result, my “being in the world” self-image is more dependent on my job description than it used to be. This was a transformation that I had not realized was taking place, until, quite independently of any action on my part, I was told that my job will be changing.

The good news is that the change is not arising out of incompetency on my part, or displeasure with my performance. Quite to the contrary, my current boss, a very nice man, is re-tooling my job description so I won’t be moved to another organizational area of the institution, led by the “prince of darkness.”

In the context of my life goals (raise son, adopt daughter, help husband finish college, find meaningful work when the kids are school age), this change is a good thing. I get to keep the same, kind and smart boss, and work with the same people of whom I’ve grown fond over the years. But, I lose domain over the more public aspects of my job. I will operate more in the background.

Funny, but I didn’t realize how the public face of what I do had grown to mean something to me. It’s a surrogate of sorts, because I’ve always sought creative work that would get me attention, as though the world is one vast audience substituting for my father. But, as with my father, the attention I’ve gotten from the world has never even been close to what I dreamed, but I keep going at it, hoping to get that big, public pat on the back which never comes.

So, in a way, I’m being relieved of that illusion. Disillusionment, however, is rarely comfortable for me. I can take this as an opportunity to re-examine what I’ve looked to the job to be, and perhaps find a more genuine forum for attention-grabbing. Oh yes — I accept that attention-getting is part of who I am, and have no desire to change it for now. I await a future disillusionment to purge me of this need but, for now, it’s part of what I need.

The fact is, for all my hard work over the 23 years since I graduated from college, I’ve never really gotten much attention. So the results would seem to belie the intention. Perhaps, in some way, I destine myself for obscurity. But, I don’t believe in pop-psychology “self-sabotage” talk. We don’t even know ourselves well enough to determine what passes for self-help, and what passes for self-harm. We don’t spend enough time being aware of our choices, seeing our lives from the outside as an objective observer. When I do that, the term “self-sabotage” seems unnecessarily (and counter-productively) dramatic. It seems to arise from the desire to pin a narrative to our lives, which is very useful when we write, but not very useful for living.

So, I will continue to observe my life, and see where the pain, change, disillusionment, and pursuit of paternal approval gets me. Tonight, I’ll march around the living room with my son as he bangs his toy cymbals and I shake his toy tambourine. Then we’ll have chicken nuggets, take a bath, and go to bed. That sounds good.

I had one of my apocalyptic dreams last night. I’ve had them all my life, but they usually are based in a nuclear holocaust kind of theme: fireballs, birth defects, body burns, and running for cover. Going to grade school in the early to mid-1960s was just a little bit scarring.

But, these days, under a virtually totalitarian state, the apocalypse is more of a biblical variety. I just moved away from a neighborhood of fundamentalist Christians. They used to take their kids to see installments of the “Left Behind” series. This one young girl, Madison, was utterly beautiful and delightful. She babysat for my son, and she and her family were very nice. She regularly attended “Left Behind” screenings, and spoke of them as though she had just attended the church fair or something. Then joyfully played with her Polly Pockets as if no impression were left on her mind greater than an episode of Veggie Tales. No big deal — let’s play!

But, this generation’s “duck-and-cover” is having a profound affect on the collective psyche as fundamentalist Christianity takes center stage in the political environment. Kids are being told to run from the fireball, and to have no compassion for those too unfortunate, stubborn, illiterate, or agnostic to escape it, and to simply be grateful that you were among those who ran.

What could possibly be on the other side of this “I got mine” paradise, when in your mind you know that others suffered and died? What kind of paradise could exist devoid of compassion, and built on a rationalization that places you in a higher state than another? It’s like the transcendent equivalent of the 1980s, where I got mine manifested in those brat-pack inspired bumper stickers reading “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins.” The ego, the survival of the “me,” in either case, seems to be what’s important. I need only sign a deal with the devil (in the 1980s), or with Jesus (today), and I’ve essentially bought an eternal life insurance policy. I’m covered.

I could go on and on about this. But, my dream did it for me. I think I dreamed a screenplay, so, I have to jot it down before I forget it.

The time was today, and there was a pending sense that the end of the world was near due to the four horses released in the middle east and all that jazz that has us wondering if World War III is here. I was back living in New York City (I’m so glad that my subconcious has not yet caught up with the fact that we moved to Virginia), and it was the perfect backdrop for good meeting evil. But, I had the memory of the Fredericksburg neighbors who were fundamentalist, and the fears I internalized from conversations with them about being “Left Behind.” I think those fears would not be so great had my Catholic upbringing not provided a perfect medium of resonance for them. If I were still Catholic, you could pick me off like a duck in a shooting gallery with all this “Left Behind” talk. But, like Captain Kirk, I fight the alter-ego inside me in a histrionic fit of gratuitous conflict.

So, in the dream, I am succumbing more and more to saying the prayer that would keep me from being left behind. This is a very specific prayer that fundamentalist Christians try to get you to say. It’s like the magic words, so my husband and I have taken to calling it “The Great Moogly-Googly.”

Back to the dream. I’m on the verge of saying the Moogly-Googly, but my husband, Noel, won’t bite. The apocalypse is coming, I just know it. We have a Chinese-American friend in the dream (I think in real life he is the lab assistant, Jing, in my husband’s day job). He’s a local newscaster. Jing tries to get us to say the Moogly-Googly.

I see signs of violence breaking out in the streets (remember, I’m in New York City, so this is pure theatrics at its “Escape from New York” best), and know that the end is near. There is a sense of evil afoot. I want to escape it, and I want my son and husband to escape with me. My son is kidnapped, but our Chinese friend does a newscast about it, and someone finds him and I get him back. I take this as a sign that I must say the Moogly-Googly. Noel still won’t say it. So, I say it for myself, and for my son. And then I tell God that Noel is a good person, and can he please, please let him not be “Left Behind” if I say the Moogly-Googly.

Finally, we are taken to a boat by Moses (it really is Charlton Heston, but, we strangely don’t acknowledge that). The boat is like an ark (I know, the ark was Noah, but allow my subconscious a bit of biblical conflation here), and we are inside of it, not able to make out what’s going on outside. But, it sounds really bad. Tossed and turned, we hear bombs going off, feel a lot of heat, listen to a lot of screams, and assume that we are being somehow protected from the end of the world.

Our boat finally rests. We go above, and see a shore in the distance. It is a beautiful sunrise, behind the three crosses on Calvary, empty, with the center cross having the robes of Jesus hanging on it. I see this, and discover, in an instant, that the “Left Behind” folks were right.

“It’s real!!” I proclaim to my husband, who still carries the skepticism of someone who’s not quite buyin’ it (he does that in real life, too, but his upbringing was free from the ravages of organized religion so he can pull it off). I bow down, and start to pray thanksgiving to God and Jesus.

We arrive at the shore, and there are priests there to greet us, as well as scores of others happy to be there. I notice one thing: the priests are all white men. This has me suspicious, but only briefly. I am still in the rapturous feeling of not being one of the poor suckers left behind.

They greet us, and congratulate us on having made the right choice. We are told that we will be given a bit of time to explore Heaven before they give us some more guidance. Sort of a self-guided orientation, but without the PDAs or cassette tape players.

My first thought is “Where are my brothers and sisters?” I ask one of the priests. He says they all made it but one. I’m thinking “Which one?” They are all really good people, but Mike always eschewed organized religion so it must be Mike. But, I love Mike and he’s a really good person. I don’t want him to suffer and be dead. But, I again get pulled into the rapture of having not been one of the suckers. Slightly saddened, I begin to explore this Heaven.

I see my friend Ross, who joyfully greets me, and then speeds off on a skateboard. Ross was always a big Bible person, and he and I frequently shared impressions of things like the Jesus Seminar (he’s the only person, other than myself, that I knew who subscribed to “Biblical Archaeology Review“). So, it’s understandable he’s in the dream. But his speeding off so quickly leads me to believe that he’s not really HERE the way I am. That perhaps he was left behind due to his skepticism about Jesus being the son of God. Like his presence here is a sign to me of sorts, the meaning of which will be revealed later.

Then, I get back into a boat to explore the place further. I see an island city, with a skyline that is a mixture of New York, Paris, and a bit of Los Angeles. Like a post-apocolyptic Epcot or something*. This seems very weird to me. If we are in Heaven, why these bits of the world that are not necessarily Heavenly? There’s really nothing “Heavenly” about the Citicorp building. I mean, should Heaven be populated by examples of mediocre 1980s architecture?

But, like Epcot, this amalgamation of the City on the Hill seems immaculate. I go ashore. After some exploring, I see that our old apartment is still there. But, it’s been cleared out. And the hallways have been blocked off. I get trapped in one of them, and claw my way out by taking out a wall sconce and digging through the sheetrock. It starts to feel like I’m in a theatre set (reminiscent of “WestWorld” — a really bad 1970s sci-fi movie).

Then I hear on the loudspeaker that we will all be able to “pick out a job of our choice” with an employment counselor. “Job? In Heaven, you have a ‘JOB’???” Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been dreaming of escaping the day job phenomenon all my life, so, this definitely isn’t heaven.

Things are seeming really fishy. Then, I take in more of what’s around me. All the people are white, educated, and Christian. There are no Mexicans, Blacks, Muslims. We are in a world that has been manufactured to include the reliably compliant, English-speaking, and, stereotypically, intellectually capable. Then, it hits me. “Left Behind” was all fake. We are still on earth. There was no God-sent apocalypse. An apocalypse was manufactured by humans to rid the world of the “bad” kind of people. And now, we are trapped in a totalitarian state of labor and the gratuitous pleasures and soma holidays that pass for happiness among the vapid.

The moral of the story: Seek only for yourself, and you will inherit a world where you are surrounded by others who do the same. Say the “Moogly-Googly” just to save your own skin, and that’s exactly what you’ll get, at the expense of your conscience and humanity. You will join the ranks of the could-have-been-human, extolling your good fortune to not have been “Left Behind.”

The dream had no ending, and insufficient sub-plots. But maybe the screenplay can take care of that.

Does anyone know John Carpenter’s e-mail address??

*In real life, in the early 1990s, I visited Epcot and saw a 3 YEAR OLD BOTTLE OF BEAUJOLAIS!! That was the sign, in that context, that I indeed had NOT arrived in paradise.

Pema Chodron spoke with Bill Moyers on TV tonight. I remember reading one of her books (”Start Where You Are“) years ago when I was dating a psychologist who fancied himself quite the Buddhist, of the Mahayana variety. He saw the book, and ridiculed my choice as not being intellectually rigorous enough. His preference was for the myriad mythologies in Tibetan Buddhism, for the writings of Robert Thurman, for lining his walls with rare mandalas and drawings of the boddhisatvas, for the less understandable language that buries enlightenment, so utterly simple as to defy words, in the complicated language of intellectualism. A fundamentalism of sorts, “My brand of Buddhism is better than your brand of Buddhism because the books are much harder to read.”

He liked porn a lot, too, and was offended that I didn’t. As if the only reason for hating porn is prudishness, or moralism, and not a desire to raise the human condition above it’s baser places where people hurt others and themselves in search of pleasure (and ultimately pain) by ingulging an appetite rather than examining it, and to help others live in that hope of transcendance. No. I was just “uptight.”

Maybe he was right — nah, I’m lying. But there was something so profoundly simple about the message in Chodron’s book, and in how she spoke tonight. A woman deserted by her husband, she hit a bottom of pain, the kind of pain with which I identify. I’ve been through the trials many of us face in life, and can look back at the milestone times where I have felt utterly, in her words, “groundless.” My father’s sickness and death, my mother’s sickness and death, my realization of my alcoholism, my disillusionment* at realizing my then fiance’s shortcomings, the failure to conceive through IVF. Each of these incidents seemed to float somehow, to have carried me, rather than my carrying them.

And I do indeed carry my life — like a yolk. I wonder why I can’t do more with it. It is heavy and burdensome. I try to turn it this way and that, try to make it do stuff, try to make it fit somehow, in the space and time I occupy. I try to shine it up, clean it up, put it in order, make it better. But, am I ever actually IN it? I was truly IN it during those times of trial. I have long realized, since losing my parents, that the time when you watch your parent waste away and die may be among the most sublime times that there is.

All of the baser realities melt away. You live in pure pain, pure utter awareness of every thing in the painful moment that you cannot escape occupying. You give in, you be, you stop working on it, because it can’t be worked on. It is simply happening without you. You are simply in it, or next to it, or seeing it.

That corny “Footprints” poem that folks like is kind of like that. It’s not Jesus I’m talking about, but something nameless. We are comforted by the nameless most deeply in these hours of utter inescapable pain. It’s like the end stages of cancer when the cancer cells produce so much ammonia that your body is numbed from pain. The pain itself becomes the anesthetic, and it all comes full circle.

So, not to sound macabre, but there are times when I long for those times of pain at my mother’s side. There was something pure about holding her hand, lying on the bed with her, seeing her in a state of inescapable dying, with nothing to give each other but a squeezed hand and a smile. Pure human love, as pure as it gets for humans. I lost my desire to be me and for her to be her. We just were, we just be’d.

So, I see this woman, in her Buddhist nun robes, and long for what she has, and realize that the moment of longing is in itself my trying to move the boulder of my life to a new position to see if it works better there than it did over there. But, getting beyond that, I come back to this desire of mine to minister to others. Through song, through deed, through service, to minister to those who perhaps cannot see the profundity of the gift of deep pain. To minister myself in the process, learning how to be in stillness and satisfaction, listening more closely to the lilies of the field, and less to the parable of the talents.

The lilies are clothed more grandly than any of us, with all our extreme makeovers. And they spend not a penny, and fret not a second, and still are beautiful. How much more beauty could I achieve for the world if I just stop fussing on it, and simply humbly, as it is says in recovery, do the “next right thing.” The wisdom of seeing the next right thing is not a small thing. It’s the kind of thing where language breaks down, and the word “right” somehow evokes other meanings. We moralize the word, we dilute it, and it loses its purity.

We know, we each know, what’s right. It is always different, but it is always the same. Right is constant, but it takes on infinite shapes. So, is it right for me to long to minister to people? I mean, who the hell do I think I am? This woman has been a nun for 30 years, and began this when her kids were young. That’s not the right thing for me, for the act of being a Mom is just too damn fantastic, draining, full of that in-the-moment sublime quality that sweetens the painful demands of consistently sublimating desires to help another.

I am weak, I am undisciplined, I am a creature of bad habits, and I don’t care well for myself. But I know that when I perform on stage, or sponsor another alcholic, or listen to a friend, or aid a sick parent, I am at the center of that which gives life meaning. This is only a seed, and I don’t really know what any of it means. Not today anyhow.

There is something in my fate, something in the stars under which I was born, that repels attention. I think I do what I can to grab and beg for it because it seems not to come easy to me. I almost did it last night, but I retracted and deleted the email. Thank god for the forgiveness of some technologies, and for the ninth step’s recommendation of “restraint of pen and tongue” which I all too often ignore.

This is my third profession. In my first, I was an architectural planner eventually became fascinated with building codes and zoning. But my first love was to plan spaces with limited resources that solved problems. I was fond of Eero Saarinen because no two projects looked alike; in each case, he solved the problem at hand and responded to its context. That is unusual in a profession where everyone’s niche is dependent on some sort of manifesto based on placing yourself on a continuum between modernism (the material expresses the structure and space is seen as negative material, in a sense) and traditionalism (ornament, historical planning methodologies and reference to previous styles in an effort to evoke emotional response). Saarinen used a modernist vocabulary, but not as a force to drive him, but rather as an open-ended tool that gave him the flexibility to respond to the situation at hand. I admired that very much, although the world was much more interested in Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson, modernism’s (and post-modernism’s) superstars.

I do not have Saarinen’s talent or portfolio (I dropped out of architecture for numerous reasons, beginning with the painful associations it had for me, marking a time in my life that is still too tender to the touch). But, I do share his desire to solve a problem, and let go of an associated “style” that would define “me” ahead of the solution at hand. The result of this is that I am not seen. That may be a good thing, the ultimate compliment in a way, for I could say (in a more arrogant and, perhaps, confident mode) that this is a sign that the problem has been solved, the solution itself is seamless.

This kind of success, the negative kind, is characteristic of how I was raised. The Finns were all straight-A students. Nothing less was the norm. So, if you got a 98, my father would not pause to say “great job!”, but rather would ask “Who got 100?” If you got 100, the response would be, “What did you expect? You’re a Real Finn.”

Later, when teenage social life grew more prominent, and grades took a back seat, it became apparent that the best way NOT to get negative attention was to obey, or to lie, appearing to obey. You were not rewarded for obedience, but rather, the punishment passed over you like the angels of death on Passover. Your good behavior was not a badge, but rather a shield. You didn’t get beaten against the stairs like my brother Mike, or thrown against the garage door like my sister Mary, or have a chair thrown at you like my sister Maggie. You kept quiet, you did your best, not for praise, but for avoidance. You learned the art of invisibility through success.
I learned how to problem-solve. How to manipulate a situation so that my father never felt the pain of the problem. My father was not to be shown the gratuitous pain of the child heard and seen.

So, to this day, I seem to pick roles and professions that demand high degrees of problem-solving skills, and little attention or praise. I consistently perform far ahead of the curve, but to little notice. I would dare say, in my current profession of higher education Web architecture, that I have achieved much much more than my peers (as witnessed at IT conferences where I have answered questions that others have not begun to ask). I have re-framed the discussion in many ways. I know this in my heart. But I get no praise.

This is not an environment, however, where praise is in short supply. I have a supervisor that regularly doles out praise to colleagues, but the angel of praise passes over me. A large, large project that was accomplished through hours and hours of coding, planning, designing, meetings, learning, re-programming, coordinating, etc., with absolutely no help from my co-workers, received substantial praise yesterday. However, the praise did not come to me. It came to my client, who did no more than populate the content into the system I designed single-handedly.

I received a forwarded e-mail from this client who wanted me to see what my supervisor said about the project. My supervisor heaped praise on this client for the project, in detail. He sent nothing to me, other than a response to my e-mail that it had launched that read: “Way cool — thanks very much for all of your work on this.” And I had to receive this information second hand. The client, in turn, did not mention my name, but reeled off the names of those in his shop, and referred to “your folks” in a generic way.

I cried and cried. I wrote the email, and then retracted it. I have witnessed this supervisor publicly praise my colleagues, in forums that go beyond our organization, but my name is never mentioned.

I am not paid well, and remain at this point in this job for only one reason: I have earned 8 weeks of maternity leave for when I adopt, and I telecommute which will help me to spend more time with the baby before she gets mobile and needs paid childcare. At that point, I am sure to find something that pays better, and something where I am not so invisible all the time.

I have to accept why I am here, that it is a means to an end, and not expect so much praise. But, this lack of praise has peppered my life: I was the ONLY kid in my family to be valedictorian in high school, but my father persisted in saying that my brother Mike was the smartest. I have a generous gift for music, but my father came to see me perform, and looked at the floor the entire time; afterwards, looking at my mother saying “where do you want to go to eat?”. I designed the lobby of an affordable housing project on the lower east side, only to have a colleague steal the drawings, take it to the client, and then claim it to be his own. I designed a store in Huntington, Long Island, only to go to the opening and have the client claim credit for the design, not introducing me to others as the designer or acknowledging my presence in any way. I have designed our institutional Web site four times, yet received scant attention for it, not even a mention in our organizational meetings, unless I bring it up.

I am the common denominator here, and I know that. Still, there is something going on that I can’t fathom, some lesson I need to learn. I need to learn that either a) I have chosen “behind the scenes” kind of work and that’s what you get, or b) I have to choose work where my hunger for acknowledgement can be met.

At present, it is met only in the eyes of my son and the support of my husband when he sees how little the world notices me, and makes me feel validated for feeling shunted aside. If I can hang in there, just long enough to adopt, and to leave, and to find work where I am financially and emotionally rewarded to an extent that I feel my work deserves, I can be happier.

I think right now I just need to cry.