Detaching With an Axe

I have not written in a while because I’ve been unable to come up with the words to describe the pain of what happened to me recently. So, I titled this post with a saying from Al-Anon. The ultimate goal of a sober person is to detach with love from those who are “in their disease.” However, as humans, we don’t always drum up the love we need when we are hurt, so how to detach and stay emotionally sober? The Al-Anon wisdom is to detach with an axe. It’s better than nothing, and gives us time to heal while we wait for openness to the love and forgiveness.

The alternative is to stay enmeshed in the hurt, and thus enmeshed with the sick person. I’m being abstract. Let me be more specific.

Without going into chapter and verse as to why, a neighbor one block over decided at one point that her kids were not allowed to play with my son due to his illness. This was after my son had bonded with her son, the only kid on our two blocks that is exactly his age. He had been overjoyed to make a friend that wasn’t older and trying to get rid of him. His mother stopped returning my calls for playdates, stood up my son for playdates twice, and never told me why. I finally got her to call me back, and got the news about why my son was no longer permitted to play with her kids. No apologies, and she had some suggestions for family counselors, just to make her blowing me off, standing up my son, and not apologizing look like sympathy.

It’s always good form for well folks to suggest counseling when they fear someone’s illness. Makes them feel like part of the solution, then they can go watch TV in peace.

It’s hard for a 5-year old to understand why he lost a friend, especially when the reasons really are other people’s fears, not any wrongdoing on his part that he has complete command of, although he works hard every day to live with his illness. His heart was broken, but, like kids do, he internalizes things, and moves on until the next time he has to confront the reality of what happened.

That reality manifests every time he wants to go over to the next block, connected to our backyard by a little bridge I put up across the creek. He wanted, a few weeks ago, to cross the creek and see his friend. He heard him playing on his bike in the street, and he was so lonely. I had to, one more time, explain to him why it wasn’t a good idea. He was crying, and I got my indignation (Read: “IRISH”) up, thinking about his deep, deep pain. I resolved I should go over with him, knock on her door, and try to change her mind.

How do you spell “Big mistake?” I should have read the AA Big Book before I went:

To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.

It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while. But with the alcoholic, whose hope is the maintenance and growth of a spiritual experience, this business of resentment is infinitely grave. We found that it is fatal. For when harboring such feeling we shut ourselves off from the sunlight of the Spirit. The insanity of alcohol returns and we drink again. And with us, to drink is to die.

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us. They may be the dubious luxury of normal men, but for alcoholics these things are poison.

We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look for it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how? We could not wish them away any more than alcohol.

This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.

Sigh.

Not everyone responds to my emotions the way I think they will. Keep in mind that I have a mood disorder, and there are days when I manage it better than others. This was not one of those days.

I cried to her “How can you break my kid’s heart?” Apparently, I added a little “color” to the sentence with 4-letter word which I didn’t recall because I was so overcome with the pain my son was feeling. That’s all she needed for the prompt to ask me to leave, even though I was sobbing, not threatening her in any way, clearly a mother in distress over her son’s loneliness. She told me that I was stalking her (?) which I thought was bizarre, and I responded, “I was following up on playdates with my son. He doesn’t have any friends on our block.” “And WHY is THAT?,” she replied, an apparent reference to his illness warding off other children, but that’s not the case. I responded, “Because all the other kids are older, and he was thrilled to have a boy his age to play with.”

Her response, “Cathy, you have to leave now or I will call the police.” I left, sobbing, with Blake playing in the yard next door with her son. He refused to come with me. The alternative was for me to carry him, kicking, screaming, biting, and pulling hair across the woods, over the bridge, and back to our house. He’s getting so big now that I can’t do it, so I decided to walk home, hoping he would follow because he usually does. I would compose myself. If I didn’t see him in a few minutes, I’d drive my car over to get him.

Before those few minutes went by, the police were at my door, me opening it still sobbing. The woman told them I had forced my way into her house and was threatening her. Now, I’m the first person to admit I was crying, and maybe dropped the “f” bomb as in “Why the f-k are you breaking my kids heart?”, but threatening is just not my style. Even when I’m upset, I know that I can’t follow through on a threat, and would not want to. My goal, in these kinds of ill-advised emotional exchanges, is NEVER to hurt. It’s to be HEARD. And my desire to be heard is very strong when I’m having an emotionally bad day. It goes back to my Dad, to his telling me “No one is interested in anything you have to say,” and all the years he demonstrated his belief in that harsh statement. My desire to be HEARD, to be relevant, to be needed, to be an integral, irreplaceable part of something bigger than me is at the base of my emotional and spiritual struggles. It is this character defect, this faulty historical emotional landscape, that pushed my emotions front and center of what should have been solely my son’s pain.

The officer believed me when I explained to him through tears that I had not broken in and threatened. I admitted to being upset, but that I had been invited in, and that I left when asked to to so. He said that I had to go with him to get my son, that he was now trespassing on her property. I walked over, sobbing. He retrieved Blake from her backyard where he and her son were happily playing. I took him home, and have been working on him to understand never to go there again, but it’s hard.

EPILOGUE: Over the last couple of weeks since this happened, I have been in a deep depression. While my emotions have run the gamut, life has gone on. Blake has since made friends with another boy, across the street from her house, and this new boy’s backyard abuts ours. So, Blake can see him if this new friend crosses the bridge to come to our house. Ironically, this boy and his brother have also been “banned” from playing with that other woman’s kids, so, their mother is happy to have them come over here. She and I have gotten to talking a lot. She is a Christian, of a much more conservative variety then I am, but she is not at all judgmental and very, very kind. She and I have prayed together about this and she also was deeply affected by what happened to me. We took our kids to Chuck-E-Cheese together this weekend.

I have been drawn to Matthew 5 about this. You may know them as the Beatitudes. This is not to elevate the importance or value of what I’m doing and to position me as the righteous inheriting the earth (as if), but to focus me on the fact that when you advocate for someone with an illness that is hard to understand, even if you do it far more gracefully than I have, you may make some people unhappy. But, you can’t stay silent out of fear of human revenge:

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying:
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

So, it would seem in the service of love, it would be wrong for me to lose my “saltiness.” I’m not sure if Christ meant the “f” bomb, but if he did, I’m all about saltiness

In spite of the healing connections I am making, and the biblical reminders to speak out of love, no matter the cost, I am humbly remaining one day at a time about this new friendship and all other connections related to my son. For this new connection, I’ll try detaching with love, and see how it works. For the other woman’s son, and for her as well, I’m afraid I have only the axe to work with for the time being. It will have to do.