Whose Mind Is This Anyway

I’m trying to swim on a Friday morning but intrusive thoughts are dampening the fun. Is it too much to ask to exercise and relax (to me this is one in the same), to pretend that this is an outdoor pool, that it is a warm and sunny day, and that the pool is all mine?

In reality it is full of lap swimmers and we’re all indoors and it is in the forties and cloudy outside, although it is supposed to warm up to fifty by noon.

Impossible, this imagined pretense about sun.  The list of things to do, for all intents and purposes, is full of unwanted, intrusive thoughts, and it expands with each splash. I am grateful that it is a list, not a conversation, that it isn't a script, one that will never be enacted, but probably should be, in vivo, a manifestation of conflict, that thing that keeps the analysts and Woody Allen in business.  

The to-do list, for us sandwich generationers, is endless.  It is only 9:05 but my day started at 5:15, almost four hours ago.  I dropped FD off someplace and am scouring the grocery store.  Thirty minutes pass and at the automatic checkout, things go well.  The system works, no need to call for a store manage for "unwanted items are on the belt." My self-esteem is much improved.

By eight o'clock two grandchildren are in my car, on their way to school. The angst of having no grandchildren in town has magically dissipated, as if it never was, since our daughter and her family moved from California to Chicago months ago. Change can be good, you know.

I drop the older boy off at the school his uncles attended at his age and wave from the car to  the principal at the curb.  The once young rabbi now sees me as old.

I sing Frere Jacques with the three-year old on our way to my apartment. We park and lug up the groceries in a cart at the service elevator (he pushes the up button).  Moments later he is mixing his second breakfast, baby pancakes. He doesn't start school until nine.  The pancakes go in a plastic bag because he won't eat a single one.  I test them.  They are excellent.  He will leave them in his schoolbag where his mother will notice them and toss them, maybe, late at night or perhaps the following day when she packs new lunches.  As in therapy, for a three-year old, life is all about the process, not the content.

In the parking lot at the nursery school he swipes his index finger on each and every car we pass, holding my hand with his other hand.  I tell him his finger will be dirty and it might end up in his mouth which isn't cool, eating dirt.  He stops drawing on dirty cars, seems to understand this word, cool.  

He marches merrily inside the community center where his teacher has all children wash their hands before breathing.  She tells me it is Picture Day.  Did his mother fill out the form?

I know what is in his backpack and there is no form for Picture Day, no check.  I only have a few dollars in my wallet, nothing else.  I text his parents:  Do you want pictures?  There is the matter of the form.  Yes!

The answer doesn't matter.  Clearly the other grandparents in this family will want them.  It occurs to put a reminder in my phone to revisit SnapFish or to look for some other service like it to print copies of good digital pictures.

My son-in-law chimes in from work, texts that he will give me a check, to stop by. He’s excited at the prospect of school pictures.  We arrange the pick-up.

Before leaving, Conference Day sign up catches my attention.  I scribble his parents in for a 6 pm, the latest time still available, hoping it will work for them.  The evening for this nursery school teacher is otherwise full. That there is a need for conferences about a 3-4 year old is interesting.  Don't these teachers work a long enough day?  And must my grandson progress?

It is time for me hit the pool, same building. Almost immediately, mid-first lap, intrusive thoughts attack, those things to do, that second shift stuff of life that is really first shift for me, discretionary time before office hours.  Details gather, no, pummel into my brain.  To control them I begin a mental post for this blog, this very post, thinking that by doing so, at least the verbiage is productive.

But surely most of it will be forgotten, my voice lost before hitting the showers.

Realizing that trying to control life while paddling in water is ridiculous, the brain's executive manager (we all have one, some are better than others) proceeds to the cognitive strategy that works best for her, a stopping technique.  When one is not doing backstroke, a good thought stoppage technique is to clap one's hands as loudly as possible.

The chosen intervention is word review, using new words in sentences, words and sentences direct from the Kaplan GRE Vocabulary I-phone ap.  You are never too old to learn words like abjure, abscond.  This works, stops the obsessive thinking.  The reason it will always work is that the brain cannot consciously parallel process, cannot comprehend two sentences at the very same time.  When you try to hear two people talking at the same time, no matter at cocktails or a business conference, you will fail to comprehend either.  

Starving, I go home and have breakfast, oatmeal that is now three hours old and doesn't taste good.  I bake some cookies because these will taste better, and we are expecting guests for the weekend.  By evening I will be too tired to do anything productive like this.  My machetainista (rhymes vaguely with bucket-rain-ist-uh, short for my daughter-in-law's mother) is a much better baker than I.  Hopefully having one of my cookies will boost her ego.

True cookie people all agree that once a cookie has cooled off it isn't as good anyway, perhaps isn't worth eating.  Take this as a health tip.

Also, one of my married sons will be visiting and he likes cookies.  He is coming to collect his collectibles, rooms full of them at my old house, the one his sister now occupies.  He finally has the space for his stuff, a real home of his own.  If you wait long enough, there is progress in life.  You may find a place for your stuff.

Or you may get rid of it.

The subtext to much of this is that I am worried, am becoming more than a little upset.  Six weeks ago the condo two floors directly above us flooded, something about a refrigerator hose, and each of the units below, all the way down to the first floor, suffered water damage.  I heard our bedroom wall crack, watched as water seeped in, kept seeping for days.  Management has known about this from the start, informed us that it isn’t safe to sleep in a potentially mildewed, moldy bedroom.  They moved some of our furniture into our guest room while we vacationed in a far-off land. 

But nothing was done to fix things.  I suggested to the building manager, at first gently, then a little more assertively, that this is not cool, the crack in our bedroom wall, losing a bedroom.  We are overcrowded and I wear a mask, try not to go inside that room, and I worry about my clothes.  Some of them are now in FD's closet in the guestroom. We are elbowing one another constantly, arguing over space under the bed.  Shoes have to go somewhere.

For weeks the response has been, We are waiting for insurance.  

This key word, insurance, makes me feel guilty.  There are people who lost their homes in a hurricane and here I am, worrying about a crack in a bedroom wall.

How can anyone make any kind of move in life without insurance?  Apparently it is impossible.

When I suggest that since the condo association must wait for insurance, they will also wait for rent, (we are test-case renters, an experiment) I get a new response: Next week for sure.  Monday!  But this must have been a dream.

Condo flood

Daily I visit her, the building manager, to remind her that this is not what I signed up for, moving into this place.  She gets that deer in the headlights look when there are any complaints from us, must always consult the board, has never had anyone rent here before.  Procedure is fuzzy.  I do not tell her that I am considering starting a blog to satirize condo living, Someone Was Seen...

Conflict is not my style, however, so I take some of my newly baked cookies, still warm, and put them on a paper plate, cordially bring them down to the building manager. 

“Is this a bribe?” she asks suspiciously. But she has something of a smile going.

“No!  Heaven forbid!  I remembered you like a good cookie, thought you might think of me as you chew. They aren’t my best, are a little too soft.  Rush job.  Lots to do today."

“You know,” she says, “butter is the answer to everything, makes cookies crunchy.”

I agree (would I argue?) but must go.  No time to talk ingredients.  Toodaloo.

The race is on.  In one hour, the following, erased:

1.  Pick up check for Picture Day from s-i-l.  Admire amazing new office.

2.  Shoot over to BBB (Bed Bath and Beyond) to get the canister for Soda Stream (device that makes carbonated water, favorite drink of old Jews).

3.  Drop in at Office Max to find carbon paper.  They still make it!

4.  Drop off the Picture Day check to the nursery school administrator.

5.  Take pic of Conference Day schedule on classroom door so daught can switch hers with someone if necessary.  Shoot it over to her.

6.  Pick up afghan from the cleaners that machetainista crocheted for us. Looks like new. (Add bring in down jacket to to-do list).

7.  Drop check off at auto mechanic, have the following conversation:

“Gary, you must hate me!”
“I love you,” he offers back.
“It’s so late!  I’ve had the check in my purse for weeks!”
“No problem!”  

He's smiling like he means it and the smile carries the morning.

8.  Back at the apartment, switch to biking clothes.

9.  Ride over to mother’s apartment.  She is going to a dinner tonight and needs help putting on jewelry.  This takes only ten minutes and she is unbelievably grateful but perseverates on the dangers of riding a bicycle to work.

10.  Ride to work.

11.  Ride home in the dark, scare a raccoon, maybe.

That night, picking up my mail at the house, my daughter shows me her Google calendar, how she has different colors that remind her of her many things to do.  My work calendar is about all I can take, adding things to it would probably mean someone gets double booked.  The Reminder Ap on the phone works best for me but means I am always, forever, tied to the phone, can't tell my left shoe from my right without it.  

Still, it is better to rely on this, to know that it is there, with an ever-changing list of things to do, than to give the never-ending list attention while swimming. If the errand isn't on the phone then it probably isn't very important. Lightning will not strike, either (cognitive-rational thinking) if something isn't done, is lost in the shuffle.

Now if only there were an ap to eliminate obsessive dialogue.

therapydoc

Post script: The maintenance engineers are working on the bedroom!  Eitherthis had to do with no rent, or maybe, just maybe, somebody is worried about the blog.  

What I Did For Love

Wow, it seems my vacay from blogging never was, it's so easy to come back to this. But I needed a break, just some time to attend to things, like shredding twenty-five years of old tax receipts, returns.  That was fun, bringing those boxes out of the attic.  I approached it like I do everything else, with a broom.

While I was away I did an Anniversary Post. Not a blogging anniversary post, but a Marital Union Anniversary Post. What you will get out of it are prime examples of conflict avoidance. Or do you prefer: Synchrony of Emotion. Empathy. All depends upon what color glasses you're wearing.  We prefer something in pastel.

June 22, 2011

FD and I have been married for 36 years.

You should know that the number 36 is considered a lucky number, because it is twice 18, and 18 is a lucky number. If you're Jewish you understand that multiplying things has tremendous psychological power. The number 18 is lucky because it is the numeric equivalent of chai (hard "ch", rhymes with fly), the Hebrew word for life.

How does a word become a number? Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is associated with a number. Add up the numbers that correspond to the letters of a word, and you get numbers with feeling.  You can imagine the speeches at the Bar Mitzvahs.

What we do to celebrate our life together is regress, stick it to the whole idea that we're getting older and crankier. Meaning, we take off and do what we used to do when it wasn't as hard to do it, with less intensity.  We cancel our appointments, sign out, give over coverage and run away for a day and a half, never too far away.  The Midwest is a lot prettier than people think.  We met in the cornfields of Illinois, two and a half hours southwest of the city of Chicago, in school.

FD does most of the work as I put together a cooler of fish salad and fruit.  He somehow gets our bicycles to stay on the back of the car using an ancient bike carrier. I make a big deal about making the salad while I talk on the phone. It does take forever, right, to make a decent lunch?

We drive away.   This particular anniversary morning follows a night of severe storms all across the western suburbs.  We have reserved a  bed and breakfast in the western suburbs not far from Fermilabs.  FD has discovered that there are extensive bike trails near the nuclear reactor.  Finding the trails is easy, choosing the B & B is hard.  My job.

Do we go to Marcia's Bed and Breakfast in Ottawa?  When I ask Marcia how much, she asks if we're bringing our horses.  I like her right away.

If not Marcia's then perhaps Oscar Swan's in Geneva, where the service is said to be iffy, but we might catch a wedding.

To be honest, Marcia's is a little too far away for a day trip, and frankly, I don't travel well anymore.  So I tell her another day, and we book at the Oscar Swan.  Then FD gets sick, and there is no going anywhere.

But being a doctor, he gets well!  How he does this, I'll never know, but he goes from looking like death warmed over to, "HEY!  Let's go someplace!  I haven't had fever in two hours* and the antibiotics are working, and it's our anniversary!"

I'm saying, "Dude, we should totally stay home, and if we're adventurous, measure the kitchen floor. We take the money we save at Oscar Swan (significant!) and apply it to the new floor."

He goes, "Yeah, but it's our anniversary." He says it with a certain nostalgia.  Or is that a whine.

We settle on a show.  Yes!  Let's go see a show!  We live in a big city, Chicago.  There are many of these.  I suggest Chinglish, a comedy set for Broadway, soon.  He's good with this, but we can't get cheap tickets.  He finds The Outgoing Tide, a play about Alzheimer's with John Mahoney.  John Mahoney is best known as Frazier's father.  He's an older television star.

"Fine, dear. We'll see a play about something depressing.  That's cool.  I'm good.  Truly."

I cancel our reservation at the Oscar Swan.  I have already discussed our issues with Marcia in Ottawa, the proprietor who asked about our horses.  She knows we'll be back one day, probably with grandchildren.  We have a relationship.   We spend more money than we should at the Northlight Theater, thinking that if the weather is good and he still feels good, we can get out during the day and ride somewhere and still make it back to get dressed up for the show.  I love getting dressed up for a show, although this is a passing trend, at least at the Northlight.

The night before, as we've already indicated, the storms are fierce, make religious animals out of Chippy and Dale  and everyone else who doesn't live in our attic.**  We wake up to find that our neighborhood quite possibly has the best weather within a hundred miles.  The sun is shining.  The skies are blue, and the weatherman is telling us otherwise for all of Chicagoland.

But we can't stay here. We have to go someplace we haven't been before, somewhere only we know, as the song goes.  I watch the Weather Channel with great interest.  "If we're going to ride, it seems to me that Antioch might stay clear for awhile."

This is Chain of Lakes in Illinois, where he takes the grandkids fishing sometimes. Before we blink the food is ready to go, and the bikes are hanging low on the Nissan; this is an old drill.  "Drive slowly," he warns.  "The bikes are hanging low." Noticed that, between us, didn't say a word.

And it is, as it always is, just fantastic.  We find the park, get out and air out.  There are three hiking/riding trails within seven miles and check them all out via pedals.  He complains that I ride too slow.  I tell him that I have to stop to take pictures.  It's an addiction, remembering.  We lose that ability all too soon.

It is lovely, we're having a good time.  Neither of us cares much who is trying to reach us when we miss those calls.

It is all good until we hit what feels to me is a highway.  At this point FD tells me that we have to ride on the shoulder of this Route, whichever it is.  The traffic is whizzing by.

No, dear.

He tells me there is no other way to get to where we want to go, and I still insist, Not Me.  Now We.

We look at one another.  Stalemate.  We both want to go.  We want to keep exploring the area.  We rarely ride on the busy streets, but occasionally are forced into it and there is this thing they call a shoulder.  To turn back is white bread, there is no fiber to this trip yet.  We're not white bread people.  Our eyes turn, once again, to the highway.

All of a sudden there is NO traffic.  Of one mind we hightail it across and in moments are comfortably riding west on the shoulder, not a care in the world.  It will be a mile and a half to the next official trail.

The traffic, of course, catches up with us, but we're within three feet of the nearest flying automobile, and we've been here before.  We have faith.  We'll be fine.

Except for the flash flood.  We should have seen it coming.  The sky had changed.

We feel the moisture, we can tell that the water on our skin is rain, we just aren't prepared for a flash flood in the middle of nowhere while riding on the shoulder of a highway as trucks kick what have become rivers onto the shoulder. 

We get off our bikes, rapidly hunt for our parkas, soon a little more protected.  Except that it is pouring and we're in the middle of nowhere and a parka is only good from the waist up.

"What now?" I ask, hoping he knows what he's doing.

"We find a shelter and have a picnic, of course."

Of course.

"We're not riding to this shelter," I inform him.

"No, we can walk there."

And the rain keeps pouring down.

There is no shelter.  But by the time we get to the park, five minutes away, really, the rain is quite finished.  The sun is out, and we're drying off.  It helps to ride standing up, and who can't do that?

I'm wary of another storm, keep my parka on, but FD stops to tell me that this is slowing me down.  He hates that I ride so slowly.  I give in, take it off, hoping that this really is the end of the bad weather.  We have vacationed for thirty-six years in all kinds of weather, weathered all kinds of storms.  A little drop of rain can hardly hurt me now.

At some point we're lost.  My Iphone has a compass that tells me we're heading south and I know we need to go northeast.  FD tells me that my compass is wrong, that we're heading east, which is fine.  "How can a compass be wrong," I ask, suspicious.

"I don't know, but it's wrong."

This inspires confidence, obviously.  I am tired, and a little hungry, and not totally dry, although the sun is doing what it is supposed to do, and there is a lamb on a farm that is basically saying, Come take my picture.  But by the time I get to doing that, he disappears.

Seeing a lamb makes me happy.  We reach the car and FD begins the process of loading the bikes on the car carrier.  It is beginning to rain.  I get in the car, hope he doesn't get too wet, and he doesn't.  We pass the home grown fruit stand, stop to buy some berries, and of course, nothing is home grown, but you have to love that, too.  Home grown bananas.  Right.

     

therapydoc

*Actually, FD came down with this ridiculous illness the day before and started treating it immediately. Loathe to use unnecessary antibiotics, we know he wasn't faking.

** The Is it a raccoon?  Or  Is it a squirrel? story is priceless, but not for today.

Words Hit as Hard As a Fist

We've talked about conflict and intimacy avoidance in other posts, how we learn from the examples set by our parents. It isn't rocket science, but there are subtleties.

Those of us raised in affectionate families sometimes find physical intimacy the easiest thing in the world; it's difficult to conceive of life without it. Feed us with love and we love back, cringe at anger. Some of us develop an allergy to anger to the degree that we'll walk out of films, change the channel on the television when the volume feels too much.

Those who suffered violence in the home, as opposed to peace-love as children, can be conflict-avoidant, too. Others identify with the aggressor and are consciously aggressive. There are many variations here, including one in which two people are drawn to one another, feel they're soul mates because they both grew up in violent homes of one type or another.

But expectations are everything in a relationship, and expecting a partner to be a peace-nik when you want him to be a peace-nik, just because he should, in your opinion, be conflict-aversive, having grown up with so much conflict, doesn't make it so. If you think about it, logically it makes sense that one of the two should be good with conflict, and the other, not-so-good. Laws of chance.

And when that happens, things get pretty wild. Let's pretend the person comfortable with conflict is a guy, and the person who is conflict-avoidant is a woman. (Substitute genders at will).

The assumption on her end is that he gets it, this soul mate of hers, that she's had enough insults or sarcasm to last a lifetime. She's thinking that he, too, doesn't want to raise his voice or hear her yell, that he won't want to behave like his parents behaved. He understands.

Yet he's hardened off, is immune to verbal and physical violence. The continuum of violence is what is meaningful to him. A jab, a joke, a minor insult shouldn't hurt. It's a left-handed insult; or sarcasm, no big deal. A good fight, even, no big thing, nothing to fear; it's something to win.

Whereas she truly could be overly sensitive. Negative communication might hurt her to the degree that she feels re-traumatized. She's already too bruised, can't handle any more bruises, emotional or not.

Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me. His refrain. Doesn't she get that?

For him it has become something of habit, rising to the offensive under pressure, and it is hard for him to change, even if she has called him on his words, told him how much they hurt.

She's disappointed in him, is the truth, which depresses him. He senses it. She's disappointed that he hasn't changed, for she has said something to that effect on numerous occasions. But she doesn't yell about it, doesn't punctuate in the way that he's used to people yelling when they want to make a point. So he doesn't hear, doesn't respond, and out of nowhere, he spontaneously cuts her with words, especially if he's feeling attacked.

She'll walk away, get some fresh air, won't even say,

You know, Words hit as hard as a fist. Watch what you say.

That's the tagline for the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse, highlights a poster that a patient once stole for me. She took it off a bus. I've had it for thirty years.

This is a simple family therapy. We revisit both childhoods, talk about feelings, explore the intimacy avoidance characteristic of the behavior of both partners.

What's amazing to me is how long some couples endure this pattern without insisting it change. You would think the conflict avoider would explode, at some point, for exploding is necessary, to make the point. It is most typical that a child will bring a couple like this to therapy, will think of some way, act out, carry a symptom. It can take a good while for anger to become the motif of that treatment. The anger management is eventually requested, interestingly, by both partners, and begins with old fashioned insight, psycho-dynamic psychotherapy, reaching into childhood.

Only after that, will the cognitive-behavioral strategies really work, the self-relaxation, the breathing, integrating a positive parent figure, the one we all want to be. There are a host of anger management techniques. They don't work, not until you get to the root and yank it out, because it is primitive anxiety that drives the conflict as well as the conflict avoidance.

You can't really apply a band-aid to the deep stuff is the truth.

therapydoc