Jealousy

Yes, jealousy. One of the most universal human emotions that we cannot speak about. It’s gross and miserable and beyond uncomfortable and it strikes us mute. We sputter and spit and stumble in trying to express it without sounding insane or weak and yet—and yet—jealousy is a powerful emotion which taps directly into our bodies.

I have stumbled through this territory all of my life, and perhaps that is the clue. It’s old. Jealousy is always old. I’d like to think it is about this man or that woman but at heart it never is.

It is also never this: Jealousy is never about love, it’s never about sex, it’s never about attractiveness even though those may be the cards we play in trying ever so hard to explain our predicament when trapped in jealousy’s swamp.

It’s also—and I am slowly coming to get this—never about him.

My recent tutor is French analyst Marcianne Blevis in her book “Jealousy: true stories of love’s favorite decoy.” She makes the powerful and iconoclastic case that jealousy exists to help us and to free us. Yes, I know it never feels anything like that, does it? She’s onto something though. (Yeah duh, she’s a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist and brilliant so I’ll concede that she’s “onto something”).

But look at this thing she says: Jealousy is a response to anxiety. (jealousy is not the anxiety but a response to a preexisting anxiety) and she says the anxiety arose early in our lives: “If an impulse in childhood is struck down by a prohibition, it transforms itself into a terror and anguish” Ok, that makes sense I will be jealous of one whom I perceive to be the thing I was never allowed to be. But then she says this: “Jealousy not only tangles our memories, but also puts us in contact with those unconscious forces of childhood that are struggling to free themselves from the realm of the incommunicable.”

I did mention that she’s brilliant right?

Jealousy is not bad no matter how bad it feels. It is built in as a gift to save us. It is as if it is the antidote taped to the side of the poison bottle. It comes to free us from the thing that was prohibited, the thing we transformed into terror long before we had words.

Here’s a simple way to get at this in yourself: What were you not allowed to do that you did naturally and freely as a child? What did your mother or father prohibit? What were you shamed for? Was there something you did or liked to do for which affection or love was withdrawn?

Gail Sheehy Caregiving Book

I’m reading Gail Sheehy’s new book: Passages in Caregiving. It is very good. It may be the best book available on caregiving. It’s heavy on specific advice and true—brutally true—stories and very light on the platitudes. Nowhere in this book does she talk about putting on your own oxygen first. Bless you Gail Sheehy for knowing that the “oxygen in the plane” thing is a stupid metaphor. For most of us caregivers the plane has already crashed

Tony's Wisdom

My friend Tony died of lung cancer a year ago. He was a charming and witty guy and he had the gift of seeing quickly and deeply into people and situations. His comments could sting but he was the one to go to for an honest and helpful assessment of any situation. He continued to tell the truth when he had cancer.

Last week I ran into a mutual friend and we talked about how Tony lived and died with cancer. She told me that he said to her, “You can’t have cancer in the midst of an orgasm or a belly laugh.”

Joy

We are writing our wedding invitation. We each write a draft and compare notes. They are almost identical. We both used the word Joy. It is the perfect word and has been from the start. Not happiness, not peace. But it is Joy.

Home Wrecker

Thank you Oprah and Rielle Hunter for re-framing the feminist discussion: “Are women property?” Most people would say that women are not, but when we enter this discussion it turns out that men are.

Hence language like: home wrecker and a husband stealer. But notice that in these discussions—on the air and all the next day at the water cooler—it’s always the women getting bashed—and mostly by women.

Infidelity brings out the most anti-woman beliefs in the most feminist women. We blame a woman or both women in the social construction of infidelity.

The “other woman” is a thief, home wrecker and man stealer. On the other hand if we determine that she’s not the bad one then certainly the wife is because she didn’t “hold onto her man”. In either case the man is just a piece of valuable property to be kept, owned, held or stolen. Kind of like a check book with a penis.

Oprah for all her big talking and her embracing of the pseudo-psychological and the empowerment of women still misses the basic geometry: Infidelity is a triangle. Three human beings, equally flawed, equally trying, equally noble, equally victims, equally responsible.

Women Writing About Women

“If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same thing, he’s describing the human condition.”

That’s from Emily Gould in the May 3 New York Magazine. Gould’s new book, “And the Heart Says Whatever” will be published this week. Her statement hits home as I struggle to write about cancer and caregiving and love and sex –and work and clothes and money and fear and thinking and therapy and food and writing.

Is it one woman’s story and/or the human condition?

Home Again, Home Again

I’m home from Orlando. A week of conferences, teaching, sunshine and a hotel room all to myself. One million people visit Orlando every year. That’s what the taxi driver told me on my way to the airport yesterday. They come for Disney and the other attractions. But my vacation this week was totally inside the Florida Hotel and Conference Center. It was Goldilocks’ perfection: not too big, not too small, with a nice restaurant on premises and a great swimming pool. If you love to swim you’ll get this: most hotel pools are too short for real laps, you have to begin your turn after a few strokes but this hotel had a pool that was looooong so great, luxurious long laps with a real deep end so I could play mermaid and practice dives.

I loved having a week away. It was mostly work; I was teaching and speaking to a national caregivers group and I loved the people. But each day after the last session I was so happy to decline dinner invitations and have a swim and then dinner alone in the lobby and then go to my room to watch junk TV and read my book.

Home last night to John grinning at me from the airport gate. Then showing off my new tan--real and faux—for him and having a proper and wicked welcome home on the dining room floor.

It's Always There

I leave today for a week in Orlando for a Caregivers conference. Longest we have been apart since John’s surgery. I notice that my mind calculates time this way.

Yesterday in the car on our way to a concert we were listening to the Yankees game and there was a public service announcement for Colon Cancer screening. We both listened and didn’t speak. It’s always there.

We talk about the future. We talk about “when we are old” but cancer and its nasty statistics are always there. And I calculate. I plan for a wedding and a funeral. I dream of white and black. My contingency plan is always in place. Cancer is the hum in the background. It’s always there.

Colonel Chicken Cares about Your Breasts but not Your Life

More pink madness. More marketing fear.

Does the American Cancer Society care about heart disease? Does the Heart Association care about diabetes? Does Liver care about Lung? Does Chrohn’s and Colitis care about strokes? Does anyone care about all of you?

Our health care, health research and health education have become so fragmented because of marketing—and money—that it seems as if no one cares if you live or die they just want the organs they care about to survive. You can go ahead and die, they seem to say, as long as you don’t die of OUR disease.

A current ad campaign by Kentucky Fried Chicken is pitching a special promotion for fried chicken and The Susan B. Komen Foundation. You can now buy a big pink bucket (a bucket!) of fried chicken for the woman in your life and 50 cents from each big pink bucket of FRIED chicken will go to breast cancer research.

This makes me crazy! Does anyone want breast cancer? Nope. Do we want to prevent deaths from breast cancer? Yep. But this fried chicken campaign begs me to ask The Colonel—and Susan B. Komen: Do you really care about women’s lives and their health or only about breasts (both women and chicken)?

Here’s a fast bit of women’s health research: More women—more by far—die of heart disease than breast cancer. More women will die of cardiac related disease than breast or any other cancer. So if you really want to promote women’s health do you want to encourage us to eat buckets of FRIED chicken? (We know that you think we are babies—all that pink crap we have to endure, but you also think we’re stupid and can’t Google the words: breast cancer versus heart disease.)

What’s next? How about some pink Marlboro smokes? Pink Absolut vodka shots? A gallon of pink Hagen Das Ice cream and pink Wise potato chips consumed on a big pink couch in front of a pink TV?

Come on Susan B. Komen, get some balls—or are you leaving that to The Lance Armstrong Foundation? Will one of these health charities have the courage and integrity to care about the whole woman? To say to women—and the market-:A whole woman has boobs and brains and a heart and lungs and we need to take care of all of it for good health and a good life.

Prevent Cancer

A friend of mine is an educator for The American Cancer Society. The info below is from her tagline. Startling when you think this thru. All we fuss about with cancer and One Third of all cancer deaths are related to what we do to ourselves and One Half can be prevented! Holy Chemo Batman!

Tracey's tagline says:

One-third of all cancer deaths are related to nutrition, physical inactivity, and being overweight or obese. One-half of all new cancer cases can be prevented. Check out cancer.org/greatamericans to learn what action YOU can take to protect yourself!

The Marriage Artist

I was talking to my friend Stephanie yesterday about John and our plans to get married in August. “Why get married?” she asked me. The question, asked by others too, has nagged at me. Why get married when we have both been married before; when we won’t have kids; when we don’t know what might happen to his health or to our lives?

Perhaps the implied question: Why are you getting married again? Both of us married before –four past marriages between us--so why again? We talked about the cultural issues, the social status, the fact that marriage carries an additional satisfaction knowing that there are some who have bet against our relationship.

But there is something else: I like being married. As I’ve described it to friends, I like the container of marriage. I have always envisioned marriage as a container in which two people concoct something chemical, physical, emotional and spiritual. Some of the creations live a long time and some don’t. Some have stunningly beautiful chemical reactions, some make stinky messes, but all are living things.

Yesterday talking to Stephanie—as we pushed and pulled at this idea --I realized another part of this. Marriage is a creative act—and yes, in a way that living together is not—the materials are more expensive, there is an audience and there is no net. The very legality adds a risk factor. Seeing marriage as a work of art and myself as a marriage artist came closest to making sense of why I am willing to do this hard, imperfect and often uncomfortable thing over and over. Perhaps it is a kind of performance art created in front of a live audience. Or an installation –bizarrely conceptual and wildly improvisational.

It is also why the question, “Are you happy?” seems irrelevant to me. Friends-- wondering about this marriage –have asked me, “Are you happy?” But that’s not the question that I ask myself. I’m not always happy. What artist is? But am I interested? engaged? challenged? stretched? learning? surprised? perplexed and ultimately deeply changed? Yes to all of the above.

All of these years trying to find my medium, here it is at my finger tips. Marriage as medium. The marriage artist.

Letting Go of My Father - Magazine - The Atlantic

Letting Go of My Father - Magazine - The Atlantic

Here is a powerful caregiving story and a picture in neon of what caregiving stress is like.

God is Love is Sex is God

Church, passion, kneeling at communion. Our shoulders and hips touch but our prayers are private and intimate. God forgive me, change me, heal me, bless him, show me. Bread in wine, flesh and blood and we eat it kneeling. Devour a man’s body and juices on our knees. We drink blood. Absolute carnality, absolute intimacy, absolute love.

Rising we are healed, saved, restored.

We reenter our pew and he grips my hand so hard. There are tears in his eyes. He chokes, “I love you.”

We come home to the New York Times, mocha coffee and Italian pasties from Bella Napoli. I’m reading about palliative care and he is in front of me, tears again, kissing me, tugging at clothes.

“Is there any greater compliment than a man who wants to f*** you?”asks Helen Gurley Brown.

And he does. And we do. Laughing, grunting, crying all over each other’s bodies, mouths, hands, fingers, legs.

Finally tired and hungry.

God is love. Sex is love. He is risen today. Amen

The Easter Brother

I consider the following to be quite telling about my own personality: I never believed in Santa Claus. I never, even as a little kid, imagined or believed that a man would go house to house in a red suit and bring toys and stockings to boys and girls.

I did, however, believe, until I was ten or maybe even older, in the Easter Bunny. In my own defense I have to explain that we lived near the woods and I saw all kinds of rabbits, little baby bunnies and distance-covering jack rabbits, all the time. But I also had two older brothers who, as only big brothers can, facilitated, my belief. Sig and Larry would talk just slightly out of my earshot about The Bunny. “Don’t let her see him”, and “Did you see the basket he left next door?” They also, to make it more convincing, put bite marks on the handles of our Easter baskets.

My brothers died when they were 42 and 48. Now I’m the oldest. At Easter I miss them. I miss having an Easter basket from Lar who –even as an adult—made me one that included the bunny’s teeth marks to remind me just how naïve I had been. And I miss our sibling tradition of finding the family “King Egg”. As Easter approached we would each decorate our own hard-boiled egg, fortifying them with dye and crayon and competed (Sig and Lar were both went on to become engineers) by ramming our colored eggs together to see whose broke first.

I also miss dressing up for Easter services, complete with new dress and corsage. The three of us continued to go to church on Easter even when we had walked away from organized religion. We kept this holiday because we all liked the uplifting Easter hymns like “Up From the Grave He Arose”.

I kept going to church on Easter even as, and after, Sig and Larry were dying because those Easter hymns gave me a weird hope. It was not a hope of miraculous recovery for either brother, or necessarily for a reunion in the “Great Beyond”, but hope for my own “arose” from the heartache of losing my brothers, my playmates, co-conspirators and occasional torturers.

One of my final conversations with Sig was about my car. I was 40 years old but still easily defeated by my car worries. Larry, who was then sick, was caring for Sig who was dying, and I called their house in tears to report the impending death of my car. Larry, who was on the phone with me, relayed the mechanic’s opinion to Sig who was lying in what would soon be his deathbed.

Lar said to me, “Sig wants to talk to you”. I was surprised because Sig’s speech had become painful and very difficult for him. I waited until Larry positioned the phone for Sig to talk.

“Here’s what you tell them….”, he began, and he proceeded to dictate a set of car repair instructions to convince any mechanic that I knew a nut from a bolt, and that this girl had a brother who would not see his sister taken for a ride.

At Easter I have the best memories of a girl with brothers—of a basket-carrying rabbit who was “just here a second ago” and of making faces to spoil the, “Come on; Say cheese” Brownie snapshots that Dad took of our Easter outfits.

Apart from any theology, Easter lets me believe in the resurrection of my family, of my all too gullible girlhood self, and in a life that rises, falls, rises and dies over and over as we each cycle through layers of loss and gain.

What Jealousy Offers

In my therapist’s office I read a back issue of Psychology Today from August 2009.

Here was the fascinating tidbit I learned about jealousy:

French Psychiatrist, Marcianne Blevis,—(It really helps that she is French I think) wrote a book called, “Jealousy—True Stories of Love’s Favorite Decoy”. She insists that jealousy is a signal—not to blame a partner—but to look within. Inside ourselves, she says, we will find the source of insecurity that makes a rival seem superior to us. What’s at stake in jealousy—she suggests—is not the partner or the relationship—but the survival of our sense of self.

What is exciting about this idea is that it follows another of Blevis’ assertions: All human emotions exist to help us figure out who we are in the world. So jealousy too is a productive emotion for us. This very thing we cringe to feel or are shameful to admit is trying to help us claim a self. Jealousy is a resource that we call on when we feel at risk, when our sense of self is in jeopardy. “When we are jealous we are in the grip of an identity crisis.”

But invariably, according to Blevis, we misdirect our attention. We imagine our so-called rival with an aura of magical attributes—yet we are the one who assigned those attributes to the rival!—and they represent (hello projection!) something unrealized in ourselves.

I love thinking like this and ideas like this that turn it all upside down.

Think about the kind of people who trigger jealousy for you. Pretty? Young? Sexy? Smart? Successful? Children? Travel?

They are shouting thru a megaphone—This is what I want! They are invitations to take a step toward something that YOU want.

Time Travel--What is Meant to Be

I am reading “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger. The movie was so-so but the book is intriguing and delicious. It is one of those books that would never have survived an MFA program workshop..I can just hear the whining—Time Travel!!

But yes and it works. It works in plot and in metaphor and in spiritual challenge. It raises the questions of why we are where we are in our lives and why some relationships make sense even when they make no sense at all.

This week I read several articles that say that relationships like mine with John, “never work” but this one seems too. And we were both in marriages that were “perfect” but then in what way were they not?

“Were you looking for me?” I asked John yesterday. And he said yes, “all of my life”. “I was so afraid I’d die and never have loved like this.”

Those are the kind of words that you do read in romance novels. WE have them here and we have all the other kinds of words too including, “screw you” and “No friggin’ way”. But I keep praying and trusting—and sometimes not trusting.

Will we someday know why this happened in our lives? Will we get a note or a nod from the future and have peace with the cost of being together? I don’t know but I like to think this was meant to be.

Married Illness

Here is a new and wonderful book about making a good—or decent marriage—while facing chronic illness. Called: “A Husband, A Wife & an Illness: Life Beyond Chronic Illness” written by Dr. William July and his wife, Jamey Lacy July.

They had just begun their marriage—his first and her second when a terrible auto-immune illness began to torture her. A former personal trainer and super athlete she was reduced to chronic pain, a life of medical appointments and treatments and a changed body and appearance. The blows were to her and to them. They went bankrupt, lost their dream home (her big income was gone overnight) and their lives were changed in every way. But, they write, they found a way to make a marriage in this long painful illness. It helped that Dr. July was and is a marriage and relationship counselor. But even knowing doesn’t always mean doing.

Powerful lessons from his mistakes and their almost mistakes: the well-spouse has to keep living; has to have a life apart; has to have a self. Not easy to do is it caregivers?

For many of us cancer too is a now a chronic illness. Our minds if not our lives are focused on what’s next, fear, and planning.

Here is a book that is simple, practical and very forthright about how a marriage can survive and sort of thrive in the face of all that.

For more practical wisdom go to theri website: http://www.couplesfacingillness.com/

Letters from the Land of Cancer

A new book adds perspective to the thing I have often challenged: the idea that cancer is a war. Obituaries say, “After a valiant battle with cancer”, “He/she lost a heroic fight with cancer.”

In his last book, “Letters from the Land of Cancer”, Walter Wangerin writes that it is not cancer we fight but mortality. And in that we all are engaged no matter the disease or even those who are blessed with the gift f long life. We die, we die, we will die. Sooner, later, easier or hard. We will die.

What he adds to this discussion—even as he writes during his experience with terminal lymphoma—is that if our battle is really with mortality then—for those of us who have faith—we are engaged in battle with God.

Dare the obituaries say, “After years of fighting God on mortality she finally surrendered.” Or how about this: “After a lengthy battle with God—in the land of cancer—God won.”

Ask the Right Questions

1. Is this an act of faith or an act of fear?

2. Is this an act of self-love or an act of self-sabotage?

3. Will this choice add to my life energy or rob me of my energy?

4. Does this choice empower me or disempower me?

5. Am I choosing from my divinity or my humanity?

6. Will this choice bring me long-term fulfillment or bring me short term gratification?

7. Am I standing in my power or trying to please someone?





from The Right Questions, by Debbie Ford

All of It

A friend of mine told me what a wise friend of hers told her when she was contemplating marriage to the man she had been living with.

The friend told her to get very quiet and “make a list of all the things that upset you, annoy you and that you don’t like about him”. Then very carefully look at that list and ask yourself: “Can you accept each item on that list?”

If you can, then you can marry him because those things will not change.