Exposed: Being Seen and Heard

I feel all alone in the middle of my aunt and uncle’s living room. There are a lot of big people in the room, all related to me, but I don’t really know most of them. It is my fourth birthday. I have been given a gift – a large rag doll almost my size with elastic on her feet designed to be pulled over my shoes. Someone commands me to put the doll’s feet on mine. Another command follows, “Come on, dance with her.” What do I do? There is no music and all these people are watching me. I don’t know what to do or how to be. But they are expecting me to perform. Please God who I still believe in, let this moment end. I do not want to be watched.

My fourth grade teacher brings a new machine to our classroom. It is a tape recorder. She commands each of us to speak into the machine as we read a passage in our readers. She plays the tape back for everyone to hear. I nearly die of embarrassment. I hate the sound of my voice and don’t quite believe that it is me. It does not make the same sound as it does to my ears.

I do not want to be heard.  

I sit in 7^th grade social studies and pray for invisibility so I will not become a target. There are already two targets in my class, a boy named Bruce, a girl named Cindy. They have done nothing to deserve all the fun made at their expense by some of the boys in my class. Looking around at everyone else, I calculate that on the misfit scale, I would probably be the next one at whom they’d take aim. I shrink in my seat and bend over my text book looking down.

I do not want to be noticed.

I sit in my 11^th grade English class and listen as my classmates talk and laugh about the party Saturday night at George’s house – to which I was not invited. I tell myself I don’t care, I wouldn’t have gone anyway. I wouldn’t have known how to be with them. They talk over me, ignoring me, not unkindly, just not anything.  I wonder if I have achieved the invisibility for which I have prayed from the God I now doubt.

I sit in a women’s group in my early twenties and find it hard to take my turn. When the timer rings (so no one hogs all the time, as some might) and our charismatic leader with piercing eyes turns her attention to me and commands that I pound a pillow and emote, the real me vacates the premises, leaving the play actor behind to perform on demand.   

There are many similar stories. I recall them with sadness and sometimes detachment, sometimes curiosity. But as my daughter and others of her generation might say, “It is what it is.” Or was what it was.  I know that these tiny events (and they are tiny in the grand scheme) have defined me in ways that are difficult to escape. I am who I am despite multi-year efforts to change that.

Writing from the heart is the epitome of exposure and an act of courage (or foolishness) for someone who aimed emotionally for invisibility and silence for years. I never press “post” without wondering if I’ve said too much or been too honest. I feel pleased when my words resonate with others and am grateful to those who respond from their own hearts and share their experiences. In those moments, I feel connected, heard, and visible in ways that are tolerable and pleasant.  

I emailed a few blog entries to a relative around Christmas. I handpicked some that I thought she might particularly enjoy – reflections about the holidays, an entry about my brother. Nothing that I thought would kindle any fires. So I didn’t see the meteor coming when she wrote me that she doesn’t understand why I don’t write about another relative who “loved you [me] so much, maybe too much.” I started to tremble with something approaching rage. The message I sent back was clear and direct. Do not tell me what or who I should write about. I don’t write to meet your needs. 

                             

Put another way, I will no longer dance because someone has commanded me to dance.

                            

I snail mailed some entries to an elderly friend I’ve known for over forty years. When I was 16, she used to read my adolescent attempts at poetry. She is always interested in knowing what I’m doing so I thought she might enjoy reading some of my current efforts. We used to be quite close but in recent years I’ve kept my distance. I grew up with her pointing out every discrepancy she found in what I had to say.  Even as an adult, she’ll remind me of something I said or thought when I was 19 and demands that I justify any changes in my viewpoint. Frankly, I often just don’t have the emotional strength to endure her questioning. The other day I received a telephone message from her. She’d read my work, some entries two and three times. She loved my writing. So far, so good. But then she said she’d like me to call her back. She wanted me to talk to her about some of the things I’d written.  “When you’re ready,” she said. That sounded ominous. Rewind.  “When you’re ready.”  Every danger antennae in me went on high alert.  My emotional brakes engaged. If she wants to share her story with me, relative to something I’ve written, great, I thought, wonderful. That’s what this is all about.

But I will no longer speak because someone has commanded me to speak.

Mourning Dad

I listened to a father and his son on the subway recently one morning.  They were having a real conversation. Dad listened intently to his son’s opinion about something that had happened in school and asked thoughtful questions. It was a sweet moment and it made me feel sad.  I think about fathers a lot. Two friends, one from almost 30 years ago and the other in my current workplace, mourn the loss of their dads within the past year. Their sadness is palpable. They each had remarkable and very close relationships with their dads. I envy them. This past week was the 7^th anniversary of my father's death. I remembered him on that day (February 15), but I do not miss him. This also makes me sad.

My dad, about whom I’ve written nostalgically (In Honor of My Dad, 10/15/10), and I did not have a genuine relationship. I spent my childhood yearning after him but he was wrapped up in his own world which consisted, besides work as an electrical engineer and owner of a large mobile home park, of membership in several fraternal organizations, being a ham radio operator, running for political office, starting a paint manufacturing business, overseeing the metamorphosis of an old school bus into a state-of-the-art motor home, starting a newspaper and functioning as editor/writer/photographer, and being the president of many things. Almost every night of my early youth, he would dress up in what my sister and I called his “monkey suit” to go to a meeting at the Masonic lodge. And almost every night, I would climb up into his arms and ask him when he would be staying home with us.  He always came home after we were sound asleep, and although my mother swore he never missed a night of coming in to kiss us goodnight, it doesn’t count when you’re unconscious.

When he was home, he was a lot of fun if he wasn’t lost in thought about his own endeavors. My dad loved having kids because it gave him a chance at a second (and third) childhood. From him, I learned to love roller coasters. He taught us to swim and water ski, and maneuver a go-kart.  He swung us so high in our lawn swing that he ran right under it as he pushed. He built us a magnificent tree house and then slept out under the stars with my sister and me and our friends.  

It sounds wonderful, I know. And some of it was. But what was missing was real engagement. There were no conversations. No heart to hearts. No dispensing of paternal wisdom, guidance of any sort (except “Go ask your mother”), or reassurance. His idea of engaging with his children consisted of an occasional, “What did you learn in school today” – which always felt like an unanswerable question. Opinions ventured often resulted in tears (mine). My father had a very short fuse. One memorable moment was when I proudly announced in the first grade that if I could vote for president I would vote for John F. Kennedy. Kennedy. My father’s name was Ken. In my mind, a vote for Kennedy was an endorsement of my father and I wanted him to know I admired him. Maybe that would please him. A staunch Republican, my father did not wait for my explanation about why I felt that way  – he just blew up at my stupidity at expressing a “political” opinion he saw as opposite to his correct viewpoint. I learned to be quiet but I didn’t give up. I tried to learn the Morse code in 3^rd grade so he would think I was smart and want to teach me about his radio equipment. He drilled me on the dahs and dits which I struggled to memorize and got irritated when I made mistakes. He read books on hypnosis and past life regression. I read them when he finished, hoping we could talk about them. He played the piano. I played the piano and made it my mission to learn his first piano recital piece from his childhood. I was determined that he would notice me, value me, pay attention to me. I am nothing if not tenacious.

The nearest we came to a real conversation was my 21^st birthday, which was two days before I was to be married. I hadn’t known the man very long – not even a year. He was much older than I and from a different world. The engagement was short and very stormy.  My father came to my apartment that day bearing a dozen yellow roses and said he wanted to talk to me. This was unprecedented and I was caught, unsure of how to be, embarrassed, and wanting to escape. We had had a huge fight about a boy when I was fifteen and I’d been enraged at his audacity for thinking he could suddenly assert his authority after being absent my entire childhood. Ever since that time, being alone with him felt torturous. He cleared his throat and told me that he knew the wedding was but two days away. He acknowledged that I’d had a bridal shower; the cake and flowers were set for delivery, and my dress had been picked up. However, he wanted me to know that if I wanted, if I felt it wasn’t the right thing to do, it would be ok to change my mind and not go through with it. He was acknowledging what I knew in my heart – this was not the right man for me. But years of silence and lack of real connection and trust conspired to keep me vigilant and defensive and I was simply unable to take in his words, let alone allow them to affect me. I assured him that getting married was exactly what I wanted to do. He looked at me dubiously, but said, "okay", and took his leave. The end. Almost.

* * * * *

In early January 2004, his doctor gave him 3 weeks to 3 months to live. He had cancer of the esophagus. He wasn’t ready to die. There was still so much he wanted to do, including winning a fortune on the horses. He wanted to teach me his carefully devised system of handicapping so it wouldn’t die with him. He ran out of time. I was with him most of the last 48 hours of his life. He was weak and in pain. My sister and I dripped morphine down his throat throughout his last night and whispered in his ear what a wonderful dad he’d been while his wife slept upstairs, exhausted from long nights of his restless activity. Morning came. He’d been quiet for a few hours so when his wife awakened, I went home to my mom’s to shower and get some breakfast. As I left, my dad aroused, opened his eyes, and waved goodbye to me. An hour later, his wife called to tell us he’d taken his last breath. I watched the funeral director and his son put my father in a body bag and take him away, feeling nothing. My sister and I planned the funeral service.  We made photo collages, wrote the ceremony and presided over the event, with dad’s favorite ragtime music playing in the background. He would have approved of his send-off.

* * * * *

I remember his death seven years later and feel nothing. But the 50+ year old loss? Ever present.

Valentines and Taming Tigers

I’m not really a fan of Valentine’s Day – never have been. Possibly it’s a case of sour grapes because I’ve never really been anybody’s valentine, except maybe once. It’s a holiday that has evolved to focus on “stuff” and equates love with roses or diamonds or candy. I can’t count the number of times in my practice that I sat with clients who were angry over what they considered to be their partner’s inadequate attempts at buying their love on Valentine’s Day, and tried to be non-judgmental and accepting of their feelings. The expectations tied up with this day, frankly, I find obscene.  

The other reason I eschew Valentine’s Day is all the darned sugar. Chocolate and more chocolate. Little hard sugar hearts with Be Mine and other endearments stamped on them. Red and pink M&M’s. Red and pink marshmallow hearts from the people who bring us Peeps at Easter.  Beautifully decorated valentine themed cupcakes at three bakeries I pass twice daily in Grand Central Terminal. This holiday represents another sugar gauntlet.  

  

My first memory of Valentine’s Day is from the first grade when my mom baked her highly addictive sour cream sugar cookies for my class. She frosted them in pink and neatly wrote each child’s name in white frosting on their own cookie. They were beautiful and I was very proud to deliver each one to the proper child when we had our party in the classroom. Back in those days, we exchanged valentines with each other, but the rule was that everybody had to receive a valentine. The teacher would send home a list of every child’s name in the class and whether or not you were friends with everyone, there was no exclusion allowed. I remember very carefully picking out valentines for my classmates from the box my mother bought for me, being sure to save the pretty ballerina card for Christine, who I thought was the prettiest girl in my class. And I secretly hoped that of all the valentines I would receive that day, one of them would be a ballerina. There was always one in every box of store bought valentines.     

Every year it was the same. I crossed my fingers and prayed that I would be the recipient of the ballerina card – or the princess card – or whatever card featured some character who was ultra-feminine and pretty. Somehow in my mind if that card was bestowed on me, it meant that the giver thought that I was ultra-feminine and pretty. I didn’t feel that way inside but looked for any external “evidence” I could get.

My second solid memory of Valentine’s Day was in 8^th grade when I sat at a card table set up in our dining room, listening to the Four Seasons sing Working My Way Back to You on the radio while I made valentines from red and pink construction paper, paper doilies, glitter, and stickers for my four best girl friends. There were no boys in the equation – well, except for Judy and her boy-next-door, but that didn’t quite count. He went to a different school so during our 8 - 3 school day, we could pretend he didn’t exist and Judy just belonged to us.  

In the 9^th grade, we had Mr. Greiner for social studies – global studies I think it was called. Mr. Greiner was a very tall and solid man and he was an avid sports fan. The first week of school, he gave us a current events pop quiz, as he was apt to do, and one of the questions was to name a professional basketball team. My answer? The Harlem Globetrotters. I mean, really, what did I know about basketball (or any sport, for that matter)!!! I’m sure he either laughed himself silly or just pegged me for a loser.

Mr. Greiner’s other chief characteristic was that he was mean. Physically mean.  He had a reputation for banging boys up and down the hallway against lockers. Bad boys, boys who mouthed off, or made him mad in some way.  It would happen and word about who was the latest victim passed through the halls like wild fire. Back then, teachers got away with that kind of behavior.  Even though I wasn’t a boy, and didn’t mouth off, I still feared Mr. Greiner. The sound of his booming voice made my heart do triple-flips and my knees need to sit.

What does this have to do with Valentine’s Day? Well, somehow, I think from our gym teacher who we believed was having a romance with him, my girlfriends and I found out that Mr. Greiner’s birthday was Valentine’s Day. By February, we had learned that one way to get on his good side was to produce obsessively neat and detailed maps of the countries we were studying. He would give the class a list of all the elements of a country that were to be included – rivers, lakes, mountains, anything of geological/geographical import – and order us to produce maps to scale. There seemed to be a direct correlation between the amount of time spent working on the maps in our local library and the magnitude of his grudging approval of our efforts as he handed them back in class.  We decided, my girlfriends and I, that we could further cement his approval (and perhaps a guarantee to never be the victims of the locker-bounce) by acknowledging his birthday. So on February 13 after school, we gathered in my mom’s kitchen and baked a heart-shaped birthday cake, which we frosted and decorated for Mr. Greiner, and took to school the next morning.

It was a successful undertaking. We studied his reaction carefully as we surprised him with the cake. We’d rarely seen Mr. Greiner smile, unless it was sadistically, and certainly had never heard him speak in anything but a booming and intimidating voice. But that day, he glowed a bit red from embarrassment, smiled broadly, and actually bowed to us as he said simply, “Thank you.” 

The tiger was tamed. An aggressor on your side is better than an aggressor on the opposite side.

Sugar: When a Little Isn't Enough

Within a few days, my last post, Cranky & Irritable, soared to being the #1 most read blog entry since I started writing in August. Besides the public comments, I received lots of private emails from people who are feeling the same way for a variety of reasons and a few phone calls from concerned and loving friends. Occasionally, many stressors come together in life to create an untenable situation and that just happens to be the situation for me right now.  I am resilient, and there are supporters in my corner, in all my corners, actually. The things that are causing me angst are solvable, and looked at another way, provide me with writing fodder for the future.

My funny best friend, who is feeling about as crummy as I said, “I would suggest shopping as an antidote, but that's off the list. Okay, how about a night at the casino? No? Well, then - a cookie? No you say? Well, I'm all out of ‘things to do to make me feel better.’”  She then decided I am vice-less.

Some writers suggested that craving sugar means my body needs something and that it should be listened to. In one sense, they are correct. When humans are stressed, our bodies crave carbohydrates. That’s because stress breaks down serotonin, the neurotransmitter in our brains that regulates sleep and calms nerves, among other things. Carbohydrates, of which sugar is one, trigger the body to release insulin, which in turn provokes the brain to produce more serotonin. Many anti-depressants target serotonin production.

In addition, human beings are born liking sweet. It’s one of the only foods (I use that term loosely) for which we do not have to acquire a taste, as we do with salt and bitter. One theory behind that has to do with keeping early humans alive – sweet yearnings drove us to eat fruit, which our bodies needed for optimal nutrition.¹ There are other theories as well – you can google them if you are interested.

However, it is also the case that most of us in western societies are truly addicted to refined white sugar.  Most of us just aren't aware of it. It is in almost everything we eat, in varying amounts (mostly large), in one form or another (I learned there are over 50 forms of sugar.)  Most of us eat enough of it to keep the addiction fueled, or if we start to feel irritable, we solve the problem with a little more. It starts with breakfast.  I know how much sugar I put in MY coffee to make it palatable. There is sugar in my Kashi Heart to Heart cereal. There is sugar in the soup I eat at lunch, and in the yogurt I believe is good for me. It is, after all, low fat. It’s in the ‘reduced fat’ dressing I use, albeit sparingly, on my salad at night and in the dried cranberries I sprinkle, also sparingly on that salad.

Refined sugar is an addictive substance. In separate studies conducted with rats, Lenoir, Serre, Cantin, and Ahmed, S.H. (2007) ² and Avena, Rada, and Hoebel (2008) ³ found that once conditioned to ingesting sugar, the rats in Lenoir et al.’s study preferred sugar to cocaine, and in both studies, rats exhibited signs of withdrawal, similar to opiate withdrawal, when sugar was withheld.  Sugar is refined from sugar cane, and in the refining process, anything of nutritional value is removed. We do not need sugar except to feed an addiction to it.

Like many ‘good’ girls who think we are in control, I blame myself for this addiction. If I hadn’t been so skinny all my life that it didn’t seem to matter what I put in my mouth. If I hadn’t walked to the corner market with my girlfriend every day after school in 10^th grade to stock up on Hostess cherry pies, fudgesicles, and fireballs to eat while watching Dark Shadows. If I hadn’t fallen in love with the taste of Hawaiian punch at 11 and drank it like water.  If only mom’s cookies hadn’t been so irresistibly yummy. If I didn’t think of ice cream as a major food group, supporting the rest of the food pyramid. If if if…. It’s all my fault on some days.   

One of the reasons I can't take the "give your body what it craves" advice is the issue of moderation. If I could feed my soul with one of something, it might be workable. However, I’ve learned that one (or a little) is simply insufficient. Last week at an event at work, for which there were boxed lunches, I studied the black and white cookie, wrapped in cellophane in my box. For the non-NY-ers, black and white cookies (featured in the photo at the top), are gigantic, about five inches in diameter. They are also thick and are a staple of every NYC deli and bakery. Truthfully, I don’t really like them all that much – they would not make it to my Top 10 craved desserts by a long-shot. But, if in a moment of satisfying a sweet craving, I take one bite, I will consume the whole thing. There is no saving the other half for later. It’s more like w-t-f, I might as well eat it and get it out of the way.  In the moment of studying that cookie, looking soft and delicious in its cellophane, I seriously considered tearing open the wrapping with the defense, “It was in my lunch” as if that would remove any personal responsibility.  However, I also seriously considered that this was one of those moments that I could do the normal and customary OR I could try something different. I decided to try something different, hard as it might be. I gave the cookie away.

At the end of the week, there was another event for which lunch was served. I had already consumed my soup and yogurt by the time I realized that a lunch table had been set up outside the classroom where the event took place. As I walked by, I noted that there was a tray of homemade chocolate chip cookies and brownies. I know those cookies well. There have been times that I have eaten four of them consecutively. My fingers itched and my mouth watered at the thought. I walked faster. I made it down the hall, where I sought refuge in the office of an in-the-same-boat colleague and friend. “I walked by those cookies in the hall and didn’t take one,” I reported. He looked at me guiltily, his eyes telling me the truth before his mouth did.

Ultimately, I (and others) may ‘need’ sugar because we’re so stressed and sleep deprived, and thus need the rush of serotonin that will be produced by consuming as much as possible/available. But solving those problems by ingesting sugar, I’ve decided, is not the way I want to go. I want to be kinder to my teeth and my pancreas. And for the rest of the things causing temporary angst, I will get farther opening my mouth for talking about them only.

¹ Contento, I.O. (2011). Nutrition education: Linking theory, research and practice. Studbury, MA: Jones and Bartlet Publishing.

² Lenoir, M., Serre, F., Cantin, L. & Ahmed, S.H. (2007). Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward. PLoS ONE 2(8): e698. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000698

³ Avena. N.M., Rada, P., & Hoebel B.G. (2008). Evidence for sugar addiction: Behavioral and neurochemical effects of intermittent, excessive sugar intake. Neuroscience Biobehavioral Review, 32, 20-39.