my body and me

Cross-posted at No Butts.

Let us just skip right over the yoga class I went to on Monday night (I write this on Tuesday morning). I bitched to BF for three or four minutes without taking a breath about why it made me so unhappy, but it’s just not worth complaining about here. The good news I garnered out of that trip to the studio is that I’ll be teaching at Lululemon for three of the four Saturdays in July. Woo! I love teaching there, and it almost definitely means three feedback forms. I’m also taking over the fourth Saturday of the month at the studio at 10:15, which is a class for which the nominal instructor has been a no-show twice now with no explanation. It’s a prime slot, and I’m glad I’m finally afforded one.

Teaching three or four times a week has given me a whole new relationship to my body. Yoga teaching is a vocation (or an avocation) that requires a strong and healthy body. It’s a vocation where the body is constantly used – for demonstration and for adjustment. The body is depended upon, not just to get us from here to there, or to lift and carry, or to be in one physical space for the duration of a workday. It must bend and twist and stretch and work for 60-75 minutes, and do these things well enough to keep the students safe in their imitation of your poses. It must do the difficult things you ask of it, or you will not be doing your job. I wouldn’t say that my job is as hard on my body as an athlete’s or a dancer’s job, but it’s the same idea: the body is your profession, and when the body breaks down, your ability to do your job is compromised.

This has led me to alternately push my body (during class) and try to treat it very kindly and gently (at all other times). I’m afraid of it breaking [further], and I’m almost equally afraid of it staying unbroken, because that means I have to keep punishing it this way. I’d have it a lot easier if I had larger classes, composed partially of students who know what they’re doing, because I could rely on the more experienced students to partially model the class, and wouldn’t have to do every move, every breath of the class with the students for the sake of demonstration. As it is, with three or four students per class, none of whom really know the poses or the sequences, I’m left with lots of demonstration and little rest or adjustment time. Although I love teaching, I’m tired of working so hard, and I don’t know where the breaking point is – where my edge is, the place where I say this far and no further, no more classes on my schedule, no more teaching one student per class rather than just telling them to go home, no more full sun salutes with them.

I should add that yoga is, by and large, not unsafe – my eye keeps catching on the word “punishing” as I’m revising this post, and it’s not really a word that is generally associated with yoga – but too damn much of anything is not healthy. Teaching fills me with joy and light, and I love saying “you’re welcome” to students at the end of a class, but my weary Sunday evenings, when I find myself with barely the energy to get off the couch for a snack, are my body reminding me that it’s also hard, hard work.

So while I honor and revere my body for doing such great work for me, I’m also a little afraid of and for it. My mind keeps pushing and my body keeps responding, until it’s exhausted, and even then I find it usually has a little more to give me. This is disrespectful. So I try to baby it, make it feel better with more gentle or ecstatic yoga when I practice by myself. But then I get angry at it for being too inflexible to bend all the way over, for being so weak as to have injuries that haven’t fully healed despite the energy I’ve put into that healing. More disrespect. I apologize, and I get cautious: how much have you got for me today? Can you go a little farther? Good, goooooood body. Let’s keep going. And then the cycle starts all over again with pushing and responding. I’m afraid of its limitations, which I don’t really understand fully, and I’m intimidated by its ability, which has been tested mightily and has continued to triumph. All of these emotions I feel about my own body, the crude matter that houses me, the fingers typing these words.

There’s another, only partially related set of actions and reactions that I have with my body: what’s going to happen as it ages. The spectre of aging is a huge percentage of the reason that I do yoga: I want to maintain a youthful range of motion, lubricated joints, a healthy spine (ha), good circulation, etc. I had an elderly woman in my restorative class recently who couldn’t sit on the floor comfortably, lift her own body to scoot herself forward, or stand up without help. I do not want that to happen to me, just through the normal deterioration of the body. I’m petrified of that eventuality, to be honest – like, cold sweaty nightmares kind of fear - and I want to do everything possible to keep myself safe and strong and able for as long as I have.

I’m also vain, and when I see my body changing as I get older, I feel a sense of something slipping away. I know intellectually that to everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and there’s a time for me to be 22, and a time for me to be 45, and a time for me to be 71. There are advantages and disadvantages to every time in life. But the disadvantages of age, they press on me, they bring me naked terror. I’ve been living with the disadvantages of youth (no one takes me seriously, and it’s more frustrating than I can explain in paragraphs, so this parenthetical will just have to do) for as long as I can remember. But I really don’t know if trading that in for a sagging face and unexplained aches and pains and hardening ligaments is worth it at all. I’m not sure that it is.

I’m just trying to stay in love with my body, rather than resenting it for its limitations and changes as it ages. It’s hard to do, but it’s my hope that yoga will make it easier – rather than harder, as it is now, with the cycle of teaching and its stresses.

June movies, part the second

Harper – A Paul Newman flick from 1966, one of his H movies (Hud, The Hustler, Harper, Hombre, all very successful). Part 60′s sex comedy, part gritty detective drama, and all Newman. The tone of the film changed dramatically from the first half to the second half, when things went from hep-cat talk and bikini dancing to majorly sadistic and violent, but again: there’s lots of Newman to go around, which meant I was happy. A surprisingly crappy screenplay (in my opinion) for someone who’s such a spectacular writer. Lots of interesting little performance details. Generally, two and a half stars out of five.

Broken Flowers – Jim Jarmusch directs Bill Murray. I find that I get pretty much nothing out of the indie filmmakers that broke out in the early 90′s: Jarmusch, Linklater, etc. This was no exception. The glaring, screaming point of the movie is that there are no tidy answers in real life, but I don’t need a film to tell me that. Terrific women in this film – Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, very briefly Julie Delpy and Chloe Sevigny, Tilda Swinton in a non-weird role – and some visual discussion of The Female in a way that was splendid, and a scene of grief from Bill Murray that was moving, but otherwise, it took forever and was so noncommittal as to be obtuse.

The Woods – Reasonably good psychological horror. I like movies that work hard to evoke what it’s like to be a teenage girl, and I also like stories about nature being murderous and spooky, so despite its holes (would have made a better novel), I liked this. Patricia Clarkson and Bruce Campbell both do good work, but it’s Agnes Bruckner’s movie, and she does wonderfully for being so young.

Bottle Shock – A very uneven film, clearly meant to capitalize on Sideways, about an event that really interests me: the Judgment of Paris. Polonius would call it comical-tragical-historical, but it does none of those particularly well, dipping and diving between emotions and evoking largely confusion. Alan Rickman’s performance is well-tuned if a little repetitive (there are only so many times an actor can sip wine, reorient his face to show some significant realization, and look meaningfully at the person who gave him the wine before this procedure becomes a little tired), Chris Pine is pretty good under a truly horrible wig, Bill Pullman plays well a character with an idiopathic and almost comically enormous chip on his shoulder, and the 70′s are evoked nicely. Made me absolutely desperate to spend about a month in Napa Valley, driving over golden hills and going to tastings and eating wonderful California food and going to more tastings and perhaps never coming home.

Maxed Out – A documentary about American credit and its continually increasing critical-mass quality. There was not much about it that was new to me, but for people who don’t know much about credit, it will be a serious and frightening eye-opener. Very, very sad stories in it, up to and including suicide. Recommended.

The Remains of the Day – I put this one on the Netflix list in utter certainty that I’d seen it before. I thought I’d refresh my memory; as I am female and a romantic, I love Merchant Ivory movies. After several minutes of watching it, I thought, “Hm, I don’t seem to remember this.” After half an hour, “Wow, this movie has totally evacuated my brain.” After 45, I looked it up on the internet. Turns out I’d seen Howard’s End, the other early-90′s Merchant Ivory film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Oh, gee, my bad. This one is everything a Merchant Ivory fan loves: it’s gradual, it’s elegant, it’s a period film, the performances are nuanced, the ending is tragic, the production design is lush, the setting is like a stage play: a beautifully made film, and only a small percentage of the population will not be bored out of their skulls by it.

The Fountain – I had heard that this movie was plain awful, a muddled and failed experiment. I beg to differ. It’s by no means a perfect film, nor is it even an extremely strong art film, but its message is one that’s close to my heart and its colors and visual themes are quite beautiful. There are moments of the sublime in it, which the most I can ever ask for from cinema. I find it most interesting as a contrast, though: Aronofsky made Requiem for a Dream around the same time that Christopher Nolan made Memento. Aronofsky went this way; Nolan made Bale into Batman. Ah, filmmakers and their career choices.

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – The BBC miniseries from – wait for it – 1981. The special effects etc. are really pretty decent for being from that year. The Vogons, not so much, but Jabba was not exactly a miraculous effect either. In any case, this rendition was much more faithful than the 2005 movie, but slightly less fun. And some of the actors were very plainly radio actors and not television ones. Still, not at all a bad way to spend three hours. (Adams is probably BF’s favorite author, so I hate to give this work such a lukewarm review – but I just didn’t fall in love.)

Swimming Pool – A French mystery thriller. Lots of sex, some drugs, very little rock ‘n’ roll. Overall, decent-to-middling; the plot twist in literally the last three minutes of the film made some radical change in what I just watched, but I wasn’t sure what it was. The movie contained long periods of low-level tension broken by sudden, often inexplicable behavior by the main characters; I was definitely interested enough to keep watching, but not enough to recommend it very highly. Rampling’s performance is good, with lots of interesting details, and I definitely believed her as a British fuddy-duddy with some oddnesses under the surface that are never fully revealed. Ludivine Sagnier is the latest for me in a long line of young French actresses who are thoroughly intriguing and whom I never see in another film.

Scanners – A little slow and crude, but a terrific premise, and while grody in the extreme, not as black-spirited and ugly as most of Cronenberg’s films. It also evokes the story of thalidomide, which is a tale I like to keep in mind whenever a new drug (or a new sugar substitute) comes on the market to solve all our problems. Great cult fare.

the hard sell

The doctor was a short, rotund black woman with a friendly smile, and she kept eye contact with me as she asked me why I wanted to consider sterilization.

I told her, starting with never wanting children, never melting around babies, BF and I getting engaged and talking thoroughly about the non-kids thing. I went on to describe my experience watching the womb video, and my discovery that what I had was a phobia. I told her that I’d considered getting my tubes tied for some years, but the experience with the video had made me see that I wanted to go on and do it for my own peace of mind. I said I realized that I was young and it was a hard sell, but I was certain it was what I wanted.

She understood. She really, really did. She was warm and intelligent and she told me that no, she couldn’t tie my tubes for me, not right away. She explained that although certainly, as a doctor the lawsuit thing worried her, she was more concerned as a person about whether I would be happy and healthy if she did it – more worried about whether doing this would be a life mistake for me, rather than a medical mistake for her. She cared about her patients, she explained, and she didn’t want to agonize over the decision about whether to tie my tubes when I was so young. (I believed her.) She wanted to know that it would make me feel better rather than, eventually, worse.

Her conditions were two. First, that BF would have to come in to see her with me and tell her for himself that he was okay with this decision, that I wasn’t making it alone, and that it was something he supported fully. This made good sense to me. He will soon be my husband, and tying his life to an infertile woman would be a big and perhaps difficult decision for most men.

The second was that I would have to see a head doctor to talk about my tokophobia, to make sure I was certain and healthy before I had the procedure half-cocked. She said it sounded like I had a genuine phobia, and she wanted to see if psych help would assist me in getting over it. If that was the case, then maybe the tube-tying* would be a mistake. (I think I failed to emphasize that the phobia is about 1/3 of the not wanting children thing, and that most of my mind is made up about tube-tying because I don’t want to raise children. The phobia realization just kicked me in the side with spurs to get to this appointment.) Again, her explanation here was that she was thinking of my health; if I could be happier mentally, not paralyzed with terror at the idea of pregnancy or birth, then so much the better. She wanted a doctor to sign off on the fact that this wasn’t a fly-by-night decision and that I truly understood the ramifications of this choice.

This seemed sensible to me. I was worried that she would ask for therapy because if I didn’t want kids, I must be crazy, but that didn’t seem to be the aim at all. She said at one point that she thought it was a choice, and she wasn’t going to argue with the choice not to have kids. Her concern all the way around appeared to be my health, which honestly is a refreshing change from all my experience in the medical world for the last three years or so.

She also told me that if I wasn’t willing to meet her two conditions, that was fine and she could refer me to a doctor who would be able to sterilize me right away. I thought “Oh, great, so you’ll refer me to an unethical doctor. That’s exactly what I want!” Any doctor who wouldn’t be sensibly cautious in the way she was is not a doctor I want performing a procedure with potentially bad side effects on me.

She advised me about Mirena, which is just a hormone-drenched IUD, an option I’ve known about since I became sexually active. Since it lasts five to seven years, she thought this was a good midway procedure for me to do, because I might change my mind by 35. If I didn’t, then the tube-tying could move forward. She had a good point there, which I acknowledged; I thanked her but respectfully declined. I’ve heard that the hormones in Mirena can be wonkier than the ones in the pill, even leaving aside all the horrid anecdotal side effects I’ve read about, and I don’t want something in there, the way an IUD would be. Might as well just stay on the pill for five to seven more years.

So, the next step is for me to find a head doctor who can listen to me about why I don’t want kids. I have not taken this step yet. Part of the reason is that I know I have a stressful year ahead of me, planning the wedding, and I don’t feel that it’s necessarily a great idea to be trying to find a good therapist in and amongst that. And then, moving forward, having the procedure before the wedding is a terrible idea, because if something God forbid goes wrong, the wedding will have to be moved or cancelled, and that is the absolute last thing that I want. I’m also continuing to feel the spirit of moving slowly, and taking this journey one little leg at a time: taking time to think about it, and then taking a step, and then thinking about it some more, and then taking another step. What’s my hurry? I’d like to be off the pill, but it’s not as if I’m allergic to progesterone.

And, after all, I Could Change My Mind.

To be continued…in a few months.

*I’ve continued to speak of this procedure as “tube-tying” for the sake of convenience. In fact, I haven’t fully decided between Essure and tubal ligation. Essure seems like it would be a simpler, less expensive choice (it’s doubtful that my insurance will cover either procedure, although BF’s might after we’re married), but because I’m young, there’s more potential for it to be ineffective after some years, and I’m a little worried about my potential sensitivity to the nickel in the Essure coils. I don’t really want the invasiveness and anesthesia and recovery time aspects of a tubal, and its risk of pregnancy anyway is approximately the same as Essure’s. It’s just another decision I’ll have to make in the months ahead.

white-knuckled

Part 3 of this story begins with the mundane work of me finding a GYN nearby that took my insurance and had an appointment in the near future. I was in no real rush to make the appointment, because I wanted to mull over the experience of watching the birth video, of the extraordinary talk I’d had with BF about it, and of possibly making connections between one psychological issue and another in my head. I also didn’t want to rush this decision. I tend to rush all decisions, from whether or not to buy an item at Target to whether I should get involved with BF (a rushed decision that turned out to be good), but I didn’t want to rush this one.

I got an appointment a month away. The doctor I was going to see was, ominously, named Chastity. I was very concerned about making my case to any doctor that I should be sterilized at age 28; I am a practical person and understand that it’s wholly likely that as an average patient, I’ll change my mind, and then come to blame the doctor for what was actually my decision (presumably, the doctor should have known better), and then sue the doctor, and then win a zillion dollars, and then ruin the doctor’s reputation. No doctor wants to be subject to that, and I fully understand.

I also didn’t want to hear any motherly crap about the joy of children and how I shouldn’t deny myself the best experience of my life, the one thing that unites us all as humans, what a waste it’ll be if BF and I don’t make babies, etc etc. I didn’t want a patronizing smile telling me I’d change my mind. I’ve heard it all before and it makes me furious, because you out there? You do not know my mind. You don’t know my priorities. You don’t know how sickened I am by pregnancy, how fearful, and how 18 years of raising a child sounds to me like a prison sentence in the worst jail on the planet.

A lot of women feel tokophobia almost as a fear of the unknown. They are afraid of what could happen to them during birth; they’re afraid it means death, the cutting or ripping of their labia, lots of blood, etc etc. It sounds, to them, “medieval.” They are afraid of the physically punishing side of labor and delivery. That’s not exactly how I feel; I’m repelled by the whole thing, from the moment the baby starts growing until…well, really until s/he walks out the door to go to college, but actual repulsion comes from pregnancy through birth. I think giving birth sounds like a horrible experience, one I never want to have, but worth it, for women who want children. The notion of pregnancy makes me shudder in horror, and I have no idea how I’d stand it for nine long months, knowing there was a parasite inside me. I hoped that I could make this understood, that it wasn’t just a fear of what could go wrong in the L&D ward, but a strong force propelling me in the opposite direction of anything that had to do with pregnancy or birth, that brought me to this doctor’s office.

So, a week or so ago, I went to the appointment. All day I was petrified. Tiffany had, in a case of spectacular bad timing, written a post about a prejudiced and totally unprofessional doctor she’d seen who hurt her feelings and made her cry over this very issue. I’m younger than Tiffany and haven’t raised stepchildren, so I knew it would be an even harder sell; Tiffany’s evil doctor probably would have thrown me in the street and spit on me (or perhaps knocked me out and had an orderly impregnate me). I hoped that Chastity would be kinder to me, and that I’d at least be able to get my story out before she told me that what I asked was absurd and no doctor would ever consider it.

I must have called BF three times that day to talk to him about how afraid I was. My heart was beating hard all day, with adrenalin twisting my stomach into butterflies about every twenty minutes. I was so afraid of what I’d have to say to justify myself, about how the doctor – how Chastity – would react to me. BF was patient and kind and loving, as he always is; he helped, but I was still so nervous that I couldn’t keep a thought in my head.

Upon testing, my blood pressure was fifteen points higher than normal. I waited in the examining room for the doctor, trembling. I went over and over all the points I wanted to make when I talked to her; I tested my voice to make sure I could keep it steady and calm. After ten awful minutes, she came in.

To be continued.

connected. irreversible. freakish.

When BF got home that night, I talked about the video experience with him. We are both pretty damn sure that we don’t want children, and have both been clear with one another on that point from the very beginning of our relationship. The biggest reason is that we like our lives the way they are, selfish as it may be. I don’t want to expend the time and energy and money necessary on a child for 18 years to life. The fact that I had this pregnancy/childbirth phobia factored into it, but I had always thought that if I changed my mind about the emotional and practical reasons for not wanting children, the physical feelings about having a baby would get changed as well.

What I told BF was that there was a new level of certainty for me: I was now positive that, without some kind of miraculous psychotherapy (or possibly a brain transplant), I could never give him a child of ours unless someone else carried it. I have tokophobia, and it will prevent me from having children of our own – even if I wanted them. Practically, it kind of pains me to think about this, because a child of his and my genes would be a hell of a terrific kid. I know BF would be a wonderful father. But neither of us wants to raise a child, and I think it’s clear now that I cannot carry one without serious psychological damage. I wanted to know that this was okay with him, since we’re getting married, after all, and he assured me that it was. I said of course we could adopt if we changed our minds, and he said sure.

I told him that another idea had occurred to me – that maybe this was part of the reason I’ve been having the troubles with sex that I’ve been having for the last couple of years. I have alluded to them here but not talked about them. And I still am not really ready or happy to talk about them. As I’ve said before, BF is a living, breathing human, and I don’t want to unintentionally humiliate or lessen him in the eyes of people who do not know him by talking about what a pathetic partner I am in the bedroom. Maybe people would only think he was noble, and the humiliated party would be me, but I don’t want to have to parse out potential reactions like that. Suffice it to say, 1) it is completely my fault, and 2) my life and happiness would be hugely improved if there was a way I could increase my libido a hundred-fold.

After my reaction to the video, I wondered if perhaps the pregnancy thing and the sex block were connected. Maybe I was so petrified of getting pregnant that I was afraid to have sex unless I really desperately wanted to. I knew early on in our relationship that, despite the fact that a D&C* would probably be my decision, I would have a very hard time terminating a pregnancy if it was BF’s and mine, because I know what a great kid ours would be. But until I sweated through that horrible video, I hadn’t known the depths of my fear of pregnancy itself. That fear might be driving all kinds of other machines in my personality that I’m quite unaware of.

So, the upshot of all this is, I began to consider getting my tubes tied far sooner than I’d thought. My idea all throughout  my twenties has been to start investigating it by my 30th birthday, because at that point I will be square in the middle of my childbearing years (and will have been on the pill for most of them – and I think it’s just too much progesterone to ingest for another 15 years). I thought that if I had warmed no more to the idea of children after fifteen years of fertility, it’s unlikely to happen. Neither BF nor I is a fan of irreversible sterilization, because we are both open to the possibility that we could change our minds, as unlikely as it seems. But after this new epiphany, I started to wonder if going on and having the procedure done sooner rather than later would bring me some peace of mind that I’m clearly lacking. Again, we can always adopt.

The problem becomes getting it done. I’m still in my twenties, and it’s a hard sell to a doctor who could face a lawsuit in six or seven years. Tiffany has explained that I could be subject to therapy before I’ll get a green light. That would probably not be a terrible idea, all things considered, but it’s humiliating that I can’t make my own choice.

All along, since the first time I told someone I didn’t want children and was laughingly told that I’d change my mind, I’ve felt like something of a weirdo. Finding that I have an actual mortal dread of the whole concept of carrying a child makes me feel far more freakish. I’m glad to learn that there are other women like me out there – even if it looks like most of them do want kids where I don’t. (Which is actually worse, poor gals.) Even though it was a horrible experience to watch that video, it showed me things about myself that speak of better times ahead – more certainty, more power over my life. Like so many boss battles: hard, but worth it.

To be continued.

*As a courtesy to me, please do not use the a-word in leaving comments. I don’t want to be searchable by trolls with that word.

not discomfort or apprehension – TERROR.

On May 12th we watched a video in my anatomy & physiology class. It was actually quite interesting: it was called The Womb and was made by National Geographic. Through a combination of very fancy video techniques and computer modeling, the video showed what fetal development was like from conception forward. It was directed by someone who had apparently just graduated from film school, though, because there was a lot of unnecessary artistic technique involved.

I was extremely unhappy, even before it began, about watching any video that ended in birth. I have a major problem with birth imagery; the scene in Alien when the alien bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach is one that, much as I normally love gore & guts in the movies, I cannot stand to watch. Birth imagery is frightening, disgusting, and deeply disturbing to me, in a way that no other movie gore can touch. Watching the real thing, I believe, would be far worse. I do not know where this psychology comes from, what caused me to feel this way; I only know that to keep myself from suffering a breakdown, I stay the hell away from birth imagery.

The video started, and I found the process of fertilization fascinating, the fact that out of so many millions and millions of sperm, there are only a few that can go the distance; that the cell divides so many dozens of times so quickly; that our stem cells have the capacity to become any tissue in the body – well, human bodies are miracles to me when they’re walking around and mature, and the beginning of one is even more marvelous. But then the zygote started lengthening out and looking like a tadpole, and I started feeling sick.

The weeks rolled on, and the baby got bigger, and I felt more and more unpleasant. I listened to the stages of development and what was happening to the fetus with interest, but I felt ill every time the fetus was actually shown. When it moved, I wanted to run out of the room. The mother’s belly was growing. I was feeling worse and worse. I made it just about through the second trimester, watching the clock move by millimeters, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer, class attendance points be damned, and I left, crying when I got to my car.

This was not an offensive video. It was well-made, interesting, and not anywhere near graphic. But the experience of watching it was excruciating for me. The notion that this creature was inside a woman, being nourished by what she ate, kicking the inside of her abdominal wall, just nauseated me. Even thinking about the purpose of the placenta (objectively, a fascinating organ) is horrible to me. I cannot and could not stand it.

The thing that made me cry was not how upset the video made me – which was significant, to be sure – but the idea that feeling this way made me a freak. Everyone knows that childbirth is awful, the most painful experience of a woman’s life, but the vast majority of women on the planet will go through it anyway. Many of them will be happy during pregnancy, and most of them will be happy to have the resulting child. How could I be thoroughly repelled by this entire experience – the very notion of having a child in my body – and still call myself a woman? I must be hopelessly cold-hearted and…just…not normal.

I had also thought this was something I’d outgrow. I have never in my life thought it would be fun to have kids, not even when I was a little girl and had dolls, not during my teens, not never, not nohow. When I learned about how babies were born, I thought sounded thoroughly gross, and as I grew older, those feelings didn’t exactly evolve into tender desire. I figured that if I still didn’t want children for all the other reasons I don’t want children by the time I was in my thirties, that wouldn’t be a big deal. But I’d seriously believed that my lifelong repulsion regarding pregnancy and birth would pass if I was exposed to the concepts more. Apparently not, judging by how upset I was that Wednesday.

The term for how I felt is tokophobia – a terror of pregnancy and childbirth. Although I knew that there’s a -phobia term for fear of just about everything on the planet, probably including fluffy bunnies, I was still amazed to discover on the internet that I am far from the only woman who feels this way. I’d assumed that there were probably women who discovered that childbirth really sucked, and were afraid of it after the fact, but I’ve never really believed that there were women like me, who felt utterly repulsed with no existing trauma, no prior bad experience.

To be continued.

6/25

A 100% certain way to cheer me up: put me in front of The Dick van Dyke Show. I loved it when I was a kid and it was on Nick at Nite before The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I loved just as much), but watching episodes of it now, I’m sort of amazed that it’s just as good as it was then, when I was a child and all entertainment was wonderful (cf my love of Drop Dead Fred at age 10). Even more interesting is that there’s another level of enjoyment for me now: van Dyke and Moore are both so excellent at their jobs, with such terrific chemistry and pitch-perfect timing, that’s it’s just a pleasure to watch them, no matter how good their material is (and it’s really, really, really good material). There’s more sophistication in me that I can view the show with, and I’m able to see just how capable a show it really is.

I have cleaning to do this weekend. I keep seeing more and more things around the house that I want to take to the Salvation Army, and it’s time to box up a carload and take it away. I’m not really looking forward to it.

The yoga studio where I teach has implemented a policy that makes me very happy: for every class you teach where at least one student shows up, you are paid for three students automatically. Of course if you get more than three students you get paid for as many as there are. But this means that instead of teaching $7 privates, I’ll be teaching $21 privates. It’s not more encouraging in terms of how popular my classes are, but it sure is more encouraging to deposit my check every two weeks. It makes me feel like my time is actually worth something, instead of not.

Today I felt the first niggling of worry about the notion that I’m not actively working towards something right now. I remember this feeling from last fall, after I was done with my paralegal certificate but before I started on yoga teacher training, and then again before the brief massage class and the anatomy class. It’s as if I’m wasting my time because I’m not adding more accreditations to my resume. The anatomy class was such a nightmare that I resolved to be finished with school for quite a while after I was done with it – I’m ready to do other things with my time than study and sit in class and struggle to balance my life. But without the feeling that I’m working towards something specific in the short term, I’m kind of rudderless – my life spirals out before me, years and years ahead with no goal other than to live, write books, get them published, work at a reasonably OK job, build my teaching practice, stretch out my hamstrings, and be happy with BF. I know that’s definitely not a bad list of goals, and I’m happy that those are the things I want to do with my life, but few of them can be chopped into smaller pieces and attacked as short-term accomplishments.

Of course I know that the other reason I had this sensation is that I spent 16 formative years living semester to semester. Without the structure of school, my life seems weird and unformed. Getting back to that structure when I was doing the paralegal certificate had a definite familiarity to it, familiarity that was almost comfort (except that the material was so rotten, and I was driven by a real-life annoyance to get finished as quickly as possible). I wonder if this is a challenge for many other people, or if it’s just because of my mother’s career that I have this problem. I guess if I wanted children there would be a more immediate purpose I could set my mind to, and then as the kids grew, I would mark off time by their milestones rather than my own. Without any of that, it rolls out like a long highway with no foreseeable exits.

Which brings me to my next topic, to be explored in posts that I’m going to make myself sit and write this weekend. I’m also going to attempt to start again on my Greenland novel, so there will be a lot of forced writing getting done in our house. Unless I manage to make my cleaning take all day Saturday. Don’t know which I’d like worse to do.

6/24

It is very hard on the spirit to have a supervisor who gives you visible proof every day that he does not trust your work, or your smarts, or your ability. I’ve had people nattering on about my potential for so long that I had no idea what the other side of the coin was like, and I’m here to tell you: very, very hard. It’s good that he’s only one of three that I support.

Last night I made a soup which I told BF was the culinary equivalent of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: an interesting failure. It was surprisingly flavorless, despite all the stuff that went in it, and if I decide to make it again I’m going to follow the recipe only in the loosest sense. After that, and after doing aerobics like a good girl, I ate a salad with my soup and watched The Fountain. BF got home shortly after 9, and instead of going to bed right away we sat on the sofa and talked with each other for another 90 minutes. I love my life with this man. I love having conversations with him. I love hearing his voice. I love the pure companionship that sheaths me when we’re together.

He had bad news for me, though: they’re extending the drop-dead date for the game. In theory this should be good news, because it means the company has more time to make the game good, to polish it. But it also means that there will be another 1-3 months than we’d thought there would be of six-day weeks when he gets home at 9:00. Or 10:00. Or midnight. The general feeling around the office is pretty mutinous, because the entire company has already been working six-day weeks for a few months now. A lot of these people have families with children. If you get into high finance, you expect this kind of thing, but not games, for God’s sake.

I had a whiny little fit for a few minutes when he first told me this, and then I came to my senses and actually comforted him, since, you know, he’s the one who’s working these ridiculous 70-hour weeks. I wish there was something one of us could do about it.

One of our other topics was the wedding. I put forth some fluff about managing editors and editors-in-chief, and tried to explain that I only wanted help from his mother after all the decisions had been made so as not to sound like a broken record of “No…no…no…no…no…”, and honestly I’m just so overwhelmed about the fact that I have to start actively planning the wedding next week, and I want to invent Calvin’s time machine, where he wants to go forward to 8:00 PM when his homework is already finished, but of course the problem is that instead of doing his homework at 6:00, he built a time machine to get to 8:00. This is what I’m thinking about: time machines in comic strips. I want to go forward to June 13, 2011, when all this work will already be done. But I can’t, unless I stay here and do it.

I keep trying to rationalize and tell myself that it won’t be that bad, that I only have a few major tasks: flowers, pie, decorations, invitations, officiant. The catering/bar is done by the venue, so there are only micro-choices to be made there. Simple. But then I think, no, that’s crazy, it can’t be simple, wedding planning is nationally known as a nightmare, how can I rationalize it down to being simple when it’s obviously not, I don’t know whom to call for flowers and an officiant, how will I decide what my invitations should look like, how am I going to do this from 500 miles away, WHAT IF NO ONE LIKES MY WEDDING?

I have to take the first bite of the elephant. I have to. June is almost over, the bridal season in Chautauqua will be over, it’s time to get moving. But I’d really rather sit in this cardboard box until it takes me to June 13, 2011.

no one’s offended by flowers

BF and I bought these sunflowers at the grocery store this past weekend. My parents used to raise sunflowers outside our house when I was in high school; outside of flower shops, they really get enormous, and extremely tall. I don’t remember ever seeing this fuzzy variety before, and once I got started taking pictures of them, I could have continued to do so all day.

 

 

 

I totally love my new camera.

rethought

I put up a post this morning that I have changed my mind and privatized. If you read it before I did so, or if it’s still in your feed reader (it’s still showing up in mine), do what you like with it, but know that I’m not happy it was public for a few hours. I wrote about a terrible quality of myself, and that doesn’t bother me so much, but I ended up doing more big-picture analyzing and generalizing than exploring the topic I really wanted to explore (the bad quality and its permutations and why I need to get over it), and so I don’t think I wrote about it well. I also started worrying that I was actually outright insulting people that I know are reading, and because they know I know they’re reading, they might have thought I didn’t care about their situations, and that would have been bad, especially because it’s not true.

That last reason leads me back to the reason and intentions I had for writing publicly again, and whether maybe I should go back to writing privately. If I’m still thinking about other people when writing, I’m not being thoroughly honest. But there’s a difference between writing as honestly as I can, and barreling ahead without thought to anyone else around me. Like exceeding the speed limit a little bit vs. going 75 in a school zone.

With this in mind, I’m still rolling over whether it’s even a good idea to talk about last week’s appointment, what it was about and what I’m thinking about it, because I’m still trying to figure out how much is honesty, how much is stepping on other people’s opinions and banging into their painful experiences without consideration, and how much is simply too much. Since there are so few comments lately, I’m not sure about any of this; would I start getting hate mail from people I had no idea were reading? Would I get nothing and later learn that was a chilly silence rather than a neutral one?

I also want to start writing a series of unsent letters to my father – things I want and need to say but will not say to him. But every time I open up a window to begin one of these, I think of Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 saying “Ohh, who’d care?” I also hear the voice of my ex-fiance saying “For God’s sake, stop with this daddy issues bullshit” as I cried in his living room. The first admonishment serves for why I shouldn’t make it public, the second for why I should just move on. The more I write about it the more I feel like a brat – the more I play into his judgment of me. It’s all wrapped up together and very challenging to unravel to discover what’s true about me.