Category Archives: Being Human

Esse-a-Go-Go: The Regret Story

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Regret: to think of with a sense of loss.

The above definition is how an online dictionary defines “regret,” but when I think about my own definition and took a quick poll, that doesn’t even come close.

Today’s story is about the one thing to date that I can’t shake as a personal regret. That doesn’t mean don’t I wish I’d done some things differently in the moment, it simply means this event is the only thing that lands squarely in how I define, “regret.”  That said, I honestly wasn’t sure how to define it in words but merely in emotion until I read this from a friend of mine yesterday and realized, that’s it, or as close as I’ve ever been able to come to it.

“A regret is something you did or said when you KNEW you shouldn’t do or say it at the time & you bullheadedly went ahead & did it anyway & have since seen the anguish it caused someone else or yourself. If you really did or said what you believed to be best & it just didn’t turn out well, I don’t think that is regret-worthy.”

This is not a happy story, but it is one that has haunted me for 3 decades. Perhaps ultimately that is my definition of regret, an unabated haunting.

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Having regrets is a hobby for some people. I never cease to be amazed by the number of people I know or encounter who want to have lengthy conversations about things they’ve done they wished they hadn’t — or vice versa — and all of the attending angst.  I’d say I saw the greatest lumping together of American women’s most popular woes on a recent Good Housekeeping cover, something along the lines of “Valerie Bertinelli shares her weight struggles, what she learned from her failed marriage, and her biggest regret.”

How uplifting.

Suffice it to say, I am done with guilt and regret. I actually gave up guilt as a practice many years ago, and have never looked back. It became obviously self-important, neurotic, and useless. It simply had to go.

Regret has been a harder nut to crack. If I am honest, I do have a handful of things I wish I’d done differently in my life, but when push comes to shove I can’t say I would really want things to be other than what they are now. There is only one thing, one thing only that I truly regret.  I’ve only ever told my husband this story, and now I’m going to unburden myself to you, dear reader. My hope is that by telling this story I might make things different for someone else.  It is much too late to make things different for Alice.

Alice was a beautiful young girl at Camp Virgil Tate where I was a counselor for 4-H Kanawha County Camp one summer in the mid-1980s.  She and her brother were both campers that week, and even back then I recognized in them a fragility under their good looks and strong sibling bond.  Knowing what I know now about what so many kids experience growing up, I shudder to think what they might have left at home to come to county camp.

Alice’s demeanor was one of someone who had been beaten and psychologically abused. Because I was not much older than she was, and because at that point in my own life I had never encountered such a terrible reality, I didn’t understand her behavior. She was needy, and shy, and desperately wanted to be liked, but she did weird things. She clung to her brother when other kids wanted her to socialize with them, and though she was in her early teens (I think), she carried a baby doll everywhere she went. She slept with the doll, changed the doll’s clothes, even introduced the doll as her friend.

I was in charge of the cabin where Alice and a group of other girls were housed for a week that June. I knew the other girls were snickering about Alice’s insecurity and rolling their eyes over the baby doll, but I didn’t think there was trouble brewing.

I was wrong.

One morning I heard peals of laughter coming from the community bathroom.  ”Come in here, Elizabeth, you have to see this. Oh my God, this is hilarious!”  A lot of pranks at camp were funny and good-natured, in fact I would say all of the ones I ever saw were that way, with the exception of this one.

I can still see it. My heart is pounding right now as I write this, and I feel sick to my stomach.

I walked into to bathroom to see Alice standing alone, crying, with a circle of girls around her laughing. She was trying to reach something, and the others would not help her. The others had hanged her baby doll naked from a shower curtain. Hanged as in noose around her neck, hanged. They tortured and killed the only friend Alice had at camp with the exception of her brother, and then they laughed in her face as she cried for help.

I remember being frozen. It was one of those terrible moments when your mind and your body refuse to connect. It felt like an eternity before I could move or speak. I told everyone but Alice to get out. I reached up to save the doll, and then put it in her arms. I think I told her I was sorry that  happened, but I don’t know that I did. My memory is that I wanted the whole thing to go away as quickly as possible.

I believe the one safe place that child had that summer was violated, and that I could have done more to prevent it from happening. I could have done more to reprimand the girls who did this awful thing. I could have done more to comfort Alice, but I didn’t. I moved on. I wanted it to never have happened, and I acted like it never did.

Without going into the weeds, I’m a middle-aged person, and I’ve dropped the ball a few times in my life. I don’t care who you are, if you live long enough and are honest with yourself, you know you’ve done or not done things that might count as regrets. After all these years, the way I failed Alice is the only thing I define as a regret in my life. Because that bar is so high — or low — I have never been able to define anything else as a regret.

I knew she needed a friend, someone who would do more than just take the doll down. I knew those other girls needed to be held accountable for what they did. I analyze this now because when I read about all of the bullying episodes nationwide, there is this same theme. Others are there, others are aware, but they do not get involved at any meaningful level. Why? My experience suggests that one reason may be that when you actually witness this kind of psychological violence against another person, it is truly frightening. I think if you have never seen it in action, it is hard to understand its power. It isolates and harms the direct victim, and it paralyzes the witness (often) with a cloud of desperation to make it stop. Talking about it seems to keep it alive.

Of course that’s just how it seems. How it is is that not talking about it keeps it alive. It would be convenient to say, “I know that now,” but I knew that then. I didn’t do what I should have done, and what I knew was required.

I don’t know why this event out of hundreds of life events haunts me the way it does. If there is an afterlife, my vision is that I will encounter a healed and whole Alice, and that she will forgive me.

The President and the Children: Don’t Think First, Just Feel. Then Think.

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There are pictures, and then there are photographs. And then photographs evolve to portraits, and portraits speak to identity and soul in ways that are irrefutable and powerful.

With every President of the United States, there emerges a portrait that speaks to the American people.  That portrait, that eternal visual of identity and soul, enters our collective consciousness and stays there.  It tells us who our President is, but also who we want and need him to be.

Marvin Eugene Smith recently shared this photograph of President Barack Obama on Faceboook, and added these personal thoughts:

See? We need more interaction like this between youth and their “stars.” Simple little gestures like this last a lifetime. Back in the day it was quite common. I’ve seen pics of Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sammy Davis, the Temptations, Count Basie and many others doing the same exact thing. No need for bodyguards to brush the young people aside who genuinely love you.

Mr. Smith is an African American man living in Chicago, and the series of social media connections that brought the President’s photo to his attention and then to a friend and then to me was made up of other African American men.  Some of you reading this immediately will jump on the defensive and say it doesn’t matter that black men see a portrait here, but you would be wrong.  Yes, anyone can identify with this image (I do), but the fact that it resonates and brings to mind other African American men and women who became children’s role models and heroes is critically important.

Look at those children.  Look at that man. Let yourself feel what it means, what it can mean, that magic moment of connection that clearly flows both ways across the fence.  He understands what they don’t yet, that who they dream they can become and how fiercely they believe in that vision is the lifeblood of this nation.  They just touched a man who leads the free world and who, figuratively, could be their father, their uncle, their brother, themselves.

As a mother and a child advocate, I now call this my portrait of Barack Obama.

(We do not all share the same portrait as “The One” that explained things to us about who the person was or is, and how his individual identity becomes part of our national identity. But we all know “our” image when we see it.  Following are some of my favorites, what are some of yours, and why?)

This is my top Kennedy portrait (I like this one because of the youthful energy and optimism, as well as the Jackie element in the bottom corner): 

This is my top Lincoln portrait, or others showing him literally in the battlefields of the Civil War (though frankly, any great photograph of that awesome craggy face works, too):

The pain here in President Johnson speaks to me about the agony of Vietnam, and the grief of a man who wanted to lead domestic policy and found himself drawn into an entirely other world.

The Moment of Commitment

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“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”

From The Goethe Society of North America,and I’m still not sure if Goethe said it, but it’s outstanding.  Image credit: Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World.

Scarletts and Melanies

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A friend of mine recently mused, “In this life there are Scarletts, and there are Melanies.” What followed was the predictable rush of women to assert that they were Scarletts, they had gumption, they were independent, and one may fairly assume that they were captivatingly gorgeous as well……..

But my friend and I got into a side conversation about Miss Melly, a character who as I grow older I find all the more incredible and in fact the true heroine of Gone with the Wind. (I noticed right away that my friend never judged one or the other, but it was immediately assumed she was lifting up Scarlett as cooler and more preferable.)

If you recall, Melanie’s portrayal as “mealy mouthed” and basically a big loser comes only from Scarlett, her chief rival for Ashley Wilkes’ love. If you discount Scarlett’s obvious bias against her and just judge her on the merits of her actions and her approach to life, she is a complete rock star.

She is incredibly kind. She never has a bad word to say about anyone, and in fact rushes to Scarlett’s public defense, calling her “sister,” when anyone else would have let her crumble under the much-deserved public scorn she heaps upon herself. She knocks out a Civil War childbirth with no medical help. She is able to talk Rhett, rendered incoherent and insane with grief, off the proverbial ledge when his child dies. I have some vague recollection of her dragging a sword to Scarlett’s rescue when she can barely walk herself. There is more, but these are my favorite memories of Miss Melly in Gone With the Wind…….

I don’t need to tell you what a repulsive person Scarlett O’Hara is. Yes, she is stubborn. She is a fighter and a survivor. But she wouldn’t know love or friendship if they slapped her in the face, and unless someone is serving her in the manner she wants to be served and worshipped, she has no use for them.

So yes, I think I might want a Scarlett if I need someone to do absolutely anything necessary to never be hungry again. But I want a Melanie beside me in life for the long haul.

Thankfully, I have many.

This post first appeared on the original Esse Diem on October 30, 2009.  I am grateful to my friend Em B who recently asked, “Are you a Ginger or a Mary Ann?”  It reminded me that I’ve always wanted to re-post this here. 

“Divorce,” and Other Words I Wasn’t Allowed to Say by Jennifer Kayrouz

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Jennifer moved to West Virginia just prior to starting 8th Grade. Some people thought that her family moved to West Virginia on a dare.  That was over 22 years ago and she now claims she would give her left pinky toe to be considered a West Virginian by her hillbilly peers.  She went off to college once or twice, but always happily landed right back in Charleston. She now works for the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and loves most minutes of it, getting to travel and constantly learning and being challenged. She lives in Kanawha City with her husband, who, while being 7 years younger is still decades more mature and light-years ahead of her in his intellectual and emotional capacity. They are delighted to be the parents of one precocious 4-year-old girl.

Note:  Jennifer worked for a period of months to tell her story in a way that is honest, transparent, and also respectful of everyone involved.  Finding that balance in a story of a childhood where your family is coming apart at the seams is not an easy thing.  I have tremendous admiration for Jennifer and for her difficult work in this effort.  When I read the final version of the essay, I could feel it all just “click.”  As I told her, Damn, girl.  You nailed it!  Well done.

“Divorce,” and Other Words I Wasn’t Allowed to Say

Childhood memories are very polarized. It’s easy to recall that epic Christmas where you got an entire Barbie settlement and to romanticize the moments of your youth, but the bad memories are always there to keep you honest.

The memories I have of our life on 1062 Cloverbrook are certainly some of the best and definitely many of the worst in my life. There were five of us in that house and I can make a fair assumption that all five have a different take on that time in our lives. With every thimble-full of torrential screaming about a dirty bedroom or why our dog fucked up the afternoon, there was a sturdy bucket pouring over its sides with silliness watching a movie as a family and genuine joy at racing down the rapids at New Braunfels. This strange dichotomy was my norm and I began to anticipate the storms because I knew the sun was never warmer than after the rain. There was always a bit of peace that gave some reprieve from whatever caused all the commotion to begin with.

It was within this space between the bad and the after that I seem to remember the most.

My memories are painted all the more surreal because we were living in San Antonio, Texas. If you have never been to Texas, go.  Take your kids. Texas is a circus-like playground. Everyone is a character and life really is bigger and brighter in The Lone Star State. Fireworks were legal (everything was legal in 1982) and beer is as acceptable a beverage at 10 AM as juice or coffee. For the record, my dad drank Busch and Shiner beers.  The weekends in southeast Texas are even more fun. There was always something to do. Always some county festival to conquer or flea market to troll for colored glass. I learned to swim in Medina Lake and to pick strawberries in Poteet. To my childhood eyes, it seemed like it was always the 4th of July; there were just so many people around.

We were a popular family. We had a big yard and there was some type of hutch out back where my brother raised rabbits or guinea pigs.  I took ballet lessons, joined and quit the Girl Scouts before I was ever graduated up from a Brownie, and I was one of the first kids on my street with an Atari gaming system. My older brother was a great athlete and my younger sister was so cute she barely had to speak with all the people falling over themselves to get her to giggle.

My mom had cultivated a beautiful rose garden and we grew vegetables in our back yard. By the time I was eight or nine years old, I could name at least fifteen different types of rose bushes and describe to you their color. I can’t underscore enough the amazing images I have of lush yellow and peach rose petals all over my yard or the way we always had fresh cut flowers on our table. It was as if Georgia O’Keefe had spent time in our yard. What I wouldn’t give now to look at a picture of our rose garden…. It is one of my deepest and happiest visual memories. I can now just barely remember the endless and escalating bickering over how much it cost, who pulled who’s back out digging the flower beds, and who was being ignored for that damned rose garden.

To be blunt, my parents did not agree on much. I am not quite certain about what brought them together in 1973, but I imagine it was because they were both very bright, attractive, and naturally drew others to themselves. In those two ways, they were perfectly matched — my dad, the funny and charming tall drink of water you start chatting with at a party and come to realize that he is brilliant and knows the entire history of everything, and my mom a stunning beauty who  gave off mystery and intellect as easily as breathing. Sadly, they differed in the basics of raising kids, growing a marriage and most everything else.

I don’t want to demonize either of them. I am a parent now and I know that ‘the best I can do’ varies by 100 degrees from day to day. I truly believe that they were doing the best they could with the skills they had at the time. This was pre-Oprah, pre-Internet and pre-other people can poke around in your family’s business. Folks didn’t pour their wash water into the streets like we do now and certainly, if you caught a whiff, you smiled and pretended not to notice. Both of my parents grew up in Catholic families, went to Catholic schools, and were taught the fundamentals of life from immigrant parents who possessed a sharp focus on a narrow line of tolerable behaviors. Mom and Dad were each very intelligent, and each was exhausted emotionally from being themselves and our parents.

You aren’t supposed to see your parents as people. You are always supposed to gaze upon them in their exalted station as safe-keeper to all in their manor. They are not supposed to be the ones who scare the children. I watched my mom stab my dad in the back with a Bic pen over what seemed like folly at the time (she laughs at this now as if it were all an inside joke). I was often so afraid of what miserable disgusted venom might spew out of my dad’s mouth over the smallest of childhood indiscretions that I had almost no fear of what would happen when I really screwed up. They played hard and they fought with equal measure. As I spend time with my seven-year-old self now, I see them as I would see my own peers. The year I turned seven years old, Mom was thirty-five and Dad was thirty-three, both younger than I am as I write this. I see their flaws as people, not as my parents. It has made all of this much easier to swallow now that I know how easy it is for any of us to fall off that cliff. I don’t necessarily blame either of them; I just wish they had been better at hiding it.

For so many of my adult years, I didn’t know all this and I wished that I hadn’t been partner to their marital demise. I know it wouldn’t change the outcomes if I could process all that detail. Mostly, I just don’t want to remember the cruel words that my parents said to each other, the acts of a marriage breaking down, and the three kids who got flung into the abyss like General Zod into The Phantom Zone. I watch the three of us kids floating in space trapped in our panes of glass; none of us knowing how to escape or stop from shattering into pieces. We aren’t those kids any more and none of us ever want to be again.

If you were to ask me 15 years ago to paint my story, it would look very different from how it does now. Fifteen years ago I was angry and self-serving and most of all, self-righteous. I blamed everything on those two people and how they shaped my life. Everything from my fear of commitment all the way down to my student loan debt was because of Mom and Dad. Deep down, I harbored a grudge so fierce that my mouth tasted like metal and salt when I thought of any of it. In an ever more twisted angle, I relished this station and used it to draw my power.

Sadly, in my twenties, I was stupid and short-sighted enough to believe it was working. Thankfully as my youthful duties began to wind down, I began to gain perspective on life in general and how I came to be standing at that point. I wouldn’t characterize it as an epiphany (although it was certainly as powerful) as much as a slow and steady ascent towards understanding. Finally, I was able to look in the mirror and see my dad. When I saw this, it made me want him back in my life. So I started the wheels in motion to enter his world and make a big space in mine for him. As I got to know him as the adult I had become I realized that the best parts of me come from him. Amid many other traits, his sense of humor and silliness are painted all over me, not to mention my sense of right versus wrong and honor among men. I see it plain as the nose (also from Dad) on my face and I relish these parts.

While I had always remained close to Mom, when I looked in the mirror I thought I saw my defenses against becoming her molding my face and heart. I was wrong. Every woman eventually turns into her mother; mine is wonderfully complex and gets funnier every year. The logical and intellectual side of me is the exact same shade as hers. We are both smart enough to bend our reality and I am grateful each day for a tiny dose of her sex appeal. I am stubborn and irrational and just wise enough to get away with it. I have her to thank for that. It serves me well still. I am the perfect recipe of the two people that made me and I am delighted for it.

All in all, I think this is a story of redemption. For twenty years I thought it was my parents who needed to surrender, to apologize, and to beg forgiveness. I always expected heart-felt letters and poetic lectures about why all of that stuff happened. For a lot of it, I just needed an explanation. The daughter needed to know how certain events came to be even if I understood that I would never be able to reconcile them in my head. I thought my dad needed to make reparations to my mom for his part and she needed to mend the ties to me and my brother and sister for how she reacted and lived out the rest of her young life. It was a neat package of justice I held and I thought I should be the one to deliver us all into a full emotional recovery.

None of that happened.

As with everything else ironic in my life, the change and redemption happened to me. I s-l-o-w-l-y released my anger, fear, guilt and contempt and it was I who ultimately was set free. My heart is the one that was pushed open and flooded with love — love for my family and forgiveness for myself. All those years I thought I needed to forgive my parents and be given an apology for my sufferings. They never owed me either.  I owe a great deal to them.

Even though I wouldn’t want to live through any of it again, I have turned out to be a complex and multi-faceted woman with lots to offer to my partner and my community. On some days, I am downright brilliant and funny. Had I been born under some other moon to some other couple, I fear the under-bloomed yeast of my white bread existence. Because I am who I am, however, I will weather life’s rains better than most. I even found my own happily ever after and started my own little messed up family. My husband is very much like my dad and we have a little girl who eerily resembles the four-year-old me.  She was lucky enough to get me as her mother.

God help her be strong – she will need all the faith and patience she can get.

Our Mothers, Farewells, and The Departed

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Ada was the biological mother of three of my friends, but it was not until she died  recently that I truly knew she was my mother, too.

I spent most of my late adolescence in her world.  I attended 4-H club meetings in her basement, shared overnights with her daughter, rode in her panel van to Jackson’s Mill and Camp Virgil Tate, ate in her kitchen, played ball in her front yard, ran up and down the basketball court at her church, and even hid out in her new basement bathroom the night before I was married.

Ada was synonymous with comfort and a place called home.

She had incredibly good posture.  I wish even in my tallest, straightest moments I could stand like she did.  Her crystal blue eyes always stayed connected to mine when we spoke; in fact, at her memorial service I shared my belief that talking to her was like being in a tractor beam, and the comment received rolls of laughter in recognition.  Apparently I was not the only  person upon whom she focused her full attention when talking and listening.

Trying to pin down her most memorable trait, for me it was this utter focus in conversation.  While that may not sound particularly special at first, consider how many people in your life you can say always — always — give you their full attention when you are together.  She had a husband who was significantly older than she was, and who needed her towards the end of his life as much if not more than her three children needed her in their own growing up, yet she never seemed lacking in energy and interest in others.

To see Ada was to feel joy.  I remember hundreds of times I saw her.  Sometimes it was unexpected, like in the grocery store.  Other times it was entirely anticipated as she opened the front door to her home and her face lit up as she exclaimed, “Liz!  Come on in, it’s so good to see you!”  Whether at her front door or in the bread aisle, her presence was consistent and loving.  She was what I think everyone dreams of, sometimes even subconsciously, when they dream of a mother.  She was one of her parents’ eleven children.  As a middle arrival, maybe that is where she learned the skill of managing younger and older people equally well.

This past weekend I drove up to her house for the first time since her death.  It was all routine until my car reached the first familiar bend in the road that for thirty years led me to the place Ada raised her family, extended and otherwise.  My chest felt oddly hollow and I took a moment to make sure my heart was still beating.  I took the next turn, and the car rose up the hill which would crest in the homestead I sought.  There was that strange chest sensation again as I reached the driveway and my eyes rested on the place where Ada no longer was and never would be again.

The house is empty, save for a few remaining personal things, their destination and ultimate dispensation to be determined by Ada’s children.  It is a strange place to me now, this domestic structure that for decades held some of the happiest times in my life.  I’m not sure what I expected, but I think it was to feel some of Ada still in the house.  The truth is, I didn’t feel her there at all.  I felt very sad, and I began to process and manage some of the larger grief I feel beyond the acute pain from the event of her death.

When a person and the home they built disappears in a physical sense, it is a heavy thing.  Forced to deal with this passing, I had clarity about Ada and all that she shared with me as an anchor in my own psychic landscape.  I remember a similar feeling when my beloved Uncle Guy died, a physical feeling of loss, like a gaping wound was echoing a cold wind on aching walls.  The deep desire to put my hands on my lost mother, to feel her and see her and hear her again, is still intense.

I know from losing my uncle that the ache will diminish but never fully go away.  When Ada died, one mysterious term kept popping into my head: “The departed.”  While I am not Catholic, I am familiar with the concept of the departed from the prayer that reads,

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.  May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

The spiritual concept of a soul having escaped the limits of what we know is, for me, spooky and compelling.  Something about a person’s essence having made an exit with a sense of other-worldly destination rings true in Ada’s unexpected and heartbreaking death.  She departed.  She is somewhere else now.  I can’t see this place, or touch her there or hear her voice, but I feel strongly she is in a new home, where she is greeted — always — with complete love and focus.

As we like to say in Christian parlance, “The tomb is empty.”  That is a metaphor, but it is also reality.  I love you, Mrs. K.  Thank you for everything.  You shaped my life, and I will never forget you.

Image credit: Mary Cassatt

I Want to be Remembered by Susanne Farrell Smith

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I Want to be Remembered

In this post, Susanne Farrell Smith writes and remembers the words of her second grade students.  Susanne’s blog, In Search of Memory, chronicles her attempts “to excavate lost childhood memories.”

In a slow but steady return to teaching, I’m having fun digging through my old files. Unearthed today in the literacy folder, this list (formatted in fancy font for our bulletin board) of ways that my second-grade boys finished the sentence, “I want to be remembered…”

I want to be remembered …

For not making any mistakes in my first piano recital.

For my artwork. 

For helping my team win the Cup. 

For being a messy tie boy. 

For all the goals I blocked at Field Day. 

For making it to the silver badge in France.

For being able to hit a baseball really far. 

For helping the poor every day. 

For my drawings.

For giving someone on the street $5. 

For sitting on the puck from an opponent and helping win the game in hockey. 

For saving my team when we were losing.

For getting all the math challenges right in the Math Olympics. 

For being a great swimmer.

For helping to keep peace.

For being kind and playing with my classmates. 

Susanne concludes:  ”Funny, I remember each and every one of them, now in eighth grade, for these things (among a kabillion others). I remember the academic successes, sports triumphs. I remember very very well the kindness and the pride in the arts. And I remember that tie. That ice-cream-dipped, glue-smeared, always-open tie worn by a boy utterly enamored with the world.”

Special thanks to my friend Jack Hoblitzell for connecting me with Susanne’s blog.

Check Your Bags. And I Love You.

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I’m starting to realize I actually am not opposed to this “getting older” thing.  This past weekend was my 25th high school reunion, and it was simply marvelous.

I remember being 18 years old and looking at people in their 40s and feeling so sad for them.  Their lives were over.  They had to work, most of them had children who were wearing them out, they had no idea how to dress properly and they were getting kind of grey and wrinkly.  Not me!  I was the opposite of all of that, and I could see them looking at me with some envy.  I believed I was in the best place in the world, and they were on the down slope to nowhere.

The thing is, when you are young, you can only look at things you’ve never been and guess what they are.  You take your experience, which is profoundly limited, and you make your best guess.  You don’t know what it’s like to get older.  But when you are older, ahh…….now I can see.  You can look back at your early years with knowledge.  That look of envy?  Not exactly.  It’s the look of the bittersweet happiness you feel when you think of who you were back then, and the irreplaceable warmth of gratitude for who you are now because of it.

In essence, it’s all good.

This reunion was unlike any previous event for the Class of 1986.  It was the great equalizer.  For the first time, some of our real heroes are dead.  We’ve lost classmates, too.  Some of us are taking our children to tour college campuses, while others are experiencing the late-blooming joy of new love and a baby.  We’re all over the map in some senses, and yet very connected in others.

A couple of nights before the reunion, I kept hearing dialogue from The Big Chill.  William Hurt’s character Nick is stoned and fighting with his old friends.  The primary source of the fight is repressed emotions about a mutual friend’s suicide.   At one point Nick snaps to Tom Berenger’s character Sam, “You’re wrong.  You don’t know me.  A long time ago we knew each other for a very short period.  It was easy back then.  You don’t know anything about me.  It’s only out here in the real world where things get tough.”

Sam is angry but he tells his friend, “You’re wrong.  I know I loved you and everyone here, and I’m not going to p*** that away because you’re higher than a kite.  I’ll go on believing that until I die.”

This scene has been lodged in my memory since I first saw the film.  It’s the ageless question of how “real” the friendships of very young classmates can actually be, especially when they remain under the glass of a nostalgic past.  I knew how I felt about my old friends, but I was anxious about what our time together would really show.

It didn’t take long to find out.

I noticed a new vibe at this reunion, one that said all bags had been checked before boarding the weekend.  One lovely consequence of getting older is that we are just  too weary to lug around all of the issues we dragged along to the previous reunions.  Half of us have experienced at least one divorce.  Some of us have lost siblings or children to illness or accident.  Many of us have deceased parents.  We’ve had career crashes, sickness, parenting fails, pounds on and pounds off, and severed relationships with people we once loved.  We all know it now.  No one has missed these experiences entirely, and if they claim they have, well, they are not telling the truth.

This time, we all came to the reunion to tell the truth.

I’m gay.  I’m a single parent.  I’m really sick.  I’m unemployed.  I’ve killed people.  I’ve delivered babies.  I’m afraid everyone will realize I was never a very good friend.  I married someone I didn’t love.  I’ve never been happier or more sure of myself.  I’m worried about my parents.  I’ve turned to God.  I’ve left the church.  I’m an alcoholic.  I fight terrorists.  I fight with my kids.  I finally know what I’m doing.  I have no idea what I’m doing.

My friend posted this on his Facebook page today:  ”With the passage of twenty-five years, most of the people with whom I went to high school had turned into vague mythical shadows in the depths of my mind. What a pleasant surprise to find that the people with whom I was friends are still wonderful, and the people I didn’t know well are kind and thoughtful adults. The class of ’86 rules!!!”

Rules indeed.  Now, pass the aspirin and my cane.  I need to rest up for the 30th……you people wore me out.  And I still really love you.

Rage and Reason: It’s Time to Talk

Posted on
12

I’ve been avoiding writing about some very important topics well within the realm of this blog for a long time.  Why?  Because every time I start to put the words down, I have the most sickening feeling inside.  Tears turn into sulfuric acid and when I try not to let them out they drip into my stomach and rip at my guts.

I keep thinking surely it’s about to stop.  Someone is going to stop it.  But no one is stopping it, it is only ramping up into a greater frenzy.  These are a few headlines and signs that told me I have to write about this:

I am not about to stand up for prostitution.  I am not one of those people who views it like the overly-made up saloon workers from Gunsmoke just exercising their right to operate an atypical business.  If that is your image of prostitution, you need a wake up call.  Read the link to the last bullet point above, and you will have a nauseating insight into what prostitution is today.  If you think joking about pimps is funny, you have no idea what you are talking about.  None.

It’s past time for some frank talk about denial.  Men receive and appear to deserve the preponderance of blame for what is happening all around us, but no one is immune.  Plenty of women confess to using Internet pornography and there have been some high profile stories that became criminal cases of women putting their own children on the Internet and selling them to strangers for sex.

This is not about whether or not using pornography to manage your sex life is right or wrong.  That is a very complicated subject beyond this blog with so many twists and turns one could devote his or her entire life to it and never be done.  This is about facing the consequences of going down this road and dealing with it.

Being fascinated with looking at other people naked is pretty much ancient news.  It’s human, it’s normal, it’s no big deal.  Looking at other people having sex, while it’s not for everyone, is also something that is an established attraction for many human beings.  So far, nothing is really way out there, right?  It used to be that this interest had a fairly limited range of opportunity that kept it in check, so becoming obsessed with it was unlikely.  It had a place, that place was limited, and while it was omnipresent as a lurking interest it was a controlled if powerful instinct.

Enter the Internet.

What if a common but heretofore controlled human instinct were entirely unleashed in terms of access and frequency?  And what if that instinct could be harnessed to fuel an insatiable appetite that would drive an economic engine so powerful and lucrative that it would be limited only by your imagination and willingness to take new risks?

Wonder no more.  Welcome to the brave new world of online sex for money.

The “brain on sex” has been compared by neurologists to the brain on cocaine.  We are due for a serious conversation about what is happening to people’s minds in this new equation.  People on cocaine are not renowned for their thoughtful philanthropy and intimate relationships.  They are marked by paranoia, aggression, and singular focus on their addiction, usually to the exclusion of any concern for or awareness of the destruction they are wreaking on themselves and others.

The sex we are dealing with here is not Hugh Hefner’s sex.  There are no cute bunny ears and people over 18 years of age.  Frankly, one of the reasons I have not written about this is I do not really want to get into it.  It’s too upsetting.  As generally as possible I will say that I’m not sure I can even call it sex.  It is pornography.  It is self-gratification by the violent degradation of and dominance over, and in some cases killing of, submissive others.  And there is no more available “submissive other” than a child.

Right about now, you are thinking, whoa, slow down there lady.  I just pleasure to “porn.”  I’m not hurting anyone.  You are crazy.

What is crazy is the refusal to step out of a compartmentalized way of thinking in order to see what is as plain as day.  We aren’t just on the slippery slope, we are on a slope covered in grease wearing Olympic skis.

There is an old joke, “Everyone who drives faster than I do is a maniac, and everyone who drives slower than I do is an idiot.”  That attitude applies in many areas of life, not just driving.  We all look to our own “normal” to judge other people’s behavior.  But the trouble with this is that there will always be drivers going faster and slower than you do.  Don’t look to the outlying extremes, just look at yourself.

Believe me when I say, I am a typical person.  I am no better than anyone else and I am keenly aware of that.  Because I have lived in denial at certain points in my life, I recognize its reliable hallmarks easily in others.  They look something like this:

  • I can’t tell my partner about that because he/she would freak out.
  • I’m not doing anything wrong, no one is getting hurt.
  • It’s not illegal, so leave me alone.
  • What I do is my business.
  • I wish everyone would stop being so judgmental and irrational.

My call today is for all of us to step outside of the bubble and look critically at the roles we have in why selling children on the Internet is now an everyday occurrence — and by officers of the court at that.  We need to be more open about how we have allowed a generally safe and productive human interest to be twisted into a cash machine that grinds up marriages, partnerships, careers, and children’s lives.  It starts with doing one of the most difficult things to do — admitting that our choices are not necessarily benign just because we didn’t intend to hurt anyone.

We need to embrace the reality that what we intend to do really has nothing to do with what is happening.  You can be religious, or atheist, or agnostic about it, but we need to stop talking about intentions and start talking about results.  The result of what is going on now is an utter nightmare barreling along at an alarming rate.  It is screaming in the headlines.

Will we listen?

Love & Sex, Sideways

Posted on
11

I have no clue why a member of the U.S. Congress thought it would be cute to put a picture of his private parts on Twitter.

Absolutely no clue.

The fact that he is married (and less than a year at that) makes it extra unfortunate, but he could be single and I would still be like a deer-in-headlights over his decision.

I would be, that is, if I had not remembered Thomas Haden Church in Sideways.

Recalling Church’s character Jack Cole helped me at least begin to process what could be at the heart of the craziness.  Jack is an actor losing his edge in his career.  His fiancée Christine is elegant, beautiful, intelligent, wealthy, and she loves him.  Much of the movie Sideways takes us on a ride with Jack and his friend Miles Raymond as Jack roams the countryside looking to have sex with anything in a skirt.  Jack seems at first to be completely panicked about the expectation that he will be with one woman for the rest of his life, and he can’t get busy with random women fast enough.  After all, the clock is ticking, and his wedding day is right around the corner.

It’s when Jack picks up a star-struck waitress at a franchise steak house it begins to dawn that he’s not really sowing his wild oats.  He’s looking for someone to whom he can feel superior.  He does not feel worthy of Christine, and when he loses their custom wedding rings whilst being chased by the waitress’ husband, he breaks down.  Jack has been arrogant and dismissive of his fiancée up to this point, but at the prospect of losing her his world collapses.  We see a man walled-in by insecurity and self-doubt.  Only when he lies about who he is and engages women who respond to his artificial persona does he feel in control.

Jack’s true panic about getting married is that one day Christine will realize who he actually is and that she does not love him.  Through his tears be begs Miles for help finding the rings, “I can’t lose Christine, Miles!  I can’t lose her!”

The first time I saw this movie I had the aforementioned deer-in-headlights feeling.  Huh?  Jack loves Christine?  What kind of person acts like this if he loves someone?

With time I’ve learned that, unfortunately, a lot of us numb our vulnerability with stupid behavior that contradicts our real feelings.   No one wants to be hurt, or disappointed, or found out to be not quite all the packaging promised.  My gut tells me that this incident with the Congressman “putting his junk on Twitter” — as a friend of mine so descriptively phrased it — has a little Jack Cole in it.

The one thing that keeps it from being too neat and clean is that when I look at Anthony Weiner, I don’t see Jack.  I see Miles Raymond in his eyes.

Sounds like my strange prayer list just got another name.