Shaking Things Up

I tend to like routine.  I find it comforting and also conducive to productivity.  But lately I’ve noticed in myself a discomfiting willingness to try new things.  Here are a few:

·      Spin class: My Achilles tendinitis became so uncomfortable that I was forced to take a break from running.  The Bike Dojo in Santa Cruz (across the street from The Happy High Herb Shop) offers great classes with instructors who manage to be high-energy without being peppy.  I hate peppy.

·      Words with Friends: Robert and I try to keep a running game of online Scrabble going, but my friend Sue recently introduced me to WWF, and now I’m hooked.  Yes, it’s exactly like Scrabble, but the simple fact that it goes by a different name qualifies it as a shake-up in the natural order.

·      Neck cream: I am not a lotion-y kind of gal, but middle-age neck sag is upon me, and Dr. Perricone’s products kept appearing on my Facebook feed.  On the plus side: Robert says I smell clean (which is worrisome only if I allow myself to imagine that he means I didn’t before).  On the negative side: some doctors think the ingredients cause cancer.  I will probably stop using it because of this, but I’m going to give myself credit for having tried.

·      Pushups: I have been working with weights for years, but I have always resisted doing pushups because: 1) they seem manly and 2) they are hard.  However, I am now doing them.  I can actually do a lot of them.  I hate them.  Doing them while “Modern Family” and “Mad Men” are on helps.

·      Sugar: I am giving it up.  Sort of.  By this I mean that I am trying not to eat all the Milky Way bars with which I consoled myself after I gave up eating wheat.  And I’ve stopped putting brown sugar on my oatmeal.  And when I bake a cake, I don’t eat giant spoonfuls of frosting out of the bowl.  Baby steps.

·      Mozart: I’ve always loved classical music, but I stopped listening to it because it reminded me of my father and made me sad.  But recently I remembered that years ago, a psychic told me that my spirit guide (named Anthony, a fact which made me think at the time that the psychic saw the name “Gina” and just pulled something Italian out of her ass) recommended that I work while listening to Mozart.  So I’ve been doing that.  I like it.

The biggest new thing that I’m doing is writing a middle-grade fantasy.  I have never written a fantasy before.  All my books have been about contemporary children dealing with contemporary problems.  A fantasy novel requires different skills, different emphases.  I have to make characters talk less and do more.  It’s a challenge.

(I should add that the psychic was remarkably prescient about a whole host of things.  Knowing only my first name, she told me that I was a writer, that I would live near the sea, and that someone I know casually would eventually have a host of very unusual and specific problems.  So I do believe that Anthony is watching out for me.  Maybe someday he’ll do something about the pushups.)

An Awful Lot of Happy

It’s been a rough few weeks with my mother, and there are no signs it’s going to be over any time soon.

But I don’t feel like writing about that, and I don’t feel like thinking about extremist politics or my dishwasher that’s wonky or what’s wrong with my latest manuscript.

So here, for a change, are some of the nice things I’m thinking about:

·       This fence festooned with roses borders the path down to the beach.  The house pictured belongs to that fence, and its gardeners make sure that it blooms every May.  Even on a foggy day, that fence cheers me up.

·       Yesterday I snapped at a lovely friend for a comment she made on Facebook that upset me.  She wrote back the most beautiful, heartfelt apology.  It made me see yet again that knowing how to apologize authentically and sincerely is one of life’s great gifts.  If we could all manage that, the world would feel different.

·       I am wearing a scarf that I bought yesterday when I was shopping with my daughter.  It is pink and orange and frothy and frilly and I love it.

·       We are having chicken tonight.  I gave up eating breasts when I realized that I really only liked the drumsticks and thighs, and now I could eat chicken five nights a week.  (Yes, I know the breasts are healthier.  I don’t care.  I drink alcohol twice a month and have given up wheat and sugar.  I am sure the gods will make an allowance for me on the chicken legs.)

·       I am reading Nemesis, by Philip Roth.  It is a love story to wartime Newark, and it is also about polio.  It is one of those books that I have to force myself to read slowly, so I won’t finish it too fast.

·       Today in spin class, I arrived wearing my hair the way I usually do, instead of pulled back, in preparation for sweating.  The teacher and one of the students raved about my hair.  “How do you look so good in the morning?” the student said.  (Note: I have decided I get to brag about this, because I have the kind of hair that not everybody likes, and I got teased for it when I was little.  My blog, my rules.)

·       This week, my son and his girlfriend are driving up to their new apartment to paint it.  My daughter is going to help them.  I am going to bring them food and maybe help a little, and mostly just sit back and feel joy.

There’s more, but I’m going to stop, because that’s an awful lot of happy, and I don’t want to push the gods too far, especially when they might still be pissed about the chicken. 

What Little I Know

As those of you who read my blog know, I’ve been preoccupied with my 93-year-old mother’s progressive dementia for some time.  Of course, it makes sense, given the close relationship I have had with her for most of my life, and also because I am responsible for her medical and financial well-being.

But I realized recently that this isn’t why I post about her so often.

For the last few days, I’ve been reading the tweets posted at #alzheimerssucks on Twitter.  Here are a few of them:

·       Back from gym to find empty house.  Not good sign when wife’s dad was supposed to be there.

·       My gran would be proud I repurposed 3 pickle jars while cleaning up breakfast.  #missher

·       Is so tired of being sad and crying about her mom

·       I’d do anything for some of my Great Granny’s banana pudding right now.

·       So grateful for my papa.  He doesn’t remember who I am, but I still love him with all my heart.

What strikes me about all these posts is the sense of absence.  People with Alzheimer’s  are right there in front of you, watching Maury Povitch, breathing, sleeping, sometimes speaking, sometimes (in the case of my mother) screaming at innocent police officers who have come by to check up on them. 

But they are not there.  They are gone.

Last night, I said to Robert, “You know, I was really close to my mother.  I heard all her stories about losing her parents, growing up in an orphanage, working in Chicago, meeting my father.   I know which jokes she laughed at, whom she voted for, the books she read.  I know that she always bought clothes on sale, even when she could afford not to.  I know that she cried when she first heard Mahalia Jackson on the radio, that she danced with soldiers in a USO canteen, that she read the dictionary on her lunch hours at Michael Reese Hospital.  I know odd and cringe-worthy facts about her sex life (because orphans have really bad boundaries), and that she lied about her age and having gone to college, and that once, when she was babysitting her five-year-old nephew and made him go upstairs to bed, he called her a dirty Jew and she burst out laughing.

“But this is the horrible thing.  I feel as though I don’t really know her.”

Does everyone feel this way when their parents die?  Do we feel this way when anybody dies?

Then I started thinking about myself and my own kids and whether they will feel they really know me when I die.

And I realized with shock that they probably will feel as though they don’t.

I guess the reason it shocks me is that I (unlike my mother) have a blog, in which I write about what I’m thinking and how I feel.   Also, I am pretty talkative at home.  (I’m sure this surprises no one.)  It is weird to think that all this writing and talking and feeling (with, I hope, pretty intact boundaries) can still leave others in the dark.

Maybe this is just the human condition.  We can only know ourselves, and that’s if we’re lucky.

But it certainly explains why some of us write, why it is so important to put ourselves down on paper, whether it be through blogs or memoirs or letters or through the stories we have made up, which tell the world so much about who we really are.

My mother would hate that I’m writing about her decline.  She would want me to write about what a good dancer she was, how she always had nice legs, how she looks younger than her years.

But I feel compelled to put it all down.  Not to embarrass her, not to make anyone think less of her as she loses hold. 

Mainly, just to hang onto what little I know.

In Advance of Mother's Day

Mothers and neediness are much on my mind these days.

Yesterday I met my adult daughter for a little lunch and a little shopping.  I bought her a blouse.  As I did so, I realized that I haven’t bought her anything for a while.  She works, pays her own bills (including payments on the student loans she incurred in college), and is extremely independent.  She doesn’t need me to buy her much of anything.

My 93-year-old mother with worsening dementia needs me desperately.  But she doesn’t like me much these days and meets any of my attempts to help her with disdain and a supreme lack of graciousness.  (Recently, I bought her a new phone, but I had to let her think my ex-husband bought it for her in order for her to accept it.)  I do what I need to do behind the scenes and without thanks of any kind.

There is a dove nesting in an old clay pot outside my laundry-room window.  She hasn’t left her perch in three days.  I think her hubby brings her food at odd hours, when I haven’t been looking.  Sometimes we stare at each other (or, at least, I assume we are staring at each other: it has occurred to me once or twice that maybe she’s dead).  I imagine that she is warming eggs beneath her, that soon there will be babies.  I tell her that she is a good and devoted mother.  Yes, I really whisper it out loud (and then hope to God I’m not talking to a dead bird).

It occurs to me that we tend to think of children needing their mothers (and fathers), and of elderly mothers (and fathers) needing care and comfort, which almost always falls to their children.  But we don’t tend to think about young (or middle-age) mothers needing their children.  Or, more specifically, needing to be needed.

But we do.  Or I do, anyway.

Last night, I was reading Alice Munro’s great story, “Gravel.”  In it, the main character, now an adult woman, says, “All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes me as a mistake.”  Of course, the woman who is saying this did something terrible as a small child: she depends on being able to smooth over misery in order to live with herself.

I don’t know how to do that.  (And neither, thank God, does Alice Munro.)

I was going to write something flip about being a bird, how you just lay the eggs and shove worms down your babies’ gullets and then die when they fly away.  But I see from Wikipedia that doves feed their babies—called squabs—dove milk, and that they may raise up to six broods in a season.

That’s a lot of being needed.

 

And a lot of eviscerating, if you’re a disgruntled squab who’s into that sort of thing.

Touchy-Feely

I’m working on a new manuscript, and I’ve reached the point where I’m starting to worry about my characters’ emotions. 

Emotions are a tough thing to nail down in a book, because often the emotion a character feels is not the emotion that really accounts for her behavior.  This also happens to be true in real life.

I just finished reading a very bizarre fantasy novel, ostensibly for middle-grade readers, but with an overly dense and lavish plot and characters that struck me as flat and uni-dimensional.  The reason the characters never came alive was that (for example) if the protagonist was sad, she said she was (or said she felt as though she was).  It was clear, cut-and-dried, unambiguous.

Really?  If only actual life were so simple.  My experience tells me that fear, sadness, and anger (“the big three,” as they’re known in my brain) often hide behind each other, or pretend to be something they’re not, or otherwise muck things up and make for confusion and uncertainty.  Much as I may wish that they would straighten themselves out in the people I know in real life, I actually like to see them muddled in works of fiction, because then I have the pleasure of trying to unknot them, thereby learning more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Right now, I’m puzzling over Wallace, a secondary character in the book I’m working on.  He is an angry boy, insisting on doing things his way, often yelling.  But because I want Wallace to be lifelike, I know that when he says he’s angry, there’s something else going on.  He may be angry, but he’s also scared. 

My father, who died when I was 19, and whom I adored, was angry all the time.  He was angry at patients who didn’t follow his post-surgical instructions.  He was angry at the checkers at Safeway, who always overcharged him (not realizing that he had tallied his purchases to the penny in his head).  He was angry that I had frustrated his efforts to make me into a classical violinist.  He was angry at Nixon.

 

Years after he died, I was telling someone that he had given up a lucrative private practice to work in an organization that covered his malpractice insurance.  And that once, on a gondola over the Canadian Rockies, he had ordered me to stop turning my head to see out both windows, and then walked down the mountain rather than take the return trip.

“Wow,” my friend said.  “He was really a scared guy.”

My father?  The guy who yelled a lot, who wouldn’t let my mother have a checking account, who vacuumed the entire house after the cleaning lady went home, who wrote me a letter a day during my freshman year of college?

Yeah.  That guy.

Because he was a person, and people are complicated.

I learned a lot from my father in the short time I knew him, but the most important thing I learned was that even very smart people don’t always know why they feel the way they do.

It’s  knowledge that has come in surprisingly handy, over the years.  And it has certainly made me a better writer.

On Dr. Phil and Goats in Berkeley and Learning to Type

Robert wouldn’t be caught dead watching Dr. Phil, and I wouldn’t either, except I watched it last week.  (See my recent post, The Five Stages of Watching Really Bad Reality TV Shows and What It Has to Do with Being a Writer http://reallivewriter.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-five-stages-of-watching-really-bad_19.html#links)

In the episode I watched, Dr. Phil talked about his “10-7-5” plan, in which one examines the ten moments, seven decisions, and five people that, for good or ill, have had the biggest impact on one’s life.  Despite the fact that Dr. Phil is a self-aggrandizing blowhard, I decided to think about all this.  Robert and I have been talking about it at dinner, and it’s a fascinating exercise.

One of my “moments” occurred in 1969, when I was twelve and my family was living in Berkeley.  It was a bad summer: my uncle died suddenly and unexpectedly, and our neighbor’s goat crawled into the backseat of my father’s Imperial and took a massive shit.  My parents were a mess and wanted to get me out of the house, so my mother signed me up for typing.

I was already “hunting and pecking” on my father’s discarded Underwood, writing long and formless stories in which characters with funny names were described in great detail and did absolutely nothing.  But I don’t think this is why my mother signed me up, because the course she picked for me involved six weeks of typing and six weeks of shorthand.  Fortunately, the typing came first.

Every weekday morning, I would walk to the intersection of Claremont and Domingo and get on an A/C Transit Bus.  I’m pretty sure it was the E, and I think I had to transfer to get to Shattuck by nine.  It was the first time I was ever allowed to take a city bus by myself.  I remember it as a whooshing, wind-in-the-face-blowing-my-hair-straight-back kind of freedom. 

The typing school was in an old brick building that has long since been torn down.  I think I had to take an elevator to the fourth floor, and then walk through a wooden door with a frosted glass panel, like the ones behind which 1940s private eyes worked.  The school was housed in a single, windowless room, with three or four slightly rising tiers of desks, and on each of them, a typewriter and a workbook.

I was the only kid in the class.  The other students, as I remember, were in their late teens, or possibly twenties, and were clearly there for the purpose of remedial education.  The mood was deadly serious.  The only sound was the clicking of typewriter keys, and the sizzle-click of carriages being returned by hand.

I think there were two teachers: elderly women in shirtwaist dresses with big, gray beehive hairdos, who smelled like old paper.  They took turns walking behind us students, looking over our shoulders to see how we were coming along.  I don’t remember either of them ever speaking to me.  When they felt I had mastered whatever I had been working on, they simply turned the page of my workbook for me, thereby signaling that I could progress.

I loved that class.  I can’t tell you why, exactly: it had something to do with the exhilaration of getting there by myself, the clear expectations, the fact that socializing was not required, the fact that I was good at the subject at hand.  (To this day, I remain a kick-ass typist.)  Also, I think I felt in some corner of my soul that this was necessary for me in a way that my mother didn’t understand.  It was one of several keys I needed to unlock my future, my bliss.

After the typing class ended, I put my foot down and refused to attend the shorthand segment.  My mother was unhappy with me, but my father, who was starting to recover from the whole goat thing, understood.  I spent the rest of the summer eating Quisp cereal, figuring out which Monkee I would marry (Peter Tork, because Davey Jones was too short), and mentally typing anything anyone said to me.  I worried that this private quirk would never go away, but it did, eventually.

I miss old typewriters.  I see that they are now collectors’ items, often for sale on ebay.  Perhaps I shall put in a bid.

Update on My Mother

I haven’t written about my mother lately, because I haven’t wanted to bore anyone with my own frustration and unhappiness.  But in the spirit of full disclosure, and for anyone who is wondering, here’s an update.

At 93, she remains at home, with 24-hour care.  I took her car away about 18 months ago when I had the feeling that she might be failing, and that is the one thing she has not forgotten.  She has been telling people that she is quite sure I hoodwinked her doctor into diagnosing her with moderate to severe dementia, that I am after her money, that I cannot be trusted.  (“I know her,” she said, shaking her head, refusing my ex-husband’s best efforts to defend me.)

 

She makes sure to remind me on a regular basis that I hurt her terribly by not dedicating PRETTIEST DOLL (Clarion, 2012) to her.  On once being reminded of the fact that I dedicated my first book (NATALIE SPITZER’S TURTLES, Albert Whitman, 1992) to her, she said, “I don’t care about that.  I want to tell you how I feel.”

I have tried to manage my own reactions to her by reminding myself of this statement.  My mother is no longer interested in lawyerly argumentation, a clear and evidential presentation of the facts.  (Actually, she was never much interested in facts, but she knew how to pretend that she was.)  She wants everyone to know how she feels, and how she feels is terrible, awful, as miserable as anyone has ever felt before.  It does no good to remind her that she has no physical pain of any kind, that she lives in her beautiful apartment with big windows overlooking lush oaks and willows, that she is free and able to take walks alone whenever she chooses, that she has two nice ladies who cook and clean and watch Maury Povitch reruns with her all day long and at deafening volume.  (“Gina, do you like Maury?  I love him!”)  My mother is mad and sad, and she wants that made clear.

Of course, she is also terrified, but this is something that she will never tell anyone, ever.  I am not sure she knows it herself. 

I struggle with whether to believe that my mother’s often-voiced disdain for and distrust of me is a symptom of her disease, or what she has thought of me all along.  Friends, doctors, and social workers have given me their conflicting views on this.  It’s hard to sort it all out.

My brother remains adversarial to me.  He and I had only the most marginal relationship for much of my adulthood, but I always held out hope that the boy who was my best friend during the first seven years of my life would re-appear.  Sadly, I don’t think that will ever happen. 

I was talking with a friend yesterday about how it feels to know that the only two surviving members of my family of origin don’t like me.  Basically, it is terrible.  But this is not a pity party.  I don't feel sorry for myself.  I am so lucky in almost every other way.

This is a picture that sits on my desk: my mother with my kids when they were babies.  It reminds me that we had so many good times together:

When my kids call my mother on the phone, she tells me, "They're magnificent.  Just magnificent."

They are.  

And I'm glad she still remembers that.