Trying Toads

I’ve been trying to challenge myself more, writing wise, and it just so happens that  Imaginary Garden with Real Toads provided some pretty compelling inspiration in the artwork of Kathryn Dyche Dechairo.

For L

Broken heart, broken vase

Broken vow, ripped lace

Broken promise, broken face

Mending done, shield in place.

  

It doesn’t matter what they are unhappy about, you will get the blame. If they treat their children badly and cause their children to become angry, you will be blamed. If they loose their job, have car trouble or just can’t seem to catch a break, you will be blamed. You may go months at a time without seeing them or talking to them, but you can bet that if something goes wrong, you will be blamed. ~Cathy Meyer, About Toxic Ex Spouses

And She Loved to the Very Bottom of her Heart

Though he hid it well, my husband was a very jealous man.

And here I was, unable to quit thinking about my first love, a childhood romance. But I had put away childish things for a more practical life, and I was happy.

Except I wasn’t.

So I met my love when my husband wasn’t home—briefly at first, and then more and more until I felt as if we could never truly be apart again. I looked forward to our trysts with an unparalleled giddiness and left feeling flushed and spent and whole.

“You're back,” an old college friend remarked over the phone. Had I been gone? “Yes, for a long time,” she said.

And then, after a phone call, I made the announcement. “I am guest columnist at a newspaper.” I still remember the way his face went red, then white with anger.

I never looked back.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all who love words as I do.

It’s Valentine’s Day. It’s not the day you run away from love. It’s the day you chase it down. ~Cameron in “Modern Family”

Pierced by the Thread

A while back my blog friend Jules wrote a post titled “Who Sees the Common Thread?”  about how upset she and her mother were after the shootings in Arizona. Though they viewed the tragedy from slightly different perspectives, Jules and her mother were both moved to tears by putting themselves in place of some of the people more directly affected by the crime. I was deeply touched by the empathetic responses that Jules recounted. Appropriately enough, guess what someone who doesn’t have empathy or conscience is called? According to Martha Stout, PhD and author of The Sociopath Next Door, this is all a sociopath is.

Sounds like almost a small thing, doesn’t it? Like a minor flaw. But without empathy, people not only can’t judge good and evil, they don’t care. Without conscience, people’s evil has no “brakes” and careens out of control, wantonly destroying whatever is in its path, no matter how undeserving. Sociopaths care only about getting caught. They ironically see themselves as superior to normal people, see others as objects to be manipulated—and are proud of their ability to con, trick, deceive and lie. They attack good people not merely in spite of their goodness, but because of it; kindness to the sociopath is only vulnerability, one more trait to exploit. They cling, need and use, but they don’t love. They seem blissfully ignorant of ways they’ve hurt others. When caught in the act, they lie with surprising alacrity. They are the victim; the person who accused them is the cruel one to say such things! Yet when they think honey will catch the particular flies they happen to be after at the moment, their personalities are more honeyed than any you’ve ever known. As Stout says in the book, “…charm…is a primary characteristic of sociopathy.”

Although many criminals must be sociopaths in order to commit the crimes they do, not all sociopaths are criminals.  In fact, most are not—simply because they can be so talented at avoiding justice. According to Stout, four out of every one hundred people is a sociopath. One out of twenty-five. One in every average-sized classroom. How can that be? The more covert sociopaths are extraordinarily good at keeping themselves hidden. They “mirror,” or imitate, good people—not because they want to be like them, but to do what they do best: take advantage in order to manipulate. Though you may not know it, there is a very good chance that you know not one, but several. As Stout says in the book, “…by far his most impressive talent is his ability to conceal from nearly everyone the true emptiness of his heart—and to command the passive silence of those few who do know.”

Jules and her mother responded to a very obvious kind of sociopath by exhibiting the opposite response—showing empathy. That struck me as so perfect. Jules says we cannot comprehend evil, nor should we try. Maybe we can’t know what that hideously cold lack of empathy or conscience is like, but when we directly experience seemingly random attacks, don’t we automatically ask why? Don’t we have to?

Jules mentions in a later post that it’s hard to feel so much, hard to feel other people’s pain. Yes. But it’s rewarding, too. As Stout says, “…the awareness provided by extreme conscience improves people’s lives and makes them happy.” Sociopaths, with their furious, terrified need to control, aren’t able to enjoy the truly good things in life that the rest of us automatically embrace.

Her words reminded me of something I recently read in M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie that I’ll use as today’s quote. And thank you again for being so inspirational…and for shifting the balance of power in the world.

I know that good people can deliberately allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others—to be broken thereby yet somehow not broken—to even be killed in some sense and yet still survive and not succumb. Whenever this happens there is a slight shift in the balance of power in the world. ~M. Scott Peck, M.D., People of the Lie

Senior Sex(less) and the City: #16

The Cowboy
We’d met once about a year earlier, so we hugged warmly. Old friends in singles group world. We were eating at a restaurant where the fare was a bit tricky. My buddy—a somewhat solicitous man—asked me if I’d like some help with it. I asked him about something he was eating. Here, he said, try some. I couldn’t eat my potatoes; did he want them? We exchanged. Later, a friend asked me something about my date. Date? I assured her that I barely knew the guy. But it made me realize how easily I’d fallen into that old-married-couple interaction with this man. Odd how emotionally attracted I am to that calm, masculine energy, that ruggedness, yang to my yin. A cowboy quality.

I was reared in Nebraska. Reared in the city, but still, a part of me knew this man, knew that he knew horses and dust and how to cup a cigarette in callused fingers, flicking the ash like a small gunshot. I knew he could mend a fence and casually lean on it as he pulled the hat down to shade his squinting eyes. I could feel without touching the dryness of his hands and the stubble on his chin.

And he sensed, in turn, that I have learned to sniff the air around people, easy to spook. He knew to move smoothly, self-assuredly, not too suddenly, so I don’t bolt. He quickly had me—a separate species, really—eating out of his hand.

But helpful very quickly seemed to turn…patronizing. Is there a time in life when condescension is ever truly appropriate? I can’t think of one. Even my father was never patronizing, bless him, as the truly great never are. Those little digs cut like spurs.

Snort. Gallop.

Not Your Father’s Grandma

I have to admit that aging is made easier for me thanks to my heroes. My heroes are those women I run into everyday who are amazing, dynamic, fun human beings in addition to being older women. I just recently met two of them.

While Christmas shopping, I stood behind one of them in the long, long bathroom line at the department store. She looked a little like a jeans-clad Auntie Em. “I say we storm the men’s room,” she announced, elbowing me conspiratorially. “We can do it if there are several of us. Are you in?”

I laughed and nodded, but this was before I realized she was serious. “It’s not like I’ve never done that before,” she laughed. Well, me either, frankly. But I found out men get very upset when women go into their bathrooms, even though all of those stalls just sit there while we needlessly suffer. Go figure! But besides that, men’s rooms creep me out a little. That foreign wall décor is just icky….

My almost-partner-in-crime, Auntie Em, was a little miffed with me when she found out I was a wimp. That’s okay. She was still my hero just for thinking about it.

Then there was the woman I talked to at my hiking group. She had to be close to twenty years older than I am. In town visiting her mother, she said. The mother was in her nineties. The daughter, the hiking one, is a therapist, she told me. Still working, of course.

When she started asking questions about me and I told her I was divorced, she turned to study me for the first time. Her eyes took my breath away for a second. My mother’s eyes. Fierce eyes. Fiercely sharp and fiercely good, all at the same time. She pronounced me a “courageous woman” in a way that made me feel frightened and moved and oddly transparent. I like to believe that sometimes God sends people to deliver the messages we most need to hear. Courageous woman. I secretly carry these words like a totem, a gift from a wise Earth Mother, hug them close to my soul.

She told me about her various groups. Biking is over, she lamented, as is kayaking. And swimming of course. So she hikes. That was when I realized she had been slowing her pace to stay behind enough to talk to me, because I was starting to get a bit winded on the hills.

I know who I want to be like…when I don’t grow up.  Happy New Year!

That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weak. ~Erica Jong

The New Books are Here!

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Family Matters is officially released tomorrow. It’s a collection of stories about weird family members, and appropriately enough, it’s decorated throughout with pictures of nuts.

Like most of them, my story is written under a pseudonym with all of the names changed. It’s about a former family member, an older woman I’ll call Laverne (though she has a different pseudonym in the book). I did not write about this woman’s talent for selecting the very thing a person does best and then attempting to compete with it, usually with amusing results—but she does that, too, especially with younger women. It’s an obvious need to assert her dominance, and Laverne is all about dominance.

For instance, she recently told my former sister-in-law about looking at colleges. The irony is that Laverne has never attended college herself or taken an interest in colleges, and to my knowledge she never took any of her children on college tours. But she does know that my West Coast sister-in-law has a son at Notre Dame and a son at Syracuse, is still traveling all over the country looking at more for her other two, and knows more about colleges than most paid advisors.

What’s funniest is that her facts sounded totally made up. Laverne doesn’t care. If she were part of a water buffalo herd being studied on Animal Planet, she would be that big old mean one that bites the others in order to remain top cow.

With me, Laverne’s issue usually involved words, although when I was eight months pregnant she told me—in her typically lofty manner—that my obstetrician was wrong when he told me that the baby got hiccups. She is fond of starting her sentences with, “No, honey….”

In honor of the book release, here is one of my favorite Lavernishments:

Laverne’s son Barry and I were sitting at Laverne’s kitchen table, and Barry was doing a crossword puzzle. Laverne was nowhere to be seen.

Barry asked me, “What’s a ‘kind of speech?’ Spelled, ‘c-a-n-blank.’” I told him I thought it was “t” for “cant.” That was when Laverne’s voice piped in from the other room, “No, honey, that doesn’t make sense!” I explained that I didn’t mean the contraction, “can’t,” but the word “cant.”

Laverne said, “No, honey, that’s not a word. It’s c-a-n-D. It’s short for ‘candor.’” Barry then asked me what a four letter word for “bovines” was. Started with “k.”

First I loudly suggested that he ask his mother. No answer. After a while, I quietly whispered, “’kine?”

That was when we heard the loud sigh from the other room. “No, honey, that’s not a word, either. It’s ‘oxen.’” Barry reminded her that the word started with “k.”

Laverne’s classic response? “Then it’s ‘cows.’ They’ve just misspelled it.”

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here! ~Navin R. Johnson, “The Jerk"

Totally Random Tuesday: Put Downs

Carving the people around you into canyons doesn’t make you into a mountain by comparison. It just makes you dirty and low.

Totally Random Tuesday, but with a Random Picture of Backyard Goldfinches That I Took This Morning Through My Window That Needs Cleaning

If you love something, set it free. And work on those control issues while you’re at it; love isn’t about imprisonment. With all due respect to Richard Bach (or whoever originally said it), if it comes back to you, it still isn’t yours. The only thing we truly own is our choices.

Write On, Dude

A Cup of Comfort for Dog Lovers II is out today. I have several reasons to be jubilant about this.

My husband used to put me down. He made nasty little threats. Took my graduate school money. Wouldn’t let me take one day off. Wouldn’t let me take a vacation. Got mad when I had friends. Got mad when I painted or drew. Got mad when I distinguished myself in any way. Oddly, I never really thought of it as abusive because I laughed at him and did most of what I wanted, anyway. But I got what I always called “the punishments.”

And then one day I volunteered to write my subdivision’s newsletter. My husband was mad. Again.

It was only when he tried to punish me for writing that I really began to see him for what he was. I was living life with a human being who seemed only to know how to take--a parasite. Suddenly, I wanted to fling him off and feel free again. And the way I did that was by writing. It felt like I wrote myself back into existence. I felt paradoxically whole again.

He got mad when I used his computer...I used it anyway. Wouldn’t baby-sit the children so that I could take a computer class...I took it while the youngest was in preschool. He wouldn’t keep an eye on the children so I could write the newsletter...I locked myself in the bathroom and scribbled on scraps of paper while they lay on the floor outside and put their little fingers under the door.

When I tried to write creatively, the computer “crashed.” Twice. When people dropped off items for the newsletter, he literally pushed himself into the conversation. He had jealous fits when men brought articles for me to print. He tried distracting me every way he knew how. He even tried pretending to people that he’d been secretly doing the writing for me.

But I wrote and wrote and wrote. And I found myself again in those words. And finally, much, much later than I should have, I left him.

I left in spite of poverty, attacks, and struggles. I left in spite of the fact that most of my extended family is dead. I left in spite of a future that’s worse than uncertain; more poverty, attacks and struggles are certain. And I’m not a bit sorry.

Then last week, he shorted child support even though last I knew, he made 16 times what I do (although I do 100% of the parenting and pay 20% of college and medical expenses). So when I emailed him to ask where it was, I got this telling little email: “I would think that by now with all of your writing deals and book signings that you really wouldn't have time to mess with trying to extort yet more money from me.”

So right now, I am laughing….And I am writing. And those snarky little words are music to my ears.

Is it tacky of me to be telling this? Probably. But the truth is, if I had read this a few years ago, it would have helped me…so I will write. And it helps me now…so I will write. As long as this controlling person attacks me, I will write. As long as any controlling people attack anyone, I will write and write and write. And if they don’t attack, I will still write…about something else.

It's not bragging when I announce I have a story coming out. That’s not it at all. It's not about being a great writer. It's not even really about writing. It's not about being special or successful or making money. It's about refusing to give up or give in to a person who—for reasons I will probably never understand—thought love meant destroying me. It’s about celebrating. It’s about saying, you can take everything away from me, but you can’t take me. I am still here. And in spite of it all, I am happy.

The truth is that monetary poverty is nothing—nothing—compared to the starvation of the creative spirit.

“I dedicate this book to that part of myself that inched forward when a thousand winds blew and she had but one small pink birthday candle to hold up her wish….” ~Tama J. Kieves, This Time I Dance! Trusting the Journey of Creating the Work You Love

Good Book

I just finished reading a good book called Controlling People: How to recognize, Understand, and Deal with People Who Try to Control You by Patricia Evans (©2002 by Adams Media Corporation). There are parts that so closely nail controlling personalities, it occasionally made me gasp aloud and require a break just to let it sink in.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. ~Charles Baudelaire