Sneaky Stuff

Grief often cleverly disguises itself as other emotions. It is a trigger for reactions; it blows them up bigger, and often nastier, than in they would be in their natural state. And unless you are really aware that grief is the underlying cause, you can get into trouble. Who am I kidding? Even if you know that grief is messing with you it wreaks the same havoc internally, just the same. The good news is that I am pretty aware that grief is an underlying cause of many of my recent emotional reactions. The bad news is that the reactions and feelings are still there and not necessarily controllable.

Case in point–I applied for a job that I "should" get. I work at a community college, in a temporary classified position (that I love). I applied for an adjunct teaching position, or more specifically, to be in the adjunct pool. Because I already work 30 hours a week, I would only be allowed to teach one 3 unit class per semester, at most. Logically, I'm not sure I really want to teach right now. I also have a growing freelance business and only have so much time and energy to go around.

Let's be clear, I feel qualified to be a part of the adjunct pool. I applied for the full-time position a few months back, but didn't get an interview. And I was really, truly okay with not getting beyond the paper screening for that one. But teaching part-time would give me more experience and more chance of full-time work later. And honestly it seemed like a given that I would at least get an interview. Everyone in the department that I spoke with shared their assumption with me that I would. Some even offered to help with with interview questions in advance.

But I didn't get an interview for the part-time position. Instead I received a very gracious phone call from someone on the hiring committee (my boss in my temporary position no less) who assured me that I had very stiff competition and that the hiring committee thinks very highly of my work.

I have to be honest, that hurt. I was really pretty devastated. It felt like a personal rejection. In the back of my mind I had considered the adjunct pool to be a fall back place if I my current job is not made permanent. In a sense, it was my safety net. It was a side door to take me where I want to go, just down a different corridor. Fear washed over me, along with the anger and hurt of rejection. I felt as if I was on much shakier ground than I had realized and that the chances of falling, of truly failing to make a living, were much greater than I had thought. So I cried the bitter tears of someone who feels useless and worthless.

I assumed at the time, and still do, that I was upset in large part because of the grief that is lurking around me. I could vocalize that potentiality, but I didn't really believe it in my heart.

A week later, the hubby and I planned to take a power walk with the doggies around a local park for some good exercise, then head downtown and have a quiet dinner together. A date night. It sounded wonderful. Hubby fell asleep on the couch as soon as he got home from work. Okay, I thought, so we didn't need the power walk. He woke up an hour or so later, and by this time I was really, really hungry. He said that, yeah, he wanted to go out and get a bite to eat, he just needed to finish up a quick posting on a website bulletin board he participates in, then he'd be upstairs to change and we'd go. I needed to do a couple of things upstairs as well, the timing seemed okay, so off I went to do my stuff and wait for him.

An hour later he came upstairs. An hour! I was furious and felt many things, lots of anger, crankiness from being way too hungry, and really offended that our date was so unimportant to him. I caught myself thinking that I just couldn't stand to be rejected again, especially not by my honey.

Ah, there it was. I knew it as soon as it entered my head. I was reacting to the non-job. The non-job reaction was, in large part, grief related. Damn, that grief just tucks itself in and spreads like tiny poisonous tendrils. The really frustrating thing is, that despite understanding this on an intellectual level, emotionally I just can't shake the feeling of rejection from the job situation. I feel wary now of any pleasant overtures from my colleagues. I no longer believe with any certainty that my temporary job will ever be made permanent. And I am extra sensitive to any rejection, perceived or real. This is especially problematic as I am trying to get my work published. I always sending essays out hoping they will get picked up, and I'm trying to find representation for a book. I haven't been able to bring myself to submit anything for weeks.

The hubby and I ended up going out for a nice, albeit late, date. It was nice, but it took more than an hour for us to feel good with each other.

Blah. Stupid grief. It is really sneaky stuff.

Anger versus Pain

Sometimes anger is empowering. When it gets me off my butt and on the phone to set a problem right (generally a consumer type problem, like my daughter's replacement phone arriving broken), then it is a good thing. When it pulls me out of a really bad headspace, like when I was feeling very victimized and sexually harassed by a student at work, then it is a good thing.

But when I am angry at someone who died, who technically isn't around to argue with, it can be very frustrating and painful. Not such a good thing.

Last night I felt my bio-dad very strongly. Before he died, I believed that I could reach out my emotional feelings and touch base with him, even though we weren't speaking and hadn't in many years. We didn't have conversations when I put out those feelers, I just kind of touched base, checked to see if he was still there, or maybe wished him a happy birthday. I admit, I rarely if ever felt him reach back, or reach for me on his own. Although when he did, I generally rejected it, so who knows how often he may have tried.

Shortly before he and my bio-mom died (see the posting from last summer for the details), I stopped feeling either parent. They left a strange kind of empty place, and actually took some negative stuff with them (like my very strong aversion to tattoos). I felt a bit lighter, but I also knew that it meant they were either dead or dying. A few days later we got the call that my bio-mom was indeed about to succumb to lung cancer.

Once they were both dead, however, they came back into my consciousness stronger than ever before, save for maybe when I lived with them both as an infant. It felt as though they planted themselves on my chest, wishing to stay closer than ever in what I believe is an attempt to be with me in a way they couldn't when they were alive. They didn't want to leave me in death. And this made me angry. Where the hell had they been for the last $)+ years? Why, now that I can finally be free of the head trips that they could take me on with little or no effort, did they insist on hanging around? It quickly became clear that they wanted to prove something. Perhaps now that the physical restraints of this world have let them go they can finally be with me. To hell with that.

This is where feeling anger isn't terribly empowering. It feels like a constant fight, a constant attempt on my part to stand my personal moral ground, to insist that they stop wanting forgiveness and acceptance from me. I don't feel like they have given me what I need in return. They haven't taken away my pain, they haven't reversed the feelings of abandonment that have plagued me my whole life, and the resulting feelings of worthlessness and inherent badness that too often reduce me to a mess.

So when I felt my dad last night, so strongly, it hurt because I kind of miss him. He may have been a sporadic presence in my adult life, but we had our moments. We had a handful of really nice moments. If I miss anything about him, the real him, I miss those moments. And while he was asserting himself so strongly last night, it felt as though he was making a case for me to forgive. To forgive both himself and my mom. Talk about pissing me off! I am not ready to forgive her. Or him. They hurt me in ways that I can't begin to describe. I carry around these buttons and triggers that get tripped on all the time, buttons and triggers that they helped me construct, but haven't been around to help me dismantle. So I spent an evening arguing with him in my head. (yes, it may be all in my head, but that is beside the point)

I feel that if I forgive, then I am negating the value of my own feelings, that I am letting go of the right to feel pain, of the right to acknowledge that what they did was wrong. If I forgive, my pain no longer matters. I am not ready to devalue my feelings like that just yet.

This post is entitled anger versus pain. Sometimes they are mutually exclusive, sometimes they are two sides of the same issue. Sometimes anger can empower and reduce or soothe the pain.

Today, at least, they are battling it out inside me.

Consider yourself warned

I've never actually been one to journal in any kind of consistent or regular or honest manner, so blogging has been a bit of a stretch for me. While anyone who knows me will agree that if you want to know something about you me all you have to do is ask, and likely I'll hand over more information that you really wanted, I simply don't assume that the whole world wants to know my business. Nor do I assume that putting down my most personal private thoughts is a safe thing to do in any form, yet I am a memoir-ist. Go figure.

Back to my point.

In a few short weeks the anniversary of Miriam's death will be here. This has begun a sequence of grief related responses in my house. A few weeks later will be the anniversary of my mother's death, then my father's.

Last summer simply sucked.

And dealing with the losses was not easy nor simple. So I did what I could, put my head down, and moved forward. Apparently it is time to look up again, face my surroundings, my feelings, my fears and my grief.

A blog seems as good a place as any to do that.

I am a fairly inconsistent blogger. A handful of wonderful people check it fairly regularly (according to site meter), but there is rarely anything new.

The plan from today forward is: to write what I am feeling, good or bad, about the people that have been lost to me, and to my extended family, and just how much it hurts or how much I need to process, or whatever the hell I need to write.

This is cyberspace and the possibilities for reading my blog are infinite. This is cyberspace, after all, and the probability of many reading this blog is infinitesimal.

So consider yourself warned.

American Grafitti comes back to town

There is a “Salute to American Grafitti” planned in my hometown next weekend. It is three days of nostalgia. There will be Classic cars, 50s costumes, cruising, music, and more. It is a celebration of the innocence of the post World War II years, before JFK and King and Malcom X and RFK were assassinated. Theirs were deaths that would change the nation for generations. This party will be about the decade before all hell broke loose.

Yes, by all means, let us celebrate a decade of oppression, conformity, and the ever-present, underlying terror of nuclear war. Let’s root for Joe McCarthy’s Communist hysteria, black-listing, and the loss of civil liberties. We should dance with joy in celebration of our country’s first “police action” in Korea, that lovely warm-up to Vietnam and Iraq. Everyone was supposed to fit into neat little boxes. Giving birth was practically a national pastime and mom stayed at home taking good care of those babies as they popped out, and found immense satisfaction in caring for her home, washing dishes, scraping shitty diapers and waiting on her husband hand and foot. Dad was at work; the kids were at school or playing nicely in the front yard on the newly mown grass. The teen girls were readying themselves for matrimony, and hey, if they don’t find one by the time high school was over, college might be a good place to fsnag a man. There was even a box for a rebel, as proven so well by James Dean. More than one at a time meant gangs. Come to think of it, even gangs were conformists; they all wore the same cool clothes.

No one was gay or unhappy and certainly not different. It was just normal to practice bomb drills, and build fallout shelters.

An all out salute to the 1950s lifestyle depicted in the film American Graffiti is really ironic. It is a film that takes place in 1962 and was filmed in 1972, but the style is all 1950s. The need to alter our perception of history is palpable. The need to believe that we once truly lived in a simpler time is understandable. It may have been simpler then, but it certainly wasn’t safer. Not really.

But I suppose that there were good things to remember, even if we have to squint to see them, to make the frame as small a possible to keep the ugliness out of our line of sight. There is joy in most every sorrow; somewhere in there we humans have managed to survive, in part I believe, because we can find enjoyment, laughter and love. And I suppose that as much as anything, the salute to the movie and that time in history is really a salute to the good that did exist.

Isn’t that, after all, what nostalgia is?