Having No Choice

Artwork by Lorraine Art Schneider

 I find myself thinking about my parents, of course, this time of year.  Both have been dead for over ten Christmases now, but their karma really bit me.  The violence in my family seems allied to the violence at Sandy Hook; the violent response of the NRA reminds me of my father, who wanted above all to keep his gun.

My mother never felt she had a choice in life.  I don't think her mother, Leona, did either, though it is bittersweet to know that Leona did have an affair with "the motorman."  I imagine there was passion and pleasure there, but it is not clear whether that had anything to do with her death in her early forties; my mother thought it might have been hemorrhaging from an abortion.  All abortion was illegal in 1943.  That's not my subject, but it is relevant.

What I was thinking about was dinnertime in the house I grew up in.  My mother would put on the table something she had made from scratch, of course, back then.  It might be her famous spaghetti and meatballs, the sauce made from tomatoes she canned.  There would be this tension while we watched my father covertly taste it.  Most likely he would sniff, which was a way he had of sneering, and say, refusing to look at her, "No napkins."

Because my mother always "forgot" to put the napkins on.  Then we would eat in silence.  I suffered chronically from irritable bladder and bouts of diarrhea.  It made me what I am today. 

If I were dealing with someone like him today, first of all, we would have talked about it.  If that didn't stop his game, I would not have cooked dinner the next night, that simple.  I imagine he would have said, "What's this?  No dinner?"

I would say, cooly, "Why should I?  You don't appreciate the effort, and the kids can eat peanut butter."

It's a nice fantasy to think that we might have talked, but I don't know.  My mother seemed unable to negotiate with him.  She  probably tried various passive-aggressive tactics; I know she made up her mind to refuse him sex after one St. Patrick's Day party when he embarrassed her in front of friends by refusing to dance with her, but danced with the rest of the women there.

In a patriarchal system, many women are frozen with fear of overstepping the unspoken boundaries set up by the belief that men are better than women, that women are stupid, that we are here to serve men.  We can be conditioned to these beliefs without ever hearing them spoken that way.  We are so conditioned that we don't know we are afraid.  We don't even think of options. I believe my mother thought,  "Of course you cook for Your Man.  You have to."  That wasn't a matter of choice.

I think I'll stop the domestic story here to remark that my father stole the gun, a Luger, from a dead German (he called this "liberating" it) in World War II.  He had joined the Army during the Great Depression, a poor boy who couldn't find a job, but ended up serving six years once the United States finally entered that mess, after hideous damage had been done to other countries and peoples.  He was in the Battle of the Bulge.  He only talked about that once.  That's about all I know. 

Except that he had post-traumatic stress, and would sometimes have nightmares and wake up calling for my mother.  And now I have it, because he abused me, sexually, verbally, emotionally, every way he could. After death, I learned he'd been making moves to cut me out of the estate.

There's a whole lot of bad karma around power.  Hatreds and illness are born in any system that sets someone up as is intrinsically better than someone else by virtue of gender, race, religion, sexual preference, skin color, intelligence, money, or any other superficial difference you can think of.  Such ideas of superiority were directly behind the Holocaust Hitler was creating until America finally decided it was our war, too.

It's complex.  But peace is not. 

The Unhappiness Disease

Henri the Existentialist Cat speaks for many

 I've been thinking about happiness and depression.  I know that a certain amount of our unhappiness is the result of what we tell ourselves, what we believe, our delusions.  Not everything we don't like has to make us unhappy.  To quite a degree, a resilient person can accomodate to life events.  There's a lot written about this.  But it doesn't apply to depression.

I am speaking of the kind of depression brought on by malfunctioning neurochemistry.  It is logically contradictory to think you can be happy while depressed.  Depression causes unhappiness.  Professionals call it anhedonia, the inability to enjoy anything.  Not even spaghetti and meatballs and homemade cherry pie. And it's not "all in your mind."  It's all in your brain.  In neural pathways and erratic switches that are not understood.  It features imbalances of of the feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin. Nobody understands it well enough to cure it.  You try this, you try that.

It can really get bad is this time of year, for the Christmas season is the Great Spiritual Hedonic Holiday here in America.  We are supposed to be happy in a mellow quasi-spiritual way, surrounded by our loving family, generous, tra la la. When I say "supposed to be" I mean it:  that's what the culture is telling you with every song on the radio, every end display in Target, every commercial about getting all your Festive Crap needs in one store. How can you help but think, I should be enjoying this. It's The Hallelujah Chorus for god's sake.

Maybe when UPS delivers your Light Therapy box, you'll perk up. (Yes, I have one on order.)  Meanwhile, you aren't having any fun.  If you are inclined to, you can pray that nobody criticizes you for not smiling and  wearing jingle bell earrings.  Then you'll really have to work on right speech, again.

A new year, a new cat

Hello, especially to friends whose calls I haven't returned or whose e-mails are languishing in my inbox, along with 900 other items from 2010 I intend to go through. I have excuses, believe me. Illness - generally covered in my last post. In me, illness tends to be accompanied by depression; so do the holidays.

But maybe missing the holidays is worse. We still haven't had our Christmas with Cassie and company, don't even have the gifts wrapped. I missed the Christmas Eve service at church, still sick and on the wrong antibiotic. Missed the post-Christmas service too, busy throwing up with a kidney stone passing. But I wasn't wholly enthusiastic about attending these things, because post-transplant I am afraid of "church food," that wonderful reception that follows the Christmas Eve service, a hundred kinds of treats made in home kitchens and handled by many unsterile hands, and even by people harboring germs of colds, pneumonias, TB . . . it's true, folks.

But on New Year's Eve day, after I posted, desperation overcame my reasonable paranoia about zootropic disease, and went to Cat Welfare just to visit, to scout the kitties (as they are called there, though most of the cats are mature, and people only want kittens). Let them know what I was looking for. I thought I'd wear the mask I keep in my purse, but I tell you, I dropped it in the van and couldn't find it, not that it would be useful after that. And I thought, To hell with it. I'd rather be dead than feel like this.

And sure enough, petting a cat filled my chest with that baby-love feeling. And it seems possible that The Next Cat found me. In any case, I brought her home that afternoon - on warranty. A six-month-old girl, just fixed, looking much like a Russian Blue, maybe with bigger ears, and acting like a nervous Meezer once she was here.  She absolutely loves being petted, once you coax her near, and pick her up.  But inbetween pettings and knocking over plants, she acts like we are strangers, the menacing kind, and tears through the rooms, skidding on the wood floors when she reverses directions.  You have to admit, it's cute.

Nameless Cat is waiting for Laurie D. to come and suggest alternatives to Tami, the name the shelter gave her, and Amanda Starpaws, the name I came up with, which doesn't lend itself to calling and nicknames.  I am waiting and hoping NC will get over this nervous-cat thing.  I see now that years of old cats spoiled me; Sweetheart is still a kitten, very interested in the cords that dangle from the laptop in the den, and clearly exploring my bead table at night, selectively knocking things over.  Ah, yes.  A house is not a home without an animal as the heart.
[photo:  Rubber Duck Nativity.  Why not?  We take ourselves too seriously.  Some day I'll take a picture of my Buddha Cat and post it here.]

Another Blue Christmas

A triumph over self today in the grocery store - I did not buy a poinsettia.  I did not even want a poinsettia.  This is not because I have already had three days of horrible pop-Christmas songs running in my head ("A holly jolly Christmas") or, worse, pop renditions of religious songs that once brought tears to my eyes.  It is not because for a long time I have found Christmas disappointing.  Sad.  That's another story, and I am not very inclined to memoir that doesn't help anyone, and just fixes things more clearly in my head.  But, poinsettias.

They were not a feature of my childhood home, but they were of my liberal Christian home church, which was then Congregational - I think that, too, has passed, and Congregational merged with another denomination.  You can go home again, but you will be disappointed.

This big old stone church had a circular sanctuary, it was called - sanctuary - a safe place where they didn't pick on you.  The balcony, where we always sat, wrapped most of the way around, but the front of the church was given to the altar, choir loft, and pipe organ.  Every Christmas the altar was banked with dozens of large red poinsettias, paid for by congregants and then taken to the homes of elders and the sick. They were the color in this serious place, along with the stained-glass windows and, on Christmas Eve, red carnations on the ushers' lapels.

Another good memory of poinsettias:  the year my mother died, I was sitting at my kitchen table feeling sad when I saw come up the walk Marcia, from my meditation group, half-hidden behind the biggest poinsettia I'd ever seen.  It was a newer variety, smaller bracts, almost shaped like roses, entirely unexpected and badly needed.

Where is that beautiful plant today?  Gone, along with forty or fifty others, no matter how valiantly I tried to save them.  That's the problem.  Theoretically, you can save a poinsettia, and I have known a woman who did, an aged Greek immigrant who had a touch with plants.

But I, as much as I love the idea of gardening, am not an earth person, and my attempts to help the plants live on never work. They begin dropping leaves as soon as I bring them in, and soon look naked and unloved.  We probably don't have enough sun for them here in the midwest.  And I used to over-water them.  Then I learned not to do that, and began neglecting them instead, but that didn't work either.

I am very fond of plants, and a great many have died in my care, so many that I now have ten or twelve houseplants that do live for me - the two African violets even blossom (watered only from the bottom).  This fondness makes me want to keep potted plants alive.  In theory, you can buy a poinsettia and on January 1, discard it.  In practice, I never have.  I nurse it along until spring, when it may have only a little umbrella of leaves on a naked stem.  Then I put it outside in the sunniest spot, where I do forget to water it, and the outdoor cats knock it over.  Then I throw it away.

So today, commenting that the little poinsettias in Kroger's were overpriced at $5.99, I shook my head and told Tom, "I am not buying a poinsettia this year. I'm not going through that."

"We'll see about that," he said mildly.

"Not an amaryllis, either," I said.

But that's another story.

[image:  Yellow leaf. Neither red nor green.]