There Are Places I Remember

I’ve known a handful of magic places in my life; pockets carved out by time and people.  They’re chapters in my life, they’re what’s made me.

The first was the Lane, a short dead-end street on the side of Mount Tam.  My childhood home was on the Lane (Friars Lane to the uninitiated) but my house was not what made the Lane magic.  My best friend, Casey, who also lived on the lane was responsible for that.  Together we created intricate stories, stories we’d draw on the pavement and step into.  We roamed from her backyard to mine, to the Lane and back, speaking the voices of the characters that inhabited our secret worlds.  This went on for a good ten years.

The second magic place was Ruby Scott Theatre at Tam High.  It was a black box, morphing with every production.  There I met Megan, I met Evany, I met many of the people that are still with me.  Under the guidance of the indomitable Dan Caldwell, our drama teacher, we wrote, we directed, we produced, we acted.  It was our shelter in the storm of adolescence.  We found a moment in a single pool of light where we could actually be ourselves.

The next was Room 1340 in McGowan Hall at UCLA.   It was a room, yes, but a big room, a theater, another black box.  There I met more drama freaks, made more drama, pulled off the layers of girlhood one by one until I found the woman underneath.  The Freud Playhouse, the mainstage next door, was much fancier, much more prestigious.  But what we created in 1340 was grittier, it was three-dimensional, it was true.

Number four, another theater.  This one was the Cast Theater in Hollywood.  When one thinks “Hollywood” one is not imagining the Cast, at least in the nineties.  It was two tiny theaters housed in one run-down building on a residential street in a mostly Latino neighborhood.  We performed original plays by Justin Tanner, our wunderkind.  For five years running I performed a play called “Pot Mom” every Saturday night.  It was everything the title implies – irreverent, pee-your-pants funny but with a huge heart.  We were a ragged band of actors, shouting our lines over the thumping Mariachi from next door, movie stars in the audience.

Number five was the first house I ever owned.  It was 750 square feet, on a hill in Fairfax.  Ben and I bought it as newlyweds, a fixer-upper we quickly shone into submission.  There we conceived both girls, the most magic you can make.  I gave birth to Lana in that house.   We had first steps, first words.

Number six, the very last magic place on my list, is The Garage.  This is the design collective I’m a part of in my little town.  We’re a retail shop housed in an old fix-it garage, largely unimproved.  We are all makers.  Everything you find here is unique and beautiful.

If all the places on my lists are scenes of creativity, The Garage fits right in.  Here I discovered that people might actually want to buy the stuff I make, the stuff I’ve been making for years just to feed my soul; the ponchos out of old cashmere sweaters, the dog-bowl stands out of vintage fruit crates, the brown sugar fudge that was my father’s favorite.  I’ve discovered a group of artists unlike my former actor tribes; they are visual, often internal, but no less magic, no less true.

This coming Sunday we close our doors.  Our building has sold, we have to move out.  A few of us are opening a new store in nearby Olema, a place that will undoubtedly be my next magic spot, an exciting prospect.  But on Sunday we will say goodbye to this place, this entity that for me, at least, has been a life-changer.  I’ve spent two years here, blossoming from a stay-at-home mom to a business owner.  I have been inspired and supported by these gorgeous people around me.  I’ve said before that the Garage has become the beating heart of Fairfax.  On Sunday will be a little death.  And all I can say is thank you.

Starving

When I was pregnant with Mae, my first kid, I was pretty sure that being a mother was going to be like babysitting – kinda fun, kinda boring.  Then, (thirteen years ago yesterday, to be exact) she was born.  In that first moment I saw her squalling Mae-Mae face, I discovered that, actually, being a parent, particularly of a baby, is like being in the presence of a movie star.  Every move, every sound, every glance, magic.  Being a mother, it turns out, is falling in love.

Mihiretu and I have been working on our attachment.  I consult with Aaron, our therapist, and he tells me how to alter my behavior around Mihiretu.  Walk out of the room when he’s misbehaving, check in with him every half hour or so he knows I’m there.  Starve the negative attachment, build the positive attachment.

We talk every week, Aaron and I.  He’s on the East Coast, I’ve never met him.  Mihiretu doesn’t even know he’s in therapy.  This last Monday, I took a break from painting our new store out in West Marin and dialed the New Jersey number at the appointed time.  I sat outside on an old metal chair in the alley behind the store, plugging my non-phone ear to drown the sound of the occasional car, early spring sun warming my shoulders.

Aaron said something that quietly blew my mind, continues to reverberate in me.  He said that I need to open my heart to Mihiretu.  When he enters a room, I need to whole-heartedly greet him, turn my body toward him, smile.  This is a kid, he said, who’s lived his life on a starvation diet of love.  Since his adoption, he’s been pushing away everyone he cares about – testing them to make sure they’ll stay.  And so we, his family, have hardened under this constant barrage of little boy abuse.  Historically, he’s thrown rocks, he’s hit, he’s kicked, he’s sworn, he’s shrieked, he’s stolen, he’s destroyed.  When he walks into a room, we’ve been trained to cower.

For whatever reason, this depiction of Mihiretu, of a boy who’s starving, got me.  Because I’m the one that can feed him.  I’ve been following all the recommended behavioral modifications for the month that I’ve been working with Aaron, but this week, the therapy entered my heart.  It was the key that unlocked me.

And so, when Mihiretu enters a room, I stop what I’m doing, I look him in the eye, I smile and I say, “Hi, Buddy”.  Every ten minutes or so I rub his knee or shoulder, tell him I love him.  He seems a little bewildered by it, but certainly not unreceptive.

Two nights ago we were lying in his bed.  He was telling me about his day, about his friends at school, about his friends in general.  He said, “You know who my favorite girl?”

And I said, “Um, no.  Let me think.  Alana?  From school?”

“Nah,” he said shyly, gazing at me from under his eyelashes.  “I lookin’ at her.”

If being a mother is falling in love, maybe six years into being Mihiretu’s mother, the love affair is finally beginning.  I’m finally feeding my starving child.  And this whole time I didn’t even know he was hungry. 

Selfish Shellfish

I’m employing a new therapy with Mihiretu.  Like most adopted kids, particularly those who found their new families after infancy, Mihiretu has attachment issues.  It plays out in all kinds of ways, most of all behaviorally.  He is an incredible person, but often it feels like we’re living with a gleeful poltergeist.  He destroys homework, he hides favorite stuffed animals, he throws his dirty underwear up onto the ceiling fan.

We’ve addressed this with many different therapies; psychotherapy, medication, OT.  This new approach is all about attachment, only about attachment.  The hope is once he feels securely attached the negative attention-seeking behaviors will evaporate.

In the meantime, by the request of our therapist, Mihiretu is living full-time with me.  This therapist believes that a secure attachment begins with the mother.

I’m not a selfless person.  Really at all.  I’m pretty selfish, actually.  Vain, opinionated, pleasure-seeking.  Maybe to compensate for this basic nature, I’ve put myself into a position where I must be selfless.  Three kids, the youngest of which demands PhD-level parenting.  Really, now that I’m here, now that I’m in the situation that I set up for myself, the most selfish thing I can do is turn this kid around.  Otherwise he’ll torture me for the rest of my life in bigger and bigger ways.  And yes, of course, I adore him.  I want him to have a happy and healthy life.  I want that for all my kids and this current path seems the only way to that end.

The therapy is intense.  I’m changing my behavior with Mihiretu, neutralizing the negative attachment so we can form a positive one.  I’m working on it every moment I’m with him.  He doesn’t like it, no surprise.  It’s completely exhausting and unnerving.  And it’s my work for the next six months to a year.

So all my fun will come down a notch.  Dating will be on a low simmer, if the stove is on at all.  Not a lot of nights out with friends.  Selfish shellfish won’t get much playtime.  I’m trying to be okay with this.  Most moments I am.  Though when he’s screaming at me I can feel a little cornered, a little alone. When his behavior is bad, all I want to do is run away.  Now I must turn around and face it.  There’s no way out but through.

Wish me luck.  I’m going to need it.  Though if there’s one thing I can do in this lifetime, putting my three kids out in the world as whole people is it.   Maybe once that’s done I can go back to being selfish.  Selfish, selfish old lady.

Luck

I was walking through Fairfax yesterday afternoon, Sunny pulling the leash ahead of me, on the way back from a short stint working the counter at The Garage, idly checking what was playing at the movie theater, when it struck me how very lucky I am.

I live in my favorite town in the world, a quirky Mayberry, chock full of Nuevo-hippies, transsexuals, artists of every stripe, live music always within a stone’s throw.  I can’t walk twenty feet without seeing someone I know and likely love.  I step from my door into the woods, onto the mountain, one vista opening onto another.  A thirty-minute drive takes me to a world-class city, a metropolis unique in its love of human rights, of art, of food; a jewel in the fog.

My work is my passion.  I’d be doing it even if I weren’t being paid.  I’m never happier than with my hands full of old cashmere sweaters, cutting, shaping, sewing; crafting a treasure from trash.  I'm an essential part of the coolest store in town, nestled in a community of makers.  And, in yet another cool store just around the corner, I get to teach the women of this town how to move their bodies, how to find fitness and strength at any age.

My fabric of friends is a tapestry.  They make my life infinitely richer, they keep me alive in all kinds of ways.

My children are my beating heart.  From cuddling with Mihiretu on the couch, to listening to Lana narrate the intricacies of her outfit, to laying with Mae in my bed, quizzing her on Spanish vocabulary, both of us snorting with laughter (I like to roll my r’s).

My house is tiny and gorgeous, every corner has a purpose and a beauty.  I can vacuum the whole thing from one electrical outlet in five minutes flat.  It holds us, it cradles us.

And then there’s love.  This whole new world.  I no longer have partnership, true.  One day I’ll find that again.  But in the meantime, there’s so much that’s new.  New people, new ways of being.  I’m in my body, really in my body, in a way I haven’t been for a very long time.  I feel awake.  In the midst of my daily life of work and friends and kids, I have episodes of romance.  Episodes that I can get lost in like a dream.  Completely delicious.

I am a lucky girl.  A very lucky, almost-divorced, less-than-financially-sound, often-sobbing-on-the-couch, forty-four-year-old girl.  Can I get a hallelujah?

New Year's

Today we went to IKEA.  We moved into our little house a year ago tomorrow and to mark the occasion we thought we’d refresh the place a little.  A new sisal in the kitchen, fresh duvet covers; minor changes that feel major.

Mihiretu has been feeling a little barfy the last couple days.  This isn’t necessarily unusual.  He was malnourished until he came to America.  He overeats and then his stomach rebels.  But it seems that he is bonafide sick at the moment.  His energy is low, he was up in the night spitting into a bowl. 

But we – ok, the girls and I - were excited about the IKEA idea.  I lured Mihiretu into the car with an iPad and a quilt.  Once at the Swedish Marketplace (as my Garage friends euphemistically title it), we settled him into the cart with a borrowed pillow.

Within an hour we were falling apart at the seams.  We couldn’t agree, the girls were competing over who got more stuff for their respective rooms (always a metaphor for parental love), everyone was hungry.  We took a break, waited in the crazy long line and got ourselves some meatballs.

Mihiretu ate everything in front of him in three minutes and then said, mournfully, eyes big, “Mama…”

I placed an almost empty plate under his mouth just in time to catch the torrent of barely digested ligonberry-mashed-potato mayhem.

When that plate was exhausted, I grabbed another.  And then another.  Around us, people kept eating, oblivious.  We were all laughing, even Mihiretu.

“Well,” I said as we hastily exited the cafeteria, “That certainly cheered us up.”

We somehow made it home with our booty.  Mihiretu promptly crashed on the couch.  And our plans of going to our friend Megan’s house for the evening were revised.

And so I sit on this blue leather couch that I found (and haggled for) on craigslist a year ago, listening to Death Cab for Cutie covering Yaz, a fire in the stove.  Something I’ve spent a lot of time doing this year.    I’ll ring in the new year alone, in the presence of sleeping children – something else I’ve spent a lot of time doing.  And it all feels right. 

This was one fuck of a year, 2014.  I wouldn’t trade it but it wasn’t easy.  I’m so, so curious about what 2015 has to offer.   If this year has been anything, it’s been unpredictable.  I expect the same for the next.  There’s a beauty in that.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

So I’ve been thinking lately about love.  Romantic love.  If it exists.  If I’ll find it.  Why I’ve lost it on the rare occasions I’ve stumbled across it.

I’m a proclaimer.  If I feel something, you’re going to know.  When it comes to love, I’m big, I’m brave, I’m foolish.  I believe in grand romantic gestures.  I ask men out.  I tell them exactly what I’m feeling.  And while this is the only way I can imagine living, almost every time in my life I’ve gone big and loved, gone big and said as much, it hasn’t worked.  The relationship, for one reason or another, hasn’t lasted (as, granted, most relationships don’t).  And it’s cost me, this huge exposure of myself, my heart out there on my sleeve getting bumped and bashed.  There is a part of me, not the big brave part, but a small delicate part, that feels unlovable.  A girl somewhere deep in there that believes that this handful of men she’s adored didn’t love her back, didn’t return the grand gestures, because she’s unworthy.

I had a conversation recently with one of this handful.  The first one of the handful.  And he told me something mind-blowing.  He said that he did indeed feel that for me.  The timing was off, the situation was off, we were too young to do right by what we felt but – shocking, shocking! – I wasn’t the only one in love-land.  I had company.

Which leads me to think that I might need to rewrite my internal script.  Instead of that old line “He isn’t with me because I’m not good enough”, maybe it should read “He isn’t with me because, well, because he’s just not”.  Maybe he loves me, maybe he doesn’t.  Maybe the picture is so much bigger than I can see.  Maybe it’s not entirely my fault, maybe the moral of the story isn’t YOU SUCK.

Of course it all goes back to my dad.  A man I’m certain loved me but whom I always had trouble connecting with.  A man that always left me feeling unworthy, not quite enough, never able to truly please him.   A man that left this world long before I could begin to try to heal the relationship, before I was even truly an adult.

Sometimes this shit, this vast psychological morass that is my emotional life, seems insurmountable.  It seems absolutely impossible that I will find a long-term truly satisfying love relationship. 

I went and saw a psychic in the last dark days of my marriage.  She said, yes, my marriage was not long for this world.  And, yes, (and this surprised me) that I would find love, big love, beyond it.  She said a man would walk into my life, a “warm” man was the only way she could describe him.  I would know him the moment I saw him.  She said she could see the way I’ll look at him.  Like Bambi, she said.  And that feeling will last, the Bambi-eye phenomenon.  She said I don’t need to go look for him, he’ll arrive when I’m ready.

So ok, Warm Man.  I’m probably not ready yet.  I need to rest this big, brave heart of mine.  But I have great, terrific hope that you exist.   I’m going to hold onto that.  Maybe that small delicate girl inside me will someday meet her match.

Anniversaries

It’s a week of anniversaries.  Three years ago, my mom died.  One year ago, my marriage broke up.  How did those two things end up in the same week of the calendar?  Good fucking question.

Anniversaries get me every time.  There’s something about the slant of the sunlight, the earth in the same spot of its orbit, that brings everything rushing back.  The smell of whatever’s blooming or whatever’s rotting.  The feel of the air.

It’s a week of loss for me.  And in this week of loss, in my darkest moments, I’ve thought of my mom.  Of a very specific day with my mom.

I was probably nine, I’m guessing. I grew up on a short dead-end street named Friars Lane up high on Mount Tam.  We few kids that populated it called it the Lane.  We were isolated from the rest of the world (okay, Mill Valley) and we were close-knit.  Closest to me was my best friend, Casey.  Her first memory is of looking in my crib.  My first memory is crying when she had to leave my house to go home.  Today, though, on this very specific day, Casey and I were out on the Lane fighting.  It didn’t happen much but we were arguing over my new Big Wheel, one of those three-wheeled plastic vehicles.  I don’t remember the details but I do remember Casey cutting the ribbons on my handlebars.  And I remember swearing at her – someone had a potty mouth even then.

I ran home crying, threw open the front door and yelped, “Mom!”  She came running, she sat me on her lap, she stroked my hair, she let me cry.

All this week I’ve been wishing myself back into her lap that day.  What I realized today was that was probably the last time I ever cried in her lap.  I was a little old for it, a little big for it, and though I wanted her to make my problems disappear, they were my problems to solve.   I was swearing at my friend, for Christ's sake; this did not fall under a mother's purview.

And now, when I want to sit with her, just let go and have her take over, I know that even if she were here, even if she was mentally and physically intact, she couldn’t do much for me.

Maybe what I’m feeling is a helplessness.  A desired and momentary helplessness.  I’ve been working so hard to solve almost insurmountable problems.  I am, for better or worse, captain of my own ship.  And sometimes I want a moment of “I can’t do it”, my mother’s arms around me, her fingers in my hair, the sound of her voice saying, “Shhhhh.  It’s going to be all right.”

They say that every woman wants her mother when she’s in labor, no matter the state of the mother-daughter relationship.  They say that every man wants his mother when he’s dying on the battlefield.  This week, I really want my mother.   I want my mother because I miss her.  I want my mother because I’m feeling the magnitude and solitude of divorce.  I just want my mother.