Balance

I listened to a man speak for an hour today and when he was finished I knew where I was and what I was about, at least in the moment. He is a man of significant courage, or balls, if you will. If he is to be believed he has come up out of the coal mines, attended universities on football scholarships, worked for IBM where he discovered who he was and who he could be and then built an empire. A couple of them, actually. I believe. You are, as he states so beautifully and succinctly, your results, and that is all there is to that.

I've been in the working world for, let me see, a lot of years. From small businesses, large businesses, start ups, technology, insurance, technology, technology, services, technology and now this, Print. But still technology. After all, bidness is bidness no matter what you make or sell it's about the game called the bottom line and I am almost always about technology even if it is operational, finance, or analysis. But the truth is, I freaking LOVE the game called The Bottom Line. I live and breathe for it and have lost limbs, lives and marriages over it. I am the bottom line.

At the company where I grew up, the high tech corp which has since been swallowed up by Mr. E., I was as passionate about my job as anybody you'd ever come across. Passionate and earnest. Oh so very, very earnest in everything I did. In the end when I found out that not everybody was earnest or honest or passionate about the bidness I was stupid heart broken and disillusioned and crawled off into a hole to re-evaluate my life and all that.

I wish, I do so wish, that this man had come along when I was thirty and malleable and I would have jumped right on his football bus and who knows what would have happened? But that's not what happened. He came along now. Now when I am middle aged and tired and so very untrusting. And the most terrible thing, you know, I believe in his vision. It's a game plan I could get behind, align myself with and just, you know, take off. Don't you know.

I have hardened into a shell of unwillingness and now find myself gnawing at my own self restraint and wanting to bust out and be thiry-two again and on fire.

Well so maybe I will come to the party after all. Forty-three or otherwise.

The cold hard facts of maternal fears

The true horribleness of having a near perfect stranger in my house landed good and hard last night. What occurred is not so much the unbearable thing as my response mechanism - and I was fine, nothing bad happened, nothing bad got said and I am fairly certain no body parts were lost.

I should probably state right up front that I believe if you bring a nineteen year old into your house you're going to have to deal with nineteen year old behavior or assumptions, one way or another and that no matter how much screening you do in advance you never really know what you're going to get until you've got it. Same goes for dogs and horses too, by the way.

I was not comfortable with her request to go to Hartford on Day three of her arrival because we were very specifically told that these three days were very important in terms of family bonding and orrientation. I sat on her request, which was made a few weeks in advance of her arrival stateside, for a few days and stewed over the expressed desire versus the possible price and decided it would be all right given that school didn't start right away and she technically wouldn't be on duty immediately.

I was also not comfortable with her inability or unwillingness to accept the inevitable travel difficulties involved in moving by public transportation from one county to another. The trains run in and out of New York all day and most of the night but they only go as far as New Haven because that's pretty much the outer most limits of a survivable commute. After that you've got to either bus or pick up Amtrak which is not a commuters line at all, no matter what they'd like you to think. There's also the added confusion of working out how to make the ten mile trip to the train station in the first place. If you come home on Sunday night you can leave the car at the station but if it's going to be there come Monday morning it's just as likely to be towed before 8 AM as the overbooked and over reserved lots fill up.

The long and the short of it was I let her go and she was going to ride to the city by herself, meet up with her friend and then they'd make their way to Hartford on Sunday, find a hotel or motel and come back Monday morning. I didn't ask her how she was going to find or pay for a Sunday night hotel in Hartford. I just let it go, I do not need another late adolescent to parent, I'm still recovering from the boy.

It was a relief to have the house back at least momentarily. I'm really not so good with people in my personal space and I know this is going to take some getting used to. For example, she needs to learn to feed herself unless there's a meal being put on the table and that's only guaranteed if it's Monday through Thursday evening. All bets are off and you're on your own otherwise unless you are six years old and then I will make sure you're fed. I don't mean to sound harsh, I know it takes time to learn about a family and adjust but I think her mother did her laundry and fed her three meals a day if she was home. She'll get used to it or be hungry I think.

Last night the phone rang at 10 PM. First conversation when I get back home (which won't really be until Wednesday as I've got business engagements that will keep me out late both tonight and tomorrow) is about how late you can call. 10 PM is generally too late as I really ought to be well on my way to out cold by then. So she calls and I make my husband take the call because I am just not in the mood to be even remotely nice and I think, if you are calling this late, something is wrong and you are going to inconvenience me horribly and I have visions of driving the 75 miles to Hartford or where ever to rescue her sorry self because she has not found a room and the last Amtrak train leaves Hartford for New Haven at 8. Also, she simply would not consider coming home before the bloody bitter end because all the best bands are at the end. Whatever.

Husband says, yes, yes, well all right, we'll leave the front door unlocked (she has, for some reason, refused to take her house key because the girl will be home on Monday to let her in). He tells me that she and her friend from the city have met up with someone who is giving them a ride home and he heard male voices and the friend from NYC will be spending the night.

WTF??? Shrieks the voice in my head and then all hell breaks loose and I'm sitting there silently freaking the hell out over this, my stuff, but still:

This is the safe home of my daughters that I have worked very hard to create and maintain. You have met someone strange at a concert and he, out of the goodness of his heart, is going to drive you all the bloody way from Hartford into the woods of Weston because he's nice? And then let you and your friend walk through my safe front door and not follow? You will be lucky to make it home alive. You will be lucky to make it through my front door alive. You will be lucky to make it through the night with any skin on your body at all.

We discuss this, he and I and are of a similar mind having grown up in this part of the country and being a damn sight old enough to know better. I pour another glass of wine that I really should not be having and we watch bad television and wait until 11:30 when we hear the car door in the drive.

We go to the living room and wait. My oldest daughter is still up and I ask her if she should go to bed and she asks if I need her to and then I just say that I don't and it's all right but I am shaking inside.

Our house is a split level ranch with an expanded foyer. This means when you walk in the front door you feel as if you are in this rather grand entry way which is all Italian marble and intricate mosaic and chandelier (I'm working on getting rid of some of that but it's still quite too much for my taste) and you are immediately at a disadvantage if someone is waiting up those six stairs and staring down at you and even more at a disadvantage if those two someones are sitting just out of sight and you hear only the disembodied voices welcoming you home.

Only the two girls walked in the house and the door shut behind them. I stiffled the impulse to rush to the bedroom window to see who was in the car or not in the car. We chat briefly and I tell her that we stayed up to be sure that she is all right. The girls are visibly nervous and they should be. I did not meet the friend before hand and I would not have a stranger, male or female, come into my house at night without speaking first. Not with my girls in the house. Not with anyone in the house, quite honestly.

We go to bed and that is the end of it for the time being.

I am going to have to tell her what I thought and I am going to have to do it in such a way that she hears me. This is not about a nineteen year old getting her panties in a bunch because I do not trust her. Trust her to what? Put my children at risk? I know that I have superimposed my own fears onto the event but, as it turns out, that is my job.

Tired

I couldn't decide on which site tonight's entry belongs so here it is. Today is one of those days that I am unbearably tired. This is when I start looking at balance and trying to figure out where I am out of alignment and how I need to offset the deficit, or something like that. It almost always comes down to me trying desperately to be in control, or at least maintain the illusion of control. Takes up a fair good amount of psychic energy.

In the mean time I am drinking wine and eating leftover raspberry cobbler on the screened porch that looks out onto the swamp and hears the peepers in the spring and tree frogs in the summer.

I did a lot of work many years ago with one of those horribly cultish but remarkably useful transformational groups where 'coaching' is painful at best and traumatic most times. I guess I do prefer the 2x4 method of communication. Control and surrender were my two big boogies. Maybe it comes from being a type A latch key kid but I'm pretty damn well convinced that the fate of the universe, at least as it pertains to me and mine, rides securely and completely on my shoulders.

Has its uses but puts me in a nasty kind of box, doesn't it?

I read somewhere once that if you really want something you have to be willing to not have it. If you're completely vested in a thing and can only see one straight line toward the goal you're just as likely to get knocked off the path and come nowhere near what you wanted in the first place.

All good in theory but what happens when it's about your child?

I don't know. Just floundering this evening, I guess. Might be really helpful to be able to say, God, could you make this thing happen for me and mine? But that's never rung true for me in any case. I guess my relationship with God is such that He or She or whatever expects me to get on with it and work it out.

Sometimes though, sometimes I am unbearably tired.

Please, no footprint in the sand responses. I'll gag and then cry from the futility of it all.

Living in my mother's heart

How do we get so far away from our parents? How do they get so far away from us?

There was a time when I think I didn't talk to my mother for two or three years. I up and left my husband which somehow translated to up and leaving my mother. If I were to be perfectly honest, I up and left everyone. When I started to put it all back together, after being pretty damn close to completely out of control (as if I had ever been in control) everything had changed.

My mom was my champion. I grew up in upwardly mobile middle class suburbia with two working parents; I was of the first generation of the latch key children. I was difficult and prickly and either unwilling or unable to fit any particular mold. Most of my childhood was solitary. My mother has a PhD in something or other. I have nine million credits toward two completely separate degrees and refused to graduate with either.

It was the mothers of the South Glastonbury Pony Club who made sure I had a suitable pony or a horse. It was my mother who made sure I kept the horse. It was me who let the horse go when we moved to Fairfield and couldn't find a stall to rent for under $600 per month (this was in 1981!) It was my mother who called at 3 AM from Seattle to tell me she had two arab quarter crosses and was bringing them home to me rough broke. I was twenty and had been horseless for four years. I finished breaking and did the rudimentary training. It was my mother who fine tuned the babies. It was me who put my husband on the horse and my mother who made him get off. It was me who, pregnant at 22 with a pathetic income, marginally employed husband and unfinished degree, wanted to buy a house in Fairfield County. It was my mother who came up with a way to buy the farm and a way for me to work out how to keep it.

And we moved in lockstep for eight more years.

It was me who was headstrong and walked off the path. It was my mother who narrowed the path.

There was a point in time, when I was introducing my mother to my possibly third husband when she looked at me and said, this is just a side show, you know that, right? All she wanted to know was that I wouldn't be having any more babies. Not that I couldn't take care of my babies, just that I couldn't stay with my husbands. When I told her my eggs were dead as doornails and he'd had a vasectomy she said I could keep him for awhile if it made me happy.

Strangely enough, after she got done being mad at me for leaving him, she hated my first husband and horsenapped my horse right off his farm (he was holding my horse hostage, in a way, so that maybe I would come back). I still have this brand new equestrian saddle bought just for that horse that never got broke in. He was my last horse and that saddle is still in my house. That horse is not.

She accepted that my second husband was completely inappropriate but maintained that I'd made my bed and needed to lie in it; we're still Calvins at the root. She chastised me for leaving him in the same breath that she asked how I could live with him. If I tell her that I struggle in my third marriage she tells me to give ultimatums and when I laugh and say, this is perfectly normal adjustment of two people from different backgrounds with multiple children learning to live together she tells me the world is ending.

She lives on a farm and I live in a swamp. I am not concerned about the rodents my rat terrier ferrets out from under the deck or in the swamp. She tells me, in all seriousness, that they carry the plague.

My mother cut the road through Burma in the corporate world. Her father cut the real one with the real Calvary (you know, like with horses) in WWII. She is for sure his daughter. My mother wrote code in her sleep and navigated the treachery of women in the workplace, with a career and a family. My mother wrote poetry and stories in the closet of her mind and showed them to no one. I found them in a moment of kismet and have never let them go. I painted larger than life murals of dragons and forests on my bedroom walls. My mother cried when I didn't go to art school.

I wear my mother's shoes and remember never to cry in public. I irritate her beyond belief when I don't follow the same rules because the world has shifted. My mother looks at the application programming I do and pronounces it hogwash. I remember to thank God that my mother explained binary when I was twelve and I never forgot. She's a crazy cross between unwilling and recalcitrant St. Louis debutant and horse whisperer. She is happier with dirt under her nails and fourteen dogs in the house. I write thank you notes on engraved paper because it is the right thing to do given my current circumstances. My mother wants to know where the hell I ever got that idea and would rather I ran the stationary off on my printer.

When I was bleeding a slow death into the sheets and convincing my husband it all would pass, it was my mother I called all the way in Ohio and told about my white fingers and blue gums. It was my mother who kept me on the land line and called my Connecticut doctor from her cell phone and ordered me to the hospital immediately. I was running on empty and maybe four hours from dead.

She wants me to be safe.

I cannot be safe and alive at the same time.

It is an uneasy peace but it is peace all the same.

It is my mother I want when I am unbearably sad.