You know, my last post was pretty lame (repetitive theme - nothing really new).
I just sat down and said I will write something - whatever comes to mind. A large part of my mind seems to be shut down - and I'm hoping it doesn't last long.
Recently someone I knew committed suicide (not family and not a close friend, but somebody I had interacted with many times nevertheless, and someone with whom I had had a complicated relationship). So I've been determined not to dwell on it. Our family is just really recovering from a tragedy in November, and this new death could potentially be very hard on my psyche for that and for other reasons.
So, here I am - no, wait, here I'm not.
Yes, I've been fairly successful in not dwelling on it - but, no, it's not really a success. I find that I can't really think about too much at all.
Oh well, I am working on the syllabus for an upcoming class and doing other things. I'm not completely paralyzed.
So, I plan to keep on keeping on (expression from the 1980s, I think). Really really really - sometimes it is best just to keep moving.
I remember my mother. Wow, she was a world-class champion at carrying on. Now, in her case it maybe went too far, because she turned to drink and left some people wanting more real communication (not me, actually - I think I may have dreaded real communication with her). Still... notice that I didn't actually say that she went too far with it, I just said "maybe." Certainly I haven't chosen to go so far along the path of ignoring difficult ideas, subjects, conversations or memories. But I have been hearing from various sources about the strength that being able to just carry on can give us. The idea of psychotherapists of the old school (I'm kind of embarrassed by what I just wrote, because I don't really know enough about the subject to write this way - still, bear with me) that the only way to truly be "well" was to dig and dig and dig until we understood everything about what makes us tick, is too simplistic. I'd say it may be useful to "dig" if, for example, that helps an insightful person recognize the roots of self-destructive behavior. But, at a certain point, the only thing that matters is figuring out how to avoid that behavior --even if we're not even close to the deeper meaning of it all. Hmmm... maybe some of us are really helped by seeking understanding of the roots of a problem, but others aren't. And even for people who could benefit from the magnifying glass to the soul approach, it is so easy to get stuck there.
In my current situation, that quicksand is something I fear a little.
I'm looking for the middle ground. I want to be able to carry on, but I don't want that to mean that I've cordoned off too much of my ability to consider life's deeper meaning.
Well, damn it. I'm going to end with that last trite sentence. Well, too bad. I just don't have the patience now to look for something that matches my ideas more profoundly... so "life's deeper meaning" it is.
So, here I am - well, almost.
So there
26 April 2011
life, the ice cream cone, and everything
Yesterday L. asked if he could go out to eat with a friend "El". I said "Yes, but that he had to stop accepting invitations without reciprocating." But, it turned out it wasn't really an invitation that one had to reciprocate. I don't know if he didn't want to give me the details or if he didn't really know what was up. L told me he'd be going with El's mom (looked a bit uncertain when he said it) and so, when my husband asked me if we should send L with money, I said not if he was being invited by El's family.
Well, El got to the door and I had managed to dig a dollar out of my wallet and some pennies and dimes because I meant to send L with a little cash in his pocket just in case.
I looked at El and said, "You guys better be treating."
El said he had $6!
That is NOT what you say if you have a mother waiting to pick up the tab.
It turns out that El and L are just going to walk over to get ice cream because a certain girl had invited El to do this but had told him she didn't want to go just with him. (Here we have a potentially very amusing story about how long hubby and I speculated about this girl. I love it that I can give his dad such pride and joy by suggesting that this girl had asked El specifically to get L in on this ice cream social.)
But, back to the main story:
I was a bit embarrassed to have suggested to El that he should invite my son - but cleverly saved the awkward situation by saying to L, "Go talk to your dad. He has $5.00." or something like that. I tried to make it sound like I wasn't backtracking from what I had just said about there only being a dollar and change available for L... he could get more. You know? Like I wasn't really being cheap before.
But I'm really not cheap. And that's where this is leading. L has had a rough semester academically and, now more than ever, I hate to just shove $$ into his hand.
L went out for ice cream with $6.00 in his pocket. He came home with one dollar and just a tiny appetite for dinner.
I took $5.00 out of his allowance. I told him that at times his dad and I would cover these things, but at times he'd have to cover them (and we'd be more inclined to cover them when his grades were good). That last part irritated him.
I HATE to be inconsistent. I'd like to say, you need to pay for all of this except under X, Y or Z conditions - something like that.
But, his dad would like to cover these little social outings always - so I don't mention to his dad that the money actually came from his allowance.
Many of you will think I'm evil, but I have had this conversation with my husband. Trust me, it backfired. Sigh...
My husband remembers being poor and not being able to invite out any girls because he never had any money. He wants to spare his son and he takes great pleasure in being able to give his son some of the things he was deprived of (I mentioned food in another post).
What I can't get him to accept is that his own struggle may have helped shape him in positive ways and that we can try to leave some struggle. That is, L is never going to suffer the way his father suffered, and I'm just as happy about that as anyone. But...but if you don't expose your kids to some tough choices, moments in which they have to decide what their priorities are --the nintendo game or the girl--, one is depriving them of something valuable. Sigh... So, I feel the need to make L see that all these aspects of his life are part of the same ... process. Damn, becoming very repetitive here - NOT eloquent.
For example, L didn't need to buy the biggest ice cream cone to have fun (at the place they went, $5.00 and change buys a heck of a lot of sugar). If he eventually understands that this choice may negatively impact other parts of his independence, he'll make different choices. I don't know if I can really create this situation for L. Sometimes I worry - No, often I worry. His father will be over 70 when he graduates from college. Will we have given him the foundation he needs to go out and make critical decisions about his daily life and his future?
See, that's what this ice cream represents to me... Way too much...
Well, El got to the door and I had managed to dig a dollar out of my wallet and some pennies and dimes because I meant to send L with a little cash in his pocket just in case.
I looked at El and said, "You guys better be treating."
El said he had $6!
That is NOT what you say if you have a mother waiting to pick up the tab.
It turns out that El and L are just going to walk over to get ice cream because a certain girl had invited El to do this but had told him she didn't want to go just with him. (Here we have a potentially very amusing story about how long hubby and I speculated about this girl. I love it that I can give his dad such pride and joy by suggesting that this girl had asked El specifically to get L in on this ice cream social.)
But, back to the main story:
I was a bit embarrassed to have suggested to El that he should invite my son - but cleverly saved the awkward situation by saying to L, "Go talk to your dad. He has $5.00." or something like that. I tried to make it sound like I wasn't backtracking from what I had just said about there only being a dollar and change available for L... he could get more. You know? Like I wasn't really being cheap before.
But I'm really not cheap. And that's where this is leading. L has had a rough semester academically and, now more than ever, I hate to just shove $$ into his hand.
L went out for ice cream with $6.00 in his pocket. He came home with one dollar and just a tiny appetite for dinner.
I took $5.00 out of his allowance. I told him that at times his dad and I would cover these things, but at times he'd have to cover them (and we'd be more inclined to cover them when his grades were good). That last part irritated him.
I HATE to be inconsistent. I'd like to say, you need to pay for all of this except under X, Y or Z conditions - something like that.
But, his dad would like to cover these little social outings always - so I don't mention to his dad that the money actually came from his allowance.
Many of you will think I'm evil, but I have had this conversation with my husband. Trust me, it backfired. Sigh...
My husband remembers being poor and not being able to invite out any girls because he never had any money. He wants to spare his son and he takes great pleasure in being able to give his son some of the things he was deprived of (I mentioned food in another post).
What I can't get him to accept is that his own struggle may have helped shape him in positive ways and that we can try to leave some struggle. That is, L is never going to suffer the way his father suffered, and I'm just as happy about that as anyone. But...but if you don't expose your kids to some tough choices, moments in which they have to decide what their priorities are --the nintendo game or the girl--, one is depriving them of something valuable. Sigh... So, I feel the need to make L see that all these aspects of his life are part of the same ... process. Damn, becoming very repetitive here - NOT eloquent.
For example, L didn't need to buy the biggest ice cream cone to have fun (at the place they went, $5.00 and change buys a heck of a lot of sugar). If he eventually understands that this choice may negatively impact other parts of his independence, he'll make different choices. I don't know if I can really create this situation for L. Sometimes I worry - No, often I worry. His father will be over 70 when he graduates from college. Will we have given him the foundation he needs to go out and make critical decisions about his daily life and his future?
See, that's what this ice cream represents to me... Way too much...
10 April 2011
censorship of the worst kind
My husband has a special fondness for comics which is one of the contradictions I love about him... since he considers himself an intellectual. It's only after some time that I've come to understand this contradiction.
He started reading when he was very young and he'd read anything he could get his hands on. Keep in mind that he grew up in a very poor family in a small town in a coffee growing region of Colombia. Life was tough, and to make matters worse, the region he lived in was being affected by La Violencia. Seriously, there was a decade (about 1948-1957) in Colombia where the violence between "liberales" and "conservadores" was so wide-spread and intense that it's known as "The Violence."
For a time when he was young he lived with an Aunt because his parents were off trying to get settled in a new, larger and safer city. He had a comic book collection because he had saved what little money he could get his hands on to accumulate these comics, and, if I'm not mistaken, they had even been a source of income for him; he could rent them to other children.
Anyway, this Aunt was very religious and disapproved of the comics. One day when he came home, he saw that she had taken his comics and cut them up for toilet paper.
Just to allow you to complete the necessary mental image:
Naturally people didn't purchase toilet paper in a poor family back then. The family would cut whatever paper they could use into small squares which were then skewered onto a thick wire hook (or a pole) with a pointed end. This was kept near the toilet.
I can imagine his frustration and rage. I know he was quite a handful as an adolescent, but I suspect this was before the time when he basically started making his own life decisions. . . which was pretty young by his account.
So, it's no accident that he has little tolerance for the type of closed-minded fearful censorship that comic books and similar reading can awaken in adults (He and I often disagree about what's appropriate - and I've been much more liberal about what my youngest son sees/reads because of that). And it's also pretty predictable that, in spite of a general lack of interest in material things, it's hard for him not to accumulate books and comics/graphic novels. It's a fun passtime, too - because mainly it involves searches through garage sales and used bookstores.
Anyway, back to the past, his aunt had little respect for his reading, but others did. I have to add an anecdote I heard about my husband which was really an AHA moment for me. My mother in law had come and we were sitting around with family and friends from his childhood (we were visiting Florida). One of the things that my mother in law said was that, for a while my husband suffered from headaches as a boy. Well, her remedy involved TYING A PIECE OF RAW BEEF TO HIS HEAD. Isn't that fantastic? You know that she cooked it afterward.... Well, I didn't ask her (it seemed indelicate) but, seriously, she couldn't really throw away meat like that I'm thinking.
But the point of this story is that, when the other mothers saw that H had beef tied to his head, they started tying beef to their children's heads!
Since neighbors and family would see him reading newspapers when he was super young - I guess everyone knew that he was the smartest kid around. If a piece of meat tied to the head was good enough for H, well.... You get the picture. I just love this image.
He started reading when he was very young and he'd read anything he could get his hands on. Keep in mind that he grew up in a very poor family in a small town in a coffee growing region of Colombia. Life was tough, and to make matters worse, the region he lived in was being affected by La Violencia. Seriously, there was a decade (about 1948-1957) in Colombia where the violence between "liberales" and "conservadores" was so wide-spread and intense that it's known as "The Violence."
For a time when he was young he lived with an Aunt because his parents were off trying to get settled in a new, larger and safer city. He had a comic book collection because he had saved what little money he could get his hands on to accumulate these comics, and, if I'm not mistaken, they had even been a source of income for him; he could rent them to other children.
Anyway, this Aunt was very religious and disapproved of the comics. One day when he came home, he saw that she had taken his comics and cut them up for toilet paper.
Just to allow you to complete the necessary mental image:
Naturally people didn't purchase toilet paper in a poor family back then. The family would cut whatever paper they could use into small squares which were then skewered onto a thick wire hook (or a pole) with a pointed end. This was kept near the toilet.
I can imagine his frustration and rage. I know he was quite a handful as an adolescent, but I suspect this was before the time when he basically started making his own life decisions. . . which was pretty young by his account.
So, it's no accident that he has little tolerance for the type of closed-minded fearful censorship that comic books and similar reading can awaken in adults (He and I often disagree about what's appropriate - and I've been much more liberal about what my youngest son sees/reads because of that). And it's also pretty predictable that, in spite of a general lack of interest in material things, it's hard for him not to accumulate books and comics/graphic novels. It's a fun passtime, too - because mainly it involves searches through garage sales and used bookstores.
Anyway, back to the past, his aunt had little respect for his reading, but others did. I have to add an anecdote I heard about my husband which was really an AHA moment for me. My mother in law had come and we were sitting around with family and friends from his childhood (we were visiting Florida). One of the things that my mother in law said was that, for a while my husband suffered from headaches as a boy. Well, her remedy involved TYING A PIECE OF RAW BEEF TO HIS HEAD. Isn't that fantastic? You know that she cooked it afterward.... Well, I didn't ask her (it seemed indelicate) but, seriously, she couldn't really throw away meat like that I'm thinking.
But the point of this story is that, when the other mothers saw that H had beef tied to his head, they started tying beef to their children's heads!
Since neighbors and family would see him reading newspapers when he was super young - I guess everyone knew that he was the smartest kid around. If a piece of meat tied to the head was good enough for H, well.... You get the picture. I just love this image.
09 April 2011
My secret identity can never be revealed...
now that I've posted this most embarrassing aspect of my personality...
Dr. Who fan (since 1983).
Dr. Who fan (since 1983).
06 April 2011
Extra Extra - Read all about conflict in NJ
Had battles with both of my children (the ones at home) yesterday.
Day begins with very tired L who is finally almost caught up with his work since the musical ended a few days ago. He didn’t e-mail me the work he needed to print before he went to bed last night, so I turn on his laptop to check on it and send it to myself (from L’s laptop to my computer which has a printer)... As I’m working on it to make sure the bibliography & citations are correct, I have to get L out of bed TWICE; he kept getting back under the covers after breakfast.
I noticed that he had failed to include an important source in his bibliography (although he cited the author’s name after a quote). That was especially galling for me, because it happened to be a source I had lent him and I’d been asking for him to return it for days. Instead he had to find it that morning. Anyway, when I see another source is missing from the bibliography, it’s too late - L has to go – I had to print it and, in fact, I had to drive him to school.
For days, I’ve been frustrated because I’ve suspected L has been getting back in bed in the morning. I know he’s tired, but the thing is – those ten minutes of shut eye probably don’t give him any relief and just cause him to rush out of the house in the mornings without preparing himself for the day (and then he calls to have me deliver things if he’s forgotten something – although he is doing this less now).
So, as we’re going out the door, I hand him the only money I have in my wallet, a twenty, but I tell him that I couldn’t make his lunch because of the work I was doing for him as he went back to bed, and so , whatever he used for lunch would come out of his allowance. Lucas looked shocked, but beyond the incredulous question, we have no time for an argument: I’m a sight – as I pull the twenty out of the little wallet attached to my keys, I drop all my credit cards and papers on the floor and ignore them as I frantically look for shoes and run out the door. When we got out to the car, I had those uninterrupted five minutes with him and I softened my tune a bit. “He’d only have to pay for half his lunch, but he HAD to stop getting back into bed in the morning. It does you no good -blah” (Only one blah, because I really didn’t go on and on – It was very civil.)
I dropped him off, and told him I loved him; there was no door slamming or ugly looks from his side. And as I drove home I realized that L could give me a ten when he got home, tell me he’d spent ten, and he could actually make five bucks out of this awful punishment... Sigh... Next time I won’t wimp out.
So, how much did my poor son spend on lunch? Well, he didn’t get home until about 4:00 and then he headed straight to the computer to check facebook etc. When I called him downstairs to ask for my "change" about 20 minutes later, he gave me the entire $20.00 back. I asked him what he’d eaten and he insisted that he hadn’t eaten anything. But, I know that kid. If he hadn’t eaten all day, he would have rushed right to the kitchen that afternoon. (My psychic powers are telling me that he mooched off his friends... Here’s a possible scenario: he tells everyone that I didn’t make his lunch today – maybe he even tells them that his mom said he should buy his own. These kind souls take pity on him and he ends up eating more than usual...) I’m okay with whatever happened – I’m even okay with being the bad guy – I’m just glad I wasn’t faced with the moral dilemma of how to handle it if he’d come home claiming to have lost the money or something. L is a good kid.
Oh, the ONE thing I am really ashamed of, and KNOW I have to change is that when L sends me a paper, I can’t just print it – maybe fix his bibliography. No, I always read things and even add the odd sentence. God, it’s true, and I know how wrong it is. In fact, many a time (including this specific incident) I’ve added something, realized that I’ve gone too far and then deleted it completely. This paper was especially hard on me because I'd given L a source last night and explained it to him - to help him clear up a point he'd been confused by. Instead of correcting it, he just took the entire point out of the essay. So, I was stuck on that for a few minutes.
So this tendency or pattern of mine is not good, and it also means that, while it’s true that L didn’t do his part (he was days late with the essay etc.), my obsessive nature also slows this printing process waaaaay down. It’s my terrible secret, but it’s not that I’m an overly ambitious mommy – no it seems to be an obsessive-compulsive trait. My students get a lot more comments on their papers than students of other professors. Just this weekend, another example: my husband gave me a chapter of his book (textbook) to review, and begged me just to give it a “once-over” and fix any big errors. I was NOT to polish for style or anything else... I could not do it. For example, when he included a quote that I found poorly worded, I spent a half hour trying to write the paragraph with less text quoted so that it wouldn’t include the offending snippet of that quote. When H and I bickered about it as he reviewed my revision, I accused the author he was quoting of not having a good editor. Then we lost another five minutes as H changed my brilliant reworking of his paragraph.
But wait, Amazing Almost-Invisible Woman, you haven’t told us about the other fight.
Well, since day before yesterday I had been getting calls for my daughter V (my husband’s daughter who lives with us when she isn’t staying at her partner’s parents’ house). The caller won’t leave a message except that it’s about “personal finances,” but this isn’t the first time V has received calls and letters because she hasn’t paid a bill. Once –the first time- I even sent a check to a collection agency to get them off her back (later, she swore she’d paid the bill...)**
Back to the current crisis: So, I call her, I e-mail her, I call her partner and leave a message saying she needs to call me or check her e-mail. Later, when my son answers the phone, they actually tell him that it's Victoria’s Secrets... (Note to self: if you get the call which begins with the recording with a fake sounding British accent telling you to wait for the important call, it’s Victoria’s Secrets bill collection department.) At that point I use my cell phone to text V, “pay victoria secret.”
I tell her dad that evening and he says, “What? Again? I’m going to have to sit down and talk with her.” But, who can talk with the disappearing, theoretically adult and independent daughter. Knowing that we have bad news for her, she stays away. Yesterday, I only got one call for her – so I was hoping she paid the bill. She doesn’t get home at all until probably after 1 am yesterday: worked until 11 or so and then went to the gym with partner... So, her dad wakes up, opens our bedroom door and yells down the stairs – something about the calls (I don’t hear the exact question as I’ve just woken up.) She answers that she doesn’t know and is starting to explain something when he interrupts her, “Victoria’s secrets. kiss kiss kiss kisss.” Seriously, that’s how angry he is. He gets up but doesn’t go downstairs, doesn’t call her out on what was probably going to be a lie- that she doesn’t know who was calling – and sends her kisses.
So, now I was wide awake and frustrated with H. These calls are upsetting to me. I went downstairs to talk to V, but when I didn't see her and she doesn’t answer me, I go back upstairs. Yes, that’s me – I still mean to talk to her, but I want this to be a real chance to talk... (excuses excuses – it’s that I dread confrontation). Anyway, when I come back up, H is mad at me because now I’ve woken him up completely when I sniped at him for his handling (NOT) of the situation. He gets up to go downstairs and so I go downstairs and this time I’m not retreating until I talk to her and she gets the message. I’m in the kitchen and she can’t hide out in the bathroom forever.
She comes out; I ask her, “What’s up?”
It’s a bill she has to pay but she didn’t have the money – but she was definitely going to pay it “tomorrow.”
I ask, “Why do you even have a bill with Victoria’s Secrets?” She doesn’t answer, she just looks down. My hubby comes into the kitchen and sits down to listen at some point. I basically tell V that I feel as though “I am enabling her by taking these calls from creditors and being discreet about it.” In a way I’m acting as though this were normal behavior, and it’s not normal. She’s making really poor financial decisions. I’m not willing to continue to do that – Next time I’m going to ... I don’t know ... tell her mother. I ranted, but not too long. V wasn’t responding anyway; she just looked at the ground. So, I hope that main point was really clear. I’m not going to just continue to take these calls and collaborate by being discrete about this.
I didn’t say this to her, but it is very frustrating to me to worry about her, but have no power to really demand anything. She is the best person I know at making sincere promises and then NOT follow through. She has mastered the art of strategic disappearances and being incomunicada.
Bottom line, I have no threat to make – and, believe me, my numerous attempts to reach her through $$ incentives have failed... In a way my only power is to hand this thing off to her mother who is currently living near-by and who will hound her. I know V doesn’t want her mother involved and my hubby and I have supported that decision. V’s emotional and physical separation from her mother was a huge turning point in her life, and she was so proud to see, after she survived, that she was stronger than she thought. She was about 19 then – so it has been over 5 years, but I know that she still has to defend her space a bit. Of course I don’t want to gratuitously involve her mother against V’s will.
For V, it goes beyond just her mother butting in; as far as I can tell, V doesn’t let her partner know about her $$ errors. I mean, some months ago, Toyota started calling her and was on the verge of repossessing her car. And, as far as I know, nobody found out. V just disappeared to her partner’s family’s house and managed to pay the bill...
Here’s the strange thing: these are problems over smallish bills – They don’t have to become major crisis. For example, if she wasn’t lying to us, her Toyota Bill of $200 a month was only a month late – in other words, she owed two months or $400.00. Last night her dad asked her how much the Victoria’s Secret’s bill was. She said she was going to pay $60.00. Her dad caught the hedging and insisted, “How much do you owe?” She says only $120.00.
But I think V doesn’t want to ask for help from us, from her partner – her mother has no money anyway, but might be able to help her. No, nobody. Still, she lists our home phone as her phone number – and I have to take these calls – and see the letters.
So, this morning, V got up before 7:00 am came out to the kitchen and told me that she’d set her alarm for 7. “Oh,” I said, “you set it for 7 so you can pay your bill?” Yes. “Do you have the money to pay it?” Yes... It ocurrs to me that it’s not payday – so why did she have the money today but not yesterday or the day before? But I’m never going to find out, probably.
So, last night I went to bed and felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t offered to lend V the money to pay the bill (instead of waiting for her to ask to borrow it – which she didn’t). We got back up to bed at 2:30 a.m. and I couldn’t sleep. I turned on a lamp and read, of all things, a book about “Mao’s Great Famine.” H hugged me and said he knew I worried about everyone. I had set the lamp on the floor, but still I worried about whether H would sleep with the light. I am worried a bit about H. The other day I looked at him, and he seriously suddenly looked older. Sigh. So, I turned off the light but couldn’t sleep; lay there for a good hour to let H sleep, but I HATE this lying in the dark when I can’t sleep. If I can’t turn the thoughts from preoccupations, it’s not good to lay there in the dark. Finally about 4:00 am, I reach over and slowly open up the drawer in my bedside table where I’ve seen a little reading light that came with the snuggie that V gave me for X-mas this year. I keep reading about famine in China and about how the Chinese are exporting grains and cotton in those years (1958-59...) even as people were suffering from the cold and from hunger. I realize that I am very hungry and also simply too cold to be able to fall asleep (WHY oh why do I go to bed without socks on in the winter when I know that I shouldn’t?), but I don’t want to wake husband. No, the irony of the situation isn’t lost on me – my puny problems are really nothing compared to the people I was reading about.
Finally, I get up and get on two pairs of socks and another pair of pajama pants. Grab a pillow from the side room – wrap myself up in a sheet and read some more with my little reading lamp, snuggled under the covers next to H. Ahhh... I’m feeling so much better. At 4:40 a.m. I turn off the light and don’t have another conscious thought until 6:25 when H gets up and gripes about the cats who have once again clawed at the carpet under our door until it’s so bunched up that you can’t open the door whithout pulling it straight. And I’m off to another day.
______________
**funny --but also kind of sad—story. The bill that had gone to a collection agency came from car insurance. Not long after she came to live with us, she got fed up at her dad’s “meddling” (and mine I’m sure) and decided to move out. Well, she’d already gotten her own car insurance when she realized that she couldn’t afford to move out. Wow – this must have been about 4 years ago. So, she cancelled the car insurance but still owed a day or two... It wasn’t more than 40$. What was the “meddling”? Well, it was certainly after the one time her dad seriously did intervene in her financial decision-making (he’s very very laissez-faire). She still had no income, but had managed to put over $1000 on her first credit card. He took it away from her. I think the “meddling” in question was more that he was asking her constantly about her classes... and I was always asking her if I could help her with any of her class work (Didn’t work anyway – to constantly ask her, that is).
Day begins with very tired L who is finally almost caught up with his work since the musical ended a few days ago. He didn’t e-mail me the work he needed to print before he went to bed last night, so I turn on his laptop to check on it and send it to myself (from L’s laptop to my computer which has a printer)... As I’m working on it to make sure the bibliography & citations are correct, I have to get L out of bed TWICE; he kept getting back under the covers after breakfast.
I noticed that he had failed to include an important source in his bibliography (although he cited the author’s name after a quote). That was especially galling for me, because it happened to be a source I had lent him and I’d been asking for him to return it for days. Instead he had to find it that morning. Anyway, when I see another source is missing from the bibliography, it’s too late - L has to go – I had to print it and, in fact, I had to drive him to school.
For days, I’ve been frustrated because I’ve suspected L has been getting back in bed in the morning. I know he’s tired, but the thing is – those ten minutes of shut eye probably don’t give him any relief and just cause him to rush out of the house in the mornings without preparing himself for the day (and then he calls to have me deliver things if he’s forgotten something – although he is doing this less now).
So, as we’re going out the door, I hand him the only money I have in my wallet, a twenty, but I tell him that I couldn’t make his lunch because of the work I was doing for him as he went back to bed, and so , whatever he used for lunch would come out of his allowance. Lucas looked shocked, but beyond the incredulous question, we have no time for an argument: I’m a sight – as I pull the twenty out of the little wallet attached to my keys, I drop all my credit cards and papers on the floor and ignore them as I frantically look for shoes and run out the door. When we got out to the car, I had those uninterrupted five minutes with him and I softened my tune a bit. “He’d only have to pay for half his lunch, but he HAD to stop getting back into bed in the morning. It does you no good -blah” (Only one blah, because I really didn’t go on and on – It was very civil.)
I dropped him off, and told him I loved him; there was no door slamming or ugly looks from his side. And as I drove home I realized that L could give me a ten when he got home, tell me he’d spent ten, and he could actually make five bucks out of this awful punishment... Sigh... Next time I won’t wimp out.
So, how much did my poor son spend on lunch? Well, he didn’t get home until about 4:00 and then he headed straight to the computer to check facebook etc. When I called him downstairs to ask for my "change" about 20 minutes later, he gave me the entire $20.00 back. I asked him what he’d eaten and he insisted that he hadn’t eaten anything. But, I know that kid. If he hadn’t eaten all day, he would have rushed right to the kitchen that afternoon. (My psychic powers are telling me that he mooched off his friends... Here’s a possible scenario: he tells everyone that I didn’t make his lunch today – maybe he even tells them that his mom said he should buy his own. These kind souls take pity on him and he ends up eating more than usual...) I’m okay with whatever happened – I’m even okay with being the bad guy – I’m just glad I wasn’t faced with the moral dilemma of how to handle it if he’d come home claiming to have lost the money or something. L is a good kid.
Oh, the ONE thing I am really ashamed of, and KNOW I have to change is that when L sends me a paper, I can’t just print it – maybe fix his bibliography. No, I always read things and even add the odd sentence. God, it’s true, and I know how wrong it is. In fact, many a time (including this specific incident) I’ve added something, realized that I’ve gone too far and then deleted it completely. This paper was especially hard on me because I'd given L a source last night and explained it to him - to help him clear up a point he'd been confused by. Instead of correcting it, he just took the entire point out of the essay. So, I was stuck on that for a few minutes.
So this tendency or pattern of mine is not good, and it also means that, while it’s true that L didn’t do his part (he was days late with the essay etc.), my obsessive nature also slows this printing process waaaaay down. It’s my terrible secret, but it’s not that I’m an overly ambitious mommy – no it seems to be an obsessive-compulsive trait. My students get a lot more comments on their papers than students of other professors. Just this weekend, another example: my husband gave me a chapter of his book (textbook) to review, and begged me just to give it a “once-over” and fix any big errors. I was NOT to polish for style or anything else... I could not do it. For example, when he included a quote that I found poorly worded, I spent a half hour trying to write the paragraph with less text quoted so that it wouldn’t include the offending snippet of that quote. When H and I bickered about it as he reviewed my revision, I accused the author he was quoting of not having a good editor. Then we lost another five minutes as H changed my brilliant reworking of his paragraph.
But wait, Amazing Almost-Invisible Woman, you haven’t told us about the other fight.
Well, since day before yesterday I had been getting calls for my daughter V (my husband’s daughter who lives with us when she isn’t staying at her partner’s parents’ house). The caller won’t leave a message except that it’s about “personal finances,” but this isn’t the first time V has received calls and letters because she hasn’t paid a bill. Once –the first time- I even sent a check to a collection agency to get them off her back (later, she swore she’d paid the bill...)**
Back to the current crisis: So, I call her, I e-mail her, I call her partner and leave a message saying she needs to call me or check her e-mail. Later, when my son answers the phone, they actually tell him that it's Victoria’s Secrets... (Note to self: if you get the call which begins with the recording with a fake sounding British accent telling you to wait for the important call, it’s Victoria’s Secrets bill collection department.) At that point I use my cell phone to text V, “pay victoria secret.”
I tell her dad that evening and he says, “What? Again? I’m going to have to sit down and talk with her.” But, who can talk with the disappearing, theoretically adult and independent daughter. Knowing that we have bad news for her, she stays away. Yesterday, I only got one call for her – so I was hoping she paid the bill. She doesn’t get home at all until probably after 1 am yesterday: worked until 11 or so and then went to the gym with partner... So, her dad wakes up, opens our bedroom door and yells down the stairs – something about the calls (I don’t hear the exact question as I’ve just woken up.) She answers that she doesn’t know and is starting to explain something when he interrupts her, “Victoria’s secrets. kiss kiss kiss kisss.” Seriously, that’s how angry he is. He gets up but doesn’t go downstairs, doesn’t call her out on what was probably going to be a lie- that she doesn’t know who was calling – and sends her kisses.
So, now I was wide awake and frustrated with H. These calls are upsetting to me. I went downstairs to talk to V, but when I didn't see her and she doesn’t answer me, I go back upstairs. Yes, that’s me – I still mean to talk to her, but I want this to be a real chance to talk... (excuses excuses – it’s that I dread confrontation). Anyway, when I come back up, H is mad at me because now I’ve woken him up completely when I sniped at him for his handling (NOT) of the situation. He gets up to go downstairs and so I go downstairs and this time I’m not retreating until I talk to her and she gets the message. I’m in the kitchen and she can’t hide out in the bathroom forever.
She comes out; I ask her, “What’s up?”
It’s a bill she has to pay but she didn’t have the money – but she was definitely going to pay it “tomorrow.”
I ask, “Why do you even have a bill with Victoria’s Secrets?” She doesn’t answer, she just looks down. My hubby comes into the kitchen and sits down to listen at some point. I basically tell V that I feel as though “I am enabling her by taking these calls from creditors and being discreet about it.” In a way I’m acting as though this were normal behavior, and it’s not normal. She’s making really poor financial decisions. I’m not willing to continue to do that – Next time I’m going to ... I don’t know ... tell her mother. I ranted, but not too long. V wasn’t responding anyway; she just looked at the ground. So, I hope that main point was really clear. I’m not going to just continue to take these calls and collaborate by being discrete about this.
I didn’t say this to her, but it is very frustrating to me to worry about her, but have no power to really demand anything. She is the best person I know at making sincere promises and then NOT follow through. She has mastered the art of strategic disappearances and being incomunicada.
Bottom line, I have no threat to make – and, believe me, my numerous attempts to reach her through $$ incentives have failed... In a way my only power is to hand this thing off to her mother who is currently living near-by and who will hound her. I know V doesn’t want her mother involved and my hubby and I have supported that decision. V’s emotional and physical separation from her mother was a huge turning point in her life, and she was so proud to see, after she survived, that she was stronger than she thought. She was about 19 then – so it has been over 5 years, but I know that she still has to defend her space a bit. Of course I don’t want to gratuitously involve her mother against V’s will.
For V, it goes beyond just her mother butting in; as far as I can tell, V doesn’t let her partner know about her $$ errors. I mean, some months ago, Toyota started calling her and was on the verge of repossessing her car. And, as far as I know, nobody found out. V just disappeared to her partner’s family’s house and managed to pay the bill...
Here’s the strange thing: these are problems over smallish bills – They don’t have to become major crisis. For example, if she wasn’t lying to us, her Toyota Bill of $200 a month was only a month late – in other words, she owed two months or $400.00. Last night her dad asked her how much the Victoria’s Secret’s bill was. She said she was going to pay $60.00. Her dad caught the hedging and insisted, “How much do you owe?” She says only $120.00.
But I think V doesn’t want to ask for help from us, from her partner – her mother has no money anyway, but might be able to help her. No, nobody. Still, she lists our home phone as her phone number – and I have to take these calls – and see the letters.
So, this morning, V got up before 7:00 am came out to the kitchen and told me that she’d set her alarm for 7. “Oh,” I said, “you set it for 7 so you can pay your bill?” Yes. “Do you have the money to pay it?” Yes... It ocurrs to me that it’s not payday – so why did she have the money today but not yesterday or the day before? But I’m never going to find out, probably.
So, last night I went to bed and felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t offered to lend V the money to pay the bill (instead of waiting for her to ask to borrow it – which she didn’t). We got back up to bed at 2:30 a.m. and I couldn’t sleep. I turned on a lamp and read, of all things, a book about “Mao’s Great Famine.” H hugged me and said he knew I worried about everyone. I had set the lamp on the floor, but still I worried about whether H would sleep with the light. I am worried a bit about H. The other day I looked at him, and he seriously suddenly looked older. Sigh. So, I turned off the light but couldn’t sleep; lay there for a good hour to let H sleep, but I HATE this lying in the dark when I can’t sleep. If I can’t turn the thoughts from preoccupations, it’s not good to lay there in the dark. Finally about 4:00 am, I reach over and slowly open up the drawer in my bedside table where I’ve seen a little reading light that came with the snuggie that V gave me for X-mas this year. I keep reading about famine in China and about how the Chinese are exporting grains and cotton in those years (1958-59...) even as people were suffering from the cold and from hunger. I realize that I am very hungry and also simply too cold to be able to fall asleep (WHY oh why do I go to bed without socks on in the winter when I know that I shouldn’t?), but I don’t want to wake husband. No, the irony of the situation isn’t lost on me – my puny problems are really nothing compared to the people I was reading about.
Finally, I get up and get on two pairs of socks and another pair of pajama pants. Grab a pillow from the side room – wrap myself up in a sheet and read some more with my little reading lamp, snuggled under the covers next to H. Ahhh... I’m feeling so much better. At 4:40 a.m. I turn off the light and don’t have another conscious thought until 6:25 when H gets up and gripes about the cats who have once again clawed at the carpet under our door until it’s so bunched up that you can’t open the door whithout pulling it straight. And I’m off to another day.
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**funny --but also kind of sad—story. The bill that had gone to a collection agency came from car insurance. Not long after she came to live with us, she got fed up at her dad’s “meddling” (and mine I’m sure) and decided to move out. Well, she’d already gotten her own car insurance when she realized that she couldn’t afford to move out. Wow – this must have been about 4 years ago. So, she cancelled the car insurance but still owed a day or two... It wasn’t more than 40$. What was the “meddling”? Well, it was certainly after the one time her dad seriously did intervene in her financial decision-making (he’s very very laissez-faire). She still had no income, but had managed to put over $1000 on her first credit card. He took it away from her. I think the “meddling” in question was more that he was asking her constantly about her classes... and I was always asking her if I could help her with any of her class work (Didn’t work anyway – to constantly ask her, that is).
04 April 2011
my non-recognition policy
I recently took on a volunteer post in my son's school play . As I became bogged down with the work, I was still glad to have done it, not only because it eased a burden of guilt for not contributing more, but because I was meeting other parents. I made an effort to learn names, and when I actually saw the parents involved (most of this work was done via e-mail) I tried to link the face with the name.
Well, on the final night of the show a woman says "Hi" to me, and I look right at her, study the face briefly as one does; I know that I should recognize her and search the old data bank; then I say, "Sandra, right?" She looked upset and reminded me that her name was "Carolyn"* - My friend and neighbor J who had come with me, also corrected me with a practically shocked expression...
Now, I know people make mistakes with names all the time, but here's how BAD this one was... Carolyn is somebody I had interacted with for years, albeit only very occasionally. What's more, she has a hair lip (not a bad one - she's perfectly nice looking, but it's not a face that anyone with social skills can mistake). So, in case there was still any doubt...
* As usual, all names are changed to protect the innocent.
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