Maybe Baby 2

I have been looking at porn.

This porn comes in the form of a Facebook page for local moms who are selling or giving away baby stuff. 

I’m on this page because one of my best friends is pregnant, and I have hopped so far aboard her baby-train, I’m surprised I’m not morning-sick myself!

In the past few weeks, I’ve begun reading a book on pregnancy that she read and loved (The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy), crocheting baby bibs, buying scrap fabric for burp clothes, and practically stalking her to ask if she wants a breast pump I found online. 

As I spoke of in my 2014 blog post “Maybe Baby,” I am not sure whether I want children. 

As then, I am not in a serious relationship, and I still am not willing to go the motherhood route alone, so there’s no real reason to question if I do or do not. But, reasonable or not, that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it. 

With every article on our drought, the cost of living, the planet’s imminent demise, the expansion of the stupid class — I am convinced for a few moments never to bring children into this hateful world. 

And with every true breath of fresh air, every warm hug, every belly laugh — I am convinced for a few moments that I want another human to bear witness to this world’s incandescent beauty. 

I am the age my mom was when she carried me (33), and then my brother at 36. I have been emailing and asking her all kinds of questions about her pregnancies since I began reading the pregnancy book — what was your morning sickness like? what does pregnancy feel like? did you have food aversions? stretch marks? hemorrhoids? (god help us, she did not!)

I have had the liberty and the luxury of asking my mom these questions, and too, my friend who is pregnant, does not. And I am very aware of this fact, and I think it has spurred my devoted interest in her pregnancy — I want to be there as much as I can, because I want to make up for any absence she might be feeling (real or imagined, to me, since I haven’t spoken to her about it yet). 

I was on the phone with my mom this morning, telling her that I feel my heightened interest in my friend’s impending mommy-hood is also that she’s my first local BFF to be pregnant. One of my other best friends in Long Island had a baby last year, and I was able to be there for a few days when the baby was a month old, but that’s all. There wasn’t the same imminent babyhood. 

I told my mom that I’d been thinking about my very best friend from childhood, a woman I’ve known since we were 3 years old, and how I can’t imagine what it will be like if and when she gets pregnant across the country from me. And I began to cry. 

Of course, it’s about her, my New Jersey friend, and it’s also about me. About how I’ll feel, if and when I also choose to have a family — assuming I’m able — so far from her and my own family. 

This is big business. This mommy stuff. 

And I am wanting to prepare to make that decision in a realistic way — so I have doubled-down on my work around intimacy and relationships (or in my case, habitual lack thereof). This morning, I told the woman I’d been working on these issues with by phone for about 6 weeks (a stranger whose name was passed along to me from a woman I admire) that I have reached out to someone local to work the rest of this stuff with. 

And I have. I will continue this relationship work with this local woman who has known me for nearly 8 years, who has seen me at my best and worst, who can call me out, see patterns, and provide so much space for my feelings and vulnerability that I can practically swim in them and still feel safe. 

Yesterday morning, this same woman (as we were talking about what my issues were and what I wanted to work out) said that she'd always felt for me that my issue was around deprivation. 

… 

She’s very astute. 

And it’s also funny to me because it’s one of those things that doesn’t come into focus about yourself until someone else (who knows you well) reflects it back. 

I am very aware of this time in the generation of women around me. My friends who are certain they don’t want kids, ones who know they do, the ones who can't, and ones who, like me, are unsure.

It’s a particular, cordoned off time in our lives. And I’m holding the space for that, leaning into the grief of potentially not seeing friends change their whole lives, them not seeing me do the same. I’m aware this is “future-tripping,” but it’s fair to acknowledge my feelings around it, anyway. 

I’m allowed to not know what will happen (for me or for my friends), and I’m allowed to have feelings either way. 

Today, what that looks like is picking up a bitchin' breast pump for my best friend. Continuing to do the work toward an intimate relationship with a man. And letting myself be both sad and happy for and with my peers. 

Meet the New Year, (not quite the) Same as the Old Year.

there’s so much and little to tell you: 

i have to decide whether to ditch work and attend my annual women's meditation retreat next weekend. how to tell my boss when I asked for that sunday off — originally for the retreat, but now for an audition — that I really do need that time. and I’m taking monday and tuesday off for my friend who’s visiting from canada. 

that the couple who were the subject of the "day before christmas" poem/blog came to visit me on tuesday, and took me out for sushi, and it feels like i have this sort of surrogate parental couple right now. even though they live in vancouver. we exchanged all our information, i got a happy new year email, and i’m going to talk to him about mediation. like, becoming a mediator, and what that would look like. another career goose chase maybe, but worth looking in to. 

that my mom is having trouble sleeping, and doesn’t want to change her work schedule even though she could. that she’s having health issues that she could address, but procrastinates on. 

that two years ago, right very now, I was waking up in lahaina, maui, hawaii. in the bed of a school boy whose parents graciously invited me to stay and kicked their son to the couch, so a bald and chemo-riddled me could have a vacation from a cancer. 

i have to call the student loan people so they don’t raise my payment from $67/month to over a thousand, but being my mother’s daughter, i haven’t yet. 

I am excitedly waiting for the indiegogo campaign to end and for the funds to be sent to me, so I can write this final check to my landlord for my back rent accrued while i was sick. and to watch that number in my budget line fall to zero. 

i am looking forward to my first real paycheck from the retail store, but as i’ve figured the numbers, amazingly, i’ll have earned the exact amount i would have if i were working at the desk job i quit in october. 

though i wouldn’t have that back-rent money, because that only came about as i was sitting in a cafe with a friend in november, looking for work, him too, and i mentioned the wanting to art again and the potential art studio upstairs, and the back rent. and he said, you should do a kickstarter. 

so, i wouldn’t have that, or at least not now, if not for being unemployed and sharing with a friend who was also spending a mid-day cafe work-search. 

i have a script to read and a song to rehearse for two auditions this month. 

the first is because a friend from mockingbird suggested i try out for this one company in town, and i said i wasn’t good enough, and he said i was and i should and made me promise. and so i did. you know, just a few weeks later!

it’s a classical play. i’m nervous, as i’ve never done one before. 

the second is another musical. and, i’m nervous! but. i’m excited for the role i’m auditioning for. it could be a lot of fun. 

they would run consecutive to each other, one closing, and a few weeks later, rehearsals for the other beginning. so it could work. but not with this sales job. i think. assume. project. worry about. 

but then, too, i have to remember the whole “from thanksgiving to thanksgiving” thing/blog: to not worry, to trust, to at least notice I’m worrying and begin to try to trust. 

i have all these collage cards i still want and need to make, holiday cards and thank you cards. but with the constraints of buses and bart and standing and … (*breathe*) from thanksgiving to thanksgiving. 

i flaked out on my NYE plans. i think i may have disappointed my friend by doing that. but it was a day off for me. i got loads of stuff done early, and by the late afternoon i was home and cozy, i didn’t want to leave. even though it’s a 9:00pm ball-drop! i had to work yesterday, and yadda yadda excuse excuse. i just didn’t feel like getting all dolled up. though i’m sure it would have been fun and my FOMO-meter ran high. 

instead i stayed home, and it was lovely. i know it won’t always be so quiet. but it was nice. 

i have a lot and same old happening right now. i don’t know if any of it is interesting to you, but today is more a state of the union address:

all is well, amorphous, covered and uncertain. 

i have friends and opportunities and procrastination habits and work issues. 

i have a warm home to leave and come back to. 

and two auditions to get ready for. 

Happy and Healthy New Year, Friends. You rule. 

Retail Christmas: A Family Tale

'Twas the day before Christmas and all through the store

not a creature was stirring, it was really a bore. 

But some time in the day as I walked back from lunch, 

a gentleman remarked, Gee you don’t hunch. 

What great posture you have, and a convo was struck 

as his wife later joined and we talked cardio stuff

He and I spoke of their trip from Vancouver,

his wife in a fight with their my-aged daughter

I listened and shared; it was strange to be sure

to stand in the racks of not-quite couture

and be talking about things that do really matter

and not prattle on with plastic-smiles, idle chatter.

I gave words of wisdom that were passed on to me

about just showing up and letting her be. 

We even talked of my dad, how things there are rotten;

he said try again, love is never forgotten. 

I have my own opinion and still question his advice

it was odd to talk about this, but somehow quite nice. 

Out came his wife, and we put things on hold,

I said a kind goodbye and to stay warm in the cold. 

But as the wife handed me her card and I entered her digits

She shared she and her daughter were really quite in it. 

I didn’t mention I knew, and just made the suggestion

Tell her you love her and are there to listen. 

We smiled, it was strange, and out of the norm

to be talking real life in this capitalist storm. 

A few hours later, my feet throbbing with pain,

I couldn’t wait to get out and back to the east bay. 

When a coworker said there’s someone looking for you,

around the corner came the wife & her husband, too. 

“I wanted to tell you,” she started to sob, 

"I took your advice while I tried on some bras.

“I texted my daughter I was hurt, but am here,

and, Look! She replied!” her face stained with tears.

I read from her phone, while her husband looked on

a bit happy and startled at her goings on.

“I wanted to tell you, I’m so glad we met,

I wouldn’t have been ready before what you said.”

We teared up, exchanged hugs in the DVF stacks,

a slice of what matters near a discount sale rack. 

They left that day a little lighter it seemed,

and I wondered if this is what ‘meant to be’ means. 

I don’t know why I’m there, in the overpriced store,

but for a minute I’m reminded what humanity’s for. 

And maybe it’s not to sell lots of clothes,

to perfect my eyeliner or hike up my hose. 

Instead I was given the gift of what’s real: 

On the day before Christmas, I helped a family heal. 

There always had to be a fly...

...in the ointment.

If things were going well, there was always the knowledge that my father’s parents were shut-ins and deleterious hoarders. Or that my mom was manic-depressive. Or that my brother had a horrible stutter.

There was always the reminder that my clothing was bought at discount stores, that my father had an awful temper, or that my mom’s parents had died under circumstances that ripped her family apart and isolated us against them.

If things were going well, there was always a skeleton or two to whisper in your ear about not believing good things were for you, about being dragged down, about not being allowed to be happy.

Today, those long-quieted skeletons, imagined they’ve been exorcised for years, have begun their murmurous palaver again.

Yesterday, I had a phone call with my mother. She is sick. Again. It’s the same or similar cold/sinus infection she’s been struggling against for over a year. And when it came up last year, when she didn’t know why she kept getting sick, when doctors didn’t immediately know why either, I called my psychic.

Because at the time, all roads led to cancer. Did she have it? What was going on? What can I do?

No, said the woman on the phone. It’s not cancer, but whatever it is, if she doesn’t deal with this, with what’s underlying it, it could be the beginning of a long road to the end. This could be the thing that takes her out.

Whatever your thoughts about intuitives aside, I’d worked with her enough that she knew of what she spoke. And from all indications since that phone call over a year ago, it’s proving pretty accurate. My mom is still sick. Healthier, Sick, Healthier Sick.

And I’m dragged immediately back into a curtain-drawn bedroom where she’d curled up against the light, fighting another one of her chronic migraines. I’m dragged immediately back into being a child taking care of her mother, telling her to get out of bed. Leaving her there, and getting my brother and I out the door for school.

My mother is a woman of chronic ailments. And this newest one, whatever its cause, reason, purpose, is dragging me down again with her.

What is love, comes the question? What is equanimity? What is detachment, enlightenment? Fate? What is the caustic, oxidizing rust that others’ baggage leaches onto you and your own path?

And what is my responsibility in helping them through their pain?

Especially if they don’t recognize it as such.

So much has come up lately about codependence versus interdependence. About leaving others to their experiences and feelings, and letting that not affect what I’m doing and how I’m feeling. Even something as simple as the play, and trying to not let the audiences’ reactions sway my mood.

I feel angry. I feel angry this feels like it’s happening again. I feel angry that I’m powerless about how she cares for and treats her body, about how she schedules her work in the 12-hour days without lunch breaks. About how she spends her off days flattened, recuperating from her over-working.

I’ve had to do so much work on letting her have her experiences, despite my opinions, and yet. And yet. I’m human. And I love her, and I don’t want her to be in pain. And I don’t want her to deteriorate.

And moreso, I don’t want her life to affect mine.

When does a child grow up? What is the role of a loved one? How can you, and can you, let someone crawl along the bottom of their own experience, while you make strides in the direction of your own fulfillment?

Because that’s what’s at stake here. Callous as it may sound, it doesn’t matter, ultimately, what happens with my mom. What matters is what I take on about it. How I allow it to affect me. And mostly, can I continue to make my life what I want it to be when there are still murmuring skeletons?

My whole life, I’ve been distracted by the flies. I’ve allowed my attention to be derailed in fishing them out, or I’ve simply allowed them to decree that I cannot be happy because they exist. That I cannot find success because there are flaws in the tapestry of my surroundings.

Obviously, I write about it today because I’m upset and I don’t have the answer to these questions. Because I don’t know how to move forward when there are tendrils threatening to draw you back.

So, for today, I’ll leave it both as an open question, and as evidence of a success. Because, today, I get to tell you about it. And darkness can’t live in the light. 

Pumpktoberfest

I’m sure I write about it every year, but as the wafts of pumpkin spice glide out of my coffee mug, I’m moved to write about it again.

Fall. Fall on the East Coast. Growing up where Fall means a certain smell of chill and decaying leaves. Kind of wet, sometimes, the piles you’ve helped stuff into enormous black plastic bags that I’m sure are illegal in California by now. And heaping them into the street, spilling off the curb, where you and your little brother will take a bounding head-start and leap into the center of the pile, the slightly moth-eaten leaves enveloping you up to your shoulders, softening your fall and bathing you and your senses in its musty, alive scent.

I noticed the leaves blowing last night, and here, they sound different as they tumble across the pavement; they sound dry and tired, each one brown and curled up on itself. Back East, they’re still half-alive when they fall, some of them. So they lilt and are soft, and … colored. How many people must write about the color of the leaves, the ombre fade of red and orange and gold. There’s something about their display that radiates joy and change and marks something miraculous, something that we, as humans, have the unique privilege to recognize and admire.

Pumpkins start popping up on doorsteps. We hang Indian corn, the same set of three tied to our front door for as long as memory serves, and three small palm-sized pumpkins decorate our own stoop, before squirrels begin to bite chunks out of them, and a jack-o-lantern we've spent all day carving.

Fall begins the part of the year when I felt and feel most loved and normal and inviting and, again, loved. It begins with Halloween, and follows through Christmas (celebrated at my dad’s folks house, who are/were vaguely Christian). The time of year when we feel swept up in something, in something communal, town-wide, Jersey-wide.

We celebrated, we decorated, we invited, and we lit fires in the fireplace, and ate my dad’s pumpkin pie. Our one time of year when my family could gather together in a semblance of normality, and put on the most average and happy face we could, and it was all decadent. The feeling of it was.

The change of the season with its scent and sights, and the length of the days, the incoming dusk approaching like a secret to encase you. Creeping slowly closer and closer, but welcoming, the cool still amenable, coaxing and gliding you home in the dim light, toward a mug of hot apple cider perhaps. Maybe one of the gallons we’d picked up from our annual apple-picking trip, harvesting hoards of apples, plucked in those wire basket poles that my brother and I would wave menacingly at each other, slipping on fallen rotting apples in the orchard, filling up woven wooden baskets we could barely carry out.

It’s the change of the light and the scent that’s been my indicator these California days. It’s not the same as Back East, but there’s still the aroma of crispness and an excitement.

I will begin to buy all things pumpkin, like the rest of America. Like the pumpkin pancakes my friend treated me to yesterday, and the abomination of flavored coffee that I’m drinking right now.

I will use the pumpkin ganache cookie recipe that was given to me by a college roommate and make the pumpkin pie that my dad’s passed down through trial and error – a recipe that would never, ever, include “Pumpkin Pie Spice,” but itself includes about 8 individual spices, which I own expressly for the pie’s creation.

Fall is a time of coming back to center, of reigning in the resources. Of whittling down excess and getting the necessities done in the light of day. It’s a time that rings with good memories, full, warm, joyous memories. Fall reminds me of the earth, of how the natural world has shaped my experience. And it tastes like the release of a constriction you've held the whole year, the exhale and inhale of a breath you haven't dared relax to take. 

To me, Autumn tastes like love.

Stay in Touch.

I received a birthday card in the mail from my father the other day.

On the front are printed all these large, cartoony instructions saying, “Daughter, Whatever you do, don’t open this card!”

On opening it, the message inside reads, “You still don’t do as you’re told.”

And there’s a handwritten note, wishing me a happy birthday and telling me to stay in touch.

It’s both funny and tragic. It’s funny, not for it’s printed content, but for the fact that it continues my father’s understanding of me and our relationship: He’s the good one, I’m the fuck-up. He makes the rules, and I don't follow them. What a set-up. 

This is “funny,” because it’s sad. Because it’s continued confirmation of how unrealistic our relationship is, and because it confirms that this is not a person I want to be in communication with.

Lest you think me harsh to judge or condemn a relationship based on one tin-eared card, believe me, this is the softest of these messages I’ve received. And continue to receive from him.

On Saturday, I got the chance to talk to my mentor. We were talking about amending relationships where there is discord, or where I simply don’t feel at peace.

This, of course, is one of them.

But, my father was listed in a category of others, too: People I’ve fallen out of touch with out of self-preservation.

I wanted to talk to my mentor about whether I’m in the wrong… that still-lingering “good daughter” or “good friend” guilt. Shouldn’t you show up no matter what? Isn’t that love? Or is that obligation? And does it matter?

Isn’t it my job to adjust myself and meet these people where they’re at, regardless of how they’re harming me?

Because as painful as it is to know how intractable the situation with my dad is, I still lash myself with reproval.

I should be able to withstand my crazy aunt’s needling about my family’s ills. I should be able to listen to her constant health complaints and victim-laden phone calls. I should be able to because she’s family and because she’s alienated nearly everyone else she’s related to.

I should be able to sit in a car with my manic friend, even though I get quiet and withdrawn around that kind of unpredictable behavior. I should be able to meet her level of enthusiasm and kookiness because that’s cool, right? Why can’t I just be cool, like her?

I should be able to be in relationships with people I don’t want to be in relationships with, because that’s what “good” people do, right? Because that’s what we’re told good people do.

But, to quote that myopic card, I rarely do what I’m told. …

What my mentor offered me was there are some relationships that are once or twice a year out-reaches. And that’s okay.

Send your aunt a birthday and holiday card, and call it a day.

Allow your friend who makes you uncomfortable to have her own experience, and you don’t have to be a part of it if you don’t like how you feel around her.

Reply to your dad’s occasional emails, thank him for the card. And leave it at that.

There are relationships that we invest more in and there are those we invest less. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care for the person. It doesn’t mean that they are bad, or that I am.

It just means that my self-exacting standard of communication needs relaxing.

You don’t have to invest in relationships that cause you pain.

Believe me, I’ve done enough work in trying to make these particular ones work. To find common ground and compromise and a way of communicating that is healthy, or at least not harmful. And unfortunately, there isn’t one.

I wish and try and hope and beg Universes that they were, particularly with my dad, because who wouldn’t? But, this is an intractable situation. And I have bloodied my fists knocking on a closed door, trying to break in through a side window, and torn fingernails trying to dig underneath all the battle defenses that each of us have drawn to come to a relationship with him that I can be in.

But, when you come to the end of the line, it’s time to get off the train. This one doesn’t go any farther, no matter how much I wish it did. And I do. And I probably always will.

But in the reality of today, these relationships are not serving either of us. I can’t demand someone to show up or behave how I want. I can only adjust myself to what is. And allow myself the compassion to stop haranguing myself for not being able to adjust them.

And I can do that by staying in touch. Just barely. 

Incoming!

Enjoying my last moments of solitude in my studio apartment before I pick my mom up from the airport this afternoon. Delighted though I am that she’s coming to visit, I look forward to someday having an apartment where we both have bedroom doors!

Also, my voice is going, a combination of sickness, rehearsal + yesterday’s voice lesson, when it really began to go. My voice teacher advised that I avoid talking as best as I could during the next few days… I replied, (Fat chance!) You know my mom’s coming into town, right? 

That woman and I could talk until all the stars burned out and still have things to talk about that were interesting. It’s who and how we are. How we've been. But, I need to “rest my voice,” as the teacher put it, so either my mom will do the majority of talking, or she’ll get really good at lip-reading!

I’m excited to see her, to have her here. But, I also know that it means three and a half days of mostly “up” energy, or at least engaged energy, which is hard for me. Because it’s a “visit,” it means that we have a lot to talk about, and a lot to try to “fit in" to three days, since we see one another maybe once or twice a year. Oakland may be the Brooklyn of the Bay, but it doesn't mean I can get to her home of Manhattan by the Q train.

What I realize is that I’m going to have to police myself these few days, getting over a bad week of being sick still, but also, just for general self-care.

My mom, whether it’s the New Yorker or the mania in her, runs on an elevated frequency. As her child and a game partner, I tend to rise to her level. Some people call that level anxiety(!), but as someone once said to me, The difference between nervous and excited is breathing.

So, I’m going to have to remind myself to breathe, to take time to be a little more still and not quite as participatory as perhaps I might be, and to also let her know that's my intention. Also, I’m going to have to inwardly remember to un-constrict, to let her vibrate at whatever frequency she wants to without feeling I have to meet her there. That’s my part in this: she’s not asking me to be all abuzz with her; I’m doing that myself.

It’s hard, as I’ve said, when people change the rules to a game you’ve played for a long time; but I also don’t like partially dreading spending compacted time with her. It’s a litt-- a lot exhausting to try to match that level of up-ness and on-ness, and, well, it’s why she’s the one with bipolar disorder, and not me.

There’s also a crash when you’re up that high.

I’ve tried to learn to moderate my own extroverted and introverted behavior, balancing a few hours of out-ness with a few of aloneness. It doesn’t have to be inside my home, away from the world; just alone-ness is enough, on a walk, at a museum alone, at a movie alone. As much as I thrive on connection and conversation, and could indeed talk to the end of time, I’d be working on fumes by then.

Self-care will be the name of the game. I know that’s changing the rules a little from how we've always been and always communicated, but if I let her know that I’ve introduced a new rule to our relationship, at least for now—for even one hour out of the 16 we’ll be spending conscious with one another—I think it will be respected and absorbed.

It might not be a smooth transition into a different way of “being together,” but I think in the long run, it will help us both to be present with the other in a way that feels nurturing.

Which, I think is what a mother-daughter relationship is supposed to be anyway.

Hum a few bars?

There’s a famous story in our nuclear family history:

My brother was maybe five years old. He swaggered into the room. Feet planted, arms wide, he opened his lips and belted, “GOTTA DANCE!... Gotta Dance, Gotta Dance, Got ta Daaance.”

This, friends, is a move from a song in Singin’ in the Rain. My family trades in musicals. Broadway and movie musicals. On frequent rotation in our VCR were Singin’ in the Rain, Meet me in St. Louis, Calamity Jane, On The Town. Eventually, there’d be Chorus Line and Cabaret with their more "adult" themes; even Flying Down to Rio and Top Hat, from in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers oeuvre. My mom, brother and I would trade lines like currency, like code, and for us, they were.

All four of us together, with my dad, weren’t a family of deep conversation. Instead, we’d throw these bones of reference to one another as a note of connection and a wink. One commonly used phrase in our house was, “What’s that from, again?” We were almost always speaking in movie lines, not just musicals. Watching movies was what we were able to do together, to spend time the 4 of us, without having to talk, but able to be in the same room at the same task.

Unknown is what might have happened if we'd allowed my dad to join in on the impromptu a cappela fun. We always cut him off, because he couldn’t sing a bar; the trees weeped. But he could whistle, and play the harmonica, and there’s even an old banjo lying around that apparently was his in his younger days.

But, for the most part, it was me, mom and Ben. Trading lines, lobbing tunes to one another, volleying them back, and joining in. So much of my growing up, I see us, in and around the kitchen bursting into a melody. Me, on the melody, actually, and Ben on the harmony. I never had quite the ear for harmony, and he did; still does.

For my bat mitzvah party when I was 13, instead of the DJ party most of my friends requested, I wanted to see a musical with my friends. We lived a short drive from Manhattan, and many of my friends had never seen a Broadway show.

We went to Phantom of the Opera. In a short party bus, about a dozen of us rode into New York City with Nightmare Before Christmas playing on the thick, boxy t.v. screens, since it was mid-October, right after my 13th birthday.

My mom and I’d created gift packages for my friends, little heart shaped wicker boxes with a fake rose with a plastic water droplet on it; a cassette tape of the soundtrack; and a mug with the Phantom mask on it that turned from black to white when you filled the mug with something warm.

I was extraordinarily lucky to have been to some shows already, my aunt, a stalwart New Yorker taking me to see Guys & Dolls and later, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying starring the inimitable Matthew Broderick (if you think him singing Twist & Shout in Ferris Beuler was something… well, I assure you, this man has charisma. And talent.)

But the Phantom theater was magnificent. There’s an enormous chandelier that crashes into the stage during the middle of the play, and we were sitting right behind it, this wide, gold, frail thing about to murder the ingénue. For a group of giddy, hopped up tween girls, this was a pretty cool experience. Well, for me it was, anyway ;)

Musicals are in my blood. I was raised on their fervor, their simplicity, their saccharine lyrics. And I love them. I know they can be cheesy and I know it “doesn’t make sense” that people bust into song all the time. But, you see,

In my house, we did. 

My Own Private Fan Club.

“I’m a fan of you, Molly Daniels, in your entirety,” he wrote.

Granted we later slept together. But I digress.

I had the good fortune to spend time last night with several women I admire. I shared with them what’s going on with my father and my having to make the decision to attend his wedding in lieu of performing in the play in which I’m cast.

One of them reflected: “I’m sorry your dad is not able to see you.”

And when I listen to this more deeply and clearly, it is a bell of truth.

The fantasy and illusion I’ve abided by for years has been that if I am a good daughter, a good girl, a devoted and doting woman, then I will be seen. The delusion is that my people-pleasing will make him see me. But. This is false.

I have tried many times, this path of behaving. And I’ve tried its opposite, being a wanton, crazed, rebellious teen and young adult, in order to be seen.

But what struck me this morning was this image: You know when someone has a lazy eye, and you’re not really sure where to look, so sometimes you just look at their forehead? Or if you’re trying to avoid someone’s eye for another reason, you focus somewhere else that sort of looks like you’re looking at them, but you’re not?

That’s how I feel with my dad. That he never actually looks directly at me, which is why I’ve tried to make the trappings around me so much larger or different or “approvable” or “disapprovable.” If you can’t see me, maybe you’ll see the life I’ve built that meets with your military/engineer’s strict sense of correct.

If I have the job you can brag about, … but that’s not me. I am not my job.

If I have the relationship with you you can brag about, … but that’s not me. We don’t know each other.

If I have the life you can brag about, … but I’ve tried that. You threw my own failings in my face.

I have tried to make the external parts of me approvable enough for you. But even those periphery trappings (and they are “trappings”) have not been enough to hone your focus onto the all of me. Me in my entirety.

I didn’t know that was what I’ve been seeking until my friend told me he saw me. I didn’t know that was what I’ve been missing, and making a pretzel out of my life and myself in order to make happen.

If I want to please my father so he sees me, what do I think will happen if he sees me, “in my entirety?” ... I don’t think I can answer that. Except to say he’d love me, in a way that I could feel.

Because here’s the thing: If he’s looking around me, and not at me, he’ll never love me in a way that I feel. He may “love” or approve of the things around me, the life I meticulously and back-bendingly try to arrange around myself. But that’s still not me.

This is a system, a relationship in which I am not seen. The one thing I want to glean from it is the one thing I cannot have.

In reading Brene Brown so voraciously right now, I can know this: He’s not able to be vulnerable enough to do that.

To see me, is to expose himself, is to open himself to being vulnerable, and for him, that is not an option. His whole life has been built on a foundation, a faulty one (well, in my own estimation), that precludes true connection, because he is unable to look at and love himself. I know how this formed, and I can only presume the pain that’s caused, because he’s never shown it. (Except in these indirect ways.)

Brene writes that men deal with vulnerability in one of two ways: Rage or shut-down. (She also writes about those who find ways out of that dichotomy, but those are the go-to’s without the tools to do anything differently. And surely, those aren’t the only means to deal, but it’s her research, not mine!)

I know that when I told my dad that I might not be able to come to his wedding because I’ll be in a play that weekend, when he put on his “I insist” voice, that was his way of hiding his vulnerability, his disappointment and hurt. I know that this was rage to mask actual feelings. I know that this rage was to protect and prevent of moment of true connection, in which something different might have been said like, “I’d really love for you to be here. It would mean a lot to me.”

That directness is too vulnerable.

To look me in the eye and say that is too vulnerable.

To see us both as humans doing a dance of having a relationship, instead of as a master and a servant, a “father” and a “daughter,” is too vulnerable.

If I can’t squash it or approve of it, I can’t deal with it.

I “get” this. I get and have compassion for and understand this dilemma for him. Also, this is a dilemma that I’ve prescribed for him; true or not, it’s only my interpretation.

But, like I said before, it’s my choice how I want to engage in this “relationship.” Because for as long as I can remember, I’ve been waving my arms in an effort to start one. An effort in vain. And my arms are tired.

Brene writes that shame is countered by self-love, and that shame resilience is a practice, not a diploma.

“I’m a fan of you, Molly Daniels, in your entirety.”

I’m going to have to say this phrase to myself, repeatedly. To truth-test the thoughts of “not good enough” – especially "not good enough daughter" – as this future unfolds.

I’m going to have to truth-test my fantasies around this relationship versus the reality, and I’m going to have to accept, even for a minute at a time, that this relationship is the way it is, and that my father is the way he is.

I’ve heard many times that “acceptance is not the same as approval.” No, this isn’t ideal. But turning my life into a pretzel to garner a connection I will never (or not today) have, is the worse fate.

Wilderness Survival

So, here's a funny.

Remember when I posted that blog about finding equanimity in my relationships? About not being thrown by others emotions (or even my own)? Yeah, that one I posted on Friday... three days ago?

Well, guess what I've been given the opportunity to practice these last three days?

Bingo!

To be respectful, I will simply say that I saw many chances to retaliate and behave how I used to -- particularly, by being curt, punishing, and seethingly silent. If I behave that way, you, of course, will apologize for your behavior, and change in the way that I want you to, right?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, I really noticed how I wanted to react, my first reaction. How my disappointment wanted to come out as being mean. Instead, I tried to my best to "let it go." I had that silly Frozen song in my head a lot this weekend!

How others are choosing to behave is none of my business. As it affects me, it is my business. But it's up to me to choose how I want that to be expressed.

Let's just say that I was pissed, so much so that I was on the phone while driving, and got pulled over by a cop before I even left San Francisco.

Luckily I was let off with a warning (and I know how much those tickets cost!), but it gave me the opportunity to pause and look at why I was behaving in the way I was -- in a way that wasn't good for me.

The whole weekend ended up, for me, being an exercise in letting other people have their emotions and their actions, and not being drawn into that drama. It's camping. It's supposed to be light, fun, and not particularly insightful, except maybe the insight and rest and joy that comes from being in the silence of the forest. Which, is never actually that silent, once you get quiet enough. That's one of the things I love about it. To hear the rustle of the trees, the little animals, the little noises. How this tree sounds as it sways in the wind as opposed to that tree.

Luckily, I was able to ask for some of that time for myself, so that I could get my stillness in.

I am no saint, and I am no angel, and I have no business judging others, or assuming that they should be any way other than they are. But I do get to ask for what I need, and I do get to behave in a way that is in alignment with how I want to be. Despite that my brain gremlins are momentarily eviscerating you.

Upon arrival home to Oakland, I get a phone call. It's my dad.

Really?

I let it go to voicemail. I'm emptying out the cooler in my bathtub. It rings again.

Now I think it's an emergency. Nope: After a decade of being engaged to the same woman, he's finally getting married.

The last weekend of the play I'm playing the lead in.

I was *informed* I should see if they can get the understudy to do that weekend. I wasn't asked what play it was. I wasn't told congratulations. I was told, in the voice of force only my father knows how to invoke, that I should be there.

I told him I'd ask about the understudy.

I called my brother, who'd left me a voicemail about this earlier that day. If the invitations were going out the next week, it was clear that this plan was in place quite some time ago, no? Could be that I could have been informed a little earlier, no?

I was virulently reminded of when I was sick with cancer, and my father told me that he could only call me after dark, when I was exhausted from my days of chemo, that "This is how it works." This is what he told me about not being able to call me earlier. "This is how it works."

After I got off the phone with him yesterday, I remembered that. This occasion, this insistence that I be there, despite whatever (SUCCESS) is going on in my life, is part of his pattern of demand, and selfishness.

And, an inability to say something like: You know, Molly, it would mean a lot to me if you could be there.

I told my brother when we were discussing the viability of my coming out, plane tickets, and where to stay, things that my dad has obviously not thought of. ... that I would talk to my network. That I would look at my numbers. Maybe ask him to pay for half the plane ticket out, since I'm not in a position to go back east again right now.

But then, I do know how awful it is to ask for money from him.

So, I will talk to my network. I will repeat "Let it go" in my head, and I will remember the thing I usually forget when I feel made small by him: I am awesome.

My being in a play IS a big deal. My getting a lead role IS a big deal. I'm doing a brave and new thing. I am taking chances to be greater in my life. And the exercise in equanimity is to allow and remember and embrace and be bolstered by these facts.

It is not a surprise that the weekend I claim that I've moving "beyond" being thrown by others, I'm given several (immediate!) chances to practice what I preached.

A mentor once told me that our "character defects" (or, outmoded coping mechanisms) aren't relieved from us. They aren't removed. Instead, we're given opportunities to either pick them up again, or to act a different way.

I haven't known what that other way is, until I'm given the chance to try something else. If I only reach for what I know, I do the same thing. It's not that I feel relieved of being thrown by others' emotions. I just feel more able to deal with what that brings up for me, and how I choose to engage with that.

What will happen with my friend? Change.

What will happen with my father? I can only hope: Change.

Well, Shoot.

There has been all this heartache in me about wanting my father to change. To be loving, available, vulnerable and open. I have wanted this to happen for as long as I can remember, and I’ve held out a resentment toward him for his inability to do this for that long, too.

I have tried many ways around and through this resentment: loving kindness, acceptance, letters to god, letters to him I didn’t send, letters to him I did. Individuation meditations, praying daily for his peace and happiness, envisioning him as a child... But nothing has moved this boulder of a need.

And I finally realized what the need really is. It is not that I need my father to change. At this point, it’s that I need him not to. Because if he did, then I would have to look at being loving, available, vulnerable and open to him. And this causes trouble, because this is not safe.

So, keeping my resentment toward him has been a circuitous way to protect myself from my being vulnerable to him.

It’s all well and good to want someone to change – but when faced with the actuality of their transformation, how do we deal with that?

I wish I could tell you that I have overblown the situation, and he’s kinder than he appears, and being vulnerable to him could maybe, possibly, just-give-it-one-more-try, be a good idea.

But it’s not. Unfortunately, I have enough evidence to support this. Not ancient, you yelled I was a liar during a game of Clue when I was 5. Like, recent, appallingly turning my vulnerability against me evidence.

So, here’s the thing. I can forgive all of that. I can be willing to forgive it all, anyway. But do I want to change my behavior? Not really.

I’ve spent all this time trying to find my way around the rock of resentment to get toward connection, but when I look instead at what the rock is doing for me, not to me, I get to see that maybe it’s been doing the right thing all along. And this realization is hard for a person like me.

I have fear that keeping myself separate from him will cause bile in my soul and in my body, and corrode other relationships. I have fear that by not being vulnerable to him, I’m going to call down some cosmic retribution and be serially alone. I have fear that I’m not “spiritual” enough, or evolved enough or recovered enough, or else I’d be able to have him in my life as a loving and caring adult, both ways 'round.

I have shame that I can’t allow this relationship to flourish. That I refuse to be the asshole who riles on the ground before him and begs him to love me. I have been doing that for as long as I can remember, too.

But the thing I always thought I wanted was for him to do that too. To acknowledge his faults, to claim ownership of his behavior, and to beg my forgiveness.

What I see now, is that if he actually did, I don’t want to give it – that forgiveness is a door to love. And with him, love is a door to hurt.

The boulder has been there doing this job all along.

Until I learn a “healthier” way of screening those doors, they’ll just have to remain shut. 

Phone a Friend.

I was invited back for a second interview. And I politely declined.

If there’s anything I learned from my awkward dating experience recently, it’s that saying yes to something you’re sure you don’t want is lying and wasting both people’s time.

Therefore, when I was passed up for the job I'd applied for in this organization and my resume got handed from one branch to another, I did my due diligence: I showed up, made a good impression, and knew that this newly offered position was not a fit. But I got the callback anyway.

So on Wednesday, when I got the "want to see you again" email, I called my mom. Not always the paragon of rational decisions, but someone who here I felt could be, I told my mom about the parallel metaphor between my career and my lackluster first date. And it’s strange and uncomfortable follow-up.

A friend earlier that morning suggested I just go to the second interview. “You never know.” But, see, I think you do. When you’ve given a fair and first chance at something a worthy go, I think at that point you get to say whether you’re interested to go further.

As a mentor once told me, A first date is just an interview for the second.

We do get the chance to say no at some point, yes?

I felt so, and I just needed a little corroboration. Not always a co-signer of my machinations, either, mom was the right call. She listened, and then she asked what advantages this job could have over my current one. They were few.

One, I told her, was suggested by my friend earlier that morning: You could meet a nice Jewish guy.

After hearing this very short list, she replied, “First of all, you are [insert some really nice and positive characteristics, like, smart, beautiful, brave and wonderful] and you don’t need to take a job you don’t want to meet a hypothetical guy.”

Or something like that.

It was really the only enticing reason of the bunch I gave to her. If the job I’d actually applied for in the first place was still available, I’d still be interested in that, and I do know it’s still open. But this offered job would be a lateral move, adding a 3 hour commute for what I imagine is similar pay and responsibilities that don’t really align with my values or my career goals.

So… she said it sounded like I already knew what I wanted to do. But what I could do was be honest about my goals, tell them that I was still interested in the first job, be very flattering and kind about their organization and say if other opportunities came up there, I’d be interested to have that conversation.

Unfortunately, in the dating world, it’s not as easy or accepted to say, "Hey, I’m not interested in you, but if you have any friends you think’d be good for me, let me know!"

But, Romance and Finance don’t always overlap.

In the end, that’s what I did. Called the woman who’d interviewed me for the second position, got her voicemail, and told her exactly what my mom coached me in saying.

What my mom really did was help me to feel comfortable owning my truth.

This is not always easy. And sometimes I need someone outside of my own limiting self-beliefs and self-sabotage to coax me and just sort of shuffle me along on the path I know I want to follow.

In the pre-school in the building where I work, some of the students have a cute ritual when their parents drop them off in the morning: Push on the Tush.

It is exactly how it sounds. Having been deposited in their classroom, feeling safe in their surroundings, the child is ready for their parent to leave, and wants to have a ritual for that separation. So, the parent stands in the doorway, and the kid gives him a push on the tush. And out the parent goes.

For me, that’s what my mom did. Having come to a conclusion, but needing a little encouragement, I reached out to a person I knew could hold and support me, and then give me a little push. 

Tossed.

On a shelf high in my closet sits a box. This morning, I took it down, dumped it over on my bed and picked through the pieces of paper I’d written and thrown in since it was given to me as a one-year sobriety present.

Someone mentioned recently the idea of dumping out their “God box” every once in a while, to see what “god” may have already taken care of, and to see what we’re still holding onto, even as it’s been "surrendered" to the box.

It’s sweet and astonishing to me, all the things that tortured me so hard, I found them listed on multiple post-its, torn pieces of paper, even a square of toilet paper.

The ones that I got to separate from “still actively seeking hope/help” included a lot of men’s/boy’s names that haven’t gotten a rise out of me for years. I had to wrack my memory at one of them, and then got to see the number of times others' names had been tossed in there in the hope for resolution and divine intervention, and indeed, they've become completely old news. Today, those got tossed to the resolved pile.

In that pile, I also tossed, Food issues and Smoking. Issues that I haven’t had to box with for years, so much so that I am surprised to remember them, and to notice they caused me such pain (well, smoking was a bitch to quit – and I never doubt that one will always lead to more).

The ones that remain in the box, that I am throwing back in there, are varied.

One reads:

      Jesse Morris will live.

      And he will find recovery.

      And he will be beautiful.

      Amen.

Jesse Morris did not live. But I believe him to still be beautiful.

I also have the memorial service booklet from Aaron Brown’s funeral following his heroin overdose.

I have the necklace my father gave me when I was sick with cancer. A photo of my mom holding my brother, age 2. A photo of the ex whose innocence we shared.

And the torn shreds of a fortune cookie I didn’t understand why I’d ripped and torn in there until I pieced it back together: “As long as your desires are not extravagant, they will be granted.” – I can easily see why I would bristle at such a fortune!

Finally, what will stay in the box, rethrown in, and recommitted to allowing them to be “taken care of,” are those issues which have remained “issues” to this very day.

The best illustration of these being an actual illustration:

Home, Love, Health, Security, Happiness.

(Or at least I think that’s happiness, and not Pirates.)

There are a bevy of papers with some amalgam of these on it. Some verbose pleas to a higher power, others simply a heart drawn on a post-it.

It is cleansing and reaffirming to dump and sort this box, this box that over the years I’ve begged over for things to change, hurled words in there like grenades, or exhausted, dropped them in tear-stained.

There are ones that I don’t know if “resolution” is possible, like those untimely deaths of beautiful people. And they will stay in the box.

There are ones where I still can’t see what resolution will look like at all, as with my dad, my career, and “my life,” as I wrote it again and again. They will stay there, too. 

But, luckily, there must be hope from a sorting such as this, because the pile of “resolved” issues is nearly half. Those torturous achings that caused me to toss names and circumstances in that have simply fallen out of mind, out of importance, into the fate and design of my past...

These ones that make me smile now for the girl who wrote them, and for the wisdom of time that solved them: They give me hope for the others. 

Stay to Play.

I'm at my new Monday morning desk-trade shift at my gym (unlimited classes in exchange for checking people in.... at 5:30am), so I don't know how extemporaneous I feel while techno music blares in the background, and my pulse finds center again... so perhaps this'll just be an "update-y" kinda blog:

The play I've been cast in (Queen of the Amazons...!) begins rehearsals at the end of July, to perform over weekends around Labor Day. I haven't actually opened my script since our first table reading... but I continue to take it places with me, in a good intention to read it.

In the meantime, I went to play bass yesterday with a friend and his friend -- it was super fun. My poor un-practiced fingertips are a little swollen, but ... man, just to be back in the loud, the beat, the fun. It was so much fun. (Did I mention it was fun?!) We're looking at playing a date in October, and are meeting up again next Sunday. I feel... like myself, having this in my life again; being a bassist again.

My dad didn't actually receive the Father's Day card I sent, since he's moved back up to New Jersey from Florida for the summer. I still haven't returned his return voicemail, but now that I got the card back in the mail, "unable to forward," I suppose I should find out what their "Summer" address is. And also endeavor to keep my bile and perhaps envy to a minimum.

In an exasperated flurry, last week, I sent my photos to some modeling agencies in SF, and heard back from one they'd like to see me this week. ... Then I looked them up on Yelp -- and if there are worse reviews on that website, I haven't seen them! So I'm going to gauge whether that'll be worth my time to meet with them, just for the experience, if not for the professional service of them.

I'm also in conversation with two professional leads for actual work, one I'm meeting this week, another I hope to. Both are in the "helping/teaching" professions. And I haven't quit my job yet -- YAY!!

That's honestly been the biggest success of this whole time, for me. I am unhappy, but I'm not cut-n-running. Which is my M.O.  -- In jobs and in relationships.

Granted, in both, I tend to get into them without much thought as to whether I want to be in them, get through the "honeymoon phase," look around and say, Uh... is this really where I want to be? And that is when the cutting and running happens.

It's not that leaving is not the appropriate move, but in jobs at least, doing so without a safety net is a recipe for desperation, low-self esteem, and the tendency to get into the same situation.

So, this "sitting on my hands" that I've been able to do (with the *enormous* help of friends) has been a really new thing. And, like a cigarette craving, it seems to be waning.

The more I stay in this place of active looking and active staying, ... I don't feel my throat constricting every single minute as I have in these past few weeks. That feeling of crawling out of my skin, of needing to do SOMEthing ANYthing to make this feeling stop.

The "some"thing I'm doing right now is not running. That's been my only move before. A one-trick pony: Uncomfortable? Run!

Instead, I've been asking for major help from friends in helping me not to do that. And during that time, I've discovered ... been forced to discover ... other modes of action. For example, actively seeking work, finally sending out my photos to agencies, and just showing up for the rest of my life anyway.

Even though I'm unhappy, I don't have to be unhappy.

There's this picture I drew once in response to an exercise in a self-help book last year. It's called "Creating a Life Worth Living" (and now sits in my Kindle, unread past Chapter 2!). But it asked us to draw a picture of how we see our life being a year from then.

In it, I drew several things, including the back of a curly-haired head facing a computer, a phone looming large near it. The only thing you see is the computer. Me staring at it.

It's the most depressing image!

So, what would I like to change about the image, the prompt asked me? Well, I'd like that experience to fade. To fade in importance. To not be so activated and aggrieved by it.

The longer that I "sit on my [active] hands," the less running seems like the right option for me. I like having a job while I look for other work, while I "figure out" my life. I like not feeling panicked about how I'm going to pay my rent.

But mostly what happens when I quit a job is that I cut back all the things that are fun in my life.

I can't be a volunteer usher, because I don't have a job. I can't come play bass with you, because I need to be sending out my resume. I can't laugh, because I'm in scarcity.

Staying in a place that is not ideal is not ideal, of course, but I feel like I'm developing alternative ways of dealing with that, ways that include having fun, even as it's hard.

1 + 1 = Forgiveness?

Because he was an electrical engineer and adept with numbers, it was always my father I went to with math homework.

This near-nightly escapade always took the same tired route: My dad trying to explain to me a concept that was assumed, understood, and so ingrained for him by now that he couldn’t explain it properly, and his getting frustrated when I couldn’t understand what for him was plain and evident.

I would get frustrated at his impatience, and the fact that I had to do this homework so I had to sit with him. And eventually, we’d become locked in a battle of wills so contentious, we’d end up screaming at each other. We call this 4th grade.

My brother told me a little more than a year ago, when I was going through chemo treatment and my dad was unable to show up for me, that what I was asking my dad to do (show up emotionally) was like asking a crippled person to walk: It’s impossible. It’s unfair, and it’s presumptive.

The same assumption that my dad had about teaching me math concepts, the ease and obviousness and facility he had with numbers, I have about emotional matters. I simply assume that because this is something so damned simple and easy for me, even when it’s painful, that everyone should be able to do this.

I am making the exact same mistake he did with me: I am shaming someone for something they are not able to do.

So, when I contemplate following up my dad’s return voicemail from Father’s Day, I have found that I want to do what I always want to do: Hash it out. EXPLAIN to him what is so obvious to me: I needed you to show up for me, and you didn’t. In fact, you blamed me for not being attentive to your needs. And you threw in my face every time I’ve failed in my life as if that would manipulate me into realizing, once again, you’re the savior and I’m the fuck-up.

I want to tell him this, of course, in a gentle, loving way, because then, of course, he’ll be able to hear it and understand it.

If I explain it really  s l o w l y  as if to a child, my dad can’t possibly not understand that his behavior across the years has been abominable at many times, and that I don’t like to be in touch with him because of it. That I don’t trust him because of it.

However. I’m simply expecting what he expected of me back then: Comprehension.

No Comprende, Mamasita. He don’t get it. He won’t get it. And you can sit with as many graphing calculators and pie charts of his behavior and your feelings of hurt and betrayal as you choose. You can even make a PowerPoint presentation about how his increased anger and violence was inversely proportionate to your trust of him.

However. I’d be wasting my breath. And do people even use Powerpoint anymore?

I still remember concepts my dad taught me about math. I used the one to figure out a percentage this morning. Somewhere between the yelling and the tears and the slammed books and doors, I did learn something. But what was the price of that education?

My dad was not a teacher. And my dad is not an empathetic person. It just is. Just as a paraplegic, my asking him to do what he is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually unable to do is unfair of me. My expectations on him won’t make him walk.

I hate relearning this lesson. It too ends in tears most times. But, today, I do have a choice between struggling to opening his mind, or to simply let him be a cripple and relate to him as such. Because it seems like the person who needs to learn something is not my dad (someone I have no control over). The person who needs to learn empathy here, soy yo. 

Not the Buddha.

Yesterday was Father's Day. As evidenced by the insane photobombing bonanza that was Facebook yesterday. (Yes, I'm modifying the meaning of photo-bomb in this context.)

I was unsurprised to notice an amalgam of feelings arise as I scrolled down, and down... and down, through the newsfeed. Yes. Everyone has a dad. Yes. I get it. Yes. I even have my own. Do I have to see yours, too?

In the end. I posted my own photo of myself with my dad. I must be about 5 years old, climbing over the guard rail into the brush. We're probably on vacation in Cape Cod, the ocean visible in the background. He's looking out through binoculars, the front fender of his red 1970 Cutlass in the corner of the image. The majority of the photos I have of us together when I'm little are from the Brownies/Girl Scouts Father/Daughter dances -- staged photos on cubes of packed hay. I'm sitting on my dad's lap, looking highly uncomfortable.

This annual awkwardness was the closest my dad and I ever got, and the call to look normal at it was a difficult one to answer.

But, still. Yesterday, I too wanted to feel a shred of familial nostalgia, true or un. I wanted to add to our communal photobook my own pixelated, sugar-coated memory.

In the afternoon, I attended a seminar being hosted at my work. I was on hand as a staff member but got to participate too. The subject under discussion was "Having Difficult Conversations." ... It was the most requested topic, and the least attended. We all want to know how to do this, but we're also hesitant to do so.

With about a dozen other folks, I was asked to turn to my neighbor and share "the story" of a conversation I'd been avoiding having. It was about 3pm on Father's Day, and I'd already mailed my dad a generic, but nice enough card. I'd emailed him yesterday with that photo attached. And the conversation I was anxious to have or not have was whether or not to also call him.

Had I done my due diligence as a daughter? Was a card and an email enough?

One of the questions asked of us was: What is their side of the story?

I thought about this, wrote about it. Thought about my dad wondering what he'd done to be punished with silence. Thought about him getting angry with me for disappointing him again. Thought about him contemplating his martrydom, that all he'd done was love me, and I can't show up for him.

But. True or not, these are only what I think he's thinking.

In reality, what he's probably thinking is that he loves me and misses me and would like to hear from me.

Period.

Because as time and experience have proved, he has little ability to contemplate much below the surface.

Once the workshop was over, I'd concluded that I'd probably done enough. That I didn't need to call him, to subject myself to being open to attack or discomfort, as previous conversations have only proved to be. That's what the story is, too: If I call, I open myself up to disappointment. Again.

But, once I arrived to my friend's house for dinner, I'd had a few more minutes to think, and as I parked, what occurred to me was a phrase a friend told me long ago: "The Buddha says hello first."

I thought as I put it into reverse, What kind of person do I want to be in this world?

Surely, I don't want to be someone who allows themselves to be whipped over and over, but I forget that I'm also someone these days who when I see that coming or happening, I have the esteem and wherewithall to stop them or to end the conversation.

I want to be the kind of person who sends love, even to those who are unable to receive it. Not as "The Giving Tree" would do, but with conscious decision. I know I'm taking a risk reaching out to you, but I care ... not really about you, sorry, but about how I feel -- and how I feel is that I want to send you a ... not an olive branch, but perhaps just a message of peace, not truce.

In the end, I just wanted to act toward my father how I would want him to behave toward me, with awareness, with boundaries, and with empathy toward us both.

So, I called. And mercifully, I got his voicemail. I left one, short and sweet. Which he reciprocated while I was out to dinner and left me one.

He just wants to know what's going on in my life. He has lost this right. He has proved himself untrustworthy to know more than the most sweeping generalizations about my life. And I will have to decide once again if this is a conversation I want to have.

The Buddha may say hello first, but how many times do you say hello to someone you don't trust?