self-acceptance

My midlife crisis is going well. Thank you very much.

Painting by Hector Arrache.

To be honest, crises rarely go well at all. I haven't taken up with a lover, or traded in my SUV for a sports car. Rather I rename myself Coatlicue, eat the hearts of virgin artichokes. I am more Mexican than Mexicans these days. I wear big coral jewelry and linen clothing, summon the soul of Frida Kahlo. Burning sage, and channeling the spirits of plant people. I paint on eyebrows, and speak in halfie Spanish, smoke cigarillos, and keep a pet monkey. Paint large garish paintings of myself bleeding and naked.

That's not true either.


I haven't been writing or painting much. Not anything for public consumption, that is, just nightmare angst poetry that makes this seem more like Teenage Life Crisis, Part Deux. And in the end, I'm not sure I ever quite stopped crisising, from teenage life to midlife. It is much the same angst. Always about passion, too much or not enough. Mercury retrograde makes everything wrought, sensitive. Communication difficult. The illusion that we are moving backward instead of ahead, but we always move forward, even if it is slowly. This Mercury retrograde is in a water sign, and it means all this past emotional stuff comes back to us, stares us in the face.

I do not know if I have ever noticed Mercury retrograde so poignantly in all my life. I feel stripped bare, staring at my old selves, retelling those stories with the people who were there, watching the trauma unfold, like a origami tiger.

Why, that is just a piece of paper, I exclaim. A colorful, fierce thing easily carried by the wind.

Photo by Howard Linton.

I had coffee with an old friend who I've known for twenty-two years. He talked about the eighteen year old me, brave and impulsive, hyper and curious, political and passionate. And the stories he told were ones we have told each other and others for two decades, but they sounded different this time. Stories of kung-fu and rock climbing and Buddhist monasteries with tequila and cliff diving. Of changing drivers in a moving vehicle near the SETI fields of New Mexico.We laughed, and I scolded him for telling my children such salacious tales of their mother. And though I was smiling, part of me felt so sorry for that girl. My children found a little slide of me the day before he visited. It is me at age twenty-one, posing from behind, showing off my tattoo. And it is that girl I think of, so damaged and broken, reaching out for something to fill that hole inside of her.Danger or booze or adrenaline or Buddha or men or fighting or loving. The past comes back again and again, makes itself present, until you deal with who you were and who you are. It is the Mercury retrograde.

Besides my old friend, I have been these same types of conversations with all these major figures in my life, my ex-husband, my current husband, my sister and others. They are hard, important conversations that I cannot believe we haven't had in the last twenty years. And they just keep coming up, even when I avoid them, reject them, beg them to be done. But I am grateful for the fearlessness of everyone involved. G. keeps reminding me and himself that every mistake, every bad decision, made us who we are today, capable of the radical love we are capable of today. In one low moment, I said to him, "I just don't think the person I am now is all that worth holding onto. I would change the past if I could." But I wouldn't. In my highest moment, the moments I want to reign, I have no judgment about me. No label of good or bad, just me--a bum trying to do the next right thing, like most of us.

In these conversations, I have realized that the suffering I have gone through in the last twenty years, the self-inflicted suffering to the random chaos suffering, has dramatically increased my capacity for unconditional love. It is only now that I can unconditionally love the people who most deserve that, who most need it. I could never unconditionally love my ex-husband, even though that is what he needed. He needed radical acceptance, but I was incapable of radically accepting myself, let alone anyone else. Every emotion and act back then was conditional on his behaviour. All of it told a story about my worth. Attention, love, affection toward me, as well as attention, love and affection toward others, measured my own meaning. It drew some conclusion about my body, my thinness, my intelligence, my charm, my beauty. That love or lack of love on their part had nothing to do with my fatness or unworthiness. It never did. That is what twenty years and the death of my daughter has brought me. Releasing the need to judge my worth in relation to other people's actions. I want nothing from them.

These realizations have been fundamentally contingent upon Lucia's death. Her death and my grief magnified those feelings of worthiness or rather unworthiness. It opened the thin layer of skin between the hole inside me and the world. And it sucked in all the shit from everyone else. Her death amplified that feeling that if I were just better, thinner, faster, smarter, more compassionate, nicer, kinder, sexier, that she would have lived. It was ultimate fuck-you from the universe. She died because a cord got pinched, or maybe she just died because her heart couldn't take it. Or maybe she lived her life exactly as long as she needed. And it has nothing to do with me at all. How narcissistic of me to think that my baby's death was about my worthiness to be a mother. And conversely, the love others felt or didn't feel toward me maybe had nothing to do with me. Their ability to be present for my grief, or my marriage, or my parenting, or my recovery, or my daughter's death or me entire life also has nothing to do with me at all. And in that realization, I am free to release judgments about my worthiness again. It opens me to love unconditionally the people around me, the humans coexisting with me, all of them equally, perhaps even myself.

There is a kind of trauma in getting older, realizing that you cannot change the past, and time has moved forward in spite of your efforts to stop seeing time as linear. But you can change how you see the past, how you interact with it, how you judge it. I have empathy for me at age seventeen, twenty-nine, thirty-four. I feel sorry for that girl, sometimes. Sorry for her pain, for the suffering she inflicted upon herself. But I hold her, soothe her, remind her that her decisions were the best that could be made with the information she had.

My midlife crisis and Mercury retrograde come together in this perfect storm. And I have examined every part of my life for passion in the last month. I have looked at who I was, who I am and who I want to be. Though I liked my schooling, it wasn't something I was passionate about. I had to admit it. But I was pouring money, time away from my family and all my residual energy into it. So, I made the difficult decision to walk away. I haven't walked away from much in my life. I live in it, punish it, punish me, until it nearly kills me. I am stubborn about commitments. Headstrong and demanding on the things not working for me. Because I desperately wanted to be right. Right trumped being happy every single time. I stayed in bad relationships, drank for too long, rode my bike much too long, worked in shitty environments until I nearly threw myself out windows. But this time is different. I stared at old me and new me. Old me massaging new me. Old me judging new me. My body is so different now, so low and full and maternal. I look like a mother earth statue naked. Big belly and boobs, and thighs, and getting undressed was mildly excruciating, to expose my dead baby body to people every week. And I looked at it. Am I doing this to be right or happy? Am I undressing and massaging strangers because I am passionate about it, or because I think this is what I need to do to make peace with my body and my life? The trauma of who I was and who I am converged. I didn't want to push through that pain, because I realized I was stubbornly trying to make the me now passionate about something the twenty year old me wanted. I was punishing me, humiliating me, because I still haven't accepted me. I don't love me unconditionally. I was making me walk this public line of exposure and acceptance because I wanted to skip the slow steady love that comes with maturing into my body and self-forgiveness.

Drinking paralyzed important parts of me. It froze the past and the past me. I thought one day I might return to that brazen, strong, funny person I was at age twenty. I would wake up thin and flawless and untraumatized. But that is impossible. This Mercury retrograde fell across my path at exactly the time I needed to release all that anger and guilt and resentment toward me. Now, this is the me worthy of trying something. This is the me worthy of passion. This is the me practicing self-compassion. This is the me walking away.

blue moon

Wind takes pity on my battered soul and torn up legs, moves through the backyard, first caressing the chimes, then moving the mosquitos to the neighbor's backyard.  It is night. The dog is patrolling the yard, scaring squirrels, chasing phantom cats to prolong outside. I don't mind. I look both ways, then I open my arms and close my eyes and see the moon as a photo negative behind my eyelids. It is so bright already. Strange in this place that steals organic light, sucking it into some suburban ambient dull orange aura that surrounds our town. A second full moon this month is the moon of intention. Deliberate abundance. It is the one of synchronicity. "Ask your spirit guides," I read on a blog. "Watch for signs. Open yourself to them. Make connections. Then act on them."

I feel the magic run through my body as I soak in the moon. I am not eaten alive by bugs. That should be enough magic for this long summer. I ask for nothing, rather I tell the universe what I have in my mind's eye. It is what the blog shaman says to do. Use affirmations.

I inspire my children. 
I bring joy. 
I am driven. 
I know. 
I awaken. 
I am confident. 
I am clear-headed. 
I forgive. 
I am healthy.
I am a source of light and love. 
I am my higher self. 

Then, I whisper the vain requests, I am thin. I am strong. I am beautiful.

I am run by the moon. I howl to energize and turn inward, my cycles match up to the moon, perhaps like all women. But I don't know what to do with the power I harness from the night sky. I squander it on resentments and dream work that I am too lazy to write down and deconstruct.

I like the Native American names for the moon. August is the Sturgeon Moon which makes me happy for the fish (don't forget the fish.), and yet the blue moon, the second one this month, takes the name of the first, like a shadow self. Amore radiant, special, important shadow self.  Last full moon, I was packing for our trip, and praying and I forgot about the moon all together. I felt disconnected from the space outside my house. Heat and mosquitos kept us inside in July, bouncing on furniture, wrestling until someone cries. I am trying to let go of my shadow self, or rather maybe I am trying to make her more radiant, special, and important, like some kind of blue moon goddess. Can that be the shadow self I don't discuss in proper company? The one that is luminous, forgiving, pious, full of God and light, as opposed to the angry, resentful Angie? I realized a few weeks ago, that I hadn't thought about my righteous indignation in a week or more. I scratched my head and thought, Yeah, but I can fire that up if I want. Maybe that means I am still damaged. 

But I don't want. It is exhausting to let it go string by string of the cord that binds me to curses, abuse, and neglectful spirits. After more than a year, finally, I feel almost free of the cord that bound my heart and prevented me from letting women get close and know me. It occurs to me that I have already set my intention this year. I want to allow another woman into my life as a close friend, someone to confide, share, open up to and who I can do the same. I miss that in real life. Perhaps it is a friend of my daughter, or the pagan yoga instructor, or the psychics who ask me to join their group. I am asking the universe for a friend in my town, someone who makes me laugh and brings out that part of me, someone who likes far-out gypsy topics and oracle cards, art and crafts, and remembers that women need each other. Someone I can listen to for hours, someone who I trust.

I signed up for this two-month project called the Magical Sabbatical. It was everything I wanted to accomplish, and it felt divinely given that I even found it. It follows the full moon cycles, starting this blue moon, and ending on the full moon of October. It contains lectures and affirmations, rituals and intentions. The website says it is "an intentional disruption in your status quo." I am open to opening. I am open to the shadow self, the luminous goddess that she can be, if I only let her.

What are your intentions this blue moon? What are you accomplishing spiritually, emotionally? Share with me. 

forgiveness and remembrance

The shop smells of Japanese incense. There are chakra crystals and handblocked fabric bags made in Tibet by a women's collective. There are angels in resin for a buck, magical rocks, and pyramids, and in the middle of lavender eye pillows, I see a smiling praying jizo statue for their garden. A big jizo. It is reasonably priced, and I imagine the red bib I will sew for him. He looks like one of my paintings. I ask the beautiful woman with long flowing scarves in August, and almost no shoes about the statues around her shop. There are jizos all around this place. I ask her if she has more. I want to see them all, and she leads me around the shop, showing me Buddhas, and jizos, and Hoteis. And the first jizo is the best. He is mine.

As we stop, I reach for him, turning up to heaven, hands in prayer position, smiling. The clerk touches my wrist where her name is written on my body. It is a sensual gesture, one of compassion. The touch of a stranger feels electric. Her finger rests on my pulse. It quickens.

What does that say?

Lucia.

Is that your name?

No, it is my daughter's name.

It's beautiful. How old is she?

Actually, she died.

How old was she when she passed?

At birth. She was just being born.

Our eyes meet. It is kind of true, I am trying to communicate. No, it is true. She didn't have an age. She would have been born soon. She died just before she was born, but she was still a baby. Stillborn sounds like miscarriage to strangers. And miscarriage is also difficult and physical and hard and not to be dismissed, if you don't want it dismissed, but those words, stillbirth, miscarriage, pregnancy loss open dismissal and distance from the fact that I gave birth to my six pound baby. Lucia looked like me, and I had to leave her in the hospital for an autopsy, then cremation. So, I said she died at birth. It's not a lie, really. What I really want to say is that I pushed her out of my vagina. She was limp and gray, and weighed more than my neighbor's living baby. Her eyes were bruised and the skin torn. I kissed her anyway, and had to push her little tongue back in her mouth so she would look more alive, because it was hard to see her dead. After I held her for a few hours, she grew cold. I couldn't bear it. I wanted more blankets to cover her, to warm her.

I'm sorry. 

Thank you.

Do you have other children?

Yes. A two year old and a five year old. But Lucia is why I want the jizo, because jizos protect babies that die, and guide them into the next life. I paint them. Constantly paint them.

Wow, really? 

Yes. I paint them for other people all over the world and for myself. It is a ritual of forgiveness and remembrance.

She stared at me, tears welling. And then she hugged me. The clerk in the metaphysical store in a cluster of other stores held me. She said there was a light in me. And I could feel the darkness bubbling under the light. The dark is so overwhelming, I want to tell her, that all you can do is light stuff or it would consume us all. Even you, even your light, gauzey fabrics.


I kneel in front of the jizo I placed under her tree, next to the stepping stones we made for our two babies.

I'm sorry you died in me,I say.

There is no answer.

I'm sorry you died in me, I say again.

I chose to die like that, Mama. 
You did?
You chose it too.
I'm sorry.
Don't apologize to me, Mama. I had a good life.

I light another stick of incense and jam it into the ground.

I'm sorry your baby died in you, Angie.
It's not okay, Angie. I'm not sure I forgive you.
I know, Angie.
But keep apologizing, Ang, I think it might be working.

I perform a ritual of forgiveness. It involves nothing selfless. It is all about me being forgiven. It is empty and dark and sad, and as I walk through it, I am come out the other side full and light and contented.

I think about the life I made out of her death. It involves writing and painting and going to metaphysical stores and letting go. I let go of friends. I let go of expectation. I let go of the future. I let go of my tears. I let go of naiveté. I let go of my baby. I let go of the darkness to embrace something dark in me. I let go of anger. I let go.

+++

Today, I was over at Glow in the Woods writing about this thing that happened to me a few years ago. It was something I never talked about, or if I did, only privately to Jess or my husband, I think. I was embarrassed about it, actually, which sounds weird considering the emo shit I have owned on this blog, but still, you know, there once was a girl on the train and I loved her for a few minutes.

self-compassion

I had been having trouble sleeping. Lying in bed watching the night sky change as the hours pass. Planes fly overhead of our house, all hours of the night, low and coming in for landing or taking off from Philly. Heading somewhere else, or from somewhere else to here. I wonder who is gripping the armrest. Who is crying? Who is drunk and doesn't want to be? Who is annoyed? Who is grateful? Who is excited? Who is content? Who is indifferent? Where are they going?

I say up to them:

You are not the only person in the world to feel like this.

Perhaps I should write it on the roof of my house.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

That is the first step of tonglen, if it is a meditation practice you want to cultivate. Just to think that you are not the only person to suffer in this particular way that you are suffering. And further, since you are feeling it, perhaps you should feel it for all the people suffering from that particular brand of suffering. That is a kind of immediate tonglen practice.

Perhaps it is not comforting to be one of the many sufferers. I find it comforting to think tribally, act individually. By thinking as a tribe, I know someone has gone through what I have gone through and they have figured out a solution. All I have to do is ask for help. I find comfort in knowing that things will change, that my emotions do not come with a tattoo artist.

I have been thinking about suffering a great deal lately. As my friends suffer from differing experiences. I have been thinking about sitting in discomfort, anger, sadness, grief, resentment without reacting to it. And honestly, I don't know how to do that well. I think I linked to this piece once before by Pema Chodron about Anger and Aggression and she says that anger is such an uncomfortable emotion, it literally shakes us until it comes out. We want to change anger so desperately, we are willing to fight, yell, hurt people, just because dealing with having to make amends is easier than sitting in anger.

I have been fascinated with this idea of self-compassion since I got sober and realized self-pity is one of the defining characteristics of me and of most alcoholics. As they say, "Poor me. Poor me. Pour me another drink." I think of self-pity as self-compassion run riot. I'm trying not to let anything run riot in my life anymore. So, I am trying to change my self-pitying tendencies to self-compassionate habits.

Every time I call my sponsor about a problem, or a resentment, or an issue, she says the problem is me. It pisses me off, because I want people to agree with me. She is nice about it. She says she loves me. She listens, but then she tells me the problem is with me. And you know what, it is me. She said I have not accepted that life is exactly as it should be. Honestly, I never believed that life was exactly as it should be. I always thought that I should get the boy I want, the job I want, the house I want, and if I didn't, life wasn't as it should be. Hardest to accept is her death. I wanted Lucia here. And I thought she should be here. But she was not here.

People said it all the time to me in this community, "Your baby should be in your arms." I believed them, and I believed me. No amount of magical thinking, or righteous indignation, brought her back. I rewrote that book a thousand times in my head. And it always ended the same.

Conversely, everything that happened after--the bridges I burned, the people I hurt, the bottles of bourbon I drank, the tears I cried, the resentments I cultivated, the angry emails I sent, the self-pitying and unfair blog posts I wrote, the victimization--I cannot change any of those things. Even as I was plotting my course of isolation, I thought it shouldn't be this way. I thought I should be given a wide berth to be an asshole, grieve angrily, self-righteously, demand better behavior from people. I thought my bad behavior was justified and everyone else should be held to unrealistic standards of saintliness and compassion.

None of those things helped me grieve. None of those things helped me accept Lucia was dead. They distracted me from feeling the depth of her death. I couldn't control her death, so I tried to control everything else. It is not something I am proud of. I will not repeat those behaviors again, but I cannot change that part of my story. I could only be who I was. I didn't know what I didn't know.

And so three plus years out, my nights up late involve self-forgiveness. Apologizing to myself for being such an asshole. For not knowing what I didn't know. I am learning about my incredibly complex self-denial, and the ways in which I tried to deny feeling any kind of suffering even while I was in the middle of suffering.

Monday, on our local NPR station, Dr. Kristin Neff was the guest of Voices in the Family, talking about self-compassion. (You can listen to the show here. It is a good show. When Dr. Neff was speaking, she was asked how you sit in suffering, anger, resentment. And she said, you feel the emotion.

I made a Scooby-Doo sound, and twisted my head. And then it was like all of me felt afire. I don't feel. Not nearly at all. I don't let myself feel almost anything. I wiggle out of emotion. I tell the story over and over. I write it out. I pray about it, but I never quite feel it. I can't even quite describe my emotions. It is just flaming, brightly lit emotion.

And she said, you detach the feeling from the storyline. You stop telling yourself the story that led to the emotion. Despair resides in the storyline. She said every emotion, anger in particular, lasts at most twenty minutes. That is, if you don't feed it. If you feel it, and detach from the storyline, and sit with it, maybe you will stop feeling it in twenty minutes. You give yourself unlimited self-compassion because you are human, and all humans deserve compassion. Remove the judgments you have about your own behavior and sit with it. She said feel where the emotion resides in your body. Do you feel the anger in your ribs?

It was like she was speaking a different language, but one I wanted to learn and understand. As they say, "Suffering is inevitable. Misery is optional."





I thought I would share these thoughts as I am going through them, because in this tribe, someone else might be suffering in this way. What about you? What are you thinking about lately? Also open to answering questions, I haven't done that in a long time. Questions about religion, life, parenting, baby loss, art, writing, or anything really. You can leave it in the comments or email me directly, or Facebook me. And also wondering what everyone thinks about doing Right Where I Am again this year. I thought it would be cool to revisit it a year later. What do you think?