Wild Heart

The Curse of the Competent Woman

A week ago tonight I woke from a nap with chills and a fever, wondering what I should do. Was I sick enough to go to the emergency room? OK, I had a fever, but the pain wasn’t bad, just cramps really, and the colonoscopy had gone well. Maybe if I just went back to bed, got some sleep, all would be well tomorrow.

A week past that event and I’m still surprised at how my wits just left me. Before my nap, I was a reasonably intelligent woman with years of experience taking care of myself and others; after my nap I just wanted someone to tell me what to do.

Tonight as light rain continues to fall and my little space heater hums, I’m thinking about the Curse of the Competent Woman: I don’t know how to ask for help. In fact, I don’t even recognize that I need help. There have been three occasions in my life when I was falling apart, making really bad decisions, barely able to cope, and not only did I not recognize that I was a mess, most people around me didn’t see it, either—not because they weren’t perceptive but because I was so good at carrying on as if all was well. I did seek help from professionals during those times, and they didn’t get it either. I am really good at appearing to be just fine, thanks.

Think about an infant screaming, how the little voice quavers in mid-scream and her face goes red, how hard she works at calling attention to herself: she’s wet, she’s poopy, she’s hungry, she’s scared—and she screams until she gets the attention she needs.  Big people don’t do that. We manage. We carry on. We don’t want to appear weak or, god forbid, incompetent.

Last Wednesday night I scared myself, not in the moment but in retrospect. I was too fevered at the time to feel scared and too certain in my fevered state that there was really nothing wrong with me. I don’t like feeling vulnerable. I don’t like knowing that in some circumstances, I am not the best person to make decisions for myself.

Funny how all of life is about learning how to trust ourselves, how to come into the Who that we are, to make choices based on what we know of ourselves and what we’ve learned from experience. And then sometimes, the Who is disconnected, in this case from a fever, in the past from deep grief, once when menopause tried to kill me. I passed for normal and made life-changing choices from a self that was temporarily out of commission, a mental and emotional power outage, a live wire, a loose cannon.

Many years ago I lived in San Jose, California, across the end of the Bay from Fremont where there was a glider port. One day I read a small article in the paper about a cross-country glider pilot coming into Fremont who zigged instead of zagged, missed the landing strip, and mistook a broad green expanse for a field of grass. He headed for it, and once in a landing pattern, a glider cannot do a go-around. As he got lower, he saw that the green expanse was not grass, not any solid growing thing: it was a waste treatment swamp, a fact that became very clear when he put the glider down in it.

When you find yourself in the middle of a field of shit, the only thing to do is to wade out. What’s my point? Well, whatever decisions we make, all we can do is live with the consequences and make the most of them. I had a fevered dream that I didn’t need to go to the hospital and was fortunate enough to have people around me who recognized that my bulb was blown. So maybe one of life’s lessons is to recognize when we need help—and to ask for it, to know that the Competent Self can be wrong.

So I spent two days in the hospital learning a lesson I wish I had learned many years ago, during those other times when I thought I was landing on a broad green field . . . and I still wonder sometimes how long it takes to wade out and if the stink will ever be gone.

Aging Perception and Perception of Aging

Have you noticed this too: As you get older, everyone else gets younger? Here's what I mean: When I was going through menopause, my GP sent me to a gynecologist who was just starting her practice in Boulder. So I'm sitting on the exam table, its paper sheet crinkling with my every movement, trying to keep the inadequate gown attached to my shoulders when she walks in: khakis, a white polo shirt, a long blond braid down her back, and a chirpy cheerful voice.

Somebody call a truant officer!

I refer to her as my 12-year-old gynecologist. And maybe I wouldn't be so dismissive if she hadn't been so darned sure - without even talking to me first - that I needed to go on hormone replacement therapy and everything would be hunky-dory. What are they teaching kids in high school these days?

But I digress.

When I was in the hospital I met some really nice doctors, so nice that I suspect Avista Hospital of requiring their docs to take Bedside Manner 101. And they don't dress up in doctor clothes. One of the consulting doctors was a surgeon, and the best way I can describe him is to say, "What a cutie!" He was the youngest of the bunch, and he did something I thought was brilliant: When he was palpating my stomach (that's what they call it when they poke and push and press - palpating), he was looking at my eyes to gauge my pain level.

Dad went out of this world never having touched a computer - and proud of it. My grand kids know computers the way I knew hula hoops and roller skates that clamped to the soles of my shoes. I never needed a doctor back in the days when they wore white doctor coats and had a fatherly manner. Now that I am 66, of course they look like kids to me.

The Dr. Kildare medical profession is long dead (probably of lung cancer). Some progress is really is for the better.

 

An Unexpected Adventure

I just spent two days in the hospital getting tested up the wazoo (literally) to find out if I have a perforated colon. I don't. In my heart I knew I didn't, but there's no check box on the hospital forms for that. So I let them make the decisions.

On Wednesday morning, I had a colonoscopy. They removed a polyp. I went home. And four hours later I woke with a high fever and pain in the belly.

Sometimes you feel like a nut; sometimes you don't.

So I asked a friend to take me to the emergency room and next thing I knew, I was being wheeled down a hall in a bed, heading for the x-ray and CT scan.

I'm 66 and I've never been in a hospital over night except to have babies. So as we're rolling down the hall and over the speed bumps (speed bumps?!), I'm thinking about those episodes of ER where the camera sees the world from the patient's point of view: ceiling walls and tops of doors. I give a queenly wave as we pass the nurse's station.

At the CT scan machine, I watch from my camera-in-the-bed position and wonder how I would describe this in a blog. Clearly I am not taking any of this very seriously, even though my belly hurts when I move. They do their thing, I get drugs, they push here and poke there and keep me overnight for observation where I am hooked up, plugged in, and monitored. Then they wake me every 2 hours - not that I was sleeping.

To most of you, this stuff is known already, and certainly I've been in many hospitals visiting friends and family, but never from the sickbed, so mostly I'm just fascinated - until the gastroenterologist takes away my water and tells me they have to do more tests to make sure there's no perforation and the surgeon will be in to talk to me.

That's when I feel scared.

So more xrays and another CT scan and  more poking - and I am grateful for all of it. I still don't believe that my colon is perforated. Infected, yes; perforated, no. Maybe that's denial. Doesn't matter. Then three doctors agreed that I have an infection that is rapidly healing and I am sent home.

As hospital visits go, mine was a glitch in my quiet life, unexpected and a little scary, but nothing serious. I want to joke about it (like whistling in the dark?) and I don't. It's not fun and it's not funny. My father ignored the pain of a perforated colon and had to have major surgery. He died 8 days later.

I'm at home now, my youngest daughter asleep in the guest bed upstairs. Both daughters stayed with me in turns. And we've all had a bit of a wake-up call.These things happen, usually not to me, and now it really is time to get a living will and set up those durable powers of attorney.

When I left here Wednesday night to go the emergency room, I really thought I'd be back that night with a prescription and the admonition to take it easy. Instead i entered Oz but without the flying monkeys. When you're rolling down the back halls and up the restricted elevator, you're in another land, one where your companion as you go to the bathroom is a six-wheeled coat-rack thing that you have to unplug from the wall first and then be careful not to run over your toes with it. During one walk to bathroom in the middle of the night, I had the distinct feeling that I was taking a really ugly pet for a walk.

This land has a culture and a language that sounds foreign to my ears. Within 24 hours I acclimated (and learned how to make the bed go up and down). Now I am home and I feel humbled by the experience, grateful for medical technology even as I am understanding that I was there in the first place because of medical technology - the removal of a small polyp on my colon.

This is the world we live in. Fewer people die of colon cancer now. The healing arts are many and varied and optional: no one forced me to get the colonoscopy. Some people refuse. I respect that. The older I get, the less interested I am in preserving my life for the mere sake of preserving it. We're born, we live, we die. It is not a tragedy when an old person dies. Sad for the many who love her, but not a tragedy.

So I'm trying not to take myself too seriously. And I'm reassessing my priorities (again) and coming up with love (again) and compassion (again) and really living this life so that when I pass out of it - well, it's just my time, that's all. But not yet.

 

Morning Tea on the Patio - with Feather

The honey locust tree is full of birds this morning. Look! They left me a tiny feather!

The Memory of Heat

In summer, the song sings itself ~ William Carlos Williams

The parking lot stinks of melting tar as I step out of my car and into a snug envelope of heat. I swim through it to the automatic doors of Whole Foods and take a deep breath of cooled air. For about 20 minutes I shop for vegetables and pasta, balsamic vinegar and a roasted chicken. I'm making pasta salad later, grateful for the pre-cooked chicken so I don't have to turn on the oven. While I shop, I forget about the heat. I don't think about anything as I move from produce to dairy and up the pasta/rice aisle.

When I was a housewife many years ago, I believed that I hated grocery shopping, but really I don't, not now and not then when one baby daughter sat in the baby seat and the other baby daughter insisted on walking beside me, her eyes at the level of shelves that hold the off-brands. Even then I could lose myself tapping on cantaloupe or checking the dates on the milk, all the while chatting with the girls in that mindless way that is about as meaningful as humming.

One time in the local supermarket, I lifted a bag of ice out of the cooler, swung it toward the cart, and the bottom split, sending ice chunks skidding all the way from popsicles to frozen peas. A nice young man hustled over to help me, called for a clean-up on aisle 7, and offered the girls a cookie. Let's call him Timmy. Timmy was always around when I shopped at that market, and he always gave the girls cookies, and he always leaned in a little too close. I think he had a crush on me. Or maybe he just admired the kids, who really were adorable and never pitched a fit in public places. Really.

Now when I shop, the grocery store people smile and ask if they can help me and the clerks ask me if it's hot enough for me and how have I been. They're mostly nice people - and I am not a 25-year-old mother of two who weighed 110 pounds and wore mini skirts (it was the 70s). Now I see that I get attention because I have gray hair, because I walk slowly, because I remind them of their granny. At least that's the story I make up.

I came home from shopping, unloaded enough food that now my fridge looks like it belongs to someone who eats (I was down to condiments and feta cheese). Heat rises in waves from the hot pavement and my garage feels like a sauna. Tonight when the temperatures cool enough that I can open the windows to sleep, I'll hear the single cricket that sings from the edges of my little patio, and the moving fan will bring back my grandmother's voice rising in alarm, warning my grandfather, "Don't let that baby near that fan, Paul. Watch that baby!" In those days a kid could get her fingers whacked off in the blades of a fan. In those days there was no AC in the thinly insulated walls of the old house in Terre Haute where my grandparents lived, and their heat came with humidity and the earthy smell of honest sweat and a metallic tinge in the air that meant lightning.

I don't much like heat, but I've learned to find something in it that I do like, and that is the reminder of a self that is more - let's say - than the sum of my parts, a self that moves in a 66-year-old body and can still feel Lisa's 2-year-old hand in mine and can still see those sugar cookies that Timmy wooed the girls with. And I remember those summer visits to Terre Haute, entering a world so different from home in San Francisco, where it was always too cold to open a window at night.

Anything can come back to me when I am navigating a hot parking lot and meandering through a cool grocery store, and I see now that I like grocery shopping because I love the grand theater of the imagination that is constantly triggered by figures on a cereal box or the shape of a sugar cookie.

Dancing Myself Awake

I woke this morning to Big Band music in my head—Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing—and in the fading dream I was cutting the rug with a couple of eight-year-old boys who were break dancing. I found this so humorous that I closed my eyes and stayed there awhile.

 

20 Sing, Sing, Sing

 

I believe that our dreams are messages from the unconscious, but what the heck . . . ? I’d worry about myself if I weren’t having so much fun.

Wrapped in the Arms of Summer

What good are shelves full of poetry books, pages flagged, when I can't find the one poem that I need this minute to complete my life?!

Summer: Go shopping at, say, Macy's, where it's cool and the air has no smell and the mannequins no expression and the clothes no personality. The exit takes you first into that indifferent space between in-here and out-there.

Now go Out There.

Summer is so happy to see you, it jumps up on your chest like a great dog full of slobbery love. There's a poem I can't find, and I think it's by Mary Oliver, where she writes about being outdoors on a summer day, lazing about, in the "blowzy lap of summer”—or at least I think that's the line. I can't find the poem.

We're approaching that part of summer when fallen fruit rots on the ground—beak-poked cherries and plums lost in the underbrush. Tomato vines are heavy with red globes ready to split, and a person can't pick the pickling cucumbers fast enough. Corn is tall, the stalks sticky-fuzzy and ready to be stripped.

That was in the midwest, in the farm land around Terre Haute, in the fields off of back roads and the trees overhanging the alleys, in the side yard between my grandmother's house and the house next door where we built a cardboard fort and lay in there spying the storm clouds through the loose top of the carton and taking in those smells that could only be sorted and identified now in the unscented and air-conditioned living room of my Colorado home.

I'd swear there were peaches and apricots, lilac (don't those bloom in the spring?) and roses, honeysuckle with their buzzing bees and watermelon rinds with buzzing flies.

In those days I was Out There, dirty and sweaty and adding my own reek to the cacophony of smells that filled my childhood summer visits to Indiana.  These days I am In Here, clean (if not tidy), smelling of this morning's shampoo and appreciating the quick summer storm that rolls through and eases the heat that I'm so good at complaining about.

A friend I've known for more that 50 years has a home "on the land" near Jenner, California, where In Here and Out There are blended, where dirt is not something to avoid and animals are wild, where heat is simply heat and cold is simply cold.

"When are you coming to visit me?" she says after detailing the glories of her home.

"When are you going to have indoor plumbing?" I answer from my cool living room.

In Here, Out There. A dividing line between two old friends? A dividing line between childhood and now? Maybe the line is drawn on the sidewalk in chalk. Maybe the afternoon storm will wash it away.

Maybe I'll find that poem by Mary Oliver.

What If . . .

I woke this morning to a voice calling my name.

I live alone.

But there was a voice. And it called my name. I woke, said, "What?!" as in, "What do you want?" As in, "What now?!"

It's cooler today than it has been in weeks, and I have plans to drive to Denver for lunch with My Old Pal Bill (we met in high school about 50 years ago). We meet up every 6 weeks or so. He played the lead in Brigadoon. I was one of the girls in the chorus. Sounds lots sexier than it was.

So the voice woke me, I got up, came outside to enjoy a bit of cool air, and I'm wondering if I'll hear the voice again, if it will give me some direction or if I'll have to create my own direction - again. What if I stay alert for voices today. I wonder what I'll hear, who I'll meet, what I'll do.

One doesn't know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one's life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief weilding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime. A lost girl in a blue gingham skirt and white pinafore hardly seemed a likely ambassador to a rosier future: still, stranger things had happened. ~ Gregory Maguire from A Lion Among Men

12 Hours of Separation

It was a strange day - oddly quiet and I was oddly restless.

The computer went down at noon and stayed down until midnight. Updating the Internet connection. We hadn’t broken up, me and my laptop, we were just taking a little break. We weren’t even making other connections, it was just that . . . we had been spending so much time together, both of us getting clingy.

You know how it is: she says, “It’s not you, it’s me.” And I say, “I could try harder.” And she says, “I just need a little space.” And I say, “I notice you’ve been spending more time at the Wii-Fi Cafe.” No one’s fault, really, and maybe things will be better now, more connectivity, less waiting around at intersections, possibly more privacy.

It’s a fresh start. Clean out old records, empty the trash, let go of the temporary files. Yes, we had too much baggage between us, preventing us from having a deep . . . interface.

It will be OK now. I’m sure of it.

Quiet Summer Morning

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat any time
and be yourself. ~ Herman Hesse

Quiet morning on the patio.

Voices in the distance, birds up close, and a visiting small dog on my lap. We’re taking in the cool of morning before the heat of summer rises up and swallows us. Yesterday afternoon I ran errands, filling the tank and then storming Costco for only this and then that, no meandering, no looking down this aisle and up that one. I shop for specifics, no more than I can carry in my arms, and then I’m out of there, charging on to the next stop - Target - small storage hassock on sale, I can use it to prop my feet on at my desk and then dump piles into when they collect - again - on an end table or the kitchen counter or on the floor by the sofa.

What do other people do with all the paper they acquire? Or is it just me?

Could I pile it, glue it, shellac it, and call it a table? Paint the stack and call it art? And bigger questions: Do I need any of it? Can I shred it or just toss it into recycle? And why do I feel like I’m making a valuable contribution when I put anything into recycle? If I get rid of it, will I find a need for it two weeks hence and know it’s gone for good? Has that ever happened to me before?

Our HOA added a compost bin to the area where the garbage and recycle bins sit. Now I can contribute tea bags and egg shells, leftovers gone fuzzy and lettuce I forgot to eat. I feel righteous about this until I think about how much I waste, how rich I am in resources I take for granted. When I was a kid, I ate the tough fried liver and spongy brussels sprouts so that children in China wouldn’t starve. That made no sense to me then, but Mother said . . . And so I did . . . And now I wonder what lessons I took away from that dinner table that I’m still living by.

The day heats up. The visiting dog lies in a spot of sun now. No more voices in the distance. A small plane passes in the blue, blue Colorado sky.