cracked me up

ok people.  here is an item we actually read the reviews for before purchasing.  it was a few months ago when we read the very first review for that plunger.  the story sticks with me, and i just used the plunger for the first time today.  we've had it a while, but luckily david somehow does most of the plunging.  anyhow, let's not get into why we need to plunge so much.  i think this one toilet has just got a really small pipe or something.  but anyway....plungers!

you've got to read that review.  then read the replies to it.  david replied to it.  ha.  he is the seventh reply i think, oldbarrows is his reply name.

if it doesn't crack you up like it did us, i'm sorry.  it could've just been us.

but maybe you need a better plunger?  i will say, my first use just now was the easiest bit of toilet plunging i've ever done.





this guy would never clog a toilet.....cutie mr.

workshop it for me if you please

so we got married.

and now i obsess over our state of happiness or unhappiness.

i'm writing a story about us.

i do this a lot.

i have two parts so far.  there is one part about a memory i have from our wedding.

there is another part about a couples' therapy session we had.

i am looking for another couple parts to add to the collection of little stories about us.

that makes me smile.  little stories about us.  i have so many to choose from.

1. the time we looked at each other over our son's recovery bed after his surgery when he was seven. 
2. the time you had me spit my fear into your hands as i was in labor with our third child.
3. the first time we almost got divorced, and you left for a weekend to do mens' work.  (i googled 'mens' work' and i get a list of sites to look at mens' work boots.  then i get a few sites for Men at Work.  Then i get a feeling i am looking into men's work when really i need to be looking into women's work.....)
4. the second time we almost got divorced and you brought us to a new couples' therapist who i now feel is golden, and the weeks we don't go to therapy are not as good as the ones when we do.  
5. the first time one of our parents died, and you stepped into the stable shoes for me, for a while, but then you had to go back to work and i had to do all that grieving on my own, cuz i didn't know to ask you to be more present with me.
6. the second time one of our parents died, and i stepped into the stable shoes for you, and i didn't ask you to do the dishes for a whole year.  and then i wanted a divorce again.  

it's the heavy stuff that comes to mind.

Rumi says "Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."  

I think my story for us, this time, is about the work, the amount of work we have to do to stay together as a couple.  maybe i need to be googling 'couples' work.'  how do i tell a story about this?  how do i also show how essential all the little miracles are too?  it's not just the work we do that keeps us together.  and who says staying together is the right thing to do anyway?  are we just to afraid to actually split up?  we have gotten so close.  and then we don't go through with it.  and i chalk it up to work and miracles.  what if it's fear that keeps us together?  

i'm drinking golden dragon tea this morning as i ponder how to tell this story.  this story of ours.  

you wore a white bow tie to our wedding.  

we weren't messing around.  i sewed my dress out of an off white brushed silk..

okay, back to rumi.  when i have barriers up, keeping me from loving, what within myself is keeping me from loving?  

being in writing school, i keep getting the message that i am here to learn to tell a story.  not to ruminate on my thoughts so much, but to just tell a story.  ok bitch fuckers.  i will just tell a story.  but which one?

wu wei.  i hear this guy saying this at the next table over.  just let it unfold he says.  wu wei.  a concept meaning to embody the non-doing that keeps the world going.  the way the planets orbit and revolve without working at it.  the way trees grow without trying to grow.  it's doing the natural thing.  a little like this other concept i was reading about yesterday, in an interview with phillip shepherd, about living by listening to the world, interacting with the world through the belly, using the intelligence in the second brain, the belly.  

alright.  i'm gonna pay attention to this, and listen to my teachers and all these concepts of natural intelligence and just drudge through my gut and tell some story of ours.  

the therapy story, combined with a piece of the wedding story

ok...tell me what you like and don't like about this little story i drudged up....or not, but if you are cool, and you read it, you will give feedback.  

                                                                  Foreplay

                              

We went to our couples therapy this week.  This room where we meet is in a grey concrete office park, on the second story of the east-most building in an efficiently laid out soulless complex.  The first time we came to this therapist, the monotonous horror of the buildings surprised me.  After parking, we enter through the exterior tinted glass door, then up the grey concrete stairwell, down the grey hallway with faux wood doors.  Most of the offices aren’t rented, adding to the overall sense that there is something wrong with this place.  No one wants to be here.  Once in the therapy room though, we surrender to a hidden world of woven rugs with snake patternings, woven hangings depicting primitive birds in neon yarns, and provocative, arresting images in the framings on the walls.  In one frame is an image of a souldier, with another souldier behind him aiming a spear at his back.  Pay Attention I am reminded.  In another frame, an image of a stone carving in the shape of a man’s face, the word MASCULINITY underneath.  And in another frame, an image of black bird-woman, with layers of shadow and light radiating off of her.  Our therapist is a small framed man, with dark olive skin, dark brown hair cut in a relaxed professional manner.  He wears leather open-toed slip on shoes.  Each of his big toenails is painted a dark purple as well as each of his thumbnails.   He is sitting, legs crossed, in his upright wooden chair, looking at his phone when we arrive.  He looks up and greets us with cave-like brown eyes, a hawkish smile, a look that somehow says, Come join me in the lower realm.

            There is a photo of him and his wife, probably taken twenty years ago, sitting on the shelf next to his chair.  On this shelf is also a photo of a wolf looking directly at us, and a clock.  That snake rug is between all the chairs, and those snakes lure us lower.  All the way to the bottom if we work hard enough.  Provided for the me and my landman are a low-to-the-floor, but deep-and-wide, stuffed black leather chair, and a wooden rocker with a subdued crocheted blanket draped over the back.  A little table sits cattycorner these two chairs, supporting a box of tissues and a blank lined note pad and pen.  This little but spacious therapy room has one window looking out to the next sad office park building across the street.  I sometimes stare out that window, at the sky above the sad buildings, when my husband is speaking. 

            The waste-basket is sitting behind and to the side of the therapist’s chair, right next to his big laminate desk.  Once well into the lower realm, usually about a twenty minute descent, we shoot our tear and snot soaked balled up tissues into the basket from our seats.  If I ever miss, my husband gets up to put it in for me. 

            There is a white erase board on a wall no one faces.  We’ve never used this board, but I wouldn’t be opposed to mapping out our pains on there.  A big map of our hearts’ pains.   I would paint part of my heart black.   My beloved would paint part of his white. 

            I’ve asked the therapist about his own marriage before.  They almost divorced at year seven.  They are now at year twenty-nine, reassessing if marriage is still what they want.  Our therapist before this one was a divorcee.  And now she is a lesbian.  Finding an elder who made marriage work, without dying internally, is like coming upon a wolf in the rocky mountains these days.

On this day, I finally bring up the sex topic.  I feel ready to talk about my lack of desire to have sex with my husband, I say this, my hands flat on my thighs, rubbing the nap on my pants back and forth.  My hands flat on the top part of my tail, smoothing my ruffled green and gold scales with my tears.  The scales on my tail so dry and wrinkled, like grapes on a vine in a drought.  Therapist says, sitting back in his upright chair, What would make you want to open to him?  If he didn’t seem to need me so desperately, I say.  Therapist says to me, You are doing great, with a King Snake authority I can only say Ok to.

King Snake asks me to look at my husband, sitting in that giant black leather chair that causes a person’s body to sink in such an uncomfortable way.  I look.  He has that needy look in his eyes.  He is looking at me like I am all that matters.  I can’t look at him for long, I say.  Husband, the bearer of my (dry) land as the word originally meant, straightens up and says he is not feeling needy.  I say, But you look like you are.  King Snake says, Mermaid, was there anyone in your past that pulled you under against your will with desperate neediness?  Of course, My mother I say, rocking slightly in the grandma chair, pushing my cuticles back incessantly, my tail flapping, like a cat’s on alert.  My mother, afraid of man’s constraints upon me, kept me under the sea, in hiding, hoping desperately that no man would ever own me. 

My Beloved has been looking at me this whole time, his arms resting on the arm rests, feeling like a tree holding his ground.  He has stayed steady.  He is holding so steady in his uncomfortable seat while I rock, getting wetter and wetter, sensing comfort in his eyes all of a sudden.  King Snake asks Landman, Was there anyone in your life whose approval you needed in order to feel adequate?  Squinting his eyes like he’s looking into a dark corner, full of the pent up fire that men who aren’t getting laid feel, he answers, My mother.  His mother who tended to him like all well-meaning overbearing mothers do, teaching that the woman in his life determined his good standing.  The pasts’ snakey patternings are perfectly uniform and there is no break in the pattern until we reach either the head or the tail.  We will even shed our old skin, over and over, but our patterning will be the same.  We pay bucket loads for King Snake’s transformative bites, week after week.    

We leave the therapist’s office coming up slowly from the lower realm.  Stepping outside, on this day, the light is so bright it hurts.  We are both red in the eyes, standing in the parking lot, surrounded by blocks and blocks of mostly unoccupied grey buildings.  We stand there on some thick grass, sweating under the light.  It is anything but soulless in this office park I now see.  Landman holds his masculine pitchfork upright, knowing he is ok, and I swim feminine circles around him, knowing I am free. 

We leave in our separate cars. I go home to the kids, let the babysitter go.  Landman goes back to work.  He comes home a while later, holds steady, as if I am the sea who can neither approve nor disapprove, I just don’t have that power.  My only power is to rock, and he holds steady.  I am turned on for the first time in so long.  His foreign nature lures me this night.

I remember the gravel under my shoes as my grandma walked me down the aisle to be married.   I remember the sound of the grit under the soles.  I remember us both looking down at our feet on the ground.  I remember each step we took, so deliberate, and each stone we stepped on spoke to us.  They had something to say.  The earth having her words with me as I walked to meet my Beloved.  It was so formal and ceremonial.  But the rocks under foot said something else.  The rocks under foot said ‘You are on earth, and it is rocky.  It is noisy, it is dusty.  It is grey.  You are on earth and your high heeled shoes are awkward.  There is grit everywhere.  Welcome into the darkest lower realm of marriage.’  I did not understand at all.  My grandma understood, and focused on this exchange with the earth so I was free to smile at my Beloved.

Marriage, the word, comes from the Latin maritare, and originally meant union under the auspices of the Goddess Aphrodite-Mari.  Aphrodite-Mari governed the world by ius naturale, the natural law of the maternal clan.   She was the Great Fish who gave birth to the mermaids, the fish tailed Aphrodites.  In matriarchal times, the land men needed to be bound to a woman to gain power and land ownership.   Under modern patriarchal law, the crown claimed as its own all mermaids found in their territorial waters.   As a postmodern mermaid, I now cannot be claimed.  I do not feel mating for life is an unnatural construct, nor partnering between a Mermaid and a Landman.  It’s just the patterning of the natural law was lost on us all.  Buried so low. It’s in the lower realm, and it’s incredibly rocky the path back down.  My grandma knew the rocky terrain, heard the rocky welcoming, held my hand, and walked me right to my man.

(A spell is cast, then broken, over and over, forever.)

late summer dress 2013

i sewed vogue pattern 1086 (V1086) in some grey striped linen i got at joann's

kinda feeling happy with it

yay

simple yay

brave hearts

Ok…watch this disclosure, dissing the closure

  ( I disclose because I am helped by others disclosing, most of all)

We went to our couples therapy this week.

I finally bring up the sex topic, blatantly I mean, as in, I say,  'I want to talk about my lack of desire to have sex with my husband.'

This is not something we’ve discussed yet with our new therapist.

I say, ‘I want to open sexually because I am turned on,

I don’t want to have to make myself open, which is what I seem to have mostly done these past ten years.’

Therapist says, ‘What would make you want to open?’

I say, ‘If he was in his power around me, like he is with other men. I say, maybe he needs to pretend I am a man.’ 

Therapist says, ‘Don’t go there.’

‘Ok,’ I say. 

Therapist says, ‘What does it mean to you for him to be in his masculine power?’

I say, ‘It’s when he is steady.  When I can be my wild feminine self, and he stands strong and steady, and I can do anything to test his stability, and he is like a rock, I cannot knock him down.’  I say, ‘That makes me open, naturally, easily, I couldn’t stay closed to masculine energy like that if I tried.  I feel safe in the presence of that power, and I am always attracted to him when is like that.  But he isn’t like that with me, just with other men.’

Therapist says, ‘Heather, what do you want to ask David?  What do you want to ask that you are afraid to ask?’

I start crying.  Then I say, ‘David, why can’t you be in your masculine power around me?’

David doesn’t seem to know why exactly.  But he does seem to know what I’m talking about.  He says he tries, that he feels he approaches me in this way, and that if I am not receptive, if I am not open immediately, he goes away, feeling I wasn’t approving of him.

I have a thing with feeling as if David is needy, energetically needy, often coming to me to suck my energy.  So I have a tendency to close down at the onset of our interactions if I get a wiff of needy.  I am not proud of this, but it is what happens. 

Therapist says, ‘This is where you two are reliving your core wounds.  Heather senses neediness, that may or not be there, and she closes.  David feels he is not good enough based on her lack of openness, and retreats.  You are both left alone and longing for connection.'

Therapist asks me to look at David.  I do.  He looks like he has that needy look in his eyes, and I say 'It’s really hard for me to look at him when I sense the neediness in his eyes.'

David says he is not feeling needy.  I say, 'But I feel that you are.'

Therapist says, 'Heather, was there anyone in your life that overwhelmed you with their neediness, that drained your energy with their neediness?’

‘Of course, my mother,’ I say.

Therapist says I am looking through a filter that is projecting this experience I had with my mother onto David.  Even when David is not being needy, I am projecting it onto him. 

David has been looking at me this whole time, I have kept on looking at him too.  He has stayed steady.  I see him now.  He is not feeling needy at all.  He feels safe and just like the rock that I cannot push over. 

I say, ‘Wait, David, I like what I am feeling from you now.  It feels really good the way you are looking at me.  I think I have to test you.  Maybe that is what I’ve been doing for so long, testing you to see if you can hold yourself steady long enough for me to trust that you are for real.’

Therapist says, ‘Yes, and when you project the needy energy onto him, he feels rejected and this triggers his core wound, his core wound of needing confirmation from his mother that he is okay.’

Therapist says to David, 'She is going to test you.  She cannot help it.  You are going to have to hang in there for those moments while she discerns if you are for real.  If you are there in front of her in your masculine power, or if you are there to suck her dry.’

David gets it.  He is holding so steady in his seat in the therapist’s office and I am a little wetter.

It is almost like magic how easily I am turned on by a display of fierce masculine presence. 

We leave the therapist’s office when the session is over and go outside and look at each other.  We are both red in the eyes and wide open from this very real breakthrough we just had. 

I say, ‘We are just going to keep having breakthroughs forever, huh?  We are not going to arrive and peak and feel we have attained couples’ enlightenment, but we are going to keep on in the Process.  It is a relief to me to realize this.  I tell him that I’ve been having an email dialogue with a friend the past few days, and that the friend just wrote to me saying how he feels we (as a species I guess) peak, hit our potential, and then at some point in our ‘older’ age we look back and realize that our potential is not what it once was.  I tell David that I responded to my friend by writing that I saw something different in the way David’s dad lived his life out.  I saw David’s dad live his life to the last few days, working, to improve on what he could improve, in his case, it was law suits around health care inequalities.  What could be more beautiful than that?  He never felt he peaked, he just got more and more invested in doing the best job he could.  David and I are standing outside, and he is crying as he listens.  He then says, ‘Thank you for saying that.’  I say ‘Yeah, and your dad flossed his teeth to the very end too.’

We leave in our separate cars. 

I go home to the kids, let the babysitter go.  David goes back to work.  

He comes home a while later, and I test him.  He holds steady and it is real.

We make love that night in the most satisfying way we have ever before. 

Improve.  We will work to improve on what can be improved, because with that state of mind, we don’t have to peak.

what before ever/i am so happy in so many ways

infinity

a gratitude list is all that i can do right now...

i'm so happy about the reading of harry potter we did this summer
we started the second one tonight

after i just single handedly took my three medium sized kids to a music festival for the whole day.  david is in brooklyn for the weekend.  yep i did something i thought i couldn't.  and then we came home and started a new novel.

smile.

sounds idyllic.  guess what i felt like later tonight.  blech.  i'm staying up late, trying to redeem myself from feeling like i wrote a shitty blog post, the last one i wrote.  i feel blech from the sunscreen that made my eyes cry throughout the day.  blech from the wreck of a kitchen.  i'm trying to redeem myself in the wee hours of the night so that i can wake up and feel sane and go to max's graduation ceremony for his rites of passage class.

i have a weird habit of beating myself up.

does a gratitude list help balance that?  or is it a self love list i need to do?  or not even self love, but maybe a 'ways i am awesome' list.    

i read my kids harry potter this summer.  it is hard to even say that is awesome.  i go to this other place so quickly, this place where i say to myself, that is lame you just read one book.  having read four novels to the kids would be awesome.  one is lame.

i hate trying to be awesome.  i just want to be me.  'just me' read harry potter to my kids!  it was awesome.  i'm not kidding.  we loved it.  we were in heaven...then we watched the film, the first one, and now we have started the second book.

my kids and i started taking piano lessons this summer.

we as a family went on a beautiful road trip to santa fe and then the southern colorado sand dunes.

we really did some good restoration on max's room.

the kids took a few classes, a few camps, i am so proud of them.

david and i went for it with couples' therapy.

i came back to my old sweet and safe and quirky blog where i am just me.  and i find 'just me' often by writing around on here.

i love water.  it was weirdly hot today.  i sat in the sun listening to neat music, eyes tearing from sunscreen, hurting.  my oldest girl crocheting the smallest rubber bands into a 7 foot long necklace.  my son being peaceful in his chair, doing nothing but sitting, my youngest girl coloring and drawing.  they never wanted to go sit at the creek, or play in the water all day.  so we just chilled in our chairs a lot.  it was awesome.  is that weird how much they just wanted to sit?  no iPods, no nothing but live music and sun and water bottles and food and ice cream and walking back and forth to the bathroom.  my habit of judging every situation, looking for how not perfect it was is painful.  i hate it.  done judging for now, now that i've just named what i was doing.  we had an awesome day.  i sold our extra tickets.  at a discount.  i made some people psyched.  they were neat people too.  there is a whole story about zhi losing her ten dollar bill.  it is sad and weird.  we went to walk up to the front near the stage, to see the band Lucius up close. we found an open grassy spot and plopped on it.  a minute later, an older jewish seeming man comes and sits next to us, on his blanket.  a minute later, an older reddish headed lady approaches him, with a ten dollar bill, and says she just saw a man walk by her and drop it.  he says it wasn't him.  since i had just given the kids each a ten dollar bill to spend if they wanted, or to save otherwise, i look at them and ask them to see if they still have theirs.  zhi's isn't in her pocket anymore.  i tell the lady, that we just sat down here, just before this man did.  that it could be my daughter's actually, she seems to have just in the last three minutes lost her ten dollar bill, as we were walking up here.  the lady looks at me and says she is positive she saw a man drop it.  i totally think, ok, totally possible, not gonna push this.  i say ok and she walks away.  we then go back to our seats five minutes later and zhi breaks down crying.  of course.  i would have too at her age.  it's not often i give them money to spend.  i tell her i will replace it.  and that maybe this is just a good time to learn the lesson on how easily things can make their ways out of our pockets.  then i have the idea, because zhi really wants me to go and talk to this woman again, to ask red headed bitch lady if she doesn't find the man who dropped the money, in this sea of 2000 people, if she'd consider passing it on to my girl who is crying over having just lost hers.  and we did lose it just before you came and offered it to the man sitting right beside us.  just saying.  just an idea i tell her, and i show her where we are sitting.  she is so mean.  she is clings to the story of how a man dropped it.  it is maddening.  but i say ok, and walk away.  it takes me thirty minutes to energetically move on.  i finally do, by telling myself this stress is not worth ten dollars.  i tell zhi if it was a hundred dollars i'd maybe push it more with lady, but even then i don't know.  if someone is going to be that wrong seeming, unless it's worth a ton to me, i don't know if it's worth uncentering myself to get into conflict.  or to push it even.  it is worth a ton to me to work through the energies i deal with in my marriage, it is so valuable to me, so i work really hard on it.  working though something like that with a bitch woman?  no.  it is a clear grounded no, that was to be let go after i did my piece.  i was a clear communicator with that woman.   and after i got another ten dollar bill, making change by buying a drink, i sit down and zhi asks me if i want to talk to that lady again.  i say no, now it is time to let that go.  i could feel zhi's relief.  she needed me to show her how.  and i did.  i just said it was time to move on, and i meant it.  i felt it.  and together we totally moved on.  the lady never brought the ten dollars.  olive whispered in my ear that i should tell the police.  cutie.  but i did sell my extra tickets since david ended up going out of town and it's a long story, but we had two extra three day passes.  i sold them at a super good, basically half off price, cuz that's what i had to do to sell them, and i got the price i asked for, no bartering, the people were so happy, and so was i.  it felt great.  so neat.  so happy.  i think of the ten dollar bill lady and feel sad for her.  and then i remind myself that maybe a man really did drop it.  and maybe she needs that ten dollars way more than i do, or zhi does.  and maybe she is just a really mean lady.  i don't know.  that's really what i am reminding myself of.  i don't know.  but i am proud about how i handled that situation.

my fingers feel like spiders typing on this keyboard tonight at midnight.   i love it.  i am going to go and wash that sunscreen off now.  sigh.  i am awesome to have just written that all out.  that was hard.  that took effort.  it was not fun.  but i can feel right now that i am glad i did.


 

raw

raw teeth.   i've ground another tooth down into a painful situation.  i just cried and cried in the dentist's chair.  she said it's just what happens to some.  i have to be serious about the night splint.  she put some desensitizing stuff on the tooth, and said i may just need the spot filled.  we'll see how i feel next week.  i think i need dental insurance now.

i'm raw and about to bleed.  is there anything more raw than a woman bleeding her womb out?  turning her body inside out for a few days?  her emotions, her thoughts.  my exposed blood.  and bone.

my dentist also said, the body works in weird ways, and that i just had a really hard year, and maybe my body is just now starting to show the signs of the stress, that i am just now starting to unwind enough to start the grinding.  ha.  that is so wretched it makes me laugh.



max's old carpet, out the window.  his floor is now exposed and raw too.  we have been grinding the stone down, removing the old hardened carpet glue.  we are about ready to seal the stones back up with a protective sealer, and then i touch up some of the painting i just did that got messed up by all the floor work, and i think he is about to have a really nice refreshed room.  a room with walls that are not banged up and a floor that is not stained and basically gross.  a room that is nice, sealed and protected.  beautiful and strong.





my mom helped me paint ....olive too.



freshly dyed old kitchen towels are cool.  raw edges have their place.

i wonder if drinking coffee makes me grind my teeth at night....

why is quitting it so hard?  it's quitting something i love, that's all, right?




tea dyeing feels really soulful, i think it is.



you know how when you cry a lot, it makes you tired for the rest of the day?  i cried all the way to the dentist.  just cuz i heard a song that cracked me open.  then i cried the whole time at the dentist.  and now i am wiped out.  and ready to go to couples therapy.

ha!  that is funny, right?  my darkness says yes.





this girl sunday, a soulmate friend that i met in our first year in the dorms came to visit the other day.  just looking at her in this photos with the kids makes me smile.  she makes me smile pretty easily.



here's a little old linen hanky i dyed.  i love the patterns i see in it now.

i see teeth.

i'm gonna get through this toothy summer.

anyhow.