Category: family

adulthood · family · femininity · love · motherhood

Dear Mom, I Hallmark You.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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It was always very clear what our family would do on
Mother’s Day: We would have bought hanging fuschia plants at Metropolitan Plants up on Route 17 in Paramus, one for our mom (Ben’s and mine) and one for
my Dad’s mom. We’d make the U-turn by Grand Union, near which, whenever driving
past it together, my best friend M. and I would parrot a mean jingle about our
babysitter: “Get everything you don’t want aaaat Grand Pam!” (name changed for
anonymity!)
Once home, we’d exchange the broken and feeble fuschia that hung by the
side of our house all winter for the new one, hook the other in the Camry, and
drive over to Queens.
After the lovely awkwardness of pizza with them, our family
would reward ourselves by stopping by The Pastrami King. Which has since
closed, and there’s now a Pastrami Queen somewhere, which, sorry feminism, is
not as good.
Pastrami King had the real barrels of pickles along the wall, all different
kinds, fat, warty, dark, light green, and my mom would dive into the barrel with the plastic tongs to fetch these prizes out of the water. My brother and I would gag at
her.
We’d get round potato knishes and pounds and pounds of,
really, the best pastrami I’ve ever had, and also some of their own spicy
mustard – because people, no mayo, no ketchup, nothing but MUSTARD, is supposed to go on a pastrami sandwich. Sorry.
It’s the Jew way. Well, at least, our Jew way.
Mother’s Day did mean
something in our household, and despite all the “It’s a Hallmark holiday” scorn
it receives, and despite the mixed emotions it may bring up for people who’ve
lost moms, lost babies, can’t or didn’t have babies, for me, it’s nice. Yes,
even on this arbitrary date some CEO thought up some years ago, it’s nice to
acknowledge my Mom. And so, I do.
This year, by coincidence and fortune, I came across a
website with cuff bracelets with large metropolitan city subway maps engraved
into them. Paris, Berlin, Chicago, New York. My mother, the consummate New
Yorker. In fact, this very morning, she sent me a batch of photos from the
window display of her local dry-cleaner. The purveyors apparently rotate a series
of Barbie tableaus. Last time was the Oscars, complete with a miniature “Gone
with the Wind” poster, red carpet, and a Marylin Monroe Barbie. This month, a Barbie Seder,
with mini Afikomen and all!
She loves the city, and so, my brother and I split the cost
of one of these cuff bracelets for her. She may never wear it, it may be “not
quite right,” and sure, a nicely written
card could have done the same thing, and for many years it has. But, this year,
it was nice to say, “Hey, I know this is something very important to you, a
part of you, this city, and I want to give you something that represents that,
that says, Ben and I know you. You are not invisible, you are seen, you are
recognized, and you are appreciated in your interests and oddities.” (Not many
women her age would brave black and white saddle shoes with skinny jeans. But,
her photo to us to mark the start of Spring was of just that!)
I am not a mother. I don’t know if I will be, the fates
haven’t sent me that postcard yet. But it’s baby season around me. At work, I’ve gotten
to snuggle almost weekly with what started as newborn for the last 4
months, and now teeths and laughs and dances and flirts all shy and coy
sometimes, while his mom gets to compose emails with two hands. Like yesterday, I’ve gotten to snuggle another newborn at my friend’s house, letting
him sleep on me for swaths of time where my little heartbeat rests right
against his, and his flutters like a bird, and he’s so warm and soft and new.
It’s glorious.
I’m flying out at the end of the month to visit one of my
best girl friends on Long Island. She got married last year during 4th of July,
went on honeymoon in August, and got pregnant on a boat in the Mediterranean. 9
months later, baby. I asked a few of the new moms I know if it would be “worth” my
flying out to see her. How “important” it was. If money were no object, it
would be no question. It’s the only time at work that I can really go in the
foreseeable future. 
How important is it? The baby won’t remember. My aunt tells
me all the time how she was there when I
was born. I don’t remember. Doesn’t really mean anything at all to me. Or, at
least, it hasn’t. But, now I’m beginning to see that it is meaningful — to the adults. To have
the people you love around you at a time when everything is changing, exciting, exhausting, new – I’d want my best friend there, too.
I don’t have those “uteran tugs” that some women experience
around their 20s and 30s, that ache for a baby in my body. But being so close
to the motherhood around me makes it so much more real, significant,
miraculous.
I’ve written before about my own “Maybe Baby” question, so this
one is just to say, laying a baby – my baby or not – on my chest, having him
nuzzle into me and rest because I’m a safe place, is Life’s great privilege. 

anger · body · disappointment · family · grief · healing · therapy

Rage against the dying of your light.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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So, I’ve seen this somatic therapist (Rosen Method) now about 4 times, and
each time I plan to go, I wonder if we’re “doing” anything, if anything is
“happening,” especially if anything is “changing.” I want results to
long-harbored ills, and I want them now. Or at least evidence that we’re
heading in that direction.
Damn this woo-woo laying on of hands, heal thyself bullshit
– gimme the Rx, gimme the fix, and let’s get on with this “life” business. Or
more accurately, let’s get on with the happy life business. Enough processing. More doing, more getting, more
fulfillment, more joy, more security, more ….
She told me that if I keep on trying to skip over my
emotions, they’ll still just be there. Waiting, licking at the back of my
throat, causing the tension in my shoulders I’ve carried for decades. If I put a
lid on them, feel them well up, and force them back down, … well, I could
finish that sentence with, “Then you might get cancer.”
But I’m so good at
emoting. I’m an emotional wreck! No, I kid, but I am an emotional person, I feel
things, deeply, often, sometimes. So, where am I not feeling what needs to come
up and out?
“Anger wasn’t an allowable emotion,” I told her. I know I’m
not unique in that. But anger was modeled as a way to impose, control,
terrorize. Anger, I interpreted, is bad. It causes people to behave badly,
meanly, poisoned.
Anger, I also surmised, is consuming. When you are angry,
you are nothing else but a hot, raging ball of ferocity. No humanity, no
compassion, no faults.
I’ve worked on anger before; I’ve read Julia Cameron saying,
Anger is a call to action. It shows us where our boundaries are being crossed,
and calls us to take action in their assertion. (to paraphrase.)
Anger is healthy. Anger is right.
Anger is totally not allowed.
This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, anyway. Ask my
coworkers! But I feel it as a place where my veil of self-control has slipped,
instead of as an integrated part of my expression. I feel my anger as a
failure. Something to be overcome, overruled, rooted out.
But, that’s simply not the case, and the more I keep it separate
from myself and an integrated whole, the more compartmentalized and dissociated
I will be.
It’s not like I want to be the Hulk, or a crank, or someone
who’s angry all the time. I just want to allow it to be a part of my emotional
range, just like compassion or amusement, and like boredom or fear or apathy. I
don’t quash with visceral force even these less “comfortable” emotions; I don’t
feel shame over feeling them. Positive or negative ones.
But Anger. And grief. Get the cold shoulder. The taut
one. The tense, clamped down, forcible shoulder.
Being a somatic therapist in this way of working, it’s sort
of like reiki, only she’s not “sending me good vibes;” she’s observing how my body tenses or releases,
acknowledges “true” things, or asks me to rephrase, since that didn’t “feel
true.” I don’t know precisely what polygraph she’s plugged into in my body, but
when I do rephrase to something less “proper,” I do feel the difference.
She can feel very acutely when, this week, I began to
talk about my disappointment around work. And I began to say that it feels like
I’m just giving my dad more evidence that I’m the fuck-up daughter. He’s the
Dudley Do-Right (his words), beyond reproach and reproaching everyone else – can
you feel my anger, too? – and that I don’t have a firm career track, a
“successful” life, feels like more evidence for him that I’m the fuck-up. She
asked if I felt that way about the career stuff. And I said, no, I simply feel
like a failure. Which I interpret through all the lovely filters of his I’ve
internalized as a fuck-up. Which I suppose is the same thing, come to think of it.
You’ve heard this before from me. The antipathy toward getting
better, or simply seeing myself as
better because it would change the entire nature of my relationship with him.
There wouldn’t be a relationship
– certainly not the one we’ve had, at least. And so for now, in fact since
cancer, there is no relationship.
Yell at your sick daughter while she’s getting chemo, and you stop getting the
right to shame me. Sorry, Pops. I’m sitting on the bench right now.
But I haven’t walked out of the park, have I? I still want
revenge. I still want to pain him. I still want him to see the error of his
ways then and now, and be the father I
want that I’ve never had. I still have that hope. And so my anger kicks in when
I recall him to others. My frustration. My deep deep disappointment.
But only for a flash. As soon as I let myself have a moment
of anger, even now, I have this impulse to say, Well, focus on yourself, Molly, and
what you can change, and your expectations; you’re living your life
away from him, and yadda yadda bullshit.
I need to feel angry!
I need to feel betrayed. I need to rail against the fate and circumstance of
it, and I need to let it pass.
I never let it pass. Pass through me. Through my red, pumping
oxygenated blood.
She asked me as I lay (clothed!) on the massage table, Can
you feel that? Can you feel when you got angry how much energy there was? Your
voice got loud, your body got hot.
And then it was gone. And then my shoulders tense, my gut
constricts. I’m not allowed to be angry. I’m not supposed to be.
I don’t want to let it flow through me. I’m terrified of
being consumed by it like they were.
But, I have had the experience a few years ago around grief.
I was terrified that if I began to let it out, it would drown me. If I started
to cry, to feel it, it would overwhelm me, and I would be lost in it. In the
psych ward in it. So, I held it back. (I do still.) But during that time, maybe
5 or so years ago, in the presence and care of another therapist, I let myself
feel some of what I needed to. I let it pass through me, out of me, I let it
disorient me.
But it didn’t dismantle me. I wasn’t wrecked by it. I felt it. It
was hard and sad and wracking, but it wasn’t annihilating.
I will try to remember that as I go forward here, because it
feels really old and really sad to hold my body in fight/flight/freeze all the
time, and to interpret my life and myself as anything other than brilliant. 

abundance · change · clarity · deprivation · despair · family · finances · hope · recovery

Cleaning House.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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There’s a phrase in Al-Anon: Let it begin with me.
I’m in the process (or supposed to be) of looking back
through my life and writing down where underearning/underbeing/debting has
affected my life, and eventually caused it to be unmanageable.
I’ve often and easily thought about my dad’s parents and his
half-brother when I think about the history of this “disease” in my family.
It’s easy to do. They are the ones who hoarded, let the dog go to
the bathroom in the house, and despite brains that cognitively thought at high
levels, lived like people who were under a crushing weight of despair, which
looked on the outside like the crushing weight of filth.
These folks, my kin, would have been the people who Hoarders would have descended upon, who would have reluctantly
and silently allowed their belongings to be sorted, sifted, and discarded. And
after the cameras left, would have as quickly as possible returned their home
to the state of dishevelment and insurmountable disarray. The familiar state of
it. The state in which they felt most comfortable, even if not comfortable at
all.
After my parents’ divorce when I was 20, my dad let our
childhood home fall into much the same state, with the dead bugs on the hood of
the oven, the flies belly-up on the window sill, and the tree that shaded our
home, that stood sentry in our front yard, so long-neglected it had to
come down. And though it’s easy to see these patterns of neglect, hopelessness,
resignation, and simple denial in that side of the family, through my inventory work, I’m also getting to see a different strain of ideas around money,
belongings, worthiness crops up from my mom, too.
I spent some time with my brother last year in his apartment
he rented alone. The same silt of neglect, of using half-broken items, of
allowing the home you live in to be in a state of disrepair lay over his home,
too. But, from the same familial miasma, his attitude toward money became very different than mine.
At some point, I brought up money and my not knowing how to manage it, to save it, to “make
it work for me” (whatever that means!), and he admitted, surprising me, that he
is a miser with it. He hoards and saves his money, and is virulently opposed to being indebted to anyone.
He hoards money. I hemorrhage it.
In the end, though, the result for us both is the same (and
I recognize that my assessment and diagnosis is unfair to him, simply in that I
am not him, so please forgive my
hubris). But the result is that neither of us have money to spend on fun
things, nice things, things that make our lives fun and easy and worth living.
If he’s loathe to spend anything, even if he has it, then life becomes smaller
than it needs to be. If I simply spend whatever I make without thought to
long-term or significant goals, my bank balance becomes zero, and my life shrinks
with it.
I may not do my dishes as regularly as I should (though I am better now!), and my
fridge may house food that is unidentifiable with mold, but my home is
neat, clean, organized. It feels light, despite its size, and I endeavor to make it so. But there’s an article I read recently on home
decoration that said, “Do it: Clean, organize, make pretty, and then GET OUT.” Get out and into and on with your life. There’s more to life than decoration.
So, as I tally my numbers each month, calculate my income & expenditures, as I put money into a savings account and a vacation account, I
have to remember it’s not just so that I can have a neat and orderly
spreadsheet. That, in fact, even if there were a million dollars in my account,
I’d have to remember, like my brother, that it’s there for me to enjoy thoughtfully. That
it’s there for me to live, to support a life worth living. I have to remember that I do all this work so that I
can go out in the world as my family was unable to do.
I let it begin with me. 

anger · detachment · faith · fallibility · family · forgiveness · humaness · serenity · spirituality

The Father-Daughter Dance

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

My friend found out yesterday that her father is dying in
Switzerland, and she and another friend happened to be at my house yesterday
morning when she got the call. It felt like divine timing that she “happened”
to be at my house, instead of alone in her apartment, when she received this
call, and then had to argue with her phone company to get international calling
added to her account so that she could call the ER where her dad was admitted.
We were able to sit there with her, just to sit in my kitchen
while she paced my living room, on the phone. Able to make her tea and just
set it there, whether she wanted to drink it or could or not. Able to bear
witness to her tears, and her fear and her love and her fraughtness about
timing and money and taxes and passports and citizenship.
We were able to help her talk through her very next steps,
just the ones she needed to do that day in order to prepare to get on a flight
tonight.
It was a gift to be able to be present with that.
These past two days, I’ve pulled the “Emperor” card.
Shuffled them thoroughly, cut the deck, and again, this morning, I pulled the
Emperor card.
I squick at this card. I don’t like it. In my book, it lists
the traits of this card: Fathering, Structure, Authority, Regulation.
Um, you all know my dad was in the military, yes?
My friend yesterday, between phone calls, told us how much
she loved and admired her father; what a kind man he was, how great a man he
was. It was obvious that she had great esteem for him.
I, do not have the same feelings toward my own. And
strangely, I got an email from him just a few days ago.
We haven’t spoken in months. Not since his brother died
unexpectedly over Christmas.
But, I had been thinking about him, and that it was probably
time for me to send an, “I’m not dead” email, just a check-in, just to touch
base. And then, there was his email.
So, I replied. Reported the generic updates I would tell a
casual acquaintance about my life. And it’ll probably be another several months
until we speak again.
I’m still livid, folks. I’m still angered and betrayed and
astonished at how he behaved when I had cancer, when I was going through chemo.
How he demanded phone calls on his time table, instead of mine, when I was the
one in a hospital bed with chemo dripping into a port in my chest. How he simply told me, when I
asked for this to change, that, “This is how it works.” How, even though he was
newly retired and was working in
the yard of his fiancé, he somehow didn’t
have any other time in the day to call his daughter in the hospital.
And mostly, it’s just sad. It just still saddens me that
this man has no idea how to show up for people. That if it isn’t something that
is structured, regulated, and orderly,
he doesn’t know how to address it, and therefore, he simply tries to quash it.
And, unfortunately, people, I’ve grown up too much to be quashed by him
anymore.
I’ve done a ton of work around him, asking for compassion
and forgiveness. In fact, just these few weeks, I’ve been using a new
affirmation: I forgive my dad fully and easily.
Strange to realize now, after the new email, the
Emperor card, my friend’s ailing father, that this might be part of that process. This doesn’t seem like coincidental
timing to me.
I know that I have more work to do. I know that I feel very
unwilling to forgive him, even at the same time that I have compassion and
understanding for someone who never, ever had kindness modeled for him. Someone
who didn’t have his own father, and only a step-father who demanded perfection and doled out derision.
I know “how” to have compassion for him. And sometimes, many times, I have it.
But, forgiveness is another thing.
And I know that my unwillingness to forgive, to continue to
drink the poison I intend for him, is only holding me back, and is only
creating blackness in the light I want to move toward. I know that my
unwillingness to forgive yokes me to him as surely as shackles, or, perhaps, as
surely as love. 
I also know that it is only in the past few weeks that I’ve
begun seeing this new therapist, and last week, just the mention of my
father, almost in passing, came up. She remarked later that it was clear there
was some work to be done there. Which, obviously, I know, and hope for us to do together.
The last thing, and the only thing that’s keeping me from
burning that Emperor card is the end of the description in my book. It says
this card can also stand in for the archetypal father “in his role as guide,
protector, and provider.”
Surely, mine was not able to be this in a way that was
supportive. But these are the exact qualities that I’ve been seeking and hoping
the “Universe” embodies. That I’ve been praying for, and trying to trust the
Universe to have. That it supports me with guidance, protection, and
provisions.
Individual, versus Archetype. Reality versus Fantasy.
Compassion versus forgiveness.
I really hate that card. 

authenticity · balance · community · connection · family · happiness · joy · laughter · love

Yo’ Mama.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Apologies, reader, for the rain delay (lack of blog)
yesterday. It was this wonderful Spring rain in the morning, and instead of
sitting at my stoic kitchen table, and peering out the window while writing
morning pages, meditating, and composing a blog, I took my mug of
coffee into my studio’s bedroom/living room, tucked myself into the corner of my couch
against the window, and sat next to my cat on the arm of the couch watching the rain make everything greener.
It was warm and cozy, and I just couldn’t bring myself to
break the calm of the spell. The sound of the rain, the steam from the mug,
watching my cat’s chest expand and contract with each breath. Oh, calm! How I
miss you! Oh, rest, you ineffable minx!
I let my thoughts roam over the landscape, and thought how I
missed my mom, when she was here last, and sat on this very couch with this
very cat. And so, I called her. – Strange and funny thing to do, eh? Think of
someone, and actually call them? Not
text or poke or email – but make a phone call – God, it’s luxury and connection
incarnate.
I knew she’d just returned from her annual trip with her
beau to some Caribbean island (Back, Envy, BACK!), and even with only a half hour (barely enough
time for us to scratch the surface of a conversation), I called to find out how
it went.
I love talking to her. Sure, there are times when it’s
grating, and I have to remind myself she’s human with flaws and working on
them. But, on the whole, especially these past several years, talking with her
is more refueling than it is draining – which is a gift.
She’s just hilarious. Our conversations meander, and
side-track, and disambiguate, and non-sequiter, yet always find their way back,
like six degrees of separation. It’s these things that I know I’ll miss most
when she’s gone. And why I’m trying to get what I can now, to call, and make
plans to visit, and email when I can.
Call it morbid, call it realistic. I just want to store it
all. Engage in it all.
Coincidentally, one of the anecdotes from her trip was about
interacting with the armed guard at the airport, the process of going through
customs and homeland security, and the stark seriousness of it all. And, so, as
she is wont to do, she planted a funny sentence into the bleak and rote
exchange with the check-point guard.
He cracked a smile and then cracked wise. Suddenly, it was
an exchange between people instead of
objects.
I told her how synchronistic it was that just this very week
I wrote a blog about learning from her to talk with strangers, to make our interactions
with one another just that much more engaged and alive.
I shared with her my own story about being in Port Authority
around the Bush Iraq invasion, and bantering briefly with a guard walking
through the orange-tiled halls about exchanging his gun for some flowers.
I love that she does this, and that I do it, as I wrote the
other day. It’s part of what makes this life worth living and engaging in, part
of the surprise of being alive. When you engage, you don’t know what will
happen, you’re rolling the ball onto the Roulette wheel. Maybe the person won’t
want to play, maybe they’ll look at you with a “look, I just want to clock out,
please stop talking to me” impatience. But, perhaps, both of your days will be
lightened just that little bit. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only time you talk to
someone all day, as can happen in our disconnected world of modern
conveniences.
I asked my “intuitive” once what she thought about my moving
back to New York-ish to be closer to her, since sometimes it really is painful
to live so far away, to not get to pick up the phone and say, hey that movie’s
playing on 72nd tonight, wanna go? Or, I just saw this exhibit is opening at
the FIT Fashion Museum, meet up this week? Or, can you come with me to Sephora,
I need to find a new blush?
Honestly, it pains my heart to not get to do that with her.
But, my intuitive, whenever this was, a year or so ago, had
a pretty logical answer: If you go, you’ll be her caretaker, and that will not
be good for you.
It’s true. There’s a fine line from being involved to
being too involved, and there’s a
pattern of being her caretaker that I don’t want to repeat from my childhood.
And it’s a role I know I can easily fall into, without strong enough
boundaries: Love as Caretaking, instead of Love as Equanimity.
The jury has been out indefinitely on my move back to the
East coast. It doesn’t have to be New
York. It doesn’t have to look
like moving into caretaking distance. It can look like, “I’m coming down or up
for the weekend, let’s do stuff,” which is easier than “I’m taking a
cross-country flight.”
Luckily, I am not in charge of my destination, I’m only in
charge of doing the work. Perhaps my boundaries become stronger, perhaps I am
better able to stay out of the grooved rut of caretaker. And perhaps they
don’t, and I allow myself to say, That’s okay, Mol.
But, on a rainy Saturday morning, I can still give her a
call, and we can laugh, meander, and enhance one of the cherished relationships I will ever have.

adulthood · adventure · anger · courage · family · fear · healing · health · hope · love · perseverance · relationships

Nature vs. Nurture.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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Being raised by a psychoanalyst, I grew up believing pretty
strongly in Nurture vs. Nature. I believed adamantly in Tabula Rasa, and that
every aspect of my personality was developed in reaction to my environment.
Eventually, even through a Psychology Major (that switched
to Minor), I began to admit that perhaps there were a few inborn traits that one
has out of the womb, but the majority of a human’s personality was forged out
of their experiences before the age of 3.
But, I have to admit that the aggregate of my own lifetime
experiences, up to and including a Leukemia diagnosis, has begun to make me
admit that perhaps there is something more to the Gattaca within us. Perhaps
something like perseverance, courage, and visceral insistence on life has more
to do with my wiring as “human” and as “Molly,” in particular.
I would never peg myself as someone brave or bold. I don’t
charge into the fray, or head corporations, or tie myself to a tree before a bulldozer. I have few
of the outward markings I would associate with leader or change-maker.
But I am compelled to admit that my undertakings as an adult
do, in sum, mark me as someone willing to rage, to rail, to fight, to excavate all in the
service of healing.
Though perhaps if my formative years hadn’t been what they
were, I wouldn’t find the need to heal from much. Perhaps.
I had a therapist a few years ago who said something novel
to me: Your dad is not a courageous man. This struck me as apocryphal. My father, the one so quick to temper and anger and
rule of iron fist was not brave? Isn’t that what violence is—bravery? Isn’t
that what power is—anger?
Yet, her words rang so unbelievably true. Like seeing the Wizard behind
the curtain in Oz. I know now that that kind of anger does usually hide and
house one who is critically afraid. I mean, I usually wear my black leather
jacket when I’m feeling more insecure, as if its made of chainmail instead of
leather.
But, I was on the phone with a friend yesterday, answering
her question about why I was in Victoria’s Secret the other day. I told her
about my upcoming trip to meet my consummate penpal—and she squealed. She
thought it was so bold and brave, and adventurous, and ALIVE. She rattled on
that this experience is going to help so many other people down the line, help
women to see that life is meant to be
lived.
It sounded so epic when she mirrored it back like that! And
maybe it is. And maybe it’s not.
But, I do know that with every meditation, every alternative
healer, every inventory, every striving, every goddamn picking myself up, that
I am taking something back. That I am reclaiming something. And if that impulse
to charge onward, in light of all that is, is called courage, then I guess the
Wizard granted me a heart on the day that I was born. 

direction · family · performance · perseverance · theater

Postcards from the Edge (of a Bookshelf)

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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Two nights ago I picked up a book that’s been on my shelf
since July of last year. I brought it back with me from New Jersey, where I’d
stayed with my brother and attended a good friend’s wedding. My brother was
getting set to move from his (omg LUXURY) apartment (by SF standards) to
Baltimore to live with his long-time girlfriend. (Seriously — a huge one-bedroom for $950. Come ON!, she drooled.)
He was getting rid of nearly everything. And my brother is a
keeper of books.
I didn’t know this about him. We haven’t lived in the same
place since I was … 23 and he was 20, still living in our childhood home. So, for about
ten years I haven’t been able to witness him living on his own, developing his
own habits and patterns, becoming a real self-sufficient adult who buys his own
eggs and toilet paper, and who apparently keeps books.
I am not a keeper of books. I am a library whore. I love
them, escaped to the one in our neighborhood growing up, and mostly, I like to
live light. But, as I’ve settled into my own adult-ness, and one place-ness,
and probably not moving anytime soon-ness, I’ve begun to slowly add to these shelves.
And when Ben was about to throw out (or dear god, I hope
donate!) almost all his books, I scoured his shelves for anything that wouldn’t
weigh down my carry-on bag too much. I took a few “classic” novels,
returned my copy of Catch-22 to myself,
a few books on physics, and two on acting.
One is by Mamet, and is a little too mean for me (not as in
base, but as in incompassionate and didactic). The other is called Auditioning by Joanna Merlin.
My brother had the great experience and success of doing the
plays in high school and in college, and I even flew back once for his star
performance in undergrad (the play of which I cannot recall), to attempt to
make up for the years when I’d been absent from his life. He was a fun actor,
an able one, and I still hope/wish that he takes it up again one day.
Confidentially, (if this place can be called that), acting
was one place for him that his stutter completely disappears, and he is the
confident man I know him to be.
The Auditioning book
hadn’t a crease in its spine. Brand new. And Ben gladly passed it on to me.
I began reading it again because in class at Berkeley Rep on
Monday, I opened the notebook I’d brought, which I use for theater stuff, apparently.
In the notebook were some handwritten notes and quotes from Merlin’s book. I
must have written them down when I was reading the book last summer, and then
promptly put it back on the shelf.
The quotes were revelations, the extending of a hand down
into the dark world of trying and hoping and trying some more in the
course-less world of theater. I took the book back off the shelf the other
night, and haven’t been able to put it down since.
There’s practical information about what happens at an audition,
compassionate anecdotes about sitting in the waiting room for one, and tips and
exercises for how to explore a scene or monologue. It’s a great book. I’m
devouring it. And I know I’m at a place where it’s relevant now, where it
wasn’t when I began it a year ago.
I have a frame of reference now; I have a better
understanding of the challenges I’m putting in front of myself, and the ones
that are inherent to the process.
If my best friend hadn’t gotten married, if I hadn’t had the funds to go, if I hadn’t stayed
with my brother, if he hadn’t been discharging all his books, if I hadn’t taken
this class at Berkeley Rep, if I hadn’t picked up this very notebook, I
wouldn’t have gotten this gift.
This tome is a welcome hug and nudge on a path I’ve never
walked before – but someone else has. 

addiction · detachment · faith · family · fear · love

On Witnessing the Inevitability of Life

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

My mom and I spoke yesterday for the first time in a while. As in, really talked, not a quick check-in, how are you, okay, gotta go. She and I can speak for hours, on subjects ranging from all manner of depth to superficiality. 
Yesterday, she wanted to ask me my advice about a situation she and her long-time boyfriend (for lack of a better term for a live-in adult partner) were facing. His son, my age, was having consequences (severed tendons) that seemed to refer to alcohol (after an altercation with a guy at a bar).
This apparently wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and despite the stories he told about it (he slipped and fell on the sidewalk after the altercation), my mom and her boyfriend were concerned that this pattern of incidents pointed toward alcoholism.
So, she called me to find out what they should do.
I gave the best advice I know for the families and loved ones of someone in an addiction: Get the help for yourself that you wish the person had. I suggested Al-Anon, or CoDA (Co-Dependents Anonymous), which are geared toward the families of folks facing addiction.
Because, I told her simply: There is nothing you can do.
Apparently, the son had texted to cancel a brunch with his dad yesterday morning, claiming he’d not been able to sleep well, and would be a zombie. His dad texted back, Okay, but we need to talk.
I suggested to my mom that her boyfriend change his tactics. If the son is really in the grips of a disease and an addiction, then he needs to know he has allies. And, really, what would another conversation do about it, as they’d brought up A.A. already and talked about their concern? Play the tape: What do you hope to accomplish from a talk with him that hadn’t already been said? So, the son will say (again), you’re right, I’m sorry, I’ll do better, different. The dad will sit back in his chair with relief and triumph. – And then the son will do whatever he was going to do anyway.
I told my mom some things that sound harsh and even crass when speaking about a loved one in a hard place: That ultimately, the intention of a conversation like that is to get the result that the son’s dad wants, that my mom wants: relief and reassurance that the son be happy, be healthy. And if he is happy and healthy, then they two can be as well. Ultimately, these desires are selfish: I want to feel better; I want to feel relief. (And I know that’s a hard thing to hear when speaking about a parent’s love for a son.)
Furthermore, though, their desires for his changed behavior proclaim that they know the best course for the son. And they don’t. We spoke about “not robbing someone of their bottom;” that getting sober isn’t the way for everyone; and that the person very very much needs to come to the conclusion themselves that they need or want help.
You cannot tell someone to get sober. They have to want it themselves, or it won’t stick; and if you demand it from them, they’ll feel pit against you and your expectations, instead of aligned with you against the terrifying proposition of giving up the one thing in the world they know how to do.
To let go of the results of someone else’s addiction is a grave assignment; that’s why there are support programs for the people who are in that circumstance. It isn’t easy for the people on either side of the bottle.
I told her too, that the thing she does have control over is how she chooses to engage the situation. I talked about Loving Detachment, which I haven’t mastered at all, but have less antipathy toward. I told her she could “pray” for him, in whatever way that meant for her (the agnostic Jew), even if that meant sending thoughts of hippie rainbows toward him. I suggested using the phrase, “I pray that he gets the same peace love and happiness that I want for myself.”
Because it may not be this kid’s path to get sober, to stop drinking, to stop getting in bar fights. It may not be his path to live past 35, is the ultimate truth of it. And that’s where the enormous task of Loving Detachment becomes so painful. And, that’s where help for the loved one’s comes in handy. There are people who have been where they are, and some of them are not there anymore.
The thing about 12 step support, I told her, is that you hear others’ “experience, strength, and hope;” you hear them telling the same stories, not from 3rd person hearsay, or generalization: you hear your own story coming from someone else’s mouth, your own feelings being mirrored back at you, and you realize you are not alone in your struggle. That these folks were where you are, and they aren’t (hopefully) there any more. How did they do it? Stick around and listen. There is hope here.
The last thing I suggested was that the boyfriend amend his text to his son about “needing to talk,” and simply say, “You know what, I’m here when you need me, if you ever want to talk. Otherwise, I’ll just see you on Thursday for the game.” (or whatever.)
It’s not that people in their addiction need to be coddled or allowed to behave inappropriately toward their loved ones. They simply need to be given enough rope to hang themselves. To come to their own desperate conclusions in their own time.
And if you have the strength, or the exhaustion, to let someone you love do that – you all have a better chance to be helped.

* Disclaimer: Opinion and interpretation is only that of the person who gave it, and by no means representative of any other group or entity. 

distance · family · love

"I hate it when you call me, ‘Bro.’"

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

(*a line from face/off we invoke often)
I dreamt this morning that my brother Ben and I were jumping around while singing this really funny camp song in the kitchen where we grew up. It’s this Hebrew
song called “Ochel,” food, that starts
with the word, Hummus, has the word Pizza in there somewhere, v’Steak – “YEE HA!”
I don’t know all the words, but somehow it’s stuck in my
neurons all these years. We learned most of these songs at sleep-away camp in
the Poconos mountains growing up.
Working in a synagogue now, I get to see parents of nursery
school children, Hebrew school-aged children, summer camp children, and I get
to notice something that as a child of course doesn’t strike you: Parenting
costs a lot of money, and our parents
shelled out.
We did all of those things. “Growing up” was a mixed bag, always, but
when it came to our education, our extracurricular activities, paying for
summer camp, they did. Granted, they were both full-time working parents, and
needed us to be somewhere. But, you don’t realize til you’re older that all those things were
value judgments for our parents, and they valued us in that way, the fostering
of our education, our fun, our play.
I was the kid with
the off-brand Troll doll, and got made fun of for it. I was the girl who in 6th grade was told that there was a
bet for what I’d wear the next day, since my outfits were so few. We did shop at the discount mall.
But, I also was the one who played Gin Rummy with my dad,
and my brother played chess with him. I was the girl who used the round white
plastic things they use in pizza boxes as Barbie tables with my best friend
from next door. And I was the girl who got to go away to camp, even though none
of those summers was perfect (teasing, breaking a tooth, waking up with a
spider on my face!).
But my upbringing was American, I guess. With “American values,” and
the striving to provide me and my brother the kind of life that they envisioned
as successful.
And in so many ways, they did.
Besides gratitude for knowing that song and its nonsensical
joy, knowing that flailing around loudly in our kitchen is totally something my bro and I would do, as I woke up this morning, I also felt a little wistful, wondering if Ben
and I would really ever get to do that again. He lives a life on the East
Coast; I see him maybe once a year if we’re lucky. Will we get to sing camp
songs, exchange movie lines, wallow in the hilarity of our non-sequitors?
I remember one day, sitting on the couch with him in the
house where we grew up, we were in our tweens. Somehow we began making up a
non-sequitor story that included the phrase, And then the tree crashed through the
window, scattering the gnomes.
How much fun would that story be to continue?! and it
was.
I know I write about it often, the distance from my family,
and how hard it is for me. And these are the reasons why. It’s not just about
“getting to see one another;” it’s also about
getting to share the one relationship that you are likely to have the longest
in your life, getting to share memories, laughter, and change with one another.
I instant message him sometimes during the day. They’re usually
short conversations, since I’m usually at work. But, I get to float a balloon
of humor and love in his direction and he gets to tell me how he’s adjusting to his move
to Baltimore. We each text one another quotes from Back to the Future or Bill
& Ted’s Excellent Adventure, to remind us both that we have this network,
this shared history and connection.
I’d tell you, “It’s enough,” but it’s not. But, maybe just
like feeling grateful for the way our parents raised us, warts and all, I can
feel grateful that we have the relationship we do. I know neither of these
things are commonplace. 

adulthood · family · forgiveness · grief · love · softness

major malfunction

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Normal
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4087
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5019
11.1287

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The quote from Full Metal Jacket came to me this morning as I was putting away my
(clean) dishes (thank you, Homejoy, for your Facebook coupon!): What is my major
malfunction? Why have I gone so far off the reservation with this dating situation?
What is my primary malfunction? Primary…
That’s when the trap door opened, I fell through my crazy, into the heart of truth. And I began to cry. From realization and long
delayed-grief.
Some of you may know by now that my mother suffered from
manic depression as I was growing up—still does, but went on medication about 8
years ago, around the time I got sober, in fact. She told me a few years back
that she was terrified of loving me fully because she was scared of the depths of her feelings, that they would overwhelm her. She told me that when I was growing up, she would spend
30 minutes locked in her bathroom crying every morning before emerging into the
day. This, I remember. Staring at the closed bathroom door every morning, listening to her
cry, and having no idea why, if she would stop, if she would come out, what I
could do. She said that she just thought this was normal—this was her normal at least, and it was the only way of being
she knew.
The way this manifested in our relationship was that I never
knew when she would turn. When she would be the mom who was there for me, and
when she would click into mania and be unreachable in her heights, or click
into depression and be unreachable in her depths.
This, was not a recipe for trust.
My father, as we all know, was a volatile man, doing nothing
to help the bonds of trust and love cement into something benevolent,
supportive, and foundational.
What I saw this morning is that the ambiguity of
dating targets right into that major malfunction with laser precision.
I don’t blame her, and have long since forgiven her. But
apparently, I still haven’t really healed what it meant to attempt to establish
bonds of love on a fault line. Not knowing what your feelings are about me… I
get as crazy as you’ve seen me this week. Perspective, reality, confidence,
hobbies, work, all get ousted as I try to figure out what it means, because if I can figure out if the
fault line is about to crack, then I can get out of dodge. I can shut down, run
away, shove you away.
That was my previous M.O. for sure. I will shove you away
before you get close, before I have to “figure out” if you’re trustworthy. It
was not worth the pain of waiting to see if I could. Better to bomb the whole
base, just in case there was a sniper in there aimed at me.
So, shove you away. That meant any number of things,
including not dating, only have casual relationships, going after taken men.
My other way of being was to fall quickly into a
relationship, which is how my two long-term (read: 6 months) relationships
began. Express interest, have sex nearly immediately, you’re now in a
relationship.
There wasn’t ambiguity in that.
I didn’t have to figure out (then) if you liked me, if you
were gonna hurt me—we were “boyfriend/girlfriend,” and had
great sex. It only came later (read: by month 4, and certainly by 6) that I had
to question something different: if I
liked you.
So, it is believable, understandable, and more than a little
compassionable that an ambiguous dating situation would set off an atom bomb in
my head. Though, ultimately, it’s stemming from my heart, but more ultimately,
it’s stemming from my head, and the recreation of an old story and an old way
of coping with the uncertainty of human relationships.
I have very little dating experience past the first date. It
has always either gone: “Ciao, buddy, thanks for the latte,” or “Which side of
the bed is yours?”
People I know talk ALL THE TIME about “living the in the grey,” “not figuring things
out,” “relaxing into the experience,” and I want to spit a poisoned dart into
their over-eager eye. Fuck you people. The grey was a place, growing up, that
was riddled with landmines and Blitzkreigs. The grey place was one where you
never knew if you would be okay, ever.
And now, of course, how fitting, I’m being asked to once
again live in the grey—or at least get a rental application—but to live there differently. To live there, visit there, try it out there in the
grey, because that’s where most of life is lived, and I want to live in life.
To be in the grey differently, means to call upon my own foundations of trust
that I have established with myself and with the people I have chosen to love
as friends in my life—Not all of these friendships went the distance, but they
were worth pursuing. And didn’t cause any agida. So, it’s a deeper love and a deeper trust we’re working on.
And it’s probably not even with a person, unless that person
is me. It’s probably about developing, deepening, cementing trust with a
benevolence. And from the foundation of that relationship, will I be able to withstand whatever the Richter scale
throws at me. Especially if it’s reading 0, and telling me it’s safe to stay put.