Category: love

art · authenticity · courage · honesty · love · maturity

Occupy Life

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Don’t worry, this won’t be a political diatribe.
As perhaps you’ve been garnering from some of the recent
writing, I’m becoming more open to be available to my own life. To occupy it,
as it were.
This has happened slowly, and is still a work in progress.
But I remember back to the “Life of an Asparagus” blog, about beginning to
sense that some of the seeds I’ve been sowing over the last few years are
beginning to peek through, and show me their colors and flavors.
I’m excited by this prospect, and still, afraid of it. Will
the asparagus be green enough? Tender enough? Snappy enough? Will I, as I begin
to show you more of who I am, and what I have to offer, be enough?
The un/fortunate truth is that I don’t really have a choice
to pull the emergency brake here, and say, WHOA buddy, let me make sure that
this is all kosher and “molly-approved” before I put it out there to you.
When I’d been contemplating The Cousin (*not my cousin*) a while ago before we ended, I said to a
friend that I felt like I wanted to put him up on a shelf, to pause him and our
romance. I wanted the time to figure myself out, get “well,” get fixed, and
then take him back down and continue the romance, with me as a whole, well
person.
Problem is, life isn’t like that, and people aren’t like
that. I don’t get to put anything on hold – others, myself, the world, school,
my finances, time – so that I can get a better handle on it.
It’s a constant game of changing the tire while the car is
in motion.
Constantly evolving means being willing to give up control;
to give up the demands for the future.
In all of this “lifeness” that’s going on, however, things
are changing, and have changed, and I find myself at a different place than I
had been, having arrived here somewhat circuitously, but somewhere where things
are, where I am, different.
I haven’t had to pause the world for me to get here. I’ve
had to, in fact, jump on board with the fact that this train is leaving and
will continue to leave, and I can ignore the fact it’s moving, or I can enjoy
the view. And more than that, I can let myself be shaped by its movement.
That “letting myself be shaped” has been the hardest part.
Or one of them. To accept that I’m not exactly sure what I’ll look like, who
I’ll be, and if I’ll or you’ll like me on the other side of it. But keeping my
eyes closed to the brilliance that is outside and inside, well, it’s kept me
pretty lonely and forlorn. And in the end, it’s not fair.
Who am I to shut my eyes to what I’ve been given, what
others are offering me? To the love that is being offered me – the help, and
the hope, and the encouragement, and the desire I’m told for more… of me. Who
am I to deny that?
I begin to think about this, and write this today, as I
start to recognize this new path of thought and action. One which, although I
may not be taking all of the action steps that are suggested, I’m becoming open
to taking them 😉 I see their merit – I see that these actions are helping me
to fill out my life, like an underinflated balloon that could be buoyant and
loved, if it only let itself get full.
Perhaps that analogy fell flat. But, I think I’m
understanding what it means! It means that I’m changing. It means that I’m
becoming more available to my life, and to my gifts, and to others. It means
that I’m beginning to choose community and vulnerability as opposed to
contraction and “safety.”
I’ve had to tell a
few more people a little more about what I’m doing, and what I like to do,
because those were the indicated responses. (I write, I sing, I act, I paint.)
Every time I tell someone one of these things, there is the reactionary twinge
of fear and the cavernous echoing “NO!!!” … but, I do it anyway, now. And every
time I do, I’m staking one more claim to my own life, and allowing it to open
up to me as I open up to it.

inspiration · joy · love · writing

And so, she falls.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I am in LOVE. This is no mere crush.
The feeling that the very molecules of your DNA have
rearranged themselves, and that the world has possibilities where there were
only plain corners. That by standing on the back of this wave of pure
inspiration, I too can achieve great things and greet the world with an
untrained eye, a new eye, an unfettered, welcoming, curious, open eye.
Yes. I am in love. With Jeanette Winterson and her
writing.
She was only just introduced to me by a friend who happened
to be reading Jeanette’s latest memoir. My friend said she had a quote about
poetry to send me, I said great, not really thinking much of it. And then I
read my email.
The quote was like walking into the room and locking eyes
with the person you will later have a torrid, fiery affair with. I was lit by
it. And so I followed it, her trail, to her website. And began to read the
excerpt from the book, the first chapter. I was mesmerized.
Like listening to someone on a first date describe what they
do and are interested in, but you actually care. You’re actually hanging onto every word as if it were laden with the
truth of the Universe and a single dropped syllable will leave you dangling off the cliff of sanity.
I read the chapter like my life depended on it – like the
meaning of my life depended on it. And I followed her to Amazon. And to the public
library.
And yesterday, I captured her. I caught up with her in the
school library, in the stacks, far in the back, while students ticked away on
papers and palms jutted into their weary faces.
There she was, nestled among others I had no eyes for at
all. Glittering gold and the miasma of the universe could have split open
around me, and I’d see nothing but Jeanette. I grabbed her. I went to the
other section where she was, and I stock piled her. I pulled her out and on top
of me. I melted under her weight and was levitated by it.
I radiated purpose and joy. The sense of purpose only pure
love can bring. The moment of Ah Hah, the moment of clarity. The moment of
infinite future, and complete finite utterly lostness of the present. Just
here. In the musky scent of pages and binding. I gathered her up.
I absconded with her, like a Sabine woman, this taut,
witty, tawdry, brutal, reluctantly tender woman. I ran with her out into the fading
light of dusk, and I opened her up to me.
I ployed with her skin, brain cells fainted in her wake
overcome by the fullness of witnessing her. And by witnessing her, I
witnessed myself. I witnessed the magnitude of the human experience. I watched her
dissect the grand Truths of the World into aching wisps of language that got tangled in my hair and singed my eyelashes.
I ingested her the way only lovers can do, wholly, boundlessly, allowed her to come inside and rearrange my organs to her pleasure.
To kick my heart out of my lung and into my throat, to choke on her
brilliance. I lay submissive to her steer-branding of every blood cell, let myself be mottled by her, cleaved apart by her, and culled back together with the
mortar of her.
Yes, I am in love. And I am different for it. 
family · love · maturity · recovery · self-care

Family Planning.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

(oh, who doesn’t love a little tongue in cheek!)
I spoke with my mom yesterday. It’s a new record. Twice in
6… well, more like 9 months. It went well. Better than with my dad at least,
but I know part is that she was simply excited to talk on the phone with me and so was on “good behavior.”
I’ve had to watch my balance between “maintaining boundaries” and silent
scorn/punishment. Because I can tend to tip the scales toward the latter, still
making my parents make up to me things they don’t know need to be made up, and
punishing them for things they do naturally, as if punishing someone for
breathing.
But, it’s becoming, and had become, time to step back into
our relationship, and hope that this is a dance floor not a boxing ring. I’ve
needed to time to cool off, to solidify my ability to say things like “That’s
not my business” or “I’d rather we didn’t talk about that.” And, as yesterday
at least was proof of, I am becoming better at it.
This isn’t to say there weren’t the few tinges of the same
old, but, they were few, and I wasn’t thrown by them, as I’ve been so easily
thrown into the drama of despair and self pity that my family is nuts, always
has been nuts, and ever thus shall be, amen. Including myself.
There’s been a lot of need for differentiation work. My life
being mine, and not a carbon copy of hers, or dictated by the mandates of my
father. Coming to believe that the life I’m living is actually my own …
well, it’s been harder than … it is for some people.
It’s something I’ve been repeatedly told over the last few
years. Don’t you understand that you are
the one doing the living? Don’t I understand that these are my decisions to make?
It’s been hard to take that ownership. To believe that I actually am the captain of the ship, or the one
doing the breathing of this body. When much of early life is focused on the
needs of others and falling in line with those desires, the questions as, “What
do I want?” take on magnum
proportions.
Although the aim of school was to accomplish a number of
goals, one of them was to really do what I
wanted. This decision, let me tell you, was NOT supported in some corners of my
nuclear family, and they were very
vocal about that. About telling me that I was making a wrong decision, that I
was making a mistake. That I couldn’t have what I wanted. And that I was stupid
to think something I did want was a viable option. … Only the first two were
actually stated – the others were interpreted by me, and my fear brain which
loves to tell me much the same thing.
I will here state, however, my mom has always been in my
corner around school. She hasn’t always understood what I’m doing creatively, she
hadn’t always supported it (or been aware of it, is more accurate), but she is now. And she has for a few years.
And part of my untangling my knot of self-sabotage is to
begin to see the support in my life around my creativity – and although it’s a
“nice to have,” not a “need to have” that she supports me, … well, it’s
*really* nice to have.
She’d contacted me earlier this week, perhaps the day after
I had my activating conversation with my dad, to ask about coordinating for the
graduation – my graduation. And, so, I told her I’d call her. And I did. And we
talked, and when it was getting a little maudlin, I kept it light and aimed
toward getting off the phone. And when she mentioned her retarded work schedule
(by which I mean 12 hours straight with no breaks, so that she sits with
clients while eating a Clif bar as lunch… <– no judgment there, eh?) I didn’t tell
her what I thought. I didn’t make suggestions. I didn’t, in fact, tell her she
was doing it wrong.
The thing which I so despise being told.
There were a few other minor things like that, where I
wanted to say, WOMAN you are marvelous and talented and beautiful and
intelligent and hilarious and creative and brilliant – OF COURSE you can find
something nice to wear for the graduation day. Of course you deserve to treat
yourself better than your work schedule. Of course … Well, Of course I love you.
Which I suppose is what it boils down to for all of us. All
of us, in this nuclear family, and all of us, us.
So, yes, it is nice to be having my mom coming out to visit.
To celebrate. She agreed she and my father (and his fiancé) will be cordial,
and that’s all they need to do.
I’m looking forward to putting that phone call in my
experience bank, diminishing the deficit of my negative thinking around both of
our “brokenness,” and letting myself live my own life, as I begin (continue) to let go of hers. 
action · balance · fortitude · love · recovery

Talking Alarm Clock Meditation

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

When I sit for meditation, if I’m timing it, I set my alarm
clock to the setting where it plays back a recording. I can record whatever I
want, 8 seconds long.
I bought this little clock before I set off to teach English
in South Korea in 2004, and had my mom record herself telling me to wake up,
so that I could hear her voice on the opposite side of the earth.
At some point the recording got recorded over, I
accidentally pushed the recording button, and it got erased, so I’ve gotten the
chance to have it say whatever I want it to.
For the past few years, I’ve recorded and rerecorded myself
saying “Thank you,” so at the end of my meditation time, instead of an alarming
beeping as it’s set to wake me up, I hear a soft voice repeat that phrase till
I hit the stop button.
Today, I accidentally erased that recording, and went to say
“Thank you” again into the little microphone in the back, but instead, I
recorded myself giggling. 😉 And I played it back, and it giggled, and I
giggled back at it, cuz it’s so silly but infectious, and at the end of my
meditation time this morning, it giggled at me. And as I reached to shut it
off, I giggled too. It’s very silly.
And yet, I’ve been hearing and reading more about the power
of laughter and smiling. A friend of mine’s been participating in a heart-smile
meditation with a friend at school. She said basically, they just sit around
for an hour … smiling. She said it feels weird, but sort of funny and cool, and
that the facilitator/friend of ours said that you have to actually smile with
your face, you can’t just smile inside.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this. In fact, I
think I probably read it first in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love during her sojourn to Indonesia and to the Balinese
medicine man, who told her to smile “even in her liver.”
And in another book I’m reading, they talk about the healing
power of laughter. About the frequency that gets emitted when we laugh, about
how it can heal us, about how we can change our current thoughts, simply by
laughing.
I haven’t done the meditation, although I’m curious, and
probably will sit in with those girls sometime soon. But, something this
morning – well, I just didn’t want to record the staid “Thank you” again. I
wanted something lighter. Laughier.
I think this whole “power of positive thinking” thing has
its merit. And I’m also getting to notice the needed balance between magical thinking
or “visioning” or collaging with the very earth-oriented action steps that I’m
having to take. I believe there’s a dovetailing of these two actions. Visioning
and taking action.
If I don’t use my imagination to concretize or even
vague-itize what it is I want in this life, I will be a 50 year old secretary.
If I only spend my time “manifesting,”
creating collages, or being in my magical accidental thinking, then nothing
will actually change.
However, I need the basis of those visions, those dreams,
desires, callings, whatever people are talking about when they say “follow your
bliss,” in order to figure out what the hell my bliss is.
Of course, the second part is the action. And luckily, I’m
at a moment in my life when I’m becoming more open to the baby steps that it
takes. These look small this week. But, they’re not.
I called my credit card companies to close my current
accounts. I called those store credit cards still listed on my credit report
which I haven’t used, or seen, in years (Mandees anyone?). I have one more
“hard” call to make. I have a collection agency on my report, with initials below it that are the same as one of the hospitals I was in when I was 21. I don’t know
if that’s what it’s referring to, or if I still owe money to them or not. But, clarity is better than fear or
vagueness.
Other action items of this week are to let you, and my other
communities, know that I’ll be participating in a reading at school at the end
of this month as a part of an open mic/party night. I told this to someone on
Sunday, and she insisted that an action I take this week is to LET PEOPLE KNOW.
To continue out of my hiding and isolation, and to let people know.
In that vein, I’m to work on a chapbook for the reading.
Basically, a small collection of my poems, so that I might be able to sell them
there. It’ll be about the same time my thesis final draft is due, and I should have a good
portion of work at that point.
Putting my work out there; putting myself out there; closing
up these holes of old accounts and fears. These are what enable me to move a
mountain one spoonful at a time. And if a giggling alarm clock helps me get
there, so be it. 

community · fortitude · gratitude · grief · love

Be Lightning.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

It will be impossible to write today without acknowledging
yesterday. Puffy eyed and dehydrated, as if I drank all the salt water
that I poured out yesterday.
A bottle of root beer was spilled ceremony-like into a glass
of vanilla ice cream. Like when someone spills a person’s favorite drink onto
their grave in memoriam.
Someone chuckled at the number of women he’d slept with who
came to the funeral. That that said something, that they all showed up.
A woman he worked with told about the practical jokes he’d
done at work, like rearranging her cubicle when she was gone for lunch, so that
when she came in, it was all walled in and backwards, and she couldn’t get into
it.
What I thought of him was that he
was like the initial spark of a lightning bolt. That all of the ions became
electrified just by being in his
vicinity, just by being adjacent to him. That suddenly the whole place, the
whole sky was lit up. He had that effect.
I am not among the women he slept
with. I was not friends with him in a familiar, close way. But I was in his
vicinity, often, and I too had been lit up by him. Heartened by his just being
there, even if he was sulky and sarcastic, as he was more and more. It just
felt good to know him. Just to know he was here.
There were more than 200 people
there yesterday, with standing room only, and all the doors to the small chapel
opened wide for people to crowd in together. I shook with repressed sobs. His
mother was in a mildly hysterical, altered state that you associate with
someone with dementia – oh, isn’t this nice, what’s your name. …
In Judaism, parents who have lost
a child get a free pass to heaven, no questions asked. In Judaism, we also
don’t do open caskets. So this was the first time I’d been near a … one.
Awkward in his My Girl made-up face. The slight raised angle of his
eyebrows toward the middle that always made him look like he was eager, or
worried.
I’d written a blog a while back
about death, and how it occurred to me that what was left was love, and
children’s laughter. There was a child there yesterday, his nephew, playing
outside the opened doors where people were crowding in. And love is not even
the right word for what was felt in that chapel yesterday. It’s not even close
to big enough.
With no other course, I am
inspired to honor this life, his life, by attempting to be a fraction of the electric ion that he was. To quit my solitude and hiding. To love as
much as I can, as I know I’m here to do. And lastly, with no other course, to accept that this had to be done. That this was necessary. That he needed to go home. That he needed to go back. 
For all of the lives you brightened. For the one thing that held you back from “getting it.” For addiction’s baffling ability to cut us down. And for your legacy that poured from every eye in that chapel.  May you be at peace. 

home · laughter · letting go · love

February 29th

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

My parents married on February 29th of 1976. This
day of the year comes only once every 4 years, and true to their oddball senses
of humor, they thought it would be funny to marry on the leap year day.
It’s been on my mind, as I know that Feb 29th
is coming around again this year in a few days, and … sort of cosmically, my
childhood home, their home while they were married, goes on the market this weekend.
You know, I’m sure my Dad didn’t plan it this way – he’s not
much of a cosmic guy – but, I see it as pretty “full circle” in some ways. A
sad one, but I’m happy for the people who will get to enjoy that home next. It,
for all that it harbored, is a great home.
Most suburban sprawl children grow up feeling like there’s got to be something better than this po-dunk town. Or,
at least, the teenagers think that – we did, I did. But as a kid, actually, it
was pretty great. A number of parks in walking or biking distance. Everyone
rode a bike, and it was around the time they began to institute the “must wear
a helmet” law, and so everyone had some graphic neon print on theirs – or at
least I did. Hey, it was the 80s.
There were supersoakers in the summer, and a fire in our
fireplace in the winter. For all its hardship, this was a wonderful place to
grow up.
Sure, we got antsy, and angsty the older we got. And we
spent many many an afternoon as
mallrats, being dropped off and picked up by our parents via a call from the
nearest payphone. We would posture and stand outside the mall. We would walk it’s
many corridors – we knew it back and forward, and could tell you the fastest
way to get to the food court. We rarely bought anything. If anything, we would
shoplift a bit. Or at least I did. I still owe some financial amends to a Junior’s department!
And then we’d be at someone’s home, their sunken living room with the
enormous box t.v. At a friend’s who had cable and this marvelous thing called
Nickelodeon and MTV.
Back at my home, there was the “secret passage way” to my best
friend’s house next door that my brother never figured out was just a path
through the pachysandra, and would beg to know the secret.
We’d, my best friend and I, block out the sunlight in my
parents room and play “blind man’s bluff” with my brother, which was an awful
game in which we covered him with a blanket, spun him around, and then he had
to find us in the semi-dark. The bed was out-of-bounds, and you couldn’t go on
it to escape him, but we did. And more than once, we spun him around so far
that his first step forward was into the nearest wall. …!
I spent hours in my
room, later as a stoned or drunk person, doing little projects around my room.
Creating a collage around the doorframe. Whittling down this enormous candle
with designs and indentations. There was the time when the sort of cream, sort
of yellow carpet began to swirl into different faces and shapes on one
particular evening.
When my friend and I would spill glue or paint onto the
carpet as little girls, we would use scissors to cut it out, so no one would
know.
The attic was always a scary place filled with junk and
treasures. Cascades of ribbons and wrapping paper – the only reason I ever went
up there — and would see in the periphery furniture, a bird cage, and that pink
insulation stuffing that I once got all over me and the little glass pieces
made me itch, and I had to sit in a bath of calamine lotion.
There were the number of times I puked in that house as a
sick young girl. The times I listened to my brother playing our grandfather’s
piano, and when I was doing homework and asked him to stop, he always had to play those last few notes.
There was my dad trying so hard to help me with my math
homework, but him always being a frustrated teacher, and me becoming a
frustrated student, and fireworks and yelling would ensue.
There was my mom and I using my spelling list in second
grade to create magical stories that used all the words, and I’d get little red ink
stars on all my spelling homework.
There was my first kiss. 🙂 When I was 11, and my mom’s best
friend came over from Switzerland with her family (though she too was from
Brooklyn), and she had a daughter who was 16 (tres glamourous to me at 11),
and a son who was 14. Erik. Tall, Blue Eyes, Blond Hair. Accent. And he told me
I was beautiful. When with my bottle glasses and frizzy hair, I’d
decided already I wasn’t. In the dim evening in my mom’s office, on the worn blue carpet,
after chatting giddily and eagerly, he kissed me.
177 Woodland Ave., River Edge, New Jersey, was my address from 3 – 24 years of age, with it being
my fallback location until this past fall. It was a dream house when they
bought it, and it will be a dreamhouse for its next
inhabitants, and their mall-lurking, supersoaker toting children.

abundance · fear · finances · letting go · love

Two-Way Street

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

The phrase I hear in certain spiritual circles, You have to give it away in order to keep it,
has always bothered me. So, lately, knowing I’m coming up against this as a
block, I’ve been altering it to, I have to share it in order to keep it, just to make myself feel better about it.
I made a few realizations recently about my reluctance to
share. Notably, in each case when I’ve been “down on my luck” financially, and
have gone into what I call “lock-down mode,” I’ve been forced to surrender, and
let go of my pride, or my ideas, and let other people know what’s going on, and let them help me.
It occurs to me that lock-down mode is a closed circuit. It
says, anything that I get, I must hold on to fiercely, because I don’t know if
I will ever get more (this goes for love, and finances, and jobs, and
creativity, and more, I’m sure).
Lock-down mode is also a closed circuit because it is like
battening down the hatches of a ship, bracing for a storm. Don’t move, or you’ll be swept overboard.
In these circumstances when I’ve locked-down, it’s been like
increasing the speed of a flushing toilet, I realize. It’s gotten worse,
not better, faster.
Abundance, community, love, creativity, require an open channel, an open circuit, one which allows energy in, and allows energy out.
I reported on here a little while ago about a meditation
where I noticed that although still reluctant to do so, I allowed energy to
pass through me into those behind me, instead of, as I’d done in a previous
version of this meditation, simply fill others from my own bucket, denying and
absolutely refusing to take in from those sending to me.
Either ends of this constriction is a closed circuit,
depleting, and ultimately self-defeating.
Whether I choose to lock-down, and absorb, reach for, demand
everything I can, and horde it; or, whether I choose to close off the inflow,
and simply – and resolutely – give to you from my own bucket. This, is not a
channel.
When someone had mentioned to me recently that I have to
close these holes in order to be able to hold abundance, that there are places
where I’m letting it seep from me, and will never in fact be able to hold it,
this is a place of that fissure. Seems ironic that in order to have abundance I must begin to stop holding it, but, such is the paradox of spiritual
axioms.
To quote what I’ve heard, There is enough time, there is
enough love, there is enough money. Therefore, if there is enough, then I don’t need to hold on to it.
And, I need to address the other side too, the part of the
inflow. Like in Tuesday night’s class when I’d recognized how little I’d been
letting other people “give” to me.
In the moments when I’ve been broke, looking at the price of
Ramen noodles in the discount grocery store, I’ve let go. I’ve stopped folding
the end of the hose, and let it open, fear or not. And, miraculously, I’ve been
taken care of … abundantly 😉
So, there are two sides of this constriction that I would
like to address. The part that says, I can give to you, but you can’t give to
me. And the part that says, once I’ve got anything at all, I’m holding onto it
for dear life.
The “dear life,” it seems, occurs only, only when I do let go of strangling it. 
acting · friendship · love · persistence · self-care · synchronicity

In All Its Forms

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Yesterday, I got to cross a few more “Serenity Moths” off my
list, including letting my apartment get messy (kitchen, another story); no
fuzzy socks (my clothing allowance this month will now be worn on my very
toasty happy feet); and not using my art and craftyness.
Today is the birthday of the woman who I have known longest
in my life, second only to my family. We met when we were both three-years old
in a story both our mothers love to tell.
Soon after my brother was born, my family moved from Brooklyn to northern New Jersey. Maybe that same or maybe next day, our new door bell rang.
The story goes, that the little blond girl who lived just next-door stood on the door-step, looked up at
my mom, and asked, “Does a little girl live here?” I peeked my head out
from behind my mom’s legs and we have been friends for nearly 30 years. (wow, I’d initially wrote 20!, but no, it’s 30!!)
Like most friendships, it’s seen its fair share of trials,
but through a fair share of miracles, we have found ourselves to be strong friends again,
across the sands of time and Minnesota.
So, yesterday, I made a crafty little gift for her. I took
out my tools I laid down since my Christmas card puttering-out, and infused as
much love as I could into it.
I also put up a handwritten sign in my apartment, just below
the very tall almost 12 foot ceiling: “Love, as much as you can.” And put little
hearts around it. ;P This was the edict, the command, and the hope, from the
workshop I did a month or more ago when we meditated to ourselves as really old people, and asked ourselves what lessons we needed to learn. Today is the final of the 4 in the
series of workshops on relationships. Spiritual Contracts and Inner Archetypes.
On the note of that type of work, I did get an email back
from the Sacred Stream meditation school, and they do have a scholarship, but
it’s itty bitty, and I can’t afford the course right now – particularly after I
pay the security deposit to the Bay Area Modeling Guild, which I found out last
night that I got in to 🙂  But,
that’s alright, I feel like I’ve got enough spiritual shenanigans happening
around and in me at the moment, that I’m not quite sure
now is the right time to blow the top off myself anyway. Sometimes, I just need
to regroup. Ground myself again.
So, doing these sort of “of the earth” type activities has
been nice, cleaning my apartment, making art, finally in-putting my numbers on
what I spent in December. (which, I was probably right to fear! oh holiday
spirit…) 😉
On another note completely, so, I’d been praying for an
acting coach. That was the suggestion I got from my acting friend in SF, and
although I’d been half-heartedly looking, I’d also been dragging my feet
feeling that I didn’t have the money to really afford a coach.
Then, I went to my Thursday afternoon class. Acting
Fundamentals. I had completely forgotten that I’d signed up for this course.
But I had. So, maybe I don’t have an individual acting coach, but I now have an
acting teacher. Included in the price of all that I’m already paying for school.
She’s the casting director for Berkeley Rep, and has been teaching acting
forever, and has acted forever, and although at the moment she seemed a little sharp at the
edges, I think this is just what I’ve been asking for.
After class, she said that it seemed I had more experience
than the other girls, and I said, I’m open to any help she can give, and she
said she tries to challenge and meet people where they’re at. I also found it
rather hilarious that I’m more experienced than anyone in my theater experience, as I feel like such a
novice I can’t even tie my shoes straight!
But, it’s not about comparison. It’s about what I can learn,
and how I can inhabit my body and my emotions more fully. It’s about WAAAAYYY
tuning down the cacophony of my heartbeat in my eardrums when I stand in front
of a panel at an audition. I think the audition is the hardest part – for me at
least. Good thing I have two more over the next two days. 😉
So, here’s to Love, which finds it’s way back to us, over 30
years of friendship, in the form of a needed teacher, and in the self-care
which buys me these awesome fuzzy socks. 
adulthood · family · honesty · love · self-care

Passing.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I found out yesterday that my grandmother died in the middle
of the night before. My dad texted me after I’d gotten out of work to call him,
and I knew, or expected that to be the information he’d give me. It was. And
he’s alright. He’s, well, he’s not an emotional guy, but in the last few months
of his mother’s sharp decline, he’s been pretty roller-coaster about it – which
has been a little ungrounding for me – to see stone cry is a little … weird.
It’s been coming. She’s been in decline for a while, and has
spent the last month or so in a nursing home/hospital. Which has been like a
blessing. As some of you may recall from previous blogs, she and her husband
and other son are sort of (no, not sort of, badly) hoarders, who live in chaos and
desperate filth. So, it was a blessing that she got to spend her last month
having her basic needs of food and cleanliness taken care of. She was losing
her marbles, and sort of didn’t know where she was, but, I was glad for it.
Two things are sticking in my craw about yesterday, though.
I called a few people after I talked to my dad – got several voicemails, and
one lovely friend. And after wandering around the commercial street near where
I live, sort of meandering aimlessly, I called my brother. To find out how he
was, and just to tell him I was thinking about him. He feels similarly, that it
was a blessing, and I told him that I wonder what will happen to the other two
(her husband and son), and Ben said angrily, “I don’t really care.”
When she went into the hospital/nursing home, it was around
the corner from where they lived in Queens. And yet, the reports I heard were
that the other two were not visiting her at all. The reality is that they have been
shut-ins for a long time (getting groceries delivered to the house), and I imagine that having the linch-pin of their family
trio dying in the hospital was more than these fragile, broken people could
handle. I have a shit-load of compassion for them. They are sad, doing the best
they can people. And the best they could do was not to go to visit her.
This pissed my brother off, who seemed completely happy
enough to write them both off. There will not be a service, my dad said, and he
and his fiancé are having a shiva (sort of like a wake, without the body) at
his fiance’s house on Sunday, and he’s invited his and her various social
communities. But, for Ed and Randell, my grandfather and uncle, there’s
nothing. A cremation, I heard.
The reality is that Ed (my dad’s step-father) and Ran (my
dad’s half brother) have been in my life since I was born. We spent Christmases
there; Ran set up all the small little lighted up villages; Ed wrote all the
cards for the presents as riddles, giving clues to what was inside, sometimes a
series of gifts with strange rhyming clues to get to the final “answer”
present. For all their descent into disturbia, they loved my brother and I. And
my dad, and my mom.
And that’s the other craw-sticker. After talking with my
brother last night, I bought a few needed groceries, and came home. I’d spent a
long time in the used bookstore before I called him, looking at titles from
authors like Thich Nat Hahn, and Chodron, and Cameron, looking for comfort, I
suppose. But I didn’t buy anything. In fact, I didn’t buy my way out of my
feelings, climb into the movie theater, go to blockbuster, the ice cream shop,
or over eat. I felt sad. That feels like a normal reaction. The “both/and”:
relief for her release from suffering (one hopes), and sadness for losing the
last blood related grandparent.
In any case, I bought some apples, eggs, and oatmeal, and
came home. I made some of my new favorite tea, and sat down, and cried a bit.
Then I called my mom. She and I haven’t spoken on the phone
for over 6 months, for reasons which again made themselves evident last night,
but for which I had better tools to handle them. I left her a voicemail, as it
was close to 11pm on the east coast. My dad had asked that I tell her, and I
agreed before saying that actually she and I weren’t in the best of touch at
the moment, and he said okay, he’d ask Ben.
My parents do not speak since their divorce over 10 years ago.
At all. It’s not like they’ve erased, ignored their portion of life together;
no, rather they each feel indignant and rageful and affronted toward the other.
It’s awful. And I have had to spend a lot of time working up the boundaries to
say, “That’s not my business,” when they each separately want to talk about the
other.
My mom called me back last night. And we spoke for a little
bit, and I told her about Ben’s reaction. I mean, she is my mom. It was finally
who I wanted to talk to. Not to tell her, as Ben could have and would have done
it (as inappropriate, perhaps, as that may have been), but because sometimes we
just want our mom. My mom is not the mom I want, but she is the mom I have. And I am coming to grips with trying
to not change her. (And, I won’t enumerate her assets here, but she is also one
of the brightest, funniest women I know, and has shown me a great deal of love
in my life to the best of her ability to do so.)
That said. When she began to say that if it weren’t for me
and ben, she wouldn’t know anything that’s happening, and Dad’s stopped talking
to her, that he’s been—
I cut her off. I said that I didn’t want to talk about that.
And she paused, and said, well the point is that thank you for telling me.
(Perhaps you can gather what a less-able-to-put-up-boundaries Molly was subject
to in last year’s conversation. Narcissism is not just a river in Africa.)
So. Yeah. I’m going to call my grandfather today and offer
my condolences, as that’s really all that I can do from here, and it’s what I
want to do. It doesn’t matter how the other members of my immediate family are
reacting to this passing, or the remaining alive members of my grandmother’s
immediate family. I am able to show up with love. And so I will.
Too, I can accept that the same compassion I am able to show
them, I could extend to my immediate family – because anger, indignation,
narcissism – these are actually the best they are able to do. This, right here,
is my family’s best, and I won’t try to ask them to be or do more than that.
What I will do is allow myself to show up at my best, and leave the rest alone. 

faith · fortitude · love · self-care · sex

Holding the High Watch

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

The best laid plans, right? I had grand ones for this week,
then I got sick. I am on the mend, past the worst I think (insert ad for
Airborne here [despite others’ nay-saying about its efficacy, I swear by it,
and finally stocked up yesterday]).
It has given me the opportunity to nest a little bit; I
haven’t cleared my NJ boxes, but I have put up the revised “vision of love”
collage. It’s so much better than the
last – I wish I’d taken a before photo of the beige yawn it had been! And I
have another decorating project I might get to.
I think I know why I got sick – what tipped the scales from
‘minor winter ill-health’ to full-blown ‘duuuude, I don’t feel so good.’ I made
out with someone. — Not that this is karmic retribution or anything, but that he must have been sick too. 
A few days ago, I was in the car with a guy friend of mine.
We have a teeny bit of history having been involved for a full 4 hours 😉 a few
years ago but have remained pretty good friends, sort of sweeping it under the
rug. We often talk about our dating lives and such, and as he’s giving me a
ride home, we begin to talk about it again, what’s going on, etc, lighthearted,
etc.
Except…
I begin to say that I am of two minds lately. The one mind
that knows I’m “holding the high watch” as it were for something real,
potentially lasting, and ultimately revolutionizing. (Realistic… right? [I do
think so actually!]) I tell him about the work I’d been doing via Calling in The
One, and about how I am attempting to
create my best life, so when I meet someone, I’m fully present and accountable
for myself, I’m engaged in a life that makes me happy, and I’m not seeking for
someone else to make me happy or to take care of the needs within myself that
are actually my responsibility.
This is basically the aim of the book, and of a lot of the
spiritual work I do. To become my authentic and most available and active self.
That said,
I am also of another mind. Which says, I’m 30 years old, my
bones and ligaments only getting older and less nimble, and these are prime sex
years that I feel I’m wasting! It feels like a tragedy to let each day go by
without engaging in one of life’s greatest pleasures.
My guy friend says that it sounds like my body is saying one
thing and my head is saying another – but I really think it’s everything all at
once, to use that phrase again. My heart & head know what I’m doing,
holding the high watch, creating space, making room, expanding my life in
positive ways. They/I know that this “lull” is temporary, and perhaps in fact
necessary to sort of flush the system, or simply not clog it with anything less
than awesome.
In his car out front of my apartment, I ask, Has this whole
conversation been your way of saying you want to make out? and he laughs, I’m not
that transparent, am I?
But, being a hot-blooded human and woman, and knowing the
course of the conversation had been headed here, and having actively
participated in it, we make out.
And it’s fun and hot for a full ten minutes or so, and then
I know I have to leave. I don’t want to sleep with him, though, surely it would
be fun, but I am very familiar with fun
of this sort, this particular sort, which looks like neither of us actually
being romantically attracted to each other whatsoever, and I am also very familiar with the … blasé sort of let-down feeling
as you each pick up your discarded socks and clunk through some small talk and
try to figure out how quickly you can get out of there.
Sex is temporary. Love is not.
So, despite the “tragedy” of “wasted sex years,” I am clear
on what I am heading toward. I am clear on the woman and partner I want to be.
Clear-ish. I know it’s fluid. But I also know I am very much done (she says,
knowing things may always change) with vapid sex.
Besides, Good Vibrations appreciates my business.