Day Jobs.

June 8, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Yikes. Unintendedly, I apparently freaked my mom out. I
guess “What goes around comes around” is a less than spiritual comment here.

When I was camping this weekend, one of the women said she’d
used this 23andme site that did genetic mapping and testing. She said she found
it to accurately confirm things she knew she had and “labeled” her cousin as
her own on the site, so she felt it was reliable when it came to the things she wanted
clarity on or might not know. So, on a whim, I looked it up yesterday. Part of
it is my own rampant curiosity about my dad’s father’s side of the family, about whom
we know nothing (very hush hush, gramma got pregnant at 15 in an Irish Catholic
family under-the-rug), so I’d like to know about that fourth of who I am.

Secondly, and importantly for me, my mom’s mother died from
Alzheimer’s and I want to know if I have the gene or not. You can get it
without the gene, and you can not get it
with the gene. But, I’m curious. And a little excited. If I don’t have the
gene, I can (and would) worry less; and if I do have the gene, they’re coming
up with all kinds of new things people can do these days to stave it off or
minimize the effects – and I’d look for more information on stuff like that.

So, in an effort to “share the good news,” I emailed my mom
and brother yesterday to let them know about it (though women are more likely
than men to get Alz). I got an email back this morning from my mom saying that
no matter what to never [BOLD FACE] EVER tell her the results of it.

Yikes. Granted, my mom is a class-A worrier,
anxiety-disordered woman on medication, but… yeesh. That obviously wasn’t my
intention, to freak her out – I guess I imagined she’d react as I did – “Cool,
what can I learn, so that information can be useful in how I lead my life?” …
Best laid plans, I suppose.

It’s Friday, so it’s a little rough to go into what I
remember of my mom’s parents’ deaths, and what I consider to be and have been
“wrong” ways of grieving. And so I won’t do that today. It’s NOMB – None Of My
Business.

So, I’ll undeftly switch topics, as I’m uncomfortable. 😉

Yesterday, in reading Tina Fey’s book, I had a sort of
realization about “day jobs.” Fey worked at a YMCA for $5/hr in Chicago when
she left undergrad. She wanted to take improv classes, so she angled for a job
“upstairs” in the office of the YMCA. When she was asked on the interview why
she wanted the job, she replied unabashedly, So I can afford improv classes.
She got the job, took improv classes, and quit the job less than a year later
when she got work with the improv group.

I had my informational interview with my former acting
teacher last Friday, and she said nice things like I have “great instincts,”
and that “it’s obvious [I] really enjoy it.” She didn’t really give me the
“constructive criticism” I was looking to get – areas that I could improve in,
and as I was recounting this to my friend last weekend, she said it sounded
like I wanted to hear places I could just do X, Y, and Z, so that I could “fix”
it, and suddenly everything would fall into place. Yes, give me a set of
movable problems, let me fix them, and then let me be free of problems forever.
That sounds about right.

So, I didn’t get that. I got what felt like nearly reluctant
suggestions. Again, I guess I had expectations. But, I heard that acting
classes would be a good idea to continue with. So, yesterday, I looked up the
classes at A.C.T. Studio, and their summer program. It’s not very expensive,
but surely more than I have now.

And I remembered what Tina Fey had said: she took a job so
she could afford to do what she really wanted to do. For SO long I’ve been
agonizing over what is my “ideal” job, or what will feed me spiritually,
intellectually, and creatively – what one
thing would fit all my needs. I don’t feel this way about people, why would I
feel this way about work? I don’t expect one person to fulfill all my needs –
that’s ridiculous, unfair, and leads to disappointment. So, why should I feel that a job
would or ought to do the same.

There’s something in this. It takes a shit ton of the
pressure out of whatever job comes to me next. That it is a means to an end. And further, I’m honing in more
closely on what I’d want those “ends” to be – what I want my job to afford me
to be able to do. Lessons, classes, (acting & music, for now). I’m not sure what
this realization will bring me – except that I already feel less internal
pressure about “What I’m going to do next.” Chances are (G-d willing!!!!!!)
that the job that I get next can
afford me the disposable income to take classes like that. Or, rather, the
chances don’t have to be there, I can just start angling the satellite dish of
my focus in a slightly different direction, picking up on things that I’d
dismissed, as they wouldn’t “fill me spiritually.”

Like a person, it’s not a job’s … job to fill me spiritually. That’s up to me. That’s up
to me to take the kinds of actions that will allow me the freedom from financial
worry to do things that do feed
me spiritually and creatively. I have a phone call date with another acting
friend next week, having been inspired by the new angle of my satellite to be
able to continue having these conversations with people.

What comes of it? Who knows. But I feel more open to things,
and I’ve noticed that makes a world of difference.

(Sorry, Mom – didn’t mean to freak you out. LU, m.)

community · intimacy · joy · love · relationships · respect · San Francisco · school

Going to the Chapel.

June 5, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

In an effort to hold myself accountable, I’ll here announce
that I have an art project to complete by this Saturday, for my friend’s
wedding. And… in an effort to be honest, I mean start and complete by Saturday. It’s all good – I’ve
already sketched it out, but theory and practice are disastrously different
things.

This will be the first wedding I’ve ever attended. Somehow,
it’s just never happened that I’ve been around people who get married, or been
in the same state or country to attend. I did work with a catering company at a
few weddings last summer, but that’s not the same. Although, it did give me
some great perspective and insight into the whole rigamarole.

The first wedding I did was between two women, which was
pretty cool. But, I got to learn that you shouldn’t have speeches during
serving time at dinner, as people are really confused as to whether they should
eat or listen, and then the courses get backed up, and you’re removing plates
while people are speaking, which is hella awkward and earns more than a few pointed
glances.

I learned that if you’re having a sunset wedding in the
Sonoma hills that bugs will flock to and then drown in your water, champagne,
and wine glasses. I learned that before you blink, the whole thing is over.
This is not meant to be a diatribe on marriage or weddings, it’s just
observations – and a reminder to really be present for things like this – they
really are fleeting.

I decided that, personally, a set of anonymous towels was
not what I wanted to give this couple. I met the bride within the first year, I
think, of being in San Francisco. We met out front of a building where folks
like us gather for an hour, and I asked her for a light or a cigarette, or we
just both happened to be smoking out front, me feeling socially awkward as
hell.

We talked. And somehow, stars aligned, and we knew that we’d become really good friends. Nothing
momentous was said. No raw secrets were shared, or raucous joke exchanged. We
were just ourselves, nervous, anxious companions in the semi-dark on the
concrete steps to a massive warehouse-like building by the San Francisco Marina.

When I left, we exchanged a hug. We reflected later that
neither of us were a huggy bunch. We were, or at least I was, still much too guarded then, and hugging was restricted for the very few people I now was
beginning to consider friends. But, hug we did. And it was almost that
spontaneous act of mutual affection, an act neither of us typically allowed ourselves,
that sealed that something different was here. A friendship had been
formed in the 5 minutes it takes from lighting to filter.

More than 5 years ago now.

She’s part of the reason I went back to school. I watched
her quit her lucrative job as a store manager in a touristy spot in San
Francisco, and go back to school full time in an unusual major – or at least
completely unrelated to anything she’d been doing previously. I watched her
walk, even painfully, through the process, and in the middle of winter in 2010,
I sat on her couch – maybe it was our Christmas or New Years, or something
gathering. She cooked, we talked. I asked her why this major, how come, out of
everything in the world, she chose this?

She told me that it was a thread throughout her life. All
through her life, she noticed that she’d gravitated toward information around
this subject, she sort of watched herself nurture and feed this interest. That
phrase, a thread through my life, stuck
with me.

It was hard to imagine that someone with a lucrative and
stable job (with all the attendant mishigas of a lucrative and stable job)
would quit all that to go to school, and start nearly at the beginning of a
career. But she did. I admired her dearly for it.

And so, when, two months later, I found myself at a
crossroads in my own job world, I asked myself, What is my thread? It was
writing. I have poems that date to 2^nd grade. It
was her conviction that she was insisting something to herself almost
unconsciously through her choices of hobby and interest and book perusal that
underlined that this was her arena. And so, I followed my own thread.

Because of the nature of life and distance, and full-time
schooling for us both, we don’t get to see one another often at all. It is her
I blame, full disclosure, for having hooked me on the horrifyingly ridiculous
and addictive Twilight book series –
that very night, actually back in 2010. Walking out toward the end of the
night, I glanced at her bookshelf – and there it is, the entire series. I
guffawed. I was stunned – attractive, intelligent, funny, generous, achingly cool, and reads Twilight??
This couldn’t be right.

She asked me if I’d read it – I looked at her as if she’d
asked me if I enjoyed stepping in dog shit. No, I had not read them. Scoff,
scoff. (!) Then she gave me the first volume, and told me to try it.

And so I did. And damn her, if she hasn’t turned me into one
whom others scoff at. And I thank her for it. Cheesey, and melodramatic, and
angsty, she helped me to learn to not take myself too seriously, and to let
myself have uninhibited, puffy fun.

I am honored to be attending her wedding this weekend. I
have watched her and shared with her over the course of years, and the deep
affection that was tapped on that lonely concrete outcropping has murmured like
a brook under the surface of my life every day since.

adulthood · balance · dating · integrity · love · progress · relationships · romance · self-care

Opportunity Knocks

May 29, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

So, first, some news – Remember the “SOLD” blog when I asked
all y’all to pray for my childhood home to sell so my dad and his fiancé could
move to Florida and retire? Well, 10 days after that blog, the house sold :)!!
Thank you ALL for your prayers and kind wishes! I’m really happy for them, even
though my dad is still shocked he didn’t get the price he wanted… Oh dad, you can’t win em all.

Next on the horizon, date # 2 happens tonight (this is the first 2nd date I’ve had in almost 2 years), and lord have
mercy, I’m trying to ground myself in every way possible. Stop tripping out.
Remember that I’m worthy of love and am able to give and receive love in an
appropriate way. Stop trying to script or plan. It’s not about “him.” I mean,
it’s not about wanting this person or not. It’s so much more about how do I
show up and stand in the experience of something new, trying something new. To
stand with integrity, and self-esteem, and awareness, and that fair and
balanced view thing that keeps coming up.

I don’t need a person to validate or complete me. I need to
be able to allow myself to stand without armor. I had a pretty funky
meditation/shamanic journey this morning. Unexpected, but right on track. About
my ability to receive love, and the melting of my resistance toward it.
Overbearing or absent were the ways that I learned love could show itself.
Overwhelm or rejection. I’ve carried out that pattern with my own partners, and
with myself as well. I’ve believed, and have stated in the past, that my fear
is that my needs are too great – that my needs are like a barely held back
tidal wave, and that to let them go, even in the slightest, to let them out,
would be an invitation for drowning – particularly, drowning someone else. So,
better to keep the dam contained.

It all comes back to what is the evidence for that today? Is there evidence of that today? And again, back to,
I’ve never let myself try, or others try, so really, I don’t know. Again, I
could be more capable of a thousand things, but having stopped and shunted them
all, I’d never know.

I am grateful for this “obstacle to practice on,” as is
written in a lot of the work I do with a woman one-on-one in the city. But I
said recently to someone else, that I think I’m going to begin using the word
“opportunity” rather than “obstacle.”

For a while, when I began writing that phrase with my
friend, it tasted so bitter and awful in my mouth – obstacles, fuck obstacles, I don’t need no steenkin obstacles.
I was pissed. How many more f’ing obstacles did I need in my life, I asked her.
And she told me that it wasn’t up to me. It wasn’t really my choice. These were
being presented to me, whether I wanted them or not, and it was my choice on
how I chose to use them for practice.

She was right. What do I know about my path? I want to get
from A to Z, but the “path” needs me to stop at H, J, and O on the way to
garner skills and friends and love and esteem. So, I wrote it. Thank you,
G-d, for this obstacle to practice on.

But, be it the “law of attraction”ish believing part of me,
or simply a framing shift, I don’t want to see or write them as obstacles anymore.
They’re not. They are opportunities.

These are
opportunities for me to choose – Turn Left, toward freedom and serenity, or
Turn Right, to well-worn misery. These are all mental paths, psychological
paths really. And in my phone right now, on my cover screen, I set the display
to read, “Turn Left.” It’s a reminder to me that in every given moment (what a
phrase! “given moment,” these moments are given, even gifts, if I can see it),
at any time, I can remember that I have a choice. I have the choice to obsess about tonight or not. I
have the choice to believe in my inherent worthiness or not. These are all
choices. And my choices are reflected back to me in real time.

I’d like to choose to
not obsess, to remember that I am talented and worthy, and don’t have to sleep
with people I don’t know well, and that my house can still be off limits even
though I said I was cleaning it to make it “guest appropriate.” I was told that
I am the czar of my own experience, and further, my own body. That I
don’t owe anyone anything. Repeat. I
don’t owe anyone anything. A date is not a
promise. A date is not a sexual invitation. It is an invitation to get to know
someone better. To vet each other for each subsequent date. A friend once told
me that a first date is just an interview for a second one. And so on they go.
That’s all.

So many years of believing I was promising something I
didn’t want to deliver, or was obligated to do because he was hard. Not my problem.
Sure, don’t be a tease on purpose, but he’ll live. An erection is not an
obligation.

This is an opportunity for me to hear that and feel that in
a way that I haven’t. For me to try to see that I have assets beyond my
physical self. And for me to allow those assets to be shared and seen. Dating
can start so physically, and that part is critically important, but physical
attraction is a dime a dozen, really. (I mean it’s not exactly that easy, as
I’ve realized that too) – but sex itself is a dime a dozen. I don’t want that.
– as in hell yes, I want to get laid, like every other hot blooded person on
this planet, but I don’t want only that,
and my experience has taught me for sure that when I go to that part too quickly, I undermine myself every time, and I quash any ability for me to learn
that I am worthy for more than my looks and my pussy.

So, here’s to an opportunity to try something different. To
try to believe something different. And I am excited for tonight, and that’s
all well and good, but I’m also going to pay attention to my own music stand,
and Turn Left toward the tasks I have ahead of me right now.

Wish me luck.

community · compassion · family · generosity · laughter · life · love · relationships · San Francisco · willingness

Modern Family

May 28, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Yesterday could not have been more marvelous. Oh, San
Francisco friends ~ How I miss you!!! And how I don’t realize it until I see
you.

Having lived in SF for almost 5 years before moving here to
Oakland, I had the (I can’t even think of the proper word – I don’t think I
know it) intensely fulfilling and soul-affirming opportunity to meet and grow with a pack of women. Many of my
desperately favorites were at my friend’s Memorial Day bbq event yesterday.

The feeling of guts relaxing, smiles expanding, hearts sighing, that’s how it was. I can’t stand it.

But I could, and I did. I was there, and present, and
helped, and talked, and listened, and laughed, and sun-baked (beneath a
generous layer of SPF), and hammocked, and cherry picked, and peach picked, and
dribbled little lines of peach juice down my chin, and made children laugh, and
they made me laugh, and caught up, and shared, and understood, and was
understood. Oh, this family gathering. This is my family, part of it anyway.
And how good it was to be back with them.

So many things have changed. The children are bigger. One is
moving to Japan. One got braces. One got certified. How many things change when
we aren’t looking – or in communication.

The phone works, sure. The bridge works, sure. But how me
and this particular group of women met, and shared, and grew, it was in person.
It was by witnessing monumental and incremental growth over weeks and weeks
which became years and years.

Yes, I’m feeling a little sappy. But I can’t help it. I love
them. And, they love me. This is a section of people who know me in a way few
do, who have witnessed my own growth and change, and who like me, accept me,
are fond of me. As I do them. What a miraculous gift. What a fucking gift.

I don’t know quite the solution. Does there need to be one?
The ache that I realize was there? I felt the same way when I went to a
workshop run by the same woman who hosted this barbeque – the workshop was in
January, and I arrived and saw two women I hadn’t seen in likely a year or
more, and again, my guts sank down from somewhere behind my ribs, where they’d been benignly pinching my
lungs and inhibiting my breathing, they sunk, phoom, back down to where they belong in the
grounding, rooted, centered calm.

It was at that workshop that I realized how much I missed them
all. This won’t be another diatribe on how I don’t feel connected to the East Bay as in the
“Exile” blog. I do feel connected, more
connected, than I had, with more women than I had. I feel friendships, and
activity partners, and women to share with. But. … I’ve only been here a year
and a half, almost two. That’s not 5. That’s not in the same way.

Things change. They must, and they have to. Can I change
with them? How do I balance? How do I maintain – or if change is necessary, not
“maintain,” then, but evolve? How do I evolve with the reality of distance?

Because I won’t always be here in the Bay. That much is
likely true. And what happens then? I have a dear friend who moved to Brooklyn
last year, and we speak on the phone maybe once every two months, with some smatterings
of texts, but we’re not nearly as close – this woman who was once as close as
my heart.

How do we do this?

I’m not sure. I know that I obviously missed these women
more than I knew. I missed the way I feel
when I’m around them – known and loved, exactly as I am, for who I am. Women
who know me well enough to jibe at me, laugh with me at myself, and poke into parts of me that need to
be poked for movement to happen. These are women… for christ’s sake, I can’t
stop gushing.

What now? If I’m aiming to be responsible and adult in my
life, to take action where I’ve taken none, to believe that no one is coming to
change or live or make my life for me – then, how do I incorporate this
knowledge? The knowledge that I want more of that – that I want those
connections kindled, or renewed?

I love my new friends – they are buoying me in ways they
don’t even know. But I miss my old friends. I miss so much of what’s happening.
Life is so damn short and quick, and things move so suddenly. Someone moves to
a new town. Someone to a new country. Someone is engaged, or married, or
pregnant. Someone is in a break-up or new relationship. Someone is changing
careers, or expanding a business, or taking a new class, or forming a girl’s
band (yes, that’s me and my friend with plans to jam with her drums and my bass,
here in the east bay).

I want. Terrible words. But, I do. I want – I want what I
had, but in the present. I want what I had yesterday – the gut-release, the
warm bath, the mild pleasant smirking at the familiarity of us all.

I want. In the present. And how.

adulthood · change · dating · fear · intimacy · Jewish · love · progress · relationships · sex · sobriety

Mind your own music stand.

May 26, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Several years ago, about 5 or so, I was dating a wonderful
man. I was also in therapy. These things were and were not related 😉

One day, my therapist and I stumbled across a metaphor that I’m reminded of
today – when I get into relationships, it’s as if I’ve been the conductor of my
own orchestra, and ultimately, the highest ideal and intention is that my
partner, boyfriend in this case, have his own orchestra, and that the two sounds mix
and meld in a way that increases the beauty of both, without losing the
integrity of either.

Surely, you may have your own metaphor for this, as there
are many, but that’s what came to me then.

The “problem,” as it were, is that I was noticing my
tendency to want to begin to conduct his orchestra. That if his oboe were a
little more resonant, or his triangle more tingy, we’d sound better together.
The result of this peeking over onto his side, was that I began to neglect my
own. In beginning to mind someone else’s business, I forgot to mind my own.

When this happens, things like self-care, integrity, and reason
begin to go out the window. I become more interested in making sure you’re
doing things “right,” and that we “sound good together,” that my whole balance
of living gets thrown off.

That was then. This is now. Will it be the same?

When, before I began dating that man, I asked a trusted
friend if she thought I were ready to date – as he would become the first
person I’d date while sober – she said that if I was ready to handle the
emotional twists of a relationship without drinking, then go for it.

And so I did. I learned a lot, and ultimately, it didn’t
work out, but I learned so fucking much.
I learned how to try to love, how to try to be loved. I learned how to be
honest with another person. I learned to look at the clouds and see shapes and
animals again. I learned how to relax a little.

Yes, these are things I can learn “on my own,” they are. And
I get more of that now than I did then. But, too, there are some things that
can only be learned in communion with
someone else.

I notice that that big hunk of manic-depressive wild-haired
meat that I call my inner manifestation of Love is “up” right now. As when I
met her on one of my shamanic journeys, and she threw herself on me after I
gave her one bit of kindness, she is not yet one who knows balance. When I
pushed her off of me, she got rageful and went Neanderthal.

This is part of my pattern. Show me some kindness, and
suddenly, I light up like Times Square and drape myself on you, my needs,
expectations. Show me that you can’t possibly meet those demands, and I will
turn to ice quicker than an eskimo’s piss.

There’s more to this. As there usually is. If you’re not
meeting my demands, and I’ve turned cold, you won’t really know it. It’s subtle
closing off and shutting down, this Elvis leaving the building. We’ll have sex,
but I won’t be present. I’ll still try to use it as a way, the main way, to
connect, but it doesn’t really work when I’m not there.

Also, as I recognized last night on my surprise-last-minute okJewpid date, before I know more or better or have a peg on the situation,
sure I’ll be outwardly as gregarious and charming as always, but… I felt it – I
felt my shell.

Perhaps this is “normal.” You’re meeting someone for the
first time – you of course have some guards, maybe. But, I’m just so much more
acutely aware of how scared I am. How scared I am to allow that shell to melt,
because inevitably, in my past, it has meant a descent right into that enormous sigh of relief that you are here, that I can now
relax, depend on you – and make a few adjustments to you while we’re at it.

When I let go of this shell, I start a pattern that leaves
me alone, sad, and feeling pretty childlike. Not womanly. Not adult.

So, I keep the shell. I’ve kept it for years now. Better to
avoid the whole game than to try to play it differently, acknowledging and
using the new skills for living and being that I have. I could have garnered a
whole fleet of new tools and attitudes, but fuck if I let them out of the gate.
They’re like a trained – well, I was going to write “army,” but I’d rather
leave the military out of my love life, thank you – they’re like a well-trained
dance company. Having rehearsed for years, perfected, practiced, fallen, and
learned – but … me, their manager, I will never and have never let them perform. They
are a lost art. They are a lost gift, because I’m too scared of how they’ll be
received, or of if they’re really ready for the big show.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but with the Cousin, I
said at one point (not to him) that I felt like I wanted to put him up on a
shelf, and “fix” myself, or get better, and then, only then, when I were
better, then I could take him down, and we could have a wonderful life
together. Life.Does.Not.Work.In.Darkness. It does not work in absence, and it
does not work without my active participation.

I may be the world’s best anything, but I’d never know it.

And so, it’s time to see if my conductor skills, my dance
company, my emotions have learned things that I may not know they’ve learned.

Because my date was awesome. And, likely, I may want to date
again.

abundance · adulthood · community · compassion · forgiveness · growth · love · reality · receiving · surrender

What Ifs – A Response

May 20, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

What if I thought more of others’ happiness

What if I were grateful for what I have

What if I took good care of my possessions

What if I took good care of my body

What if I allowed myself to receive love from others

What if I allowed myself to receive my own

What if I believed I was alright

What if I were grateful for my coffee mugs,

gifts from
kind friends

What if I were grateful for the furniture in my apartment,

free, all of it

What if I were grateful for the electricity

clean water

hot water

a refrigerator

What if I allowed myself to fill my refrigerator

What if I allowed myself to believe in my inherent goodness

What if I believed that I was more than my wants

What if I believed that I was able to carry more than I ever
have

What if I thanked others for their kindness

What if I meant it

What if I let myself feel love for other people

What if I let myself feel generosity of spirit

What if I thought there was enough for everyone

What if I thought more about everyone

What if love was a gift

What if I let myself breathe

when I hug people

What if the smell of children’s hair was enough

What if I let myself believe in my dreams

What if I let myself support them in an adult way

What if I opened to hearing your praise

What if I opened to hearing your guidance

What if I opened to hearing your story

without thought
to improve, correct, enhance

What if you were enough.

What if I were enough

What if I let myself stop

worrying

being small

hiding

What if I believed it were safe

What if I believed you were safe

What if I believed that I were

What if I let myself be

What if I were more generous with my gifts

What if I were more generous with my affection

What if I were more generous with my laughter

What if I could relax

What if I could relax.

adulthood · change · family · honesty · intimacy · life · love · relationships · willingness

A Fair and Balanced View

May 14, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

There are a few things that are hard to reconcile. For
example, prefacing your poem to your family by saying it’s mediocre as you did
not have time to edit the first draft – and after reading it in public at the ceremony at school, having people come up to you afterward praising the poem
and asking how they can get a copy. I gave a woman my card.

It’s hard to reconcile my view of where and how I am in my
life with the clouds of pride and support that beamed from my family and
classmates on Saturday, graduation day.

It’s also hard to maintain a stoic, stark, medieval view of
myself when I have women around me who “want what I have,” and a woman to call
who reminds me of the length and breadth of this process of school, and indeed the last 6
years.

A fair and balanced view. How to achieve that around
ourselves, whom we hold to such impossible standards that we’re always falling
short. Or at least I do.

Because I’m not
falling short. My measuring stick is broken and outdated and subjective.

Not much has “changed” outwardly over the last few weeks as
graduation occurred, and it’s hard to know if much has changed inwardly, but, I
think it is, slowly. I think my awareness of my rigid and flagellating stance
with myself will begin to bring change with it.

I also decided to change my workshop to sliding scale,
instead of a set fee. I had the thoughts to either cancel the whole thing (as I
had/have only one registered/paid participant), or to host at my house the few
who said they wanted to come, or do it in the city anyway.

I chose the latter, partly because I want the experience of doing it in a more “formal”
or official setting. I still want to share these tools, and help others
to learn whatever they need to learn from this. And also… I’m worried if I just
cancelled it, people might show up at the event the day-of, and be disappointed 😉

So, we’ll see what happens with that. It still may just be
me and my one registered participant. And if that’s the case, and I eat the
rental fee, so be it. Not ideal, but my ideas about how the workshop should be
are obviously not working, so instead of edging toward “fuck it” and not do it,
or toward “you MUST” and do it for the set fee, I’m finding a middle way. – That feels
like progress.

Also, I got to talk with my mom yesterday at the ass-crack
of dawn when we’d dropped my brother at his flight at SFO, and had a few hours
to kill before her flight. So, we grabbed some coffee and sat in Terminal 2 in
those Ikea-looking tangerine-colored winged chairs, and we talked.

I decided somewhere mid-conversation to tell her why I’d
stopped talking to her on the phone for almost a year. I didn’t “owe” her the
explanation, but I did want to share why. I reminded her of that last
conversation we had, and how she “hi-jacked” the conversation (a term she used
about her behavior when I’d finished). How suddenly a light and fun and mutual
conversation jumped the tracks, the shark, the point, and careened head-long
into “My Mom’s Issues.” I told her that I don’t feel able to hold the space for
that stuff for her anymore, that it feels inappropriate, but that I didn’t have
the words or wherewithal to tell her that in the moment. And so, instead of putting up a boundary, I put up a wall.

And it’s held. She said she had to just accept that we’d communicate
via email and text, and that that had to be enough. And for this year it was.
Seeing her, however, I really was reminded of how much I miss her. And she said
to me after I’d shared what went on with me, that if I felt able, and it sounds
like I feel more able now, to tell her that she’s hijacked the conversation to
let her know. And we’ll see if I can.

We both know we’re still in new territory. Our relationship
has swung the gamut from oversharing, overly enmeshed, over identification all
the way over to not talking for months and months, several times. We’re still
finding our center in our relationship, as I suppose we’re each finding our
center within ourselves. Back to the fair and balanced view. The Middle Way.

How can I hold the contradictions? How can I allow for
myself to be vulnerable without a hard shield of protection? How can I see
myself as a simple, or simply complex, human, with assets and liabilities? And, how can I allow others that same
generosity?

Dunno. 😉 But I think I’m trying.

community · family · forgiveness · love · maturity · recovery · San Francisco · willingness

Three’s Company

May 12, 2012August 9, 2017 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Best Laid Plans are luckily not always the best plans.
Overambitious as visits with family usually are, my brother Ben and I did not
get to see all of San Francisco in an hour and a half. He did say the sweetest
thing, as we swept back into the car off of Pier 39 on our way to Lombard
Street – that he came here to see me, not San Francisco.

My brother is 3 years younger than me, lives in New Jersey,
and is a highlight of my life. It was not always rainbows and puppy dogs between
us, but the last few years have seen a dramatic, but incremental shift toward
mutuality, trust, and love. It’s been one of the greatest gifts that I’ve
gotten, this renewal of our relationship on a basis of support and respect and
admiration – to get to know each other as adults, or as adult as we are, rather
than as two kids fighting each other for the crumbs of whatever there was
available.

So, he and I got to briefly traipse around those tourist
spots, and then had to get to SFO to pick up our mom. Another relationship which
has formed and reformed many, many times. It’s in an iteration that neither of
us know, and so we’re sometimes formal, hoping not to cross boundaries or
offend, and we’re sometimes deep, treading carefully for the same reasons as
above. Mostly, we’re funny. Mostly, the three of us together is like an old
left-off conversation, dotted with movie references, and cackles of laughter –
though my brother chortles rather than cackles.

An old boyfriend of mine got to meet her once when she came
to visit me in San Francisco about 4 years ago. He said that we laugh the same.
I’m sure we’re many things the same – sometimes I catch the strangest sights of
myself, and am struck at how much that’s a “mom” move – reaching for a kitchen
cabinet, I see the hollow of my thin, graceful wrist, and it’s hers that I see
and remember. Sometimes it’s the way I click my fingers together when I’m
nervous or anxious. And sometimes, it’s strange things that I’ve picked up from
her, like when I was in college, cutting up chicken breasts in the kitchen, and
I started clucking at the chicken – and didn’t even notice it until my roommate
came it and laughed – this, is a mom move.

Irreverent, sensitive as all get out, brilliant, worried,
with a kind creamy center like the inside of a cadburry egg that you cradle so
you don’t crush it. That’s my mom, and also my brother and me. We each have
varying degrees of it, but we are apples not fallen far from the tree. And
however embarrassing it was growing up without cable or Nintendo, so that we
watched Fred & Ginger movies, and all the movie musicals, and The Marx
Brothers, so that no one our ages would get our references, we’re older now,
and people still may not get our references, but I can appreciate that we have
them at all.

A friend of mine told me maybe a year or more ago, how
distancing she felt that her father could really only communicate in quotes
from movies – that it wasn’t personal enough or intimate enough. I shared with
her my and my brother’s experience, and said, for me, now, it’s actually one of
the ways we do share intimacy – sharing
something, a witticism, with each other that we know the other will get, and so
we bond and revel in our commonalities.

My cell phone broke recently. In it were saved text messages
over the course of several years. I’m a hoarder of texts. One of the last that
I know I have saved in there is from my brother a few weeks ago: “Of course
your president is an actor – he has to look good on television.”

For those uninitiated, this is a Back to the Future quote, just one in the long continuous conversation
that my brother, and mom, and I get to share with each other across time and
space.

We cannot be present in person with each other often. And
when we are, we’re all still learning how to relate in a way that is open
without overreaching, and fun without being superficial, among many more
balancing acts that all relationships aim to master, but likely never fully
achieve. We figured out that the last time the three of us were together was
about 3 or 4 years ago.

Last night, at dinner, which didn’t go “as planned,” as my
dad and his fiancé were stuck in the city and didn’t make it to the ceremony at
school, it went perfectly. It wasn’t as I’d planned, it was better. And the
three of us delighted in the bright, animated, multi-faceted, infinitely
tangential company of one another.

For all that has come before, for all that it took to get us
to that dinner table, for all that will continue to need to happen to help us
show up to tables like that with one another, I have a family whom I love, and
who love me dearly.

TODAY’S GRADUATION DAY! So, as Abe Lincoln said,

Be excellent to each other, and… PARTY ON DUDES!!!

adulthood · aging · family · home · love · selfish

SOLD

May 10, 2012August 9, 2017 Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

What the hell – might as well admit it…

So, each time I’ve read my Tarot cards lately, (which I heard
once you’re not supposed to do, but the book I have says it’s the best
way to learn. Who knows – so I just don’t do it too often). Nevertheless, I have been doing it mildly
frequently over this past month in an effort to “figure it out,” and darnit, if I don’t keep getting The Devil
card. This card represents a lot about materialism, the bondage of self, and
self-obsession.

And nothing leads me more to self-obsession than being
broke, so I’ve been pretty much all I think about lately. Not a very lovely way
to live. This morning, … in meditation (I can’t believe anyone still reads this
stuff!), I realized that I’ve cut myself off from a lot of my connectedness
through my contracted and constricted thinking around money, jobs, my life, my purpose,
etc.

I have been reaching out more for help, but feeling actually
calm, centered, connected, all is well? Well, that’s felt a little out of reach
for me. Fair enough, it happens. But, it’s nice to notice that although I’ve
been availing myself of more resources and networks and connections this time
(only when I’ve thoroughly exhausted my self-propelled resources!), it’s still
so Molly-centered, and gimme gimme. It feels icky.

An assignment that I’ve had since Monday is to pray for
others’ happiness once a day for two weeks. Some specific others, but sure, it
could apply to everyone. In doing this, I realized how much I’ve been focused on
myself. And also, how depleted I am internally from working in that closed
circuit. I haven’t “filled the well” in a long time. My well is dry. And others
need me to get some moisture up in here.

Connecting back to sources I know that are nurturing, and
getting back onto a schedule for myself will help (I was up till 1am applying
to a job – not the best time…but I won’t have much time as the family all pours
in from the corners of the eastern seaboard) are some ways to refill the well.
Perhaps this then sounds like another path of self-obsession, thinking about
how I can feel better, and maybe it can
skew that way, but I’d like for it to skew in the way to help others – to
refill so I have something to give. So I can actually have energy to put behind
my prayers for others’ healing.

Specifically, last night, I had dinner with my Dad and his
fiancé. They’ve come in for vacation/my graduation, and came to see me at
school, and we went to dinner. They are planning on moving to, and have a house
all ready to go for them in Florida. It occurred to me last night how much
older they both have gotten.

I see them, and my mom and brother, maybe once a year, but
usually every other year, and it’s been that way since I left for Korea in
2004. So, I don’t get to witness the slow aging process; I see them, and I’m
beginning to notice the slower pace they walk, the much grayer hair of my dad, and
the general aging look of them both. It’s startling a little to see so much
change from visit to visit.

They are moving to Florida to retire, like good Jews, into a
house in a “senior community” (I half envision Jerry Seinfeld’s parents in
Boca… And I don’t think that’s half off!) She is older than my dad, and my Dad
is 65, not “old,” but there’s a lot of aches and pains and aging issues. I can
tell that he’s sad that he’s not as vibrant as he was. They “courted” by going
to lots of dances and on motorcycle rides and kayaking and whatnot. They were
very active, at some type of dance or other nearly every week.

Last night they said they don’t really go anymore.

In order to move to Florida, however, they need for my
childhood home to sell. I’ve done a lot of work on letting go of this house, I
burned sage when I was there emptying it last Fall to help let go of all it housed and witnessed, and in meditation, I’ve
tried to do the same. To differentiate my identification with the house too –
having seen it for a very long time as a neglected beautiful thing that could
be so much if it only had enough love. I’m come a long way with that, and feel
ready for it to go, feel ready for it to be owned and loved by a new family.

But, the house does need a lot of work, and it’s not
selling. We all know what’s happening in the economy, so I decided every little
bit of help counts, and this morning in meditation, I went to the house. I
asked it what it needed to go to another family, and it said it needed Love. (Yes,
really.) So, I tried to sit in a room in the house and radiate love out to it,
so that it could radiate love and attract a new family.

Problem is, I’m running on fumes, and that’s how I
recognized this this morning. I sent someone else in, a teacher/source I know,
to illuminate it, but no dice. I need to work on receiving some light, to get
back to being a channel, rather than a closed circuit running on
self-propulsion for me to have anything to give.

Will it help the house sell? Dunno. Will it help me to feel
more connected to those around me? Likely. Will it do me some good to think
about others’ happiness and how they are? Definitely.

And, if you would be so kind, could you maybe send a little
love to the house too? Envision a “Sold” sign on the lawn? Help my Dad and his
wife move to a better place?

Thanks!

change · discovery · femininity · grief · growth · love · recovery · sexuality · spirituality · vulnerability

And So, She Wakes.

May 9, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

As I was flipping open my Morning Pages notebook this
morning, it fell open to the back page. Written at the top was “Meditation:
Lodge Day 4.” I usually write my journeys and meditations in another
“spiritual” notebook, to keep them all together, but I couldn’t find it last
Thursday when I apparently wrote this. I’d forgotten, and it makes intensely
marvelous sense to me now, and I’m happy I stumbled upon it.

Again, bear with the “do we have to listen to another one of
these woo-woo Mollyisms”!

As you may recall, I went to my first sweat lodge last
Sunday, and we were told by the facilitator that the lodge “works” for four
days after the lodge, hence, Day 4 above. The meditation on that day, then,
went something like this:

The four characters of Beauty, Love, Sexuality, and
Femininity [I guess I didn’t write a blog about her, but a former meditation introduced my Inner Femininity to me as one anorexic and frightened looking young woman, who has been getting healthier for a few months] gathered at the lodge fire. Sexuality discarded her heavy cloak of
shame into the fire. All of the rest of “us” stood behind her – all my aspects
that sit at my internal dinner table, all my animal guides, and all my teachers
human and otherwise. Then the 4 entered the lodge, not with “me.” In the lodge,
they merged, joined, combined, and exited as one. She then purged all these
prayer bundles [little sacks of tobacco filled with prayers, tied together with
string, usually tiny, about the size of a nickel] and the last one was about
the size of a bowling ball, filled with shame. It burned brightly and a phoenix
rose up from the ashes and swam about the clearing. All the others whooped and
cheered – there was great merriment [so it says in my notebook]. She grabbed
onto the phoenix and made the whole trip back from the Santa Cruz mountains and
to my apartment where I sat meditating. And she asked me, Are you ready? And I
answered Yes. And she joined me, into me, empowers/powers me now [I write]. Am I
ready? Yes.

So, what? I realized this morning as I read over this page
that, in fact, something like this has happened. My dalliance with the married
man began the very next day. Brief and physically Rated G as the now-ended tete-a-tete was, I have not felt that kind of power, or charge, or electric in a long time.
That awake in a long time.

I relate it to the awakening of a limb that’s long been
asleep. Suddenly it starts to tingle, which feels sorta nice, and then, more suddenly, it begins to
feel like it’s burning as it awakens. As the blood starts to rush almost anew
into this place so long cut off. You almost wish it would simply go back to sleep again – better that than this. As you know, I’ve cut off much of these parts
of me for quite some time, imagining, and having fed the story that my
sexuality, femininity, beauty, and love bring me pain, destruction,
self-hatred, and, again, shame.

So, beginning to feel the tingle of these parts of me again,
these massive alive energized parts of me, means that I’m beginning to walk with
my full self again. See, I don’t think it’s just about sex, or being a woman, I
think it’s about me being a full and entirely embodied human. About allowing
the blood, power, energy to flow into ALL of myself. And when that is allowed
to happen, well, I believe I’ll be able to take actions I haven’t been able to
take before.

I wrote a few informational interview query letters out to
networks of mine last night, and in it, I wrote a line that surprised me at its
truth. I wrote that I would, ideally, like to paint, act, sing in a band, and
facilitate workshops. So, there you have it. I now have an answer to “What do
you want to do.” Isn’t that lovely?

In fact, it is. I know that I’m still finding my way to
getting there. But having full working ability of all my limbs has been the
only way to get there. When, over the last several months I was told that I had
to work on this sex stuff before I could get “more information,” well, I think
I’m coming out of it/into it. I think I’m clearing it.

Apparently, sure, I have some work to do on how to do it
skillfully. My old habits with righteously attractive unavailable men are much
more familiar in my muscle memory – and as my muscles awaken, they seek the
familiar. (And seek to post the NIN “I wanna fuck you like an animal” on facebook!) So, it’s about owning, and holding these parts now – how to hold them
properly, and respectfully – without
fucking shame.

Finally, I realized yesterday, as I was clicking “attend” to a workshop for Shamanic Journey work, that if my professional development could
be anything, it would be this – sweat lodges, and collage parties, and shamanic
journey workshops. That my professional development ought to align with my
personal development. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Therefore, again, it’s about heading there. About allowing
myself to head there. Sure, I may need to find a job for the mean time, the in
between time, but with the full use of my faculties, with a widened and
compassionate understanding of the voraciously ambitious and pulsatingly
powerful support of my full feminine, human, creative self, with an eye for new
behavior, and with a welcome acceptance of all that I am, and want, and yearn for –
I believe that, Yes, I Am Ready.