Category: relationships

indecision · letting go · relationships

Silly Putty.

Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

3.19.18

At the beginning of this month, I let my therapist know that I would be canceling for March while J and I attended couples’ therapy, since I couldn’t afford both.  When, after the 1st session with our couples’ lady, I told J as much, he looked agog — horrified, morelike.  Uh, so maybe it would be good for me to see her while we go through this?  Perhaps he was right, so I scheduled back on with my own lady.

Then, after our 2nd session with the couples’ person, we broke up and I had a little more funds to throw at my own personal therapy… but really, I didn’t want to.  I was sick with the flu last week, so we had a phone session instead, yet as we hung up, it was me who asked, “Same time next week?”

But the truth is I’d meant to use that session to end things with her!  I didn’t want to continue going.  Part of the reason we began together was so that I could parse out what was going on with me and J.  Now that that’s (relatively) settled, I truly don’t feel the need to keep going.

After that call, I wrote in my journal, “So, let’s get this straight: You’re continuing to see a therapist because you think that’s what she needs?”  And so it came that I emailed her yesterday to officially and for all (foreseeable) time cancel our upcoming appointments.

She wrote back to say okay, but also that this on-again-off-again with her was redolent of how it’s been with J, and that if I wanted to schedule a last session to process this idea, and how our therapy has gone, she’s open to it.

NO!  I don’t.  And YES, she’s right about the parallels.

When I was in the final phases of processing and deciding whether to leave this relationship, a friend said that we’re having a silly-putty breakup.  Huh?  You know when you break apart silly putty in a slow way, she said, it dangles on, a thin strand getting weaker forever?  Well, when you break it apart quickly, the whole thing breaks off in two pieces at once, with a clean edge to both sides.

Hmmm….

My breakups over the last dozen years have allll been the llllong silly-putty break-ups.  Months of questioning.  Months of negotiating out of it, into it, back out of it.  Months of tearful phone calls to friends about “what to do.”  And months of continuing to sleep with the person I’ve told I don’t want to be in a relationship with anymore.

Silly putty.

And painful.  So, when my therapist lady asks if I want to process any more?  For the love — No!!  I am so done with processing.  Can I change this habit of stretching my decisions on into infinity?  Yes, I believe I can.  Do I have to give this relationship any more than I already have?  No.

So, I believe I’ll just email her a simple thank you, put my two halves of putty away, and go for a goddamn walk.

 

breakups · dreams · relationships

Broken Promises.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

3.16.18.jpg

Many moons ago, J and I broke up (for the first time).  It was Spring, and he’d purchased us each unrestricted season passes to a ski mountain up in Tahoe.  These are pricey commodities bought because of his love of skiing each Winter and the anticipated notion that the following Winter, we’d both ski the mountain together.

And then, we broke up.

So, what does a person do, I later asked a girlfriend, with the promises you made while you were together?

What do you do with the ski passes, the travel plans, the house you envisioned,… and the children you named?

This question has been resurrected this last week since J and I decided to break up again—though I am more the firm one on it, and our living together rubs daily salt in the wounds.

What do you do with the promises you made when you were together?

I ask this aloud as J and I sit opposite one another over the breakfast table last weekend, both a little soggy in our tears, warm mugs and handkerchiefs in hand.

I answer that maybe I consider each of the plans like small, child travelers — now, I wrap them back up in warm clothing, zip their puffy coats, straighten their mittens, and send them back out into the world.  Your place is not here, I’m afraid.  And walk them to the door, and watch each promise waddle back out into the snowy village to look for someone else to take them in.

Or, I suggest, perhaps each promise is simply like a thought gift I get to hug close and thank for visiting me—for offering me its joy or serenity or delight or warmth—and then I get to release it, like a caged bird into the sun.  Thank you for visiting me, for showing me more of the world.

J replies dryly, “That does not help.”

And that’s okay, I suppose.  It doesn’t have to help him, but it may help me.  It may help me to treat all of the plans and promises we made with love and gratitude, rather than with mourning and bereftness.

None of us know which bundled traveler will stay—and none of us know which traveler is cresting the ridge of our yard, just now waiting for us to open the door.

 

love · relationships · uncertainty

Yea, though I walk…

Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

3.5.18

My fingertips are raw and red, nails jagged and bleeding, shorn off by my rabid scrabbling.  Come, sit with me here, he gestured, the vista of the savannah behind him.

There are two chairs in the center of this vast landscape, this depression in the wide, long plain above.  I walked here earlier with my guide and overlooked the gulf.

This is all yours, my guide had told me months ago.  It felt to me as if it were Love; there was no sign or true indication, but the sense that this whole of land below us was mine, was love.

And it was an elephant graveyard.

As she and I stood above, her a sentry, me wary, the sun came out and did something miraculous: it vacuumed all the bones into its depths.  The litter on the floor of the canyon rumbled and shook as each piece of deadness was lifted off into the air, into absolution, into white heat.  Gone.

When I look again at the earthen floor, it is clean of its detritus, the hulking masses of death and memory and intractable sorrow/horror.

We walk down in, my sentry and I.

And here, this morning, sits my beloved, my boyfriend, the one who just right now sleeps a bit restively in our bed in the other room.  In the savannah, he rests on a chair, wooden, light-colored, tall backed, and now, he gestures for me to sit in the next.

I recoil.  I panic.  I have a hardness in my heart that is now a cage of ravens flinging themselves at the bars.  I follow their panic and begin to scrape at the sides of the cliff to get up and out of the ravine.  Come, sit with me here, and my skin trembles with fear and my mind is a primal sphere of neural terror.

…

My boyfriend and I are looking at moving to a bigger (and more expensive) place closer to my work and housing a garage for his motorcycle.  It’s perfect in all the ways we need it to be, and I refuse to commit to it, to him, with this panic still a chaos in my heart.

He is generous and sensitive and more understanding than any of us have a right to be about my process toward commitment.

Because here is the rub:

In my meditation this morning, with the scrabbling, squalling lady that is me, I invite some other imagined man into that savannah, seat another man — an idealized, “fuck yeah,” perfect but imperfect man — into that other chair.

And I react the same.

J. has been incredibly patient with me as I attempt to parse out what of my fear and doubt and terror is about our relationship in particular and what would be, for me, the same fear and doubt and terror in any relationship.

But, patience runs thin for us both.  My “process” is no quicker because of the impatience, but the demand for an answer is ripe on my mind nearly all the time.

If a “Fuck Yeah” imagined person, a man who has some kind of qualities that I feel are absent in my current love, will arouse in me the same panic as the man who now sits in front of me, then it’s not the man that needs to change.  Clearly, it’s me.

And though both J and I have known this, and both realize that my work is to parse out the wheat from the chaff, the hurt from the truth, the terror from the path forward, this work is wearing us both a great deal thin.

 

 

god · Jewish · relationships

Devotion.

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment
2 16 Camp Harlam.jpg
Camp Harlam’s Chapel on the Hill. Kutztown, PA.

The following is a list of the organizations at which I’ve worked during the past 10 years:

The Bureau of Jewish Education.  Congregation Beth El.  Oakland Hebrew Day School.  Brandeis Marin.

Perhaps you notice the clear and obvious trend: Jew.  Jewish.  Hebrew.  Jewey jewness.

I grew up Reform in northern New Jersey, and attended Sunday and Hebrew school, high holiday services, and occasional family services.  For a while (apparently at my and my brother’s behest), my family sat down for Shabbat dinner with a challah and chicken dish every Friday night.  One year, to our father’s ire, my brother and I chose to honor Rosh Hashanah by walking around the duck pond across from the synagogue while our parents went to services.

Ben and I went to Jewish sleep away camp, and learned the songs and more melodic prayers.  I became active in my synagogue youth group which participated in wider NJ-NY events, connecting with high school students across the region, singing those camp songs and new songs, and crafting inside jokes and photo albums.

When I lived in South Korea teaching English after college, I attended a Passover seder on the American Army base in Seoul (where the hagaddah [prayer book] was written in English, Hebrew, and Korean!).  After being abroad, I moved to San Francisco, got a job at a property management company, and fell in with the Chabadnik family (one of our tenants), who were generous and inviting and funny.

Then, I quit that job, became awfully ill with a 104-degree fever, and pondered what in the hell was I going to do for work.  As I lay bedridden that week, I asked myself, “Besides ‘creativity,’ what do I love?”  I answered myself, Well, I like being Jewish. !

I then went on the internet and Googled “Jewish San Francisco.”  The rest, as they say, is history (aside from the 103-degree fever with which I attended my interview with the BJE!).

Yesterday, I got to sit in the synagogue that is attached to the school where I work.  Every Thursday, the school gathers together to sing and pray and learn.  And I love it.

The songs are generally similar to those I learned in Jew camp and youth group, and I like to notice what’s different from East to West coast melodies.  The order of the service is the same; the wave of choral voices and clapping is the same; the eternal flame over the Torah is the same.

I’m not religious.  I love Jews and Jewishness and songs and clapping and “L’chayim-ing,” but I do not love the dogma or doctrine — the very little I admit that I know of it.  I do love the wide-openness I find in Reform Jewry, and how whatever my conception of G-d or Jewishness can fit generously inside the fleshy parameters of the religion.

Yet, what feels the most significant, most comforting, most embracing is that I can sit inside that synagogue yesterday, hear the voices of children and guitar crash over me, and mourn the present (folding and unfolding) dissolution of my relationship, and be witnessed and honored and held by the hand of whatever G-d there resides.

cats · commitment · relationships

Committed.

Molly Daniels Hayes2 Comments

cat 1.jpg

The first true commitment I made as a grown-up was to adopt my cat.

I know, I know.  But for many years, I’d considered “commitment” close to a prison sentence.  I watched how my mother went to the same therapist for over 30 years (and didn’t appear to get any better), and I figured therapy was a life-time commitment.  I watched how she and my father remained in a marriage that had eroded from the inside (if there was ever much to hold it besides momentum), and I considered marriage a commitment to lethargy and despair.

My own youthful relationships had been bright fire-work explosions, replete with the optical afterimage of what was when that was not true any longer.  They were short-lived, intense, and unstable.

And so, when it came time to move across the cavernous, yawning bay from SF to Oakland for graduate school, my amour of the time suggested I, like he, adopt a cat.  I’d considered owning a cat for a long time, but my considerations had always been followed by this disturbing thought: But then I’m going to have to watch it die.

I’m going to get attached, then I’m going to have to part.  This is life, this is death, this is inevitable.  Why would I ever intentionally knock over a domino that would lead me toward suffering?

Why would I make a commitment, a 15- or 20-year commitment, to love and care for and cherish and laugh with and snuggle with and bat away from my water glass, if I’m only going to have to bring a now-underweight being to the vet and tell them, “Take her”?

So, yes, it was phenomenal, miraculous growth for me when I adopted my cat (Stella Meowenstein — “So she knows she’s Jewish,” my then-bf would laughingly suggest.  Though, I think she looks like a shiksa).  Stella was here in my studio apartment with me as I began grad school and slowed the number of times I could reasonably cross the bridge back into SF (where my real friends were).  She was here when my car got stolen and it was even less reasonable to cross back in.  Stella was here as I healed from my break-up from that boyfriend and tearfully read, It’s Called a Break-up Cuz it’s Broken on the Kindle he’d given me for Chanukah.

My cat has been with me for 8 years, and I will have to say goodbye to her.  I will one day have to help her to exit the world, and I will weep precipitously.

But my commitment to her has also meant oodles of love that I have received and given.  My commitment to her has meant that I have consistency, permanence (for its time), and companionship.  In short, my commitment to her has been a highlight of my life (and I hope of hers).

Clearly, my relationship with a domestic short-hair has altered my ideas of commitment as a prison sentence.  And yet, on occasion, the lines still feel blurred.

 

 

curiosity · growth · relationships

Curiouser and Curiouser

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

2.12.18 curiouser

Several years ago, I had this exchange with an old boyfriend:

“I know what you’re going to say–” I started.

“In that case we never have to talk,” he wisely interrupted.

Uh hmm… well, I do suppose he’s right.  If I believe that I already know how people will act, talk, behave, and respond, then why bother talking to or engaging with them, anyway?  If I think that all people are is a prescribed set of responses and actions, what on earth is exciting or surprising about them — and, more to the heart, what on earth am I learning?

Yesterday, I listened to the SuperSoul podcast interview between Oprah and Brian Grazer (a Hollywood writer and producer, whose name I’d not known, but whose movies I’ve cherished: Splash, Apollo 13, Parenthood).  He’d just released his book, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life, and I loved what he had to say in the interview and promptly downloaded the book.  (My most pleasurable way to clean my house is while listening to books — and this one is read by Norbert Leo Butz, one of my favorite Broadway musical actors [yes, with a name like that, I’m sure he had no choice but to become so incredible he couldn’t be laughed at!])

Brian Grazer’s message is apparent in the title, but what struck me was the idea of remaining curious within my own relationship.

At the start of our dating, and for many months after, my current boyfriend repeated the following, partly as a habitual mantra and partly as a badge of honor: “My first answer’s always, ‘No.'”

As a woman who enjoys lots of new experiences, I was frequently given the chance to hear him say his cherished mantra:  No.  I don’t like movies.  I don’t like vacations.  I don’t like parties.  I don’t…

Yet, as soon as we’d complete one of those new activities, he’d almost invariably (if begrudgingly) admit, “I love…!” or, sometimes the pride-preserving, “I guess ___ isn’t so bad.”  Or, maddeningly, “Why didn’t we do this before?!”  *insert eye-roll emoji*

Over our year-plus together, we’ve both noticed an interesting shift in his knee-jerk response from “No” to “Maybe.”  As his girlfriend, this has been exceedingly wonderful to hear.

However, at times, even “maybe” is too foot-dragging, too oppositional, too much effort for me to convince, and I become disheartened, occasionally pessimistic, and sometimes dour about the prospect of trying new things together, moving into new places in our lives together.  And I stop hoping.

Now, while this might be a reasonable reaction to a wall of “no,” the pure truth is that the answer is increasingly, “Sure!”  While I may quietly lament a lack of verve or passion for life, the truth is that he’s increasingly taking action, showing verve, and expressing passion.

What I’ve begun to realize is that my own pessimistic reactions have become static, sedate — and outdated.  J. is not the man I began dating — he is becoming a new version of himself.  Yet I can still react to him as though he is the negative nancy I knew.

I have lost my curiosity.

I have begun to assume what his actions and reactions will be.  I have lost sight of what is happening today by pasting it over with a staid version of yesterday.  I have limited him to a vision of who he was, rather than who he is and is becoming.

How very sad.

So, my action for myself is to now notice who and what is truly in front of me.  Yes, sometimes that is still a nay-sayer, and that can be true, but how about noticing the Yeses, the That was Funs, the We should do that more oftens–

And mostly, the increased Joy.

 

 

doubt · relationships · self-care

Calculus

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calculus

There is a subtle, ever-present equation being solved in my brain by the minute.  To be happy in this moment, do I need a little more rest or a little more activity?  To be happy in this lifetime, do I need a little more savings or a little more spending?  To be happy in this relationship, do I need a little more stability or a little more spontaneity?

This weighing and measuring circulates incessantly that old GPS tagline beneath all my thoughts: “Recalculating.”

I’m listening to the audiobook of Gretchen Rubin’s Better Than Before, a book about the formation of and adherence to habits.  Of the 4 tendencies she describes, I most clearly identify with “The Obliger,” with some elements of Questioner, Upholder, and Rebel.  As an obliger, I am most apt to complete something I’ve set out to do if I have accountability.  In fact, all the positive habits I’ve formed over the last dozen years, I realize, have been as the result of making an explicit or implicit pact with someone (or something, like a daily vitamin pill dispenser):

  • Stay Sober & Solvent?  Accountable to a group of people doing the same.
  • Run a 10K?  Accountable to a running group doing the same.
  • Write Morning Pages?  Accountable to my Artist’s Way group from 2008.
  • Make fresh coffee in the morning (instead of nuking one pot all week)?  Accountable to my boyfriend’s insistence that I have nice things!

What harangues me is the more insidious obliging that I engage in, where the motivation is much less clean:

  • Return the guilt-inducing phone call from my father?  Accountable to:  A) “Good daughter”ing or B) Genuine desire.
  • Remain a mentor to someone who is clearly not a fit?  Accountable to: A) “Good mentor”ing or B) Saving them from themselves.
  • Stay in a relationship peppered with my doubts from the start?  Accountable to: A) My partner’s wishes; B) Saving my partner from himself; C) My mom(!); D) My genuine desire for and love of him.

Where does my obliger nature veer into codependence rather than self-support?  And with every new piece of information — with every glance, hug, laugh, anger, sorrow — I calculate again, an always-running app in the background, doomed to refresh infinitely.

 

 

balance · money · relationships · writing

Early Bird and the Gimme Gimmes

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

libra 8 17 17

Today, I write you from the lounge in the building at my new school.  I wanted to see what traffic would be like if I tried to arrive on time for teaching, rather than on time for our faculty work day.

I wasn’t on time.

Even leaving before blogging, an hour in advance, I wasn’t on time for what will need to be my settling in and minor morning prep, particularly as Monday mornings will find me teaching from 8:02am to 12:20pm, with one 15-minute break.

… Oy.

In a continuation of the Efficiency and Effectiveness in the World theme, it is likely that I will change this from a daily blog to a weekly blog starting Sunday.  I don’t want to do this. I like the process of writing you everyday, but to touch on the relationship theme I’ve also been jamming on, it’s also got to work for me.

Part of the reason I want to continue writing daily is a grasping one: I want to make money.

What??

Stick with me here:  There are several people in the world who have established a name and a voice for themselves via their blog, and then published a successful (even moderately so) book in the world.  I’d like to be one of them.

I want to publish a book because, a) I feel like a book is supposed to happen (likely several, of different genres), and b) I want to make money.

Ha!  Oh, Molly, your grand schemes and designs.

There’s nothing at all wrong with wanting to make more money, but if I think that my creativity is obliged to bring that to me, I’m sorely mistaken.  If as a natural, ancillary byproduct of Reason A (to write because I need and want to write), I arrive at Reason B, grand.  But I cannot make them the other way around.

Which is sort of what my attachment to writing this daily would be (to court, sustain, and curry your devotion), particularly if that was to mean waking up at 4:30am, instead of the current 5:30am.  (Did I mention I already have sleep problems??!)

I want your eyes; I hunger for your revelations and communion.  And because of that desperation, I will lose myself and you, not necessarily in that order.

So, lovely readers, our relationship will have to morph and evolve as both our needs evolve. We’ll have to support each other as best as we can as we work to support our selves. Sounds healthy, no?

growth · love · relationships · wounding

Emotional Cheesecloth

Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

cheesecloth 8 16 17

I’ve been thinking about the savior role.  About my shoving an apple into the mouths of others, nearly before they’re open because I have all the answers anyway.  How I manicly (and maniacally) attend to your needs, taking me from attending to mine.

But, there’s something else I need to learn:  how to sit with others’ suffering.

When we’re born, we’re like a house without a gate.  We throw the doors wide and absorb everything life offers.  As we grow, we begin to realize that, “Hey, wait, not all this stuff is good stuff.”  Suddenly, in our emotional house there form mountains of other people’s shit — stuff that’s overflowing or untenable in their own homes being shoved into ours.

Some of the stuff that comes in is indescribably good.  Generosity, color, laughter, awe.

But, with our doors wide open to all comers, we can begin to feel overwhelmed, maybe even resentful: There’s a storage facility down the street, lady.

And so, we begin to put up fences.  Maybe walls, maybe even security guards, or those boiling-oil pouring soldiers who cry, Keep the Fuck Out.

Because stuff is thrown at us so quickly, there becomes little time to discern its value.  (Even the city dump makes you weigh and measure your crap before they take it in.)  And perhaps your doors have been so widely open, you’ve become a drowner in a sea of rot, so that you say to yourself, you know what, I don’t want any of it.

Sometimes, though, you have a chink in that wall somewhere, and people or ideas or experiences sneak in.  Sometimes, they’re so marvelous, you are dumbstruck by how desolate and isolated your house is and how abundant and gorgeous Life is.  And so you invite that person in.  You fall in what you call love, and you have found salvation in that person who is not going to give you any more shit and may even help you clear out some of yours.

But.  People are complex.  And when, as is laughably inevitable, the cycle of realization turns from “Salvation!” to “Oh, crap, you’re Human,” that crash can lead a person to kick their loved one out.  Out, out, out.  You’re complex!!  I have no room for that.  No time for that!  Too much, too human.  Out.

It is not my “picker” that is broken; it is my emotional resilience.  The fortitude to sit with another’s humanity without absorbing and storing all their crap and without kicking it all so far to the curb their new address is China.

I am not good at this yet.  I am not good at not shoving apples into people’s mouths, allowing them to have feelings without my neeeeding to “solve” them.  I am not good at remembering people aren’t projects.

I also have very little experience simply sitting with others’ stuff without running away or growing cold.

What I need is reweaving.  My netting had been too wide in youth and I drowned.  My netting is now too narrow and I reject.  There is a human-sized webbing which allows for inflow and outflow, which allows me to speak up when you really are putting things in my house that shouldn’t be but also lets me sit with your things that are uncomfortable to me without becoming an ice queen.

I want love, healthy love, but that comes attached to humans.  So I must learn to let you be one.

 

codependence · interdependence · relationships · self-care

Come on, you know you want it

Molly Daniels Hayes1 Comment

giving tree 8 11 17

I walk through this life like a battlefield water-bearer, insisting to each person I meet that they need some of my light and life:  “You can’t get along without it!  Look how thirsty you are, needy, barren, bereft.  I can help, I have the magic secret sauce, and I’m the only one on earth healthy and able enough to give it to you!  I am your answer, savior, and absolute finite resource.”

Running around the world attempting to feed all those Sally Struthers children and Sarah McLachlan puppies is horribly exhausting, besides being awfully narcissistic.  But when you don’t trust other people to get their own needs met without you, you become the Giving Tree.  Here, have an apple, a limb, a torso.  I’m fiiiine without it.

This is where the pain arrives, and I finally become aware that something is terribly out of balance.  I am not fine without my torso, and guess what?  You do actually have your own.

I have assumed for so long that you’re inept (subconsciously, you know!) that I don’t allow you time to prove you’re not before I shove an apple in your mouth and run away before you demand more.

But the thing is, I don’t actually need for you to prove it.  Are you missing things?  Love, affection, validation?  Wow, that sounds like a pretty shitty place to be; I hope you get help with that … you know, from your own Source.

Because when I trust that you have your own well or tree or metaphor, I am free to tend to my own and to sit with you in gracious companionship.  Relieved of my self-imposed burden to watch for all your signals of need I am open to watch for my own.

Not gone grocery shopping this week, Moll?  Sleeping with a pile of clean laundry again?  Hey, lady, what’s going on, what do you need?

Oh, shit.

I’m going to have to answer that.