Horse Thief

March 31, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

There’s a phrase I heard when I got to certain rooms in San
Francisco: If you sober up a drunken horse thief, you still have a horse thief.

Lately, I’ve been getting the chance to acknowledge where I
still act from Horse Thief tendencies and impulses.

I was a thief in High School, probably in Junior High, and
actually come to think of it, in college, too. It was sort of “a thing” me and
my friends did, to see what we could get away with, and also, because we were
only stealing from big conglomerate stores, we felt (or at least I did)
justified, since they were always screwing the little man anyway – What did they care if Maybelline mascara went into my pocket? That’s a fraction of a cent they’ve lost in profit, and I’m standing in solidarity with the
Chinese children they hired to mark the packaging. (Riii….ght.)

I was, however, pretty clear about not stealing from people, only from these big stores, because there was a line I felt I still had to
maintain, a standard of behavior I adhered to. It wasn’t right to take from
little mom & pop shops, or to steal from actual people I knew. That was wrong.
Stealing from the mall was just expected, written into their budgets in some
corporate headquarters somewhere, and therefore right — or at least okay.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve stolen anything. Probably
since before I moved to SF. But that doesn’t exactly mean that the Horse Thief
has been repentant or ousted.

I have all the stores I’ve “reappropriated” from on a list
that I am slowly chipping away at, to make amends to, either by sending in
money for items, or “paying it forward” by donating to a charity. Each will
have a conversation with a trusted friend around it when the time comes.

But, I’ve lately recognized that there is still a pattern of dishonest behavior and thinking that infiltrates my current life.

When I was working through a temp agency while in grad school,
I got to open the invoices to see what the company I worked for was actually paying the temp agency, and it was certainly higher than the rate at which I was being paid by said agency (which, duh, is how they profit). So I approached the company I was working for, and asked if they
would just hire me under the table. That way, my Horse Thief logic went, it was
cheaper for them, and I would get a few more dollars, since it wasn’t going to
be taxed.

Um… Yeah. That didn’t work out so well. Even though I was
“working a program,” even though I could talk about the necessity of honesty
and integrity in life, and seriously really mean it, this dishonesty was
creating holes in my abundance, and in my sobriety/serenity.

Plus, I got caught. The temp agency found me out, and called
the company where I was a receptionist, and when I answered the phone, she
“surprisedly” said, Oh, Hi Molly…

Oops.

So, there were emails and phone calls and conversations
between the HR at the company where I was and the temp agency I’d spurned.
After talking with some trusted friends, I wrote an email to the agency, owning
up to my part of this deception.

And, in the end, when tax time rolled around, I got a 1099
from the company, anyway, since I’d earned a significant amount in the 5 or so
months I temped under the table for them, and I had to pay taxes on that money
anyway. Which meant that I ended up earning less from my time there than I
would have if I’d just continued working through the proper (read: legal)
channels.

I have a moral line about not stealing pens from work, or
using stamps I didn’t pay for. But there are other ways in which this fear of
not being taken care of, this fear that my needs will not be met creeps out.

This poisonous fear seeps into my life, and I make choices
based on that fear. And eventually, I am screwed by it.

It’s been interesting to notice that this is a pattern that
has continued into my adulthood. It’s certainly rooted in a long-held belief
that my needs will not be met. That if I behave along “proper” channels, I
won’t get or have enough. That if I behave by rules and laws that are set down, I will not be taken care of.

So, I better get my fearful, sticky claws into something, I better come up with some better, sneaky ideas, or
else I’ll be eating ramen again.

I get it. I see it.

And I hope to change it.

A trusted friend does a lot of work with affirmations to
counter fear. So, this morning, I used that tool:

I fear my needs will not be met.

I trust that the Universe cares for all my needs.

I fear that no one is looking out for my good.

The Universe cares deeply for me.

Sure, maybe it’s bunk. But, right now, I don’t know another
way, except to “act as if” these things are true. To try to behave in a way
that really does align with my morals, instead of with my fears.

I have also heard that, with every bought of true honesty or clarity or bill paid on time or phone call from creditor answered, that we are closing up the holes in the sieve that holds abundance. Each time my covers are pulled, I get the chance to be more honest, and thereby the chance to mend the bucket into which the fullness of life is surely always being and going to be poured.

I cannot turn a drunken horse thief (or a sober one for that
matter) into an upstanding citizen. But I can try to trust that I don’t have to
be one anymore.

acceptance · change · community · love · trauma · truth

in.to.the.light.

February 15, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had occasion to sit with two
friends who shared with me about trauma in their past, as well as reading an article by a
sexual abuse survivor about the upswing of the Dylan Farrow case.

A little less than a year ago, after I completed chemo, I started reading a book
about healing that kind of trauma. As you may remember/know, it’s my
understanding that disease can be a function of underlying emotional or
spiritual dis-ease, and after my bought with cancer, I was (and still am)
determined to do all I can to root out causes and dis-ease that may underlie
the causation of cancer. The book suggested that before you really begin, you collect your army of support
because the work would be intense. So, I sought out a somatic therapist, as the
book suggested, and saw her a few times. I wasn’t a good fit, and I soon
stopped seeing her, and soon stopped reading the book, maybe a chapter or two
in.

However, this morning, I was toodling around on my phone,
compulsively checking my email for the rehearsal schedule for the play in which
I’ve been cast(!), and I clicked on the “Notes” app I have on there, wondering
if there wasn’t some old “to do” list that may have good ideas for me.

Instead, I found a series of quotations from that book. A
series of words that struck me, applied to me, and offered me compassion,
understanding, and hope.

I … don’t really want to do this. Read that, re-read that.
Tell you here. But, my friends, it is all related. Don’t worry, I won’t get
specific here—it’s not appropriate, and not necessary—except to say my abuse
was not incest or young child abuse, but simply a series of events from a youngish age into my 20s when I didn’t
understand what No was, how to stop things, how to not
go along.

But, apparently, several things in my current life are
pointing me back at looking in that direction. And, from my own understanding
and cosmology, the “Universe” tends to bring things up when you’re ready to
deal with them. … And, if you don’t, you’ll be given occasion to deal with them
later, we promise.

One of the quotes in my app says something about moving out of
isolation into relationships. Va voy, if that’s not what I’ve been trying to do. And
here is a hiccup I didn’t see coming. A gentle nudge from the Universe saying,
Hey, there are these unresolved things. I know they’re hard, but you’re not
alone, and we’ve already pointed some support structures your way, if you want
to work on this now.

I may say, Fuck you. I don’t wanna.

I may call on the language I read once that said, Stop
Identifying With Your Trauma. Don’t use it as a shield and a sword to say, LOOK
SEE THERE’RE THESE FUCKED UP THINGS THAT HAPPENED, SO YOU CAN’T GET CLOSE TO
ME, AND I’M TOO SCARED TO GET CLOSE TO YOU—BACK! OFF!

I could call on that language and say, see, I need to not look at this, because then I’m just wallowing in my
past, instead of moving out of it.

See…. but the thing is. I haven’t wallowed. I’ve avoided.
Plague-like.

Partly because “it wasn’t that bad.” Partly because it’s
so damned fucking common. Heartbreakingly.

Partly because there have been other fish to fry.

And mostly because it’s really really hard.

I have some Louise Hay “Affirmation Cards” over my kitchen
sink, so I can look at them when I’m doing my despised dishes. The one that
calls to me about this reads, “All these changes are easy to make.” These
patterns are easy to heal and change. Maybe. Maybe this is easier than I fear.
The big boogey man with a flashlight projecting himself on the wall much larger
than he really is.

It’s happened before.

I know it’s a heavy thing to lay out to you here, but I also
know some of you are there, were there, get it, and are curious, like me, on how to go
through this stage of healing. As always, I write this for us.

change · creativity · dating · growth · self-love · self-support · truth

Look! SHINY!!

January 23, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I downloaded the book yesterday, It’s Just a F***ing Date, by the same people who wrote He’s Just
Not That Into You and It’s Called
A Break-up Cuz It’s Broken.

One of the first things the introduction says is, you’re
obviously stuck in something you don’t like doing, or you wouldn’t have picked
up this book.

I love their books. I first picked up Not that into you when I was living in South Korea. It was a lark,
there weren’t that many books in the English-speaking section of the bookstore,
and I thought it would be more funny than anything to see the stupidity of
these women who didn’t get that these guys just weren’t into them; that these
women needed a book to spell it out for them in order to stop knocking on the
closed, booty-calling door.

And yet. Of course, I got to see that I was one of those
huddled women justifying all kinds of behavior (theirs and mine) in the hopes
of romance. 3 a.m. text = he’s just not that into you. Not able to hang out
sober = he’s just not that into you. Has a girlfriend? Sweetie, come on, where has your self-respect gone?

When I broke up with my last serious boyfriend in 2011, I
was wrecked. Walk into the house and stand inside the front door empty for several minutes wrecked. It felt like every day I was hit by a Mac
truck. And yes, I was the one who ended
it. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t love there, that I didn’t care about
him, about us, it’s just, we weren’t meant to be an us.

My brilliant friend Katie once told me the following: The
thing about grief is that something is broken, but you’re not, and you’ve got
to keep going.

I had no idea how. So I picked up Cuz It’s Broken. It gave some practical advice, funny anecdotes, and
a great dose of compassion. And in time, it healed.

I love their books. So, having read an excerpt from their new It’s Just a F***ing Date book
a few weeks ago, prior to this new dating thing, I thought to look at it again yesterday, considering that my manic phone checking was probably not what the
gods of serenity have in mind.

And here’s some interesting intel I’ve gathered. One of
their questions is, When was the best period in your life, and What was going on
that made it great? My answer was surprising and heartening: the best period of
my life is happening now, the last few months of my life. What’s happening in
it? Playing in a band, signing up for acting classes, going on auditions,
planning a trip to the sea shore with my cousins, buying a new (to me) car,
upgrading my wardrobe, going on a meditation retreat, eating well, seeing live
entertainment, working the steps.

Also, I was using the Gratitude Journal app on my phone that
dinged twice daily to remind me to pause & write something in.

When did this change, it asks? When I was asked on a date by someone
I’m interested in. That’s when.

Suddenly, my center of focus has veered sharply toward
someone else, what they think of me, if I’m approved, if my life activities are
good enough, if my success is enough, if I’m prudent but sexy enough.

In short, what changed is that all the things that attracted
someone to me in the first place, all the things that were bringing me joy, and
self-esteem, and hope, have been tossed in favor of what you think of me.

This is a terrible
recipe for self-love!!

This is not the first time that my eyes have wandered off my
own music chart onto someone else’s in the orchestra of life and dating. I’d
explained to someone once that if life were an orchestra, the most important
thing is that we stay on our own page, with our own notes, listening to
what’s happening around us, but focusing actively on what’s in front of and important
to us. It would be a disaster if the oboe began to play the notes of the viola.

But, that’s what has happened for me before; I get worried, I get crazed.

Not attractive to me. Or to you.

So, what can I actively do to get back to that place, the
book asks next? Well, for starters, I can type some things into my daily
gratitude app. I can choose two photos from my portfolio to send to this
modeling agency that may be a dead-end, but I was stopped on the street for. I
can go back on Theater Bay Area and find another casting call, and I can find
another monologue and start on that.

There are PLENTY of things that I can do to get back to that
place, because in that place I was simply doing what fed me, was important
to me, was fun, and enlivening.

And one of the changes can be to remember, it’s just a
f*cking date and was never meant as the end
goal – the whole “meet you on the way to meeting me” DOESN’T WORK if I stop
trying to actively meet myself, you know.

It’s time for me to allow the mass rush of thinking about
this, the boy, etc., recede into just one part of the array of my life. I have so
much else I was doing that created now as the greatest period in my life—and, really, it is.

change · dating · opening · truth · vulnerability · writing

Dance of the Cerebellum.

January 19, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s still too much of the game to be played before you
get to see my trivialities, my lols, my 8,000 vanity shots.

There needs to be order about the thing, this dating thing,
this ‘I wasn’t even sure if it was a date until I asked you mid-non date about
it’ thing. And you told me that you hoped it would be. And so it was.

I write everything here. I write about love and sex and
alcoholism and family dysfunction and self -exploration and -derision and
-love. I write about healing and change and acceptance. I write about
banalities and wrap them in a coat of revelation.

I only just began writing again, and I won’t censor because
you’re here now. Even though, that’s what the game is. That’s what the
beginning is. It’s an opening, always by degrees. Here are my cards, the ones
okay to be seen. Next hand, here are a few more—are you folding yet? Am I?
Here, one by one, is the rest of the deck, a little coffee-stained and edge-frayed.

I had a dream about you the night you asked me to
dinner. I dreamt you told me you were 18. And we kissed. And I pressed mine to
your soft, full lips.

And yesterday, when it happened in real time, you told
me you were 25. And we kissed. And you pressed your soft, full lips to mine. …

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s too much to be known and unknown, to be veiled, and
slowly opened. Too much trust to be laid down before I am willing to open
myself and what I offer here. And too much I want to say here in this writing–to myself and my friends–about that process of
opening. This is my platform, my cauldron of community, where we all get to dive in and find the pearl at the
bottom.

And I need to dive, explore, create, and parse. I need to
tease and relate and recall and make sense.

I am a Libra, after all. Communication is our oxygen.

If I friend on the first date, you’ll see
that I know what a Libra is and does. That I talk to trees and ‘heart the 80s.’
That I argue with myself about every last particle of myself.

“Respond to Friend Request.”

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

“Accept.”

But I guess there’s an exception to everything.

acting · change · expansion · meditation · truth

S/he had so much potential.

January 18, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

I want you to imagine yourself doing something you’ve always wanted
to do, but you haven’t.

This could be play Frisbee golf, visit a foreign country,
learn piano, plant a sapling. Anything.

I want you to picture yourself engaged in this activity,
noticing your movements, your self, how you’re feeling, what energy you’re
carrying.

Now, I want you to remove yourself, and in your stead,
imagine your inner most power–the very greatest power you have thumping in your
heart–doing that activity. See if you can sense or see or imagine the unmasked
self, the soul part, your unharmed self engaged in your dream activity. Again, notice their movements, their feelings, what energy they carry.

Is it different?

Is there a difference between how you imagine yourself to
engage in the world, and how, well, the world wants you to engage in it? Are
you freer, larger, glowy? Are you lighter, uninhibited, unafraid?

Maybe, or not. Maybe you won’t do the above. But, this
morning, I did. Just sort of made up the meditation, “thought exercise,” as I sat in my morning meditation, and I
did see myself differently. I was envisioning today’s audition, envisioning
myself onstage in the dress I’ve chosen, giving my monologue. And I felt the
urge to see what would happen if it weren’t me, but the me that lives under all
my cages. I will tell you, it was very different. The second one confident,
unafraid to fill the space, to be big. Not hiding.

I’m going to try to remember that part of me, because it is
always with me, when I go out into the world, and onto the stage today. That
there is only a trap door of fear that prevents me from being her. And what if,
for a few moments, I can pry it open, and let myself be and let you see what I’ve always wanted
you to see: I am more than who I’ve been.

And greater than my obfuscation.

community · fear · nature · spirituality · truth

Remember What the Redwoods Told You

January 15, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Two weekends ago, I attended the annual women’s spirituality
retreat I’ve been going to every January for the last 6 years, since the group
was formed. Last year, I asked my doctors to move my chemo treatment so that I could
attend it. It’s a pretty important milemarker for me, and every year, I sit in
the circle of twenty or so women, and I get to see where my levels are that
year. I get to remember the crises or issues I was working on in previous
years, and how they’ve fallen away, or if they’re still present. It’s my annual
stock-check.

I still remember the first year when my big issue was around
the food they were serving. Everything was homemade, delicious… and in buffet
style. I found myself eating beyond capacity at each meal, and by the end of
the retreat, I shared what I learned was why: I had no food at home. I was
trying to gorge myself, as if that would satiate me beyond the 24 hours, and I
could bring some of that fullness home with me to my empty fridge.

This was in the days long before I got a handle on money or
my relationship with it, and I didn’t buy food. Sure, I ate, and it wasn’t an
anorexia thing; I just felt that I didn’t have enough money, or enough care for
myself to buy anything, so I’d eat popcorn for dinner, or cook up the 55 cent
packages of asian noodles I could buy near my work. It wasn’t abundant for
sure.

I shared this with the group, I cried about not treating
myself well, about not prioritizing my needs. And, several years later, I can
report that that behavior around food, though occasionally rearing, is pretty
long past.

This year, however, I was eager to “get to the root” of
several things—one thing in particular—and it was the last day of the retreat.
We had our morning meditation session, we’d shared, and the closing meditation
always took place after a walking meditation through the forest path and down
to a lower outdoor chapel of sorts, with wooden slats for benches, right
next to a trickling stream, in the center of a wooded bonanza of nature.

I didn’t want to do the walking meditation. We’d walked down
the path silently yesterday, though not with intention, and I just wanted to
GET there, so I could have more insights. I wanted to get to the real meditation. I even voted that we skip it.

But, I was overruled, and found myself walking about 15
feet behind another retreatant, with slow, purportedly meaningful steps. So, I
walked slowly, and a little past the wooden bridge over the stream, I began to
relax, to notice, to breathe, to see where I was, to be where I was – exactly where I’d been one year
before, when I was chemo-bald, in the middle of treatments, and so very unsure
of what was going to happen to me.

I felt that duality,
the nature of being in two worlds, one in the present, one in the past, walking
with my past self and experience, knowing that a very frightened but very brave
woman had worn these very shoes on this very path one year before.

And I recalled something else.

After my first round of chemo and month-long hospital
stay last October. After my esophagus melted in reaction, and I was told I
would probably be infertile after treatment. After my doctors told me that even with
treatment, my best statistics were a 40% five-year survival rate, I went for a
walk.

I am lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where I can walk
pretty close to trees, and I was taking a much needed walk, albeit slowly.
Coincidentally, it was on this walk when I got a phone call from Stanford,
looking to plan our intake interview for bone-marrow transplant. I hadn’t yet
made my decision to pass on the transplant and go with straight chemo,
believing that to be enough. I hadn’t yet heard all about the pre-transplant radiation that zaps
you to smitherines, that I would have to relocate for 9 months to the
Peninsula for 24-hour care, that even with the abominable treatments, I would only be given a
60% chance to live instead of 40. And this woman was calling to talk to me
about it.

I told her I needed to call her back. I was taking a
walk.

I walked up near a house where a large redwood grows next to
the sidewalk, pushing the concrete out of its way, slowly and surely. I walked
up to that redwood and I put my palm
flat against its umber, striated flank.

And I silently asked the tree: Am I going to live?

(Did I lose you yet?)

And in my body, in my poor shop-worn blood, in the center of where we listen, I felt and heard
the answer: Yes.

Yes.

I am going to live.

I get emotional writing about it. And, walking down that forest path in Napa
just two weeks ago, I got emotional, too. It was
there I remembered all that had happened, all the fear, and the relief, and the anger, and the
certainty I felt (even though who can be certain) that I was going to live
through my cancer. The trees had told me so, and I believed them.

I may have lost you with the tree-talking thing, but, meh,
c’est la vie.

The point is, I lived. ‘Til today. I am healthy, besides
this damn cold; my blood is normal and cancer-free, and I am alive.

Every single day is a relief, a question, an imperative
question and invitation. I heard on NPR last night about a woman whose mother
went into full remission for a year and a half, and then the cancer returned
with vengeance and she died. But how important that year of life was, to her
and to her family. It’s been a year and two months since mine went into
remission, and stories like that turn my insides to ice.

Luckily, I was on my way driving to band practice. The band
I didn’t belong to a year ago, couldn’t have conceived of, in a car I didn’t
have or conceive of a year ago. I reminded myself that I, too, have made this
year important.

And—for whatever it might mean to you, it means the world to
me—I remind myself that the redwoods said Yes.

acceptance · adulthood · family · fear · generosity · recovery · relationships · the middle way · truth

People are Not Projects.

June 13, 2012 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

Damnit. There goes my favorite hobby. What will I do with my
afternoons, now?

I’ve heard the phrase before, and it recurred to me this
morning. My mom sent me an email back on Monday, qualifying why she’d replied
so “vehemently” on Friday that she wanted me under NO circumstances to tell her
whether I had the genome for Alzheimer’s, if I were to get the genetic mapping
thing I said I was maybe possibly going to do someday.

Even before she emailed me on Monday, I got the chance to
work through some of my anger at her refusal for clarity, her refusal to do things the
way I’d do them, or the way I’d want her to do them.

I even got to see that there is perhaps a part of me that is
in fear that she will have it. Watching what she went through with her mom, I can’t imagine it. Though I know I’d have the resources internal and external to do the best I could, if she does.

On Monday, she wrote me back and said, as I knew, that her mom was
around the same age my mom is now when she began to show signs of it, and that
she’s “very frightened.” I was amazed that my mother could let herself admit
that.

I wrote her back that, of course, I understand, and will respect
her feelings and wishes around this. Obviously.

And so, I’m reminded that people are not projects. She is
not on this earth, this lifetime, for me to fix her. As I’m also reminded
often, people are not broken, and I don’t need to fix them. She isn’t broken.
She is human, like me, like you. I have faults and assets, she has faults and
assets. Mainly, those faults are just calcified fears and defense mechanisms.
And it’s not up to me to fix them. They
are not “problems.” They just are. They are part of the map that is my mom.
They are part of the challenges and opportunities she has in this lifetime. And
it is part of my own challenge this lifetime to leave her be.

This is new behavior. Not alien, but new. We, I, grew up
enmeshed with her, her feelings were my own, and I tended to and acquiesced to
and modified myself in order to attend to her feelings. It was my own defense
mechanism. And, it was also in some ways what was needed. She was an
undiagnosed manic depressive, self-medicating with prescription and non-prescription tranquilizers
and uppers. Her feelings and mood swings were uncontainable, palpable, and able to wash a small
child overboard the ship of normalcy. So, I learned how to stand by the
rigging. I learned how to read the waves, to anticipate them, to ensure that
things were precisely as they needed to be. I learned to ensure life was easier
for her when she was in her clinical depression by not having or voicing or
owning my needs. I learned to ensure that she not retreat into that state by
allowing her manic times free reign, and stand tensely in the wings of her
life, egging her on – because mania meant some more of her, but not really. It
just meant she moved more quickly in her neuroses. And was hard to be around
then.

That was probably harder. It was like a live wire. Every
vibrantly theatrical gesture and every squeal of delight was like a hammer to my heart, knowing
that it was inauthentic, fleeting, and often, embarrassing. More than the
typical teen angsty, my parents are lame kind. More like, this person isn’t aware of herself and how big she can be, and I’m sorry she’s hijacked your conversation/this movie theather/…our vacation.

I went on a trip with her a few years ago to Sedona. I’d
begun to heal some of my own self-destructive patterns, and this was one of the
first times she and I were getting to spend any significant time together. It
didn’t go well.

Diagnosed, and newly (doctor prescribed) medicated as she
now was, she is/was still my mom. Even today, even though the swings have
lessened, the grooves in the thought patterns and behaviors are still there,
engrained over a lifetime, and I’ll suddenly find myself talking to a weepy child where a minute before stood a fierce New Yorker. But, in Sedona, we decided to do one of those Pink
Jeep tours, where they take you out in a jeep into the gorgeous red rock
landscape.

My mom had to be the entertainment. There were maybe 6 of us
in the back of the jeep, and as my mom continued to make herself more and more
“heard” and “seen” by this group of strangers, as she put on her mask of entertainer
– witty, loud, invasive – I began to feel myself shrinking in her wake. I began
to notice that I was doing what I’d always done, and detach from the dramatic
entrance of my mom’s persona. I didn’t like it.

I didn’t like that I was reacting that way, and so instead,
I began to get sullen and angry. She
picked up on the anger. And she couldn’t understand why – she’d been being who
she’d always been, acting (double meaning intended) as she always had, why was
I mad with her? I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know what was the “right” way to
answer that in my new recovery language – I simply said that it had more to do
with me than with her, and that was about it. She didn’t like this answer; I
knew it was true, but I didn’t like it either. We’re a “processy” – or we had
been – kind of pair. (She is a shrink, after all…) And I wasn’t going to or able to process this with her.

What is there to process? You’re not being the mom I want
you to be? You’re behaving so falsely, and invading these folks’ space? THIS
JEEP TOUR IS NOT ABOUT YOU?

No, I couldn’t say those things. There is and was the truth
that it does have more to do with me
than with her. How able I am to accept and love my mom as and who she is
without trying to change her. Without needing to be right. And without pitying her.

There is the truth that people are not projects, and that
she is not broken. There is also the magnanimous truth that my mother is also
brilliant, witty, stylish, and bold. Yes, she is also desperately scared of
everything, self-defeatest, and paralytically despairing. She is all of these
things. (She’s also a Gemini, if that helps.)

My mother is a human, with places she falls short of the
ideal, like me, like you; places where she excels, like me, like you. And, in
the end, just wants to feel loved, and at peace. Like me. And like you.