Dear Mom, I Hallmark You.

May 11, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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It was always very clear what our family would do on
Mother’s Day: We would have bought hanging fuschia plants at Metropolitan Plants up on Route 17 in Paramus, one for our mom (Ben’s and mine) and one for
my Dad’s mom. We’d make the U-turn by Grand Union, near which, whenever driving
past it together, my best friend M. and I would parrot a mean jingle about our
babysitter: “Get everything you don’t want aaaat Grand Pam!” (name changed for
anonymity!)

Once home, we’d exchange the broken and feeble fuschia that hung by the
side of our house all winter for the new one, hook the other in the Camry, and
drive over to Queens.

After the lovely awkwardness of pizza with them, our family
would reward ourselves by stopping by The Pastrami King. Which has since
closed, and there’s now a Pastrami Queen somewhere, which, sorry feminism, is
not as good.

Pastrami King had the real barrels of pickles along the wall, all different
kinds, fat, warty, dark, light green, and my mom would dive into the barrel with the plastic tongs to fetch these prizes out of the water. My brother and I would gag at
her.

We’d get round potato knishes and pounds and pounds of,
really, the best pastrami I’ve ever had, and also some of their own spicy
mustard – because people, no mayo, no ketchup, nothing but MUSTARD, is supposed to go on a pastrami sandwich. Sorry.
It’s the Jew way. Well, at least, our Jew way.

Mother’s Day did mean
something in our household, and despite all the “It’s a Hallmark holiday” scorn
it receives, and despite the mixed emotions it may bring up for people who’ve
lost moms, lost babies, can’t or didn’t have babies, for me, it’s nice. Yes,
even on this arbitrary date some CEO thought up some years ago, it’s nice to
acknowledge my Mom. And so, I do.

This year, by coincidence and fortune, I came across a
website with cuff bracelets with large metropolitan city subway maps engraved
into them. Paris, Berlin, Chicago, New York. My mother, the consummate New
Yorker. In fact, this very morning, she sent me a batch of photos from the
window display of her local dry-cleaner. The purveyors apparently rotate a series
of Barbie tableaus. Last time was the Oscars, complete with a miniature “Gone
with the Wind” poster, red carpet, and a Marylin Monroe Barbie. This month, a Barbie Seder,
with mini Afikomen and all!

She loves the city, and so, my brother and I split the cost
of one of these cuff bracelets for her. She may never wear it, it may be “not
quite right,” and sure, a nicely written
card could have done the same thing, and for many years it has. But, this year,
it was nice to say, “Hey, I know this is something very important to you, a
part of you, this city, and I want to give you something that represents that,
that says, Ben and I know you. You are not invisible, you are seen, you are
recognized, and you are appreciated in your interests and oddities.” (Not many
women her age would brave black and white saddle shoes with skinny jeans. But,
her photo to us to mark the start of Spring was of just that!)

I am not a mother. I don’t know if I will be, the fates
haven’t sent me that postcard yet. But it’s baby season around me. At work, I’ve gotten
to snuggle almost weekly with what started as newborn for the last 4
months, and now teeths and laughs and dances and flirts all shy and coy
sometimes, while his mom gets to compose emails with two hands. Like yesterday, I’ve gotten to snuggle another newborn at my friend’s house, letting
him sleep on me for swaths of time where my little heartbeat rests right
against his, and his flutters like a bird, and he’s so warm and soft and new.

It’s glorious.

I’m flying out at the end of the month to visit one of my
best girl friends on Long Island. She got married last year during 4th of July,
went on honeymoon in August, and got pregnant on a boat in the Mediterranean. 9
months later, baby. I asked a few of the new moms I know if it would be “worth” my
flying out to see her. How “important” it was. If money were no object, it
would be no question. It’s the only time at work that I can really go in the
foreseeable future.

How important is it? The baby won’t remember. My aunt tells
me all the time how she was there when I
was born. I don’t remember. Doesn’t really mean anything at all to me. Or, at
least, it hasn’t. But, now I’m beginning to see that it is meaningful — to the adults. To have
the people you love around you at a time when everything is changing, exciting, exhausting, new – I’d want my best friend there, too.

I don’t have those “uteran tugs” that some women experience
around their 20s and 30s, that ache for a baby in my body. But being so close
to the motherhood around me makes it so much more real, significant,
miraculous.

I’ve written before about my own “Maybe Baby” question, so this
one is just to say, laying a baby – my baby or not – on my chest, having him
nuzzle into me and rest because I’m a safe place, is Life’s great privilege.

allies · career · community · debt · fear · friendship · hope · Jewish · love · perseverance · scarcity · self-care · support

Bossypants

May 10, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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“You look like you’re leading something,” she said.

We met for an info interview. My former boss and I. I wanted
to run past her my career ideas, my flailing, my desires, my questions. And what can
happen in an hour (I should know by now), is phenomenal.

We caught up briefly, I heard about the cross-Bay move, the
house hunt that fell magically into place after a year of city-looking, about
the semi-adult kids, and about the current work.

I met her in 2008. I had a fever of 103 that weekend and
had to cancel our initial interview, so we had to meet on a Sunday, fever or no
fever — I had a drastically depleting bank account, no safety net, and did what
it took. What it took was meeting her in a Starbucks, rabid coffee addiction
being the first thing we aligned on. We sat talking for over an hour, about the
job, sure, but about lots of other things, too.

I didn’t even apply for that job. I’d applied for a
different position in the organization, and having been passed up for that one,
they handed my soon-to-be new boss my resume, and said, Here, she might work
well for you.

I was blonde at the moment. I’d quit my job at the property
management company with no net and no prospects. No plan and no direction. I’d
simply had enough of crying in my car at lunch because I felt so stuck and lost
over my “career.” I’d been there almost 2 years. They were great. But it wasn’t
“me,” and I didn’t know what “me” was anyway, so I stayed.

Until I didn’t. Until my coworker there went out to lunch
with me, and I can’t even remember exactly what she must have asked me, or
exactly what I must have said. But it triggered action, for better or worse.

I called a friend of mine after that lunch, and he asked me two important questions: Why would you stay? “Financial security.” Why would you
leave? “Love. Self-love.”

I’d never said those words before. I never knew I’d had such
an impulse or a drive such as that. “love” or “self-love.”

What I didn’t have was a plan, a back-up, a safety net. And
for all that people say about “leap and the net will appear”… well, I should do a leeetle bit of my part in assuring a safe landing, too.

So, that weekend, I gave my notice, hosted a my now-annual “Pre-Val Hearts & Stars” party, dyed my hair blonde. And then scoured the
interwebs for hope. Which, FYI, is not where hope lives.

With a fever, a toilet paper shortage, and lots of “I
want to do something ‘creative,’ but I don’t know what that is” spinning, one
morning I woke up, and asked myself, What do I like to do?

Strangely, the answer was, “Well, I like being Jewish.” Ha.

So, onto the interwebs I went, and typed into google: Jewish, San Francisco.

I applied to everything there was. And I got called in for
the first job at that organization. And then I got called in by my soon-to-be
boss.

I was tired, desperate, and blond. I was feverish, scared,
and brain-addled.

I got the job.

(Here, I could insert the same style story that got me the
job at the property management company, under very similar circumstances including toilet-paper and food
shortage, but I’ll leave that for now – except to say, perhaps you now can
understand why it is that “Stability First” is my current motto and touchstone.
– No, It’s not “fun,” it’s not zany, or “creative,” but – guess what, to paraphrase
a friend I heard last week, It gives me the table upon which to build the
puzzle of my life. Stability first gives me the freedom and the ease and the
breathing room to … buy toilet paper.)

And here my now-former boss and I sat yesterday, at another
coffee shop, so full circle it makes me smile, and here were are again, talking
of Jewish, talking of organizations, of helping, of building, of changing. It’s
6 years later, now, almost to the date, that she and I have sat
across tables sipping our addictions and exchanging our personal and professional lives.

She showed up for me during cancer. She brought me gift
cards to Trader Joe’s so I wouldn’t go hungry or worry about doing so. She
brought me a travel Shabbat kit with candles and a prayer that my mom and I
would use once when she was here. She brought with her to Israel a prayer, a plea, I’d written during cancer that I’d asked her to take with her there, and she did, under a lemon tree in her parents’ backyard, dug, burned and buried my prayer with her small niece and nephew. She told me how incredible I was and how inspiring
I am.

And yesterday, she told me the same. She gave me hard
answers, great ideas, helped me think through my own. This woman is a mentor
and a friend, and lost or not lost, I have allies like her, unique as she is,
all over this planet.

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

Rage against the dying of your light.

May 9, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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So, I’ve seen this somatic therapist (Rosen Method) now about 4 times, and
each time I plan to go, I wonder if we’re “doing” anything, if anything is
“happening,” especially if anything is “changing.” I want results to
long-harbored ills, and I want them now. Or at least evidence that we’re
heading in that direction.

Damn this woo-woo laying on of hands, heal thyself bullshit
– gimme the Rx, gimme the fix, and let’s get on with this “life” business. Or
more accurately, let’s get on with the happy life business. Enough processing. More doing, more getting, more
fulfillment, more joy, more security, more ….

She told me that if I keep on trying to skip over my
emotions, they’ll still just be there. Waiting, licking at the back of my
throat, causing the tension in my shoulders I’ve carried for decades. If I put a
lid on them, feel them well up, and force them back down, … well, I could
finish that sentence with, “Then you might get cancer.”

But I’m so good at
emoting. I’m an emotional wreck! No, I kid, but I am an emotional person, I feel
things, deeply, often, sometimes. So, where am I not feeling what needs to come
up and out?

“Anger wasn’t an allowable emotion,” I told her. I know I’m
not unique in that. But anger was modeled as a way to impose, control,
terrorize. Anger, I interpreted, is bad. It causes people to behave badly,
meanly, poisoned.

Anger, I also surmised, is consuming. When you are angry,
you are nothing else but a hot, raging ball of ferocity. No humanity, no
compassion, no faults.

I’ve worked on anger before; I’ve read Julia Cameron saying,
Anger is a call to action. It shows us where our boundaries are being crossed,
and calls us to take action in their assertion. (to paraphrase.)

Anger is healthy. Anger is right.

Anger is totally not allowed.

This isn’t to say I don’t get angry, anyway. Ask my
coworkers! But I feel it as a place where my veil of self-control has slipped,
instead of as an integrated part of my expression. I feel my anger as a
failure. Something to be overcome, overruled, rooted out.

But, that’s simply not the case, and the more I keep it separate
from myself and an integrated whole, the more compartmentalized and dissociated
I will be.

It’s not like I want to be the Hulk, or a crank, or someone
who’s angry all the time. I just want to allow it to be a part of my emotional
range, just like compassion or amusement, and like boredom or fear or apathy. I
don’t quash with visceral force even these less “comfortable” emotions; I don’t
feel shame over feeling them. Positive or negative ones.

But Anger. And grief. Get the cold shoulder. The taut
one. The tense, clamped down, forcible shoulder.

Being a somatic therapist in this way of working, it’s sort
of like reiki, only she’s not “sending me good vibes;” she’s observing how my body tenses or releases,
acknowledges “true” things, or asks me to rephrase, since that didn’t “feel
true.” I don’t know precisely what polygraph she’s plugged into in my body, but
when I do rephrase to something less “proper,” I do feel the difference.

She can feel very acutely when, this week, I began to
talk about my disappointment around work. And I began to say that it feels like
I’m just giving my dad more evidence that I’m the fuck-up daughter. He’s the
Dudley Do-Right (his words), beyond reproach and reproaching everyone else – can
you feel my anger, too? – and that I don’t have a firm career track, a
“successful” life, feels like more evidence for him that I’m the fuck-up. She
asked if I felt that way about the career stuff. And I said, no, I simply feel
like a failure. Which I interpret through all the lovely filters of his I’ve
internalized as a fuck-up. Which I suppose is the same thing, come to think of it.

You’ve heard this before from me. The antipathy toward getting
better, or simply seeing myself as
better because it would change the entire nature of my relationship with him.
There wouldn’t be a relationship
– certainly not the one we’ve had, at least. And so for now, in fact since
cancer, there is no relationship.
Yell at your sick daughter while she’s getting chemo, and you stop getting the
right to shame me. Sorry, Pops. I’m sitting on the bench right now.

But I haven’t walked out of the park, have I? I still want
revenge. I still want to pain him. I still want him to see the error of his
ways then and now, and be the father I
want that I’ve never had. I still have that hope. And so my anger kicks in when
I recall him to others. My frustration. My deep deep disappointment.

But only for a flash. As soon as I let myself have a moment
of anger, even now, I have this impulse to say, Well, focus on yourself, Molly, and
what you can change, and your expectations; you’re living your life
away from him, and yadda yadda bullshit.

I need to feel angry!
I need to feel betrayed. I need to rail against the fate and circumstance of
it, and I need to let it pass.

I never let it pass. Pass through me. Through my red, pumping
oxygenated blood.

She asked me as I lay (clothed!) on the massage table, Can
you feel that? Can you feel when you got angry how much energy there was? Your
voice got loud, your body got hot.

And then it was gone. And then my shoulders tense, my gut
constricts. I’m not allowed to be angry. I’m not supposed to be.

I don’t want to let it flow through me. I’m terrified of
being consumed by it like they were.

But, I have had the experience a few years ago around grief.
I was terrified that if I began to let it out, it would drown me. If I started
to cry, to feel it, it would overwhelm me, and I would be lost in it. In the
psych ward in it. So, I held it back. (I do still.) But during that time, maybe
5 or so years ago, in the presence and care of another therapist, I let myself
feel some of what I needed to. I let it pass through me, out of me, I let it
disorient me.

But it didn’t dismantle me. I wasn’t wrecked by it. I felt it. It
was hard and sad and wracking, but it wasn’t annihilating.

I will try to remember that as I go forward here, because it
feels really old and really sad to hold my body in fight/flight/freeze all the
time, and to interpret my life and myself as anything other than brilliant.

commitment · community · courage · defeat · despair · faith · hope · hopeless · recovery · resilience

"This is the way to a faith that works."

May 8, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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I heard yesterday that another definition for resilience is
to move ourselves out of harm’s way, to get ourselves out of dangerous
circumstances. That resilience means to move toward health, wholeness and
joy.

…There are plenty of “definitions” I hear around, some more
Webster’s than others. But I get that part of resilience means to get out of
circumstances and situations that cause us to need to be resilient. – If you are the inflatable clown,
resilience means to step out of the way of the punch. You know, if you had
legs. Which I do. Long ones.

I didn’t actually intend to get healthy when I walked into a
room 8 years ago. I just wanted to stop getting punched. I listened, bawled,
accepted help, and getting healthy was the byproduct.

If it wasn’t my intention to get healthy, but by listening
to the voices in my head that told me to go somewhere I thought would help, I
got healthy anyway… is it possible that the same voices that feed me lines like, “It’s
worth it; You can heal; You are important; What you offer is important,” can
get me healthier almost without my willing it?

I mean, that’s the point, wasn’t it? It wasn’t me that
implanted that thought 8 years ago – the thought I had was, “Have another beer,
it will solve this moment, and nothing after that matters.” But the thought
that wasn’t mine was, “Go to a meeting.” Who the f*ck thought that?!

Wasn’t me. So that means there’s something inside me, beside
and under the voices that usually crowd out the cheerleaders and the still calm
being, that is there, speaking, helping, wanting for me things I can’t seem to
accept I want for myself.

There is something else inside me (not like a scene from Alien, though it feels as alien sometimes) that wants me
to be healthy, whether I like it or not. And most significantly, whether
I know how to or not.

I don’t know how. But
the undergirding and buttresses of my soul do. And if that now long-ago experience was any
indication, they’re there, talking, waiting for me to listen, to follow, to
accept.

I was also at a point that I’ve later come to define as
surrender. All my best ideas gave me were the same thing, day after day. A Groundhog’s
Day existence. An eeking by, scraping at
the dregs of my self-esteem, morality, energy. I was running on fumes by then,
and in short supply they were. I feel so much the same these days. So wan and worn and tired and unknowing and
lost.

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that read, When you’re
lost, you can always follow your dreams.

Platitudes, sure. But it was a kind of wink to someone like
me who right now feels lost. It means
there’s always something to hope for. Without dreams, without hope, there’s
nothing.

If what you can expect for your life is the same thing
you’ve always done, and the same experiences you’ve always had – if all you can
see for yourself is a life as an inflatable clown, … well, for me, there’s a
point at which I’m so exhausted of being it, that I simply don’t stand back up into
the firing line. And in that moment of surrender, of giving up the fight, …
well, that’s when it seems to me the change comes.

I’m not the first nor last to write about surrender as a
gateway to freedom. I’m not the first to terribly despise that that is so, or
to attempt lipservice to it in an effort to bypass the deflation. It’s not the
first time I’ve felt eviscerated by life and my efforts in it.

But, if I can recognize, remember, maybe even take comfort
in the fact that my evisceration led me to a place of light, friendship, joy,
health… I can try to let this time not feel as bleak. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel
like my butt has been kicked by life these past few years. Doesn’t mean I don’t
get to feel voraciously and vehemently angry. Doesn’t mean that I’m not going
to drag my fingernails down the face of “god.”

But the voices, the good ones, permit me all these feelings,
and gently – sometimes not so gently – whisper in my ear the directions toward
getting my heart inflated again.

career · courage · self-pity · self-support · uncertainty · work

worker bee.

May 7, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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I’ve been funky and introspective lately. A little unmoored.
After all that excitement in April of the trip and offering my own job proposal/promotion, and getting flat
results from it, the job at least, it’s felt like I’m back at square one again.
Back at the crossroads where it’s my turn to figure out what I’m doing with my
life. What I should do, what I want to do, what I can do.

And it feels disheartening—I guess that’s pretty entirely
how I feel. A little flat, a little steam-less. My friend told me yesterday
this too shall pass; even though that makes small comfort when you’re “in it,”
she is of course right. But once again, folks are suggesting ideas for what I
should do next, and nothing seems right.

Do I stay at the job I have with a salary and
responsibilities that don’t reflect what I can offer? Do I stay here because
it’s stable, because my boss said he’s willing to offset some of the costs for
a non-profit management certificate course? Do I stay because it’s “easy”?

Though, is it? Is it easy to feel so small in the work you
do? Is it easy to know you can do more but stay put? Is it easy to accept the
minutae and banality of office clerkness? NO. Of fucking course not.

This is not the
easier road, but it is currently the one I’m standing on, and the one that is providing
me a livelihood. And when I come to consider it, it’s a decent, if on the
meager side, livelihood. Do I stay because other people have it worse off, and struggle harder?
Haven’t I learned the foolishness of martyrdom?

It’s not like I’m not trying. I’ve sent out two resumes, one
rejected. And assume I’ll send out more. But my heart is not in this. I guess
I’m just disappointed at the moment – having put a lot of energy into offering
my job some ways to increase their success and my own, and was told, “Not now,
and probably not for at least a year, if then.” Do I hang on for that??

I need more clarity from my job about what that really
means. I want more clarity around if this is just going to be me languishing
for another year—and also, if I am owed that annual cost of living increase
that my coworkers receive. And if that bit is worth it anyway?

I pulled the 4 of Cups this morning, the card of
self-absorption, apathy. They really nail me sometimes.

Introspection can be a healthy habit, when it’s accompanied
with outward action. But when it’s just mental masturbating, or emotional, then
it’s not really effective.

It’s hard to pull yourself out of the mire though. But, as
my friend said, this too shall pass. More will be revealed, the cloud will shift
from in front of the sun, and I will know what to do next.

Much of it starts with asking the real and hard questions to
my boss. If this is really worth my while to stay, to build toward what I
offered them, then I really need to know that in more than
empty promises of someday. That doesn’t work for me.

Is that too much to ask? I don’t know, because I haven’t
yet.

I was brave enough to ask for what I want; having been told,
“Not now, maybe someday,” am I brave enough to ask for what I need? It’s not like I have other offers rolling in.

But, the answers to my own questions and to my boss’s will help
determine whether it’s time to seek those offers or not, and I can stop feeling quagmired again.

Life is way too short to languish in “maybes” that you can
get a clearer answer to.

community · connection · courage · encouragement · poetry · spirituality

Connect.

May 6, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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I haven’t much to say today, so I’m going to pull a Melissa
and give you one of my favorite poems.

I first heard David Whyte on the carride home from my annual
women’s meditation retreat perhaps 5 years ago. My friend, in her new and
exciting Mini, maybe even with the top down, decided we were a little too
altered at the moment to listen to music on the drive down the mountains of
Napa, and so put in a CD of David Whyte. I’d never heard of him. Or his Irish accent. Or the way he repeats his own lines when he recites
them, the way he pauses to savor and emphasize words. But, I did that day.

The next time I heard the poem recited, it was in the
hospital, maybe a year and a half ago. The same friend brought a slightly battered, second-hand copy of the David Whyte book named for the poem. The nurse that
day, with her Hawaiian flowerprint scrubs and her own Aussie accent, saw the gift exchange and exclaimed her own
love of David Whyte. So I asked her to read this one aloud to us, and
reluctantly, shyly, she assented. It was so still and lovely in that room then.

When you get a chance to hear him, do it. Till then, reading
will suffice.

Everything
Is Waiting For You

Your
great mistake is to act the drama

as
if you were alone. As if life

were
a progressive and cunning crime

with
no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the
intimacy of your surroundings.
Surely,

even
you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the
swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out
your solo voice. You must note

the
way the soap dish enables you,

or
the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness
is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The
stairs are your mentor of things

to
come, the doors have always been there

to
frighten you and invite you,

and
the tiny speaker in the phone

is
your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put
down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

the
conversation. The kettle is
singing

even
as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have
left their arrogant aloofness and

seen
the good in you at last. All the
birds

and
creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte. listen. (start at 1:19; so good!) read.

acting · career · connection · fun · isolation · laughter · loneliness · love · perseverance

“Just about the time you’re rotting with seriousness or serious boredom, something happens or else you’d die.” ~ Lorine Niedecker, poet

May 5, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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“The thing about grief,” she told me, “is that something is
broken, but you’re not – and you’ve got to keep going.”

Years ago she told me this, and I reflect on it in so many
situations.

Yesterday, after writing that blog that tore me up a bit, I
had to go assist at a work event, and then head to an audition for a play. I
really wasn’t feeling it.

It’s been two months now since I’ve auditioned, as I’d been cast in a play (yay!), and then turned down for other parts that allowed me the
time to go on vacation. In the meantime, I did go on vacation, and had
elaborate experience and processing about relationships, values, love. I also
got clearer about my career goals, and implemented some action around them at work,
which not surprisingly, I was told last week were great ideas but probably
aren’t going to happen “within the next year,” if at all. So, there’s been
processing around that, too.

In all, it’s been kinda heavy around here. Making
check-points of where I am, where I want to be personally and professionally.
And so I showed up to that audition, late and lost in the hills of Berkeley, with
little more than the feet I was standing on.

But, most times, that’s enough.

God, it was fun. I
really had forgotten that I love this stuff. I’d forgotten the titillation and
excitement, and the nervous sizing-up from the other auditioners, and the
frantic reading of sides before your name is called, wondering if you’re
supposed to do an accent or not.

It was great. It’s less than 20 minutes of life, but it
pulled me back to center, away from the future-gazing, away from the
grief-feeling. I still feel off today, and that’s alright, but for a few
minutes yesterday, I got to do something I love doing, simply for the effort of
trying it. I got to meet other women trying it too, and have a coffee date to
pick one’s brain on the whole “Bay Area Theater Biz.”

It’s strange to get back to this again, this thing that I
just want to do because it’s fun and not because my life or income or goals
depend on it. It’s strange to just have the fun thing simply because it’s
fun. There’s no stepping stone here, no ladder, no life plan founded on it.
It’s an extraneous, avocational, extra-curricular dalliance, and isn’t that so needed right now?

I told you I’ve been thinking about getting back into
band-ing again, playing bass again. Simply for the same reason. I forgot what
it’s like to have fun. To do the things I find fun.

In this time that I’ve been “figuring out” my life and my
strategies and my goals, it’s been satisfying and reinforcing and relieving,
but it hasn’t been fun. In fact, it’s been hella lonely in some ways I don’t
get.

All work and no play, and all that.

But, without really intending to, every single day this past week, I spent time with women friends, mostly
long-established, report-having friends. It, too, reinforced something – that
combination of history and laughter and understanding and ease. It, too, brought me back to a sense of myself, a
little lost in the myopia of “life planning.”

I saw a friend’s post this morning that read, “There’s got
to be more to life than this.”

I replied aloud, “There is.”

adulthood · childhood · community · compassion · death · friendship · life

This Used to be my Playground

May 4, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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I’ve been thinking in detail about my home town today.
Thinking about describing it to you: Up the block lived the boy I
had a crush on, across the street from him was our teenage babysitter, the park where
they buried plastic eggs every Easter, the library I used to hide in, and the
honeysuckle fence by the elementary school we all learned to eat from.

I catalogued it all in my brain before I got up. The radius
of what I knew determined by how far we’d bike. The friends who lived the flat
road across town to the other elementary school, and the bakery where my mom
would buy bagels each week, and sometimes cupcakes with frosting heaped on top
in the shape of Sesame Street characters – we’d beg for Cookie Monster, since
he also had a cookie stuck in his mouth.

The Dunkin Donuts down the hill where I got my first job,
and how you could smell the doughnuts baking from the top of the hill. The house next-door where my best friend lived, yellow, now beige with new owners. That big house on
the corner that burned down amid rumors of arson and insurance fraud.

The houses you knew to skip on Halloween, and the little
league fields with an actual brick concession stand. The tire playground that
used to stand at the grade school, where D. fell off the top of the pyramid and broke his
whole leg. The small white, bean-shaped rocks that carpeted that playground; I
picked up a handful the last time I was there, and when I rub them together in my
fist, the sound of scraping unlocks my childhood.

I was going to tell you about the awesome 4th of July parade
one year when I bought a Strawberry Shortcake ice-cream pop that, once
eaten, revealed a “Get One Free” prize on the wooden stick, so that the free one I got had the same message.

The street I first tried to drive down, the patch of pavement
where I fell off my bike and broke my foot.

I’ve been thinking about all this, everything I knew and
remembered, that shaped the world outside my front door, because facebook told me
yesterday that an old classmate’s mom suddenly died of cancer a year after his
father died of it, too. And I was picturing where his house is, just a block
from the library, one I’d have walked past thousands of times. It abuts the big
park where we all went on Memorial Day when school was closed, and there’d be
hot dogs and cotton candy.

For reasons I can’t explain (and despite being tired of
talking about my own cancer — Tired of referencing it like people reference
a year abroad: “Well, last year when I was in Scotland –” “Well, last year when I
had cancer…” as it simply is my frame of reference right now. Tired
and bored of it, and yet astonished at where, like yesterday morning), its
presence and reality will side-swipe me.

My sudden grief wasn’t all about me: it was the sadness of
the reality, once again, that life is so uncertain, so sudden, and so
disillusioning. That life offers those of us in it, grief. Live long enough,
and it just does.

When my final grandparent died last year, my generation, the
one of my classmates, became solidly in the center of life’s process. Our
parents are now grandparents or grandparent age. We’re them. And the generation
we’re birthing is us. We’re transitioning to the center of that boat.

Some of us already have transitioned, lost parents long ago, and have
always been in the center of that boat. But there’s no illusion anymore that
this is something we may be exempt from.

I don’t really know why I cried when I saw this. I felt for
him, for the innocence of our town, for my own remission/relapse fear. For
sudden grief that doesn’t permit goodbyes.

I don’t know how to end this blog. I don’t say that “those
were the days,” that the experience was idyllic, though these recollections tell me it was closer than I knew. But the fact remains that
those of us who grew up, who learned to ride bikes and squirt super soakers at
one another, who bought Big League Chew at the same candy store and rang the same Halloween
doorbells, will always be connected.

We may not be or have been friends, we may barely know the
lives each other lives now, but by circumstance
and proximity, we shaped for one another those two square miles of childhood.

anxiety · beauty · faith · fear · healing · scarcity · self-esteem · self-love · tension · truth

Don’t Hold Your Breath.

May 3, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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No, really, Moll. Relax.

A woman recently told me that the body is the last hold-out.
It’s the last place we carry anxiety, tension, fear, even as we’ve worked
through it on all other levels.

I hold my guts in tension 99% of the time, even when I’m by myself. I rarely breathe
to full capacity, unless I’m reminded to. There is always a slight constriction
of fight-or-flight going on in my body.

The few places I can recall this not to be the case are when
I’m hiking, walking in the woods. Hm, well that’s the only place I can recall
at the moment! Although, it also happened when I would go up to Sonoma to visit
friends, an old boyfriend. I would say I could “breathe bigger” there. There
was something about the openness, the closeness to nature, the un-cityness of
it all that allowed me to open, too.

I’ve done a lot of pondering on how to bring that feeling, that
sense of ease, of safety, home.

I realized something significant this week. My fear takes
two tacks that leave me hamstrung in a Catch-22: On the one hand, I’m atrociously scared
of being boring, being neglected, being overlooked. Yet, on the other, I’m
afraid that if I am seen, I will be
annihilated, attacked, shamed.

What’s a girl to do?

Well, I can’t control the first part – I cannot control how
I am seen or embraced by others.

But, what does the first part really mean, anyway? It means
that I’m scared my needs will not be met. Though what I can control is that I am
healing in a way that means I’m better able to take care of my own needs, and
to invite others into my life who are able to meet them too, without dumping my
own onto them.

So, if I can come to believe that my needs will be met,
because I and the world around me are
meeting them, then I don’t have to fear being overlooked and languishing in the abyss.

To address the other hand, the fear is that I am not
safe in the world. That if I peek my head out, if I take ownership of my needs,
become brave enough to step out of the shadows, I will be suffer.

How can I dismantle that part? How can I force myself to
believe I’m safe in the world, and not the object of opprobrium if I raise my
hand and say, Hey, this is who I am and how I want to express myself in the
world – isn’t it cool?

Well, I can’t force myself. I can convince myself, my jury, through
overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I am safe when I am myself.

I just have to be willing to look at the evidence. And
that’s hard.

Who wants to look inside themselves and declare it good? Who wants
to walk with a spine of confidence in their music tastes, clothing choices,
reading material? Who wants to feel proud of their contributions in the world? Their aspirations and hobbies and dropped hobbies and efforts and set-backs
and dorkiness and naiveté and thirst and laughter?

Who wants to say, “Yes, this is me, and I am good. In fact, I
am great”?

Perhaps we all say we do, but the issue to me is that every
time I think a thought like that, I have a gremlin born of those ancient fears
that croaks, “You think so, do you? Well, here are all the ways you’re not.”

Every time you begin to catalogue your achievements, you are
slammed with doubt. And so, you stop cataloguing; the doubt wins, and the
evidence slackens and dulls.

There is so much effort
(it seems to me, right now, and may change) to loving ourselves.

There is so much effort in deciding to face that gremlin,
allow its ire, yet continue with our own mantras of belief.

Belief. It’s all we really have, especially when we’re not
willing to accept the evidence yet.

On both sides of my fear aisle, I am called to believe: a)
That my needs can be taken care of because I believe they’re important; and b)
That I am safe in expressing myself because I believe I am important.

That’s a lot of work for a given moment! And that’s why my
guts tangle nearly every waking moment.

I don’t think I have an anxiety disorder. I know moments of
peace and relaxation and ease. I know that it is possible for me to strive to
have them more frequently by doing this dismantling and believing and accepting
of facts.

But, until then, I will just have to remind myself to
breathe.

community · death · faith · god · health · order · reality · recovery · spirituality

In Vain.

May 2, 2014 Molly Daniels HayesLeave a comment

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God? G-d? Him, Her, It, We, They?

The Great What Is?

The tendency of all things toward progress, perhaps. Toward
health and order.

Cut your hand, and assuming all other things are right with
your body, it will heal itself. In a week or two, it will be good as new.
Sometimes scarred, but altogether, well.

In parallel, cut your spirit, your psyche, and the tendency
of them are toward healing and health. If we don’t hide away the wound, or habitually fiddle with it, we’re sort of compelled to heal. It’s the natural state of ourselves,
and it’s my experience and observation that the order of life will lead us
there.

In this, I can believe.

In benevolence, I have a harder time, these days.

I’m at the part in my personal work where I’m supposed to
think about “god” and my relationship to it, whatever I choose to define it as.
I’m at the part where I come to believe that it wants the best outcome for me
and all creatures. The part where I’m supposed to take a deep breath, open my
arms, and fall into the caring embrace of this power.

Balls.

Because here’s the part that snags my shirttail: sometimes
“god’s” plan includes the death of babies. Sometimes it includes the overdose of
a friend, the death of a parent before you’re old enough to know them. Sometimes “god’s plan” includes rape. And of course, sometimes it includes
cancer in a healthy 30 year old.

I will not stand with those who say it’s part of a plan. I
don’t think it is. I think you can take those experiences, and choose to
integrate them into a theology and a world-view that helps you get through
them. Mostly, you can choose to tell yourself, perhaps truthfully, that their
or your experience will benefit those around you. That others get to witness
how you struggled, railed, and got through it anyway. I do believe that we can
choose to turn our experiences into something valuable.

(Though I do have unresolved issues with being or using anyone as a goddamned touchstone on how to life your life more fully. “I could go at any time, just like him — I think I’ll learn from his pain & in homage and reverence, I’ll paint that portrait; become a doctor; take a trip.” Balls. F’ you, man. My life is not your feeding ground. — … unless of course, it is.)

But I will not say
that I believe that “god” puts these obstacles before us on purpose. I just don’t think it’s
that intelligent.

The intelligence in focusing all flowers toward the sun (or
moon, depending), the intelligence that makes all those little newborn turtles
scurry toward the ocean, the intelligence that turns felled trees into
compost: it’s order, it’s incredible, it’s inspiring, but it’s not benevolent,
necessarily, and it’s not because a force underlies all and declares some of those
turtles will be scooped up by predators in their first moments of life – that’s simply part of the order of
it.

Because here’s another side to the whole “God as
benevolence” thing: it means (or can mean) that we believe we have an ace in the hole. It means
wishful and fantastic thinking that “god didn’t take us this far to drop us on our ass” or “god is
slow but never late,” which translates to, if I hold out long enough, if I pray
hard enough, if I act well enough, I’ll be alright. And buddy, that just ain’t
true.

It’s not really about god at all. Being or becoming
“alright” has more to do with how we chose to interpret and incorporate out
life experiences. God isn’t gonna rescue me, reward me, or punish me. It just
doesn’t care like that. But I do. And you do. And together we can form a lattice of support
that feels bigger than ourselves, that carries us through and over those hard
times. Together, we are aimed toward health, and we connect to improve our
chances of getting there.

In that, I can
believe. I can believe in our collective desire toward joy. I can believe in my
desire to clear out the junk in my heart, so that I can help you
toward joy, too.

Is that “god”? Not really. Is it good? You bet.