Old Age Day by Day August 27, 2012

One good thing to come out of asking my older kids to settle their plans without me in the middle, is that they did settle their plans.  But the second is I realized I'd like to begin a group of women as a support for those of us grappling with grown kids and how to manuever the minefields of interaction.  I think it would be useful and we could pool our knowledge and help each other figure out what is appropriate or not.  I know we are all struggling to be good older parents of older kids, and we don't know the "rules".  Some of us had our parents die so young we never got to figure out how to relate to our parents when we ourselves were first parents.  Some of us were midstream in our own young parenting when a parent died, and some of us have very aged parents so we are caught in between being grown kids and parents of grown kids.

I'm going to send out an email to friends next week and see if anyone is interested. 

Old Age Day by Day August 25, 2012

Yesterday we took our daughter and both granddaughters to a historic house and gardens, and the weather was perfect and the girls had a lot of fun.  Last night our other daughter and her boyfriend, plus our younger son came for dinner.  But there are tensions and anger and as much as I've said I won't be put in the middle, that is what happens.  Our two older kids have a conflict about the cabin next week, and though we asked them to clear up the plans, they basically won't speak to each other about it.  Each feels put upon and angry at the other, and I cannot fix this.  So what I'd hoped would be a good week with my daughter and granddaughter is threatening to be upsetting and awkard, if not a disaster.

I'm going to have to face the fact that the visit I dreamed of will not happen.  I went to my Buddhist study group this morning, and though I felt teary,  managed to appreciate the group and my practice.  Tomorrow I will go to my local meditation and dharma talk, which may ease me further.  Tonight we have a dear friend coming for dinner, which will be good. 

Four kids is a lot of potential conflict, and I'm afraid I've somehow made things worst in my parenting.  I just want to love them all and not take sides, and I pray they can put some effort into resolving their difficulties.  I know I feel punished by this behavior, and powerless to change it without some willingness on their parts.

Old Age Day by Day August 23, 2012

The connection between two current new items is interesting.  There is the Aiken flap, the underbelly of which is controlling women's lives, as well as blaming them for being raped, and the news that autism and schizophrenia is heavily determined by the male parent, and abnormalities in sperm as the person ages.  We've had decades of blaming women for autism - they didn't bond, they didn't eat right, but the determiner is the male exclusively.  The far right is not going to like this science any more than climate change.  Because underneath the varied rhetoric of the right is a biblical blame of women for all the ails of the world.  Oh, most people know how to be politically correct, but there is virilent mysogyny here as in the rest of the world.  Women and children are the slave factory, and like the South, men will fight to the death to keep a good deal.  I don't go around saying or even thinking this except rarely, but I know and all women know that the power is with the male, and it would take an apolcalypse to change societal structures.  There are men who are careful, because they are conscious of women's situation, to not abuse power or add to the negativity heaped upon women.  My husband and sons are aware and sensitive.  But underneath the niceties for most men lies hatred of women.  Maybe, as Dinnerstein has suggested, because we are fortunate to nurture life and give birth, and men are struggling to get out from under the powerful mothers they were dependent on as babies.  I don't know.  But, honey, I worked in battered women's shelters for twelve years, and there is hatred abounding.  One in three women will be raped in her life.  We have no sense of safety, and we are being subtlely or blatantly told that we dressed provocatively or made a bad decision or teased or some such crap.  I'm sick of it, and I wish women would wake up and not take this myth as truth anymore.  I don't look to men, they will never have the incentive to protect women.

As the Buddha said, "I am my own protector".

Old Age Day by Day August 22, 2012

This is the month in which my best friend in my twenties, best friend as in next to me at my wedding, as in promising to take care of each others' kids if anything bad happened, died.  She shot herself with her brother's gun.  She had described to me just how she was going to do it, and I had begged her to get help, went to her husband and begged him, offered to take her two kids for a break, pleaded, and watched them move out of state, when they'd just completed building their dream house nearby me.  I miss her still.  I talk to her in the car alone sometimes.  And I never, ever forget the day she died, and never will.  We would be old ladies now together.  We would be comparing grandchildren's photos.  She would have aged well.  She was a stunner, with pale gold hair, green, green eyes and a sweet oval face.  We would be making things:  we were always sewing, hemming curtains together, stuffing pillows, painting furniture.  She would have gone on to complete her BA in Biology, and taught, and been photographed and held up as a feminist before the wave hit.  She was the first woman I knew who was in a consciousness raising group.  The first woman I knew who built her own furniture.  She had design skills that could have netted her a fortune.  She helped her husband with his pottery, sold and delivered it to galleries.  She meditated.

And I can remember loping down the hill in married student housing and looking in the sliding glass door and there she was in her rocking chair, meditating, and I would tiptoe back home.  I owe her my spiritual life.  She supported me when my husband and I divorced, and when I remarried, and when we had our son she took our two older kids in the middle of the night during a 7 Eleven robbery, with police all around, and she and her husband wrapped them in blankets, and got them safely inside.  She was the first to visit me in the hospital the next morning.  She could save me but I couldn't save her, from her history, family, and the insidious force of depression.  Her two kids are in their forties now.  There are a few of us, missing her terribly, still, and wishing she had been helped the way she helped others.

Old Age Day by Day August 21, 2012

Only a couple of more days until our daughter and granddaughter come to visit.  We haven't seen them since April, and miss them so much.  There will be a week together, and I want everything to go well, and fret about details, when I really know it's out of my hands.  I can only handle what my words and actions are, and trust me, that's more than enough to take care of.  Expectations are super tricky, and feeling like I can orchestrate the visit is a minefield.  So many other family members are involved, and all with the best intentions.  I'm just going to be happy to physically be in the same space as my children.  It's an end to the summer kind of get together, and that makes the visit bittersweet in a way.  The fall season is coming fast upon us, and there are those expectations, the holidays, our daughters' birthdays, the shorter days and stress to handle.  Being up at the cabin is a last hurrah before all that. 

So I need to not let the pull of the fall keep me from enjoying what is happening right now.  A visit.  A chance to connect, laugh and have fun.  The future will take care of itself.

Old Age Day by Day August 20, 2012

My husband and I took two walks up a nearby mountain, and had a nice time.  On the first one I had trouble with the loose gravel and the incline, but the second was easy.  I also have trouble with heights, so there were lookouts I avoided.  Even on the way up or down in the car I struggled mightily with looking out or down.  I get very anxious.  I believe I've always had this problem, but it has gotten worse with age.  My mind goes to over the edge, and I feel as if I'm falling.  Deep breaths help and sometimes closing my eyes.  I fell three times as a kid:  down the basement stairs, on an escalator, and from the iron fireplace screen.  No permanent damage, but I was painfully hurt each time.  When I fell down the basement stairs, I was rushed to the emergency room, and I had to have stitches in my head and was told a quarter inch more I'd have died.  I was only five, but that stuck with me.  "Vertigo" is not a movie I can easily watch. 

All I can say is for me and Jimmy Stewart, falling represents death, and one's own mortality.  The more I get used to the fact I'm going to die, the more I'm afraid of it, on some level.  We can't be completely rational, not all the time, and our body reminds us of this, by getting dizzy, closing the eyes, tensing up.  The body is not ready, and it's not buying any of this intellectual rationalization.  The body says:  "Don't get near any edges or cliffs, you might slip".  Our friend, a few years ago, who was an experienced and inveterate hiker in Colorado, was on an easy walk on the hills above his house, and disappeared.  They found him two days later, fallen, and leaving a mystery as to how it could have happened.  A moment of dizziness, loose gravel, looking at an eagle overhead.  His wife and kids will never know.  Death comes when it comes. 

Old Age Day by Day August 19, 2012

My granddaughter and I visited kitties yesterday.  We first went to the pet store and saw two black kittens and one grown black one.  I could hardly tear her away.  Then I said we could visit my daughter's cats, and we did that.  I could hardly tear her away.  Then she expressed how her parents would never let her have a cat, and it would take her forever to have her own (20) cats.  She next tried to persuade me to get a cat, because then she could visit it once a week and she would be happy.  That was pretty clever of her:  now the guilt was switched from her parents to me.  I countered that when school began she'd meet new friends in her class and maybe they would have cats.  I did not console her.  She is a most determined child.

We found school clothes for her, and tights and shoes, had a lovely lunch out, then came home and sewed a blanket and pillow for the cats and dogs in the shelter we are going to visit with my friend.  Then we watched Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland", after receiving permission from her mom via phone.  She loved it.  I returned her home and we ate cherry tomatoes from her plants.  I came back exhausted but happy.