Living As All of Me

[NarcKiddo]

   I'm so happy she's doing well.

A bit of gentle advice follows because I have lost two dogs as an adult and I hope it might be helpful. But we are all different so please ignore and I will happily delete if you prefer.

It's good that you are parenting yourself through this, but I would gently suggest that you look to the future as possibilities. Some people find they can't tolerate a day without another dog, others find they can't make space for another while the loss of their beloved is so raw. I have found for myself that I miss both of my dogs as individuals much more than pets and have found myself unable to get another right now. Whereas when I had guinea pigs I was quicker to get more. You won't know until it happens how all of that will land with you. A fixed idea of what you will do may seem comforting now, like you have a framework to cling to. If that's what parts of you need for now, then that's what they need. I'd just be careful about making firm promises to parts of you that All of You might not feel comfortable with.

[HannahOne]

NarcKiddo, I really appreciate your perspective, thank you for sharing. There's wisdom in what you're saying. I think you're right, parts of me are clinging to a plan to try to reduce the coming blow. :/ I really don't know how to do this. Of course, this being feel pain I know how to do it I just don't want to.

right now little friend is curled up in my bed, not wearing the cone of shame. Soon I'll put her in the bathroom for the night so she can't leap up and down off of furniture while we're sleeping and she'll have to wear the cone. She has a plush bed in there but she's so cozy I am delaying moving her over.

It's almost impossible to imagine her not being here. She's such a big part of my life.

[NarcKiddo]

 

[HannahOne]

I am very interested in learning more about social classes, particularly the language, habits, culture... the sociology of it. Class played a big part of my childhood and also my trauma. Of course class is a setting into which we are born. In my case my family had a rapid rise in social class, a bit of a fall back. And "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." Many things, most things, changed not one iota as our class shifted. Money can't buy you class, as they say. We were in a nicer house, but we weren't any nicer people. In many ways life was worse, a nicer house yet more misery, hatred, shameful behavior and inability to function.

I was a kid, so the waters I was swimming in were changing at a time my brain was a sponge. I had to learn to swim in different waters, code switch, and, some things didn't change. This was both a relief to me, a sense that "X kind of thing really represents me, who I really am, no matter what others think" and also a source of consternation, "if only I could change X, I would nave entree into this other world I need to learn to navigate."

This dilemma is a big part of my experience as an adult and ongoing. What changes, what about me is solid, and what "if only I could" change would somehow undo, redo, or resolve the past that "holds me back" from some perceived good. It's a way of thinking, a way of seeing the world. That I'm seeing for the first time as just that, one way to see the world.

I tried to change my accent. My vocabulary. My clothes, hair. My manners. My expectations. My goals. My overarching goal was just to change. To become someone to whom these things didn't happen and could never happen. And pockets of resistance remained. Sometimes I would find myself telling a story, and preppy people don't tell stories the way people who grew up without running water tell stories. Even though I could carefully edit a story, sometimes the lack of running water would nonetheless appear. The lack of running water wasn't my story, it was a parents history. And my parents histories stuck to me, too. Entering the world of preppies meant severing from my parents' world. Which I wanted to do.

But in the end I am my parents' child. I continue to see many aspects ofme that are like them or from them. I have tried very hard to soften or aver the worst aspects. To become who they could have been, had they had time, money, therapy, access. But some of their more negative qualities continue to dog me.

There are some qualities I got from my history that I remain proud of. Being "stubborn", immigrant bravado, persistence, determined, type A. A spectrum of force. That's one. Or being a storyteller, being creative, literary, public relations, the Speaker for the Dead. That too is a spectrum, a spectrum of voice. Force and voice are important qualities I've used both to get away from the past, and also to reiterate it, to find myself again.

Learning more about the rites and rules of preps and all the connections between them from George W Bush to Barack Obama and between makes so much sense of so much that I didn't understand before. I just knew to go to the Ivies. I wanted to wear tweed, LOL. Over and I was drawn to these places, people and things that are upper class or upper middle class "preppy." And then over and over I would be drawn to places, people and things that are the antithesis: to dance class with strippers, to diners with trucks parked outside, to the ghetto areas of the city to tutor reading, purportedly, meanwhile I was listening to the cadence of the stories and noticing a more familiar kind of voice, force, the drive to learn and leave....A preppy doesn't need to leave, his family has been hear since the Mayflower and ensconced in said "borough" or "dale" since the 1700s.

I never quite felt comfortable in the "Ivies" of schools or jobs. I would get the degree and leave. Get the job, but not stay too long. I'd get the expected degree and then go get a degree in art. So much didn't make sense.... my decisions baffled my "preppy" class neighbors and friends. "Do you sell these?" They asked of my paintings or poems. Nope. Then why do it? the subtext. Now George W Bush paints for fun and it's normalized. Twenty years ago it was still a bit of an oddity.

Looking back over my life a lot more of it makes sense, what I was trying to bring together, what I was running from and running toward. My rigid ideas that somehow "preppy" meant "safe", my fear of poverty, and also my innate revulsion toward "the rich" and my desire to be more homespun, straight shooter, keepin' it real, closer to the ground. I tangled it all up together, the trauma and "class": just as I had to hide the social class of my background I had to hide my trauma. The two were like one and the same, only poor people did such shameful things, so I thought. The chaos and abuse were part of not having money, in my mind. To some extent that's true, money would have solved some of the problems. Enlightenment and education would have helped some of the problems. But rich, educated people still can abuse. I learned that the hard way as I rowed my way through my teens and twenties and got victimized over and over again, by the nice Episcopal priest, can't yet more preppy than the Episcopal Church! or the professor in the tweed blazer, or the boss at the big company. Class didn't mean what I thought it meant.

What can I say. All of these are All of Me. It's an uncomfortable topic in general, race, class, money. People have Feelings about the topics. I make some broad brush strokes that could be offensive, I hope not. What I wanted to say is that these forces shaped my childhood in ways I couldn't ignore because it wasn't a background I took for granted, there were big changes as I grew. It created a bit of an identity split. I'm understanding myself more and more in context, in the context of these social forces, social changes, in the context of "white trash" and "preppy" and how I learned to inhabit both and the in-between. How those fixed ideas still shape my hopes, dreams, desires in some ways. And what's closer to the ground, closer to the heart of All of Me.

I can never know who I would have been had I been raised by, say, a wealthy therapist from the burbs who wore cashmere sweaters and loafers and summered in the Hamptons. Not that I haven't thought about it. Who, me? And, I can take account and take ahold of Me, the Me that I am in all its complexity and contradiction, in some of its ugliness and in the beauty at least of the effort, the dream, to get somewhere better, better than here. To know I was worth more, more than what I was given. To go out and get it and make my own * pie. To be defined by those circumstances but not determined by them.

My own kids grew up in preppyville, riding horses, playing string instruments, going to the sleep away camps and tutors. I walked through their sleep away camps rubbing my eyes, what luxury, wrote the check with a little twinge. And, I worked at those camps after high school to avoid going home in the summers. I was the counselor who'd never been to camp. Acting cool to the parents, fixing my accent, telling them of the Ivy I was returning to in fall and how sure, I could tutor their kid in chem. That's how connections work, that's what makes that world turn. Yet I raised my kids in a small house, with furniture from Ikea and no ski trips in winter. There were things I didn't want them to have. There were ways I wanted them to know that we were different. I didn't want to raise them to expect Pottery Barn bedroom furniture suites or whatever the upper middle class trappings were. They have iPhones several generations old, and they only got one. No improvements. I never said "When I was a kid..." and told them a sob story about empty cabinets. But in small ways, little "no's", I wanted them not to expect. I wanted them to have to dream, to want, to force, to go out and get, I wanted them to have some fire under them. My oldest hasn't gotten money from us since graduating high school. Harsh, sometimes I think so. But I see them getting a job, saving. I see them cooking instead of Door Dashing and I see them sewing the hole in their coat. They want a chair, and they go on Marketplace and get it used from someone else. I recognize all of this, these too are tools of survival. They also know both worlds. Are much more secure than I ever was, have no accent to erase and are fluent in Vivaldi in a way I'll never be. Are not running from trauma. And---they can also tell a good story.

I am going to continue my sociological research in an effort to understand more. so much I didn't understand, I just copied it, did it, memorized it. It's very interesting as an adult to see all the connections. I see now how many connections I missed, all the missed opportunities to network, I didn't know then who knew who and how, I was flying totally blind. All the faux pas I made, oy. oy oy. Now I see why so and so reacted that way at that dinner party... LOL. Interesting to see myself from the outside. It's impressive, what I did, I'm impressed. I also feel silly and a little ashamed for how blind I was. But it worked, here I am.

As I ride the train to the city therapist I marvel at my access. My freedom. I sit next to people on the subway who are clearly without a home, without a dime. People nodding off from drugs. People going to work a hard job, a job hard enough that I never had to work a job like that, how privileged I was to go work at a rich summer camp! People who are learning English to gain access. I only had to code switch, English was native to me. How lucky. I like to ride the subway, all of us going somewhere, trying to get somewhere, defined and not defined by class and circumstance, some sleeping through the ride, some locked into their phone screen, some staring out the window bored, blank and exhausted, and some like the new immigrant, like me, staring out the window in amazement at the distance traveled, the colors and the light, what was lost, and what stays the same.