Side Effects

I had a huge fight with my psychiatric supervisor (ahem, the therapist I've been seeing since 2004),  this morning, the doc who became the director of the famed Menninger Clinic after Karl Menninger died, the man (but I don't even think of him as a man) - - who flies off to Minneapolis and Chicago and San Francisco and New York and God Knows Where and God does know where, because my psychiatrist also happens to be an Episcapalian priest, or something like that.

Or as close to "something like that" as you can get. 
He could be, if he wanted to be.
But he needs to stop treating me, first.
And I'm some kind of handfull.
Ha. As my North Dakota relatives would say.

So today I wanted a prescription for (a gasp from the entire audience!) benzodiazepdines.  Any of them.  They are extremely effective against anxiety, which, I find,  I am suddenly, in my mid-to-late sixties, up against again (I suffered from anxiety and panic disorders in my twenties and thirties and then, thanks to arduous cognitive therapies, managed to calm down enough to survive for decades without them) but now - - I find myself once again plunged deeply enough into the physical throes of an anxiety disorder so great that it clutches at my body as if I were fleeing and fighting at the same time.

We all know it, so let's say it together: it's the fight or flight snydrome.

Never mind the how of it.  Never mind the why of it. That stuff is all perfectly reasonable and psychologically obvious and observable to both the good doctor and myself.  Yep, here it is, never thought I'd face this again, but here I am, back in the middle again.  Even so.  Back to the benzos.  Of course, you should always think twice before you take a benzo and if you need escalating doses, you need to figure out why and you probably need to stop.  But.  On the other hand, they can save your life.  They are real good drugs. Because, see, the thing is, they work. You can take them whole, or you can nibble them. They help you deal.

 The side effects are, of course, addiction.

So, you guessed it, this blog is about side effects. Take love.  Okay, let's take love.  Love has plenty of side effects, but no doctor, other than Irving Yalom, who wrote the famous book Love's Executioner, is going to go on record as saying love is ultimately bad for you because it has so many damn side effects.  But it does.  It has plenty of bad side effects.  Like: Rejection. Blindness. Repetition.  Wounding. Withdrawal. Judgement. Clouded vision. Fear of vulnerability. Criticism. Seeing Through a Glass Darkly. Seeing Through the Same Glass Clearly. Censorship. The Wish to Keep the Surfaces Smooth. Oh My God, I could go on and on. Abandoment. Ultimant Disinterest. Sexual Dismissal. Sexual Dismantelment. And, finally, and believe me, one of the awfulest of all if you really love that person, death.    

Side effects.  How about..........having children. Raising families. Joining groups, like: churches. Charity organizations. Theatre groups. Becoming a professional. Obtaining AND becoming successful at having a career. Eating. Television. Buying. NOT buying. Becoming a know-it-all. Becoming a dumbbell.  Becoming an expert-in-your-field ("Show me a room full of experts," said Carl Jung, "and I will show you one huge idiot.") 

First dates have side effects. Second dates have side effects.  Sex has all kinds of various and sundry side effects, good, great, terrible, horrible, and indifferent.  And which is worst and which is easiest?  Well, indifferent is easiest, I suppose.  But don't tell that to some of the women who come to see me year after year.  Because the state of indifference can wear you down, folks, and can be a terrible side effect to your nervous system, not to mention your psychological and emotional systems, as well.

It's not all metabolic, you know.  Not by a long shot.

So my doctor, who is also, I think, my friend, or at least a man who cares for me deeply, as do I him, said  he believes I have been less than ....fabulous (my word).....in my reporting....of my goings on and comings off of anti-depressants,  especially in the years since Jim died.  And I admitted, yes, that is absolutly true.  I have not, shall we say,  kept him informed of THE BIG PICTURE. I mean, I didn't know he was so dedicated to wanting to know about T. B. P.  I always thought he would just lightly keep in mind that I was doing my best and that I would let him know if anything went truly awry.  I mean.  Come ON.

But he is a stickler.  Which is why I have remained with him for lo, these many years.

Because I am not essentially a wayfaring, casual, groovy kind of person.  And in the places where I AM casual, I want somebody at my side who is definiately NOT wild, NOT groovy, NOT spontaneous.  I want a balance, see.  I'm just like anybody else.  I'll rescue you and I want you to rescue me.  And sometimes I want you to see things my way.  And other times I'll bend and I'll see things your way.

Well, this morning, I tried to get Dr. B. to see things MY way. (While he, of course, was trying to get me to see things HIS way).  So, first we stared at each other for a long, long time.  Problem #1:  We are both Very Good At Staring.  So, number two, I tried my skills at talking.   Problem # 2:  We are both Very Good At Talking (except he knows Greek and Latin, and I don't.  But I can make up good poems and songs, and he can't. So I figure we're even, even though the two skills don't at all match up.) Finally, I tried humor. Problem #: We're both funny. He's quick. Very, very quick. AND he catches on to my manipulations really well. He can figure out the difference between what's genuinely funny and what's genuinely a manipulative ploy in a nanosecond.

He accused me of bullying.  I accused him of being withholding and not recognizing what a courageous woman I am, what a reasonable woman I am, what a serious woman I am. He smiled. I smiled. We began again. He said he would, of course, write the prescription, but he was not "entirely for it."  I said that, in that case, wild horses could not get me to fill it.  I would not fill it in a lake.  I would not fill it in a cake. (This is not, of course, verbatim, but pretty close.  Pretty close).  His last words were: "Don't forget to call me with the number of the pharmacy you want the prescription sent to." 

My last words were a scrambled up version of the ending of a T.S. Eliot poem.  Really though, just more side effects. 

So what do you do when your life feels like it's going sideways and you feel like you're all alone and the facts tell you otherwise but your chest and your stomach are yelling at you that it isn't facts you need, it's drugs? 

Here's what.  You call your doctor within the hour.  You say that you agree with him.  You say he's right.  You tell him to NOT fill the prescription, that you'll be going to the Swedish Hospital Pain Clinic in two weeks time and that in between time you WILL listen to the new tape on pain and meditation you just bought and that you WILL go to your husband's little bungalow on the water between Shelton and Olympia over the weekend and that you WILL write in your journal and even write a blog, if necessary and bare your chest, such as it is, and tell the world that you are just as sane and just as crazy as the rest everybody else and probably more, and that every single choice in Life has side effects, including the bill for this very phone call.           

Mother's Day Part Redux

Okay, so I got a little off the subject in my last blog about Mother's Day.  I wrote about my mother, then quoted from material I published about my mother, then wrote about two typologies of mother's ("The Madwoman Mother" and the Too-Nice Mother," then wrote a little bit about Anne Sexton, then went into the history of my first days with my son, then ended with a giant splash of generosity and welcoming feelings towards not only my mother but all the mothers I know and love the best.

Or, uh, maybe you read it.

But really - - really -- what I wanted to say (before I said what I did say) - - was this:  mother's are people.

That's it.

Which doesn't come as a giant surprise to anyone, I know, but it feels good just to say it, so let's all just sit back, breathe, plop a big smile on our faces and say it out loud: "MOTHER'S ARE PEOPLE!"

YEAH!!!

Isn't that good?  Isn't that great?  And isn't that true?

Mothers are people who were once little girls and who played dolls or who climbed trees and who ran and laughed and picked their noses when nobody was looking and dreamed and farted and sang along with cds or the radio and wondered about all kinds of things like where babies came from and looked at their Dads and their Moms and thought 'No way' and ate as much candy and cake as they could get away with and loved cereal and hated vegetables or loved vegetables (unlikely) and hated cereal and liked or loved certain relatives and disliked other certain relatives and grew up into junior high and got crushes on girls or got crushes on boys and started worrying about when they'd get their breasts and when they'd fit into their bras and how to deal with periods and how god, how horrifyingly embarrassing THAT would be and suddenly they GOT breasts and they GOT periods and oh god it WAS embarrassing, it WAS scary and somebody helped them with all of this or nobody helped them with any of this or somebody only helped them with it part way and they learned the rest of it from friends, duh, or books, worse, and they went on to senior high and they started dating and that got really scary because they had to go to classes and sit there and stare at the teachers and do at least a modicum of schoolwork while a whole different part of their brains were thinking about Randy or Fred or Johnny the star football player and whether or not to ask them to the Tolo or how to learn to flirt or how to get their Moms to let them shave their legs or how to get their Moms and Dads to let them go on dates and what  do they DO on a date if they get one and oh my god it's all so complicated and what about popularity, are they popular enough, and how do they get popular if they're not and how do they get breasts if  they don't have any and then they graduated from high school and they either had sex or they didn't have sex and, according to statistics, if they had sex it wasn't very goood because nobody's first time is very good, especially if it was the boy's first time too, so they had to go through that hurdle and figure out what to say about it, do you tell, do you not tell and what do you do if HE tells,  and then there's all the pregnancy fears, especially in my day, which, believe you me, was about one million-billion days away from today but even so, this is how it goes, or a variation on this, and the girl grows up but she always carries the "child part" inside of her, she always secretly (or openly) wants her candy as well as her vegies (if she really does ever like vegies), and she's only pretending to be grown-up until the day (if it really does come) when she truly feels grown up (and that could be a long, long way off) and she sometimes dreams about just shucking it and running away, because guess what, Teens, you're not the only ones who want to run away, so do your Moms.

Lots of times.

Yesterday I was sitting with a 48 year old woman, a beautiful, highly accomplished woman, a successful mother of three, and she said, "I was thinking that maybe I should have sent my kids a Mother's Day card that said, 'Sorry for the way I turned out'..."  and then she looked at me and smiled, so I smiled....and then she gave a small laugh, so I gave a tiny laugh.....and then we both threw out heads back and enjoyed a nice long laugh.  Because we knew.  We knew we we both mothers and we knew that motherhood is can be so damn life-defining and we knew that inside her funny little joke we both felt a small flash of liberation.

"Sorry, kids, for the way
your Mother has turned out.
Guess what.  Totally
human, after all.
Love,
Mom."

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY
      
    

Oh, Mother, Where Art Thou?

                      "A mother is a woman who decorates her life with babies."
                                   - Stupid Old Joke

                      "A mother's patience is like a tube of toothpaste - it's never quite gone."
                                  - Really Really Stupid Old Joke

Mothers.  I had two of 'em, both in the same body.  One was funny, beautiful, festive and warm; the other was crazy, furious and dangerous.  The "nice" one stuck around until I was around ten or so, the other one took over after that.  As Mother's Day approaches, I've been thinking a lot about them both, those two, even looking up old publications in which I've described their various gifts, characteristics and foibles.

My mother's name was LaVern, and she was an odd sort of mother.  Not that she seemed so odd at the time, but now she seems very odd indeed, I wrote and published in THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW in a memoir piece titled "The Goodnight Piece".  Odd and endearing.  She tried to keep a firm grip on life by never succumbing to sleep.  Of course she did sleep, but she didn't believe in it, or rather, she did believe in it, but not in the way most people do.  Sleep was her enemy.
     My mother considered life to be a tragically tenuous situation.  Combine this with her philosophy that human beings are weak, that when we finally lay ourselves down to sleep we lie down very still with our eyes shut tight, and that sleep mimimcs  this state nearly to a tee, and - - well, you don't have to be very smart to make the connection.  I don't think I was particularly brilliant, but I made the connection right off the bat.  I identified strongly, as the doctors would say.  My mother's enemies became my enemies, and the most dangerous of them of all was sleep.
     
     And on and on and on.  For msot of my writing life, my mother was my Muse; indeed, I have published more words about her than I have about any other subject in my adult life.  She's been the skeleton in my closet, she's been the flag on my mast, she's been the heart on my sleeve, the lump in my throat, the sword in my belly.  Oh, what is it about mothers!  What a complicated lot we are, no matter whether we are well balanced or tipsy as all get out, we remain one of the most complex  figures in mythology and psychology. 
     For one thing, of course, we are the portal through which you all, we all, gain entrance into existence itself.  We just don't get here without us.  We be it.  It is said that anxiety and fear live at the heart of existence and it may be that anxiety and fear live in the hearts of anyone who has a mother about  their mother.  Freud's famous question, "What do women want?" might be properly turned around to ask, "What do men really want from women?" For if mother is the Powerful Gateway  and the Nurturer, how can she also be the prototype of the One Who is Physically Desired in another woman's body?  What an emotionally and psychologically complex setup this is for males and it leads, I believe, to so much male to female abuse, no matter how many times males shake their heads and snicker, "Oh, get outa here!". 

Yeah, Right.

     International anger against females is just too great to deny that something's going on with men and women and female sexuality, and it's got to be fear.  Great gobs of it. Men hate it, at least, some men that it....that females experience sexuality.   Fear and loathing.  Fear and anger. But I digress....I was talking about mothers, and my mother in particular, that woman who taught me to love language - -  so much I have dedicated article after article to a term she made up, called Bloodtalk.

  From one of my three published articles entitled BloodTalk, Day Pages of a Psychotherapist, this one which appeard in CREATIVE NONFICTION, (may I brag? Along with the work of Ellen Gilcest and John McPhee):

     Language walks around my office all day: all I need do is sti and whoosh it comes, and with it comes thoughts of my mother, the second most beautiful woman in Silverdale, and could she talk!
     Mostly she talked a talk called Blood Talk, a term she made up, a term based on her belief that blood was the source of everything important and she had names to prove it: blood food, blood looks, blood songs, blood people, blood roots, blood time, blood land, blood talk.
     Real talk comes from the inside, she'd say, you'll know it when you hear it so use it when you mean it, otherwise, don't.  I've only known one person who spoke it pretty much all the time and he was a pain in the ass. Your teachers won't use it, the Lutheran minister won't use it, President Eiwenhower doesn't use it, those Bible people tried and ended up sounding silly.  All I can say is, it matters, so watch out.

And my mother said this: How would you like to go to bed as Eleanor Roosevelt and wake up as Mamie Eisenhower? What a joke. They saw Eleanor's husband said, 'I've had war and I've had Eleanor. Give me war.'  Nobody'd claim any anti-wife shit from him, an old bald man like God.  Listen: Eleanor was not pretty. Talk and not-talk get important fast when you're not pretty. Men who write books, they're not pretty, right? See? Mean your talk like blood. Quiet, that's blood, too; it can be mean. I'd say you're not going to be the prettiest so you'd better get serious about this. And stay out of Famous, they'll have you saying words you'll swear you never even heard yourself think.

Well, that was my mother, folks, I can't remember if those words came from her friendly years or......no, it sounds like they came from her furious years.   It's a strange thing, though, those furious years....even though her savage screaming and pounding, which set my autonimic nervous system on a life course of head ducking and tremoring, even so, I would still choose for myself an openly "Mad Mother' rather than the self-sacrificing "Saint Mother", that is, the mother who is overly self-sacrificing towards others, the mother who is so self-effacing towards life itself so that the daughter ends up living in an unconscious state of never feeling "good enough"as if if she were just a little more responsible, a little more dutiful behaving (not actually "feeling", but behaving), a little bit "nicer seeming"......then maybe she might be worthy of somebody's love.  Because, see,  at least you can fight with the Mad Mother.  At least you can develop a Self.  You can hit back, even, if you dare. In fact, sometimes, if you want to live badly enough, you'd better hit back. You'd better dare hit and yell to high heaven.  But the daughter of the Saint Mother of the mother who plays at being the Saint Mother has no tools at her disposal.  All she can do is watch, look and listen and make inner vows to be just like her mother.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.

The daughter of the Mad Woman knows she will do anything, anything NOT to become "mad".  She may become lots of things other people may not admire or want to strive for, she may develop gaps (as I have) that would put the Grand Canyon to shame, she may follow her senses from here to Cheyenne, but she will not kill herself or others out of shame.

                                       I stand in the ring
                                        in the dead city      
                                     and tie on the red shoes.......

                                       They are not mine,
                                    They are my mother's,
                                       Her mother's before,
                                     handed down in Life as heirloom,
                                but hidden like shameful letters.
                                                               - Anne Sexton

And Sexton, of course, sexually used and abused her daughter Linda, and then, years later, of course, she killed herself.  Between mothers and daughters, madness becomes entangled inside a web of feelings --personal and generational feelings.  And there are many types of mothers and many types of daughters and the mothers know exactly what kind of daughters they want and the daughters know exactly what kind of mothers they want and the rule of thumb is, natch, stop it.  Stop it right now.  Give up your expectations.  Give up your demands.  Please.  Because they will not, I repeat - they will not be met.  Because, see, it's not all up to you.  Mothers!  Please!  It's not all up to you!

Remember in the sixties?  That guy, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim?  The doctor who coined the term "Refrigerator Mothers", that dumb bastard, about the mothers of all children who happened to be autistic?  And it turned out later that he was screwing around with his research?  And he was an anti-Semite?  Plus he was all kinds of other kinds of a jerk?   Well, listen, DON'T LET ANYBODY EVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT TO YOU EVER EVER EVER AGAIN! 

Because, it takes more than a mother to make a person.  It takes a peer group,  that's REALLY important.  It takes a a neighborhood, that's fairly important.  It makes genetics, ok, that's quite important.  It takes a culture, that's a big deal, too.  And who knows what else!  Actually, everything's pretty much all up for grabs, right now, because none of us can explain what really happens.......take a kid from the slums who gets shot at day after day and the kid grows up and becomes a good person, a well functioning person, a good enough parent, a law abiding person, and more than that, somebody with a sense of humor and an ability to connect with other people and be intimate.....and then take a kid from a so-called "good" family, even maybe a Bainbridge Island family, with the soccer and the ballet and the professional parents and the introduction to the arts and families who barbecue salmon and maybe even ship in soft shell crabs every once in awhile and......oopsie daisy!.....there goes Betsy!

There went Betsy!
Why?
We don't know why.
But where'd she go?
Uh - - we can't answer that.
Will she be back?
Maybe.....we hope so.
No guarantees?
No guarantees.
But we're a good family. We've saved money for college.
Yeah. We know that.
So..where did we go wrong?
Who said you did?
We read it in a book in the sixties.
You read the wrong book.
Oh.

"In Anne Lamott's latest book "SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED", she is talking to her paster and she writes, "Do you think God was terrified for Jesus?"
"Well, at least concerned."
"And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?"
"You get to be obsessed and angry.  And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to.  There is a zer-percent chance you will change them.  So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world."

Obviously Anne was having trouble with her kid at this point in the book. He was nearly a grown-up and he'd gotten a young -- and wonderful, as it turned out - - girl pregnant - - and she'd had the baby - - and he kind of jumped ship and Anne, his mom, was hurt and pissed and - - hurt and pissed.  Because, see, mothers have these expectations of their kids.  Hell, I had Enormous Expectations of my biological son.  Gynormous, as my dear friend Christine would say. I thought he was going to become the most famous Russian Pianist in all of history.

Never mind that he had no Russian in him.
Never mind that I couldn't afford piano lessons.
Never mind that his Dad (not Jim, this was a different man, to whom I was married for one year) was a drug addict and I lived inside one gigantic panic attack and it was the nineteen-sixties and my mother was at her craziest and one evening managed to single-handedly tip the entire ward of women in the Lakewood Hospital Maternity Ward over onto it's (their) knees, me included, until the hospital's security guards ran in, grabbed my mother by both arms and bodily (bodily!) dragged her out of the hospital but not before several of our breasts (our breasts!) had dried up rendering us unable to breast feed our babies and my husband (ha!) got drunk and fainted and then woke up and wrecked the car although I'm not sure it was in that order and the next thing I knew I was sterilizing bottles like crazy and feeding formula to this baby I had wanted with all my heart to breastfeed and the washing machine I had counted on to work had developed a kind of quirk and the wringer part had stopped working and there were no paper diapers yet and even if there were I was probably too much of a purist to say "yes" to them so that I was washing diapers all day and wringing them out with my bare hands and sterilizing bottles and battling my panic disorder all the while trying to deal with the fact that my mother (my mother!) had come to stay with me for five days but she said she had forgotten how to bathe a baby that small and so although he was perfectly healthy (but he fainted every time he took in enough air to begin to cry) and his weight was good and we had the bath temperature just right (although it became cooler and cooler because neither of us could bare to lower him into the water), there we were, passing this baby back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to each other, "Here, you do it,"  "No, here, YOU do it,"  .....in the big, beautiful house we rented, Tom and I, from the PostMaster General of Tacoma, Washington, with it's ornate furniture, it's beautiful carved oak dining table for the many, may dinner parties we never gave, the fabulous sitting room we never sat in, the magnificent huge bear-claw bathtub I would have loved to have taken a bath in but was so afraid I wouldn't be able to hear my baby cry if I really let go and relaxed in that tub, that I took small, quick spitz baths instead........

     Of course it must be true that, any time a woman begins to write about her own mother, she must end up writing about her own self as a mother; that is, if she has been a mother.  Surely it is inevitable. What else can one do?  Where else, on paper, can one go?  My mother died when she was forty-seven.  I am sixty-six. The only memories I truly trust reside inside my nervous system, which will never be healed.  The rest of me has done a fine job of healing, and I give thanks to my mother for her great gifts she has given me, along the way. Humor. Creativity. Warmth. Music. Language.  A certain topsy-turvy outlook on life which grew as much out of her Canadian Indian background as the poor North Dakota soil my mother and her siblings emerged out of.

                                                           The Uses of Sorrow
                                               (In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
                                          Someone I loved once gave me a box
                                                            of darkness.
                                                     It took me years to understand
                                                        that this, too, was a gift.
                                                                 - Mary Oliver

My mother was a gift, often a terrible gift, but a gift.  Often a magnificent gift.  Sometimes, when I think of the "things" she gave me, I can not imagine how fortunate I was, as a child.  Her voice! Her shine!  Her imagination (how many children have a mother who says, "Okay, we'll pretend this cardboard box is a TV camera and we'll set it here, on top of the fridge, and we'll pretend we're doing a daily soap opera called 'The Mildred and Mildred Show" and you be Mildred and I'll be the other Mildred, and we'll both be married to two brothers named Joe and Joe, and we'll just make it up as we go along!")  She was a lover and she was a terror and she was a gift.  She made herself a part of me.  I was a part of her. For many years, we loved each other. We nagged at each other. We harmonized with each other. We read to each other. I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" to her. She read "Peyton Place" (!!!) to me. 

                                             "Child, born of joy and mirth,
                                                    Go live, without the help
                                                     of anything on earth."
                                                                -William Blake


    But I had it.  I had it all.  I have it all. I am the blessed, blessed one. Thank you, Charles D., I've had the best of times and the worst of times.  And I grew up to unoffically adopt two daughters who have given me some of the absolutly greatest yearsof my life.  Not to mention the grandchildren.  Not to mention Angela, who has given me her and my son's son, Aleister.  So, whatever I said at the beginning of this blog (it's late, and I'm fading fast), Happy Mother's Day everybody, and thank you for reading this big fat probably-filled-with-at-least-one-hundred-typos-blog.  It was meant, somehow, to be solely about my mother when I began, but, like all my writing, which is not for "Publication-publication", and is not for academe, I sniff my way through several paths simultaneously and always  for my own pleasure, not your's.  Sorry about that.

Never-the-less, Happy Mother's Day to all you Beautiful Mother's out there, and you know who you are, but I'll name you: Mel, Kelly, Christine, Erin, Angela, Kathy, Susan F., Susan W. , Ruth, Robin, Sherry, Jane, Jennifer, Bonnie, Brooke, Mary, Fran, a different Kelly (not my daughter),  Alys.....ALL OF YOU!  It's HARD!  It's TOUGH!  LOVE YOURSELVES!  YOU DESERVE IT  THE EPISTIMOTOMIES (sp) ALONE WERE ****AWFUL!****  I LOVE YOU ALL!                       
                                             

What Is This Thing Called DOG?

With apologies to the great Cole Porter:

What is this thing, called dog?
This hungry thing, called dog?
It eats, it poops, it sleeps like a log,
What is this thing, called dog?

Oh, what is it I am supposed to do?
It doesn't speak when I most want it to!
It gets me up at the crack of sweet dawn,
And tries to pee on my mean neighbor's lawn.....

Gosh, what is it I've done to deserve
This four-legged sheer bundle of herve,
It thinks I am it's servant, I know,
It wants to go wherever I go.....

If you can find me out in this fog,
If you can empathize with this blog,
Please send poor me a wise word or two
And help me out with  my new poochie-poo.

Well, we moved my friend Magge into a beautiful home where she will spend her final days in a peaceful and loving situation and, after a year's worth of crisis management, personal life adjusement, shopping, medical visits, Hospice arrangements, breaking through denial, getting relatives over here from Germany, not to mention finding friends to walk the dog in the a.m. and the p.m. because I've been too fagged out to do it all.......as of two days ago, I found myself ending up with The Dog.

Her name is Tess. This situation is nothing new to me, it has not been dumped on me, I volunteered.  When the question of, "Who will poor Tessie go to?" came up, I practically jumped up and raised my hand and exclaimed, "Me! Me! Poor Tessie shall go to ME!"  Well, okay, I wasn't THAT enthusiastic, but I was affirmative, by which I mean,  I was kind.  After all, Magge and Tess had lived with me for nearly a year in my old house in Bremerton, after Jim died.  Tess had sat in on hundreds of therapeutic sessions.  My patients loved her.  In my own way, I loved her.  What was not to love?  I didn't have to feed her, I didn't have to walk her, I didn't have to clean her, I didn't have to pick up her steaming poop when it hit the ground of other peoples' lawns......I just opened the door to my office, the next patient walked in and sat down, I introduced Tess, they said Oh, how pretty, I beamed at her good manners (she bites people on bicycles but not people who simply come in and sit down) and it was easy.

It was so easy.

So now I am nearly unable and practically unwilling to grasp, much less to accept, what is happening.  In the present tense.  Because here I am.  With Tess.  And, at least for three and a half days each week, I am on my own.   

Jim and I had dogs, but they were OUR dogs.  WE walked them.  WE bathed them (in the bath tub, with me sitting there in my bathing suit and our black lab, Dakota, her big eyes rolled back in her head like one of those hysterical-to-the-point-of-madness horses you see in the movies) flailing about in the water), we took them to dog-trainers, we took them to vets, we put them in excellent kennels, we did it all TOGETHER, until Dakota (the last dog and the one we loved the most) got sick and Jim got sicker and finally I had to take Dakota in and have her put down by myself.  Jim, he was too sick and had gone too deeply inside himself with his Mesothelioma, to be too cognizant about Dakota's whereabouts.

"Where's the dog?"
"Gone."
"Gone as in 'not in the room' or gone as in 'not in this world'?"
"The latter."
"Oh. Well. Sure did love that dog."

Well, folks, sorry, but that's the way farmers and railroaders and cowboys talk, when they're dying and their dog gets gone-dead-gone. Which brings it back to me.  Because I feel a little scared and lonely right now.  Like I won't do it right.  Like I'm going to forget something important.  Like, walks.

Like, how many walks is she supposed to get in one day?  I've been getting up at 8 a.m. and giving her anywhere from a twenty minute to a thirty-five minute walk - - and then, in a few hours, Alan has been giving her another twenty minute walk - and then she gets a walk around five o'clock, which is a longer walk -- and then one more before bedtime.  And how much food does she get?  Magge fed her once a day.

Once a day!  What kind of a life is that?  Once a day!  Really?   That awful dry stuff mixed with, what, a half a can of that slimey-looking canned stuff that makes me want to urp?  I can  barely handle the spoon after I slide it out of the can.  God.  That canned dog food is SO awful.  Should I be making my own out of cooked chicken and rice and, maybe, chicken broth? A little basil? 

WHA'??????????

The other thing is, that Tess never looks like she's having any fun.  Magge never played with her per se,  she doesn't know how to rough-house, not that I get very rough, but you know what I mean, I mean she absolutly NIPS if I get too physically playful with her and I DON'T want to encourage the nippy-tendency - - and I DO like to be cuddly and playful with dogs - - so - - folks, I think what I've got on my hands here is a dog that just wants to sleep and eat and walk and sniff and be petted on occassion, and that's.....it. 

And that's a LIFE?  It sounds so TRIVIAL! 

I know what you must be thinking, you must be shrugging your shoulders and saying, not unkindly, "What does it matter to YOU, you're not Tess, YOU'RE not a DOG!"

Well, thank you very much, I KNOW that. I KNOW I'm not a dog.  But I can FEEL.  I know what FUN feels like.  And I know that Tess doesn't look like she's having very much fun.  And, yes, I took her to see Magge, but she didn't look like THAT was very much fun, either.  For either of them.

So there.

Okay, this is so new I guess I'll just play it be ear until I better know what I really am up against.  She's nudging me in my crotch right now, which is SOME kind of sign,  it means she wants something, surely some kind of attention.  I think I'll take her out for a pee-break.  In my own little over-grown backyard, thank you very much.  Before my Tuesday five o'clock comes.

In the meantime, DO, if you have any at all to give, send me some advice. 

That's why I ask the Lord
In Heaven Above.....
What is this thing....
Called.......
                   ..............(love) DOG?