My inner Sweeney Todd cries out

Know the personal,
yet keep to the impersonal:
accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,
the Tao will be luminous inside you
and you will return to your primal self.

Tao te Ching

——————-

I want to kill a chicken.

At first sight, that confession may seem like a good anecdote for the true-crime novel that might someday be written about my life. But there is actually a wholesome and pure motivation behind my bloodthirsty desires.

I believe we are dangerously disconnected from our food. And if I’m going to be a meat eater (and yes, I am, have no doubts) I need to truly understand the source of that meat. Its origins. Its holy place in the revolving circle of life. Many of us city-folk are so separated from the source of our nourishment we believe that meat comes neatly packed in Styrofoam and plastic wrap, as cleanly prepared as a bag of frozen broccoli or a box of crackers. I find this profoundly disrespectful to the animal that feeds us. It’s criminally callous.

My need to acknowledge and participate in the food chain in a more intimate way started almost 10 years ago. When my daughter was 8, she said she wanted chicken for dinner. When I pulled some from the freezer, she said “No, that other chicken. The steak kind.” I realized that for her the word “chicken” was synonymous with “meat.”  I carefully explained the difference between chicken and beef based on the animal it came from.

She was understandably horrified.

She had never known what meat really was. She vowed eternal vegetarianism (until a few weeks later when she was visiting with her dad and he taunted her with the smell of cooking bacon). While on one hand it’s kind of an amusing story of childhood semantics, it stuck with me.  She was so saddened to know that meat was animals. And I realized that for many of us, although we can identify “beef,” “poultry,” and “pork,” we are almost as poorly educated as to the true meaning behind the names. I had been deluding myself, keeping myself from facing the reality of it. I just never thought about it. Intentional ignorance may sooth the soul, but it’s as valuable as good intentions for keeping us from hell.

And so I feel I must kill a chicken.

If I find myself unwilling to face the animal and cleanly end his life, then I must also find myself unwilling to enjoy him (broiled or baked) on my dinner plate. I have a responsibility to the universe to cherish the life enough to admit it exists in the first place. If I refuse to do that, I am more cold-blooded and heartless than any sociopathic killer. I am merely a profiteer, benefiting from those who are willing to get their hands dirty on my behalf, while metaphorically and literally keeping my own clean. Shameful.

Many folks would simply advise vegetarianism as an alternative to murder. But as I examine my incisors, my canines, and my molars, not to mention my single-stomached digestive system, I have to recognize that I am designed by the universe to be omnivorous. I require lipids and proteins. And as I will discuss in a future blog, artificially synthesized versions of any food are as far removed from healthy eating as Styrofoam and plastic wrap. You might as well just eat the packaging.

Besides, as long as there is filet mignon topped with melted blue cheese, as long as there is the smell of turkey roasting in the oven, as long as apples and onions can transform pork into manna, and as long as rosemary grows for the sole purpose of turning my chicken into an aromatic heavenly delight, I will be an eater of meat.

We’ll leave my leather shoes for another debate.

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Bury me not on the lone prairie. At least not yet.

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

Tao te Ching
—————

School, Marriage, Children, Death.

In that order. That’s the summation of a life as I always envisioned it.

The thing is, school-marriage-children come in quick succession, boom boom boom. Somehow my life plan didn’t take into account that there might be some time before that last stage. Shockingly, at least to me, it’s not an instantaneous cause-and-effect (as much as it may feel that way when you’re raising a teenage daughter).

So as my child grows up, I’m actually surprised by the fact that I’m not quite as ready to have my old bones buried in the chapel graveyard as I once believed.

In fact, I’d like to argue that my bones are still rather supple. Despite the creaking and popping and feeble desire to grunt as I stand up, there is a distinct absence of the odor of lilac water and mothballs that should be accompanying my imminent departure.

I’m afraid this means I’m going to have to live for a while longer.

OK, ok. So I’m only 44 years old. There are a large number of individuals on the other end of the baby boom who might laugh at the mortality pressing down on my middle-aged brow. But really. I didn’t expect this.

The worst part, though, is that if I’m going to live, it means that stretching out before me there is still a FUTURE. I actually have to plan a life. And then live it. This kind of pisses me off. Nobody warned me.

The future is quite an ominous thing, no matter where we sit on our undefined and precarious time-line.

And if I’m going to have one, start all over again, I’m not sure quite how to approach it.

When I was young the future was a wide vista of endless possibilities. All the things I could do, all the things that might happen to me. It was all very exciting, and I was entitled to all of that excitement. I wasn’t much of a worrier back then, and I assumed it would all be grand adventures that would someday be assembled into a fascinating book that would be read and treasured by generations to come.

The one thing the future never was, though, was finite. “The end” didn’t figure much into my imaginative autobiographical musings. School-marriage-children-death was what happened to OTHER people. I was going to be different, because my path was most assuredly eternal. And yet there it sits now. Once I hit marriage and children, I realized I had no choice. I had accidentally slipped into mortalty. Maybe “the end”  lives far into the future at the end of long stay at some stinky old-home facility (where I’ll be lucky to have the drool wiped regularly from my chin). Maybe it is hiding immediately around the corner behind the wheel of a careening truck in the hands of a drunk driver. It changes nothing: “the end” is as inevitable as… well… those proverbial taxes and their hooded partner.

This new planning is so different from those endless dreams of childhood. Knowing that there is some mysterious drop-off point or a giant wall obstructing my hitherto presumed immortality lends a certain frantic urgency to the future, and a sense of wasteful idleness to the present.

Hurry, hurry! urges the universe. There is a deadline, in the most literal sense. Without infinite possibilities, suddenly choices matter. I’ve never lived too long in one place and I always imagined I’d be able to eventually live everywhere. I may have been overly optimistic, there. There are only so many places I might fit into this tighter schedule. All the women I thought I could be in my life are fading. There are only so many faces left to wear. Panic sets in.

The possibilities still FEEL endless, because that’s what possibilities always were. This contradictory reality has me frozen, unable to choose. I never feared choosing wrongly before, because there were always takesy-backsies and do-overs. Now every step I take seems to etch itself in stone, permanent and irreversible. They take me on a specific path. My power of selection is being snatched from my decreasingly flexible fingers.

This depresses the hell out of me. Whither my internal Auntie Mame, living an endless madcap adventure? Life may be a banquet, but apparently I’m on a strict diet.

Its all very ludicrous, of course. Anyone in their 60s can tell me that the time I have left “post motherhood” will seem like lifetimes upon lifetimes compared to the time I’ve spent fulfilling the obligatory roles of youth, and I’m sure anyone in their 80s will scoff at the professed wisdom of those 60-year-old zygotes.

Maybe I should just forget all this self-indulgent existential nonsense and run away and join a circus. When I grow up I want to be a lion tamer. Or maybe a ballerina. Or a detective, like Nancy Drew…

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Good Enough

The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

Tao te Ching

——————-
Pigs are perfectionists.

I love generalizations, don’t you? They sit there in all their platitudinous splendor, FEELING true and tidy and summed up like perfect little equations on the blackboard of reality. Axiomatic.

But really, show me an incredibly disorganized home and I’ll show you a perfectionist almost every time.

I speak from experience rather than judgment, here. The pig is me.

Throughout my twenties and thirties, my world was chaos. I let dishes and laundry accumulate, the mess in my car overflow the floor wells, the papers on my desk grow like unstable high rises built on a fault-line. The chaos of my surroundings reflected itself in my emotions, my relationships, my parenting, and my work. The guilt of not “getting it right” ate at me and fueled ongoing feelings of inadequacy, sleeplessness, and the inevitable short temper.

I feared that my daughter was growing up thinking it was normal to have fast food for breakfast because there was no time to shop or to cook. Her homework may or may not be done, because I never modeled completion in my own tasks. Completion? I couldn’t imagine what complete looked like, I just held some vague image of a perfectly organized world, as misty in my mind as the peaks of Mount Olympus. And as I looked around at the impossible ungodly clutter, I could never even find the place to start. Hopeless conundrum.

Secretly I knew that with all this disorganization as her influence, she would grow up to be the parents’ worst nightmare: an epic failure, a beacon forever casting light on the truth of my bad parenting.

Something had to be done.

By nature I am a problem solver. Each time I would gaze upon the chaos, I would plan amazing and wondrous organization systems that would solve those problems forever. Periodically I’d throw myself into action, cleaning a kitchen until every surface sparkled, every bit of glassware was placed in the cabinets in perfectly spaced crystal rows, the drip trays under the oven coils were shining like mirrors, and the floor was spotless enough to invite a visit from Mr. Clean and his sexy bald head

Or I might tackle the laundry, not only washing every bit of dirty clothing that had accumulated over the weeks but also emptying every drawer and hanger and rearranging the closets until my wardrobe hung by order of type and season (not to mention weight-loss intentions… “by January I’m sure this dress will fit again, and by May…”).

Or I might create a multi-colored filing system complete with tickler files and prioritization tabs and sort every bit of unopened mail into its perfect vertical resting place.

I believed I had turned over a new leaf and life would now be better… even perfect.

My daughter would be surrounded by activity, cleanliness, and efficiency. By osmosis my newfound perfection would immediately turn her into a straight A student who makes her own bed and flosses her teeth. If I could only maintain my new inner June Cleaver or Martha Stewart, her teen years would be destined to be spent with the two of us giggling together over boys she liked, shared dreams for her future, mutual manicures, and the general goodwill experienced between mothers and daughters in a happy shiny world.

Right?

But after each herculean effort I’d fall back exhausted, never having enough time in the day to live up to the system I’d created. Who could?

I practiced visualization techniques. I imagined this woman who keeps up a perfectly organized life. I deluded myself that if I imagined her well enough I would become her? Her kitchen is always spotless. Her size 6 clothes are neatly pressed. As she surrounds herself with her perfectly cleaned and organized things, she has time to take up painting and poetry while cooking 4 course meals and sipping tea from delicate china cups on her spider-free veranda.  Because of her consistent and patient parenting, her children proudly march their perfect report cards before her loving eyes. They would be living legacies to her charity, her kindness, and her never-ending supply of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.

However, as I held her in my inner eye, envisioning myself slipping into her reality, I pretty much wanted to kick her in her meticulously waxed nether-regions with my pointiest shoes (which were, of course, buried in my closet under a mound of too-small clothing which I was sure one day would be cleaned, pressed and donated to charity). I really hated that bitch.

I wish I could point to a moment in time when it changed. I want to be able to sum it up in a perfectly tidy little story of personal growth, inner awareness, and maturity that will inspire future women to lay down the mantle of oppressive perfectionism and rise, free of their shackles, to live lives of peaceful self-acceptance and competence.

Therapy helped. Therapy always helps. Those who fear therapy and its stigma need to realize that great therapy is like a spa treatment for the mind.

The only moment I can pinpoint is when my therapist said two words to me. Two liberating, life-altering, magical words that rung like incantations in the air around me.

“Good enough.”

She was talking about mothering. I had been weeping over my failure to be the perfect SUV-driving cookie baking soccer mom, and she assured me that my mothering had been “good enough, and good enough mothering is a hell of a lot better than most kids get.”

My insecurity should have rejected it immediately, but I sat transfixed by the potential inherent in those two words. Good enough mother… good enough friend? Good enough housekeeper? Good enough employee? Was it that simple? Was it possible? Could I be “good enough” and be happy?

Through fits and starts and trial and error, I put “good enough” into action. Giving up delusions of Mount Olympus took conscious effort and some mourning for what I still wished could have been. But I was willing to try.

And slowly, against the odds, it worked.

I discovered that a “good enough” filing system with just a few folders puts an end to paper avalanches. A “good enough” laundry system means that clothes can be washed and put away, as long as I am willing to let shirts touch slacks and blues can be hung next to reds. A “good enough” kitchen gets you cleanly wiped counters and plates you can find and eat from without fear of botulism.

While my inner anal princess still wishes the glasses in the cupboards lined up, like with like, in little military rows, I’ve learned that it’s ok if a coffee cup sits next to a water tumbler. The world does not tilt off its axis and go spiraling into the sun. Who knew? It took time to accept this good enough world, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that there were no mounds of dirty clothes, no stacks of unwashed dishes, and I actually had time and energy to run through with a dustrag to make a “good enough” pass at the furniture. Miraculous!

And most miraculously of all, “good enough” parenting can actually produce a child who finishes school, isn’t strung out on drugs, and only has piercings in places that aren’t too frightening or questionable in intent. And if there are any tattoos, I don’t know about them and that’s “good enough” for me.

I still hope that dress fits by May, though. You can’t lose ALL your dreams.

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It ends. It begins.

…the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

tao te ching

————————–

There comes a time when your children cease their role as major players in the story of your life and wander in to their own stories. For years, all your attention has been placed on this fascinating thread and then abruptly the thread is cut and they are relegated to inconsequential mentions in a holiday or a random memory flashback.

It’s likely that their role fades gradually, but our fascination with their subplots and themes is so all-encompassing we never notice their diminishing place and it seems more as if we turn a page and suddenly their names disappear from the text.

I suppose the most successful of us pick up the dangling ends of our own story arcs and rebuild them into a new and exciting narrative. But in that moment when you realize your children have rightfully taken up their place as their own heroes and heroines, the temptation to close our own book and follow theirs is overwhelming. It is a crossroads of mortality, the internal struggle between the pull of eternity and choosing to plant ourselves fully in the present and recapture our own spotlight, ignoring the fact that to the outside world we are merely fading divas.

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