PART ONE
Saturday, September 14, 2024
Hummingbird Magic
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Serving Up Some Yogic Tennis
Monday, November 23, 2020
Cheers!
PART ONE
Five or six years ago, every time I drank a beer, especially if I had had one the night before, or even two nights before, my teenage daughter would ask, “Mom, are you an alcoholic?”
I found this triggering. Never had I ever had anyone monitor or even notice my alcohol consumption. Alcohol monitoring was my job.
Three out of four of my grandparents were alcoholics, one out of two of my parents was an alcoholic, and one out of two of their kids—and that one kid is not me. I gave birth to one kid who has, I think, grown up to be a normal social drinker.
But wait, what even is that? Couples my age split a bottle of wine every night; because of luck or grace or genetics, I’m just not into it, as a nightly habit. When I ask my daughter if she drinks alcohol daily, she reminds me how many of her peers get blackout drunk, or drink till they vomit. That answer reminds me of when I asked my mom if her father had been an alcoholic, and she responded, “My father never missed a day of work in his life” –-because apparently that was the criterion for not being an alcoholic. Anyway, everyone drank every day back then; haven’t you seen Mad Men?
While it is not my responsibility, and, come to think of it, none of my business how much or how often my daughter drinks, it is hard to not wonder, and I feel like I could save her a ton, a lifetime, of energy and effort and anguish, if she would heed my advice to enjoy alcohol sparingly, advice she likely doesn’t actually need. I mean...I hope she doesn’t need it.
I love when she hangs out with sober people; I’m always relieved when she’s having dinner with Susan, or Patrick, because I know, in solidarity, she won’t drink. Clearly, she doesn’t want wine so much that she orders it when she’s out with sober people, even if everyone else is drinking. Does that mean she’s in the clear? Does that mean I can take that off my rapidly decreasing list of parental concerns?
She says it is, and it does, and I can.
“Mom,” she has said, “I don’t have a drinking problem,” and I have refrained from saying, well, yes, of course, that is what people with drinking problems say.
My mom died of cirrhosis of the liver a few months ago. “I never really thought of your mom as a heavy drinker,” my cousin Lisa (whose mom had died a decade ago after 30 years' sobriety) said to me, when my mom was on her literal death bed. “I mean, have you ever even seen her drunk?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said. I mean, certainly it had been awhile. Though I should point out that I had told my mom in 1986 not to call me if she’d been drinking, not to answer her phone if she thought it was me.
So how would I even know?
Last month, my brother left six progressively drunker voicemails, from a number I didn’t recognize, while I was teaching at a sacred sexuality retreat in Maui. I had no capacity, or time, or cellular signal, to help him in any way. He was convinced that our father had died, and that I hadn’t informed him—“just like when mom died,” he accused, through tears, and I involuntarily giggled. He had gone from concern about the whereabouts of my dad and slightly slurring, to very drunk and flat-out victimhood, crying to me via his final voicemail: “What kind of way is that to treat your brother?” I giggled. How did he even have my number? I texted my dad and suggested he reach out to my brother. I didn’t tell him that his man-child thought he was dead. A week later, back in Chicago, I played his string of progressively drunker voicemails and giggled again, without judging myself.
But when my daughter posts a fun Instagram story of herself in which she drinks from the wine bottle, I don’t giggle.
PART TWO
Lily has a certain skewed perspective on what constitutes alcoholism. While my mom considered the condition to be a moral flaw, my daughter seems to think it’s a lack of discipline. While my mom needed an inch or two of alcohol every day just to take the edge off, the primary alcoholic in Lily’s life is a dear friend her age who would “lose count” and accidentally have 19 drinks, instead of the three he’d planned to have. “But I lost count!” he would explain, each time. He was known to throw it up later, in epic proportions. It was all rather dramatic.
That’s one way to do it.
For me, alcoholism looks like drinking in secrecy, in small quantities, because that’s what my mom did, back in the day, back when my 13-year-old brother reported it to 16-year-old me, and I told my dad about the ever-decreasing vodka bottle.
My mom could never really love me as much, after that.
I went to visit her in her rehab facility last January—rehab for starting to walk again, not rehab from alcohol use, even though alcohol is what led to her not being able to walk. Too many enzymes in her liver had led to an intestinal infection, which had led to a prescription and a warning not to drink while taking the medication. And she didn’t. But if you’ve been a daily drinker for decades, you apparently can’t just stop drinking, or you’ll have a seizure, and she did--a seizure from which she never recovered. Who knew? Apparently not my mom, or the doctor, whom she probably hadn’t told about her “little alcohol thing” (which is how my mother once flippantly referred to her drinking problem). I imagine she filled out a form for the physician and checked the box that said 3-5 cocktails a week, so as not to incriminate herself.
Having grown up with the mom I grew up with, my level of vigilance began with my first bitterly undrinkable beer in college. Would my drinking become unmanageable? I will never know if it didn’t because I never let it, or because I just didn’t have the gene. My daughter has none of the vigilance she might have had if I had been a secret or excessive drinker. She just has a mom who seems a wee bit paranoid about alcohol.
When I spent a few days with my mother last winter, I wanted to optimize what was likely the last time we’d be together. I went through our old photos and articles and brought them to the facility to remind her of our past adventures and holidays and conversations. She hadn’t exactly been a person who sucked the marrow out of every morsel of everyday existence before the seizure, so I wasn’t expecting much emotional payoff for either of us that day. But, in those photos, 30 and 40 years ago, she sure looks like she’s having a good time.
“You know, that can be addictive,” my mother warned, interrupting me from her wheelchair. “I read an article about it.”
She was referring to my lip balm, which was made of, I feel compelled to mention, an organic blend of beeswax, coconut oil, vanilla, and rosemary. At any other time in my life I would have announced the ingredients that second, or protested that even if lip balm were addictive, it was the kind of addiction like exercise, or drinking water: arguably good for you. Her observation about my lip balm addiction reminded me of the time, about 15 years ago, when I had told her about an Ayurvedic product called nasal oil, which was an organic blend of sesame oil, eucalyptus, and healing herbs. It was a uniquely helpful, alternative-medicinal product, and I had no idea why it didn’t fly off American pharmacy shelves. As I rhapsodized about how much I loved nasal oil, my mom had informed me that one of the worst addictions a person could have was putting substances up one’s nose.
That was the kind of alcoholic she was: the kind who accused other people of being addicted to their lip balm.
When I speculate on what kind of alcoholic my daughter would hypothetically be--and believe me, this is not something I even want to do, but if I don’t, it will haunt me, so, in a fit of negative self-indulgence, I can’t help but speculate that my kid would be, first of all, fun.
When her fun had peaked, she would want whichever friend she was with to tell her that she was their best friend. Once assured, she’d suddenly regret drinking in the first place, leave, and on her Uber ride home, develop a compensatory workout routine, and post the hilarious drunk-Uber exercises on her Instagram the next day. She’d have only the slightest hangover, and I’d be—virtually--proud of her creativity in a way that would predictably warp into sadness and guilt, and that’s the kind of alcoholic she’d be: a fun one, a funny one, who nevertheless elicits my refined sense of guilt. “Mom,” she’d say, with an eye roll I could hear over the phone, “I left before midnight, and my workout post got more than 12,000 likes!” In fact, it would probably go viral and she’d probably get a web tv series out of it, because that’s the kind of alcoholic she’d be.
But I would nevertheless feel a sense of personal guilt, because who would have brought a child into the world with 50-50 odds? I’d look back to now, and wonder what I could have done. But I know, as well as I know anything, that there’s nothing I, or anyone, could do, or say. It’s in the genes and it’s in the stars, and back in the day when I felt compelled to pry glasses out of people’s hands and stomp on people’s cigarette packs, I ultimately realized that rash oaths and grand gestures don’t work, because that’s not the way it works; that’s what I learned back then, and haven’t needed to revisit the topic. It’s been decades since I’ve secret-policed how much other people drink.
But, I am told, “the little alcohol thing” can skip a generation. As a mother, that’s both a blessing and a curse.
Another equally irreverent blog regarding my mother's death: Barbara Terket Thomas Connolly (1940-2018)
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
But Don't ALL Lives Matter?
A: We grew up in a racist society. No matter how racist we think we're not, we’ve been pretty clueless. When I cautioned my kid to be careful at a protest, she said, "Well. Now you know how the parents of black kids feel every DAY." So. My mailing list is full of cool conscious primarily white women who sent their kids to diverse schools, and we likely have more black friends than our parents did, we've attended diversity trainings, we’ve read Toni Morrison and White Fragility and we voted for a black president, and of course no one on my email list would be racist, no way! But. The American system is permeated with racism. I believe it’s time to examine the stories we’ve believed about race. Unlearn them and understand where we got them. I think white women are afraid to feel the collective shame. I certainly am. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t want to know that I’m imbedded into a system that has caused suffering. But it’s also SO cool, because the collective is actually creating a more conscious world rather than playing out this horrible old story that we have outgrown, this old story that we were born into. Everything I just said, though, is considered hijacking the narrative. And it's also super privilegey to even have the IDEA that we can create our own reality. I can not imagine what it would feel like to NOT be able to create my own reality simply due to the color of my skin. Assuming that I can "create my own reality" is a privilege.
We were all born into this system and something about it does not work for "minorities" (see how we are writing a story in which there are more of "us," so "they" are the minority? It is just mind blowing to start to see the old stories we were taught, which simply don't work anymore.
I have experienced that We are One. And I understand that even THAT is super priviledgey. But the entire reason for yoga, as I experience it, is to have that knowledge, that felt experience, that humans are inherently Divine. And yes there are also some nice physical heath benefits too! So it is from that place that I want to share some enlightening but also entertaining suggestions. Most of us know nothing about history from a non-colonized perspective. The only way out is through. We are the ones we've been waiting for.
When “sheltering in place," for reasons I don’t actually understand, I felt compelled to learn about the Vietnam war. (I got really into it—major blog post coming soon.) So I was on a big 1968 retrospective during the lockdown, and when George Floyd was killed and the protests began, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between now and 1968. Based on my deep dive into the ‘60s, here are some recommendations that offer a perspective that's valuable right now:
The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, free documentary on Amazon. Apparently, the FBI files have been opened because 50 years passed, and this film uses FBI documentation to illuminate the disparity between what I was taught about the Black Panthers as a kid (dangerous black guys, basically terrorists) versus what this organization actually was. It especially shows HOW THE FBI created lies about the Black Panthers that the newspapers then printed, leading every white person in the country to consider the Panthers dangerous. Actually, they were male citizens trying to peacefully protect their community from police violence. In 1968. Ultimately, the FBI broke into their pad and shot the leaders. (That could not happen with Black Lives Matter, because it intentionally has no mailing address and no official leader.)
13th, free on Netflix. This documentary is about the 13th Amendment and the prison industrial complex. Does that sound boring? It’s not. It’s lively and well produced, historical but also very current. The US has a surprising number of for-profit prison corporations, and they have to keep the prison populations high, because: stockholders. (Please make sure you are not accidentally invested in any of these barbaric places.) For-profit prisons are filled with people who couldn’t afford decent representation. And they have to work there. It’s practically legalized slavery. This illuminating and heartbreaking movie also explains the huge rise in the prison population over the last few decades. You’ll find out how Jim Crow laws are alive and well in the American South, and why the majority of black men in Alabama are not eligible to vote. I was taught that black men commit more crimes, but they don’t, actually. They just get picked up more often because they are perceived as more dangerous, which also just what we were taught--see the Black Panther documentary. The only thing that has changed since forever is that everyone now carries a video camera. Worth watching till the very end; correct me if I’m wrong.
The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson. Fascinating book telling true stories of three black families who left the south in search of a better life. It reads like fiction. The level of vicious racism these people were trying to flee is painful to hear about. Minor detail: early 1900s southern society considered the biggest threat to be black men raping white women, but guess what: actually, the rate of white men raping black women was far higher. (What the heck is that even about? Honestly it just makes white men look super insecure.)
American Values by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is a view of the Kennedys through the eyes of Bobby Kennedy’s son, Bobby, who is married to the woman who plays the wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. (She’s adorable, and I follow her on Instagram because I love Bobby Kennedy Jr. inordinately much.) Over the years I have found that most people are either Kennedy-lovers or Kennedy-haters, and, well. Hi. You’ll be reminded in this book that there were tons of great ideas and a trend toward racial justice in the 1960s—which I remember well, because my parents were totally against it. “You can’t legislate equality!” they used to say as small-government Republicans who did not want the government messing with human relations—that’s overreach. But I digress. After MLK was assassinated, 110 American cities rioted. On the 6th day of the riots, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. This book illustrates the great ideas of the 1960s and how RFK senior, speaking from his heart and not using speechwriters, was loved multiculturally, which was apparently just too much unity for…whoever shot him. It appears the family thought both RFK’s death and his brother’s were pretty sketchy. If you like Kennedy antics, the environment, and civil rights, this book offers a comprehensive and colorful picture. It shows how close we were to major racial progress in 1968. Too bad everyone who might have tipped the balance toward racial equality was assassinated!
If you are not into the 1960’s but you want to view race relations from an educated, hip, contemporary African perspective, the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is just the book. All her books are great.
If you really want to challenge yourself, check out The Great Unlearn (@thegreatunlearn on Instagram, or rachelcargle.com).
A little action step: call Target, Whole Foods, and Walgreens corporate and use your white voice to demand they distribute goods to the south and west sides of Chicago, where unstocked shelves still prevail from the early days of covid.
Things to say to your Facebook friends from high school who just don’t get it:
> 1 in 3 people killed by a stranger was killed by a police officer. Unarmed black people are twice as likely to be killed as unarmed white people. There were only 27 days in 2019 when police did not kill someone in the US.
> Don’t ALL lives matter? YES. But black lives are the current focus. Only black lives need a protest. People shouldn’t have to protest for their basic civil right not to die. It’s not like it’s 1968 anymore!
> Don’t ALL lives matter? YES. But when the Boston marathon was bombed and everybody said “Boston Strong,” nobody said, “ALL cities are strong.” When someone posts about breast cancer, no one says, “But what about colon cancer?” Black Lives Matter is not an either/or proclamation. Americans traditionally rally round the group in crisis. That does not discredit or diminish any other group; it brings awareness and support to the group that needs attention. (Paraphrased from an Instagram post.)
> Police can’t even refrain from police brutality at a peaceful protest against police brutality. (Another Instagram post.)
> “I have friends who have been police officers, and I have friends whose spouses are or have been police officers. They are nice and not racist.” Me too. The protests are not about individuals. The protests are about the system of policing. (Police Departments are super funded and reforms do get put into place, but, for example, countless policemen covered up their badge numbers during the protests, and so many were not wearing their required video cameras. I didn’t see that on the news, I heard it from young friends who observed it firsthand in Chicago, LA, and NYC. )
> “It’s horrible that an innocent black man was killed, but destroying property has to stop!” How about: “It’s horrible that property was destroyed, but killing innocent black men has to stop!” (More from Instagram.)
Let's not wait for external evidence of change. Let's hold space for a shift we probably never thought we'd see in our lifetime. We don't even know what this new world is going to look like--I mean, how could we? But we can hold energetic space for something better, and open our virtual spaces to a glorious diversity. I have no idea what to even say about physical space, but when we CAN congregate again, it's going to be even better than it used to be.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
Coro-Nation
Human THOUGHTS freak out over a potential shortage of toilet paper…for whatever reason. Those thoughts spread virally. We as individuals and quickly as the collective then hoard toilet paper, and thus we CAUSE that. We caused exactly what we feared. It is so clear. Writ large. We just created our own reality.
Speaking of victims, here’s another thing. What if, and here I depart from my early religious roots and leap into yoga and tantra, what if the “savior” is not external? Are we looking to be saved, do we want pharmaceutical companies to research a cure, and better yet do we want them to research a vaccine, so we don’t even have to deal with the enemy in the first place? That’s the old paradigm, in which the savior is external. But in the new paradigm, we are not meant to be victims. The world is changing this very second. Old paradigm: god is out there, and we are at “his” mercy, victims of “his” will. New paradigm: we are creators, not victims; the savior is within. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are being shown how to SAVE ourselves: slow down, be with our loved ones, work from home, don’t panic-buy, nurture our immune systems, trust we will pull through with a lot of help from our friends and communities. We can do it. As a collective.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Dead Ex-Husband Alive at the DMV Part 12
It was our Christmas trip. He was making himself known.
I had been slightly unwilling to believe (because this may be getting old to some people, and because really I have no proof, do I?) that he was making himself known a week before, when we were decorating the tree. It was the one time a year I’d invited him over for dinner when he was alive—to put the lights on the tree (my not-favorite task) and to make us dinner. (Yes, I invited him over annually to make us dinner, and it was the same dinner every year, called, post-mortem, “The Barrett Dinner.”)
Lily put the lights up herself this year for the first time ever; my kid is a trooper. She is absolutely committed to having great holidays and loving life, even when she’s sad. So the lights were up, most of the ornaments were on, and she was staring at the tree, when she said, “Mom, see how that one light is WAY brighter than all the others?” Indeed. It was weirdly bright. Five times brighter. Transfixed for a moment, we were silent. Lily, because she’s like this, reached out and touched it. “Ouch!” she yelped, and that entire strand went out. “It was really hot!” she said.
Our friend Steven arrived for dinner and he simply IS all things Christmas, yet he had no explanation for the weirdly bright, burned-out light. My instinct then and there was that Lily’s dad was making his presence known: on that one day a year he’d come for dinner, on that one day a year he and I would simply get along, so our daughter would have a tradition that included both of us. Never in my daughter’s 19 years did we have a strand of lights go out, let alone have one amped-up bulb.
We kept it to ourselves; she’s less inclined to share, and even to my most mystical friends I hesitated to say, “There was a really bright light on our tree, and it was Barrett!” Because, come on. I completely see the ridiculousness of it, while at the same time I regularly and randomly feel his presence with no need to tell people or seek proof. And I’d have let this Christmas bright-light magic/weirdness recede into coincidence had this book not arrived today, reminding me of the synchronicity of the Barrett Avenue sighting.
So I texted his sister, who told me she had just been scanning photos of their grandfather, who Barrett strongly resembled, and had therefore been thinking of Barrett. I then texted our most heavenly new age friend, who said she’d recently come across a photo of Barrett and me from 1992. That’s a lot of Barrett, and synchronicity, and 55’s in one week.
“I Am The Word.” I will keep you posted.
>> 18 hours later: I quite enjoy the book. I read Chapter One last night. It is very Barrett. Had it been given to me by a client, I'd say they were very intuitive and possibly even guided from beyond by Barrett, due to the fact that Swedenborg is mentioned on page three, and that the book is just, well, verrrry Barrett.
But indeed it was not given to me by someone. I called Amazon. I waited happily on hold, while the customer service rep searched two times each for the USPS number and the Amazon order number, neither of which were in the system.
Neither of which were in the system. If YOU sent me this book, now is the time to jump out and say, "Surprise!"
I wonder if Paul Selig has ever had any other readers receive his book in the mail from anonymous and possibly post-mortem loved ones.
Dead Ex-Husband Alive at the DMV Part 11!
Any second, anyone can call and ask if I received the book yet. I’m waiting.
After looking in my Amazon order history, where it wasn’t, I did a search on the book, to see exactly what it was I hadn’t ordered, and read the description, then returned to the book itself: I Am The Word, by Paul Selig. “A channeled text.” I like channeled books--at least the ones I like--but more to the point, Barrett’s religion (called variously Swedenborgian, or Church of the New Jerusalem, or New Church, the doctrines of which, by the way, were channeled, or divinely derived), was very important to him as well as a key to our connection. And his religion, and he, referred to The Holy Bible as “The Word.”
I Am The Word. Unless you tell me right this second that you sent me this book, I am going to assume that Barrett sent it. I’ve seen those videos of the Amazon warehouse, entirely automated—mistakes could happen, and I have no doubt, literally zero doubt, based on other signs from Barrett, that if he wanted to send me a book he could send me a book. And, if he were going to cause a book to be sent to me, it would be this book.
The book, according to its description, is meant to help readers connect with their guides and “become receptors for energies from above….”
Of all things.
So there’s that. And this story absolutely stands alone with whatever explanation you want to give it—unless you call me this second and say you sent me this book. And even if you do, I might suspect Barrett gave you a nudge. I would ask you what gave you the idea that I might want this book. Because this book is sooo him, and so not me—though it looks potentially interesting, and how could I not read this book? Tiny, minor coincidence that this very BLOG site is called "The Word 1111."
But there’s more.
(To be continued.)