Protected: Half Life
In my job as a psychologist and a diagnostic specialist, I am asked to answer questions and make recommendations. Answering diagnostic questions can be really hard, especially in my areas of specialty. I sift through multiple data sources, try to find patterns of behavior, and predict how behaviors change across settings and over time. Meanwhile, I have to remember that diagnoses do not define children and that their functioning at school, home, and in the community vary as a function of many many other individuals and environmental factors.
Often however just asking the question is harder than answering it. Yesterday, I received the following email:
We have a 13 year old son who is struggling in school. His main challenge is executive functioning and spacing out in class. We are not interested in assessments or medications but do want to understand how to get at the root cause of the lack of motivation. Do you think this is something you can help us with?
This email was obviously written by a very loving parent. The parent has also done some reading, I suspect given the terminology used in this letter and the reference to medication. But it is hard for me to help when I am asked to help solve a problem without finding out what it is. Asking the question, “Is there something wrong with my child?” is sometimes even more frightening than asking, “Is there something wrong with me?” Parenting hits us in the tender places in our heart. For many of us the two questions are really the same question, “Am I a bad person who is passing off my inherent badness to my child?” Some of the variations of this question are less severe but it boils down to fear of coming up short in some very critical way.
Fear of asking the question, “What is wrong” can lead to all kinds of odd little dances. So often, people try to solve problems without knowing what they are. Some people even try to solve problems without admitting that there are even problems. This sounds silly but problems have real consequences with which we are left to cope. You can’t make a problem go away by not believing in it.
Parents often feel responsible for their children’s issues. And honestly, as parents we are responsible for a lot. But we aren’t responsible for every part of our child’s reality. It is particularly hard for people who appear to be successful and high functioning on the outside but fear being exposed for the horrible people they fear themselves to be. I have met many parents who think, deep down, that they are awful people. And you know what? They are never horrible people. And some of them are quite wonderful people who nonetheless feel fundamentally flawed.
The saddest part is that when people refuse the help I can give them because they fear themselves, it perpetuates bad decision-making and bad problem solving. Then they just feel like really bad people and are even less likely to seek help for themselves and their children.
I believe that I am a worthwhile person, a good wife, and a good mother. I believe I am good at my job. But like everyone else, I am deeply flawed. I am a kind person but I hurt people and sometimes I do it on purpose. I am a loving person but sometimes feel contempt for others. I am a generous person but at times act with keen selfishness. It has never been easy in my life to engage in constructive self-reflection. At times, I have sought professional help but with great difficulty. At other times, it was not so hard. It was pretty easy to be open to seeing a psychologist after my cancer diagnosis. After all, who am I to begrudge myself support for CANCER? But I have seen psychologists multiple times in my life for individual, parenting, and marital purposes. I am happy for all of the experiences. They were extremely valuable. I did it because I felt like I owed it to myself and my family to be a well-adjusted person. Because truthfully, unhappy people are hard to live with, especially when a very unhappy person resides in your own heart.
I will keep working on myself and I wish all of you the happiness that comes from seeing yourself, the good and the bad, working on things knowing that things can get better but not perfect, and being okay with that. Self-acceptance is an amazing power and I have been happy to have gotten more and more glimpses of it as I continue through life as a beautiful and flawed human being.
Protected: Declaration of Dependence
Yesterday, I was reading through my posts for 2013 as a review. I’d had a good and productive day. I was happy all day. And then I came to my post from August when I was hit with grief over the anniversaries of my mastectomy as well as the death of my friend, Gina. I remember that day in August. I cried for hours, which is something I have done less than a handful of times in my life outside of the two times I had clinical depression.
Yesterday I cried for about 20 minutes and then I actually felt good again. I’m not one of those people who usually feels better after crying. I mean I know that it is necessary to express grief but I still usually feel exhausted and cotton headed after I cry. The grief startled me because I found instantly found myself loudly and sloppily crying. The intensity of my grief felt like the day Gina died. And my worries about my own mortality, especially the prospect of dying before my daughter is grown, only intensified it.
I’m of the opinion that life is complex and there’s usually not one reason why something happens. But I will say that viewing a series of black and white photos of a husband and wife over the course of the wife’s treatment and later death from breast cancer, likely was a catalyst for this latest crying jag. One of the photos is a head shot of the pair in bed, holding each other, each with a look of utter bliss. It’s a beautiful and happy image. And it reminds me of my husband and I. John is a very affectionate man. He hugs me in his sleep and if I awaken in the middle of the night and put my arm around him, he makes a sigh of contentment and holds my hand. And I don’t mean that he sometimes does this. He always reaches for my hand, every time over the past 23 years. So I looked at that photo and immediately inserted myself into the image. And this woman who was born in the 70’s died. And you can see the progression of her illness in the photos with each photo showing loves and losses in the most poignant way. I found myself thinking, “That could have been me. That still could be me.” I didn’t dwell on the thoughts but I had them nonetheless.
I had nightmares that night. (People, when you wonder why I am careful about watching intense, violent, and/or scary films. This is why. They have given me nightmares since I was about 6 years old.) In one, I was at a parade that included some past beauty queens, women who were now middle-aged. They were beautifully dressed but instead of being on a parade float, they were lying in open caskets on wheels! Even in the dream I thought, “What on Earth? What is this supposed to symbolize about women, beauty, and aging?” And then later in the dream, I was at the funeral of a relative. I don’t remember anything except she was a woman in my family. I remember having grief during the dream about missing my grandmother who died in 1993. In the final part of the dream, my daughter was acting completely and utterly out of control. As rebellious and angry as she could be. It was terrifying.
I am a genuinely happy person. One who has been through a lot. And lots of people have been through a lot in their lives with different impacts and different ways of coping. I am a person who feels things deeply but I am also a deep thinker. And I feel both positive and negative emotions as well as having positive and negative thoughts. I feel happy and calm most of the time. I think part of these intense moments I have of sadness and fear come from the enormity of what I have to lose, my family, my friends, my independence, my capacity to help others as a psychologist.
Today’s New Year’s Eve resolution is to remind myself of the strength of my connections, my connections to myself through my own self-awareness and the purposeful way in which I try to lead my life. My connection to my daughter who is doing so well and so happy right now. My connection to my husband who loves me so dearly that he reaches out to me even when he is fast asleep. Who trusts me so deeply that he allows me to be very open about the ups and downs of our relationship as well as our own personal shortcomings. My connection to my parents; I can’t imagine how hard it must be as older people, to worry about your child’s health and mortality. When my friend, Preben got cancer over five years ago, while still in his 30’s, I noticed that his parents started visiting him much more frequently. I told him half jokingly, “That’s what you get for getting cancer and scaring your parents.” My connections with my extended family have also strengthened. I have some wonderful cousins and sister-in-laws and my brothers have actually nudged themselves out of their comfort zone a little to be a bit more affectionate with their sister.
My friendship connections over the past year and a half have seen the most change. I have made a number of new friends who have startled me with their intense and generous kindness. I know that some of them will come and go but I think that a good number of them will be lifelong friends. I have had old friendships that have evolved into something much deeper than they were in the past. But I have also experienced some lost friendships and some that have been made weaker by my cancer. This mixture of bitter and sweet, of gains and losses, is somewhat dizzying to a person like me who craves consistency and solidity. But I have learned to cope with chaos in my life. I want to be happy and I know chaos happens no matter what I do. So what is my choice other than to try to make peace with it, live along side of it, and accept that I sometimes lose my footing.
Finally, today I remind myself of my reconnection with nature. I spend time outside every day. I have been able to travel to the mountains and to the sea. I am outdoors during good weather and in bad. Even in the most exposed and vulnerable parts of nature, there is beauty. I feel a strong spiritual connection to everything when I walk. It is both intensely personal and beautifully communal.
That is today’s resolution. Tomorrow is a new day and a new year. I wish all of you good things in 2014: moments of joy, moments of peace, and fortitude among the suffering and chaos. Thank you for your connection and support. Xoxoxoxo.
John Gottmann, a psychologist at the University of Washington wrote a book called, “The Relationship Cure.” In it are strategies for strengthening marriages and other relationships. But Dr. Gottmann is a well known expert on marriage so that emphasis of the book is there. I have read a number of his books and know that one of the things he talks about quite frequently are perpetual problems. 69% of marital arguments are never resolved. And it’s not so much that happy couples need to resolve them as they need to cope with them together.
My maternal grandparents had a long marriage of 60 years. I wish I could say that it was a happy one but it was not. They had a number of perpetual conflicts but one I distinctly remember is the fight they had about a photo that my grandmother had taken with the Hawaiian entertainer, Don Ho. They took separate vacations by the time they were in their 60’s. My grandmother would frequently visit Hawaii to see their daughter, Judy and her family. My grandmother loved Don Ho’s shows. Apparently, he used to invite the grandmothers in the audience to take a photo with him. My grandmother, who was one of the most star struck people I’ve known, of course got the photo op. But she wouldn’t show the photo to my grandfather. I don’t know how many times I heard them yell at each other over some stupid photo. Like my grandmother would have an affair with Don Ho! But the argument was not about the photo. It was about some deeper issue that they were not able to manage. But because they were of a generation, a social class, and a religion that didn’t divorce, they stayed together for many unhappy years.
John and I have been together for nearly 27 years and we have our share of perpetual arguments. And conflict is part of any close relationship. It is to be expected and to be dealt with. But never in a million years would I expect to have a perpetual argument about a plant part, more specifically soursop leaves. Soursop is a fruting tree indigenous to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. I first became aware of the soursop when I was visiting one of my best friends, Cheryl, for her mother’s funeral. Cheryl’s parents were both immigrants from Trinidad. Cheryl’s Uncle Norbert, a retired ichthyologist with more than a passing visual and vocal resemblance to Harry Belafonte, first told me about soursop ice cream. It is as I understand, an acquired taste.
Many years passed and I didn’t think again about soursop. Then I was diagnosed with cancer in late May of 2012. I had my first surgery scheduled for June 27th of the same year. One day, shortly after my diagnosis, John came home with a plastic bag of leaves. One of his co-workers had learned of my breast cancer and told John that tea made from soursop leaves would shrink my tumor. In fact, he thought it would help shrink my tumor even prior to surgery, which was scheduled for a couple of weeks later.
My husband is a software engineer for Disney Internet. The co-worker who gave him the leaves also had a high tech background. He was also rather eccentric, priding himself on storing his container of almond butter upside down so that the oil was easier to stir into it and it would remain creamier. I know this sounds snarky, because it is, but my mother taught me the same practical tip about peanut butter when I was a girl, with about 1/100th of the fanfare.
John brought home the leaves with instructions to make tea. I told him, “I’m not drinking that. Your co-worker is not a physician. He’s an engineer. And he’s weird.”
Okay, so that was not the best way to handle the situation but I was overwhelmed with information, trying to be the best patient that I could be, and the soursop leaf suggestion just seemed surreal to me. Go away, surreality. I need less of you. I am swimming in this cancer Hell hole as fast as I can. I don’t need any Salvador Dali in my life right now. My reality is spinning and melting enough as it is. Now, since it was so important to John I did a literature search on the use of soursop in cancer treatment. There was no evidence to support its use that I could find and some suggestion that it could be harmful. I considered his request considered, albeit in my own feisty way and ruled out for reasonable reasons.
As you might imagine, John was none too pleased with my response. He told me, “You only trust people with credentials.” Seriously? He said this as if it were a bad thing. Months later, he changed his criticism to, “You are so Western in your thinking.” I replied, “I believe that natural substances can be potentially very powerful for good or ill. I want to see an expert not just take advice from anyone. And by the way, you know I see a naturopathic oncologist and a practitioner of oriental medicine IN ADDITION to conventional oncologists, right?”
The argument comes back from time to time without resolution. I invited John to my last two psychologist visits as we work to transition from a crisis managing couple to a different sort of life together. The kind of life that includes the possibility of cancer and has already included past cancer. We are still dealing with the aftermath.
The soursop leaf debacle was discussed during the last session we had together. John explained why it was so important to him. He said, “I wanted to cure Elizabeth’s cancer.” John clarified that he did not think that he was a physician or that he had more expertise than my physicians. But he, as my husband, wanted to “help” in a way that was “curing” my cancer. It was important that I understand this. I had no idea. It makes no logical sense to me. Why would John be expected to “cure” my cancer. There is no cure for breast cancer. And if there were, it would not only be known by John and another software engineer. In fact, it probably WOULDN’T be known by a couple of high tech guys.
But John is my husband who loves me dearly. I know that when he is scared, he is not always “reasonable”, in fact he can be downright romantic and sometimes nearly magical in his thinking when things gets really emotionally tough. And guess what? I am not the paragon of reason at all times. I get scared, feel out of control, and have my own little irrational dance that I do.
I don’t know what it is like to be a spouse of someone with cancer. I hope never to have this experience. But I know that it is important for me to try to understand my husband’s experience. This way we can cope with the conflict of the soursop leaves, which is really conflict about neither of us having control over the disease of cancer.
Protected: Trust fall
As you know, I frequently write about my husband and our marriage in this blog. John reads all of my posts and I am very grateful to him for supporting the level of personal information I share about our lives. He’s never expressed hurt or anger with anything with anything I’ve written. He did disagree with something I wrote about myself, namely when I referred to myself as a “drama queen”. John told me that I was an “anti-drama queen” and that this is actually somewhat annoying to him at times. Although I was happy to hear that my husband views me as having good emotion management skills, I was kind of shocked. I was so shocked that I actually asked him to tell me what he thought a “drama queen” was just to make sure we talking about the same thing. And we were talking about the same thing except when I gave him the example of losing my cool when I come home to a sink full of dishes that he was supposed to do days earlier, he said this was “nagging” rather than being a “drama queen”. Okay, I can work with that. So I’m not exactly Spock. I’m a Spock who also nags on occasion.
When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer, I read a number of memoirs of other women who have had it. The most helpful of them was one that was written by a woman and her husband, both of whom are professional authors. It was clear that they had a loving marriage. It was also clear that cancer had thrown their lives upside down. Their stories were told in tandem with each set of chapters written about the same time period but from their different perspectives.
Yesterday I remembered that book. I asked John if he would write a guest post for my blog. We discussed a few ideas and he indicated that he was interested and that he wanted to think about what to write. I think he will do it and I’m pretty excited about it. My husband and I met in a writing class at the University of Washington. We both love to write. When I first met him, I thought he was an English major and was surprised that he was getting a computer science degree. Both he and I took a number of creative writing classes in college, though not the same ones. John’s mother is a published poet who founded a writing conference in eastern Washington state that ran for several years. John still writes poetry and occasionally gives readings at local coffee shops. A few years ago, he and his friend, Rex had a booth at Artopia, one of the Seattle neighborhood arts festival. I thought the idea of a poetry booth was a little crazy given the venue and especially since they were planning to write lines of their poetry ON PEOPLE. They had tons of multi-colored markers. Rex had also made stencils of lines from some of his poems and was using paint to apply those. Their booth was actually pretty popular. I had totally forgotten about how this fit nicely into the tattoo scene, which is very big in Seattle. And then at one point, the line for face-painting really long and a number of moms successfully convinced them to draw butterflies, flowers, and dolphins on kids’ cheeks. And yes, I had my husband write on me. John wrote a line from a love poem he’d written for me on my upper arm. It was a fun day.
I am hoping that he will write something soon and I don’t have to Spock nag him too much. 😉
Stay tuned.
P.S. For those of you keeping score at home, his work situation has improved somewhat and more importantly, he is taking off both Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks!
My Eyes Are Up Here 