I finally finished my Facebook page, which I started months ago. If you could check it out and “like” it if you are so inclined, I would be most appreciative.
Thanks!
P.S. Please let me know if the link isn’t working for you.
I have mentioned perhaps one or six hundred times that I have five brothers. One of my older brothers’ favorite “games” was pig pile. This involved announcing a victim and then having five siblings tackle and pile atop this person. For example the exclamation, “Pig pile on Liz!” was followed by my being tackled and piled on by five brothers, the oldest of whom was nearly 10 years my senior.
Pig piles seemed to be exclaimed on a very frequent basis and as the only girl of six children and the second to youngest it seemed that I was more often than not, the vortex to which the pile was attracted. A Bermuda Triangle of porcine piling, if you will. As the “baby” of the family, my brother James also spent a fair amount of time face planted on the living room floor beneath four sets of sprawling limbs shod in Converse low tops of various sizes.
Although our older brothers would admit to the pig piling, they would disagree with the metaphorical implications. They believed James and me to be spoiled. We avoided the horrors of ruler wielding nuns, whereas they all attended St. Anthony’s School, for example. Our family also had a little more money when I was growing up, not a lot more but just enough to fuel the “you’re spoiled” flames. I maintain that whatever advantages we may have had were more than offset by their mean older brother shenanigans.
James and I are only 18 months apart in age. Our next oldest sibling, John is 3 ½ years older than me and 3 ½ years younger than our next oldest brother, Mike. John was kind of caught between the “big boys” and the “little kids” of the family.
James and I spent a lot of time together. We played together a lot. We mostly got along very well though we could sometimes fight verbally and physically at which time my mom would yell, “I don’t care who started it. I’m finishing it. Go to your respective rooms!”
We played a combination of traditional boy and girl activities. We played with cars, trucks, and climbed trees. We designed obstacle courses in the yard and spent hours upon hours in the woods surrounding our house and neighborhood. We did not, however, play with Barbies or baby dolls. Remember, this was the late 60’s and early 70’s. My mom made us each two sets of Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls as well as a bunch of stuffed elephants. Due to her combination of genius and industry, we were able to play dramatic reenactments of family life with more socially acceptable dolls.
James was not really interested in formal music training, but he has an incredible ear and natural musical ability. He is also extremely funny. By the time I got to high school, I was pretty serious in my classical flute playing. He had a plastic slide whistle and would frequently copy whatever piece I was practicing in my room, complete with vibrato and when era appropriate, Baroque runs. When it wasn’t infuriating, it was hilarious.
These days my brother plays more music than me; he taught himself drums and plays with his 17 year-old son’s band. The only music we make together is the occasional game of Rock Band. The thread that carries over the years is that fact that my brother can always, I mean always, make me laugh.
He reminded me of this last Friday. James attended the requiem mass at St. James. I was kind of surprised to see him there since it was a pretty long drive for him and I think he hates to drive even more than I do. We got there an hour early to get a seat. During the time before the mass started, he was cracking me up and my laugh was echoing throughout the cathedral. When we were kids, due to different church rules, we were not allowed to talk before or obviously during mass. So with this as a back drop, his jokes have always been extra hilarious. I’d laugh, he’d say, “Now if any other family is coming tonight, they will be able to find us.” Then I laughed harder than before. Then he started singing family gossip in his version of Gregorian chant. I lost it again. Now here’s the thing about my brother. His antics are not particularly loud. He is actually a fairly introverted person whereas I am loud and gregarious. I believe he very much likes to set me up and watch the loud fireworks of my laughter, knowing that he is the one who lit the fuse.
James and I were successful for decades after our childhood in avoiding the bottom of the pig pile. Then I found out I had breast cancer and it wasn’t my older brothers that piled on top of me, it was the world in which I thought I had lived, that dissolved and crashed down on me. During the acute stage of my breast cancer treatment, there were many ongoing assessments and constant revisions of my treatment plan. When I was recuperating from surgery and bored, meaning prime time for worries to creep in, I called him, “James, I am bored. Tell me something funny.” And he did. And when I was anxious about waiting for the results of oncotype testing, which would determine whether my oncologist would recommend chemotherapy or not, I called my brother, “James, I have 20 minutes until I need to leave for my appointment. Can you tell me funny things and distract me?” And he did.
James does not show affection in traditional ways. I remember once, about ten years ago, his closing a telephone conversation by saying, “It was nice talking to you, Liz.” That was a major outpouring of verbal affection. But I know my brother loves me, thinks about me, and keeps the warmest wishes for my health. And he shows his love to me most consistently by making me laugh about today, laugh about cancer, and laugh about the things we did and experienced as kids.
For these things I will be ever grateful. James, you joined me at the bottom of the cancer pig pile. I can’t thank you enough for doing that. If you didn’t realize it before, please realize it now that you have helped me tremendously. Thank you for making me laugh at some of my lowest and scariest times. I love you a lot and I know you return that even when it may come in the guise of slide whistled Mozart.
James must have been about 1 1/2 years old to my three years. It looks like we were having much fun in a rare Seattle-area snow.
Lux aeterna luceat eis,
Domine, cum satis tuis
in aeternum, quia pius es.Let perpetual light shine upon them,
O Lord, in the company of your saints
forever, for you are compassionate.-From the Concluding Rites of the Missa pro Defunctis (Mass for the Dead).
Last night I went to the Mass of All Souls at the St. James Cathedral in Seattle. This year the choir, in which my mom is a member, sang Mozart’s Requiem. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this piece of music, it is the piece that Mozart is composing toward the end of the film, Amadeus. It is a powerful and beautiful mass, which was sung splendidly by the choir. The beginning of the mass definitely emphasizes the downside of death, the wrath of God, judgment, and burning in eternal fire. This is the part that also has the most exciting music. As the mass progresses, themes of life, grace, and redemption emerge. The music and lyrics become lighter, more peaceful, and let’s face it, not nearly so exciting. Mass ends with a processing of white robes, the crucifix, and candles.
St. James is a popular church and the Requiem Mass draws a large crowd of parishioners as well as lovers of sacred music from a variety of religious faiths. If you don’t arrive early, you have to stand. So I got there about an hour early. My dad, my younger brother James, and his wife, Meagan were already there. I sat next to my brother and we chatted before mass started. The church filled up but the seat to my right was empty because it was reserved for people with physical limitations. After a little bit, a woman, who was accompanied by another woman, sat down next to me. I noticed that she was bald as well as wearing some really cool black and white patent leather shoes that looked like a cross between sneakers and wing-tipped dress shoes.
Several minutes later, I saw my mom, dressed in a choir robe, walk across the church. I waved at her. The woman seated to my right asked, “Do you know her?” And this is how I met Brenda and her wife, Kristen. Brenda is being treated for breast cancer and also gets her treatment at the Swedish Cancer Institute. She was diagnosed last May and underwent a double mastectomy in June. Brenda is currently getting chemotherapy and had an infusion earlier in the day. She told me that she had just switched from Taxol and was pleased to still have some energy on this first day of the new medication. I mentioned my blog and both Brenda and Kristen expressed keen interest. It also turned out that Kristen is also a mental health provider. It just so happened that Brenda was also looking for a supportive community and not sure where to start. I described the wonderful support I have received from the breast cancer blogging community. After the mass, Brenda asked for a hug and I gladly gave her one. I told Kristen and her that they would likely be mentioned in my blog today. It was a lovely and very human encounter.
Today, I have been thinking of Brenda and Kristen, who are near the beginning of this breast cancer mess, a very scary and unfortunately exciting part of treatment. And I hope that with our connection and their potential connection with the many dear souls of this wonderful community that we will all progress further toward grace and light.
Finally, the choir really was magnificent and at the risk of being totally tacky in church, I hid my smartphone under my program and made a sound recording of a portion of the Sequence, which is the longest section of the Requiem. The choir begins after a few croaky bars sung by the congregation. Here they are, The St. James Cathedral Choir and Chamber Orchestra, directed by Dr. James Savage.
A look up at the oculus.
View of the altar. St. James’s original design was more traditional. The altar was moved to the center of the church several years ago.
A view of one of the two pipe organs.
Dad, my sister-in-law Deb, Mom, Me, my sister-in-law Meagan, and my brother James. (Mom, I know that your eyes are closed but they were in the other photos, too.)
As I’ve mentioned on this blog in the past, I am not a psychologist trained in dream interpretation and generally speaking, the area doesn’t hold a lot of interest for me. But in my own flat-footed way, I get information from my dreams at times. For example, when I have a dream that bad guys are chasing me, it tells me that my daytime anxiety has gotten high enough to invade my dream scape so I take it as a cue to get myself to “calm the Hell down”. (And when I used to have Gilligan’s Island dreams frequently as a kid I perhaps should have taken that as a cue to watch less television! I would ask the Professor, “What do you mean you can’t find civilization? There’s a big resort hotel across the water over there, within easy swimming distance!”)
Another popular theme for my dreams has been pregnancy. I remember having my first pregnancy dreams when I was a teen and they continued for many many years. As I teen I thought of what my life would be like, would I be married, would I have children, what would my career be? I think a lot of those pregnancy dreams were about how my identity was shaping up as a woman and since a lot of those dreams involved me giving birth to lots of babies at once, I think I was perhaps more than a little concerned about how I would establish a work/home balance. When I was pregnant, I had birth dreams. My husband had one, too. He said that I gave birth to a baby who looked like a softball with one eye. Not wanting to distress me (thoughtful even in his dreams), he casually asked the obstetrician, “Hmm, so when do you think the baby will get a SECOND eye?”
Now I have middle-aged pregnancy dreams. On more than one occasion, I’ve realized in the dream, “Wait a minute! I’m not in my thirties anymore. I am 47 years old! Good Lord, how did this this happen? This is a very high risk pregnancy!” No one else in the dreams seems to worry about this. And I try to be as excited as I can be for the birth. Even if this cancer mess had never occurred, I would have a very low chance of getting pregnant at my age. And as long as I take Lupron shots, I will be infertile. Eventually, this state of affairs will become permanent as a natural consequence of aging.
So what’s the deal with the dreams? I guess an obvious explanation is that in losing my fertility I am thinking about it. (Yeah I know, “D’uh!”) The only thing I’ve noticed in my attitude about losing my fertility is that it doesn’t really seem to bother me that much. In contrast to much younger cancer patients, I was done having children quite awhile ago and was in peri-menopause when I was diagnosed. I had never planned to bear any children past age 35, anyway so I think I’d pretty much processed the probability that I would never get pregnant again, already.
I think part of this is just the realization that although I am not old, I’m not young anymore. Unlike my historical hang ups with body image, beauty, and weight, I am surprisingly less concerned about getting older. But I do notice it. My father-in-law, Don, a very fit and physically active man in his early 70’s, tells me that it shocks him when he looks in the mirror. Inside he feels much younger and the person looking at him is old. My Great Aunt Blanche had uncorrected vision problems for a number of years. Once they were corrected, she was shocked at her aged appearance because she had not seen herself clearly in quite some time. She died at age 105 years. She was still living by herself and in her own home, tending to her magnificent garden until she was 103. She was extremely fit and good looking for a centenarian.
But we don’t start off life as 100 year olds, do we? And we develop a view of ourselves over the years that changes over time but perhaps not as quickly as we change externally. I imagine that youth has always been prized due to its association with fertility and reproduction. Our culture, however, has gone incredibly and irrationally overboard with youth idealization. Some people decide that they are old when they are middle-aged, that this is a bad thing, and then they interpret the advancing years in a negative way for the rest of their lives. I sometimes tell people that Aunt Blanche chose her burial outfit when she was 80, only to live 25 more years. My grandmother also chose her burial outfit, a decades old pink and black peignoir set, which she used to wear on special occasions. I think she was trying to set her sex appeal setting to Ava Gabor in Green Acres. But it might have just as well been Esther Williams, since Grandma also used to wear an authentic 1940’s era gold lame bathing suit while she was watering the garden. But I digress…
When my father-in-law was a teen boy he asked his grandfather if there were things he missed about being younger. His grandfather replied, “Every age has compensations.” Don told me that he has carried his grandfather’s words with him throughout his life. As for my own life, I am not as fit or beautiful as I was when I was younger but I am a whole lot happier. I don’t sweat the small stuff so easily. I appreciate each day more fully. Finally, I know a lot of cancer survivors say this but I look at aging differently now. Aging is more life. I can’t be old unless I live for a long time. And that sounds pretty good to me.
Christmas at Johnny and Katie Torlai’s house. The boys are my brothers. I am the girl. I am guessing the year was 1969.
For those of you who didn’t get the Ava Gabor in Green Acres reference, here she is.
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When I was a young adolescent of about 12 or 13, I felt ugly and undesirable. And as I aged into an objectively beautiful girl I still felt less than. I didn’t feel desired at a time when it felt like there was so much riding on that question. Did boys like me? Would I ever get a boyfriend? Was I pretty? Would I ever get married?
When I was 19, my first college boyfriend, who was only my second ever boyfriend, actually broke up with me for being “too sexy.” He was very religious and eventually became a fundamentalist Christian minister. By the way, we did not have sex. Not. Even. Close. But the power of my sexuality was apparently threatening to him. He apologized for being a bad boyfriend, for desiring me in that way. This was a bit confusing to me because even as much of a good Catholic girl as I was at the time, I thought that young people who were dating were supposed to have lustful feelings, whether they acted on them or not.
To be honest, I was not initially remotely interested in dating him. He and I were almost entirely incompatible. He told me that I was so open-minded that my “brain might fall out.” But he was one of the most charming and charismatic young people I’ve ever encountered. And he was very good hearted. I knew that he’d wanted to be a minister and he seemed so perfectly suited to it. So I actually found him a few years ago by Googling “Pastor John Doe” and his hometown. I emailed him and he responded to me by apologizing to me again for being a bad boyfriend, offering the same rationale. It was still bothering him over 25 years later! (Again, did I mention that we didn’t even have sex?)
So this is one of the many ways I learned that being a sexually desirable female can have definite drawbacks in addition to the wildly sexist catcalls, groping, and other unwelcome, sometimes even scary behavior I’ve endured in my life simply for being female. There’s the rejection for not being sexy enough, the rejection for being too sexy, and the aggression for being “sexy enough”. Sometimes there’s just aggression for being any of those things. If I could choose the category of attractiveness vibes that I would like to put out there in the world, I would choose, “Helen Mirren in her 60’s”. She is a sexy woman, who knows it, but she also knows that she is oh so much more. Helen Mirren is smart, talented, and funny. She is a 68 year-old actress who still works regularly in film.
After having gone through multiple surgeries, body rearrangement, chemically induced menopause, and being scared out of my mind at the prospect of having cancer, I can tell you that it is very difficult to set my set my sex appeal to “Helen Mirren”. It has been a confusing time, reminiscent of adolescence and early adulthood. I find that as I gain confidence in myself as an attractive woman, I am now remembering the pitfalls of it. Male attention is not all positive and even when it is “positive” it is not always comfortable. It was much more comfortable to flirt when I felt unattractive and frumpy. I actually remember periods of time in my early adulthood when it was just a lot easier to not dress stylishly. I was already with my husband, he’s always thought I was beautiful, so what was the point in potentially attracting attention to my looks? During one of these times, I worked as a secretary for the Seattle VA Hospital. It was the year between college and graduate school. John and I worked to save money, get married, and apply to graduate school.
I didn’t really like the job at the VA much. I was good at it and got good feedback from managers. I enjoyed a few of the people with whom I worked but it was a pretty stressful work environment and a ind of boring job. I dressed neatly but fairly casually. Frankly, I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on clothes. I got married during the year I worked there and brought my wedding photos to work. One of the other secretaries, Cathy’s way of showing “approval” for how I looked as a bride said, “Well, look at that! There is SOMETHING underneath ALL OF THAT NOTHING.” So apparently, I was not pulling off Helen Mirren for Cathy.
There are aspects of being a woman that feel like a nearly no win situation. This is one of them. I try to navigate my own appearance according to what I LIKE and how I WANT TO LOOK but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t unforeseen negative consequences. Even as a 47 year-old woman, I find this enough confusing to occupy more than 5% of my time. As a wife, a mother, a professional, and a middle aged breast cancer patient, it seems like much more time than I can spare. When I was younger, it was all so much more in my face. Now, there are daily small reminders. When I wear a dress with a v-neck opening, I have to make sure that it doesn’t gap too much or that the safety pins I use to keep my dresses from being “too sexy for work” are not showing on the outside of my clothes. I have to think about how short my dresses will get once I’m seated in a chair in front of my patients and their families. I make sure that my make up is neither too heavy nor too light, whatever that really means. It is all kind of subjective. And as a woman I know that ultimately, it doesn’t matter how I dress or behave; there will be times that I am unfairly judged or treated based on my perceived attractiveness and sex appeal. It’s a hard path to navigate, one with ever changing and conflicting internal and external road signs.
I don’t think I am alone in this no-win dance. And is it any wonder that so many of us breast cancer patients do not feel supported by ad campaigns that use sexuality to draw attention to breast cancer causes? And is it any surprise to anyone in a culture where women’s sexuality is used to sell ALMOST ANYTHING, that we feel like we are the ones who are being sold out so that companies can sell all kinds of products under the guise of helping women with cancer? In fact, by wrapping advertising in pink ribbons, which are associated with campaigns that use all kinds of sexual images of women, one might argue that the door is opened to use sex to sell EVEN more products, bottled water, yoghurt, pink pumpkins, you name it.
It is said that “sex sells” and certainly it can be argued that it sells a variety of THINGS. But does it sell respect, commitment, or compassion? Those are qualities that cannot be sold. Those are qualities that we need.
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!
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As I have mentioned in the past, I was not always a psychologist in private practice. I worked as an academic and research psychologist for a number of years. And in the course of those years, I gave a lot of presentations at state and national conferences. Sometimes, those presentations were attended in part, in order to earn continuing education credits. And to earn continuing education credits to work toward maintaining a healthcare provider license, requires that the presentation, workshop, or whatever I was offering, be rated by each participant.
I remember being part of a workshop while I was a post-doctoral fellow at Indiana University. We picked up the evaluation forms and I saw a number of evaluations with comments along the line of “not enough time was spend on x, y, or z.” I was at the presentation and I reframed the comments to the graduate students who made the presentation with me, “Look these are not bad comments. It meant that they liked the presentation and wanted more than we could provide within the time allotted.”
My husband has been working a lot of hours in the past year, much more than usual. He and I came to an agreement early in our marriage about what we wanted in terms of a work/home balance. This issue was primarily driven by him, as I recall, because he was ,afraid, given my aspirations to be a university professor, that I would work too many hours. My husband and I truly enjoy each others’ company. He is my best friend and I am his. And sometimes we want more.
This is one of those times. John knew that this project might mean a lot more work for him but he also felt that it would be both interesting and good for his career. We discussed it prior to his committing to it. Little did either of us know that I would soon be diagnosed with breast cancer and that our lives would be turned upside down.
John has been working extra hours for a long time now. In August, there was a party at our house celebrating the end of this project. It is now mid-October and the project is still going on. After a significant time of being told, “We’re almost done. I see the end in sight,” he has recently told me that he really doesn’t know when it will end. On top of this, he has started getting cranky and irritable with his work situation.
I have been very patient with his work, especially compared to years past. Last weekend I felt as though I had hit a wall. And John got kind of cranky with me and I responded, “John, I am hitting the wall with your work situation. You are officially starting to be a pain in the ass.”
The fact that I let those words come out of my mouth was perhaps a cue that I had waiting too long to say something. Because I was being kind of an ass. John, to my surprise, reasonably and lovingly responded, “I know, Honey, that’s why I am so glad that you are going out tonight with Jennie. I hope that you have a great time. You need to have a good time!”
“What?????????????????” My husband’s reply completely disarmed me. We have had times in our marriage of frequent bickering and second guessing of each other. We have been through my cancer together. We have relearned how to be close and stay strong under some pretty scary circumstances. I have very much enjoyed the increased happiness and stability in our marriage. My frustration with his work situation was starting to distress me some.
I talked to him about it again recently. He indicated to me that he had a plan B regarding his work. Just to know that he was thinking about it and planning for it was a huge relief to me.
I remembered why I want to spend more time with my husband and why I want him to be happy. He is a wonderful man who loves his wife and family. I have been distressed because I want more of him. And I want more of him because I love him and he is my best friend. And I know he feels the same. So until we solve this current problem, I will try to spend the time I do have with him enjoying his fine company.
My Eyes Are Up Here 