Family Psych 3

It's hard to be half-pregnant. Or half-hungry or half-full. But we use the word to modify conditions that shouldn't need any modification: "half-crazy"; "half-cocked"; "half-drunk" to indicate being so far gone that there's no real way of stopping the person.

Or, we mean to suggest the opposite: still time to reconsider or retreat from said state by changing some behavior. Once, half-drunk, I . . . The statement assures that the person is in control, or mostly in control. "Half-drunk" indicates a shred of sanity, a shared sense of fun. A wink-wink. We all know what that's like, right? A phrase that invites identification with the brief interval where it's possible to choose differently. We win, no matter the choice.

But reality may differ. Once, half-drunk, I walked by myself at 1:00 am. around the mile and a half loop that snakes through my neighborhood. My life was in chaos: my husband and I were at odds over my middle son, who was living at home but drinking and getting high and (confirmed later) dealing drugs from our suburban home.

No one even noticed I was gone. If I had been "half-sober" instead of "half-drunk," I wouldn't have made that sojourn--I would have gone upstairs to my husband and spoken about my feelings, seeking resolution. Instead, returning home, I launched into a tirade of irrational anger--another common strategy to keep real feelings at bay--because no one had bothered to wonder about me or follow me. The fact that I had returned home alive paled in comparison to my indignation: why wasn't someone watching out for me?

That night, I desperately sought whatever would make my life manageable. Attention? Ignorance? Solitude. I didn't know. Failure to admit the chaos and the fact that I didn't know what to do about it should have been key. But, "half-drunk," I mistook the "key" for a weakness.

My behavior that night didn't arise out of nowhere. I was long schooled in the lesson of "make it be enough." After all, my family was only "half-fractured." Our single mother appeared on the surface to be competent, capable, in control--who else did she need to make her whole? Forget for a minute that our father was out carousing with alcohol and other women. Forget that he never paid child support. Forget that instead of contributing to my chronically ill sister's well-being, instead he cashed insurance checks and kept the money for himself. Forget that we were so young that we forgave him, heedless of any other response.

Her practiced aura of control deeply influenced us. We were rarely angry at our father. We rarely thought of him as the "bad guy."

It is only years later that I can look back on these events and release an audible gasp: how could we have been so blind? He was at best a half-father, nominal in all respects. My sister's health suffered directly as a result of his selfishness (or mental illness--it was so hard to tell). The money he spent on other women and their children (there were always children) should have been spent to reduce the accumulating bills that my sister's mysterious illnesses required. He should have handed the money directly over to my mother or my sister, a fistful of real bills that would have made a palpable difference in our lives.

We coped. Coping seemed "whole," not "half," like the efforts my father made to see my sister and I on the weekends. Coping seemed the only real choice we had. We took pride in our ability to "rise above" our misfortunes. We were our mother's daughters, after all.

But coping is really "half," not "whole." We wanted to be better than our father, whose efforts we accepted grimly. We wanted to make it clear (to whomever was paying attention) that we were better than that effort-- better than him. But we wanted to accomplish that without saying it--especially without saying it to our father at whom the message was aimed.  Pretending to be without needs, clinging to indirectness as a way of shoring up ravaged emotions and psyches is not healthy or whole.

So we pursued our "half-survival." I was half-successful at the various jobs I worked in high school so that I would have money to buy all my own clothes. I wanted the freedom that financial independence (even at age 14) appears to give. Now, years later, I suspect my classmates saw through my facade. I suspect they saw my half-life for what it was and agreed to be friends with me anyway. How could I have hidden the evidence: the single pair of "popular" pants that were to sustain me, along with the 3 or 4 different tops?

Even now, I obliterate the difference between half and whole, in my nightly dreams and my waking life. I must believe I can sustain and maintain. For, how can I ever admit that I need help, that I am only half-capable? I am fully. I must be. That which I need to be.
Those who know my history can follow the path that verifies that the "fully" may really be a "half." That "half" I use sparingly. If I am truly "half-drunk," it is only because it is so fearful to be so fully. . . anything. Fully-drunk implies a loss of control, a heedlessness of responsibility. Half- it will be for now. If that is my source of self-control and a sign of my participation in the world, I will have to accept that.

Family Psych 2

In graduate school, I liked almost everything I read, with one notable exception: Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance. The course was a survey of the American novel; we read 17 major American novels in 15 weeks. On the week we discussed Hawthorne, I sputtered and raged about the pathetic narrator and his pathetic excuses, his self-absorption and self-importance. It was such a shrill outburst that, fifteen years later when I ran into one of my classmates at an academic conference, she mentioned that she vividly remembered it.

Normally, I like pathetic narrators, since I believe we are all pathetic from time to time, by which I mean that we all deserve sympathy. Who hasn't abandoned the veneer of social correctness at least once, publicly begging for attention, or pity, or love? Who hasn't unreasonably complained about a friend or spouse or lover, playing the righteous victim? Who hasn't voiced suspicions that "someone" has it in for us, which shows mainly our own fragility and paranoia, not a deep, hidden plot against us? Emotions are complex--or at least what prompts our noticing and processing them is complex; often we despise what we most fear in ourselves. Flaws, in general, make us human, and human nature is such that we ought to give each other a break.

I have always struggled with giving myself a break, though I try to be generous in understanding others' needs for a break. With chronic illness in a family, it becomes difficult, since so many breaks must be given to the ill person whose needs dominate the dynamic. There don't seem to be any leftover breaks to give away. No one asked me or my older sister, Terri, to be hard on ourselves. No one insisted that we didn't cut ourselves any slack; we did it to ourselves--rather, it was our reaction to growing up in a household with an ill sibling. We compensated; our younger sister was truly sick and required attention, medication, rest, treatments. We knew she was forced to tolerate pain and discomfort, the loss of her hair and control over her weight. Could we ever have any illness or difficulty or problem to compare to hers? It didn't seem so.

Of course, it was not a competition; we weren't asked to compare ourselves to her. But that's the way developing reasoning works; we watched her, helpless, lose her normal life to a swirl of hospital stays and radiation treatments. We watched our mother thin with worry, work three jobs to keep up with the bills. We watched our father, a planet in orbit around us, keep his distance and refrain from helping in any practical way. He brought teddy bears and balloons to the hospital, but he never paid child support or took extra time with Terri and me. Therefore, we could not make the situation worse by having anything really wrong with us. We could not really need anything significant. There simply wasn't enough of anything to go around.

The word compensation seems apt for our response, because it suggests making up for something, making reparations, making amends. We didn't do anything, yet we felt guilty: for our sister's pain, for our mother's anxiety, for our sister's helplessness. For ours. We couldn't do anything to help except not need any help. Any physical illness was out of the question.

This mentality pervaded our family, a silent and insidious presence. The strength of it presented itself to me specifically, since I had a small "something" to deal with: sometimes I passed out. The first time, I had been to the dentist getting several teeth pulled to make room in my crowded mouth. It was raining, and my mother left me under the dentist's awning while she drove the car up. The last thing I remember was watching her fade in the slant of rain as she ran in the parking lot. Then, I was on the ground, a stranger kneeling beside me, and my mother appeared and the stranger said I had fainted.

There were many of these episodes: when I scraped my toe on the pavement riding my bike barefoot; when I was sick with the flu and literally fell into the bathroom while waiting for my mother to come out; when my sister cut her leg wide open on a nail; when I had to watch a First Aid movie in Health class. I was always hot, flushed, and disoriented when I regained consciousness. And guilty. I had lost control. Again. I was weak when I should have been able to be strong.

My sisters reinforced my guilt by resenting me; they thought I was doing it on purpose to get out of school or to get attention. They often said so. They said I could help it if I wanted to. They said I focused on my own pain so much that I would finally keel over. They said I focused on myself so that I would keel over. They may perhaps even still think so.

What they didn't say but what was implied, hidden in the silences between their words, was that my fainting didn't deserve much attention. It wasn't serious. It wasn't serious enough, anyway. It couldn't compare to the seriousness of my sister's ongoing battles, nor garner the kind of sympathy we held in reserve for her and spent lavishly.

She still deserves our sympathy, since her illnesses continue. Every holiday gathering, every family birthday party is shot through with concern for her, albeit often unvoiced.

My older sister Terri once told me that my morning sickness during pregnancy would go away if I just got out of bed and exercised. She said if I didn't, I had let the sickness win. In truth, she is at least as hard on herself as she was on me, for my fainting spells. We are ruthless in our downplaying of our own limitations; we try not to accept any limitations.

So mighty was the power of our mode of compensation that I waited until I was an adult to mention my fainting to a doctor. When I asked, I was nonchalant: Sometimes I just faint; it's no big deal, but it's kind of irritating. I found out the cause; it has a name, it is a real thing: vasovagal syncope. Under periods of extreme stress, such as that caused by the sight of blood or pain, blood pressure and heart rate drop, which reduces blood flow to the brain. I could accept this diagnosis without guilt, except for the fact that the condition is described like this: "when your body overreacts to triggers such as . . ." And there it is, my family's weird dysfunction over sympathy verified by a medical text. It is my doing, my fault, which is what the word overreacts suggests.

No wonder I get so irritable when I come down with the flu, thinking to myself every time, What is wrong with me?

Family Psych, Part I

1972 was THE year for my family. I turned nine years old, my parents announced their divorce, my 3-year old brother died, and my sister became ill, the beginning of a life-long battle with several ongoing illnesses.

The fashion boom of flowing garments--bell bottoms and caftans--and skin-bearing midriff tops and halters perfectly reflected my position: I was both exposed and hidden. Where did the children of divorce end up in that era? I didn't know, but I wasn't going to talk to my friends about it; they all had two parents who mostly ignored my situation--a great stroke of grace--by including me as if I were a child of a normal home. And the children of grief? Of that I wasn't sure, either, but we did not end up in a therapist's office or even the school counselor's office. To my knowledge, no one at the school ever talked with me about my brother. There I was, there we were: in plain sight, hiding pain that changed our family for good.

When I recall this half-year of calamity, I tend to rank the losses: the hardest was certainly my brother's death, especially since I wasn't present when he took the fall that knocked him unconscious. I never saw his still, but still living, body, as my sisters did, nor the crowd of neighbors and relatives that gathered as if drawn by a magnet. When I arrived home, summoned by a neighbor, I entered a scene that was already set. All had their grief, already, welling up, a formidable wall. They were in process, I was outside it all. Everything I heard was secondhand, broken. An explanation, not an experience. I cried, too, when I learned what had happened, but I never shared in that original numbness that the sight of a small boy, immobile, invites. I only had images conjured from their descriptions. That has been my greatest grief and shame. And resentment. I wasn't there; I failed. It can't be made up, an absence of that magnitude. Unable to say goodbye to him, consciously or not, I hold him still in memory and seek peace that will not come.

Second on the list of difficulties: my sister's illness. Complications from her ongoing illness rock our family to this day. Though at the time it seemed more bearable than the loss of our brother, now it seems more central to who we are, who we've become. Chronic illness is an illness in itself, infecting the family; we all take on symptoms of disconnection, of role playing, of trying to ignore what asserts itself in every conversation we have. Many scenes come to mind:

Five years old, she sits on my father's lap in the bathroom, her eyes rolling back in her head, her head lolling back on my father's shoulder. Her body is jerking, her mouth open. My father seems caught between trying to comfort her and trying to stop the weird jerking. I am standing in the doorway, but even though I'm just seven, I know she can't see me. Later we learn what this was called: convulsions. From a high fever. The beginning of it all?

In the fall of 1972, she was thirsty all the time. She woke at night, her lips parched, she thirsted all day at school. Her lips swelled, her body swelled from fluids, she couldn't get permission to go to the bathroom from suspicious teachers. Many trips to the doctor resulted in a diagnosis: diabetes insipidus. Not regular diabetes, but something else. The treatment was daily shots to be administered by my mother.

My mother practiced on an orange she held in one hand, jabbing a needle into it viciously with the other. Our neighbor, Mrs. Sayler, a nurse, oversaw this paltry training. Sometimes Mrs. Sayler gave the shots, which were always administered in our kitchen, with my sister sitting on a chair, her pants pulled down to her knees, one of her smock tops hanging down, hiding her underpants. My mother took over and started the mother-daughter ritual that would define them: she held the needle, swabbed my sister's thigh with alcohol, then poised the needle above the leg. My sister screamed every time, tensed up, sometimes so much the needle couldn't penetrate her skin far enough to dispense the medication. Her screams, my mother's shaking hands, the blood-spiked cotton balls that collected on top of the kitchen garbage: symbols, reminders of a pain that wasn't going to go away.

Hospitals. The antiseptic smell, the plastic trays of food, containers of juice with peel-off tops. Cafeterias where we sometimes got to go through the line or buy cans of soup from vending machines. Flowers, teddy bears, cards everywhere. My sister propped up, laced around with IVs and tubes, the backs of her hands swollen and bruised with needle marks. Our stilted conversation. How are you feeling? When will you come home? The mystery was deeply embedded: no one knew what was wrong with her. We didn't know what to say or do. Our visits were important to our sister, we were told.

At home: evenings of quiet when my mother was at the hospital. She'd call on the phone to make sure we had done our homework, a dime each time. For a while, our grandmother lived with us; then we got homemade dinner, complete with a glass of milk, a few TV shows, a normal bedtime. When my mother got home early enough, we got good night hugs, very few explanations. We didn't know what questions to ask. Our mother's obvious exhaustion prevented our asking anything.

Answers, finally. A rare blood disease, histiocytosis. A cancer-type illness that attacks healthy tissue, causing tumors, growths, pain. Now we prep for round 2: surgeries, radiation, prednisone that made our sister swell before our eyes. She was home more, often sitting on our mother's lap while we older girls--too old to need attention like this, we thought--stood apart, observing.

High school is a blur of surgeries and failed attempts. My sister tries violin, she tries sports. Nothing works. My mother continues to insist on swimming classes, long past the time Trish needs to learn to swim. She can't be like us. She has few friends. When Terri and I break away from our mother's rigid control to drink and get high, Trish watches us, wary. She doesn't tattle; the distance between us grows, takes on a life of its own. Once, caught with our pot, my mother hauls Terri and me to a drug counselor. We sit, enraged, refusing to speak. Trish is asked, sometimes, to try a pain management class. She says she doesn't need it. Our mother goes on church retreats, comes home crying, hugging us, telling us how she is learning to let her anger out.

How many surgeries? Too many to count. How much radiation? Enough to make her hair fall out. She is the bride, at her marriage, with just a rug of hair covering her scalp. A ritual begins: surgery day, we all gather in the Family Waiting Room. Children are left at babysitters, our role is clear: to wait for the news. Dr. __________ comes out, a tall, handsome, dark-haired man. He couldn't find anything. He thinks he got it all this time. He had to scrape at the mandible, in the sinus cavities, at the mastoid. She will need follow up radiation. She will not need follow up radiation. Some of the pain afterwards will be from nerve damage. She could have surgery to sever those nerves, but she would lose control of half her face. But her pain, really, is hard to explain. She has more pain, the doctor says, than most people would have--than she should have. Eventually, he refuses to operate on her anymore.

Migraines, regular diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis. The histiocytosis, which is generally a childhood illness, outgrown after puberty. Has my sister gone through puberty? We can't tell. Baby-faced, heavy, stubborn. Once she refused hormone treatment to ensure her full passage through puberty and regular menstrual periods. I've had enough medication, she insists. More illnesses, piling up like train cars leaving the track. One disaster leading to another. Constant pain, especially at night. She sleeps sitting up. She rarely sleeps. Family vacations nearly impossible. She says she doesn't need sleep. Once, she falls while home alone, hitting her rib cage on the side of the tub, her head on the bathroom counter. Rather than call 911--I was going to be fine, she tells me later--she waits 7 hours for her husband to get home from work.

I fall recently, trying to move something too heavy for one person, sprain my thumb. I can't drive, call my son, since my husband is out of town. He drives me to the clinic, where I find there is really nothing wrong with me that rest and ice and ibuprofen won't cure. My sister is so sad for me, when I tell her, that she almost cries, and I hang up the phone, like always, guilty.

The Un-runner

When I was a child, a series of commercials for 7-Up, the Un-Cola, ran. The slogan was hyphenated. Even at a young age, I thought that was important. I remember the smooth-voiced, white Panama-hat-wearing pitchman repeating it as a mantra: 7-Up. It's the Un-Cola. I remember a cascade of clear liquid filling a wine glass of ice cubes. I remember the sound, the  fizzle. 7-Up. The Un-Cola.

Un- does not mean non-. A nonmember is in a different class, entirely, than a member. Un- suggests productive difference. Untied means freedom. Uninhibited means the same. Unfettered, unapproachable, unambiguouos, unhouseled (Shakespeare's words filter through my mind constantly, unleashing a string of associations). The Un-Cola was a soda pop unlike all regular ones; it was touted as something so different that it had a purpose. Now I understand that purpose was marketing for profit; then, I was just taken in by the image, the texture of sound, the promise of utter liberation.

For almost 4 months now, I have been an un-runner. This is not the same as a nonrunner, someone automatically excluded from the category. A nonrunner is someone not interested now--perhaps ever--in running. A nonrunner, we can assume, disdains running in any form. Non suggests "against." Suggests "Not me," or "Not in my lifetime." Whereas an un-runner is someone in the same class as runners who is simply different. A runner who has undergone a sea change.

Ah, Melville. We owe so much to the earnest man who gave us Ishmael, Quequeeg, the Great White Whale, the Quest. Monomania.

I have been a runner since 1994, and I have not been on a run since August 17. It is now September 23 (more than a month, in case you're calculating). I can be precise because that's precisely the point: my life has played out, in some ways, on my schedule of runs. On August 17, I guiltily tread along for 2 1/2 miles, in pain most of the time, but triumphant: I could still do it! I had been hobbling along for 3 months, running sporadically, often in significant pain. I intended to establish something.

I did. I established that I am not a doctor, don't act like one, don't have the knowledge of one. The doctor, in his infinite wisdom, assured me that at some point I wouldn't be an un-runner. But that was after the 3 months I pushed myself to run, when I didn't know what was wrong with me, when the rhythmic striking of each foot on the ground translated to a rhythmic demonstration of a drumming technique on my Achilles' tendon. No pain, no gain? I had believed that religiously. But it hurt, and I was getting nowhere.

I didn't understand, entirely, the mechanics of ankles, but I did understand pain. And embraced it.

The doctor was a "specialist." If I ran the world, he would have been the person I would have seen first, since I knew that what was wrong with me had special privilege and status (in my mind) because I qualified as a "serious" runner (think longevity). That meant regular workouts, over a period of--let me count--yes, 17 years. But, I had to wait to see him until my insurance approved; that meant a 15-second visit with a General Practitioner who knew nothing about me or any kind of foot ailment. And then a 6-week wait.

Perhaps I am warped for paying special attention to the specialist's nurse, who effectively told me that 1) running had already done irreparable damage to my body, and 2) that I needed to do whatever the doctor said (and he would likely say that I should STOP, for good). She was cheerful, in a Nurse Ratchet kind of way. When I refused to get on the scale, as I often do in doctors' offices, she sniffed. "OK, but if you have to have surgery, then I will weigh you. Surgery patients need to have anesthetic, and we need to know how much to give."

I stood for a brief second, transfixed. She was so dedicated. But perhaps to the wrong cause. I was nowhere near the sad predicament of a person who needed surgery.

I was not wooed by her sympathetic manner, or by her certainty that the doctor would take a hard line and forbid me the life I once took for granted. He didn't, in fact. But he did tell me to "take it easy" for a month. I knew what that meant. Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. Home treatment. No running. Ibuprofen every 4 hours and exercises explained to me on sheets of Xeroxed paper.

I am nothing if not faithful. I have complied with this routine for some 4 weeks. I get up in the morning, down my calcium/Vitamin D supplement and 3 Ibuprofen, then lace up my shoes and stretch my tendons and other lower-leg muscles. All day, in intervals, I shake 3 brick-red ibuprofen into my hand and swallow them.

I have not gone for a real run for a month (I want to name the gap in weeks, but it will be too depressing). Instead, against all advice from prosaic nurses, I walk. But it is not the same.

And that is my real lesson from this experience. Sure, people have to admit their physical limitations. I have worn reading glasses for 5 years; at first I resisted, but now I can read menus and books without holding them at arms' length and squinting. But walking? Really?

It is not the same. That is why I have to define it as a transitional form of exercise. My legs stride along, my forehead drips sweat, my arms swing, crooked, in time with my steps. But a real workout?

Not a chance.

Today it was rainy and blustery, so I did my distance on my treadmill. A treadmill--any kind of stationary exercise-- is misleading. One feels as if one is moving along. But obviously, one is not.

I am on a quest to remove the Un- from my identity. I have to succumb to being an un-runner for now; my left heel, my arch, and the ball of that foot ache with a regular, throbbing insistence. I wince along, a gait that belongs to infirm individuals, or those who don't know enough to do right.

I hope for another chance to fly along, feet touching ground lightly then leaving the earth, briefly, only to touch down again. I count myself, still, in the class of runners. I own 3 good pairs of running shoes, and I plan to buy more. So what if I happen to be on hiatus?

I look a little different, forging a way along the route where I still notice runners, unencumbered by injury or limitation, whom I waved to before. Now I merely nod, scrappy, mincing along the path. Why does no one send out a courtesy message as they pass me? On your left, I used to call as I skirted the slow, the awkward, the merely lazy.

We don't notify those whom we cannot see. I remain invisible to most of those I identified with before. The others? They don't know me either. I am unknowable. An un-runner. Unidentifiable. Unreliable. Unused to this hard vision of compromise.

The Return of the Crazy Grass

Recently when my husband and I were playing Trivial Pursuit, he was stumped by a question: Which family of plants has the greatest variety? Reading the question, I was pretty sure I knew the answer, or knew what I would say if the question were posed to me: Grasses.

I was right. I couldn't name another single family of plants (well, maybe I could make an educated guess), but my years of gardening have given me a humble and delighted knowledge of how grasses grow, what they need to thrive, what they do to survive.

When I was younger I didn't care about gardening and disliked even mowing the lawn. But I was a kid; what did I know then about life? As I grew up, I began planting vegetables with my children, to our mutual delight; it was nothing short of miraculous, the way the pale, curved, hard bean seeds grew into lush vines that supplied many dinners as well as stocking the freezer for winter. Or the way the pumpkin vines snaked their way over the garden's edge and onto the lawn, anchored there by thread-thin tendrils they spun out, wound around grass blades.

In those days, I only thought about what I could see above ground, not about what was happening underneath, not about the seeds' softening to open, or the heft of their roots, or the quality of the soil in which those roots nestled and burrowed. Even so, my lawn was an afterthought; I mowed with an old reel-type push mower, noting but not considering the way crabgrass slowly choked out the regular grass.

Now, grass takes up as much of my attention as my gardens. Or, more accurately, the care of grass, which is different. I care about the conditions, the unseen, not just the look of  it. About ten years ago, I began to learn an organic way to take care of the lawn--to literally tend its condition, nurture its health, all without the chemical soak that would pollute the ground water and force me to keep my children off of it.

My initiation was slow; for years I had done nothing, not even watered. First I tried homemade fertilizers (beer, epsom salts, soap), but they seemed to do nothing. In truth, my lawn was a wreck: dry, patchy, flattened, weed-infested. It had no life. It looked beyond hope. That's the way my personal and emotional life felt, too, but that is another story. Or, perhaps it is the central metaphor of this one. I was recently free from a smothering, torching relationship. It was time to learn to thrive again. Though I didn't actually determine to save the lawn (or myself), I did begin to consider how to enliven it.

So I learned about root systems and nutrients, the needs of plants, the lifecycles of weeds. Along the way I found kindred philosophers: the ideal wasn't a perfect lawn, but a healthy lawn. A little crabgrass, a few mushrooms, were not signs of the end of civilization. It is no exaggeration to say that I am amazed by what I learned:

o that grass is a perennial that does best when the soil is healthy, so that its root system can spread out

o that thick, healthy grass chokes out weeds

o that leaving the grass longer (3 inches) instead of cropping it short creates shade so that weeds have a harder time sprouting

o that crab grass has a short root system and new growth is easily inhibited

o that newly sprouted crabgrass, besides being a luminous shade of bright green, has almost no roots and is easy to destroy by simply pulling

o that vinegar kills weeds but not grass

I found a fairly simple routine that slowly turned my lawn greener, less weedy, and beautiful to my eyes: corn gluten meal in spring (a natural weed and feed--deters the sprouting of crab grass); organic fertilizer in summer, and soybean meal in the fall (a natural winterizer, like Scott's, only safe). In the process, I found a local, family-run farm-and-garden operation where I can buy these products, since they are really crop byproducts. I bought my raspberry bushes there, too, and a Weigala bush, and recently took their recommendation for a stinky spray that deters rabbits from munching flowers. And yes, it's also organic.

But mostly I found a joy that has sustained me in the way a deep faith does. My lawn's percentage of crab grass has decreased gradually; each year there is less, and in the process I have learned patience and perseverance. Weeding gives me a sense of purpose equal to writing or teaching a class or hosting guests. Yes, it is work, but those hours I spend happily crawling around the yard, gently parting grass to find the stems of stubborn creeping Charlie are hours I use to reflect on my children's lives, the love in my life, the sanctity of the daily. My work literally produces results, but the intangibles are powerful too: a gentler attitude toward myself and my family, a rapt attention to the details of life, a sympathy for the rough-edged and tough-looking.

I continue to be a student of grasses because there are so many--the cultured and the weed, the sun and the shade, the wild ones from the old prairie. Each variety has a different stalk, leaf shape, color, texture, life cycle. Each has a different feel, a different grace. A summer paying attention to the lawn demonstrates subtlety, the colorwheel of green the grass embodies in its progress from April to September. Its own ecosystem, its own routine, its own stubborn ways.

For instance, every mid-July, when temperatures rise and precipitation begins to wane, new varieties of grasses appear in the lawn. I don't know their names, only their distinctions: shapes, colors, thickness of stem. One, a tough-stemmed, small-leafed variety that resembles clover, grows in patches. But on closer inspection, a patch turns out to be a small cluster of grass, for each stem splits an inch from the ground, sends out new stems with leaves, a bouquet of weeds. Another, the light-green, lettuce-looking grass, seems to have no roots at all for the way it releases the ground when I grasp the stem with my fingers.

And then there is what I call the crazy grass. It is the color of swamp grass, variegated as it grows taller with a green so light it is almost white. Each stalk seems individual--it does not branch--but each sends out two or three leaves (or should I call them stems?), smooth, firm as the leaves of lilies, arched and graceful. Small fleur de lis. I first notice it near the clothesline pole as I mow, and I kill the engine and sink to the earth to pull each stalk out, one by one. They are easy to distinguish from grass and crabgrass, and they are easy to pull; one firm upward tug, and I can gather a handful in a few minutes' time. The stalks at the bottom are thick before they diverge into leaves. The thickness is soft, like the flesh of a ripe pear. Each time I mow, there are more stalks to pull, but fewer each time. When do they seed themselves, I wonder? From where do they arrive in my yard? Are they misplaced flowers, lilies flown in from the woods or nearby yards? Or are they perennial, lying dormant in the soil until that moment in July when their seed pods quiver and hum and stalks push upward with the quiet persistence of prayer?

I do not know. I do not really need to know, though I have considered planting several stalks in a pot to see if they would bloom. This year, I found another gathering of them under an elm tree in the front yard. It's the crazy grass, I yelled to my husband, cleaning in the garage. He came to look, but he's unconverted; they looked like weeds to him, nestled among the other weeds in that patch of bare earth beneath the tree, that used to be a garden.

To me, they are the image of grasses' complexity. How to understand their mystery? They grow up on schedule, their internal mechanisms as true as clock guts. They mingle with the plain and the ugly, assert their place briefly in the scheme of things. They persist for their time, then disappear, only to make their entrance again, on cue. I believe that even if I didn't pull them, they would die out before September, part of their identity this fleeting presence.

My pleasure is never keener than when I am in my yard, admiring, the most reverential attitude I can imagine. I have come to understand many things about the ways of grasses. That knowledge has enabled me to treat my lawn with its infinite variety like the organism it is, caring for it, assisting it, trying not to inhibit it. But like any family, at the center of things lies an enigma, a mystery. I'd rather not crack that mystery. The return of the crazy grass brings me closer to the earth from which we all come, it causes me to bend down, to kneel down, to take my time, to observe. Sometimes, I swear I can feel a pulse there, in the earth, and when I touch it, I join in the praise that arises from this mystery, not from any certainty.

Tough, Part 3

What sinews enwrap the mind? What muscular disciplines foster mental persistence in the face of life's regular resistances? If I had to pick one, I'd say my mind was tougher than my body. Countless times, watching or playing sports, I have said out loud, "It's a mental game." Over the decades, I have faced deep loss without losing my capacity to continue a daily beat. I have never broken down. I would like to swear that I never will.

And yet, I don't think of myself as tough, physically or mentally. Or, to be accurate: I don't think of myself as tough as; by comparison, I lose the battle, every time. It's not a competition, I suppose, but I grew up trailing an older sister who set the standard for toughness. Nearing 50, I concede that in every way, she is tougher than I am.

Academically, perhaps, I have the advantage. At least that is what I meant when I wrote earlier that she had every advantage except one. I was book-smarter, or I thrived more in that environment, insofar as grades are concerned. I graduated with Honors, went to college, then to grad school. Twice. She graduated high school with middling grades, then enrolled in a veterinary technician program which she never finished.

The challenges that academics provide me, however, are ones I know I can meet. I work hard and study, write well, complete assignments on time, thrive in the soup of immersion and inquiry, analysis and argument; there is no real question of whether I can do it. I know I can do it; I chose the discipline of English precisely because I knew I would not be immobilized, as I was by Trigonometry, which baffled me so much I never took Physics. But I am not anyone's star student. No one has ever mistaken what I do for brilliance; I make no claims for genius, since I'm really more a plodder, a work horse, a good but not great brain.

My sister, on the other hand, showed more persistence in her high school years than I have shown, ever. Trig also tripped her up but she took Physics, meeting the challenge by going in early to tutor with the teacher, until finally he told her that she had tried as hard as she could. It would not make her pass the course. She should not feel bad--on the contrary, she had done everything she could, against the odds. She could withdraw confident that she had done her best.

There's the advantage, the mental toughness, the head-down pursuit of what seems impossible. What I lacked--still lack. If I thought teaching, writing, all the classes I took to get there were impossible, I would have done something else.

And so it is with physical toughness as well. Both my sister and I stay in shape by walking, running, biking, playing sports--whatever we can do to keep fit. Even though she is inches shorter than me, and has asthma and allergies that affect her breathing, I think she's a better athlete. She remains in better shape because she's simply tougher and more persistent than me. Nothing postpones her workouts, which begin most days around 4:00 am. When her children were in high school, she got up and lifted weights in the unheated garage and then rode an exercise bike. On weekends, she walks with her husband or runs by herself. She works full time and takes care of a cabin, landscaping, painting, sandblasting. Focused effort.

As I age, my workouts are postponed by weather, injuries, tiredness, scheduling. I allow them to be postponed, I should say. My schedule of alternating days has remained more or less intact, but often now I let two days lapse between workouts. This summer, I have been plagued by a foot injury; it has literally hobbled me. But don't I allow myself to be hobbled? I have not searched very hard for an alternative. I have not sought out a place to swim or biked more than twice a week. I have not dusted off the weight machine nor consistently performed the ritual of ice, ibuprofen, incline.

Though I am sidetracked this summer, in truth this has been coming for some time. Since 2006 I have been trying to get back in shape. It has become my mantra. My journey has been uphill, toward an imagined summit where equilibrium, a schedule, a routine, gets reinserted as the centerpiece of my life.

The reason I have not been successful, the reason I am still trying to get in shape, is a combination of physical and mental. Yes, my muscle tone has deteriorated somewhat; middle age plays a role, too, as weight settles on me and keeps me anchored, close to the earth, difficult to move. But the real truth is that my mental toughness has deteriorated. It was never equal to my sister's, or anyone's who trains for a marathon, for instance, or works out every day. Now, because I worry that I can't do it, I let myself off the hook with excuses like lack of sleep or a hectic day or the belief that I'm in pretty good shape for someone my age or the belief that I can't work out in the morning. My physical toughness rarely gets tested or challenged these days. My brain prevents it. Real fear deters me--real doubt about my physical abilities, which are harnessed to a mental engine that begins to sputter and stall.

If it were only as easy as a mental tune up. If only the spark plugs of confidence and persistence and daring could be replaced. If only I could return to my childhood, when I followed my sister's lead everywhere, heedless of my own fears, anxious only to be there behind her, to trail the wake of her great strength and courage, fueled by endless reserves of devotion.

Off Balance

We are in the middle of a strange, unsettling summer: only mid-June, and except for two 100-degree days, the temperatures have remained cool. For the past week, the highs have been in the 60s. The tomatoes and pepper plants show slow progress. Mornings, we put on sweatshirts and pants, rather than the usual shorts and T-shirts. One or two days, it was so chilly I decided not to go out and weed; I have been baking bread and cookies, making oven dinners. The warmth comforts as much as the food I put on the table. Almost suspicious, we move slowly, on our guard, unsure what will come next.


There are two other reasons this summer's getting to me. In my late 40s, I remain active, running, biking, gardening, hiking. But for the past few weeks, a mysterious pain has hobbled me. It feels like my Achilles' tendon, but my heel is also tender; I limp around during the day, take my ibuprofen, ice it, and grit my teeth when I go out for a run. It usually hurts only in spurts, and what I read suggests it IS a tendon injury, but I hesitate to go to the doctor. I'd rather treat it on my own, doing what I know a doctor would suggest anyway. My hips ache at night, too, so I sleep restlessly, wake up stiff, and feel older than I like to admit. My body threatens to force a new identity on me--someone with injuries and conditions too persistent to work out. I resist that threat as much as anything; I don't want to change the way I've kept myself in shape for the past 17 years.

This summer, I am also reading a lot, something that should energize me, prepare me for a full load of classes in the Fall. It is, in a way. I have sent out a lot of work lately, and my mind spins with ideas for new poems. But I put off writing those poems for now. My study this summer is Sylvia Plath. Years ago, I read two biographies in the same summer, both of which sympathized with her and vilified Ted Hughes for his treatment of her. This time, I am exploring the other perspective, reading Anne Stevenson's sanctioned biography, a book by Janet Malcolm that assesses the other books about Plath, and the Ariel poems themselves. I also have Stevenson's poems on my list, as well as Hughes', and a few other leads I've taken from the reading.

To say I find this study oppressive may be overstating it. Plath's work has never moved me, except for its impressive technical control--sounds, rhythms, syllables. She gets everything to work for her to make a strange music I often admire without really enjoying, as in these lines from the opening of "Fever 103 ◦":

The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the triple


Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus

Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

Of licking clean


The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

The tinder cries.

The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!

But her life--well, that unnerves me. That's why I keep returning to versions of it. I am in general interested in the way perspective works: the person speaking reveals only one side of things; first-person narrators are enticing because they sound so truthful, when in fact they all (as we all do) leave out others' perspectives, favoring--unconsciously?--their own. So it is reading versions of Plath's life. Stevenson makes on the surface an airtight case against Sylvia and completely excuses Hughes, whose affair with Assia Wevill was the putative catalyst to her suicide. On the other hand, Paul Alexander paints a picture of Sylvia as victim and Hughes as menacing partner, even suggesting that since he hypnotized his wife to help her writing, he may have placed the idea of suicide in her head.

The facts are not clear. They will probably never be clear, since relationships between married people are fraught with emotional mazes it is impossible to navigate. In this case, both parties are dead; Hughes remained stoically silent about the whole series of events, even when Assia, whom he married, killed herself and their child several years after Plath, in the same manner. Surely he suffered; his critics spit venom, his personal life could never be separated from the Plath myth. Might not his willingness to tell his side of the story have made his life easier? Yet, who is capable of telling the absolute truth about his or her own life? Does one even know the absolute truth?

I don't, and that's what unnerves me about all this reading. Besides the fact that Plath killed herself in the year I was born, 1963, I have never worried that we have much in common. My inner life, chaotic as it may be, has never made me want to kill myself. My poems do not resemble hers, except when I read a lot of her work in a single period and strains of her tense, commanding voice seep in. But reading intensely has made me see, or created, some similarities. I am familiar with Plath's sense of an "intense, menacing yet unidentified threat" in life. Like her, I often feel divided, maintaining a clarity and calm on the surface while wrestling with things underneath, a muscular drama that goes on all day and in my dreams at night. Also like her, I often feel out of synch with the world; as Stevenson notes: "what [Plath] seems to want is a remedy for her inability to accept a form of truth most adult human beings have to learn: that they are not unique. . ." I have few women friends; those I've had have walked away from the friendship, leaving me to wonder what I've done. Like Plath, I can often diagnose the cause of emotional distress (as she does in her journals) but remain unable to communicate that insight to anyone else or learn to react differently. That conundrum is one of the reasons I stopped keeping a journal years ago.

I don't want to make too much of these perceived commonalities, but they are making a lot of my inner life. Last night I slept restlessly, seeing vague image after vague image from my night's reading of the Plath biography. I dreamed of the Ariel poems, too, though the images are unclear, and I think I dreamed I was writing in that vein. When I wake up, I feel tired, as if the day's reading (which I consider necessary) were too much. And my initial sense of mission in undertaking this project has waned. My first excitement was over the connection I perceived between one of my poetic projects, a series of Eve persona poems, and Plath's mythical quest/persona. I had a vision of my own poems, what expansion they needed, what other poems placed alongside them could form a collection. My first intuition : Plath was the key that could make my own work better. I wanted to achieve what Stevenson says about the Ariel poems: "the consistency of the imagery is preserved right up until the end, when the merest mention of the resonant symbols of Plath's mythology sets the whole construct ringing like the most finely balanced of bells."

I still want that; I consider those words to be the highest praise a poet could achieve--no mention of bravery or confession or trouble overcome--nothing personal, in other words--but praise for the way the work itself is put together. That's why I write--to make something. To make something that makes a recognizable, humming sound. To make poems that call out responses from readers.

Yet, I don't write. Not yet. My heel and my hips and this sad coolness invade my mind. Right now they are winning the battle. My weakness prepares me for brain work, for study. Perhaps the physical woes are outward signs of my inner turmoil, as I try to gain insight into Plath's life and work while avoiding the torment of perceived similarities. I don't want to assume her life or psyche, but I feel pulled in that direction. Right now, I can't run from it.

How can one not feel pulled? She suffered. In comparison, others have suffered more, but that is not the point. I am not consciously a Plath defender, but last night when my husband innocently asked, "Wasn't she partly to blame for her husband's affair?" I rushed to her defense. "Don't blame the victim," I retorted. We are all victims of each other's difficulties. Trying to understand that dynamic, to learn something to make my own interactions with people honest and productive seems like a good--but lifelong and exhausting--undertaking.