Fragile

 

"We are fragile, everyone. We all long for something more. Things are said and things are done and the pieces hit the floor. See how fragile." -  Ralston Bowle

 

 

I like to think I'm pretty tough.  I've been through a lot in my 65 years.  Tomorrow will mark the 15th anniversary of the day I became cancer-free.  It was a hard year of treatment.  Two surgeries, months of chemo and radiation every morning for a month.  And through it all, I barely missed a day of work.  Cancer is tough.  I am tougher.

 

In the last four years, I have twice been in heart failure.  I've had surgery twice, both times under failed anesthetics.  Heart failure is tough.  I am tougher.

 

2020 started out as a promising year. My husband and I spent 25 days exploring Australia - the trip of a lifetime. I was apprehensive about the trip before we left.  Twelve flights.  Thirteen different hotel rooms, twelve of them on twelve consecutive nights.  I walked hundreds of miles, sometimes in blistering heat in a nearly sixty-five year old body, with three herniated lumbar discs and a too-large pacemaker/defibrillator implanted in my chest. For weeks, I didn't have the therapy that keeps me upright.  As wonderful as the adventure was, there were times when my body screamed at me for a chance to rest, but we didn't waste a moment.  I kept telling myself I will have lots of time to sleep when I am dead.  I am tough.

 

We came back from our adventure and went straight into lock down. It wasn't ideal but there was no choice.  I dealt with it because I had to, just like everyone else.  I found the silver linings and carried on.  I started taking classes by Zoom.  I baked more, painted more, read more, knitted more and canned more.  I meditated through the pain that came with six months of no access to therapy.  I figured out how I could help others in my community.  I painted pretty rocks to leave for others to find, left jam and pickles on doorsteps and loaves of homemade bread at the homes of friends who were struggling.  But I am tough so I did okay.  

 

Life went on and things started to get better. The warmer days gave us new options.  Poolside gatherings with neighbours, even a couple of patio lunches with friends and some socially distanced visits on the back deck. 

 

But, in the past two months, things have changed.  Both of my sisters had surgery.  My oldest sister came to live with us for a time, and I came to learn that she has a greater need for support in daily living than I was aware. It is a hard time and while I don't see it as a burden, it is a weighty responsibility.  After several months with little activity, my business took off at a speed it is hard to keep up.  My every day for five weeks was filled with care giving and work.  I woke up one morning to the devastating news of the sudden death of a dear friend.  I flew into helper mode, trying to figure out how to support his family.  I barely shed a tear.  I stopped sleeping.  Somewhere in the darkness of that week, I decided that if I was going to survive this time, I would have to find a way to build some joy back into my life.  I started getting up an hour or two earlier in the morning so I could paint before I got my sister out of bed.  It is how I connect to my emotions.  Painting soothes me.  A few days later, Dora, the little dog that I loved and often cared for, died.  The dam broke.  I couldn't stop crying.  The U.S. election finally took place and after four sleepless nights, I met the news of the Biden/Harris win with tears of relief.  It was a happy afternoon.  I set up a new canvas and started painting.

 

Last night I happened on a Facebook post, showing the comments of a friend on the public Facebook page of a professional artist.  I know my friend did not intend for me to ever see his comments.  I don't know what he was thinking when he made them.  But the comments, in which I was named, were flattering of the professional artist, and disparaging about my artistic efforts.  I felt crushed.  I've never pretended to be a great artist, I just paint for the joy of creation.  The very thing that brings me such joy was suddenly turned on it's head.  For an hour or so, I contemplated taking down the photos of my paintings from my own (not public) Facebook page which is the only place I share them.  I started feeling concerned, wondering if I was embarrassing myself by posting pictures of my amateurish efforts.  After a time, I remembered a conversation I had with an old friend last week.  I hadn't spoken with her in a very long time but as we were signing off on our call, she told me how much she enjoys seeing pictures of my paintings.  She said they make her happy because she could see the joy in every piece.  I didn't take down the photos but I did get some insights into myself.  The comments stung me far more than they should have.  Why do I care if someone thinks I'm a lousy artist?  I don't put a price tag on my paintings or ask anyone to buy them.  They either hang in my foyer or in the homes of my friends and when I hand them over I always tell people that if they really don't like them, they can hang them in their closets.  I will never know the difference.  Perhaps the real insight is that I'm not so tough
after all.  Right now, I'm actually feeling quite fragile.

 

Today, I went to my favourite art store.  They were having a sale on oils and I was running low on paint.  I bought a whole array of colours, four of them in different shades of blue.

The Woman in the Mirror

"To me - old age is always ten years older than I am." - Bernard Baruch

I don't know how it was decided that 65 would be the official age for becoming a senior citizen, but here I am.  It is officially my old age birthday and I couldn't be happier about it.  Aging is the greatest liberator of all time.  I have become more of myself, less concerned about what others think, happier in my own skin, happy in my own company.

For most of my life, I've felt like a misfit.  Don't misunderstand me, I can shape myself to fit in anywhere I need to but I've always sensed that I'm not quite like other people.  When I look back at pictures of myself as a young woman, I see that I was actually quite pretty but I never felt I was pretty in the right way.  I was smart, but spent a lot of years hiding my intellect under a bushel so as not to upset anyone with it.  I was different at a time I didn't want to be different.  I remember a performance appraisal I received early in my career.  I got ranked at the highest performance level.  I did my job exceptionally well but there was criticism.  The comment on the " needs improvement" side of the scorecard was that I needed to try to not be so different.  I asked what that meant but the answer was vague and a bit upsetting.  Essentially I was asked to tone myself down, try not to be so fashionable, so passionate, so enthusiastic, so creative, so hard-working, so me.  It made the other women in my department feel uncomfortable that they couldn't out-best me in a competition I didn't know we were in. I bought a few gray suits and tried to keep my head low.  They didn't like that either.  I moved on.

I've had a wonderful career, but even at the peak of my success, there was criticism - not of my performance but of me.  My boss at the bank didn't like that I was too soft.  My boss at the entertainment company didn't like that I was too hard.  I was the same me at both places.  I stopped trying to adjust my sails to suit the winds I could not control and I went into business for myself.  I've done okay.  I don't make the kind of money I used to but I am always me, even if at times, I am my own harshest critic.  I kept my professional edge - makeup on, hair coloured and styled and nails polished. I ditched my suits for the dresses I've always preferred and when my back could no longer withstand it, I traded in my four inch heels for flats. I took a number of health hits through the years, lost some parts, gained some too.  I am plump and getting shorter.  My body is a myriad of scars from multiple surgeries and four months into Covid19, with my business in a coma, my now gray hair is cascading down my back.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about who I am.  Things that seemed important before, barely make it to my radar screen these days.  There are no mornings of checking my roots to see when I need a touch up, no careful applications of cover-up to camouflage the circles under my eyes. Beyond brushing my hair and my teeth, there is seldom even a glance in the mirror.  I don't remember the last time I painted my nails.  I've stopped trying to fit.

A couple of days ago, just having risen from bed in the early morning, I walked into my bathroom and out of the corner of my eye, caught my reflection in the mirror. It startled me for a moment.  I wondered who the gray haired, unvarnished, older lady who stared back at me was.  She almost looked feral, her face brown from the sun, her hair untamed.  I moved in a little closer and looked straight into her eyes.  A moment later, I smiled with the joy of recognition.  Oh, that's my old friend, Jackie.  I think I like her.

 

Laid Bare

rev·e·la·tion

/ˌrevəˈlāSH(ə)n/

noun

noun: revelation; plural noun: revelations

1.     a surprising and previously unknown fact, especially one that is made known in a dramatic way.

2.     the divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something relating to human existence or the world.

Middle English (in the theological sense): from Old French, or from late Latin revelatio(n- ), from revelare ‘lay bare’.

We are finally, slowly, getting to that place in the decline of our Covid19 numbers that we may start opening up some of our local personal services businesses again.  Except in Toronto and Peel Region, the rest of the province is open for business, albeit in a significantly altered form.  Newly re-opened hair salons are unable to keep up with the volume of business.  Desperate women with three inch roots and grown-out bobs are flocking to the salons.  I haven't decided yet whether I will be one of them.  I could certainly use a haircut.  My hair is now down to the middle of my back and though I normally dye it myself every four or five weeks, I haven't done it since the middle of February when we left for our Australian adventure.  It has grown unusually fast.  My roots are four inches long.  I'm less than two weeks away from my senior citizen birthday, officially making me an old lady in a gray ponytail.  A few months ago, I would have been mortified by the thought but not now.  I have a couple of bottles of hair dye in my bathroom cupboard but sometime in these days of lock down, I busted my give-a-damn.  I haven't been able to work up enough interest to care.

I can count on the fingers of one hand, the number of times I have dabbed on a little makeup in the last four months.  I rarely wore any in the Australian heat save a couple of nights we were going out for a special dinner.  I made a bit of an effort when I attended my cardiology appointment a few weeks ago.  I've made it a policy to try and look vital enough that the medical team is motivated to save me. But mostly, I'm feeling the same way about my unvarnished face than I do about my hair.  It is what it is.

My head has been in other places.  It is an amazing time to be alive.  Covid19 laid bare the world and  exposed many of the inequities in our society.  It is as if we have woken from a long sleep and for the first time are seeing the extreme divide between haves and have-nots, the horrendous oppression of people of colour and the depths of corruption of those in elected office. And now awakened from our slumber, we can no longer close our eyes.  The challenge before us is to know what to do.  How do we change what is?  How do we reinvent our society? Where is our place in this reordering of the world?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a revelation of my own, not about the wider world but of a personal nature.  I dug out a picture of my dad taken ten months before he died.  I wanted to post the picture on Facebook on the day that would have been his one hundredth birthday.  As odd as it must seem, until I looked at that picture again, I never realized that my dad was not a white man but a brown man.  I can only now surmise that in the time and place where I grew up, we didn't know any brown people.  There were white people, black people and Asian people.  Daddy wasn't black or Asian so he was white.  He used to joke that he had a prenatal tan.  I remember the first time I was given a self-identification form to fill out for a federally-regulated employer required to track the racial composition of their staff for the purposes of employment equity.  There were so many boxes to choose from including one for those who identify as Middle-Eastern.  I was shocked to see it as minority category.  I checked "Caucasian".  It is what I always believed myself to be.  My mom was French Canadian, fair-skinned, green-eyed.  What was rarely spoken of in her family is that her father's mom was a full-blooded Mohawk, and yet her father was as white as white can be.  None of this makes a difference to how I see myself. I have always identified as white though I'm not the whitest woman in the world.  I have, at times, taken a few arrows - mostly for the crime of traveling to the U.S. while having an Arab name.  I had a frightening encounter in upstate New York with a man in a pick-up truck who mistook me as Mexican and tried to run me over on a Sunday morning a couple of weeks before the election of Donald Trump.  There have been a couple of other minor incidents over the years, all of which I found more puzzling than upsetting.  But nothing that has happened to me is as horrid as the stories I hear from black people and the murders of black men we have watched with our own eyes these past few weeks.  I have cried rivers of tears, not just for those lost but also for their mothers and for all the mothers of black children.  I am the mother of a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered man and I still worry about his safety all the time.  I can't even imagine the depth of fear those mothers must have.

Last week, I lost a consulting assignment at an agency where I have previously done some work.  I wanted the assignment badly - while there wasn't much money in it, I thought it was a chance to really help.  It was an investigation of race-based discrimination and conflict in a non-for-profit agency.  I have been doing diversity and equity work since 1982 and in the course of my work for the agency last year, I flagged some problems for them that I had uncovered though they were unrelated to the project I was doing at that time.  I offered my assistance (without charge) but they didn't take me up on it.  Almost a year later, the issues blew up and they approached me about retaining me to do an investigation.  But a few days later, they told me they wanted to retain a consultant from a black-led business and they set out to find one.  Fair enough.  I couldn't be angry about that but I was certainly disappointed.  I am feeling powerless to help.  I can't even participate in a peaceful BLM protest march while we are in the middle of a global pandemic.  After forty years of equity and diversity work, I can no longer find my place. I have been wondering if it is time for me to retire. Last week I reached out for advice to a friend who runs a diversity training consultancy.  She recommended that I bide my time and assured me the right opportunity to help will present itself.  In the meantime, she suggested I braid my gray ponytail and maybe shave my legs.  And suddenly, my heart felt lighter.
  

Cracked

Cracked

I am a rock, dull and gray

You sit on my back when you need respite

I am strong and smooth and I bear your weight without seeming effort.

While you sit on my back, I absorb your pain and sorrow, fear and worry.

Small cracks form in my skin then fill with cold rain and blistering heat,

Sun and wind and sand.  The cracks get deeper and wider.

In time, tiny pieces of me begin to chip away.  I’m not so smooth anymore.

You still sit on my back but it is not always so comfortable. 

My chips and cracks begin to chafe at your skin.  Time to move on.  Time to find a new rock.

You will never know what I did with your fear and your pain,

When I mixed it with the energy of the sun and offered it to the source of creation

Because to see what it created in me, you have to look into the cracks.

Expendable

"From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable." - Jimmy Reid

As a large population, we have been in isolation for more than a month now.  Tomorrow will mark two months for me.  It would have been hard to imagine this even a month before it happened.  It is an interesting life experience for us all though we each have reacted, coped or broken down in our own way.  Some of my normally gregarious friends have withdrawn into almost total silence.  Others who are more reserved are driven to forge new ways of becoming more connected.   I've learned to embrace technology, finally uncovering my laptop camera so I can look at friends and family while we speak.  I've spent hours looking for the gifts in the experience and I've plunged into activities, painting and baking, canning, knitting and beading.  And then there are the other days when I lay in my bed in the early morning hours, trying to decide if there is a reason to get up.  There are more of those days lately.  Today is a particularly hard day, May 9 and it is snowing.  There will be no outdoor distanced tea with my neighbour, no walk in the spring sunshine.  Tomorrow is Mother's Day.  My mom is gone and I don't know if I will see my son. I'm sad.

I'm having trouble seeing the light at the end of this tunnel.  As things begin to return to some form of normalcy in much of the world, I wonder if that will ever happen for me.  Will I ever be able to travel again, attend the theatre, ride on the subway, shop for groceries or hug my sisters?  Will there be dinner parties at my table, coffee shop catch up dates with the girls, meetings with clients?  Or am I done, destined to live life at a distance? 

I understand the urgency so many people are feeling to throw the doors wide open and go forward with life.  It's pretty tough to choose between feeding your family and keeping them and yourself from a virus that is unlikely to kill you, even if you get it.  I don't blame them.  Under other circumstances I might feel the same way.  There are powerful people who are promoting the position that it is time to throw caution to the wind.  Whatever deaths occur will likely be mainly in the population that is old or already medically vulnerable.  Casualties of war.  Lives that are expendable.  Those who are already taking more out of the health care system than they are putting in.  Me.

I am one of their expendable.  I'm almost 65.  I have heart disease.  I am immune compromised.  It is irrelevant that I have spent my life trying to leave a legacy of beauty and kindness.  I am not their mother, their sister, their wife or their friend.  They won't think of me on Christmas Eve or Mother's Day.  I understand it but I can't pretend it doesn't hurt.

Calm Up

My head is a strange place to live.  I suspect my brain doesn't function the same way as most brains.  I tend to notice and remember the smallest of details, the way sun bounces off the one white branch on the tree behind our house, how a client I met only once a couple of years ago, takes her coffee or the day and hour of the party where I met a new friend ten years ago.  It would be great if my mind worked like that all the time but alas, I seem to be unable to pick and choose the trivia it notices and stores.  I regularly lose my car in parking garages.  I often scramble to recall the name of someone I've met several times and I can rarely recall where I have set down my phone or my keys and I still need to rely on my GPS to get me to places I've driven to a half dozen times.  The one thing I have consistently been able to do though, is get immersed and stay immersed to the end of a project or activity.  Sometimes, my biggest challenge is to tear myself away from whatever has caught my interest.  I want to indulge in making one more bracelet or reading one more chapter or I pick up my paintbrush to do just a few more strokes even though I have already changed out of my painting clothes.

This period of isolation has changed all our lives. I talk to my friends about their heightened levels of anxiety, their fears and worries.  I listen to them talk about cleaning their closets and storerooms for hours on end.  They rake and dig and prune in their gardens.  They are rereading the classics.  I'm happy for them that they have found these coping mechanisms but isolation hasn't quite worked that way for me.  I have found myself so distracted that I struggle to accomplish any project.  I am the voracious reader who has been unable to sit and read a single chapter, the painter who loses interest after a few strokes, the cook who became so distracted while making jam a couple of weeks ago, that I burned the bottom of my favourite pot.  And worst of all, no matter how I tried, I couldn't seem to do anything about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I started taking a mindfulness meditation class.  I tried to stay mindful through the guided meditation but my mind wasn't having it.  I retreated to a sad place and cried through the whole meditation.  The second time, I was so focused on holding myself together that I couldn't surrender to the moment.  The third was better.  My mind did wander but I was able to pull myself back to the moment most of the time.  The day after class three, I woke up with an epiphany.  I was trying to use meditation as a way to calm down when in fact it would serve me better to use it as a way to calm up.  Dealing with anxiety and uncertainty are not my issues.  I'm not distracted because I am afraid, I am distracted because I've stopped finding the small joys in the things I do.  For me, it's about finding more joy, not less fear.

On Saturday, I made a big batch of mixed berry jam.  I focused on the sweet aroma of the berries as they blended in the pot, on how the shine of the mixture changes as it transforms from berries to jam. I made bread and savoured the aroma in my kitchen as it baked, it's crust becoming golden.  I made pea soup with the recipe taught to me by my mother many years ago, remembering the soup pot that simmered on the stove top in my childhood home.  I noticed the beauty of the colourful vegetables that I evenly chopped to make a big pot of vegetable chili, the rich red of the tomatoes, vibrant orange of the carrots, crisp greens and yellows of the beans and delicate hues of the mushrooms.  I appreciated the pungent odors of the onions, not even minding the way they made my eyes sting.  After all my cooking and cleaning were done, I retreated to a quiet room to knit a shawl I wanted to finish for a friend's birthday the next day.  It has been a challenging project for me - one that I had been trying to finish for nearly two months without success. Somehow I was able to work at it without distraction.  I noticed the softness of the yarn in my hands and the coolness of my knitting loom.  I counted each stitch and watched with satisfaction as the shawl grew, flowing out from the bottom of the loom.  By the end of the day, I was calmer and happier than I have been in weeks.  I have calmed up.