Amy Shelf - Counselor at Law

The other night I had a breakdown, the likes of which my husband, Ken, has seen before.  It was late at night and the things I'd been pushing down and aside, in my commendable efforts to rise above, or at least put off until a good time, erupted.  After all these years, I'm still not very good at seeing when I am close to blowing my lid.

The mechanics of my breakdown had everything to do with the circumstances, the most significant of which is probably the fact that I have been unable to sleep past 6 AM for weeks.  And 6 has been more the exception than the norm.  Ugh.

The subject of my breakdown (at least in my mind) was cooking.  I've been doing too much of it.  Admittedly, much of the pressure I've felt around cooking comes from my own desire to be making - and eating - amazing, wholesome food all the time. 

To an outsider, my family is eating amazing, wholesome food almost all the time.  We really do eat incredibly well.  To my own inner over-achiever, however, there is much work to be done.  I want to be making sprouted grain bread, kombucha, my own vinegar, and delectable stews and ambitious dishes from cuisines all over the world.  The realities of my life, as pointed-out by many of my loving friends, make achieving my goals nearly impossible: I am running my own law practice, I am in a performing choir, I am the chair of the School Site Council, and I am making really good food a lot of time time and also trying to be a present mother and partner and friend.  Not even getting into how busy my husband is.

Ironically, my attempts to rise above my exhaustion in the kitchen, and my putting off having a conversation with my husband about shifting the division of labor in our house, were motivated by my love of cooking.  On weekends, cooking is a favorite recreational activity of mine.  I read cookbooks and cooking magazines for fun.  I have been slow to realize that things have felt burdensome to me in part because that is my character flaw (see note above re: my inability to see my emotional storms coming) but also in part because it didn't fit into my concept of things.  I love to cook, so why don't I love cooking right now?

All this got me to thinking about the strange phenomenon of how things we love can become burdens.

For example, I love my children.  Beyond all that there is.  But my husband and I have a carefully orchestrated schedule of who puts them to bed, and the schedule is not the result of us vying for our own fair turn at this joyous activity.  It is a who HAS to put them to bed issue, not a who GETS to put them to bed one.  As much as bedtime can be a big, fat drag, it is also precious, special time with two of my favorite people in all of human history.  When I can relax into the nighttime routine, it is gloriously tender.  My children are still and listening (a rare treat), we are cuddling and I have the opportunity to be privy to secrets and details that come out as they process and just babble about the days they had.

Often, however, I can't Zen into the bedtime routine.  It is time consuming, and there are a ton of things I want to do with my precious night at home.  They are whiny and resistant to the idea of sleep.  I am stuck in a dark room with kids who need to just go to sleep.  I obsess over everything we've done wrong in NOT developing good sleep habits.  I just want out.

Clearly, the lovable nature of things becomes obscured when obligation comes into the picture.  Cooking often feels like a drag when I have to make dinner for four hungry people every night, after work, and I've only got 45 minutes to get it all cooked and ready -  notwithstanding the fact that I'd jump at the chance to plan and prepare a dinner party with friends.  Lying tenderly with my children in a dark room telling stories is an awesome way to pass the time, but when I am doing it because it needs to be done . . . well, then I have more difficulty remembering that given the choice, I might actually choose to do it.

If I were a yoga teacher, I'd have a good lesson here and I'd be able to recall some parable, originally written in Sanskrit (after thousands of years of developing as part of an oral history) that exemplifies the teaching moment. 

I'm not a yoga teacher (yet) and I don't really have this one all figured out.  It seems to have a lot to do with the must-ness of the thing, and how that must-ness triggers something in us - something human, western, high-schoolish - that makes us want to do something else.  Just because we can't. 

Mostly, though, I know that really the love is, and should be, not just for the thing but also for the burden.  For the beautiful children and loving family, needy and hungry they may be.  The gift is the interdependence, the obligation - that is what gives any of it meaning.  Otherwise, its all free choice and self-determination, and that is way too much of a good thing. 

I was nearly finished with a piece about midwifery.  It started with a link to this article about home funerals and death midwives.  I find the whole thing totally cool, and an inspiring intersection of my work and a part of me that has not been my work but maybe should be.

In the piece I shared some intensely personal things, so the fact that the whole thing just got erased and disappeared I'm taking to be an indicator that I'm not ready to share all that stuff with the 7 people who read this regularly. 

But I did want to share the article and to state, for the record, that I would like a home funeral, if possible, and I would like my family (in the most inclusive sense to the word) to have the opportunity to touch my dead body without doctors or chemicals. 

I have a reputation for burning food that I am cooking in a frying pan.  I'd like to make a good case in my own defense - and I can, sort of - but the fact remains that I do burn things that I am frying.  And sometimes baking.  If not a lot, then a noticeable percentage of the time.

My husband rides me for this to no end.  At this point, we've been together long enough that all he has to do is look me in the eye and smile sympathetically when something I've cooked verges on blackened.  Even the kids are in on the joke. 

If I am frying something, be it pancakes or frozen taquitos, and one or a few should over cook a bit, I am quick to put them on my own plate, hopefully to prevent the others in my family from noticing.  If that doesn't work, I silently defend myself to anticipated dissing: I like them that way.  I am being selfless and giving the best morsels to my family.

Once I made the mistake of telling my husband about this exercise we did in 5th or 6th grade.  Our teacher gave us a piece of paper with a list of instructions, numbered one through fifty.  Item number one instructed us to READ THROUGH ALL OF THE INSTRUCTIONS before starting in on following them.  Items two through forty-nine told us to write our name on the top of the paper, perform various computations, count the number of steps from our table to the bathroom, draw a big X across our paper, etc.  Then number fifty said, "Go back to the start of this list and complete ONLY items one and two."  Items one and two were, respectively, to read all of the instructions before beginning and to put our name at the top of the paper.

Being a smart, overly-confident kid (at least overly-confident in academic matters), I looked at my paper, and essentially ignored instruction number one.  I probably skimmed the first ten items and then decided I didn't really need to read through all the directions - I'd be able to wing it.  I then proceeded to write my name on the top of my page, make X's, count steps, the whole charade.  I ended up totally humilated: I'd been outed as a non-direction-reader.

My husband rides me for this one, too.   Anytime I don't read the instructions thoroughly and it comes back to bite me, or is even revealed in the smallest, most harmless way, he gives me the look.  Not unlike the burned food look.  The sympathetic smile and slightly raised eyebrow that says, "I know you: You are a non-direction-reader and you can acquire all the advanced degrees in the world and still you will never learn."  At least he loves me anyway.

Originally my plan was to write about deconstructing this whole notion and process of identity - our own and ours as perceived by others - and how it is both descriptive and prescriptive.  Do I really burn things more than other people or is that just the perception based on the reputation? 

Then last night I made apricot jam. 

I am way into preserves and pickles and making them.  I was making an enormous batch of jam, the largest I'd ever put up, and I was really concerned about burning the bottom of the pan.  A significant concern in jam-making, even if you don't generally burn stuff.

When the jam was about 80% ready, I had a proud moment.  I'd cooked the jam very carefully.  I'd patiently heated it slowly, stirred frequently.  I hadn't burned it.  Progress!

So what did I do?  I turned up the heat, of course.   Just a little, what I thought was not too much.  I'd been patiently cooking for nearly two hours, I still had to process the jars, and I was kind of ready to go to bed.  Plus I wanted the jam to be a bit thicker than most homemade jams you taste.

Then, not 10 minutes later, I felt solid matter scrape off the bottom of the pan while I was stirring.  Large, dark flecks came up with the spoon.  I did it again - same thing, solid matter, dark flecks.  I did it a third time before I admitted that I had burned the fucking jam.   ARGH!  I took it off the heat immediately so as not to burn it more, and stifled my desire to stir it again just to see, since I'd already brought too much of the burned gunk into the jam. 

Turns out that at the end you really have to stir it more.  And maybe I shouldn't have turned it up that little bit.  Over-confident again.

Out the window goes my deconstruction of the notion and process of identity.  Cooking on low heat and reading directions are my behavioral mantras - guidelines I know I must follow, despite all of my impulses.  I give thanks to the apricot jam for reminding me to accept, once again, that I must return to these mantras.  Always.  I try to be more patient and more humble. 

A few months ago, an acquaintance of mine died.  His death was immediately preceded by a short hospitalization - he lost consciousness fairly quickly after admitting himself to the hospital for his illness.  His final weeks contained quite a narrative: the health crisis, the coma, the changing levels of organ and brain function, the determination that death was inevitable, the final visits, and, finally, his passing.

This young man's death was exceptional in a number of ways, as was he during his life.  One part of the experience I come back to, over and over, in my mind is the way that his extended community, and the extended communities of the numerous members of his incredible extended family, witnessed and participated in his final weeks through Facebook. 

I'm not even going to begin to tackle the larger subject of communication technologies here.  There is way too much to say, and much of it I don't find particularly interesting to be perfectly honest. 

Furthermore, Facebook is the only thing of its kind (meaning any form of electronic communication or community other than paleolithic email and listservs) in which I've participated.  So I'm not actually qualified to talk about any other new forms of communications.  Not that utter lack of experience has prevented me from expounding in the past.

Something that has struck me about Facebook, and that I say in its defense when Luddites (and even some techies) call it out as a time-waster, is that it provides us with the opportunity to hang out.

I did a LOT of hanging out in my 20's.  Spending time with friends.  Doing stuff, doing nothing.  Running errands together, making art together, listening to music together.  Hanging out.

I don't do so much hanging out anymore.  My time has shifted from my friends to my family.  I'm busy.  I have young kids.  There just isn't that much down time in my life, and there is less opportunity to casually and frequently gather in a group or to just stop by someone's house.

Enter Facebook.  I pretty quickly got past the thrill of locating people from elementary school and looking at humiliating and hilarious old photos, and now Facebook has settled into a comfortable, functional role in my life.  At its best, it is a place - yes, an electronic place, but a place nonetheless - where I do get to spend smallish, unstructured, and unscheduled amounts of time sort of hanging out with my friends.  Other people stop by while we're hanging out, commenting on whatever it is we're talking about, and it is frequently really fun.  We make jokes, we riff off of each other's jokes.  We kvetch, we sympathize with each other's kvetching. 

I don't know exactly how people of other ages experience Facebook - I'm particularly mystified by the Facebooking habits of those who are still young enough to have little better to do than to hang out - but for me, this communal space - my own contemporary version of a quad or dorm lounge or friendly pot dealer's house - is really sweet and familiar. 

As this acquaintance of mine was dying, his brother posted very frequent and intimate updates on his condition, and, eventually, photos of the hospital gathering the day before his death, on Facebook.  As we followed these events and the experiences of his family, it was as if we were all getting to gather in the kitchen, or to get the important news from someone else about what was happening somewhere else.  We got to be there in some bizarre, modern way, and to simply witness, regardless of how busy and far away we were. 

Obviously none of this was a replacement for actually being there.  That was done by others - those closer in spirit and in body to the family and the events.  Plenty were bringing food and scheduling hospital shifts.  No doubt Facebook joined forces with its ancient ancestors - email and telephones - to help with scheduling and coordination.   I was not on the inner circle, not even close, so I did not go to the hospital or schedule meal deliveries or even bring food.  But my own need to know was satisfied, my need to watch over this family and to be there in some way.

I thought a lot about sitting shiva during that time, the time that we looked to notes and updates frequently as illness progressed and death came.    It was as if I was able to walk past the family's house, to be satisfied that it was full of loving bodies, to show my face at their door - however briefly - so that my love and support could be delivered.  I was thankful that Facebook gave me the means to be able to stop by, and to sit silently with them.

Many devoted readers may have already learned of my theory of PMS.  Now it is time to post it to the world, in my most serious effort, to date, to get picked up by a scientific journal.

Let me start by putting a few things on the table and then brushing them aside, roughly, in an explosive fit of impatience.  For one, I suffer from this condition.  Since I was a teenager, I've struggled to maintain equilibrium in my life despite the recurring sequence of biochemical events I experience on a monthly basis.  Moving on. 

Another thing: the name of this condition has always bugged me, the use of the word, "syndrome" in particular, but even the use of the word, "condition."  In medicine, the word syndrome tends to mean a pattern of symptoms indicative of some disease.  The not-so-subtle suggestion being that there is something wrong with me, as opposed to the reality of the situation, which is that there is something wrong with everyone else.

We all know the basics of menstruation - the ebb and flow of various hormones or hormonal triggers, all culminating in the flow of menses.  Call it what you will - having your period, being on your moon, being on your cycle - one thing is undeniable: this is bloodletting.  Think for a moment about what this means - a slow (or not-so-slow) draining of blood.  Life blood.  Vitality.  That is crazy!

So here is my point: It takes a LOT of energy to stay calm most of the time.  To maintain an outward appearance of order in the face of the horror and brutality that humans commit on a daily basis.  To keep my composure despite the very real risks of harm befalling my loved ones.  To act with grace when strangers and friends alike act selfishly, and to show compassion when others drive like morons.  To silently forgive my husband, time and time again, for folding the napkins wrong.  So wrong.

Most of the time, I can summon up that extra energy.  I am strong.  As strong as a small horse.

But when my life force is being drained from me . . . well, sorry, I'm just not that polite anymore.  It is not that I am suddenly crazy or having thoughts and feelings that are caused by my hormones.  Rather, it is that all of the energy I usually use to be superhumanly zen is diverted, and I have to let you know what I really think. 

I invite you to extrapolate from this theory (remember, you read it here first!) and to think about the work you do everyday to forgive, forget and move on.  This is important, productive work.   Doing this work is part of what defines adulthood and differentiates us from, say, my four year old who will wail with all of her being when the wrong kind of noodle is selected for dinner.

But inside of all of us is that four year old, the person who wants fusilli and not tortellini.  Inside also is the person who is thrown into a crying rage because thousands of children in our wealthy nation are too poor to eat properly, and an exasperated person who has no patience left for bigotry or hatred or war and no energy left to fight them.  A person who sometimes needs to scream, occasionally because of a wrongly folded napkin but more often because people are mean for no reason, like the jerk neighbor who thinks his roses are more important than my child's need to play ball.   Also in there is the person who is brought to tears because women are finally playing professional basketball and it is televised with high-cost gatorade commercials.  And because we've finally elected a smart, compassionate President who also happens to be black.  That is amazingly wonderful and worthy of weeping.

We all must continue to do this important work of rising above our daily rage and tears and horror and irritation.   We must transcend the behavior in others we abhor, those daily violations of decency and respect.  

However, and according to my theory, this is the lesson that those of us with PMS can teach: the rage, the tears, the horror, the irritation - those are very very real, and those will not - and should not - just disappear.  The rising above, the transcendence, is a superhuman act.  And when we don't?  Well, its certainly not because something is wrong with us . . .

Last summer my family took a week-long holiday to Seattle, Washington.  Our dear old friend, Holly, lives there.  Holly is always happy to host us, even when she lives in a 150 square foot studio (disclaimer: that was before we had kids).  Holly's housemate was set to go out of town for a while, so we were even going to enjoy a bedroom, but she wasn't schedule to leave until two days after we arrived.  So we planned a trip to the San Juan Islands for the first leg of our Pacific Northwest trip - in order to find a spot for ourselves for a few days, and to satisfy a long-standing desire to see that area of the world.

We arrived in Seattle at the outset of an incredible heatwave.  It was in the upper 90's, at least, every day.  Overall, that was a fun way to experience Seattle - certainly much different than the coldest winters we spend every summer in San Francisco.  And people in Seattle really know how to party when the weather is good.

The heat, however, provided an extreme backdrop for what turned out to be a really shitty few days.  The first portend of doom was our rental car.  I can't even remember the details of what made it so ridiculously difficult to get the car, but I have visions of the four of us, sweating, walking through miles upon miles of parking garage only to arrive at a car that was not particularly family friendly.  Eventually, we got to Holly's (through rush-hour traffic), took care of business (food and a much needed drink and smoke), and then hit the road and headed north. 

Before we left home we'd had little to no time to really plan anything for our San Juan Islands trip - I'd found a room in Anacortes, Washington that seemed neither ridiculously expensive nor totally skanky and that was about it.  No guidebook, no plan, no time.  A fun approach when traveling through, say, Amsterdam.  Less reliable with two young kids and a heat wave.

Our room and spot within Anacortes was pretty nice, although it was immediately clear that in order to fully appreciate the wonderfulness of the San Juans you should really get off the beaten path.  We never did.

The next day (our only full day in the area) was a complete disaster.  Totally, fully, and completely.  The continental breakfast served at our motel was shockingly, confusingly putrid.  We drove into town to find a decent cup of coffee and everything was just weird and deserted and nothing tasted good.  We eventually settled on taking a ferry to Friday Harbor, the only landing spot on the ferry line through the Islands that seemed to deposit us actually in a town.  I was determined not to go through the hassle of taking a car on the ferry, having been traumatized by once waiting for TEN HOURS in the car-ferry line going to Martha's Vineyard, Massachussetts.  That was the reason we stayed in Anacortes - we could drive there and I was damned if I was going to spend my two days in the San Juans waiting for ferries.

When we docked at Friday Harbor, hot and hungry, we got off the boat with about 95 senior citizens and quickly found ourselves in the kind of tourist experience we usually avoid at all costs.

It was after lunch time proper, and we searched for a decent restaurant amidst all of the overpriced selections of fried food and settled on Mexican.  Even when it is not that good, Mexican food is usually OK, right?  Not right.  Not only was the food gross, but for some reason - God frowning down upon us or something - the waitress and the kitchen completely forgot about our existence.  This was really weird, given that we kept asking about our food and our kids were loudly losing their shit.  Seriously, we waited for almost two hours for our food.

After we left the restaurant we discovered that we'd just missed the ferry off the island and we had to wait almost four hours for the next one.  What did we do?  Got ice cream.  Walked for a few blocks.  Stood talking.  Walked for a few more blocks.  Found a toy store.  Fought with the children who wanted to buy anything and everything inside (their version of binge drinking).  Tried desperately to find a playground, and finally found one that was small, smelly, and mostly visited by what seemed to be meth dealers.  And it was really, really hot out.

About an hour before the ferry left, we went into the local whale museum to look around.  Ken and Holly didn't feel like paying admission, so I went in with the kids.  The museum was actually kind of fun, albeit overpriced.  There was that one five-minute period when my daughter screamed in terror because of the life-size model of an Orca scared the hell out of her.  But other than that it was fine - the space was lightly air conditioned and being there helped us pass the time.

On the way out of the museum I noticed a bus schedule - turns out that every half-hour throughout the day we could have caught a free bus to the other, less-populated side of the island where people live, eat seasonally, and pods of Orcas are frequently spotted.  That bit of information was merely insult to injury.

Hot, exhausted, irritable, dehydrated, we caught the ferry back to Anacortes, hoping to forget the day ever happened.

Despite the grody circumstances of our day, we maintained relatively good spirits.  Relatively.  I didn't yell at my husband or my kids.  But I was pretty disappointed.  I've wanted to visit the San Juan Islands for like 20 years.

At some point in the afternoon - toward the end - I had a revelation that not only saved my sanity on that day, but that has become a bit of guiding principle for me.

That day I realized that at any one time there is some percentage of families and couples travelling - my guess is around 15% - for whom everything is going wrong.   We've all had it happen, right?  The transportation problems when the kid has a fever.  The bad restaurant experience at the gathering the day before the cousin's terrible wedding.  The hotel room that is irreversibly cold with cable that doesn't work and you've just had a huge fight about whether to have a second child.  Things going wrong in the wrong place at the wrong time.

We all have to take this on some percentage of the time.  If at any one time 15% of families are getting the short end of the traveling stick, then about 15% of the time traveling is going to suck.

In my mind I think of that 15% as "doing penance" though we've mostly done nothing for which we need to repent.  Except for procreate.  Maybe that is enough.

More accurately, however, taking on our 15%, is really just shift work.  Like we're all on a commune and someone has to clean the outhouse or wash the cloth diapers.  It only makes sense that we'd spread around this crappy aspect of family life as evenly as possible.  The rest of the time - the majority of the time - things are not that bad.

I think of this 15% theory when we have those bad times - car rides with whining children and no snacks, being the family at the campground with the screaming toddler, whatever - and it gives me comfort and puts it all in context.  Often I am able to let go of the focus on how shitty everything is, and I'm able to get all Zen about it.  We're just doing our shift.  It will end and then someone else will have to be miserable.

Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, we had a superbly lovely day the next day.  We took a hike in what seemed like it would be some ordinary city park in Anacortes but it was beautiful and woodsy and on the water and just perfect.  The kids frolicked and the four of us enjoyed the stupendous company of our old friend.   We stretched our legs and breathed the fresh air and came down off of our bad day the day before.  We happily fulfilled that day's work - luckily we had the Orca-watching-and-laughing-a-lot shift.

From the time my son was about one and a half until he was about three, my husband and I rented a room in our house to a friend, Danny.  The prospect of having a housemate after so many years of living alone as a couple (and even more years of learning to have a functional housemate relationship with each other) was daunting, to say the least.  As luck would have it, Danny was a very compatible housemate for us - collectively and individually.  It didn't hurt that he and our son loved each other lots.

It wasn't effortless to integrate a new adult into our home life.  It never is effortless to live with anyone, really.  Other people are just annoying, even more so when you have to share a kitchen with them.  However, the benefits of having Danny in the house far outweighed the challenges.  Fundamentally, it was a lot of fun.

We not-so-jokingly referred to Danny as the United Nations.  He didn't really help us resolve conflicts.  In fact, I can remember a few times when Ken and I fell into the swirling pool of marital combat in Danny's presence and the poor guy just sat there looking traumatized. 

But Danny was a peacekeeper.  His mere presence in the house (or the possibility of him coming home or out of his room or even just overhearing us) kept us on our better behavior.  All of us in a marriage, or a family (that's most of us) understand how each family unit has its own brand of insanity and misconduct.  Knowing that there was a witness to our marriage, and to how we treated each other and communicated with each other, inspired us to behave better and communicate more respectfully.  What a gift.

I thought about Danny when I read this a few days ago, in the New York Times: same-sex couples are still at risk for discriminatory treatment in health care settings, even in states with domestic partner rights and registries, even with Health Care Directives and Powers of Attorney in place.

So much for my righteous estate planner speech about the value of putting documents in place, especially for same-sex partners!  What's the use if people are still going to take liberties to pass judgment on the nature of your family? 

Well, of course there is some use in having documents in place, great use even - I still have to believe that stories like the ones in the Times article are more the exception than the norm.  Perhaps, in the context of what usually occurs, this story is a bit inflammatory and thus inaccurate.  OK - but still, WTF (as they say)??

I usually avoid reading comments to online articles, not because I think doing so is a waste of my time (I know it is), but in these days of the ubernet we all need to be judicious in deciding how to waste our time, we simply cannot waste our time everywhere.  I choose to waste my time on food blogs mostly.

However, for some lucky reason I did read a few of the many comments posted to this article, and one really hit it.  This commenter wondered whether if she was traveling with a friend - not a spouse, not a partner, not a lover, but a friend - why on earth would it make any sense to kick her out of the hospital room?  Why shouldn't she get visiting privileges?

Of course, there is much yadda yadda to say in response, about rights and responsibilities, about the liability of medical professionals and the difficulties they face dealing with competing interests of others in their patients, about privacy of medical information.  All important things to say, I'm sure. 

But what I keep thinking about, as my mind floats back to the anecdotes I read described in that article, and to the comment about the traveler-friend, is how we - as a society, as health care providers, and even as lawyers - see families in isolation, as islands with distinct borders surrounded by a sea of that which is distinctly not family. 

The reality is different.  Many people, couples, and families have broad and complex relationships with those who are not family in a legal sense, but who are critically important and sustaining forces.  In other words, people who are family in a practical sense.  Historically, this has been particularly true for the LGBT community, as many have been mistreated, misunderstood and totally dissed by their families of origin, and they've created what they've needed by way of family elsewhere. 

Obviously, when there is a disagreement, when a consensus cannot be reached, the line has to be drawn somewhere.  Without powers of attorney and other documents in which we each grant decision-making authority to our chosen person, and in which we express our wishes about care, or whatnot, how do we draw the line?  As the Times article makes clear, we do not want just any old health care professional to have unfettered discretion in deciding who or what counts.  Legal familial relationships draw the line clearly.  At least when we can all agree on what constitutes family.

Where I think we're coming at it ass-backwards is in where we start.  We need to see families in a community context and assume that families are interconnected, changing organisms with hazy borders and far-reaching tentacles.  We should expect that everyone is welcome, that inclusiveness is a given, and whittle away from there if necessary. 

As a practical approach, I'm sure there are many difficulties that we'd face, especially us professionals bound by risk-oriented codes of conduct.  But, let me just say this: individuals and families mostly benefit when forced to open up to outsiders.  People are often healthiest, mentally and otherwise, when their worlds can see and know each other.  

As our experience living with Danny demonstrated, a family can benefit from politely letting others in, even for the most intimate family experiences, and from behaving accordingly.

The other day, I looked around at the world, its problems and crises and progress, and realized that this is the world in which I'm living my adult life.  This is it.  All I do to create my own reality, to grow and evolve, all of it is happening in this context, which is a defining force on me and my life.   Some people were Russian Jews who birthed their babies during the pogroms, and some people were lucky enough to be in their early 20's in the late 60's and they had a lot of fun and casual sex and maybe had gotten to see Jimi Hendrix live, or at least see the Talking Heads in a small venue a few years later.   Some people were born into the dust bowl, or the Chinese cultural revolution. 

Turns out when I hit my stride as an adult and was raising young kids, this just happened to be what the world was like.  When I say this, I mean all of this - an economic crisis, the first black president, gay marriage as one of the more polarizing issues, invasive burmese pythons in the Everglades, climate change, and things still unknown and unknowable.  All this influences my work, whether and how I can save money to pass along to my children, and the development of my psyche (which, itself, influences what my children will discuss in therapy.)

Why was all of this such a revelation?  Well, for one, it was just a moment of awareness - profound in its mere occurrence.  When I was really young, 5 or 6, I had these existential moments where I would think to myself, "I am me."  It blew my mind.  I had to work really hard to get my brain to be that self-conscious, and I remember, vividly, that feeling of effort expended to step aside from my consciousness, and to separate it from my identity.  I like to think of myself as spiritually precocious.

Another reason, I think, that my realization about the world kinda floored me, is that the world in which I am living, and in which I am trying to make a living, is fundamentally not what I expected or envisioned when I was growing up and thought about being an adult.  Some of that difference between expectation and reality is inevitable, since the future, and adulthood, are so unknowable from way back in the past. 

But the specific difference between this world, and the one I somehow expected (though maybe never articulated) lies in the existence of limitations and in the lack of a linear progress toward goodness and things being better than they'd been before.

In the 70's, when I was a child, people were getting all equal on each other, and the brainwashing was heavy: I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything I wanted to be, just as long as I didn't hurt anyone.  Society was evolving and soon these truths would not only be self-evident, but also universal.  I then came into adulthood in the 90's, when the egalitarian dreams of our parents were realized, somewhat, in the internet and in Bill Clinton (who at least didn't go to Yale for undergrad), and prosperity became the norm. 

There was this expectation that things would continue to grow and get better, and, more importantly, my efforts alone could determine so much about my own life.  The subtext of course, has so much to do with class and race, but wasn't that one of those good ones we figured out back in the 70's? 

Progress continues to be made, but there is also some serious tower of babel action happening right now.  The weaknesses in our society and in our whole global system are revealing themselves, and things have contract and move backward in many ways.  Toward something simpler, community-centered and without so much packaging.  Like the olden days. 

I'm not saying this is a bad thing - I'm happily making sauerkraut and preserving fruit like other urban homesteaders, trying to minimize that which is disposable.  However, as the scale shifts, other areas of our disposable culture are under scrutiny - I have less disposable income, my own time is more consumed with supporting myself (even if it is just a result of my dedication to pickling and preserving everything from my garden), and I, at least, can no longer easily ignore the enormous resources that world travel requires. 

Again, I really do think all of this is good, but I did not expect the world, or my world, to shrink it the way it is shrinking.  Until now, the sky not only seemed the limit but the goal.  Now, many of us are staying closer to the ground, or at least seeing the wisdom in trying.  Even when you throw the internet and communication devices into the mix, many of us are responding to the glut of global awareness by connecting with neighbors, discovering community (physically, not virtual) and getting our hands dirty.  Literally.

As I gained my composure after the duh-piphany that my life is, in fact, heavily influenced by the external, global circumstances of my time here on the planet, it occurred to me that human history can in some ways be seen like a never-ending saga of birth order.  Like my son (the first born) sees things in terms of what has been taken away, and my daughter (the second born) sees things in terms of what she did not receive, each of us being shaped by having been born after the prior generation, or having been born before the ones that we must raise.  My great-grandparents were immigrants, caught between two cultures; my grandparents were obsessed with assimilation and conformity.  My parents' generation broke the chains of the 50's and told the Joneses to go fuck themselves, the race was off; my generation is rediscovering manners and is realizing that the Joneses are part of the fabric of our community, like it or not, so we should at least be polite.

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My son, Huck, was just over 3 and a half when my daughter, Trudy, was born.  One day, when Trudy was a few months old - I believe I was still home on maternity leave - I realized the sum total of everything I needed to know about birth order, at least for my own narcissistic purposes.  Trudy was on her changing table and I was across the room.  On the phone.  Poor child was totally left to roll over to her death and I was blabbering away about clothes or something.  Honestly, I had probably forgotten about her existence completely for 10 or 30 seconds - a phenomenon I experienced exclusively with my second child. 

In a moment, I caught sight of her and a wave of guilt washed over me:  Poor baby!  How could I be so careless?  This precious little thing was getting nothing from me - no playing or singing names of body parts or attention of any sort.   I was being so totally, totally lame.

Humiliated and remorseful, I hung up the phone and rushed to her side, only to discover that she was emphatically happy.  She was staring at the black and white pictures I'd put up next to the changing table (probably the ones that were actually stuck to the changing table and had been there since her brother was a baby).  She was engaged and stimulated.  She was just hanging out.

Then the second wave of guilt washed over me: Poor Huck!  I never just left him alone to do his own thing.

I've told this story many times.   It sums up, entirely, my experience of having two kids.  Until today, however, I'd not really looked at this little story from my kids' perspectives.  Without entertaining myself and anyone else by describing the particular ways my children have been traumatized by the differences in the ways I've treated them, I'll simply note that they have been treated differently.  They were each born into a unique reality in that respect, and the external forces - my level of relaxation (or, neglect), the presence, or not, of a sibling and all that gives and takes away, parents who were 35 instead of 31 - influence so much of who they are. 

My story about being a parent of two may not provide the definitive analysis of birth order, and the related syndromes, but it really does say it all.  How we are all fucked, and how lucky we all are not to be as fucked as our younger or older sibling, 'cause they are really fucked.  Or, more generously, how little we can do about the circumstances of our births, how those circumstances define and shape us, and how, knowing this, perhaps we can confront the future without expectation.