The good enough mother

Once upon a time, back in the spring of 1978, I had a really beautiful dog named Summer. She was a purebred Viszla, amber colored short hair, amber eyes and a fluid, graceful gait. She was really neurotic and made my life hell when I left her alone. But when she came into heat in the early spring of 1978, suddenly, she wanted to get away from me as much as possible so she could get laid. I was in Grand Junction, Colorado one day, selling a Porsche 924 I had to right to own in the first place. I was trading it for a VW squareback which fit my situation a lot better. So Summer escaped out of the car and got laid like a million times by a lot of different guy dogs. I whistled and whistled for her and she finally came toward me, slinking low to the ground with her cropped tail as far between her legs as it could reach. She stunk of mongrel dog sex.

"Get in this car right now you little hussy," I hissed at her. She jumped in and curled up in a ball, exhausted from her afternoon of wild sex. I had problems of my own that spring. I was trying to extricate myself from yet another relationship with a narcissistic sociopath. This one was beating the crap out of me on regular occasions and since he was such a nice guy out in the world, nobody believed me when I told them he was a violent savage whose eyes changed form blue to black when the rage came on. I kept thinking I could love him enough to make him stop hitting me, but I realized that I might die after the third beating which resulted in a bloody nose and welts on my rib cage that made it hard to breathe.

Several weeks passed and Summer gave birth to nine puppies, all of whom represented aspects of all the males she gave herself to on that spring day in Grand Junction. Summer began to nurse them, but I saw the desperation in her eyes. She really wanted to kill them all but nature prevailed and she gave her swollen nipples to them with a great sigh of resignation. I couldn't tell her, "I told you so," at least out loud. She knew I was thinking it. Some of the puppies were frail. One even had some kind of weird disability, like doggie Down Syndrome.

I left town to save my own life when the puppies were old enough to travel. Summer had her bed in the back of my VW squareback which was made cramped and tight by all my belongings. We were headed back to California the quickest route possible, which from Telluride, Colorado, meant a trip through the desert plains of Utah and then the real deserts of Nevada. It was hot and the VW didn't have the greatest air conditioning. Summer was panting and the puppies were crying incessantly. I rolled down the windows in the back and kept looking in the rearview mirror at Summer, panting at an increasingly rapid rate and drooling, her eyes frantic and wild. Suddenly, she just had to go. Right there in the middle of nowhere, she just quit.

She leapt out the window while the car was going at least 50 miles per hour. I slammed on the brakes and saw gallop into the desert canyons. She just couldn't listen to one more whimpering puppy; she had no more milk to give, and not a single shred of patience left in her fragile, bony body.

I whistled and whistled in the heat of the Moab sun. Finally she answered, limping from the shadows of the badlands.She fell into a heap at my feet and I knelt and stroked her forehead. I told her we would just find the nearest place to put the puppies to sleep. "It's okay", I told her stroking that anguished head as she looked up at me with amber eyes full of remorse, "We sometimes think sex has no consequences, don't we?" For I too had my day of running screaming into the wilderness after discovering my desire for union resulted in a pregnancy I was not in the least bit prepared to undertake.

So I stole into an animal shelter with an armful of puppies and begged the person at the desk to take them from me quickly. The mother was not able to care for them and neither was I for that matter. And Summer was free.

I have a client with a disabled son and there is so little help for her nowadays. She is all alone in her house in an isolated subdivision nortn of Reno. Her son has a seizure disorder which has caused a significant developmental delay. He cannot be left alone because his seizures can come at anytime without warning despite anti-seizure medication. She re-married when he was about five and had another son with her current husband. Her days begin at 5AM when she gets up and steals a half hour of time on her treadmill. "My body isn't mine anymore," she laments. She has gained 60 pounds over the past 13 years. Her husband works in law enforcement and is gone 15 hours per day. Her attention is divided ten different ways every second of the day, especially in the summer when both boys are out of school. She also runs an in-home daycare because they need the income. Natalie, age nine months, arrives at 6AM sharp. She spends her days, reminding, directing, feeding, wiping, picking up, reminding, scolding, redirecting, feeding, wishing, longing, crying, monitoring a grand mal seizure, and hoping her husband doesn't leave her which he threatens to do because of "the retard," as he has come to refer to his step-son.

When I arrive, her eyes are frantic, like Summer's eyes. "Am I a monster for wanting to get rid of him?" she askes through tears of exhaustion. Her son is chronologically 17 but developmentally, he is about 8. He overhears his step-father's contempt and has recently reacted to it by having fits of rage at his inability to do what other kids do. When he rages, he tears at his own flesh and throws things, crying himself into exhaustion. His mother, strong and Amazon-like, holds him down so he doesn't hurt himself. She grits her teeth as tears roll down her face. His limbs are long, skinny and unweildy, like a newborn foal and he flails until he is limp.

She finds her little corners of sanity. She calls her mother to give her an occasional hour of respite. And she goes and gambles at the penny slots. She wants to ride her motorcycle, dress in leather, leave forever. She wants to disappear into the badlands and reclaim herself.

"This was what I used to be," she says showing me a picture of herself before the 60 pounds. her life is weighty and she swallows more than she can handle. She holds it all in her body and feels it sucking her downward into the undertow where there is no way out. Her soul paces like a wolf or a tiger in a zoo, and she pants, just like Summer did right before she went out the window of a moving car.

I hold her in the heat of the summer sun and we go outside to her little lawn in the back yard. I tell her to sit with me and we rock back and forth with our eyes closed. I tell her to imagine herself free. Anytime she wants, she can come here to this place of freedom; freedom from self-hatred and judgment she heaps on herslf for longing to be free, freedom from criticism, freedom from some standard or perfection imposed upon her by the culture or some socially constructed image of "the good enough mother." We don't talk often enough about the secret we keep so well hidden that we aren't sure we can really make it through mothering and that we hate it so much sometimes that we want to just run and run, far away into the shadows of the badlands where can can ride motorcycles, wear leather, swear, spit and not wear underwear. The dirty side where we don't measure up to anyone or worry about what he will say if the house is a mess or shame ourselves because we're fatter than we used to be because we've just swallowed way too much.

Has anyone seen "Healthcare Reform?" Blessed Rain....I have not seen it...

I dread Fridays in rural Nevada and I am trying not to. I try to tell myself I am doing some good in the world but I don't believe myself. Somehow, all my calm, zen-like feelings around generating goodwill and cultivating generosity evaporate when I am worried about covering my basic expenses. I should trust the goddesses more, but I keep falling off that wagon too. I meditate each morning, but on this morning,even as I chant RAMMMMM calling upon this ancient God to center me, I keep wandering away worrying about whether I am crazy for trying to actualize health care reform in my own way since I am seeing damn little evidence that it's happening anywhere else. Example 1: My son (now 22) has a rotting tooth that is causing him great pain. He doesn't make enough to pay for dental care, his employer does not offer insurance benefits, and dhe oes not qualify for state or county assistance. No dentist in town is willing to take payments. I wonder if they know that people aged 16-25 are the most underserved population in this country when it comes to health care? These are young adults who, unless they are in college or in the military, most often go without health insurance or access to healthcare. Yet these young adults are our future. Example 2: I am a 52 year-old professional woman who should be making tons more money with healthcare benefits.Instead, I choose to light my own path which means I will not be able to afford health insurance because I don't make enough money. God help me if I have a terrible accident right now because I am not eligible for any state funded insurance and I can't afford regular insurance. What I can afford carries with it a $5,000.00 deductible so what's the point?

Anyway, on the journey out into the desert, I listen to Pema Chodron talking about awakening Bodhichitta. In the path of the Bodhisattva (warrior for the way of the peaceful heart)one must practice awakening all the time. I chose this path of giving myself to those most in need and I chose to offer healing therapeutic service to people according to the Buddhist Paramita of generosity. But I don't feel very generous today. I feel stingy. Like Ebenezer Scrooge. I feel scared that I won't be able to pay my rent and other living expenses. In between steering my galloping brain back to center, I curse myself for not being more practical and smart like my half-sister Joan who at 67, worked like a Trojan for thirty years, carefully squirreling away her savings and now has a well-earned healthy retirement. I will probably be more like our dad who was an idiot with money and worked until he was 80performing medical procedures with antiquated skill and questionable cognition.

I travel into the desert to see families who request therapy or who are told they have to have it by some other agency (usually Child Protective Services)and I am paid only for the time I actually see clients; I am not paid for travel time (except mileage)or time for completing paperwork. If I show up to see a client for whom I have driven 70 miles and they choose to blow me off, I don't get paid. The Paramita of generosity is really only a Paramita when it stretches you and awakens you into the spirit of giving without strings attached. Strings like hoping you might get some kind of reward for being a really good girl, or hoping that maybe someone will want to give something back. It's just giving because that's what the world needs most. Okay....deep breath...let's try this again.

Today, I drive out into the desert and the temperature soars almost to 100 degrees. I am not looking forward to seeing Mae's daughter. First of all, some psychiatrist has given this child a diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder AND AD/HD. She is medicated with Lithium and Abilify and a few other drugs. I didn't think schizophrenia could be diagnosed until a person was at least 18 because it seems to manifest right around that age. But the mother is adamant. She seems to need her daughter to be mentally ill. "She hears voices. Has since she was real little." I gently introduce the possibility of a very active imagination. Mae takes a deep breath and looks at the dragon statues she has lined up on her bookshelf.

"Well I see my dead mother a lot. She lives in that desk over there." Her ashes are kept in the desk in the living room. It seems that Mae's Cherokee roots might possibly be shining through the wall of medicalization. She adjusts her position on the stained, sagging sofa and brightens up. "Yep, all of us women in this family hear voices and see things that ain't there. I know stuff before it happens and my oldest daughter is the same way. I have conversations with my mother all the time."

There is a loud clap of thunder outside. Mae whoops with delight and smiles. "Oh man I love thunder and lightening!" She notices my necklace of Tourmaline crystal. "You like crystals? You know how to re-charge 'em?". I tell her no. "Well you put 'em in a shell like maybe an Abalone or somethin.' You gotta do it in the new moon an' then you let em sit there for thirty days until the moon is new again. And don't let nobody touch 'em!"

Mae's youngest daughter puts on her bathing suit and goes out to dance in the rain. Mae leads me into a cluttered spare bedroom filled with dusty china dolls and collections of what appear to be rocks. She carefully opens a little cabinet on the wall, and takes out beautifully polished crystals of amethyst, jade, tourmaline, rose quartz and opal. She understands the healing power of all which makes me wonder why she relies on Western medicine to treat her for gout. Her 12 year old daughter, the one who allegedly has schizophrenia, is fascinated and asks question after question, one in particular about the crystal ball which sits in Mae's shelf covered in two inches of desert dust. Mae answers irritably. "You wanna have yer fortune told? Well ask yer Aunt Maude!Now quit interruptin'!"

She blows dust off stone after stone revealing the pearlescence of each one and then works her way over to her cluttered closet where she pulls out a deerskin dress with a fur-lined hem. "This was grandma's dress. And I got the moccasins too...right here" She digs out a pair of curled leather moccasins from her crowded closet.

She has pictures and statues of wolves all over her walls and shelves coated with duts intermingled with the crystals and other artifacts of her Cherokee heritage. "The wolf is my spirit animal," she says fingering a dusty photo of a wolf pup she raised.

"What is my spirit animal mommy?" her daughter asks, desperate to engage in something that gives her a sense of belonging. "Oh hell I dunno. You gotta go through a whole ceremony to find that out. Like this here eagle feather was presented to me by a medicine man when I went through ceremony." She carefully lifted an eagle feather down from its dusty place on her shelf. "I always knew it was wolf though."

Was I doing "therapy?" It didn't seem like it. I was the learner and Mae was the knower.

I took her daughter out into the rain. Blessed rain which cooled the earth and brought the smell of sage and grass so fully into my senses. Blessed rain that reminded me that the desert has beauty. We just have to look a little harder, like Mae when she made all those tirps out to the old Rawhide mines and the old abandoned mines outside of Fallon and looked for treasure in rocks that appeared to be so dead on the surface. Undderneath the graying, pocked crusts, were treasures of unfathomable beauty, with more aspects that the human eye could ascertain. Ancient and pulsating with the energy of millions of years of extreme heat and cold, they radiate beauty from behind such plain and simple exteriors.

Blessed rain that kisses the parched earth and liberates the scent of life in the sage and grasses. Blessed rocks that hold the energy of life itself. Nature teaches me today that nothing can be ascertained and appreciated without the patience to liberate potential.