Seriously. Just waiting for my turn to say my name out loud puts me on edge.
What if I forget how it's pronounced?
My one and only true starring role was in a production written and directed by my dad and his friend Richard called Moby Duck. I was roughly Beatrice's age, about three. My sister Rachel was a baby. I played Captain Ahab outfitted in a souvenir Sea World cap, a dress with an untied sash, and tights whose crotch had succumbed to gravity and settled around my knees. I carried a harpoon made from a toy broom with a triangle of cardboard taped to its handle. The Pequod was constructed from a cardboard box.
Queequeg was a yellow crocheted duck, voiced by my dad. Hence the title.
I don't think the directors really explained the story to me. Mostly I think they enjoyed each other's company and the wild silliness of making an absurdist home movie in our Providence living room. I was basically a prop, and a good reason for two adult friends to make a cardboard boat.
However. They didn't take my deep aversion to conflict, violence, and scary stuff into account. At one point my dad covers himself in a white sheet, gets down on his hands and knees, and enters the camera's field bellowing thar she blows! while sort of scooting towards me and parachuting the sheet up and down. Richard directs me from behind the camera: that's the whale, Captain Ahab! Get it, get it with your harpoon!
I scream in terror, throw the harpoon overboard in the general direction of the whale/dad, and run to the back of the boat to cower.
After a couple of takes, the adults realize things are not going so well. My dad takes off the sheet to negotiate with his actor. I begin pacing around, trying to explain why this whole whale hunting thing is seriously not working for me. I suggest another story: a baby fish and a baby whale get to be friends. And then the baby fish and the baby whale get to be friends with me.
Uh huh, nods my dad, staying in his Hollywood director persona. He repeats the plot. I nod emphatically. He ponders my treacle, then tries to convince me again of the merits of the Moby Duck idea. He suggests compromises. Maybe it could be less scary. Maybe Captain Ahab could...
Daddy, Daddy. Daddy. No, Daddy.
I interrupt, fretfully raising and lowering my hands, patting the air in front of me in a calm-down gesture, as if trying to settle an unruly mob.
Daddy. I want it nice. Everything nice.
So there you have it. Everything nice. Everyone in my family cracks up watching this. I always blush. These days, when I urge peace and harmony in an overbearing kind of way, periodically one of my kids will smile at me and say, okay Mama. We know. Everything nice.
For the longest time I felt ashamed about what I thought Moby Duck revealed about me. Cowardice, fearfulness, a strangely overblown aversion to conflict. Baby whales only, please. At various times in my life I have noticed how my reluctance to be honest out of fear of the inevitable interpersonal conflict that would follow has hampered my ability to love more fully. Sometimes it's been hard on my relationships. There's that little girl, pleading with her dad to please take it down a notch and do my story instead.
Since the election, the everything nice part of me has been hollering for my attention. Kindness, connection, attunement, care - these are the values I am holding close. And I am coming to recognize, nearly forty years into my tenure on this earth, that there is nothing shameful about the way I handled the role of Captain Ahab. My particular yearning for peaceful relationship (as well as my desire to be in charge of the story) is, like everything about us, double edged. It makes me me. It can be a great strength, and a great vulnerability too. It seems like accepting and even embracing my fear of conflict is the only way to grow more courageous, and to be able to risk conflict when honesty and love demand it.
There's a lot of upset and hurt and anger all around us right now. My Facebook feed is a steady stream of people looking to reduce their isolation by sharing their agitation and fear, people offering various ideas for what we can do with this moment, people casting about in a terrifying time for some way to essentially increase safety.
I went to a training on Friday about using mindfulness and yoga in psychotherapy, especially with clients who have been through trauma. We spent some time talking about our basic human emotional motivations. We can understand these as falling into three 'centers' of motivation: fear/threat, affiliation/connection, and mastery/achievement. In other words, we are motivated by a desire for safety, a desire for interpersonal connection, and a desire to achieve. The only problem is, when the fear center becomes activated - by actual or perceived threats to our safety - it dominates. It colors everything else. Which makes sense: animals, including humans, are created in such a way that every other priority must be pushed aside when their lives are in danger.
But living life under threat is painful and exhausting. It makes it very hard to learn and grow, it endangers our relationships, it takes a toll on our health. It can lead to violence, or substance abuse, or a whole slew of other coping behaviors that are ultimately self-harming.
I see so much hurt and fear around me these days. I feel those things too. But 'everything nice' is telling me: breathe into that fear, acknowledge it, and then gently set it down. Help others feel safe. Help your children feel safe. Help your neighbors feel safe. Then we can remember the fullness of who we are, and allow our relationships and our work to assume their proper place in our lives.
In therapy I often talk with clients about how anger is a secondary emotion. We usually feel it because there is a more painful, primary emotion underneath that seems impossible to tolerate. Fear and sadness are so hard - cover it over with anger instead.
Not that anger isn't useful. I think protests and pins and efforts to figure out what the heck is happening to us are positive. I honor the people in my world who are making more noise than I am right now. What I have to give in this moment is quieter: my own grief. Gentleness and kindness. A desire to help others feel cared for. A kind of vigilance, a quiet waiting.
I brought my family and some friends to see the student African drumming ensemble perform at Franklin & Marshall College yesterday, down the street from where we live. We sat in the back, near other friends. The students were dressed in brilliant colors. They come from every part of the world, and played with wild playful energy, putting their whole bodies into the music with irrepressible smiles on their faces. The vibrations were palpable in the auditorium, and so was the joy of the musicians, who were sharing a great gift and knew it, just by looking out at their audience, smiling along with them.
Afterwards I walked our kids and our dear neighbor's kids home through the park. The sun was setting. The children were full of music and energy and ran ahead of me, tackling each other, playing tag, throwing leaves. They were so free.
You have to be safe - in body, mind, and spirit - to feel that kind of expansive, joyful freedom. Watching them made me very happy.
So this is my 'everything nice' wish for you and yours today: to share music and singing, nurturing warm meals, time amidst golden leafy trees, snuggles with pets, affectionate greetings with neighbors, dance parties in the kitchen, eye contact and smiles with strangers. That you might be a presence that invites healing and safety in this world. Restoration. And if our neighbors are threatened or our democratic traditions are flouted, and we are called upon to brave conflict, discomfort, civil disobedience? Well, then we will be ready to act, not just from anger or fear, but from a place of love, with our whole, marvelous, human selves intact.
1 comment:
So very well said.
Post a Comment