everything nice

I hail from a family of performers and artists, people who are pretty comfortable in the spotlight. Me? Not so much. I held my mediocre own in a handful of elementary school plays and dance recitals, but honestly, I am the kind of person who begins to sweat when in a new class or group and the leader invites everyone to go around the circle and say her name. Worse, where she's from. Worse still, what she wants to get out of this class.

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.

letting go of ladysplaining

Last week I returned to the clinic where I first put on my professional helper hat, four months after graduating from social work school and three months after having our first child. Frances! What a tiny magnetic force she was, the center of my world. I would race home on my bike at lunch time, my breasts tingling and aching and letting down milk about three blocks before I arrived at our house (I swear I could hear her crying from that far away), where Mike would be pacing and bouncing our frantic hungry baby and looking at me with grim desperation as I took off my helmet and dropped my bag on the kitchen counter. How could you have taken so long? 

She never did take a bottle. So I nursed during my lunch break, and then again as soon as I came home, and somehow she kept on growing and growing and eventually ate solids. But those first weeks working full time were harrowing for our little family.

They were at my first social work job, too. I liked some of the doctors and nurse practitioners and nurses, but other people terrified me. Like the BFFs who ruled medical records and spoke rapid slangy Spanish to each other peppered with explosive laughs (over jokes I never understood) and turned their steel trap-style minds to any problem they felt inclined to address. It reminded me a little of my one and only summer waitressing. I was timid and usually confused; I'd go back into the kitchen and repeat a question four times before someone heard me and made fun of me and then sent me away empty handed. I'd wander back to my table, demoralized. Um, I guess we're all out of salsa, sorry. I was never quite sure who to ask when I needed help, nor how to ask for it. I had no bluster to speak of. I could barely make eye contact with anyone on the crazy wild kitchen staff. I wished then that there was a way to do my job and disappear simultaneously.

The clinic was full of gutsy funny smart people who knew how to do everything. I was a hesitant, slow-on-my-feet, earnest 28-year-old with no experience, a newborn, and busted Spanish language skills. I felt so white and prissy and bumbling. I didn't have an office then; I floated between rooms. The front desk person in dental was supposed to check in the patients who were there to see me. Sometimes she didn't tell me when someone was waiting. I was so intimidated; I never confronted her. I'm pretty sure she liked it that way.

But over time, the staff at SouthEast accepted me. I began to like wandering into medical records, watching Confy and Enerys tease and laugh in the endless aisles of actual paper files. Confy had every single record number memorized. Eventually people were willing to work with me; they trusted both my good intentions and capabilities. And I loved the patients. I had a million ideas for them and for the clinic, a scant handful of which actually came to fruition.

Then we moved, for Mike's new job. I cried.

And now, unexpectedly, I'm back at SouthEast. The reason we're here is Mike's cancer. That almost impossible-to-accept reality colors everything we do in Lancaster with a strange, uncomfortable light. But even so. I am profoundly glad to be back.

I was hired by a big mental health agency with whom SouthEast now has a contract to provide integrated behavioral health services to patients on site. On my first day, I set up at a desk in the provider's office, tackling technical challenges while I waited for a patient to show up on my schedule. One by one, nurses and doctors and front desk staff and even Enerys came by and greeted me with enormous smiles and hugs. She told me Confy had just retired.

What?? No Confy?

Oh my goodness. It was delightful. We asked about each other's kids and jobs. I exclaimed over how fabulous everyone looked. They really did. Just gorgeous. My jaw began to hurt from smiling.

Every once in awhile I'd stride into the nurses's station and introduce myself to the new (i.e. hired at some point over the past eight years) providers and nurses, asking if anyone had any People with Problems to send my way.

Eventually I snagged two. Success.

The next day I was at a different site, a beautiful space built after I left, where more happy reunions awaited. I got to meet with another couple of patients, but still had a lot of down time. I decided to tackle an online training I needed to check off my list.

While I did it, I listened to an interview with Glennon Doyle Melton. She said she had recently trained herself to refrain from asking for advice from 38 friends every time she had to make a decision. She said that now she just makes decisions. Her new hurdle? Learning to refrain from explaining herself.

That one caught my attention. She said women are always feeling compelled to explain their decisions.

Oh yes. She called it. Soy yo: la mujer who explains. 

It's as if we feel the need to justify our very presence, our particularity. Oh, this? I had to wear this. I'm backed up on laundry. Oh, my kid's school? See, we debated public vs. private endlessly and I really thought hard about it and though I do support public school I knew my kid was struggling...and money? Oh yes, I know, it's expensive and we can't really afford it but we applied for financial aid. And probably we won't stay there anyway. And I can understand how you feel about it, too.

I explain myself to myself. Meagan, it does seem like a bit much to have Beatrice in school full time when you don't need it every day. I know, Meagan, but I was so worn down by the summer and really needed a little time to deal. And what if Mike gets really sick again soon? That's hard for Bea. And he has to go back and forth to New York so often. So it really is okay that I'm not working and not scrambling to take care of Mike for a few hours while she's at school.

Why don't I just say: she's fine. It's fine to take some time for myself. 

Probably because taking time for oneself isn't really perceived as fine. As women especially, we're supposed to lean in and take care and maximize and multi-task and account for our activities every waking moment. We're to justify every bite we eat, every time we volunteer or don't volunteer at our kids' school, every job we take or don't take, every two minutes spent meditating or flossing or frosting a birthday cake (post the evidence online, further justification) - basically every choice we make.

So it's hard to do the work of living one's life: to assert's one acceptability and lovability through making decisions and showing up and proceeding. But when we do, I think that helps others do the same.

In the middle of that first marvelous series of happy reunions at SouthEast, a woman walked past my desk who looked vaguely familiar. I moved towards her, smiling. She smiled back. Hi! I said, meeting her bright eyes. Meagan! she said. I gave her a big hug. Then we started chatting and I realized I had met her for the first time briefly in the hall of the mental health agency that I work for the previous week. She sees patients for therapy at the clinic part-time.

It was a new work acquaintance, the sort that normally doesn't merit a huge goofy smile and hug in greeting. But it worked out just fine. She was so warm; we sat down and had a good collaborative talk about a client.

It made me think: what if I greeted everyone that way, with genuine delight? What if we approached every meeting as a happy, unexpected reunion?
 
What if I walked into every new space the way I walked back into my old clinic, with the simple confidence that it was good to be there? That I had something worthwhile to give, and to receive?

I didn't explain away my exuberant hug to my new colleague. In a rare moment, warmed through by so many reignited connections, I didn't feel the need to. The majority of the people I met at the new clinic were strangers to me, but I walked into each encounter with neither hesitation nor fear.

To give others the gift of your face, your open gaze, you have to assume the space you occupy. You have to first know that your presence is good; then you can give it away.

Maybe it's just age, or experience, or the fact that I have a positive history at SouthEast. But I think it's something more. Because wow wow wow did I feel grateful for the change that eleven years has wrought in me. Feeling loved and valued has emboldened me to take up my role and my choices - to live inside my skin - more fully, more peacefully, and with fewer explanations. So that I can love and value and embolden in turn.

Please believe me, dear readers, when I tell you this true thing: it is very, very good that you're here.

make it beautiful

Sometimes the realizing-one's-youngest-child-is-growing-up sadness hits me. Hard. I have to reckon with the fact that there will be no more babies, that I am much older now, that we are well into another time in life marked by soccer games, math homework, pleas for phones, shifting boundaries. 

But I breathe a sigh of relief when I think that Beatrice's recent confrontation with the terrible inevitability of death marks the last time I will walk closely with a three year old through that singular developmental milestone's anguish. (Also, thank heavens there will be no more potty training, or worry over weaning a toddler). But back to death. I went through it with Frances and Gabriel at this age, and it broke my heart into a million pieces then too. Not that the process is over - not that it's ever really over. But the initial realization has hit.

I can't in good conscience tell you about the conversation that came about and then escalated at the dinner table in such a way that all of our hearts broke together. With Mike and especially my older children involved, I can't really tell the story of something so intimate - I think it is theirs to tell. I have to make space to allow my growing dear ones to articulate these sacred, saturated moments for themselves. 

In the On Being interview with Marie Howe that I referenced recently, she said that art is a kind of safe container for the brute, painful knowledge we all live with, which is that all our earthly relationships will end. Death will take us away from our children, from the ones we most adore. It's the separation, I think, that evokes the anticipatory grief and terror. But art can hold those feelings for us, rendering them tolerable, even beautiful, even transcendent. 

Children especially love to tap-dance around death. They are drawn to the ghoulish: Halloween, ghosts, skeletons, mummies. I'm going to kill you! they holler at one another in the heat of play (and argument). They love games with names like Murder. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die! All these songs and games are ways to get close to the finality of death while keeping it wrapped safely in melody and story.

And then I think of Beatrice's anguish last night, sitting in my lap, asking over and over again: will I die? do people die? without the aid of art, nor any armor at all - with her bare defenseless soul exposed. She experienced a kind of agony that merited the rending of garments, the tearing of hair. For real. 

When it became unbearable, and also late, I told her it was time to read some stories. Frances and Gabriel sat with us, all exhausted by sadness, all gathered around picture books. They were a balm. And then Beatrice requested four songs, instead of our usual two, at bedtime: The Dock (which I figured out a few days ago means the Doxology) and Amazing Grace, please, then Red River Valley and Wild Mountain Thyme. As I sang I felt how these beloved songs are about the same things: God's grace and love, the pain of endings and goodbyes, the inevitable changes life brings, the joy of connection. They make beautiful, hold-able, the truths that define our lives together.

Do not hasten to bid me adieu.

After all the tearful children were put to bed, I stretched out on the couch and read and read until it was very late and I had finished Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson. I could not put it down; I barely breathed. I hesitated before picking it up, because I knew it would not offer distraction to my weary heart (unlike Narcos, my first choice, but Mike wouldn't watch it with me - it was already too late). Rather it would take me down further into its brokenness.

Which was true. But it rendered the pain of loss just-bearable, and exquisitely beautiful too. Reading that book was like being in someone else's dream, mixing memory and fear, the immersive sensations of childhood, the words we say and don't say, into a narrative that flowed with a logic all its own.

August, the narrator, is grappling with overwhelming loss. Of her intimate friendship with three other girls she says we opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.

The phrase stayed with me. I started a new job this week, one in which I will have the honor of listening to the burning stories of others, and the ashen stories too, that live dry and bitter deep in the gut. I think it is the work I am meant to do. But without art, it would be impossible.

why the debate made me cry

In sixth grade, my reading teacher was named Mrs. Gillis. She was stern, ancient, given to bouts of yelling, possessed of an impossibly straight spine. She also occasionally stepped out of the classroom and left us, 30 eleven and twelve year olds, to work independently for excruciatingly long minutes at a time. Because of her prison warden approach to teaching, students were especially tempted to raise hell every time she turned her back. Often, I braced myself for chaos. 

One day early in the school year, and thus early in my tenure at a rough urban middle school, a boy who shall remain unnamed took advantage of one of those unmonitored moments to jump out of his seat, scurry over and squat down next to mine, grab the bottom of my wide-hemmed blouse, pull it out, and look right up it. 

I remember the shirt. It was Espirit. It was turquoise and sleeveless and had buttons up the back. Despite my weird shy white girl status, I felt very cool wearing it. But it turns out that fashion cannot save you from meanness. That boy nearly put his whole head up inside my new name brand shirt, then pulled back, looked up at me and said: Girl! You ain't got no bra on! You need a bra! 

And then, booming, to the class at large: She don't wear no bra.

A week or two after that, I was in reading, bent over my work. The classroom, organized into long rows of desks, was full and quiet. Mrs. Gillis was writing on the board. Suddenly I felt a sharp yank on my hair from behind. The same boy had grabbed my ponytail and pulled. He pulled so hard that my desk slammed backwards into the two empty desks behind me, sending all three desks, in their cold metal feet, squealing and scraping across the linoleum floor. What an awful sound.

It echoed in the quiet class. Mrs. Gillis' back was turned when it happened. She yelled at us for being disruptive.

Again, I only remember my stunned silence. Fight, flight, or freeze. (I think freezing is my specialty.) But the thing is, I knew I was powerless. Mrs. Gillis was old and pissed; she didn't want the details. My tormentor, a boy who for reasons unknown spent a few awful weeks picking on me in terrible ways, was a fast-talking, skinny, tough, charismatic kid with not a lot of capacity for self-control. That school was a place where violence was commonplace and normalized. Other kids thought he was funny. Hell, sometimes I thought he was funny. He had a kind of social smarts and influence that emboldened him to push boundaries all the time. 

In those awful moments, it seemed there was nothing I could do to regain any power or sense of safety. There was no comeback I could invent to reestablish a shred of social standing; there was no gesture I could make to protect myself; there was no adult to appeal to for help. 

Maybe in the end he was caught, or suffered some consequence. Honestly, I don't remember the aftermath of either episode. I mostly remember the feeling of silent helplessness and shame, unable to secure help, unable to even find words to defend myself with. And I know I never went to school training bra-less again.

I had forgotten about that kid. Until last night, in the middle of a conversation with Mike about the debate, he came back. 

Watching Trump stalk around Clinton, listening to him make assertions and bluster and interrupt and throw up his hands, was profoundly uncomfortable. I loved Hillary more than I ever have as I watched, because she kept her calm in the face of that menace. At one point I was afraid he was going to push her. How does she do it? How does she stand there, just a few feet away, and smile calmly?

I know I'm not alone when I say the debates are tough for me to watch. 

Afterwards, we talked about how it doesn't seem to matter what Trump says. His support doesn't seem linked to the content of his speech. That's why he can say anything he wants. It seems to be more about the assertion of power. As long as he appears powerful and confident, it just doesn't matter. So coming back at him with information, or policy details, or TRUTH, means very little - at least in terms of "winning" in the crudest sense.

I felt increasingly despairing as we talked. How can it be that so many people admire the worst kind of man? I wondered: what would a noble and effective response be? What could Hillary honorably do in these debates that would somehow make him less appealing, less valid? Because truly, I told Mike, he is just like a blustering mean boy in school. He is the kind of enraging person that it can feel impossible to win against. He is a person that makes you fear there is no justice.

I started crying. I felt a kind of helplessness, unable to imagine what another woman could do in the face of this charismatic, shameless meanness, with TV cameras running and millions of people watching her every blink in order to tweet about it.

And then I remembered that boy announcing to the class, after a careful, forced investigation, that I was not wearing a bra. 

Hilary handles Trump way better than I handled that bully. But the very idea that a presidential candidate could stir up that memory makes me want to cry all over again. 

We let Frances watch the beginning of the debate. I regret it. How can a mother protect her girls (and boys) from the worst kind of men, when PBS broadcasts one of them stalking the floor of a presidential debate? And what more would that lost boy in the sixth grade have been tempted to try, if he had been emboldened by the example set in 2016?