See the Scar and a Job Offer

The other day, Jack had a young patient who was dying. (As he is a pediatrician, all of his patients are young.) While I can't talk about the kid as it would violate HIPPA (not that I would), I can talk about the dad since he was not the patient.

The man was a younger dad, and kind of rough. Some of the nurses were afraid of this guy. Jack was in the middle of rounds on the ICU floor, when this father caught Jack's attention when Jack entered his daughter's room.

"If you want to talk to me, sit your ass in the chair and look me in the eye," said the dad. The mom knew what was coming, and scurried out of the room.

Jack did as he was told. He sat in the chair and looked the dad in the eye.

"Five years ago," the father said, "I nearly died. I was riding in the backseat of a car, and when I woke up, I was in Harborview hooked up to a bunch of tubes. I was shot five times."

Jack listened.

"I was dead. The surgeons took out the bullets and put me back together," the dad said. The man opened his shirt and showed Jack a large scar that ran from his neck down past his belly.

"That's impressive," said Jack, a guy who has seen thousands of incisions in his life.

"I've seen death. I've seen other people die," the dad continued. "I am not afraid of it. Look me in the eye and tell me: Is my daughter going to die?"

Jack came home from work and told me the story.

"He wanted me to understand what he had experienced. He needed me to know what he had been through so he could trust me," Jack said. "He needed me to see the scar."

He also realized something else. "You need me to see your scar."

A few years ago, Jack had been guilty of some very bad husbanding. I understand that people screw up and make mistakes, but it is nearly impossible to heal when the person who has hurt you doesn't want to admit that they did. In addition to screwing up, Jack had been reluctant to embrace my suffering from his bad husbanding. I still need an apology, an apology that acknowledges the pain and anguish that he has caused me.

"You need me to see your scar," Jack said. I was just about to give up, throw in the towel, call it a hopeless cause, when he comes through with this. Why did it take an interaction with one of his patient's parent for him to get the message I had been trying to deliver for the past few years? Will this insight stick? Will he remember and adhere to this when he finally does see my scar? Do I want to even bother after banging my head against the wall for the past few years? Can I trust that he will truly see and accept it?

Perhaps the timing of Jack's insight correlated with a conversation I had with my manager the day before, a conversation where we discussed my future role and position, and a forthcoming job offer. Perhaps as I grow more financially independent, inspiration was easier for Jack to find.

Doppelganger

The New York Times recently ran an article about the Google Arts & Culture app where people can take a selfie and then the app matches your face to art in museums across the world using some kind of visual recognition software.

I tried it myself. This photo was taken with Apple Photo Booth about two years ago.

Here is what it found.

This Japanese deity is Fudo Myoo. He "uses his sword to cut through ignorance and his lasso to reign in those who block the path to enlightenment." His left eye is closed because he is pissed.

"The Bitch is Back" by Sandra Tsing Loh, and Days of Clarity

I have been digging around The Atlantic website and came across an old but wonderful article, "The Bitch is Back" but Sandra Tsing Loh.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-bitch-is-back/308642/?single_page=true

Considering this article is a review of a book about menopause,  The Wisdom of Menopause: Creating Physical and Emotional Health During the Change by Christine Northrup, M.D., I was surprised I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe.   The main idea is that estrogen makes women uber nurturing, and menopause is just returning to normal.  It was something that I had suspected all along, and I am glad to see that my assumption has some basis in reality.

Here is a great passage from Northrup:

A woman once told me that when her mother was approaching the age of menopause, her father sat the whole family down and said, “Kids, your mother may be going through some changes now, and I want you to be prepared. Your Uncle Ralph told me that when your Aunt Carol went through the change, she threw a leg of lamb right out the window!” Although this story fits beautifully into the stereotype of the “crazy” menopausal woman, it should not be overlooked that throwing the leg of lamb out the window may have been Aunt Carol’s outward expression of the process going on within her soul: the reclaiming of self. Perhaps it was her way of saying how tired she was of waiting on her family, of signaling to them that she was past the cook/chauffeur/dishwasher stage of life. For many women, if not most, part of this reclamation process includes getting in touch with anger and, perhaps, blowing up at loved ones for the first time.

"Woo-woo! Duck, Uncle Ralph! Go, Aunt Carol!" says Tsing Loh.  "IT’s INTRIGUING TO ponder this suggested reversal of what has traditionally been thought to be the woman’s hormonal cloud. A sudden influx of hormones is not what causes 50-year-old Aunt Carol to throw the leg of lamb out the window. Improperly balanced hormones were probably the culprit. Fertility’s amped-up reproductive hormones helped Aunt Carol 30 years ago to begin her mysterious automatic weekly ritual of roasting lamb just so and laying out 12 settings of silverware with an OCD-like attention to detail while cheerfully washing and folding and ironing the family laundry. No normal person would do that—look at the rest of the family: they are reading the paper and lazing about like rational, sensible people. And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person everyone else is. (And so what if get-well casseroles won’t get baked, PTAs will collapse, and in-laws will go for decades without being sent a single greeting card? Paging Aunt Carol! The old Aunt Carol!)"

Thank you, Northrup and Tsing Loh!  John and I were reading this and reflecting on my moments of rage in the past few months.  He could see the correlation between my hormonal condition and my mood.

"But you had good reason to be angry," he conceded.  "You weren't just flying off the handle."  Yes, these hormones make me a docile sheep for 27 days a month.  One day, typically called PMS, was actually my day of clarity, the day when the fog cleared.  The bullshit in my life became apparent, as did my ability to call it.  

I think I might be looking forward to "the change," even if no one in my family is.

The "Send" Button

A few days ago, I was in a particularly foul mood.  I had talked to some friends about this person who was irritating me, and they all tried to talk me off the ledge.  For the most part, they succeeded and helped me to stay calm throughout the day.  Their points were logical and well-taken.

In the evening, after I put the kids to bed, I started to feel annoyed again.  The rational and reasonableness I had gained during the day was fading and my emotions took over.  I started to build up arguments of why I was completely justified in being outraged.

So I wrote an email to the person who was the root cause of my irritation.  Describing exactly how I felt.  With no emotion left unexpressed.  It was, as they say in Harry Potter, a howler.

I knew while I was writing that this note was mean spirited and might have deep repercussions.  I knew that sending a nasty email was not the best way to solve the problem.  Yet, I felt so much better after writing it all out.  Though it was not the kindest letter, it did help me to clarify my thoughts.

But writing it wasn't enough.  I had to hit the "send" button.  I wanted someone to read my diatribe.  I needed to hit the send button.  It was getting later, and I was getting more worked up.  Fortunately, there was some small sliver my rational mind still working that said "Do not send to intended recipient."  So I marked the email "Draft" and sent it to my friend, Diane.  I wrote an introduction telling her I was thinking of sending this to the irritant, and asked what she thought.  Hitting the send button worked.  I felt a huge release of tension after I sent it.

Why was the send button so magical?  Why did I need to hit it?  Why wasn't it enough to just leave the note in my draft box?  Writing how I felt helped clarify my thoughts.  When I hit the send button, the note became something more than my rantings.  It became a permanent record of how I felt, where my feelings could not be erased.  Hitting the send button gave me temporary closure.  Once the note was gone, I stopped stewing for the night.  It gave me power, even if I sent to someone else.  It also gave me a responsibility to figure out how to deal with this problem directly.  I couldn't just send it to Diane, and then not follow-up.  Diane would hold me accountable, both to be civilized and to figure out a reasonable next step.

Diane goes to sleep early and wakes up early.  I knew she wouldn't check her email until the morning when she is drinking her coffee.  When she saw it, she immediately replied and put up the roadblock:

Lauren, 

Holy shit!!! Have you already sent X_____ that draft!?

She recommended that I rewrite the note a dozen times.  When I get it right, I should hand the note to  the person instead of sending it via email.  One of my husband's colleagues recommends a similar strategy for writing difficult letters in professional situations:  write whatever it is you need to get off your chest, delete it, and then write a new letter you intend to send, minus the vitriol.  I did talk to the irritant about what was bothering me.  I left the bitterness on the page and did not bring it to the conversation.

I am very lucky to have a friend like Diane at the other end of the send button.  I will apologize to her, though, as she probably burned her throat and nasal passages while choking on her coffee while reading my email.  Shouldn't we all have a friend (or two or three or four) who can be our "send" button, the one who will safely listen to our rants and then bring us back to earth?

Rage, Discrepancies, and the Holly Jolly Cure

Rage: pure, unfiltered, unadulterated anger.  I have become too familiar with this feeling as of late, and I am not happy about it.  I am used to feeling annoyed, irritated, frustrated, mad, upset, disillusioned and displeased.  Rage is new.  I looked it up in the dictionary to see how it differs from regular anger: it is defined as "violent, uncontrollable anger."  The rage I have been feeling lately certainly is uncontrollable.  I don't want to be angry, but this anger has a mind of its own.  And violent.  The rage doesn't make me violent towards other people, but it feels like there is violence inside of me, wanting to get out and scream, kick and bite.  I mostly just scream.

(I could list all of the things I am angry about here, but I won't.  Privately, I can list out the people and things that are the victims of my unregulated emotions.)

I mostly wonder why this anger isn't just regular anger: why does this tip it over into rage?  I look at people like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.  Surely, they saw unfairness in the world and sought to correct it.  How did they manage to keep their emotions in check while dealing with major social injustices and I can't keep it together over my son's Lego Club?  Do I have the misfortune of being at the whims of a middle aged woman's hormones?  Or, has my crap-meter hit the "maxed out" state and the next thing that came along pushed me over the line?  There have been cases (see the recent redrawing of the Seattle Public Schools boundaries) where I have kept my cool while the rest of the people I knew were in nuclear meltdown.  Is my current rage over these new issues stored up old rage, locked up inside of me, looking for a way out?

I wish I knew.  I've talked to friends about my recent bouts, but in the context of the specific irritating circumstance.  I want to know why I feel rage at all, why the topic of annoyance consumes my mind.  I become fixated, unable to think of little else.  And my fixation isn't productive.  I am not able to rationally find a solution.  Instead, I find more reasons to justify why I am so pissed off.  "And another thing..." The closest thing I can find it that the root cause is the discrepancies between the way I think the world runs (or Lego Club or Rec soccer) and the way other people thinks it should.  In the gap between the two resides my anger.  The anger also lies with my kids activities.  Maybe I am not as in touch with them as I used to be, and that gap causes me turmoil.  I need to rely on others to take care of my kids, just as I take care of other children.  This change and transition means loss of control.

Maybe Gandhi and Mandela felt lots of rage, but were effective at managing it.  Maybe they needed to defeat apartheid and English Rule to keep the demons away.  Likewise, maybe Gandhi's kids got on his nerves.  Maybe Mandela's friends didn't do what they said they said they were going to do.  Maybe apartheid and English Rule were small mountains to climb compared to managing a house and kids.

I have been somewhat lucky that my anger has fallen during the holidays, and a little "holly jolly" has helped me feel better.  At times when the rage ebbs, I have felt like George Bailey before he jumped off the bridge and Clarence saved him.*  Like George, I reached my nadir in the Christmas season.  One day when I was angry, we bought our Christmas tree, went to dinner, and we came home and put up the decorations.  It was hard to stay mad when I was digging through boxes finding ornaments I made when I was seven.  The other time I had three parties to attend.  I put on a happy face and told myself "No bitching allowed." By the end of the evening, I didn't need to fake it.

* Funny sidebar. My friend Heather and I watched "It's a Wonderful Life" in high school.  My parents were out and I turned it off when George was marching through the snow after all of the money in the bank was lost.  My mom came home and asked if I liked it.  I said it was the most depressing movie I had ever seen and couldn't watch it anymore.  I didn't understand why it was this great Christmas classic.  She recommended I watch the end.