Lehman

I am reading a very good book

The Lehman Trilogy

by Stefano Massini

an Italian who writes about

Bavarian Jewish family

living in Alabama

trading cotton in 1850

who grow the business

into one of the largest banks in the world

when it fails in 2008.

From trading cotton to 

trading money

somewhere they got lost.

It wasn't 

too big

to fail.

The book is written 

as an epic poem

like the Iliad or

the Odyssey.

Last year

Claire-Adele and I went to 

the Museum of Modern Art

and saw the Robert Lehman Collection

with its own wing

and magnificent paintings 

by masters

modern and ancient.

Robert Lehman died

the year I was born.

It is one of the most interesting books 

I've started to read.

I want to read more

but instead I am here

attending to my blog.

Good night.

Myopia

While I am in Montana this week, I am reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. In the book, he discussed sexual assault on college campuses, many of which are fueled by binge drinking.

Before Gladwell digs into Stanford rape case from a few years ago, he discusses what it means to be drunk. There is blackout drunk, usually at .15 blood alcohol content or above, where the drinker doesn't remember what happened. Sometimes, the drinker might appear to be awake--walking, talking, and--god forbid--driving. Can someone give consent when they are blacked out drunk? No.

Why do we drink? What happens before we blackout? 

According to Gladwell, we become myopic or nearsighted when we drink. We see what is in front of us, not everything else around us. The rest of our life fades in the fog. If we are drunk with our friends, we focus on our friends and forget about work. If we are drunk with work colleagues, we forget about our family. 

Lots of things can make us "myopic," for better or worse. A relaxing (or busy) vacation can make us forget the stress of our job. A walk through nature can help us meditate and put on problems in perspective. 

Likewise, we can use maladaptive coping mechanisms to avoid looking at the larger picture of our lives. The Boy used to ski to block everything else out, like that he was too anxious to go to school. Jack used to work too much to block out the Boy's problems. (Claire-Adele escaped the shit-show of our family by going to college.) 

What did I do? Hello, co-dependence! I focused on everyone else except me.

Here is a picture of my life:

Here is a picture of my life when it became unmanageable. See the Drama swirling in the corner?

See Drama now all blown up and out-of-proportion? It is the only thing I could focus on. My dear friends supported me during this hideous time between when the Boy stopped going to school in December 2018 to when he settled into treatment in November of 2019.

Slowly, I am learning to get out of the swirl of drama, not to be captivated by it. I am learning to have perspective.

Fishing Metaphors

We have hit a few fishing holes this week in Montana while visiting the Boy. Talk about a mental health break. Wow. I don't know how anyone can be anxious or depressed while fishing. Okay. I suppose someone can be depressed and anxious anytime.

As I have been on the side of the river for hours this week watching the Boy fly fish, I have found the original meaning of some meaning of fishing metaphors.

• The one that got away -- The Boy had a few bites that never took the hook.
• Get your feet wet -- I don't know if this is a fishing metaphor, but to truly fly fish, it is best to walk in the water to get away from bushes and branches when casting.
• There are plenty of fish in the sea -- The Boy was fishing on river, but the same idea.
• They fell for it hook, line and sinker -- When the fish is so dumb, it goes beyond the bait.

Fences & Cages

Years ago, my friend H said to me "You have to the leave the miserable marriage you are in to get the marriage you want." She was struggling in her marriage at the time. Her mother-in-law was the "other woman," the person her husband deferred to instead of her. H hated it. So, she made a plan and told her husband that the marriage was over. She was going to leave the following year when her youngest graduated from high school. She gave me the same advice she gave herself.

"You need to leave, Lauren," H said. "You are miserable. You need to walk away."

H is kind of bossy that way, but I love her nonetheless. Of course, I did not take her advice. I had thought it was stupid, but her husband got the memo loud and clear. He decided on his own free will that he needed H as his wife more than he needed to make his mom happy.

"You are my everything," he said, sobbing. It wasn't just tears that fixed the problem that made H running back. To her husband's credit, he changed. She didn't nag him. She threw a boundary.

"I need a husband who puts me first before his mother," she said. "If that is you, great. If not, I am moving on."

I've been thinking about this in contrast to some bad advice I got from a kind and well meaning marriage therapist.

"If you leave Jack, he will be married in six months to someone younger. He will likely start a new family," Janice said. "And you will be alone."

I paused.

"I've seen it before. This is what happens," she said. The unspoken advice was "Stick it out, no matter how miserable you are. Your happiness and well-being doesn't matter." This was an invitation to be co-dependent, not interdependent or independent. 

Now, I know better. Janice's advice--as well meaning as it was--was bullshit. If Jack were to dump for someone younger, so be it. Why should I have been miserable? To keep him from being happy with a new, chicky wife?

I realize now that H was right. In order to get the marriage I want, I need to leave the marriage I am in. 

How did I end up in this spot in the first place? How did it get so bad? 

Last year, my friend Anderson and I had a conversation about "Do people change?" His point of view is that over time, people are basically the same, that they don't change. I agree with him for the most part. My view is instead of people changing, circumstances change. When situations change, we see new features in ourselves and others. COVID season is a perfect example. We now know which of our friends are germophobes, and which people think wearing a mask to save the lives of elderly people with health issues is a stupid idea. 

Which brings me to my theory of marriage and fences. When cows enter a new field, they circle the perimeter, pushing against all of the fences to see if they are safe. Like cattle, people test boundaries to see if they feel safe. In relationships, we find people who fit in our fences. We don't necessarily set boundaries at first, because the people e choose might already fit inside our fence. We feel safe. For example, I would not want to be in a relationship with a coke-head or someone who did heroin. Jack never did coke or heroin, so I never had to set that as boundary in our relationship. If I would have said "I don't want to be in a relationship with someone who uses cocaine" when we first met, he would have said, "Sounds good to me." No argument would have ensued.

As life evolves, we encounter new territory and our boundaries change. We need to continue to test the fence. Suppose a young couple meets, and they both like to have fun. By fun, I mean party. They both fit in each other's fence at the time. Then they have kids. One person wants to be a responsible parent and stops partying. The other continues to party. Conflict ensues. They both might love each other, but the non-partier might say "I want to be in a relationship with a person who view parenthood as a serious responsibility." The other might still want to party. Then what?

What I used to do was bitch to Jack about the new territory, the changed area within the fence. Suddenly, we didn't agree on where the boundaries should be, nor did we know how to talk about it. Before, we had fit so nicely inside each other's fences before, we really didn't need to discuss boundaries. 

Then we did.

I thought an "I statement" was a complaint that started out with "I." I was wrong. "I statements" are about me, not about him. After more than a year of therapy, I finally figured it out this week. Before, I had thought an I statement was "I am bothered when you work too much" which is putting the blame back on Jack. "I want to be in a relationship with someone who has a healthy relationship with their job" is about me. It isn't about Jack. It is about what I want in a relationship.

Which brings me to cages. Why did I take Janice's advice at first instead of H's? 

Fear.

Janice's advice kept me in the cage. Janice's advice was fear-based. H's advice was faith based. The bars keeping me in the cage of my marriage were fear. No one was forcing me to stay. I didn't have the faith to leave the cage. And to be completely fair, this wasn't making Jack happy, either. He had to live with a disgruntled wife, which isn't fun. H's advice is scary, sure. I don't know what will happen if I take her advice, and that is the point. I can have faith that my life will be better, with or without Jack. And life will better for Jack, too.

What's next? I am not sure, but whatever it is it will be okay. 

In the meantime, I am enjoying Montana.

Wild roses

The Boy fly fishing

A River Runs Through It

The Boy has become a Montanan.

He has lived here for eleven months and is now a resident. 

"I don't plan on living in Seattle ever again permanently," he said. I think the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (aka CHAZ) might have been hard for him to explain to his non-Seattle friends at school. To the rest of the world, they saw CHAZ and thought "WTF?" To Seattlites, we knew this was the uber-left co-opting the Black Live Matter movement to justify taxing Amazon, not to change policing practices towards people of color.

The Boy is becoming an outdoorsman. He imagines his first car will be a pickup truck. He likes Dodge Chargers. He thinks there is nothing inherently wrong with Republicans and one day he might own a gun to hunt.

The Boy has become a Montanan.

Since the Boy can't mountain bike or hike or ski with his newly repaired knee, he has found a new sport. The Boy collects sports the way I collect books: just because I found a new book doesn't mean I don't love the ones I've already read. This sport is one that will likely never leave him: fly fishing. 

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing," opens Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, a book read and re-read by the Boy. We watched the movie tonight at the Boy's request. The story takes place in Missoula, about 150 miles from the Boy's school. In Montana terms, 150 miles is considered the next town over. The scenery is breathtaking.

Norman's brother, Paul, is played by a young Brad Pitt. Paul is charming and smart and handsome and an artist when it comes to fly fishing. He also has a gambling problem and some other addictions that in the end ruin his life and break the hearts of his parents and sibling.

"Why do the people who need help the most refuse it?" Norman's girlfriend, J.C., asks. Her own brother is a very hot mess, but lacks the kindness and grace of Paul.

I was talking to a fellow boarding school mom the other day and she was moaning about the cost. Another parent a few months ago also kvetched about the cost. While I have no solid proof, my guess is that these families have some means. If they can afford this, why are they complaining? Don't they know they are lucky to be able to save their sons, cost be damned?

Why do I think this? I am the queen of investing and saving money. Shouldn't I be evaluating the cost-benefit analysis of this spending? Why am I so okay with shelling out an obscene amount of cash when people who I am guessing have way more money than me are complaining?

My brother was Paul Maclean, minus the fly fishing.

I couldn't save my brother, but perhaps I can save my son. If I lose him to Montana, I am okay with that, as long as he finds himself.

Downtown Awakens, I hope

Yesterday morning as I was walking Fox on First Avenue, I smelled something I hadn't smelled in months: bacon. I just passed the Biscuit Bitch, which had just re-opened post COVID. When I turned down Pike Street, I smelled croissants from Le Painer. It was wonderful. I didn't realize how much I missed the aroma from all of the restaurants in town. I hope this bodes well for downtown, that it will come back alive.

Right now, it is quiet without the workers and tourists. I miss them. They brought a vibrancy to my neighborhood. I miss the hubbub and the busyness. Now, people are spending most of the time only where they live. How strange is that? That might be good for the local neighborhoods, but it is killing downtown. Downtown thrives on being a center of activity. Hopefully, downtown is just dormant, not dead.

Still, I am glad I live downtown. I hope when COVID is over people can be together again, and they will come here.

Downtown Seattle. Thursday 8:30 a.m.

Intuition

I am starting to learn to listen to my intuition, the non-thinking part of my brain. My friends tell me to trust my intuition, and to see where it takes me.

I have an interesting story about a friend from last fall. We were at a bar after work and he said he wished he had a friend telling him he was making a mistake. He didn't say what the mistake was about, and I didn't ask. I probably should have but I didn't. I figured he wanted to volunteer the information, he would.

Now I would answer that question differently: If you think you are making a mistake, you probably are. Why do you need a friend to tell you are making a mistake when your intuition is already telling you that?

Friends can provide validation. They can reflect what we are thinking, and let us know if our view is distorted or not. But for the most part, our intuition serves us well.

One of my big issues is that I don't trust myself. I hear my intuition, but I might tell it to be quiet, to go away. Or, I'll need to run things past committee: what do all of my friends think?

While I love and adore my friends, I am learning to listen to myself.

Crazy

I had thought I was crazy, and I didn't know why.

As you all know, I am in a recovery group and in therapy since the Boy has been in treatment this past year. In my recovery group, there are people whose loved ones have addictions, mental illness or both.

Jack had workaholism, which some therapists don't see as a real thing. Welcome to America, Home of the Protestant Work Ethic! (As if Catholics, Asians and everyone else doesn't work hard.) Working hard is good! It is normal! There is no such thing as working too hard!

...until your kid ends up in the looney bin and your wife leaves, then maybe you might want to look at how work is impacting your life.

Nevertheless, some therapists don't think workaholism is a real thing. Some regular people don't think it is a real thing. My father-in-law commented that I have nothing to complain about. His mother was married to an abusive alcoholic. I wasn't getting beaten. I should be fine, right?

Actually, it is complicated because I wondered the same thing myself. Jack's workaholism resulted in four tickets to Hamilton on Broadway, a strand of pearls from Japan and a trip to New Zealand. What did I have to complain about?

I began to think I was crazy.

I read about a woman whose spouse would drink after she went to bed. In the morning, her spouse would be on the floor, banged and bruised from his overnight bender. I never had to deal with anything like that. I never measured the level of alcohol in the fridge to see how much someone was drinking. Sure, I would count the number of nights on call on the calendar, highlighting them in yellow. But I got Hamilton tickets? How could that be a problem?

I was talking to a friend in my recovery group who read me a passage in a therapy book: workaholism results in emotional abandonment of the family.

Finally, I am not crazy.

I am not crazy. 

I could say that the workaholism paid for all of the trips and fun stuff, but Jack still had a job that he would have gotten paid the same without emotionally abandoning the family. 

Now, my recovery friends would say I should focus on me and not my qualifier, but this is about me. For so long I had thought I was crazy. I thought I was nuts. I didn't know why I was so uncomfortable, uneasy.

Validation is key. It is the first step in acknowledging a problem, and from there I can start to address it.

Emotional Math & the Perfectionist

A few weeks ago I was talking to one of my best friends from college. We both were in the same math program. I was talking about being seen and heard.

"You know that to be seen and heard is to be loved," she said. Suppose that were an equation...

to be seen + to be heard = to be loved

not seen = not loved

not heard = not loved

Here is more emotional math. Here is how a perfectionist thinks:

to be human = not be perfect

not be perfect = to be a failure

to be human = to be a failure

what? that's whack. Or at least deeply unsettling..,

This seems okay...

to be human = not be perfect

not be perfect = to fail

to be human = to fail

Why is the second one more sensible than the first? Noun...

to be human = not be perfect

not be perfect = to be a failure (noun)

to be human = to be a failure (noun)

versus verb...

to be human = not be perfect

not be perfect = to fail (verb)

to be human = to fail (verb)

I think of being a failure as a state of mind, a way of being. To fail, that is something that happens to everyone was we trot through life.

The Lead Story

Normally, I keep the anonymity of my family pretty tight. It is not their choosing to be main characters in my blog. Today is an exception as my family put themselves in the spotlight.

This week, Jack wrote a story about the Boy's mental health challenges on his workplace's website. Mental health problems are now the leading cause of admission at Seattle Children's. The leading cause of admission used to be asthma, but suicide ideation, self-harm, and generalized anxiety and depression are now taking the lead. Take that, respiratory issues! And this change isn't because there is a new miracle cure for asthma. Are kids more depressed than they were a few years ago, or are we breaking down stigma so parents feel comfortable seeking help? Is the world with people connecting on a screen and not in person taking kids down? Has FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) caused depression? I have no idea, but clearly something is afoot.

When Seattle Children's saw their main cause of admissions changing, they made mental health treatment a priority. When one of the division chief's kids was a PBMU patient, the kid becomes the lead story for the newsletter, beating out Seattle Children's CEO's COVID-19 story.

Here is the full story, for those who are curious. 

Jack and the Boy were both very brave to be in this article which is fine and awesome. 

I have one problem with it, though.

The unwritten story: inequity. 

My family is fortunate enough to afford the treatment for the problem. After having a front row seat with my brother's mental health crisis for decades, I had the will to get it done. 

The poorest of the poor can get the best care at the world class Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Want to send your kid to Wilderness Therapy for twelve weeks or a therapeutic boarding school (TBS) so they don't kill themselves and then hopefully rejoin to the world as a functioning human? Here is how you pay for it:

• Do you have a good job with great health insurance? Doesn't matter. Insurance won't pay for it.
• Are you rich? If yes, write a check and fly your kid to Utah, Colorado or Montana on a private jet. Maybe take it out of Billy's trust fund. If your kid has a trust fund big enough to cover the cost of all of this, it is likely mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, step-dad, etc. have enough funds to cover this without poaching the child's savings.
• Are you upper middle class? Dig into that money you were saving to send your kid to college. At the rate your kid is going now, they aren't going to college. "Retrench" and adjust how you spend your monthly income. Take that bonus and instead of getting a new Audi or Tesla, you have now paid for six months of boarding school. Italy or Thailand for vacation? Nope. Hello, Durgango, Colorado! (Which is actually lovely.) In the long run, this is going to be cheaper than the cost of having your grown-ass adult child live on your couch for thirty years.
• Even for families with means, sending kids back to the motherland is an option. Maybe you have a kind and gentle grandparent or aunt who lives out of state or out of the country who would be willing to love your kid back into recovery. I have friends whose cousins and siblings were shipped back to rural Michigan, Taiwan and India when their mental illness flared. 
• If you are not in the previous groups, feel free to mortgage your house or empty your retirement account.
• Don't own a house that can be remortgaged or have a retirement account? No extended family that is willing to help? Good luck.
• Are you a person of color? Pray to god your kid doesn't flip out when the cops are around. At best, your kid will be locked up in juvie. At worst...I think we all know what the worst is.

Add on top of the tuition extensive travel costs. I spent twenty-five days out of town between June 1 and December 31, 2019 for the Boy's treatment. Think: airfare, hotels, rental cars and restaurants.

If your kid in inpatient treatment, you had better get your own butt to therapy, so add that to your monthly expenses. Kids don't get to the "sleeping-on-the-couch-all-day" stage of life all by themselves. While I didn't necessarily cause the Boy's problems, our family contributed to them. 

Then there is the spiritual cost. I am in the process of rebuilding my psyche and soul as a result of this emotional trauma, and there isn't a price tag for that. 

Working from Home and Homing from Work

Like many people during this coronavirus season, I've been working from home for the past four months. Or, homing from work. Sometimes I can't tell.

Overall, my job has been fine, with a few bumps as my team learns to work remotely. We recently had a mini re-organization of our roles, which for the most part has been okay. A few toes have been stepped on and there have been a few bruised egos. Most of the toe-stepping and ego bruising might have lessened had we been working face-to-face. There was an article in Medium or Harvard Business Review (they are so the same, right?) about how to successfully work remotely. I didn't read it and I probably should. I would hope it covers how co-workers can emotionally support each other while working remotely. I am not talking about holding hands and talking about feelings. I am talking about being moderately sensitive and not being a jerk.

Yesterday was a rough day at the home office. The rough day actually started two weeks ago. Each day, tensions rose and by Thursday, I was about to lose my shit. I was so glad to go home at the end of the day, but I was already home, so...I was glad to stop working?

The hard part was that I couldn't physically leave the office and go back to my sanctuary because my office and my sanctuary are the same place. I can see how people enjoy not commuting and eating lunch in their own kitchen, but I prefer different spaces for different tasks. I want to socially and physically distance from my job at the end of the day, and I couldn't because the space is the same. I am lucky enough that I have a nook where I work that is separate from the rest of my condo--not in my living room, dining room, or kitchen. But walking down the stairs at the end of the days wasn't enough to cut the edge off.

I suppose I am lucky that it took four months to get here instead of having this happen on week two.

The Boy, my Broken Heart & Questions

After keeping everything together for the past few weeks, I fell apart tonight now that I am back in Seattle. I have been having a few challenges at work which I settled out with my manager this afternoon. I talked to my good friend Ellen. She told me her problems which made me feel like a good friend.

And then I lost it. I cried for about a half an hour or so. After spending two weeks with the Boy, I realized how much I miss him. In the past year, I wasn't his day-to-day mom. Someone else was given in loco parentis. Then for the past two weeks, I was there when he went to bed and I was there when he woke up. 

We stayed at a vacation home that was owned by a man who had been to treatment as a teenager, much like the Boy is in now. When Jack told the guy where the Boy was at school, the man asked if the Boy had been to Wilderness Therapy, too. The man's question was an answer to a question that wasn't asked. The only people who know about Wilderness are people who have gone themselves or who have a family member or good friend who has gone. Outsiders don't know that this world exists.

Seeing this man, running his own successful business, was cool. He has a family and seemed like a nice guy. It showed me that there is hope for the Boy and fellow students to get better, to recover, to heal.

Still, I miss the Boy. I've seen how far he's come and how much he has grown. Before, I didn't miss him as much. The idea of him getting much needed help overrode the pain of separation. Now that he is getting better, I miss him more.