May I Have Your Attention

Feline family feast

"Attention is the most basic form of love." ~Zen koan

Before my mother became an addict, she was a really great mom. And one of the things she insisted upon was family dinner. No television, no radio. Just four people sitting around a table eating and sharing our day. My brother and I, of course, did everything we could to make my mother abandon her commitment to family dinner. Farting noises, outlandish stories, complaints about what was on our plates. She was steadfast. Family dinner proceeded and my brother and I eventually gave up our protests.
And – whattaya know – it's something I insisted upon when I had children of my own. For years, when my husband was cheating on me and I hadn't a clue (I believed him when he said he was "working" and, some nights, he actually was), I would sit down with my three young children. I enjoyed the ritual. The setting of the table, the preparing of food (sometime enlisting small hands to help me), the sharing of our day.
Not long before D-Day, my husband asked me if the kids missed him at dinner. "No," I told him. "Their memory of you will be an empty chair at the dinner table." After D-Day, I demanded that my he start joining us for dinner. He did and has continued to for 12 years. 
My eldest, now 20, is back at home again after returning to university in our city, and routinely tells me how grateful she is for our family dinners. 
The only thing that our family dinner is serving that's truly of value is attention. For roughly an hour each day, we pay attention to each other. (And it's not every day. There are things that get in the way – night school classes, hockey practices, volunteering – but most nights we are gathered around our table.) 
I'm grateful to my mom for setting that standard. Because many of kids friends who've joined us for our meals tell us they never sit down with their families for dinner. What my brother and I considered punitive, these kids relish. 
It's not easy to find time in a day to pay attention to each other. For a whole lot of us, unless there's a crisis (hello infidelity!) or drama (hello teenagers!), many of us remain focussed on just getting through. It's enough to put food on the table, or pay the bills, or, at the end of our day, to relax in front of the television. We check in with each other – "how was your day?" to which we hope to hear "fine". Job done, we can turn on Netflix or crack open a novel. 
Our 24/7 world is constantly pulling our attention somewhere. Fires in California! Another election! Parent-teacher night! Black Friday sales! Book club! Yoga class! Weekend conference for work! The list, as we all know, is endless.
And, trust me, I'm as guilty as the next mom for just wanting some quiet a lot of the time. What's more, plenty of our dinner conversations lately (god help me, teenagers!!!) are about sex vs gender, drugs, misogyny, the economy... Gone are the days when we talked about something funny that happened on a school trip, or shared facts about sharks or dinosaurs. The stakes are high right now.
But, I absolutely know that the single best thing I can be doing right now is paying attention. Listening. (I'm working hard at learning to listen more and talk less. Not easy!)
What I'm even guiltier of lately is ignoring my husband. When he retreats to our basement to watch his favorite shows, I never follow him. I tell him it's because the basement is freezing (it is!) or that I have to bake cookies for a cookie exchange (I do!). But it's also because I'm often exhausted by that point. I have little attention left.
Which is dangerous. 
He invited me to lunch the other day. I had mentioned that I was craving a particular meal from a particular take-out place that's a block from where he works. I hadn't made a big deal about it, just noted in passing that I had a craving.
The next day he called me to suggest we meet for lunch at this place.
And the most amazing part of that wasn't the meal itself.
It was that he had noticed. He'd been paying attention. 

Wednesday Word Hug

The Thorny Nature of Forgiveness

"...it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft." ~David Whyte, from Brainpickings

Forgiveness remains a thorn in my side, though one that I'm scarcely aware of until someone asks me outright if I've forgiven my husband. My answer usually is something like "it's complicated."
But though I've never said to my husband the words "I forgive you" (I suspect I'd choke on them), reading David Whyte's description of forgiveness, I think perhaps I have.
Whyte's description of forgiveness is beautiful, isn't it? I love the notion of a more mature me, a "larger" me, putting an arm around the injured me and my painful memories and, in essence, saying "it's okay. You will get past this." And then this larger me also figuratively saying to my husband, the betrayer, "I will get past this. You hurt me but my capacity for healing is greater than the injury."
And that's the truth. My capacity for healing, which I couldn't imagine when betrayal first body-slammed me, is bigger than the injury. I can see that now, looking back from this distant shore. Yours is too. 
"Forgiveness is a skill," Whyte reminds us. Forgiveness, he's saying, doesn't just happen. It requires our participation, our attention. It requires that we want more for ourselves than to sit in our bitterness, that we are willing to "shape our mind to a future we want for ourselves."
Shape our mind to a future.
Easier said than done, isn't it?
The future can feel terrifying when we're in the muck of betrayal. It hurts to think about because we no longer trust it.
Thing is, we're putting our trust in the wrong place. It isn't the future we're trusting, it's ourselves. It isn't the betrayer we're trusting, it's ourselves. And it's trust in our ability to shape our future into one that includes forgiveness for ourselves. We "reimagine ourselves," as Whyte says. It's such a beautiful promise, it holds such possibility. To reimagine ourselves not as the weeping, aching, pitiful mess in a heap on the bathroom floor that we are right now but as someone who knows the larger story. The larger story includes our resurrection. It includes transcending the pain. Not denying it or forgetting it but incorporating it into a bigger story that includes healing from that pain. To be gifted by a story larger than the story that hurt us. 
I say it all the time, don't I? Our stories can heal us. Or they can hurt us. 
Forgiveness, even accidental forgiveness like I seem to have stumbled on, gives us the larger story. I can see now that I have extended that comforting arm around myself, the weeping agonizing injured me who can't possibly imagine that she will arrive at the place I am now. I have extended that comforting arm around my husband who couldn't imagine that he could forgive himself, nor that I might forgive him. 
I have incorporated that first story into larger one that includes – wow! – forgiveness. 

Betrayal Trauma: When Infidelity Damn Near Destroys You

It's becoming increasingly clear that refreshing Twitter every five minutes and logging on to the New York Times home page to read the latest assault on good sense, decency and human rights is not good for my health, emotional or physical. I'm agitated. I'm unproductive. I'm miserable. 
Which is why a weekend spent in my reading chair, phone and iPad tucked in their charging station, slowly reading through the pile of magazines that has accumulated, was just what the (metaphorical) doctor ordered.
I was reading September's issue of O, The Oprah Magazine when I came across a story about post-traumatic stress disorder related to infidelity.
There's a term, though it's not in wide usage: Post-Infidelity Stress Disorder, which sounds almost too quaint for what actually happens. "Stress" barely scratches the surface.
Because the key for understanding just why we're so shattered by infidelity is in the word trauma. Betrayal is trauma.
Trauma, according to Oxford Dictionary (which, incidentally, declared "toxic" its official word of 2018, edging out gaslighting and thereby giving official status to betrayed wives everywhere), means "emotional shock following a stressful event or a physical injury, which may lead to long-term neurosis."
Shock. Injury. Neurosis.
That's more like it.
It took me a long time to come across any reference to what I was experiencing as trauma. It may have been my therapist who first mentioned it, though I too often discount what she says because I think she's too easy on me. After all, I hadn't been dodging IEDs in Afghanistan. I hadn't experienced a brutal rape. 
But when I read about betrayal trauma, when I saw the words written across a page, the idea came with an authority that didn't allow me to dismiss it. Because I had been dismissing my pain. I was sure that other women going through infidelity weren't as shattered as I was. They were out in skinny jeans and stiletto heels slashing his tires, or gathering around a bottle of chardonnay with other betrayeds and plotting comical revenge, or at a spa transforming themselves into a woman so desirable, he would experience such profound regret for what he'd done and lost.
Cause that's the thing with infidelity. The only role models I really had were my mother, who'd descending into a decade of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction (not a path I wanted to take) and the women I saw in movies or country music songs or books. Those women didn't seem traumatized, they seemed motivated. 
Which is why it was such a relief to have a word for how I was feeling. 
Shock. Injury. Neurosis.
Trauma. 
"We see symptoms of shock, negativity, and emotional arousal – as you might see in somebody coming home from war – manifesting in committed relationships," says Kevin Skinner, a licensed marriage and family therapist who's quoted in the story. 
I spent my days fighting off panic attacks.
I routinely considered veering my bike into traffic. 
I felt like a caged animal, trapped by circumstance.
The mind movies made me crazy. 
I couldn't stand being away from my husband. I couldn't stand him close.
I spent countless hours poring over VISA bills and receipts, rifling through his drawers, looking for...what exactly? I already knew he cheated. I knew with whom. But trauma drives us to neurosis. To hyper-vigilance. 
If you're not reacting your news of your partner's infidelity the way women in movies or songs or books are – if, instead, you're reacting the way I did, with tears, with vacant eyes, with panic and terror – you're experiencing trauma and you need support.
There is nothing wrong with you. It is not a sign of weakness. Rather it is a sign that you are  human and that you have experienced a shock that has completely destabilized you.
Betrayal is trauma. There it is. In print.
The truth. 

Books That Saved My Life

I have a stack of books on my bedside table that threatens to fall over and trap me. At the top of the pile is First We Make the Beast Beautiful (which is a reference to a line from Kay Redfield Jamison's brilliant An Unquiet Mind, about living with bipolar disorder), which I'm reading to try and understand my daughters' anxiety. I've put it aside, however, because I have Educated by Tara Westover out of my local library, which means I have only three weeks to read it and it's incredible. And I also just picked up Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, which I had on hold and which just came in and which I also have only three weeks to read (and which is about an affair so don't go there until you're ready). My book club is reading the incredible Famous Last Words, which I read a zillion years ago but that I should probably refresh my memory. And I just ordered the always ALWAYS amazing Anne Lamott's new book to keep all the others of hers I have on my shelf company.
But it's no exaggeration to say that reading has changed my life. From the first book about growing up with an alcoholic that I tentatively pulled from the shelf of a bookstore near my office when I was in my mid-20s, to Melody Beattie's Co-Dependent No More, which got me out of a toxic relationship, to Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, which finally FINALLY gave me the blueprint I was searching for to write my own book about healing from betrayal...

So, in that books-can-change-your-life spirit, let me share the rest of my bedside table (and please, share your own in the comments). These aren't necessarily books about healing from betrayal. You can find more of those here. But they are about living life with hope and humor and humility and an open heart:

Each Day a New Beginning: My mother gave me this, which was her own bible in AA recovery. It has become my own. I don't struggle with addiction but the meditations in here work for anyone just trying to get through life.

The Impossible Will Take a Little While by Paul Rogat Loeb: This is a collection of essays about "perseverance and hope in troubled times". It features such writers as Maya Angelou, Marian Wright Edelman, Tony Kushner, Mary Pipher, Alice Walker and the amazing list goes on. Dive in and feel restored.

Leaving My Father's House by Marion Woodman: This revered feminist and Jungian will change how you view your place in this world, both historically and now. I also love the companion book of meditations.

Rising Strong by Brené Brown: Is there another writer who has done more to help me understand boundaries, vulnerability, shame? I think not.

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron: I don't know a single creator who hasn't read this book and been inspired by it. But it's not just for those of us who make a living creating but for anyone. It's a meditation not only on art but on the art of living.

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline: I was lucky enough to hear this brilliant Indigenous woman speak recently and I wished I could sit at her feet and soak in her wisdom. She has a way of threading together historic wrongs with hope. She's also an incredible writer and this book is Exhibit A.

Get Out of My Life, but first could you drive me and Cheryl to the mall? by Anthony E. Wolf: I have teenagers. This is the best book out there to keep me sane.

This is just the beginning, kids. More to come...

Wednesday Word Hug

You Are Not A Rehabilitation Centre for a Damaged Man

Women are not rehabilitation centres for damaged men. Dear woman reading this, do not ever expend your emotional/physical/mental energy on redirecting the man from the path he has chosen to walk. He has nothing to lose. You, you will lose everything about yourself. ~ tweeted by @DoreenGLM

It's such a familiar trope. Fairy tales about it, songs about it, movies about it, family lore about it. How the love and loyalty of a good woman saved a not-so-good man. 
And we buy it, don't we? Intoxicated by the potential power we have to see something redeemable in someone behaving irredeemably, we buy it hook, line and sinker. After all, we've been marinating in this for a lifetime. My grandfather, the wealthy playboy tamed by my grandmother. Well, until, drunk one of many many nights, he smacked his head on concrete and died. 
My father, another playboy (in a clear case of 'what you see is what you get', my dad had a boat that he literally named Playboy. It was painted on the stern), tamed by my mother until, well, until he cheated and it turned out he wasn't tamed so much as discreet. 
Women are not rehabilitation centres for damaged men, writes our wise Twitter woman. And yet, that's exactly what we are, isn't it? Far too often.
Why is that? I mean, of course we're socialized to think of ourselves as rescuers, of tamers. But why, after it's abundantly clear that we not only haven't rescued anyone but that we're in danger of going under too...why do we stay? Why do we keep expending our emotional/physical/mental energy on redirecting someone from the path he has chosen to walk? Chosen! Nobody has a gun to his head. 
Why did I stay with a man who chose to cheat on me, repeatedly, over years?
Well, I've written often about just how bloody exhausted I was, how wrung out. How I could barely function, let alone leave with three young children.
But that's not the whole story. It never is.
Part of it was that I believed, somewhere deep inside, that leaving would be a failure. He was sorry. He didn't want to have cheated. He wanted to be a better man. And so, on some level, I felt that I owed him the chance to prove it. That I was the rehabilitation centre for this damaged man. 
My own history, watching my alcoholic mother get sober, primed me for the conviction that I knew damaged people could change.
But what I so often forgot in the story of my childhood was that my begging didn't get my mother sober. Nor did my rage or my being "perfect". She got sober when the cost of staying drunk became more than she was willing to pay. She got sober when she made the choice.
I was not her rehabilitation centre even though I tried hard to be. Even though everyone else wanted me to be.
Women often traffic in hope. 
"Women marry men hoping they'll change," goes the jokey adage. "Men marry women hoping they won't."
Joking aside, I think there's a whole lot of truth in that. 
Especially those of us who think we can heal damaged people.
We can't. It's a lie.
We are not rehabilitation centres for damaged men. Or women. They have nothing to lose.
But us? We have everything to lose, including ourselves.