the day of her death was a cold, dark day
Thursday 10 February 2005 | I like a cookie
It’s Thursday and I have a fine ambitious list of things to do and instead I’m in bed in my new cream-colored fleece bathrobe, a gift from my mother, typing. The cat has gone mad after an attempted, nay, successful escape (she shot past me as I opened the screen door to set the trash out—circled uncertainly in the yard, crouched close to the ground and sniffing it fascinatedly, confusedly, with me chasing her cautiously with lots of talking, until I finally herded her back in the open door) and is now rampaging victoriously around the living room, batting her jingle balls wildly and galloping around with a wad of plastic vegetable bags gripped between her teeth and dragging between her legs (a toy for supervised play only, I hasten to add, lest anyone think me a terrible cat-mother).
Tomorrow is the anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s suicide, one of the only literary dates I can ever remember. 11 February 1963. She was 31 then, I think, and would be dead by now anyway, as of course is Ted Hughes.
I can’t have any thoughts that aren’t dark today, it seems, here in bed with a half-read James Hillman book (Anima: Anatomy of a Personified Notion) and two screeners I should be watching (Untold Scandal, a Korean remake of Les liaisons dangereuses, and Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation). The cat bounds up and down, on and off the bed, making her deranged trilling sound.
“In this dark place there must be poems nestling, nesting, stirring in the basement. Baby hatching pit vipers maybe. Something to leave me loveable, liveable.” If I keep requoting my own sentence, will it become true?
This morning I trolled the codependency sites and in short order had to admit my affinity or at least some kinship with this altogether unenviable group:
- inability to know what “normal” is
- difficulty in following a project through
- difficulty having fun
- judging self/others without mercy
- low self-esteem, often projected onto others (why don’t they get their act together!)
- difficulty in developing or sustaining meaningful relationships
- belief that others cause or are responsible for the codependent’s emotions (”you make me feel…”)
- overreacting to change (or intense fear of/inability to deal with change)
- inability to see alternatives to situations, thus responding very impulsively
- constantly seeking approval and affirmation, yet having compromised sense of self
- feelings of being different
- confusion and sense of inadequacy
- being either super-responsible, super-irresponsible, or alternating between these
- lack of self-confidence in making decisions; no sense of power in making choices
- feelings of fear, insecurity, inadequacy, guilt, hurt, and shame which are denied
- isolation and fear of people; resentment of authority figures
- fear of anger or bottling anger up till it explodes
- hypersensitivity to criticism
- being addicted to excitement, drama, chaos-making
- dependency upon others and fear of abandonment
- avoidance of relationships to guard against abandonment fears
- confusion between love and pity
- tendency to look for “victims” to help
- rigidity and need to control
- lying when it would be just as easy to tell the truth
There’s a better explanation on the Al-Anon website where each of these is broken down and examples given, so that “difficulty having fun” becomes more than an easily dismissable “oh, everyone has a hard time with that sometimes—”and is instead very pointy and uncomfortable and makes me squirm with its accuracy.
Of the three partner-of-a-sex-addict groups (CoSA, S-Anon, and RCA—this one the most interesting to me, Recovering Couples Anonymous), only S-Anon has a meeting in New Mexico and I’m still waiting to hear where and when that is—they take anonymity really seriously. CoSA offers me an online sponsor with a waiting list and RCA nothing.
The other option is AlAnon meetings, though I have to pretend in this case that the addict in my life, around whom I try to control and then collapse and neglect myself in different ways, is an alcoholic—which isn’t untrue, but isn’t true either. I’ve already been to two AlAnon meetings, but the newcomers meeting (during which I can cross-talk to my heart’s content! but actually other people have said that to me too, so now I know that the meeting leader the other night wasn’t criticizing me, just giving me that information. Still, would it have been so terrible if she had been criticizing me?) is on Friday, tomorrow night at the hospital. N. went with me to one of the AlAnon meetings, partly based on my pointing out to him that every horror story he has about his paranoid schizophrenic mother involves the phrase “and of course she was also completely drunk”—it was a difficult meeting for him, at least partly because a bunch of women were sitting around talking honestly about and sometimes laughing at the charismatic, compelling drunk men in their lives and the crazy mistakes they’d made getting involved with them. (As he told me later, looking small and chastened, “It was like all the women I’ve ever hurt in my life were gathered together in one room to accuse me.”) He sat very still doing his mala and looking at no one—and I noticed all this because of course I was completely focused on him and not on myself, and then realized we have to go separately from now on or I’m going to sit there dwelling the entire time in someone else’s skin, listening for his reactions and unaware of my own.
Then there’s CoDA, just plain Codependents Anonymous, and I’m going to that meeting on Monday. But I’m told it’s dispirited and dwindling in Santa Fe.
This is all I’ve got. I don’t have $30 a week for couples therapy, much less my own therapy, and I don’t want to be part of another online discussion group—they’re unhelpful and wreck my wrists. And I don’t want to read a squillion more books about relationships—that’s codependent in and of itself. I mean, I do want to read them, but I’m not going to let myself. It would be so easy to plunge headlong into a depth-psychological fascination with sex addiction, with the unhealed trauma in N.’s childhood which predisposes him to such things, what is the complex relationship between BDSM and addiction, etc. But this is all intellectualizing and getting in someone else’s business yet once again. No, I want to continue healing as best I can with people, not holed up on my own with a bunch of books and the crazy classically codependent idea that I can figure it out, solve the problems, control the situation, by myself.
In the post-mortem in his car afterward, N. expressed one uncertainty about 12-step groups. It’s just another kind of mysticism, he pointed out—hard to miss with all that emphasis on developing a relationship with one’s personal higher power—so why not just stick to the brand of mysticism we already started practicing? I offered two reasons, for myself: first, my personal relationship with a higher power started about a year ago and I have not been able to find any room for Her in the zendo or in my practice, except covertly, as Persephone and I discuss interminably. She’s hidden on the right side of the altar and there’s ony a small occult place permitted for devotion or for prayer, as I understand prayer to be: expression of gratitude and request for guidance. And second, my relationship with my teacher, whatever else it may offer, doesn’t encourage me to speak honestly and freely about the events of my life, and doesn’t encourage me to use them as the ground of my practice, but instead seems geared more toward getting me to transcend these particulars and engage in a more depersonalized practice. And I suggested a reason for him: because he’s no longer in close contact with the Fabulous Gay Maine Priest and needs something here, something tactile. He hastened to assure me that he wasn’t going to stop going to meetings, wasn’t going to back away from investigating the possibility that he’s addicted and they could help. I said nothing, finally starting to get it that I can’t do anything about whether he goes or doesn’t go. I can only do something about myself.
And it’s noon and Mandarin has called and I’m limp and numb and with a neckache and I persist, persist, persist in doing nothing about myself. [Falls asleep for two hours; wakes up and puts frozen “organic! healthy!” pizza in toaster oven; calls Mandarin again.]
Now for the obligatory link, so this looks more like a real blog: there’s a whole article about blogs in the new alumnae quarterly of Mandarin’s and my undergraduate college, which wouldn’t be that exciting except that Marya Morevna was at one point (in 1992-1993) a fairly close friend of mine, and I’d lost her, and imagined her succumbed to marriage/motherhood/jobdom. But it’s not so! She’s radiantly alive, Lord love her.
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