Muchness and Light

In the garden of memory, in the palace of dreams, that is where you and I shall meet.

Since my thyroid radiation in July, I’ve been struggling with still feeling like general crap. Fatigue and brain fog have been intermittently worse. A pretty leisurely two-mile walk with Rango and the boys recently wiped me out for two days. My bloodwork shows wildly-swinging levels of thyroid hormones, indicating that the regrown tissue is indeed dying off, though it may be months before it normalizes.

With that has also come more weight regain and self-recrimination and outright self-loathing.

I have tried to get back into the gym even semi-regularly. It’s hard enough to juggle work and school and kids successfully, and trying to find even six hours a week for myself in that is sometimes unmanageable. Of course I know the exercise will actually help me to feel better, but the fatigue that comes with hypothyroidism can be unimaginably oppressive.

Recently I started a series of virtual races through Yes.Fit. Of course I chose the Alice in Wonderland themed races. After I complete so many miles, as tracked by my Misfit activity tracker, my medal is sent to me automatically. As of today, I’ve completed three of the six Alice races, totaling more than 60 miles.

As it does every day, Facebook was kind enough to remind me this morning of memories from this day in previous years. I find it interesting to see how life has changed over the last few years, but I tend to face those reminders with some trepidation. I love the pictures and funny quotes from my boys from their younger days. Sometimes the memories are useless or now meaningless, or sometimes even too painful, and I’ll delete them. Sometimes I leave the painful ones, knowing those ghosts will haunt me again next year, because I’m either not ready to deal with them or I know they’re so important that I will need the reminders again.

But today, there were two things, from 2010 and 2011. Not surprising, there were pictures from a 2010 concert, of a band I loved then and love now. It was the second in a series of shows that were seminal for the changes that would come over the following two years. A year later, it was the memory that was down 99 of the 115 pounds in total weight loss. Yet another year later, I’d just separated from my now-ex-husband.

All of that has fueled my writing since 2010, which began with the realization that I’d lost my muchness--just like Alice in Wonderland.

I have said repeatedly over the last year that, for a variety of reasons, I felt like I was back in 2010 and didn’t know why I was reliving such similar circumstances. Regardless of the logistical changes and strides I know I have made, I have replayed the past in tandem with the present and come up with only confusion and emotional failure. I have continually grappled with figuring out which choice I didn’t make or should’ve made differently. I’ve tried to re-learn whatever lesson I obviously needed to repeat.

But somehow, I keep sliding farther and farther into the past. Where 2010 may have felt like a rabbit hole, 2016 is feeling more and more like the other side of a looking glass. Where then felt new and exciting and rebellious, now feels reflective and reversed and exhausting.

What is it? What did I miss? What do I need now that can only be retrieved from then?

It just so happens that Alice Through the Looking Glass comes out on DVD this week. Of course I saw it in the theater when it opened--how could I not?--but I really didn’t love it as much as I did the first one. It was beautiful, and I looked for the clues to my missing lessons, but the torment of Time was unsettling to me. I could willingly believe in a lost young woman traveling to surreal place and conquering her fears, but it was almost impossible for me to suspend my disbelief as the same woman mended old wounds.

But maybe that’s it. Maybe my path has been a big circle, and maybe the obstacle is an unturned stone.

Certainly I can pinpoint errors and mistakes and regrettable decisions, but I feel like I have done everything in my power to apologize and make amends for those actions. I would say I have done my best to move on, but I damn well know there are frozen moments that continue to haunt me.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something. It is maddening, appearing and disappearing, always just out of my reach.

So I’m starting back at the beginning, at Alice. I am literally retracing my steps, one foot in front of the other, until I can find a way to the next landmark on this destination. I don’t want to believe that I am personally destined to repeat the same mistakes over and over, that there is literally no way to avoid spiritual repetition. I’ve already seen the White Rabbit, I just passed the Cheshire Cat and am making my way toward the Mad Hatter. There is still the Caterpillar and the Queen of Hearts.

After that, I’m seriously considering the Pac-Man races, where I get to eat a series of brightly-colored ghosts.

The horror of that moment, I shall never, never forget!

"Love keeps no record of wrongs."

This popped up on my Twitter feed today.  I know it's a reference to I Corinthians 13.  Some of you may even be surprised to learn that the "Love is patient, love is kind..." passage was read at my wedding.  DH and I chose it, when we got married in an actual church.  (No.  No lightning strikes, thank you very much.)

This "record of wrongs" has been a point of contention, as of late.  Okay, so by "late" I mean for the last twenty years.  I can't help it; I just have a great memory. 

I can remember details, both large and small, about almost anything and everything.  I know who gave me certain books, what clothes I wore for which grade-level school pictures, and exactly where I was standing or sitting or laying when specific life events happened.  I can tell you exactly where I was and who I was with the first time I heard half the songs on my iPod.  I recently went through a couple of giant boxes of Barbies to dole them out to the daughters of friends, and I could remember who gave me which dresses, which Christmas I got the bubble bath that I never actually used, and even who gave me which Malibu Barbie for my sixth birthday--the two being only distinguishable because the fake tan was partially scratched on the shoulder of one.  (The scratched one came from Wes Smith, if you must know.)

The list goes on and on.  There's so much minutiae crammed into this purple-streaked head that I'm surprised sometimes that there's room to fit any useful stuff. 

The problem, if you want to call it that, is that I also remember the bad stuff.  I remember sights and sounds related to traumatic events from my early childhood.  I remember exactly what was happening when I got each of the calls that my grandfathers had died.  I remember, in extreme detail, how a little piece of the ring DH bought me for our first Christmas broke off, the day he and I had our first fight in 1993.  (I took it immediately as a bad omen and stopped wearing the ring.  I wasn't letting that cosmic lesson go unlearned.)

That also means I remember all the things that people do that make me unhappy, for whatever reason.  Every little slight, every perceived betrayal, every stab in the back--it's all here.  It's like a laundry list of infractions sometimes.  I don't mean for it to be that way; it just is.

DH has accused me more than once of saving them up and dragging them out into the light when it's time to fight.  He's totally insane and totally right at the same time.  I don't intentionally have a list of grievances that I keep in reserve, waiting until just the right moment to spring them on him.  (Or you, if you're so special as to be on my No Fly List.)  But I do always have a running tally of issues that went unresolved, for whatever reason.  Until they've been addressed and confronted, I can't let them go.  I just can't, physically.  It's almost pathological. 

So what is it about memories that are important?  They're the recounting of who you are, good and bad, past and present.  They can even give a little insight into who you will become.  [Yes, I know those should both be 'whom', but it sounds funny, even on paper.]  We use our memories to make ourselves.

When she first gets to Wonderland (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), Alice is convinced she must have changed somehow, must no longer be Alice.  She assumes that, because she can't remember who she is, she must be someone else.  She meets the Blue Caterpillar (Oh, Absolem!), who questions her about who she is and challenges her to remember who she was.

    For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, "So you think you're changed, do you?"

    "I'm afraid I am, sir," said Alice; "I can't remember things as I used--and I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together!"

    "Can't remember WHAT things?" said the Caterpillar.

    "Well, I've tried to say 'HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE,' but it all came different!" Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

Alice can't remember who she was, so she can't remember who she is.  She has no personal context to draw upon and define herself, whether in relation to Alice or to anyone else. 

Henri Bergson believed there were two kinds of memories: memories of habit and memories of personal events.  He asserted that when a person commits a memory to habit (multiplication tables, for example), the memory becomes impersonal.  But when the memory of how the habit was learned (the rhythmic droning of the multiplication tables in fourth grade math class), it becomes a matter of remembering the self, at least from the personal perspective. 

That's the other thing about memories: they're highly subjective.  Everyone has moments they recall with astonishing clarity, only to find that someone else remembers them completely differently.  Personal perspective--dependant on physical locale and limitations, emotional state, and prejudices defined by previous experience--are highly influential on both the original imprints of incident and on their later recollection. 

I realize that sometimes my recollections of events are totally tainted by own perceptions.  Sobriety, emotional condition, etc., all directly impact how I remember an event.  And sometimes, it's just easiest to remember something the way I want to remember it.  Maybe it's a coping mechanism, making an event seem more palatable. 

The real problem is when the not-forgetting becomes detrimental, whether to me or to my relationship with someone.  DH is right that I tend to save these things up until the most heated, inopportune time.  But when is the right time to bring up hurt?  When is the appropriate time to tell someone, "Hey, do you remember that time you were a total ass to me?  And you never apologized or told me why?  Well, that's still bugging the shit out of me--can we talk about that during the next commercial break?"

I'm trying hard to be cognizant of those things that bother me and let him know when an issue is in imminent danger of becoming a weapon of future destruction.  But I don't always see it coming.  I may not realize how much something bothered me until it's too late, until I'm worked up about something else. 

And sometimes it feels inappropriately good to lash out, to dole out the sucker punch, especially when I'm defensive and in danger of losing the argument.  This is where my perception and misconception of a memory can be twisted to satisfy my ulterior motive. 

I explained to DH recently that I had been working hard to confront my ghosts and let them go, including some issues that had been long-standing between us.  I was surprised to learn that I was the only one who'd been rattling the chains binding me to them.  DH didn't even realize there'd ever been a ghostly memory, let alone battled to look at us through the vaporous remnants. 

Sadly, when confronted, my first instinct was to defend myself by listing all the grievances I'd forgiven and forgotten.  The memories are there, always, but the emotional import I place upon them is pliable and transient.  I can re-examine them from a new perspective and see if they're better suited to being a memory of personal event, or a memory of habit.

Love may not keep a record of wrongs, but hurt does.  Hurt is rude and self-seeking, certainly.  The best we can hope for is that love finds a way to quiet the hurt, to calm its proud, angry nature, and find a way to always trust, always hope, and always persevere.

 

I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House.

I'm pleased to say that I've had a really productive few days, writing-wise.  Iceapalooza 2011 forced me to spend some time working.  I managed a few blog posts, a few smaller pieces, and 11,000 words on my big fiction project.  (I'm at 111,268, which translates to 207 formatted pages in Word.)  Unfortunately, I've picked up a cold and haven't slept very well, between the coughing and just being keyed up from the cold meds. 

My restless mind woke up this morning, debating about my next blog topic.  I realized I haven't really delved into Through the Looking-Glass yet.   Let's take a little trip, shall we?

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There opens on a wintery afternoon.  Alice is warm by the fire at home in the drawing room, watching her cat Dinah and two of her kittens, one black and one white.  Dinah is busy bathing the patient white kitten, Snowball, while the little black one, Kitty, is playing and making kitten mischief.  When Kitty demolishes on a ball of yarn that Alice has been rolling, Alice scoops her up and chides her for being a "wicked wicked little thing."

Alice lists the kitten's crimes of drinking her sister's milk and mewing while Dinah cleaned her.  Alice remarks that Kitty would look exactly like Red Queen from her chess board, if only the kitten would sit up and fold its arms.  Of course the kitten isn't cooperative in Alice's little game of "Let's Pretend."  (What cat ever is?) 

                So to punish it, she held it up to the Looking-glass, that it might see how sulky it was, "--and if you're not good directly," she added, "I'll put you through into Looking-glass House.  How would you like that?"

Alice goes on to describe Looking-glass House, which looks exactly like her own house,
in mirrored reverse.  She explains to Kitty how everything there is the same but different, how the Looking-glass House milk is perhaps not good to drink, and how she would like to explore the tiny bit of passage she can see at the back of the parlor there.    As Alice admonishes Kitty to play Let's Pretend and journey through the looking glass, the glass of the giant hearth mirror begins to "melt away, just like a bright silvery mist."

                In another moment, Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room.  The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind.  "So I shall be as warm as I was in the old room," thought Alice: "warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire.  Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and ca'n't get at me!"

Everything Alice sees after she steps into Looking-glass House is very different from the "quite common and uninteresting" things she can see in the old room.  The chess board is askew, and the pieces are walking about the board and talking.  When Alice tries to intercede helpfully in the game, the pieces can't hear or see her and are frightened by being moved around by a huge, invisible force.  She sees a book and finds all the words are written backwards, in mirror text, of course.  The poem is "Jabberwocky", which she doesn't understand at all. 

(In the entire Alice universe, we'll see the Jabberwocky years later, if Tim Burton has anything to do with it.  And if I stand by the premise that the Jabberwocky is later representative of the physical embodiment of Alice's battle with her own self-doubt, it's interesting that it's utter nonsense to the childhood Alice.  All she understands is that "somebody killed something.")

Alice reminds herself to explore the rest of the house before she has to go back through the Looking-glass, and she decides to see the garden.  She finds that she doesn't have to walk to get down the stairs, that she can float, and must grab onto the door-post to stop herself from floating away. 

                She was getting a little giddy with so much floating in the air, and was rather glad to find herself walking again in the natural way.

She goes out to the garden but is shocked to find that the paths don't work like she expects.  They' twist and turn "more like a corkscrew than a path!"  The paths don't lead in the direction she wants to go, and she spends a long time getting turned around, but she always ends up back at the house.  She encounters the talking flowers, which are beautiful but argumentative--both with each other and with Alice.  They're judgmental and difficult, not at all what Alice assumed flowers would be like, you know, if they could talk. 

Alice is suddenly confronted by the Red Queen from the chess board, who is the same size as Alice now.  In anticipated Carroll style, the story just changes and moves on.  There's rarely any resolution to the immediacy of the situation, but that style of storytelling lends itself well to the dream-like state of Wonderland, as perceived by Alice.  She goes on through a series of loosely-connected events until she wakes and returns to her normal drawing room, with Dinah and Snowball and Kitty.

The Looking-glass House isn't all Alice thinks it's cracked up to be.  It's not an exact opposite, it's a mirror. 

For a quick refresher, mirrors work by reversing all asymmetrical objects, meaning objects that aren't superposable on their mirror images.  (Left-right reversal is a recurring theme in both of Carroll's Alice stories and nonsense writing.)  Corkscrews also come up again and again in Through the Looking-glass.  Corkscrews are helices, asymmetric three-dimensional curves that spiral in reverse in the mirror. 

So even when it seems that Alice has compensated for the visual reversal, everything still moves differently.  Except Alice.  Her right and left still function like they're supposed to; she still moves to and fro mostly as she expects her body to move, even when the world around her is in complete juxtaposition to herself. 

I think everyone wonders from time to time what it would be like to step through the Looking-glass into the giant mirror-image of our own lives, to see what it would be like to live as a slightly different version of our selves.   I also think we'd be surprised, like Alice, to find that things aren't as oppositely perfect as we'd imagined.  It would be incredibly hard to function in that place where everything is backwards while you, yourself, are forwards.  So much oppositional concurrence would be unnerving and distracting after a while.

As I've talked about before, the mirror is not always my greatest ally.  To rely on a backwards, superficial image of myself to define who I am is screwy enough, but to be forced to take the perceived imperfections with me, the ones that stare back at me so glaringly, would kind of defeat the purpose of trying somewhere new. 

Plus, I'd be afraid of what I couldn't see in the mirror.  All of the little things hiding behind the big things.  It's scary enough to live in a world where I can anticipate how the unexpected might move, but to be constantly blind-sided by complete chaos would send me down my own corkscrewing path.

There's a certain enjoyment in wondering how my life would be different on the other side of the mirror.  Ultimately I find that I'd rather stay in my own parlor, curled up by the fire, and watch my kittens creating mischief their own mischief, while I ready my yarn for creating something new.

 

In winter, when the fields are white, I sing this song for your delight.

Atlanta is on day five of Iceapalooza 2011.  It's been renamed Hothlanta, seriously.  Anywhere from four to eight inches of snow fell, beginning Sunday night.  By Monday morning, the sleet and freezing rain had begun, and the snow was topped by half-an-inch or more of ice.  Even if you broke through the ice, the snow was so powdery you couldn't really build snowmen with it.  Not at our house at least.

The first day was really fun.  This was the most snow the kids had ever seen in their young lives.  Seriously, this is the kind of winter weather event that this part of the Deep South sees every ten to fifteen years.  The boys were home from school.  Snow day!  They loved the way the world looked, so shining and light.  And it was fun to watch the wonder of exploration on their faces.

I heard from a lot of my northern friends that it seemed insane to have kids stay home for six inches of snow.  The Atlanta metro area covers ten counties.  We are the southeastern home of urban sprawl.  We also sit very close to the end of the Appalachian Trail, which means there are lots and lots of hills.  And trees.  The combination of the two means lots and lots of areas that stay shady even in winter.

The county we're in covers 437 square miles of the 58,000 square miles that makes up Georgia.  We have a population of about 800,000, nearly ten per cent of the total in the state.    As densely populated as it is, the county has nine (yes, NINE) trucks equipped with snow plows.  There are also six graders and as many as eighteen sand/salt trucks.  These are the ones that are controlled by the County itself, not including the ones that belong to the small municipalities within the county.  The County also has about 2,750 miles of road.  (I won't do the math.  If you're capable of reading this, you're capable of figuring out that the big trucks are woefully outnumbered by the roads.)

If the roads aren't passable enough for the school buses to pick up a certain percentage of students, then they have to call the day.  Our school district has three inclement weather days built into the calendar, just for things like this. 

Day two was okay.  Lots of video games and movies.  The snow was too crunchy and hard to be any fun, and I don't trust young boys to not lob iceballs at each other's heads. 

The Snow Madness began on day three.  I was restless and thought I'd try again on the snowmen.  No such luck.  But I realized I could paint on the ice-covered snow with some tempera paint.  It worked beautifully.  I had some fun, waiting to see if the boys were going back to school on Thursday.

By the end of the fourth day at home, we finally had a little sunshine and some radiant heat to help melt the ice.  Our driveway is very flat and long, leading to our small, uphill street.  Which leads to another small, uphill street.  An hour of shoveling snow and ice cleared a bit less than a quarter of the driveway.  I really was tempted just to drive that fifteen feet over and over, like I used to do when I was fifteen and "practicing" while my parents were at work.

Oh, and the Snow Madness continued.I was a little less enthused than I had been the day before.  I seriously debated doing a remake of the video for Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" in my backyard.

  

 

 

 

 

Today is Snow Day #5.

  And Monday is a school holiday.  MLK Day.

The boys have had enough of each other and me.  They'll have been out of school for ten days by the time they make it back on Tuesday.  DH is working steadily from home and needs to be not disturbed.  (Good luck with that, on so many levels.)  Every mom I know is drinking alone while she shovels her own driveway.  I spent some more time doing a little snow painting, knowing it's all about to melt away.  My subject matter improved a bit, because I knew I would be able to escape my icy internment very soon.

Hothlanta reached a balmy 38 degrees this afternoon, and the boys and I managed to get my side of the driveway mostly cleared.  (Good luck with your side, DH!)  The build-up in the street was slushy enough that I could slowly make my way to civilization.  My youngest actually cheered when we got to the gym, happy to be going to childcare while Mommy got to work it with the trainer.  I was happy to take two boys to a grossly crowded grocery store.  All those provisions we'd stocked in anticipation of the snow were nearly gone. (I was so exhausted after an hour in the grocery store with the kids that I stopped for take-out pizza on the way home.)

I have a couple of friends who travel a great deal throughout the year and miss a lot with their own children.  They seemed a little appalled that I was tired of being at home with the kids.  I guess it's a 'snow is always whiter' kind of a thing. 

Don't get me wrong; I whole-heartedly love my children.  But it's like being with anyone for too much time; it will make you insane.  Especially when they have the social skills of, well, children.  I can't drink with them or make crass jokes.  And I just don't think fart jokes are funny. 

So now we're facing a few more days of togetherness.  Thankfully we'll be able to leave the house and venture forth into the world.  I fully intend to take advantage of a movie theater or the mall or some other place where the sights and sounds overwhelm my children into quiet, even if only for a few minutes.  I'll be sure to snuggle them close when it happens and revel in the warm stillness that I know will be gone all too soon.