all your grief at last, at last, behind you
My parents saw Les Misérables in 1986, at the Barbican, before it was "Les Miz", before it had even got big enough to transfer to the West End. (They were in London with the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus and had a free evening, some of them decided to take in a show, and that's what they could get. "A musical on 'Les Misérables'?!" some of them, my folks included, asked with some incredulity, because seriously, what?!) So my earliest memory of the show is of my dad playing the original cast recording and weeping unashamedly - not quite from start to finish, though probably beginning with Fantine's death (certainly that was the on-switch at any live performance) and certainly along about the end where Valjean dies only when he knows Cosette will not be alone.
Fathers and daughters, man. It could always make my dad cry and it could usually get me, too,* and lately obviously I'm much more reliably vulnerable in that area.
So I'm going to go see the movie. But I'm going to have to go alone, I think, maybe next Saturday afternoon, where I can sit by myself in the theater armed with a box of tissues in case I end up sobbing from beginning to end. Maybe I won't - but I think the Valjean's-death stuff will probably wreck me if Hugh Jackman and Amanda Seyfried are anywhere near doing it right, and all reports lead me to understand that they nailed it.
*There's a moment in "The King's Speech" where the newly-acceded George VI comes back home after Edward VIII's abdication, and his daughters are unsure for a moment what they're supposed to do - and Princess Elizabeth whispers "curtsey!" and Princess Margaret curtseys solemnly and says "Your Majesty". I understand from the director's commentary that this often got a laugh from cinema audiences; not from me, though. I burst quite unexpectedly into tears, just off the look on the king's face in the next shot, and that was close to a year before any medical drama had seized my family - that was just a girl and her dad.
I'm still experiencing some cognitive dissonance w/r/t my dad. I have this picture on my desk - the one where we're sitting on a park bench, for those of you who can see the pictures I posted here - and when I look at it there is a part of my mind that persistently fails to understand how it can be that he's gone. I don't mean refuses to understand, mind you; but knows it's true and at the same time can't grasp it. (Rationally I think, well, given this particular photograph, of course that dad is gone - that girl is gone, too, if it comes to that, as that picture was taken 24 years ago and we're none of us still the same as we were then. But that only really helps a little bit. I have the same brain-freeze when I look at pictures taken in the past six months.)
A couple of weeks after my father died, my mother went back to church, and happened to run into an old family friend whose wife died from leukemia a year ago June. He asked her how Dad was doing, so he obviously hadn't heard, and she filled him in, and he was very sorry, like you are, and invited her to lunch. Very nice. A week or so later she told me she'd been to the symphony with the same old family friend, who'd had two tickets to a concert and didn't much want to go by himself. A week or so into the new year, my brother and I got an e-mail in which she said she and he have rather hit it off and decided they'll spend more time together going forward, so far so good, and he'd been thinking of taking a European river cruise this spring and thought it would be nicer to go with someone than to go alone, so he'd invited her, and she thought we might be uncomfortable with that and wanted to see how we felt before she made plans.
I've tried to present this in a way that might give you the merest hint of how absolutely bone-deep shocked I was by it. I was at the Gentleman Caller's when that message arrived, thank god, because within minutes I was shaking pretty violently - not with sobs, just with shakes, I mean I could see clearly but you wouldn't have wanted me operating anything hot, sharp, fragile, heavy, or otherwise dangerous or delicate.
The three of us (my brother and my mother and I) had a difficult phone call that evening and then a lot of follow-up e-mailing over the next week or so, the upshot of all of which is that (a) she blew it big time in the communication department, and (b) he and I both have a lot more healing work to do than we realized, because the fact that she is not grieving the same way we are feels a lot like she's not grieving as much as we are, which is really, really hurtful. (It's also not fair. There are counselors involved talking through this with each of us. I assure you we're not trying to fly alone.) The um-friend (a term I am resurrecting because it is exactly what is called for here) seems to have more of a sense of what's appropriate here than she does - both of them having acknowledged that this happened really fast, which doesn't seem to have been what either of them intended, and there's a difference between how it is and how it would have been if this had been someone she'd just met; I believe he sincerely thought he was being thoughtful to a recently-widowed friend but could have backed off when he realized they were both deeper into this than they'd meant to get - but in fact the only ones who seem not ready for this thing to be how it is are my brother and me, and expecting my mother or her um-friend to change their behavior based on our needs is not right (since we are both grown and out of the house). And of the adults in this conversation, the um-friend is the more sensitive to our readiness etc.; when Mom asked us if it would help to re-meet him (apparently at the house during the family MLKmas gathering, which is when we do Christmas presents according to our idiosyncratic calendar), since we hadn't seen him or his late wife since we were much much younger, even he said thaaat might be a little soon (even, that is, before we'd had a chance to say "What is the matter with you?!").
So where we are now is that I (and my brother, I think) am working hard on my own shit and not discouraging this relationship - but that's going to have to be enough for now, because I'm not ready to encourage it.
Over the MLK weekend, my nephew was his normal self, which is a two-year-old kid who is very demonstrative with his parents, whom he sees every day, but a little warier of people he doesn't see all the time, i.e. the rest of us. He is not a spontaneous hugger (except of his parents; he will occasionally stop what he's doing and announce "Want to hug [mommy/daddy]" and toddle over and give them a big hug, which is very cute), and he is often, in the way of two-year-olds, busy with whatever toy he's playing with and not likely to turn his attention to someone who just wants to cuddle him. We are generally okay swooping in and hugging him and then leaving him be, and sometimes if you ask for a hug he will come hug you and then go back to his previous task. If you engage with him, say by sitting on the floor and asking him what he's doing, reading a book with him, joining him in building his block tower or whatever, he is likely to warm up faster - probably still won't hit pause to come and hug you, but he'll be more comfortable than he was before. None of this is a shock: he's two and he's a big introvert.
My mother has always wished he were more excited to see her. She has always wished he would climb into her lap so she could read him a story. She has always wished he would hug her as effusively as he hugs his own mother. None of this is ever going to happen because that's not the kid he is - and my brother and sister-in-law reassure her every time she holds out her arms for a hug and he doesn't come that it's not her, he's like that with everyone who isn't them. Others of us - me, that is, and I assume his other aunt and his other grandmother, who are not the glom-on types - understand this. My mother, that Sunday evening, gave the baby a hug and then watched him run to look at the digital clock on the TV cabinet (one of his favorite things - he likes to predict what number will come next), and said - to the room - "You know, [nephew], other friends of mine tell me that their grandchildren can't wait to see them, and come running and throw their arms around their knees." Yeah - I had started to say "Mom, those kids are different people", and had got one word into it when my sister-in-law and my brother got even more forceful: You may not guilt him about emotional availability. We understand that you wish a lot of things - but one of those wishes is that he were a different way than he is, and he's old enough to understand that what you are saying is you don't approve of him, himself, and you will not say such things where he can hear you, do you understand. You can say so to us all you like, though we can only be sympathetic, because we're not going to try to change him. But you may not say so to him. She was pretty upset - upset with herself, as much as anything, I think, because when I asked her if she understood why they were insisting on this, she said she did, and reminded me that she had sent each of us a copy of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (true!), so she should have known better, and in fact her own mother begged her not to make us go and hug her, because she (my grandmother) was no hugger, and so on and so on. But I mean my god, it's been two years of "it's not you, he's just a quiet little guy" and now it is finally no, Mom, that's not okay. (It was only three of us united on that point because GC was not paying attention; he asked me about it on the way home the next day. He did agree with our point, but probably would have stayed quiet in the event because it's neither his kid nor his mother - and also because he still feels like the new boy, which he probably always will but I think the other point is a firmer one, at least in part because it makes it okay that I did stand with them explicitly.)
Later the same evening she said something for the squillionth time about not understanding this or being mystified by that or blah blah Luddism, and I called her on her faux-incompetence shtick - and my brother and sister-in-law immediately endorsed my use of the word "shtick", because not one of us believes she is actually incompetent, or incapable of anything she might choose to learn to do herself, and if she chooses not to adopt a thing (e.g. mobile devices - we'll come back to this), fine, but we'd like her not to suggest that it's because she can't learn; we're all aware of the meme in which widows beg off $whatever with "my husband always took care of that", and that's okay as an explanation for why she might not know something right away, but not for why she needn't ever learn it herself. [tearing hair] I mean I'm talking about finances, mostly, and whom to ask for technical support if your computer starts wigging out. You don't have to be able to fix it yourself, but you should at least understand the questions you're asking rather than just calling the neighbor and saying "halp" or whatever it is she's saying. (Mobile devices, she feels behind the curve because her sister's e-mails always arrive with a "sent from my iPad" line at the bottom and she thinks maybe she ought to learn to use an iPad if it's really better. We say it might be better for her and not for you, don't worry about it. She frets anyway.)
... So things with Mom are a little strained.
One of my sister-in-law's MLKmas presents (off her wish-list) was the Smitten Kitchen cookbook, which includes these apple cider caramels. I was sufficiently intrigued by this recipe to (a) bookmark it on the website and (b) buy some apple cider on Sunday, and I made them, and I am here to tell you that they are delicious, even with dark instead of light brown sugar because that's what we had, and I might use a little less sea salt next time, and apparently when you wrap them up in waxed paper you have to twist both sides of the waxed paper in the same direction if you want them to unwrap easily, not in the opposite direction. So if I am ever giving them as gifts (hint: I expect I will someday give caramels made from this recipe as a gift, because easy and damn), I will remember this.
Caramels in general have been a project lately, chez GC, because he and his mom used to make candy and he wants to make chocolate-covered caramels as a sort of follow-up to the old mint-chocolate-in-molds tradition. First one has to be able to make caramel, right? He is - we are - trying like hell to follow online recipes and directions, and always coming up with something either scorched, grainy, insufficiently caramelized (i.e. still basically just sugar), or hard as a rock - or, occasionally, all three. We've been through about nine attempts (dry, wet, a little cream, too much cream) to make a basic chewy caramel and got nowhere useful. For one thing we probably need to stir much less, because allowing the sugar to begin to burn is the point - but see above re: scorching. Maybe a saucepan is the wrong implement? But the stuff wants to be deep enough for the thermometer to read without touching the bottom of the pan, if only as a data point. Anyone who would care to share step-by-step instructions - what to do and what not to do, better yet - for making basic chewy caramel candies in your own kitchen is welcome to do so. (
tigerflower, I'm looking at you, if you happen to have a spare minute (I know: ha!) - or e-mailing you soon.) By last evening he was pretty frustrated with the whole enterprise, poor bunny.
For a number of years, I have worn a white "make poverty history" band and a yellow Livestrong band. The MPH band is pretty stretched out and also yellowing with age, and I worry that one of these days it's going to snap entirely; so I've ordered some beaded One bracelets and will replace it with them (the basic white one, a red one for AIDS, and a rainbow one for malaria) when they get here. The Livestrong band ... sigh.
Here's the thing. Of course I support cancer research and am a big fan of people living fantastic lives as survivors. And I know that Lance Armstrong actually separated himself from the Livestrong organization even before his latest round of drama. But the latest round of drama has been so repugnant to me - whatever, doping, apparently everyone does it and it's too much to expect a leader in the sport with worldwide recognition to take any steps toward changing the pervasive culture (I suppose he'd argue that if he'd taken any such steps he wouldn't be a leader because what made him a leader was all those victories), blah blah level-playing-field - but where I check out is the level at which he has shown himself to be a lying liar who lies, ruining innocent people's lives and careers, suing people for libel whom he knew to be telling the truth, which I believe is also called perjury, and then going on international television and apologizing for none of it. You have an interview with Oprah and you 'fess up to all the doping but you don't apologize for being a perjuring dickbag, that is the last shred of my sympathy out the window -
- so I have replaced my Livestrong bracelet with a yellow "CHEAT TO WIN" band from The Onion. I feel much better now.
Fathers and daughters, man. It could always make my dad cry and it could usually get me, too,* and lately obviously I'm much more reliably vulnerable in that area.
So I'm going to go see the movie. But I'm going to have to go alone, I think, maybe next Saturday afternoon, where I can sit by myself in the theater armed with a box of tissues in case I end up sobbing from beginning to end. Maybe I won't - but I think the Valjean's-death stuff will probably wreck me if Hugh Jackman and Amanda Seyfried are anywhere near doing it right, and all reports lead me to understand that they nailed it.
*There's a moment in "The King's Speech" where the newly-acceded George VI comes back home after Edward VIII's abdication, and his daughters are unsure for a moment what they're supposed to do - and Princess Elizabeth whispers "curtsey!" and Princess Margaret curtseys solemnly and says "Your Majesty". I understand from the director's commentary that this often got a laugh from cinema audiences; not from me, though. I burst quite unexpectedly into tears, just off the look on the king's face in the next shot, and that was close to a year before any medical drama had seized my family - that was just a girl and her dad.
I'm still experiencing some cognitive dissonance w/r/t my dad. I have this picture on my desk - the one where we're sitting on a park bench, for those of you who can see the pictures I posted here - and when I look at it there is a part of my mind that persistently fails to understand how it can be that he's gone. I don't mean refuses to understand, mind you; but knows it's true and at the same time can't grasp it. (Rationally I think, well, given this particular photograph, of course that dad is gone - that girl is gone, too, if it comes to that, as that picture was taken 24 years ago and we're none of us still the same as we were then. But that only really helps a little bit. I have the same brain-freeze when I look at pictures taken in the past six months.)
A couple of weeks after my father died, my mother went back to church, and happened to run into an old family friend whose wife died from leukemia a year ago June. He asked her how Dad was doing, so he obviously hadn't heard, and she filled him in, and he was very sorry, like you are, and invited her to lunch. Very nice. A week or so later she told me she'd been to the symphony with the same old family friend, who'd had two tickets to a concert and didn't much want to go by himself. A week or so into the new year, my brother and I got an e-mail in which she said she and he have rather hit it off and decided they'll spend more time together going forward, so far so good, and he'd been thinking of taking a European river cruise this spring and thought it would be nicer to go with someone than to go alone, so he'd invited her, and she thought we might be uncomfortable with that and wanted to see how we felt before she made plans.
I've tried to present this in a way that might give you the merest hint of how absolutely bone-deep shocked I was by it. I was at the Gentleman Caller's when that message arrived, thank god, because within minutes I was shaking pretty violently - not with sobs, just with shakes, I mean I could see clearly but you wouldn't have wanted me operating anything hot, sharp, fragile, heavy, or otherwise dangerous or delicate.
The three of us (my brother and my mother and I) had a difficult phone call that evening and then a lot of follow-up e-mailing over the next week or so, the upshot of all of which is that (a) she blew it big time in the communication department, and (b) he and I both have a lot more healing work to do than we realized, because the fact that she is not grieving the same way we are feels a lot like she's not grieving as much as we are, which is really, really hurtful. (It's also not fair. There are counselors involved talking through this with each of us. I assure you we're not trying to fly alone.) The um-friend (a term I am resurrecting because it is exactly what is called for here) seems to have more of a sense of what's appropriate here than she does - both of them having acknowledged that this happened really fast, which doesn't seem to have been what either of them intended, and there's a difference between how it is and how it would have been if this had been someone she'd just met; I believe he sincerely thought he was being thoughtful to a recently-widowed friend but could have backed off when he realized they were both deeper into this than they'd meant to get - but in fact the only ones who seem not ready for this thing to be how it is are my brother and me, and expecting my mother or her um-friend to change their behavior based on our needs is not right (since we are both grown and out of the house). And of the adults in this conversation, the um-friend is the more sensitive to our readiness etc.; when Mom asked us if it would help to re-meet him (apparently at the house during the family MLKmas gathering, which is when we do Christmas presents according to our idiosyncratic calendar), since we hadn't seen him or his late wife since we were much much younger, even he said thaaat might be a little soon (even, that is, before we'd had a chance to say "What is the matter with you?!").
So where we are now is that I (and my brother, I think) am working hard on my own shit and not discouraging this relationship - but that's going to have to be enough for now, because I'm not ready to encourage it.
Over the MLK weekend, my nephew was his normal self, which is a two-year-old kid who is very demonstrative with his parents, whom he sees every day, but a little warier of people he doesn't see all the time, i.e. the rest of us. He is not a spontaneous hugger (except of his parents; he will occasionally stop what he's doing and announce "Want to hug [mommy/daddy]" and toddle over and give them a big hug, which is very cute), and he is often, in the way of two-year-olds, busy with whatever toy he's playing with and not likely to turn his attention to someone who just wants to cuddle him. We are generally okay swooping in and hugging him and then leaving him be, and sometimes if you ask for a hug he will come hug you and then go back to his previous task. If you engage with him, say by sitting on the floor and asking him what he's doing, reading a book with him, joining him in building his block tower or whatever, he is likely to warm up faster - probably still won't hit pause to come and hug you, but he'll be more comfortable than he was before. None of this is a shock: he's two and he's a big introvert.
My mother has always wished he were more excited to see her. She has always wished he would climb into her lap so she could read him a story. She has always wished he would hug her as effusively as he hugs his own mother. None of this is ever going to happen because that's not the kid he is - and my brother and sister-in-law reassure her every time she holds out her arms for a hug and he doesn't come that it's not her, he's like that with everyone who isn't them. Others of us - me, that is, and I assume his other aunt and his other grandmother, who are not the glom-on types - understand this. My mother, that Sunday evening, gave the baby a hug and then watched him run to look at the digital clock on the TV cabinet (one of his favorite things - he likes to predict what number will come next), and said - to the room - "You know, [nephew], other friends of mine tell me that their grandchildren can't wait to see them, and come running and throw their arms around their knees." Yeah - I had started to say "Mom, those kids are different people", and had got one word into it when my sister-in-law and my brother got even more forceful: You may not guilt him about emotional availability. We understand that you wish a lot of things - but one of those wishes is that he were a different way than he is, and he's old enough to understand that what you are saying is you don't approve of him, himself, and you will not say such things where he can hear you, do you understand. You can say so to us all you like, though we can only be sympathetic, because we're not going to try to change him. But you may not say so to him. She was pretty upset - upset with herself, as much as anything, I think, because when I asked her if she understood why they were insisting on this, she said she did, and reminded me that she had sent each of us a copy of Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (true!), so she should have known better, and in fact her own mother begged her not to make us go and hug her, because she (my grandmother) was no hugger, and so on and so on. But I mean my god, it's been two years of "it's not you, he's just a quiet little guy" and now it is finally no, Mom, that's not okay. (It was only three of us united on that point because GC was not paying attention; he asked me about it on the way home the next day. He did agree with our point, but probably would have stayed quiet in the event because it's neither his kid nor his mother - and also because he still feels like the new boy, which he probably always will but I think the other point is a firmer one, at least in part because it makes it okay that I did stand with them explicitly.)
Later the same evening she said something for the squillionth time about not understanding this or being mystified by that or blah blah Luddism, and I called her on her faux-incompetence shtick - and my brother and sister-in-law immediately endorsed my use of the word "shtick", because not one of us believes she is actually incompetent, or incapable of anything she might choose to learn to do herself, and if she chooses not to adopt a thing (e.g. mobile devices - we'll come back to this), fine, but we'd like her not to suggest that it's because she can't learn; we're all aware of the meme in which widows beg off $whatever with "my husband always took care of that", and that's okay as an explanation for why she might not know something right away, but not for why she needn't ever learn it herself. [tearing hair] I mean I'm talking about finances, mostly, and whom to ask for technical support if your computer starts wigging out. You don't have to be able to fix it yourself, but you should at least understand the questions you're asking rather than just calling the neighbor and saying "halp" or whatever it is she's saying. (Mobile devices, she feels behind the curve because her sister's e-mails always arrive with a "sent from my iPad" line at the bottom and she thinks maybe she ought to learn to use an iPad if it's really better. We say it might be better for her and not for you, don't worry about it. She frets anyway.)
... So things with Mom are a little strained.
One of my sister-in-law's MLKmas presents (off her wish-list) was the Smitten Kitchen cookbook, which includes these apple cider caramels. I was sufficiently intrigued by this recipe to (a) bookmark it on the website and (b) buy some apple cider on Sunday, and I made them, and I am here to tell you that they are delicious, even with dark instead of light brown sugar because that's what we had, and I might use a little less sea salt next time, and apparently when you wrap them up in waxed paper you have to twist both sides of the waxed paper in the same direction if you want them to unwrap easily, not in the opposite direction. So if I am ever giving them as gifts (hint: I expect I will someday give caramels made from this recipe as a gift, because easy and damn), I will remember this.
Caramels in general have been a project lately, chez GC, because he and his mom used to make candy and he wants to make chocolate-covered caramels as a sort of follow-up to the old mint-chocolate-in-molds tradition. First one has to be able to make caramel, right? He is - we are - trying like hell to follow online recipes and directions, and always coming up with something either scorched, grainy, insufficiently caramelized (i.e. still basically just sugar), or hard as a rock - or, occasionally, all three. We've been through about nine attempts (dry, wet, a little cream, too much cream) to make a basic chewy caramel and got nowhere useful. For one thing we probably need to stir much less, because allowing the sugar to begin to burn is the point - but see above re: scorching. Maybe a saucepan is the wrong implement? But the stuff wants to be deep enough for the thermometer to read without touching the bottom of the pan, if only as a data point. Anyone who would care to share step-by-step instructions - what to do and what not to do, better yet - for making basic chewy caramel candies in your own kitchen is welcome to do so. (
tigerflower, I'm looking at you, if you happen to have a spare minute (I know: ha!) - or e-mailing you soon.) By last evening he was pretty frustrated with the whole enterprise, poor bunny.
For a number of years, I have worn a white "make poverty history" band and a yellow Livestrong band. The MPH band is pretty stretched out and also yellowing with age, and I worry that one of these days it's going to snap entirely; so I've ordered some beaded One bracelets and will replace it with them (the basic white one, a red one for AIDS, and a rainbow one for malaria) when they get here. The Livestrong band ... sigh.
Here's the thing. Of course I support cancer research and am a big fan of people living fantastic lives as survivors. And I know that Lance Armstrong actually separated himself from the Livestrong organization even before his latest round of drama. But the latest round of drama has been so repugnant to me - whatever, doping, apparently everyone does it and it's too much to expect a leader in the sport with worldwide recognition to take any steps toward changing the pervasive culture (I suppose he'd argue that if he'd taken any such steps he wouldn't be a leader because what made him a leader was all those victories), blah blah level-playing-field - but where I check out is the level at which he has shown himself to be a lying liar who lies, ruining innocent people's lives and careers, suing people for libel whom he knew to be telling the truth, which I believe is also called perjury, and then going on international television and apologizing for none of it. You have an interview with Oprah and you 'fess up to all the doping but you don't apologize for being a perjuring dickbag, that is the last shred of my sympathy out the window -
- so I have replaced my Livestrong bracelet with a yellow "CHEAT TO WIN" band from The Onion. I feel much better now.