Coincidence Not Spoken

Their small talk is less memorable today than it was that spring morning eight years ago. Only the feelings, hers, of needing to create meaning and a place for herself on that street in that neighborhood, with that particular German woman, remain.

It was hard for Zena to keep up with the brusque woman beside her. She could not leave off her wondering: Why exactly she had agreed to come for this walk, meet with these various woman, and particularly this one, who didn't seem to want to connect deeply with her? How quickly could she either create common ground, or leave politely? She was supposed to be social, do her part for these newest comers to her town. But she was the only mom with a young child who even made time for these walks. Zena could feel the anxiety of her own needs not being met.

How would she make a weekly walk with these women, who had grown, invisible children, when her own son was needing to be pushed ahead of her in a jogging stroller, her nearly-ignored companion on this Georgia spring morning?

She'd had to change her own schedule to break away from home to drive to this strange neighborhood. Beside her, Jutta talked too fast. Zena knew she had to create a calm place to connect, or her own anxiety would only escalate. Why was it so hard for Zena to feel mature enough to warrant the German woman's attention? Was it just that she had such a young child? Zena tried to make eye contact with Jutta, and noticed that neither the sharp lines of Jutta's features nor her eyes were patient. Looking around at the houses they passed by, trying to follow Jutta's abrupt speech, Zena was out of her element. The houses were too huge for her taste, and Zena knew instinctively that each house was cleaner inside than her own home left behind in disarray.

Yet it was a sunny day, still sparkling fresh with dew. Zena's own habit was to find a natural connection for herself with most strangers. She could reach for common ground, or create it if necessary.

Today it made Zena anxious that she had her young child, not yet two, with needs she was only just beginning to fathom. Instinctively she knew T would only allow so much of his day to be spent listening to adult conversation. She would have to connect fast with this woman, to make them both comfortable, and get a lay of the neighborhood so she could cut the walk short if needed.

Jutta's small talk about landmarks in the neighborhood didn't make Zena feel at home. If only she could find a place to insert a snippet of her own story in one of the breaks in Jutta's chatting. And Zena's telling Jutta that her mother was German from the Black Sea region of Russia, hadn't triggered further interest. Well, hadn't her mother told her that immigrants after the War hadn't been welcome? That is why they didn't stay, but came to America.

But as Jutta became more personal, Zena found herself listening with interest as she explained how and why she and her husband were here from Florida. And then, Jutta began to talk of her German family.

There was an urgency as Zena waited for the right time to ask her question. She was excited to know just what aspect of German life they would have in common. Together, they would heal something, she could sense it.

For she too had German roots, had lived in Germany herself, was first generation American. Just 10 years before she had lived in Germany as the Berlin Wall had been dismantled.

When the moment came to ask, Zena said, "Where did you come from in Germany?"

Jutta, was terse in her reply, assuming that Zena was an average American-born with Casual Interest. "I lived in the south of Germany, " she answered. " A village you wouldn't know." Zena knew the south of Germany well enough. She was curious, able to make eye contact now. She had a genuine interest in this woman's story of an earlier life. Zena knew she finally would have an appropriate way to share. Story about family living in the south of Germany, after the War. Of her Uncle who was a dentist there still.

There was just one part of her own story that Zena rarely thought about these days, that took place in a shadow of a place whose name she had nearly forgotten by the time she walked with Jutta. It was village in a district near where her uncle lived that very few people knew about, or came from. Ansbach. The Germans still used words like insane asylum. Tiny Ansbach was home to an insane asylum.

Zena had been in that asylum for a brief time and had recovered her sanity. Her husband told her later that when he visited her by train, he sometimes walked the grounds. One day he saw a building (not the one she was in) surrounded by high and treacherous barbed wire. But today, Zena had her life back, complete with the faith to mother a child. Ansbach was far from her mind.

"What village?" Zena asked, thinking it might be Hausen-am-Bach where her uncle had his home and practice, a stone's throw from a community church. Zena loved coincidences, wondered what meaning there would be in the surprise Jutta would share.

"Ansbach," said Jutta. Fortunately Jutta was not an intuitive at all. She didn't stop to take in Zena's shock; instead she continued to talk about her childhood, never finding out whether or not Zena knew a stitch about living in Germany.

Zena versus the Psychiatric Diagnosis

This is a share that I wrote for my recovery group. I wrote it on the day I finally challenged my psychiatrist's model of my "illness", and would not take "no" for an answer. Over the intervening years he had "allowed" me a more optimistic diagnosis of "manic-depression". I still felt I was not being fully honest when I allowed him this analysis of my case. And, I was more than tired of him thinking (each time I came in hoping to reduce or eliminate medications) that I had showed up "manic" that day.

It seems helpful to revisit my words, written on a Valentine's Day appointment in 2007. I have forgotten to celebrate my second anniversary of being free of a daily regimen of psychiatric medications. This is a significant milestone, given that it was I who led the way out of my own jungle.

"Today I made the breakthrough with my psychiatrist that I had hoped, and can see a view to a life beyond these woods.
Dr. S. has finally listened to MY whole story of my case. I heard myself finally take credit for the fact that I was a scientist, with training (and practice, prior to motherhood) in an area of the natural sciences that admits it is multi-variable. Once I shared that, I felt comfortable listing each of the variables I had identified as being implicated in my "relapses".

For the first time I gave myself credit for the medicine free life I had had for over 11 years, prior to my recurrence in 2003. My doctor had chosen to ignore this, and once even told me that the positive effect of medications might last as much as 12 years after ending pharmaceutical treatments!

Today, even with my anxiety about being misperceived, I was able to be complete and tell my story clearly. I used my fifteen minutes to articulate my hunches that my first relapse was hormonally related and had every bit to do with being a mom of a nursing toddler. Nursing takes a lot of fat nutrients, that the brain (of both mom and child) needs for good health. In hindsight, I knew I was not supplementing sufficiently to accommodate sensitivities that have shown themselves in other endocrine systems, such as are involved with skin problems like eczema. I have always treated my eczema with omega 3's when my skin flairs up. I never supplement between times. When I had my illness recur in 2003, my eczema flared up, for th first time in years, right on the heels of the hospitalization. Finally I see how my vulnerability to eczema fits. Perhaps my eczema has always reflected dietary deficiency.....

My doctor agreed telling me, "You know your body best." At last. A breakthrough for an area of medicine that most certainly does not trust patients perspectives. Maybe having my husband as witness while I quietly led the way... helped me break free.

After the appointment, my husband and I were driving away and on our way to lunch. My husband turned to me and said spontaneously, "I can see exactly why a person would get anxious in that office, especially with only 15 minutes to work with." Wow. To hear those words, said without my needing to ask. For once, I saw that my anxiety had always been a natural response, given the uneven power balance between a psychiatrist and his or her patient.

It made me aware that it could be very easy for my doctor to misread my anxiety too! In the past, when I had come to my appointments alone and without an outside witness, this same doc had seen my anxiety (fast speech in using the quarter hour effectively) as mania. I looked at my watch and moved on, realizing the importance of not being derailed from the purpose I had brought to my visit. But still my doc had to have the last word, "You look manic to ME." It was so bizarre. Even my husband told me my doctor was out to lunch, when I called him after the appointment. Another time, he wanted to raise medications that I thought were giving me side effects (I had feelings of drunkenness... even euphoria). He hadn't listened to me! I KNEW I was having issues with a medication (that I later identified independently, using my own good judgment). When my eyes flashed at his dismissing me, after I had made a special appointment to address my problen, he insisted on this smiling (and arrogant) comment, "Anger is a sign of mania." That's the day I decided he would never get away with getting the best of me, because I would bring my dispassionate "better half" to my next appointment. The next time I challenged the good doc, my husband would be there.

Thanks to the commitment I made to myself, I can be at peace, knowing I did good.

I can throw out a good bit of my medications now.

Having a repository of all the medicines I have used only reminds me over and over of where I have been, and the shame of being held back by someone else's inaccurate assessment of me. It is one thing to remember my past, and quite another to use it as evidence against myself. In my case, that is too great an opportunity to self-bludgeon or re-experience resentment towards the medical model. Time to toss everything out that Dr. S did not put on today's script It is time to have greater confidence and faith and trust that if I need any of them ever again, I will be able to make that possible, through my new respected position of equality. Perhaps I can relax now and become a gentle giant."

Reaching back to find myself

Finding Teri

But for my dearest companion, Serendipity, I might still be trying to fight my mathematician’s voice or finding fault inside of me. But I had already said “yes” to joining Facebook in December. Many people from my current home town asked me to become virtual friends as well as real ones. Gradually I found a few folks from my high school years that belong in my current life too.

After searching through the debris of Scotty's life story and finding broken mirrors, I became curious about who I really was in the journals that I no longer had from the time I moved out . One particular person came to mind whose vision of myself was trustworthy. The day came when I decided to type in his name on Facebook. There is was, with a photo that to my mind's eye was unmistakably he.

What I write here is private and below the radar, but only the dead have their real names revealed. I'll call this old friend “No”. “No” and I knew each other short months He was the one who helped me keep my promise to myself, to leave my family of origin, before the end of my first semester of college. This was months, but an eon, before my mathematician and I met. It would take me some 30 years to recognize that the simple sketch of "No's" story had indelibly informed my life. His vision of the world and of my essential self, helped me experience that the world could be a good place. I think the shadow his life cast on mine made it only too plain that my mathematician could never be a lifelong mate, even before I could trust my instincts to act on that knowledge.

I am almost positive that reaching back to “No” after 32 years of no contact, has helped me reclaim the young woman I really have wanted nothing to do with—for her indecisiveness. I have found myself forgiving myself for my misperceptions of her. I’ve needed “No”’s voice in order to stop fighting my inner critic.

Through him, or rather, through my courage to ask his confidence, I am seeing myself through new eyes. Our correspondence contains so much a meeting of minds that I find myself having a renewed respect for myself.

I have been fortunate, blessed really, that I was motivated to do this work by the spirits of two important people in my life, who are now gone. Maia and my Uncle Wally.

ln corresponding with "No", I have found genuine friendship, stripped of illusions. In recognizing all this good in him, I see, from a whole new vista, that the same good was always there in me.

I am restored in faith and in enthusiasm, for my work as a writer and storyteller.

Does Death Transform Life?

I think so. I'm sure the perspective I have on my own life is only possible because Maia's death last May forced me from old ruts of complacency. But I would never have been ready for her message had not my Uncle Wally preceded her in death just before his own birthday, in August 2007. He also left too early for me.

As those who loved him in Germany and in New York struggled to get him across the Atlantic Ocean to New York, my mom intervened, from her castle on the hill, objecting to every effort made by others. She could not be dissuaded from rying to pull strings from thousands of miles away. She made Uncle Wally’s death more of an emotional challenge than any of us needed. But she was exactly in her appointed role as the constant example of what not to be.

I've always needed honesty and transparency-- more than other people, I think. That’s why it seemed so contraindicated that my mom used her early knowledge of my uncle's illness to lie to me, all over again. And my uncle agreed to this, perhaps because of my so-called psychiatric vulnerability. My mother and her dying brother were going to keep his dying a secret. The past hadn't changed; and the future was land mined as they both tried to make it a family pact that everyone would keep me in the dark. I would be one of the few cousins (besides my brother and my uncle's only son) to be kept from the truth of his health dilemma. Fortunately my closest aunt, who is like a sister to me, shared the news as soon as she was able. The price for her was that she was made out to be evil incarnate for her loving disclosure.

I loved my uncle, and I had amends to make with him that I never got to communicate completely. I think I was too afraid, and I didn’t dare speak urgently, for fear that he would think I had given up faith in him. I never expected him to die so early, before he turned 70.

With Uncle Wally gone, too quickly for closure, all my uncle’s six remaining siblings got to face that they too would die. One of my aunts decided to prepare her future gravesite and that of her husband, as a gift to her children.

My own sense of immortality was rapidly being deconstructed. Still, it did not prepare me for the death of someone my own age. Now I know I am on that old cliché of “borrowed time”. But we all are.

I should have known that already, as another cousin of mine died in 2001, while spending Thanksgiving night at her parent’s home. She was 37.

Dear Maia was 49 when she passed last May, leaving her parents, Jack and Natalie, stunned at their loss. Suddenly, I realized death could come any time, for any of us. I could die before my parents. I needed to find my peace inside me. Fifty myself, I’d lost my hormones early, and suddenly the girl inside me that had known Maia in puberty, knew she was alone. Maia would never be able to help me remember the past.

Not long after my uncle's death and the ensuing lessons from my mother, I finally realized that the voice in my head was not simply internalized from her. While I had actually divorced myself of many of her judgments. I’d made them a part of me. The voice I hear and the mirror I use to look at myself were given to me during my "PhD in the school of hard knocks.”

It had taken me eight years to finally admit I could not live with him, marry him or ever have children with him. I loved the man, but never learned to value myself... as much as he valued his commitment to me. Even at the end I saw myself at the short end of the stick, not measuring up to his abilities.

Until the day that he wrenched my right shoulder.

To this day, I do not remember him choosing to take responsibility for that injury. Instead, I was blamed for answering a phone that had wakened me that morning. I may not have allowed him the opportunity to apologize, because by then I knew it was too late; he was never going to change his way of dealing with his emotions. Even more, I felt the fool because I had stayed with him that long to find out. When he refused counseling after my gentle attempts to assert the issue, I knew that leaving was my only option.

Even though I am happily married now to a man with a different PhD, I kept this loyalty to my mathematician, the man who witnessed my life until the mid-point of my graduate work.

I took his judgmental voice with me, kept it with me allowing it to foster a harsh inner critic, this past two decades.

What was worse was in remembering Seattle’s bank robber, Scott Scurlock, this winter. The Scott I knew had witnessed my return to college years before. His death, however, seemed to cast shadows over me that no amount of study could illuminate. True crime stories, like those of Ann Rule, are really not my genre!

For a few weeks there, I lost self-respect and tried to find answers in looking at sordid things that were really none of my business. I could see my vulnerability and feel compassion, but my trail of intimacies, which only narrowly avoided one with Scotty, left me feeling only shame. Trying to reconstruct my life when I knew Scotty, I saw I’d left part of myself behind. Looking back over that time in my young womanhood brought up so many questions I could not answer.

serendipity

I come from the steppes of Russia. Ambivalent alliances, we were Germans transplanted in the black deep soils of Russia. Our family fled back to Germany under duress, when my grandmother could no longer conceal loyalties. “Stalin will send us to Siberia, we cannot stay.”

Autumn, Nineteen hundred and forty three, my mother was ten years old. Her small soul yearned back towards her father, an agronomist, whom she would never see again. Her will was already tilting towards America, ten years in the future.
My ancestors retreated west in covered wagons, protected by the German army.

I come from a father, whose family is still a secret sore. Unfit to serve, his back was held against him-he never experienced war, but from a distance. But an intimate war found him later in his own home. My father is a man who watched and listened. A man who went to college on the G-I Bill, he was the first of his family to become an engineer.

I come from fear in my mother’s breastmilk, from something following nothing-- that became me. I come from tears that hold every story worth telling and I’ll tell them all to everyone who will listen.

I come from gladness at a brother born in my tenth year from something coming out of me to give to him that in my wildest dreams I never knew I had. I come from mending mirrors so that the images are true and irrevocable.

why avoid argument in 12-step programs?

I am a long time member of a 12 step program called Emotions Anonymous.

And a "believer" who is dogma-aversive.

I know that in 12-step recovery work, we create safety in our diverse groups through our careful avoidance of argument. We heal, we find out we are not as broken as we think, by listening and allowing people to express their own unique opinions.

There is always a tension in diversity, but that tension also makes things interesting and helps us see the paradox in our own simple recovery path.

My problem is I love to argue. Or is it just that I am trained to notice how I want to distinguish my differences from others, even when agreement would be more conducive to peace?

I think each of us in "program" knows there is a dynamic tension always in our groups, because our stories can never overlap one hundred percent. One day we must see those differences and talk about them as well, while being observant that many people are easily hurt and argument can divide and destroy a delicate sense of safety.

In our program we choose to focus on the agreement, while allowing and then eventually learning to cherish the places where we may be different. No one needs to be just like us. It is in speaking about who I am, through my own unique perspective that I share a thread that might meet someone's unexpected need. We have harmony AND different colors that contrast.

I need your differing point of view, but not your need to be right about it. Righteousness is the enemy of healing. Nor do you need my righteousness, as proud of my own lessons as I may be, I may be mistaken. Yet there is my differing perspective as a spice of life.

And as we advance in program, we notice things that come to us from outside program that we want to share.

Another clear boundary in our groups is that we use only approved program literature at a meeting, however humble it might be. What we share from printed materials, must come from agreed on literature, approved from EA International. Some folks find this rigid at first. We can be autonomous when we share from our hearts, as we try to put our personal experience into program perspectives. But in a meeting, pre-printed materials shared from the media, or books written by popular writers can introduce points of disagreement that we so assiduously avoid.