“Home for the Holidays”?

Posted on December 25, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I woke this morning to the sounds of “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” playing on the radio. That has been my dilemma for a while now. What is home? Where is it? Is it a place, or a feeling?

For many people, “home” means where their family is. My parents died almost twenty years ago, and the rest of my family isn’t kind. I tried spending Christmas with my aunt for a while and that just didn’t work out. I was always the “Tennessee cousin” – always in the way, always left out. I felt like I was crashing a party. There were a few members of the family who made space for me and seemed to understand who I am, and for them I am grateful. But it wasn’t enough to make it worth the drive, and the constant travelling to visit every other member of that extended family on that day was overwhelming to me.

Now that I’m married, “home” could mean my parent’s in law. I’ve faked it for years, but it just isn’t what I need. They mean well, but it isn’t quite the gathering that makes me feel the peace that I associate with the birth of Christ.

This past month it has been extra awkward, and if you’ve been following along you’ll know what I’m talking about. Just thinking about going over there is bringing back that old feeling that I’d almost forgotten – dread. I thought that my hernia was acting up – but no, that’s the feeling I get in my stomach when I am very anxious about something. It is a sharp, scary pain. It is the kind of pain that curls me over into a fetal position. It is the kind of pain that stops me in my tracks. The last time I had it was in my first year of college. I was away from home, in a dorm room, no friends, no car, no idea what I was doing.

That was about as un- “home” as possible.

If “home is where the heart is” then if there is no heart, no love, no peace, then that feeling crops up.

I’ve been meditating on this day for a month, after the whole Thanksgiving fracas. I talked to my spiritual director about this, and her take on it is that maybe God put me into this family to bring healing. Maybe I’m the Christ-bearer – that I need to bring Jesus into the situation. This doesn’t mean to preach to them. It means to be like Jesus. Calming. Peaceful. Compassionate. Loving.

The line from the 23rd Psalm has started coming to mind in the past few days. “You prepare a table for me in the midst of my enemies.”

This is not a vision of “home” that is particularly appealing. “Home” and “enemy” should not be in the same sentence. For many of us, it is. For many of us, “home” isn’t a place to run to, it is a place to run from. For many of us, at the holidays we remember why we left home in the first place.

So what is “home”? Home to me is where I can be myself. Home is where my husband is. It is where I can spend all day in my jammies, making jewelry or reading, stretched out on the couch in the sunlight. Maybe a nap will be involved. Maybe a walk around the block. Home is peaceful, and quiet, and calm. Home isn’t full of sound and noise and people. It certainly isn’t full of drama.

I’ve been doing the math on Christmas this year and trying to figure out what I can handle if I go over to my in-law’s house. Go, but leave early? How early is too early? Don’t talk about certain topics? Put on a brave face? Don’t talk to a certain family member who always likes to argue, especially about faith?

I really can’t handle being around someone who speaks ill of my faith on my holiday.

I can handle it any other time. I understand. I have a lot of the same issues with Christianity. I dislike the hypocrisy. I dislike the fact that the church has become something other, something where I can’t see Jesus for all the administration and bureaucracy. Sometimes “church” is more “crazy” than Christ-like. But on Christian holidays I really can’t take the criticism.

It is like I’ve invited someone over to my house, shared my special toys with them, and then they throw them down and stomp on them. It is rude. It is childish. It is thoughtless.

So, “Home for the Holidays”? I’d rather stay at home. But I’m expected to be at the in-laws. I don’t want to. I don’t want to play the dutiful wife. It was easier, way back when, when I got stoned for the holidays. Everything blurred into a nice warm glowy blob. Now that I’m sober it is all spiky and strange.

Recovery – you have to want to get well.

Posted on October 24, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I know a lady who spent $8,000 to learn how to eat.

She went to a group of chiropractors who have cross trained in nutrition. I’m not sure why this particular paring is becoming common these days, but it is. It seems odd that regular doctors don’t seem to care about nutrition, but chiropractors do. Mine does. I’ve heard of others who do. This seems odd because chiropractors aren’t seen as “regular doctors” in many people’s eyes, so even going to them for what they normally provide is seen as suspect.

Sadly, the nutrition part isn’t covered by insurance, so it was all out of pocket. This too seems odd – it is far cheaper to teach someone how to prevent disease rather than “cure” it after it has set in. But this is a foreign concept to insurance companies. They would rather pay to get you well than to keep you well.

She didn’t have to spend any of that money. She could have done what they did for free. They put her on an elimination diet. Strip away all the stuff that usually causes problems, and stick with that for a few weeks to get all the junk out of the system. Then start adding back suspicious things and see if there is a problem. The usual stuff is all processed food and anything with gluten.

We have a winner. She was gluten intolerant. The funny/sad part is that she had figured that out on her own years back. She had gone gluten-free and done much better. Her weight had gone down and her joints didn’t hurt. But she had dropped it. She thought it was too hard.

She did the same thing this time. She said that it was too hard to go gluten free on a fast-food diet. She drives a lot and works a lot. She is too tired to cook when she gets home so she gets food on the way. But this makes no sense. There are plenty of gluten-free options these days. Everything is marked whether it is gluten free or not. It isn’t a special diet – it is pretty mainstream.

The point is that she wanted a magic pill. She wanted something simple and fast and easy. It requires work and sacrifice to make any important change, and that was the part that she found too hard.

It reminds me of when people started to notice that I’d lost weight. They (always large themselves) asked me what was my “secret”. I told them – eat better and exercise more. Their faces always sunk. They wanted it to be something simple like “eat two grapefruit a day and keep on doing the same old things you were always doing”. It doesn’t work like that.

Anything worth having requires work. The easy way is rarely the healthy way.

The point is that if she wants to get well, she has to choose. Her health has to be the winner. If she cannot eat healthy and work the way she is working, then she has to find another job. Or she has to figure out that she can cook up a large pot of food that is healthy on her days off and freeze it and reheat it at work.

The point is that she doesn’t want to take care of herself. She is a miserable person. She sleeps all the time on her time off. She has admitted that she hates everybody and has no friends.

I cannot imagine living this kind of life. I cannot imagine anybody wanting to be in this life, just going through the motions. She goes to work and hates it. She goes home and sleeps. She is escaping everything. She is trapped in her body and in her life. I can’t comprehend why anybody would want to stay in this situation. By her choice she has said that miserable is better.

She was hoping to be able to retire when she gets to be 50. She didn’t check the retirement rules correctly. Sure, she can retire, but she won’t collect her pension until she is 65, and then it willl be greatly reduced because she didn’t work long enough.

She wants to retire early because her husband is significantly older than her. She is concerned that by the time she is able to retire, he will be dead. She would like to spend time with him now. The problem is, the way her health is going, it is highly likely she will die before him. The sad part is, she already has, she just doesn’t know it. By refusing to take care of herself and sleeping all the time when she is home – she has already decided to not participate in life. She is already not alive.

I hate this. I hate all of it. There is no reason for any of this. There is no reason for her to be miserable.

Sure, it is hard to swim upstream and take care of yourself. Sure, it would be great to have everything done for you, and done well. It just doesn’t happen. Nobody is going to exercise for you. Nobody is going to turn off the TV for you. Nobody is going to make you take care of yourself.

She reads a lot of books about health and talks like an expert on it, but still won’t do it. I feel like I’m just standing by, watching her drown. I can’t save her. I want her to choose to live, and live well. Right now she is just mimicking life, just going through the motions. She has to want to live. I can’t instill that in her.

I’ve realized that this situation is just like any other addiction or mental illness. If you don’t want to get better, no amount of outside intervention will help. You can only be committed to the mental hospital if you are a danger to yourself or others. Nobody can put you on the path to recovery – you have to do it yourself. This applies to regular life as well. She has to want to get better. I’d hoped that spending all that money would be the incentive to start taking her health seriously, but it hasn’t worked.

So I wait, and pray.

Life wasn’t made to be endured.

On going to a spiritual director and not an ordained minister.

Posted on September 2, 2013 by betsybeadhead | 4 Comments

I’m always a little anxious before I go to see my spiritual director. I had to start seeing one when I was in the process to discern if I was being called to be a deacon in the Episcopal Church. That process was put on hold by the priest in charge when I came back from Cursillo a little more Pentecostal than she could handle. Then I wrote a blog post where I feel that Jesus meant for the Church to be a) not buildings but people and b) not ordained ministers, but everybody, and c) more social outreach than social club. That ticked her off a lot. So I no longer go to church, but I still go to my spiritual director. This was my choice. I get a lot from going.

There wasn’t any help on what to expect when I first went. It is kind of like going to a psychotherapist, but weirder. We talk about my relationship with God and Jesus by talking about my relationship with my husband and friends and job. I’m not sure where we are going sometimes, and I’m not sure I see the connection. But I am sure that every time I finish a session with her I want to come back the next day even though the next meeting is in a month. She manages to uncover things that I didn’t even know were hidden.

Having a spiritual director is weird coming from a faith community that has a hard time saying “I’ll pray for you.” I’m more comfortable hanging out with my Pentecostal friends than my Episcopal friends when I’m in the mood to talk about God’s interaction with my life.

This is a little weird. Supposedly I was part of a Christian church, but we would talk about God and Jesus in the abstract. We didn’t talk about God and Jesus right here, right now. They were characters in a book, not real presences in our lives. They were ideas and archetypes.

My spiritual director is part of this faith tradition, but she says things like “Invite Jesus into this situation” and “Jesus wants to be your closest friend.” She asks questions like “Where is Jesus in this moment?” This is some pretty foreign stuff. I feel like I’m doing it wrong. I feel like I should already know how to do this, how to answer these questions. I feel like I’ve been duped by priests all these years, who have kept all the good bits for themselves and left the scraps for me. I feel like I’m adult trying to learn how to ride a bicycle for the first time, when I should already know how.

I’m grateful for this time with her, and grateful to find someone who can help me. The goal in spiritual direction is “intimacy with Jesus”. This is a foreign concept to me. This isn’t something that I was ever taught in any church I’ve ever gone to. It sounds like a good idea though. It sounds like something I should already be familiar with. It sounds like the whole point of being a Christian – how can you obey God’s will if you don’t know it? How can you know it if you don’t hear it?

The funny part is that the closer I got to this idea of hearing from God, of intimacy with Jesus, the further I had to get from church. The more I talked to the priest about God talking to me, the more she thought I was crazy. The more I go to the spiritual director, the more she wants to hear about these stories and cheers me on. I’ve written about some of these stories in my “Strange but True” section.

Oh – I get it. The priests don’t want you to hear it for yourself. They want to tell you what God says. They want you to be dependent on them. They don’t want to teach you how to hear from God.

It is this kind of control that Jesus came to remove. Jesus isn’t about hoarding power. He is about giving it away. Jesus is a radical. Jesus is a revolutionary. Jesus showed us in the loaves and fishes story that God’s rules aren’t like our rules. There is so much more to how God does things than we can ever imagine. God wants us all to connect to that power and be multiplied. God wants us all to be stronger, more alive. Then God wants us to use that vitality to help others. It isn’t about paying off our mortgages sooner, as one of the “prosperity gospel” liars says. It is about using that strength and power to help people who don’t have homes at all.

Sleep (vs. alcoholism)

Posted on July 24, 2013 by betsybeadhead | 2 Comments

I know a lady who says she can’t get to sleep unless her husband is lying next to her in bed. He is retired from a third shift job and simply will not come to bed before 2. She often has to be up for work at 6. The math just doesn’t work out.

He says he is not tired. She’s repeatedly asked him to come to bed so she can sleep and he repeatedly says he will be there “in a minute.” An hour or two later he is still up, mindlessly surfing the web.

She spends the day dragging. She has almost fallen asleep at work because of lack of sleep. She has a heart problem that is exacerbated by not getting enough sleep.

I’ve started thinking about this in terms of alcoholism. Say she is the sober spouse, and his drinking is affecting her. If he listens to her needs and comes to bed, then it is OK. If he doesn’t and she suffers, then there is a problem.

So, what to do? Should she take sleeping pills? Should they get marriage counseling?

Or would a divorce be better?

Sometimes you have to separate yourself from people and situations that are harmful to you. You may want to be part of a “happy family” but if it is a family that is just for show, then the only person being fooled is you. The same works with friends. Better to have just one real friend than a bunch of people who aren’t really very loving to you, who don’t really care about your well-being.

Or, what about this? Perhaps her need to have him there is psychosomatic. Perhaps she needs to think back to before she met him and remember how she got to sleep then. If you can’t sleep because someone else isn’t present, is that their problem, or yours?

Stones

Posted on June 8, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I have a friend who needs more sleep. It will help with his anxiety and depression. It will help with his heart condition. It will help him to be more focused and less forgetful. He knows this, yet he keeps staying up late and getting up early, so every day is a repeat of the last and it is full of failure and pain. But like with liquor or drugs or any other vice he has to want to change and then there has to be grace in there somewhere too. It is hard to be stuck where you are, going around in circles. It is like Sisyphus, forever pushing that stone up a hill.

What stones do we have? Guilt. Shame. Anger. Fear. Hate. Racism. Abuse (of self or others). Drugs. Some of these stones are given to us by our parents, by classmates, by society. Some we pick up ourselves throughout our journey in life.

After a while it becomes very hard to carry all that weight. Sometimes we continue to carry our stones out of habit. Sometimes it is out of a sense of duty or obligation. Sometimes it is out of fear – what if we don’t know how to act without it? We’ve carried it around so long that we started to define ourselves by it.

I knew a guy who is an alcoholic. That is how he defines himself. He doesn’t say that he is a person with a drinking problem. The problem has become his personality. He has decided that “messed up” is who he is. He carries around this stone like it is a normal thing now.

I know women who stay with the same boyfriend for years even though it is plain that he is no good. He sits on the couch playing video games all day while she goes to work and supports both of them. He makes fun of her in public. But she stays, because she’d rather be in a bad relationship than no relationship at all. He is her stone. He weighs her down. But she doesn’t know how to move on. She doesn’t need him financially, and he isn’t helpful emotionally. But she’s defined herself by “being in a relationship”, even if it is unhealthy.

We are like that with our stones. We’d rather stick “with the devil you know” than to be on our own.

My Mom wanted to quit smoking for years, but she knew that my Dad would never quit. She thought it would be too hard to quit while he kept smoking. So she kept it up, all two packs a day of it. He finally left us to go live back home with his Mom (in his 50s) and then we found out my Mom had lung cancer shortly thereafter. She quit smoking then, but it was too late. She died at 53. Then he died just 6 weeks later. They had both killed themselves out of habit and an inability to change.

I wonder if Dad ever thought the same thing – that he wanted to quit smoking but didn’t think he could if Mom kept smoking? Wouldn’t that have been ?

I wonder if our friends and coworkers are like that? I’ll quit gossiping if you do. I’ll quit telling racist jokes if you do. What if we are playing chicken with each other? What if we are keeping ourselves back because of others? Who is going to be brave enough to take the first step and just drop the stone she is carrying that is slowing progress down?

Not taking care of our bodies is another stone. Overeating is a form of self-abuse. There is a pain that comes from being overfull. There is pain that comes from the guilt and shame of the addiction itself. Somehow the punishment (the obesity, the disability that comes with being so large) is seen as deserved. Sometimes the problem is that the person feels lesser-than, that he doesn’t deserve to feel good, to feel love. Sometimes becoming obese is a way to keep people away.

Sometimes people say they are too old to change. This too is a lie we tell ourselves so that we don’t get better. We think we can’t, so we don’t even try. As long as you are alive, there is hope. And if you start trying to get better, you’ll gain more life. You are only dead when you give up. As long as you keep trying to grow, you’ll get stronger.

One way to drop that stone is to realize that you are carrying it. You’ve carried it for so long that just dropping it outright seems impossible. Try doing it in little steps. Journal about it. Journaling helps you notice progress. It is like writing a letter to yourself.

I’m sending you a letter, now. I used to be where you are. I still have stones I’m carrying. The things I’ve done to grow and stretch have given me the insight and strength to get over and around other stones. I’m sending you this letter to let you know that you can do it. It is hard. It takes a lot of work. You’ll fall and fail quite a bit. You’ll stop doing the work for a while and then remember and start back up again. That is normal. You aren’t failing. You’re being human. I’m cheering you on.

In a way, I’m also sending a letter back in time to myself, to let myself know that there is hope. I’m 44 now. I was nowhere near this balanced and aware and healthy at 24. I wonder where I’ll be at 64? At 84? I need to remind myself to be gentle with myself but not allow myself to fall off the path completely. I’m trying to remind you of the same. Forgive yourself your failings, but keep on working on them.

I wonder if we can get a letter to Sisyphus and tell him to just walk away from that stone? Forget pushing it up the hill. It is easier to climb up the hill unburdened.