Where Has Most of April Gone?

Oh right: A difficult move, a milestone birthday, and a big party.

In the past five years I have moved 10 times. Myself, two kids, and the remains of two parents. Gradually, I have learned to ask for and receive help. Here I am with (small portions of) my dad’s archives and my mom’s quilts.

I recently turned 50 and the country I live in seems to be hurtling toward dictatorship. Both these things freak me out. So I did what I do when things feel out of control and scary in the larger world.

I made a big huge mess of my personal life and invited everyone I know over to visit.

Literally.

I put the majority of my belongings into boxes and moved them to a new place at the beginning of April. I also scheduled a party for April 12th to mark my reaching half a century of life. To ensure I completely unpacked and re-ordered my life on the other side of the move. Before people came over. I am driven by vanity and like to appear like I’m not a total mess. Or at least my home isn’t.

I did the same thing as a small child when the problems outside my bedroom door seemed like more than I could handle. I closed the door, made a huge mess by dumping everything I owned into a big pile in the center of the room, and proceeded to sort and organize everything into place. The process soothed my nervous system, leaving me better able to handle the problems outside my door. Sometimes the problems solved themselves before I finished sorting and organizing my stuff.

Whenever I make a mess—or move or throw a party—it is because I needed a nervous system reset. I needed to make a big huge mess of my life and create a nearly impossible to-do list in order to then feel in control as I put things back together and accomplished most things on the list. While connecting.

As I look back at my accumulated writing, I am going to see this pattern repeat again and again. Me making messes to distract from bigger messes that overwhelm me. Cleaning up the smaller messes to remind myself I can also help clean up the bigger messes.

I am actually pretty good at cleaning up messes. Having had lots and lots of practice.

And still, when I feel afraid I don’t know how to clean up a given mess, I make a different mess to practice and regain confidence in my ability to clean up messes. Because cleaning and reorganizing things is extremely soothing, especially to addled nervous systems.

Moving completely dysregulates me. Organizing a new home puts me back together. Balance is everything.

Having things be organized is comforting—but the actual act of organizing things is perhaps even more comforting. When we outsource cleaning and tidying our spaces to other people, we are actually outsourcing valuable nervous system regulation we ourselves need. This is also true when just one member of a household is responsible for keeping it tidy and organized. That person gets the nervous system regulation benefit of tidying and organizing. Others just get the benefit of living in a tidy organized space. Along with cognitive dissonance and guilt, knowing they didn’t contribute to the tidiness. Leading to greater stress. Which the cleaning and organizing person also somehow becomes responsible for.

I don’t like the way it is happening or the impact it is having on all involved, but I do think manufacturing should come back home to the United States. Outsourcing our grunt work has the same impact that outsourcing the grunt work in the home has. It distances more people from the grunt work, making them feel “above” grunt work, creating greater hierarchies in society, and most critically separating too many humans from the necessary work of cleaning up their own messes.

When we clean up our own messes, we make much smaller messes. It is people who did not learn to clean up their own messes who make big huge messes. It is the disconnect between making the mess and cleaning it up that leads to its untenable size.

No one who has to clean up the mess makes a bigger mess than they can clean up.

Teaching men to expect women to clean up their messes led to several major problems, including the propensity for men to make huge messes they expect others to clean up for them and the absence in many men’s lives of the nervous system regulation value of cleaning.

NOT ALL MEN

My online identity is “Don’t Sum Me Up” and I never mean to generalize or stereotype—even though I often fall into it, just as others of us do.

Especially to those of us who pay attention to patterns of data or experience, stereotypes have value. AND they always have limitations.

Because I have been stereotyped and/or summed up by less than the total value of my parts, I really try to resist stereotyping.

AND I still often fall into it. Because it’s human. We take the sum total of information we input and begin to recognize patterns in an attempt to predict future behavior. We all do it.

The autistic and hypersensitive among us do it even more than others.

This is actually how propaganda and political manipulation work. When the messages around us become increasingly controlled by people seeking to control what we think, we begin to think in that way. They puppeteer our belief systems by manipulating what we think we experience. They inundate us with messages designed to act as experiences. Creating stereotypes.

This is exactly why my paternal grandfather isolated my grandmother to West Virginia, my father isolated my mother to West Virginia, and my ex isolated me to the western Philly suburbs.

To transport us back in time to when women were meant to be subservient. To surround us with messaging and images supporting that. My ex’s dad did the same thing with my ex’s mom, moving her from downtown Baltimore to rural Harford County, MD. Where it was more politically correct to subject women to servitude. Watching Mad Men a second time this past year helped me see exactly how the practice works to subdue otherwise feisty wives. Provided early motherhood alone didn’t suffice. Or multiple pregnancies, labors, deliveries, children.

My grandfather and father both felt a need to isolate their wives to the rural countryside 50 years in the past upon marriage. My ex just isolated me from New York City, where I had lived for more than a decade, to Philly, where I knew no one. Culturally it was a backslide, but it was still a city. (A city I grew to love!) Which is why he felt a need to then further isolate me to the western Philly burbs. He had to isolate me in steps, just as my dad did with my mom. First he moved her from New York to suburban New Jersey. Then to the middle of nowhere West Virginia. No way would she have left Manhattan for Monaville. Frogs do not hop into hot water. The water heats up gradually around them.

Many male ancestors in my family line tried this with the women in their lives. Weirdly, my Granddad Jack convinced my Grandma Betty it was what she wanted. To retire to a rural village in southern England. Where women’s rights went back 50 years.

To hear the story told, moving to Newick in southeastern England was my Grandmother Betty’s dream come true. Her husband fulfilling it for her by taking his final job in London. Leaving one of their children behind in America.

Because Betty wanted to retire in English cow fields. Where women had as few rights as cows. Betty, who grew up in Manhattan.

Whether Betty who grew up in Manhattan really did want to retire amid cows in the southern English downs died with Betty when I was 9. I can’t pretend to know otherwise, nor do I.

I simply continue to interrogate what people tell me I want. Especially when it differs from what I actually want.

What if Betty wanted to move back to Manhattan and hang out with her dear friend Rosalie? Who became my surrogate grandmother in college? Who hosted me at least once a semester at Union Street Cafe and lived into her 80s, ably navigating Manhattan just as she had as a child? Who was brilliant, kind, and funny and more of a grandmother to me than both my biological ones combined.

I was told by many others it was Betty’s dream to retire in rural England where there were more cows than people. She may have even told me herself. But what if that were actually Jack’s dream? And he argued it so persuasively he convinced Betty it were her own?

My ex tried to tell me retrospectively it was MY dream to move to the suburbs. NEVER ever in the realm of reality and truth is such a thing possible. And yet if I had lived with him for several more years, who’s to say what I might have said was my own dream.

THIS is why I broke from the cycle of my grandmothers and mother before me, leaving my narcissistic abuser to redefine what my dreams are.

Dreams hatched while trapped in abuse can sometimes be the dreams of our abusers.

Escape abuse and dream new dreams.

If they are the same dreams, YAY! At least then you know they are YOUR dreams.

I made a big huge mess of everything, invited everyone I know over, and cleaned up the mess before they arrived. Thanks to all who took part and helped. Now, to focus on the mess of the wider world again.

For the record, the person I call my narcissistic abuser in this post was also in attendance at my 50th birthday party and helped me in this latest move. It was one of the more difficult and frustrating moves we had either experienced, and he did so without complaint. Maybe I’m cleaning up the mess of my fractured marriage as well?

Many things can simultaneously be true. People who abuse you can also treat you kindly. People can change, too. When they want to.

I have had the incredible good fortune of getting to witness many people change. Including my father and now maybe my children’s father. It is also entirely capable my grandfathers changed to better meet my grandmothers’ needs in their advancing age, and I was just not paying attention. In fact, it is probable. There is a reason most of the women in my family stayed. Even after my maternal great-great-grandmother divorced her husband in 1892 and moved alone to Washington, DC, from Georgia with two small children. Giving me the inspiration and strength to do the same.

We are all capable of change when we want to. Not so much when we don’t.

I am ready to embrace change as I welcome turning 50. Change is the only constant.

(Sorry I fell behind on Good Grief posts this month. Thanks for your understanding.)