The Family Business

Last night my husband and I rented movies and ate Mexican food. It was quite the rowdy Friday night for us. As I was getting into bed I noticed that I had received a couple of text messages from my brother. The first one made reference to my blog and something about "binomial insurgency." The second said something like he expected me to answer him personally. My reaction? WTF?

I first had to look up "binomial" and "insurgency" just to be sure I knew what he was trying to convey. The last time I heard "binomial" used in a sentence it was binomial nomenclature and I was in 8th grade Algebra. Sure enough:

Binomial: bi·no·mi·al /[bahy-noh-mee-uhl]
–noun
1. Algebra. an expression that is a sum or difference of two terms, as 3x + 2y and x2 − 4x.
2. Zoology, Botany. a taxonomic name consisting of a generic and a specific term, used to designate species.

In·sur·gen·cy
Pronunciation: in-'s&r-j&n-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -cies
: the quality or state of being insurgent; specifically : a condition of revolt against a recognized government that does not reach the proportions of an organized revolutionary government and is not recognized as belligerency

Apparently I am a mathematical rebellion. Either that or a zoological disturbance.

Our texting back and forth finally led to a phone call. J was amused by this texting and decided to get in on the action and began to text my brother as well. My brother was just saying he was essentially just sending a message. Basically, Dad was hurt by my portrayal of him as a "monster" and that it had damaged his familial relations, but he couldn't elaborate specifically how that manifested. Huh.

My brother is a really good guy. I truly believe he was bridging family ties and he's been a peace keeper from the start. I did say that I have not talked with Dad directly and based on recent caporegime messages from both my brother and mom, I think that all I can do is deal with each relationship individually. I empathized with his predicament of being put in the middle and said that he could choose to remove himself as the middle man.

After we hung up, J and I talked. The more I discussed it with him the more I became aware of how our family operated. It was like the The Godfather. Family came first and you never betrayed the family. I guess I played the family consigliere until recently. Cooking was a huge place of bonding. Dad's lamb shank recipe could rival the Corleone's spaghetti sauce any day. And there were messages passed down from the Don (aka Dad). I'm not certain what I'd kiss considering Dad doesn't wear any rings. Perhaps his golf club?

Its not personal, its business. While I haven't had an offer I couldn't refuse or a dead horse head in my bed, I have decided to leave the guns and take the cannoli.

Just Call Him Mark Spitz

Back in 2004 my husband first came to Indy with his mother to scope out a place to live. He said he kept me in mind while touring with the real estate agent. Why, I will never know as I had dumped him the day before he left on his trip because he was taking his mother and not me with him. However, now that we are married and made it through that bump in the road I can say I'm grateful he did keep me in mind.

The condo sits on a lake (playing to my love of water), has a community pool (love of swimming), lots of light and a fireplace. J later bought a kayak to paddle around and this summer we bought a life vest for me. (Much better than me wearing a men's extra large and having it essentially strangle me every time I sit down in it.) Another aside: the life vest says "Ho Sports" on it in hot pink. That alone made me want to buy it. Every time I see it, I end up in a fit of giggles. Plus, it was from Costco, J's mecca. Ok, back to the real point of the entry.

When I was little I had a curmudgeon of a dog named Henry. Henry was a Scottie as well, but a very large Scottie who actually was the runt of the litter. We would take Henry with us to Ginny and Pop (maternal grandparents) to swim in their pool. A couple of times, maybe more, my brother and I would be playing and the dog decided to join us. This then cued Ginny to say, "Damn dog!" and jump in to save him. Scotties are shaped like mailboxes with heads and little skinny legs. Essentially they sink.

Back when I first went out with my back, J and I took Edgar to the lakeside to play fetch. The ball landed in the water and much to my surprise, Edgar went in after it. I began to panic. But Edgar is not a typical Scottie. He is very long and tall for this breed and definitely would not win best in show...well that and he doesn't have any nads.

He's always been a bit athletic. We call him Leapin' Lizards at times because he can do things like jump on beds (no other Scottie I've had could do this), jump on my counter (see previous entry with destroyed kitchen), and once jumped out of my car while we were at the park because he saw another dog. That was the scariest day of my life so far. Mom and I got home to see we only had 2 dogs, not 3. We found him in the park and all I could do was hold him and cry. We no longer roll down the windows. At any rate, back to the swimming!

Edgar and I went to play a game of fetch the other day. He loves this game. But inevitably the ball lands in the water.
The first time he went in after it I freaked out, but J held me back and Edgar found sheer joy in just wading around figuring out he could drink the water while he walked then began to venture out further. As seen here:
This progresses into more of a shore wading/venturing out further. Mind you, the ball is now being carried off further into the lake by the current.
Edgar then sees the ball (aka, eye on the prize) and begins to go after it. This usually starts with him belly flopping out into the deeper water.
And then he tries to get the ball, but ends up inhaling more water and pushing the ball further away. By now, I'm freaking out because he is so far out there and I begin to call him back while simultaneously starting to prep myself for going in after him. It takes him awhile to give up, but he will swim back to shore.We do end up losing quite a few balls, which we may go get the kayak out to retrieve. But Edgar is very very proud of himself and happy, scrawny legs and all. Good thing he likes water because he always ends up in the bathtub after a swim in the lake.

Good Friends

Well, everyone will be thrilled to know that I have made up with my mother. I know some of you were just on the edge of your seats out there, biting your nails, and holding your breath in anticipation of what would happen. Kind of like how it was cool to watch "Days of Our Lives" in junior high and just couldn't wait to see if Roman was really John or if Bo and Hope would really get back together. But, this is a really great development in my life. It also means I can dedicate more writing to stupid stuff that for some reasons my dedicated readers keep tuning in for.

One of my close girlfriends noticed, "Holy Hannah, I certainly know you've been blogging since you've been unemployed with all of the entries!" Well, yes, it is one way I like to think I'm contributing to society in my delusional state of temporary housewifedom. The same girlfriend showed me a link to someone who truly is insane and either deserves a DSM diagnosis or a cookbook publishing deal . (Hey, its my first successful embedded link! Cue the roar of approval from the peanut gallery.)

Lets talk fiber, shall we? I mean truly how many entries are there dedicated to fiber out there? I figure if one person can do a whole blog on cupcakes then I can do one little tiny entry about fiber. The first thing you should know is that my husband is obsessed with fiber. This did not come with him attending medical school. Nope, I blame/credit his family of origin for this. We cannot scan the cereal or bread aisle without him flipping the boxes over to see exactly how many grams are worthy of being in our cabinets. I've learned that 2 grams is unacceptable and that 3 grams is marginal, but anything with 4 or more is the bees knees. This is a total switch for a girl who grew up with whatever was advertised the most on Saturday morning cartoons and promised some kind of prize in the sugary melee.

He once told me a story of a friend in high school who would look for the cereal with twigs in it. I knew this particular friend. He was brilliant, but also in that way that made his view on life seem just a bit off. I thought it was just his way of being quirky and J was just relaying this in the story. The other night we went specifically to the store for cereal.

"Hey, honey, look twigs! Its the cereal (Mario/Yoshi/Ben/etc) had in high school! I found it!" I heard as he picked up a very bland looking box. There were no cartoon characters promising chocolatey goodness in every bite, no secret decoder rings to collect, and no mazes on the back to help the Captain find his crunch-o-scope. "And look at the fiber content on this!"

I further inspected the box to find the unheard of amount of 12 grams of fiber in 1 serving. 12. Yes, you read it correctly.

"They would have to be literal twigs in order to get this amount of fiber in a serving. You may as well just go gnaw on the tree in the front yard. Are you sure they aren't real twigs?" Images flooded of Edgar pooping in the front yard and J in his bathrobe gnawing at the base of our pine tree like a beaver while neighbors strolled on their merry morning walks.

"Nah, I think its just what they call them."

"Well, now that's an advertising gimmick I wouldn't have thought of. Which company actually hired this ad agency and thought that this was the BEST idea?" I prematurely concluded that it had to have been a Japanese company given the fact that my cousin's blog was filled with poorly translated English advertising concepts. See here as an example of many.

Nope it was Kashi. A company marketed to the health conscious Gen X'ers/Baby Boomers. They were located in the hoity toity area of San Diego, La Jolla. On vacation once a girlfriend and I had to rent a Mercedes car service to get back to our hotel from this area because there weren't any regular cabs to be found in this area of town.

"Good friends?" I then exclaimed looking at the P.C. correct couple on the front of the box. "That is what they are calling it? Good friends? As in, you should be good friends with your colon?"

Hell, if I ate this cereal NO ONE would want to be good friends with me because I would stink so much. But, never the less, it won a spot in our cabinet. Note that it also states "I will savor my broccoli" Not a good friend of W, who hates broccoli, so that meant it would be a friend of mine.

Too Close To Home

I hung up on my mother two nights ago.

This is not a proud moment and I'm still stewing about it. In fact it is something that I feel really bad about. I do not condone this type of acting out in others, so why I think its ok for me to do it can be a complete therapy session waiting to happen.

The fact of the matter is I got completely overwhelmed, emotionally overloaded, and took things way too personally. Once I had clicked "end" on the phone I looked for something to soothe my internal rage. It was cocktail time, but turning to alcohol was not a good choice, nor was eating (although I did promptly break out the red pepper hummus), nor would exercise because I have a tendency to over do things and with a back injury still healing, I knew better. By the time my husband came through the door I had already screwed up two recipes and was slamming things around the kitchen with tear stains on my tee shirt. He calmly led me through a debriefing session which made me think that he was the better therapist and I had the insight of a rock. However, it made me feel better.

Looking back with 20/20 vision I could see that she was leading up to the bomb dropping through the whole conversation although I didn't clue in the whole time we were on the phone. She held back. She was tentative in her conversation: not offering too much, not prodding for more from me. This guarding is always a tell tale sign something is up.

She ended the conversation by saying she could see I was busy and she would let me go, but she had one request: Stop blogging about my father. What? Hello, left field! I have to say I was racking my brain for what I last wrote about my father.

She said that I portrayed him in a mean light to which I replied, "He can be a very mean man." She said that she worried about how that impacted extended family relations and that I should have more of an edit button on because there were hurt feelings. However if I couldn't respect her request then I should change my blog address so she doesn't know about it.

That last sentence pushed me over the edge.

Has she not been reading my last entries filled with angst? I think I was very clear that I had to be authentic and that was the larger message. But what really got me was that what she was really saying was, "I feel bad, but its now your problem not mine and its inconvenient to me to change, so you need to." This is a common family message that my father sends out quite a bit. I suggested that she just stop reading the blog. She suggested I kept my relationships private. Perhaps she really doesn't know me. I'm a lot like her own mother in the fact that I call a spade a spade.

The problem was I lost my cool and didn't think about what was the larger question being asked. I've written far more unfavorable things in the past about my family and have tempered my expression to a compromised place; preserving the relationships while maintaining content. Plus, my father and I have the relationship that if he was really upset, he'd let me know. I don't even think he reads the blog anyway. I think he only hears about it from her. So really, the larger question was what button was really pushed for her?

I haven't seen my family in over 6 months. Its hard to know what dynamics are really going on back there. I do know that perhaps my recent unemployment has hit a button with her as my father went/is going through a similar predicament and she's having a hard time (naturally and normally) trying to be "supportive" to him. Its been going on now for almost a decade. (One of her first questions to me was what my plan was for a job and what my husband thought.) I've suggested therapy for her countless times to find this balance, but I also know that she will only seek it out when she's ready. For being as forward thinking as she is, I also know she struggles with the concepts of women working. She owns her own highly successful business, but I think she wishes it was just more of a hobby.

One of my biggest fears is turning into my father and I've been wrestling those demons ever since I quit the high ranking job two weeks ago. I've been madly applying to jobs because I don't want to be like him or have J struggle with "supporting" me. However, hanging up on her was mean of me too. While we've always been each other's rocks, I don't know how we can support one another in this new chapter as it hits to0 close to what is raw and what is real.

Perspective

Ah, one week into unemployment and I'm coming off of the roller coaster o' emotion. Y'all have seen how I've struggled with this transition, but I'm beginning to see the silver lining so to speak.

1) I now have a potential social circle with my former colleagues. It wouldn't have been easy to be friends with those whom I supervised, but now we have lunch scheduled for Friday. This is a very good development.

2) On another website about 43 things people want to do in their lifetime, I now have the opportunity to actually accomplish some of these things I listed. For instance, I'm writing.

3) I don't have Mother's guilt for leaving Edgar every day in the blue bathroom. He's a much happier dog.

4) I'm working on a healthier lifestyle with my physical therapy and cooking good meals.

5) I'm taking care of things that we all should but never have the time like doing a house inventory for insurance purposes.

6) I'm a much happier person for my husband to come home to every night/day (depending upon his call schedule) and I can be a better stress absorber for him.

7) I'm not too drained to attend social events after being extroverted all day long. We actually went to the graduation and the interns karaoke party in one weekend...this was unheard of before. J karaoked, I did not. The last time I did was my 22nd birthday in New Orleans and Prince's "Raspberry Beret" will never be the same.

8) Reflection, reflection, reflection

Honey, We're Not In Utah Anymore

One of the radio stations has a No-Refusal Request hour where literally, anything goes. One can hear anything from Menudo to Ratt. We like to call it the schizophrenic station. However, the other night coming home from getting some ice cream (how Utah is that?), we heard some lyrics that almost made us pull off the road.

"Let me ask you somethin.' What time of the day do you like to make love? Have you ever made love before breakfast? Have you ever made love while you watch the late late show? Well let me ask you this, have you ever made love on a couch..."

It was primetime on the radio. We were both laughing so hard we were crying. You too can catch the action. The song is called, "Strokin" (again, not kidding), and the artist is Clarence Carter.

Undefined and Un-nerved

Last night I went to a graduation party for the outgoing residents with my husband. It was strange to be in a room with people J has known for 3 years, began his intern year with, and know that we will probably never see them again. J has one more year of residency given his chosen track. It was also strange to be in a social situation where I was officially unemployed.

One of our friends came up to me and was dying to know what happened. Her best friend worked in one of the programs I supervised. Apparently there are several rumors and theories floating about my departure. This is to be expected, I suppose. What was difficult was trying to figure out what exactly I could say and what exactly I should say. I landed somewhere in the middle still not knowing exactly if I did the right thing.

Perhaps I was a bit sensitive to this as I received a very cowardly comment on my post regarding my resignation. One cannot say that they are anonymous while then pretending to be the two individuals I named. For all this person knows, I made up the names (as I frequently do) to protect everyone involved. I've changed them once again, BTW, just to keep everyone guessing.

Let me clarify: I do not wish these people badness. Its not productive nor does it bring about good karma. I believe that they acted to the best of their abilities, which in my opinion fell short of what was needed. I too acted to the best of my ability. Its a tough situation. In light of the comment received, it caused me to reflect and change the moderation on my comments section. Too bad, really, as my trust has dropped precipitously. I've been more angry at this one individual than I have with anyone during this whole ordeal. Its a bit of displacement, but I'm ok with that too. I do wish the individual who did write the comment to speak up for a real dialogue, but chances are, they won't.

I once had an ex-boyfriend do a low blow by opening up my moving boxes and reading all of my journals. He then re-taped the boxes and moved out while I was at work. When I came back to our apartment he announced he was abandoning me and told me about the trust violation. It has taken me many many years to figure out how to write once again from my heart with no codes alluding to situations fearing that the information could end up in the wrong hands. I write for me. This is my outlet, my emotional vomit, so to speak. One cowardly individual will not change that, but has caused me to redesign a few things.

I have a lot of feelings on now being undefined in the way that society expects you to be. My MIL was highly concerned about how I was doing, according to a conversation she had with my husband the other night. She asked if I was fired. J restated that I resigned. However, there is some sort of shame involved when people don't know the whole story and I have to find that balance of telling my truth without compromising my integrity or my potential future employment somewhere else. If I say too much, I am a risk to a future employer as I look like I lack discretion. However, if I say too little then I look like I was terminated/fired/let go/pushed out/discarded/etc.

A few weeks ago when this drama was unfolding, my father suggested that I lawyer up. Granted it was well past cocktail hour. And when I didn't agree, he went straight to the jugular stating I wasn't listening to his advice and that I was a washed up, has been, who was fired. I was smart enough to know that these were is own issues and told him to put Mom back on the phone. He was just being mean for the sake of being mean which isn't uncommon when he's swimming in a bottle. But he's my father and of course it hit a nerve because his opinion will always matter. At least I was smart enough to recognize the dynamics, not take the bait, and terminate that conversation. This is something I wouldn't have done even a few years ago. I do not have that kind of relationship with my MIL to say what I need to say, even though I really value her opinion of me as well.

I honestly feel like a burden at this point in time to my husband and I fear how that will manifest in our relationship. He has been nothing but supportive and I know this has taken a toll on him. The pressure of being a sole breadwinner for two people and a dog is huge. I couldn't imagine what it would feel like if we had kids. Part of me feels like I should be enjoying the break, but its hard to relax when you feel uninteresting as a human being. We devise so much of our self-identity from what we do. People talk about what they did at work at the end of a day. My days have become pretty uninteresting all because I lost identification by resigning a large part of who I thought I was.