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Some posts you write for them.
Some you write for you.

There’s a chill in the early morning air; it’s May, not June, and I’ve got on a good Republican wool coat that my Mom gave me a few months before my father passed away. We were on the way to the hospital, talking about how we both needed coats for the winter, and I complained that Uncle Sam takes so much of my take-home that it’s a luxury I don’t usually afford myself, buying a coat.

“I have one that will fit you,” she says. She’s a fraction of her former self. She can’t wear it anymore.

So it feels good, this black wool coat that is no longer in style, for the shoulders are huge, even without the shoulder pads. I ripped those out, gave it a hard winter, the coat, by spring have ruined the pockets. Decimated them in record time. She might have said something about that once, not anymore.

I’m walking to shul (Yiddish, rhymes with pull, depending upon your dialect, means synagogue) for Saturday morning services, am going to the early service, the one that starts at 7:30, am a fashionable half-hour late. FD always attends this one, but I don’t because most of my friends, if they attend at all, go to a later service, and I like to see them, catch up on the news. But I’m not in the mood to talk today, not even with friends.

Do you ever feel that way? Like you just don’t want to talk to anyone? Your mouth feels stuck. You get to know the inside of your lips. You notice things about them you never noticed before.

The kids came over for dinner Friday night, always the ray of sunshine, goodness. Empath Two, the almost psychologist, is planning a small celebration for my son, her partner-by-legal-contract. He’s now a lawyer. We talk menu and reflect upon the graduation. Although it was wonderful, the graduation precipitated the worst negative interpersonal interaction (code for marital fight) that FD and I have had in years.

FD doesn’t like getting anywhere early, hates wasting time, and he had three hospital “emergencies.” I’m supposed to pick him up at 1:03 for the graduation. I wait until 1:20 and am about to leave without him when he finally exists the hospital, opens the car door. I say nothing, think, we’ll make it.

But I’m driving like a maniac, because doors will close at 2:15, and my mother-in-law is in the back seat, and traffic is murder this Sunday afternoon and parking will take time. FD is on my right, trying to coach me on how to drive, always appreciated. I’m seething, he’s nervous, too, and contrite, I can tell. I’m trying to get a traffic report, like this will matter at this point, and the well-intentioned announcer warns,

“You don’t want to miss. . .”

I shut it off.

“My son’s graduation from law school!”

I shout this at the radio. It’s tense, not funny, my tone of voice. Still, we laugh, all of us, to shake off the tension, at least I hope my mother-in-law is laughing.

But the kid, the kid, we’re so proud of him. The books on his desk intimidate me, and all of us are very proud of that, feeling intimidated by a kid in his mid-twenties. Our kid. We’re proud of all of our kids and their accomplishments. Awed.

But today, six days later, I feel so useless.

As a mourner I can’t make him a party, my new lawyer. Not only that, I don’t feel like making him a party. It all works out well in the end because Empath Two not only feels like making a party, but is doing all of the work. I’m not even making the potato salad, although to be fair, I offered.

It’s a small party, a few friends, some family. I can miss it.

They say that the way Jews mourn is elevated, absolutely brilliant. Those who study mourning rituals for their sociology or psychology classes agree that the week after the death of a first degree relative, the shiva, that full week dedicated to nothing but receiving visitors, grieving, is inspired. There’s no leaving the house for work, or shopping, no cooking, no cleaning, no bathing, either, although some make exceptions.

Cultures within cultures vary, and some make it into one long party, this first week of mourning, but you’re really not supposed to. You’re supposed to sit, preferably on a lower chair, like a patio chair, and chill. You face your visitors who are also sitting, sometimes in rows, for there are often many sober visitors lending dignity to the occasion. Their presence, just sitting, honors the dead.

You can talk about the deceased, if you’re a visitor, but otherwise you wouldn’t open the discussion. The mourner leads and if the mourner wants to talk about baseball or the economy, then that’s what you talk about. But nobody’s flipping on the radio. There is no rock and roll, and in the evening before bed, no movies, no teev for the mourner. I didn’t want to watch anything, not even Glee that week, and muted the Academy Awards the week after.

In fact, for a year, if it is a parent that you are grieving, a Jewish mourner doesn’t go to parties, doesn’t listen to any music at all! Can you imagine? FD is a musician! Should he not play in his own home because I am a mourner and will hear it, unless of course, I’m in the shower? Honey, would you mind taking a shower?

For the first two months following my father’s death, he didn’t play, but he plays a little now.

Occasionally, while listening, the it’s not what we do raises it’s head, that cognitive dissonance. My brain can’t absorb it, the conflict. It doesn’t feel right, doing what we don‘t do, listening to music.

Hey, he’s not playing the Goyescas.

But I’m not turning on Miley or ColdPlay. I just can’t. Not listening to music on the radio has been a challenge, that’s for sure, but it is what it is. And listening to the news is getting very old, because the news is really depressing, the same newscasts over and over again. Shoot me. (No disrespect to those of you who are sensitive to the thought).

I have a best friend who is marrying off her daughter in a few weeks. Ordinarily I’d take part in that celebration, or would try to participate. But I won’t even be going to the wedding, and I won’t be making a shower or a party the week after the wedding for the family, either.

We never quit with these after-the-wedding-dinners-for-the-children-of-our-friends, our relatives, the Polish, the Greeks have nothing on us. We basically wine and dine and bless a bride and groom for a whole week. We try to get the new couple off to a good start. Their whole first year, in fact, is a special year. The groom would never go off to the army in his first year of marriage if they lived in Israel. The bride wouldn’t either, I suppose, since women serve in the army there.

You don’t make the connection between the seven days of mourning following the death of a first degree relative and the seven days of feasting following a marriage, or the customs of the following year, not until you’ve lost a first degree relative. Sevens everywhere, and ones.

Such conflict! Any rabbi would say, Go ahead, you can go to the wedding, especially if she’s like family, the bride, like a niece. Go to the graduation party. But because in our family we don’t do this, in my head it’s an impossibility. And my friend certainly understands, as do the kids. They wouldn’t come to one of my parties either, were the situation reversed, G-d forbid.

So I’m walking to the synagogue wearing a winter coat in the springtime, but feeling good about it, if a little quiet, and I flash on last night’s dream.

There I am, at a party. It feels perfectly natural, too, being around people celebrating, and the music is good. There’s definitely music. It occurs to me that I’m not supposed to be there, not supposed to listen to music, to celebrate.

I wake up in a panic, relieved. It’s just a dream. It’s like an eating on Yom Kippor dream (rhymes with dome-keep-poor– refers to the Day of Atonement), eating on the holiest day of the year, a day of contrition, a 25 hour fast, no food, no water, nothing by mouth, no leather shoes, no anointing.

Hysterical, that so many of us have this dream on Yom Kippor, the eating dream. You wonder, why it’s so common, and then, if you’re me, you realize that both psychological drives for dreams are at work, wishes and fears. Eating on Yom Kippor? A Jewish person who is fasting on the holiday (a happy holiday, ironically) either wishes it or fears it, or both!

Jews, we could safely say, make themselves a little crazy, this is no chiddish (rhymes with kid-ish, hard ch, means newsflash).

And yet, it seems everyone has their neuroses and solutions. Whenever I’m talking to someone who works a program– and I talk to so many people who work 12-Step programs, and more people who should be working programs –maybe for gambling or over-eating, abusing alcohol and drugs, or abusing themselves with sex, or compulsive spending, or they’re working an Anon program, a program to cope with someone else’s issues, now their issue by proxy, or a program for co-dependency– sometimes when I’m with a program person I’ll say,

“It works, if it does, I think, because many of us need structure, some kind of program, a credo of do’s and don’ts that make sense, a way to make our lives and our behavior meaningful. Religions are basically program. There’s small comfort in knowing what you’re supposed to do.”

And that’s what we’re looking for, right, even in therapy? At least some of the time.

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That’s a mugshot, above.

He’s thought to have accidentally killed the girl he loved, Yeardley Love. Bloggers jumped on the story last week. Now print journalism is catching up, picking up where we left off.

The girl on the cover of today’s People could have been a model. But Yeardley Love chose sports. Her athletic boyfriend, lacrosse star George Huguely V, beat her head against a wall in a drunken rage, killed her on May 3, ten days ago. Both were students at the University of Virginia, neither will return.

Page 63, lower left,

Now many are asking, how could this have happened? Could school officials have done more to prevent dating violence?

Some of us are of one mind, and the answer is a resounding YES. (See Relationship-Wise, and previous posts. Or maybe you’re tired of the story.)

We only care because they’re so attractive, athletes like George Huguely and Yeardley Love. And the potential of kids like this, having it all– looks, talent, money. To blow it, to lose everything– it makes everyone wonder. If they can’t make it, who can?

The schools are getting the blame for ignoring the warning signs, which won’t make the Loves, Yeardley’s family, feel a whole lot better.

University President John Casteen is shouting about it, suggesting we all have a share of the process:

“Don’t hear a scream, don’t watch abuse, don’t hear stories of abuse from your friends and keep quiet.”

Or you’re an accomplice, if not in the strictest sense of the word.

How many people are guilty of this? Millions, for sure. Most of us don’t get involved when it comes to intimate partner violence. Most of us don’t know about it. Even the cops will say: It’s rough sex. People like it.

What we have so far on George Huguely V, the young man accused of murder, is that

he was fine –a happy, friendly little boy– until age eight.

That’s when his parents divorced. His father, George Huguely IV, was born to money, lived a plush lifestyle, but was in arrears in 1997 to his estranged wife Marta to the sum of $11,478.

Born to money, you sort of think, that kind of sum, he could have found it anywhere. His son was probably ten when the power and control played out. Who knows what little George saw, what he heard, what he thought.

According to People, a peer of the elder Huguely said that George the younger grew up watching his father “thumb his nose at authority.”

That role model thing; it really matters.

Whereas his father thumbed his nose at the judge for child support, the younger, as a collegian, thumbed his nose at police, displayed disorderly conduct while intoxicated in 2008. Most of us don’t swear at police, use racial epithets. George Huguely V, star athlete, did.

He didn’t learn from his community service or alcohol abuse program, either. In 2009 he took matters into his own hands, flaunted the laws about battery, beat up a sleeping teammate. The teammate had allegedly kissed his girlfriend.

Yes, Yeardley Love.

What’s interesting from our perspective is that the psycho-dynamics of childhood, the interplay between parent relationships and how children perceive their parents, themselves, their identity, the past, isn’t always the focus of therapy anymore. The first order of business is to think about what’s going in in the here and now, make sure no one is suicidal. Treat it all, make the symptoms abate with either meds or a very intellectual, cognitive-behavioral therapy. We don’t get mired in history.

Well, some of us still do. The lesson here is that it is best to do both, mire yourself in history, and stay in the here and now, too. Make sure no one wants to bash in anyone’s head. It’s not as hard as it sounds, flipping the channels in therapy. Give us forty-five minutes, we’ll give you your soul.

And here you have it, smoldering backlash against CBT. History does make a difference. It molds our personalities, sculpts our responses to things like. . . abandonment.

Not that people shouldn’t divorce for fear of that separation, the effect it will have on the children. And not that we can truly shield our children from our emotions, our anger. These things are often unavoidable, the expression of anger, they are inevitable in life, feelings. You can’t make all relationships work. Most of us can’t. And kids aren’t stupid.

But please. When there are kids, and they are in the middle in divorce? Take care of their emotional needs. Address their issues. Never normalize your rage or your partner’s, not to yourself, not to your kids. It has to go, the rage, or it’s revisited. It can be.

We hear that male members of the University of Virginia Lacrosse team carried Ms. Love’s casket down the aisle of the cathedral during the memorial service. George Huguely V wasn’t there, as much as he surely loved her, the girl his passion stole from him. He’s in jail, awaiting a June 10 court date for first degree murder.

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Yes! They’re all for sale! Direct from the basement, original boxes, some mildew, not a lot!

I thought, I don’t have to do this, blog for Mothers Day.

I did it last year, wrote all that matters, at least to me, probably. And I’m pretty sure there are even older posts on my blog, certainly Mother’s Day posts smatter all kinds of OPB’s (other people’s blogs) bemoaning the idea that there even is a mother’s day, considering that not everyone has one, and many people have more than mixed feelings about theirs.

And yet, yesterday mine said to me:

You know. I tried to access my email like you showed me and I couldn’t. But I did find the family blogs and I read your daughter’s and it was really funny.

My daughter’s blog hasn’t been touched in six months, she’s way too busy for this. But Mom didn’t care. She read the old posts and had a blast doing that. This tells us that if you’re blogging, you probably should keep at it. Assuming, of course, you’re careful about your identity, or what you say. And even if you’re anonymous, it’s not really necessary to be offensive. Okay, I’ll stop.

This morning I woke up to a Facebook message, a Happy Mother’s Day from Cham. And THREE cards in the mail from other kids, grandkids. Thanks everybody!

So it was a no brainer.

Saturday I flipped through the week’s Wall Street Journals to see why one of my patients almost had a heart attack. As a broker he manages OPM (other people’s money). The investments of most of his clients flew through the window within 3 minutes as the market dropped 1000 points. Brokers across America had a bad heart day. Why did it happen? We don’t know.

This is disheartening, confusion about investments.

Families are investments, too, so I kept reading and found a piece about these by a Mommy blogger, one that I had missed while blogging and cruising the Internet for four years. She’s WholeMama and writes for WSJ! So I visited her blog, of course.

The tagline in the header:

Before I got married I had six theories about raising children. Now I have six children and no theories.

You have to love that.

Anyway, because I don’t have the emotional or physical energy to blog today– I’m going to quote WholeMama, not to be confused with DaMama, Motherhood is Not for Wimps, also wonderful.

Amy Henry, WholeMama, writes this for WSJ

Mother. . .

Giver of life. Homework helper. Life saver. Hem adjuster. Maker of peanut butter sandwiches. All true, all real, all important. Even so, I was surprised– and even fearful– when my 16-year-old. . .

She goes on to tell us, basically, that her kid told her she wanted to be a stay at home mom, a SAM.

Ms. Henry mentions that SAMS get no respect. Networking, maybe at the playground, so enviable to someone like me, Amy hears:

One mother admits she’s considered pretending to be her daughter’s nanny in hope this would earn her some respect.

Another remembers telling people that she has five children, only to hear a woman respond, “Oh, horror!”

I missed this feeling of horror. I never felt it was a horror. Not even once. For sure, not once. Fear, maybe, when one was missing in action after school, but never horror or regret.

Every day is Mother’s Day, my friends, whether or not she was good or bad. She’s in your head, your psyche. Try it. Get her out. You can’t. EMDR can’t do it. No amount of hypnosis.

So if you had one, and she was marvelous, consider yourself so, so lucky. And if you didn’t have one, try to be one to others, a good one, for so many need these, good mom-figures in their lives, mentors, people who care.

And if you’re working outside the home, don’t look back, because yes, you are a role-model, someone your daughter is proud of, someone who has probably saved the family home from foreclosure more than once. And if you couldn’t, it didn’t make you a bad mom, or a bad anything. You know that.

And if you’re a SAM, a stay at home mom, then reflect upon what author and theologian G. K. Chesterton wondered in 1929, when he predicted the disrespect (thank you Ms. Henry, for reminding us what the little people are thinking when they blather on jealously about the mindlessness of parenting). He asked how society ever got the idea

that bringing forth and rearing and ruling the living beings of the future is a servile task suited to a silly person.

Happy Mothers Day.

Here are more Mommie blogs, thanks to Radical Parenting (check her out– I just found her) and to many of my friends out there I haven’t talked to in awhile. If I forgot you, please poke me. It’s been a tough year.

I’d find you more, but it’s Sunday and somebody’s got to get to work, believe it or not. (If you don’t work Saturday, you’ll probably work Sunday, like me. And if you don’t work either, you’re working 24/7 at the hardest job in the world).

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My Mommy’s Place
Busy Mom
The Mommy Blog
Mother Thoughts
City Mama
Mama Bird
Mommy Blog
Parenting Blog
Mom Logic
Decoder
Author Mom with Dogs
A Mother in Israel
Holly’s Corner
Mother-Wise Cracks
Pinay Mommie
Project Subrosa

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Can you really blame kids for getting drunk? Isn’t that what they do, as college students? Make that, high school students? Athletes?

Well, no. Not every college kid drinks until he loses control, and not every high school student does this. Not every athlete. We can leave the other drugs alone for a minute, concentrate on America’s favorite drug, for this is what docs learn in graduate school. Alcohol is America’s favorite drug. And it’s likely alcohol did drive George Huguely over the edge.

Here. Read the New York Times for yourself, Juliet Macur’s got the byline:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — On a night that was supposed to be a quiet one, with final exams just a day away, more than 1,500 students at the University of Virginia put down their books Wednesday and paid tribute to a fellow student killed this week.

An amphitheater was packed for an hour with students and administrators, some holding candles, all honoring the memory of Yeardley Love, the lacrosse player who was found dead in her apartment early Monday.

Another Virginia lacrosse player, George Huguely, has been charged with first-degree murder in connection with her death. . .

Court documents released this week, though, gave details of how that fateful night unfolded. In an affidavit filed in support of a search warrant, Huguely, a 22-year-old senior from Chevy Chase, Md., told the police that he and Love, also 22, had recently ended a romantic relationship. He said he broke into her bedroom and attacked her, shaking her as her head repeatedly hit a wall. The police said Love’s head was badly bruised.

This post is a little late on the draw, I know. But it’s ironic, because I wanted to post about narcissism today. Maybe George Huguely has this disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder. We know that some murderers do. I just finished a novel by Alan Jacobson about a serial killer on this. Don’t read it if you need to get to sleep at night. Crush. Set in Napa Valley. We get a really good tour of the vineyards.

Today’s theme. Crushed grapes, crushed heads. Alcohol. Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

We can blame alcohol abuse for the murder of Yeardley Love, and everyone will. But while some drink to oblivion, and don’t murder anyone, there are those who do. So it’s likely there are other disorders at work, what is called a duo diagnosis. It’s likely there’s another diagnosis tucked inside George Huguely. He’s had priors, meaning he’s been arrested before. The Washington Post:

In November 2008, Huguely pleaded guilty to resisting arrest, public swearing and public intoxication after a drunken scuffle with a female police officer during a visit to Lexington, Va. The officer said Huguely told her, “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill all of y’all. I’m not going to jail,” in a diatribe laced with racial, sexual and other vulgar terms. She used a Taser to subdue him.

Oy vay, a Taser.

He received a 60-day suspended sentence, emphasis on the suspended. He had six months of supervised probation, a fine, 50 hours of community service and 20 hours of substance abuse education.

Mostly punishing a bad boy. But are kids bad? Can we say an athlete is misbehaving like that, when he’s abusing alcohol, when he’s cursing out police officers? That kind of behavior, cursing out an officer is sheer narcissism. Most of us cower when an officer of anything just asks us our names. Well, some of us.

But if you injure some people, offend their egos, what we call narcissistic injuries, then you’re likely to catch hell for it. At best, you’ll be snubbed. At worst? Maybe murdered. Ms. Yeardley broke up with him. She rejected him. End of a promising young life. My condolences to her family, my prayers for her.

Did she need a police escort to do that, break up with George? Some of us would say yes, maybe. Certainly the police are useful with stalkers. Bring a cop to the door of a teenage stalker and that teenager is going to think twice about bothering his prey again. Catch the kids young, when their personalities are still changing, developing, and you never know.

But order therapy, seriously, not a substance abuse program alone.

And maybe we can prevent deaths like this one.

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They laugh, lest they cry, I think is how it goes.

My son, 21 years old, is starting to think about marriage. He asks,

“What do I look for in a girl? I want someone who thinks, but too serious isn’t good, right? To fit in with this family she has to have a sense of humor.”

I tell him look for someone with a sunny disposition. We all get dark, eventually. Into every life, a little rain must fall. Fine, I’ll stop.

But it’s true, isn’t it? If you have a choice going into it, why not look for happy?

Too bad Niecy Nash is taken.

I knew absolutely nothing about this comedienne until the postman dropped off my People magazine last week. I keep People magazine in the waiting room for people who get tired of waiting for people like me, although the cleaning staff throws them away, prefers Russian newspapers. I don’t know why.

This is in the April 26 issue, the one with Phoebe Prince on the cover. Phoebe, 15, killed herself because she couldn’t tolerate the bullying at her high school.

Life is beautiful, right? This has got to stop, this bullying in school, on the Internet. You’re supposed to outgrow it in middle school. Tell the kids.

But let’s talk about Niecy. She’s host and producer of Clean House and is known as no-nonsense Officer Raineesha Williams on Comedy Central’s Reno 911. My mom loves her on Dancing with the Stars, which I’m sure to be watching someday soon.

The story on this comedienne is powerful.

At age 15 she watched as her mother’s boyfriend shot her mom, “like a dog in the street,” in the back. . .Her mom survived, but eight years later Nash’s younger brother Michael, 17, was shot to death at his high school over a love triangle.

“My mother said, ‘I give up,’” says Nash, who refused to let her do that. Instead, she stood at the foot of her mom’s bed every day telling jokes until she finally cheered up. “that’s when I realized comedy was a gift.”

Oy va voy, what a world view. Make ‘em laugh. Eventually they’ll break down. I have a friend like this, Sarelle. She’s the one who scours the Internet for jokes and emails them to everyone she knows. When my father was hardly breathing, we got him to gasp until he liked it with jokes like these:

A rabbi was walking down the street when, suddenly, a strong gust of wind blew his streimel (fur hat) off his head. The rabbi ran after his hat but the wind was so strong it kept blowing his hat farther and farther away. He just couldn”t catch up with it.

A young gentile man, witnessing this event and being more fit than the rabbi, ran after the hat and caught it. The young gentile man handed the hat over to the rabbi. The rabbi was so pleased and grateful that he gave the man twenty dollars, put his hand on the man”s head and blessed him. The young man was very excited about both the tip and the blessing.

The young gentile decided to take his new found wealth to the racetrack. He bet the entire $20 on the first race that he could.

After the races the young man returned home and recounted his very exciting day at the races to his father.

“I arrived at the fifth race,” said the young man. “I looked at the racing program and saw a horse by the name of Top Hat was running. The odds on this horse were 100-to-1. It was the longest shot in the field.”

After saving the rabbi”s hat, having received the rabbi”s blessing, gotten the $20, and seeing Top Hat in the fifth race, I thought this was a message from God. So, I bet the entire 20 dollars on Top Hat. An amazing thing happened. The horse that was the longest shot and who did not have the slightest chance to even show, came in first by 5 lengths.

“You must have made a fortune,” said the father.

“Well yes, $2000. But wait, it gets better,” replied the son.

“In the following race, a horse by the name of Stetson was running. The odds on the horse were 30 to 1″ Stetson being some kind of hat and again thinking of the rabbi”s blessing and his hat, I decided to bet all my winnings on this horse.”

“What happened?” asked the excited father.

“Stetson came in like a rocket. Now I had $60,000!”

“Are you telling me you brought home all this money?” asked his excited father.

“No,” said the son.

“I lost it all on the next race. There was a horse in this race named Chateau, which is French for hat. So I decided to bet all the money on Chateau. But the horse broke down and came in last.”

“Hat in French is “Chapeau” not “Chateau” you moron,” said the father.

“You lost all of the money because of your ignorance. Tell me, what horse won the race?”

The son answered, “A long shot from Japan named Yamaka.*”

The following aren’t as clean, but they would probably still get a PG-13 rating if there were such things. They’re wife jokes worthy of Henny Youngman, for those of you who remember him. If you have politically-correct-sensitivity, change the word “wife” to “partner.”

My wife sat down on the settee next to me as I was flipping channels. She asked,
‘What’s on TV?’

I said, ‘Dust.’

And then the fight started.
****
My wife and I were watching “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” while we were in bed. I turned to her and said, “Do you want to have sex?”

“No,” she answered.

I then said, “Is that your final answer?”

She didn’t even look at me this time, simply saying, “Yes.”

So I said, “Then I’d like to phone a friend.”

And then the fight started.
****
My wife was hinting about what she wanted for our upcoming anniversary. She
said, ‘I want something shiny that goes from 0 to 150 in about 3 seconds.’

I bought her a bathroom scale.

And then the fight started.
****
When I got home last night, my wife demanded that I take her some place
expensive… so, I took her to a petrol station.

And then the fight started…
****
My wife and I were sitting at a table at my school reunion, and I kept staring
at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at a nearby table.

My wife asked, ‘Do you know her?’

‘Yes,’ I sighed, ‘She’s my old girlfriend. I understand she took to drinking
right after we split up those many years ago, and I hear she hasn’t been sober
since.’

‘My Goodness!’ says my wife, ‘who would think a person could go on celebrating
that long?’

And then the fight started.

The truth is, probably Ms. Nash has got to be funnier.

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* A yamaka is a skull cap. Some Jewish people wear these to remind them that there’s always something above.

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A scene from Sunday night’s Desperate Housewives. A do-gooder neighbor reminds an alcoholic single mom that kids need their mommies home, not out looking for men in bars.

Yeah, there are spoilers.

I suppose it’s the stuff of forensics and other fields, and even though I rarely have a murderer telling me his problems, I do hear a kid say, on occasion, “I want to kill someone.” Even, so and so. “I want to kill so and so.”

This is never a good moment, hearing this, because you have to decide who to call, and among the calls is the one that warns the potential victim. That’s the law. There are very few situations in which a mental health professional has to break confidentiality, but this is one of them.

So last night, about 8:00 pm, we’re eating dinner. I watch as FD reads the paper, watch the fork hit the mouth, and in another corner, a kid, biologically related, the other eater, is staring at a computer screen, trying to find the error in his code, hundreds and hundreds of lines of program code. He’s feeling a little homicidal himself.

I don’t feel much like sitting, and as luck would have it, Desperate Housewives is about to begin. I like the show, mainly because I like some of the actors, and I like that the women, the wives, are forced to make quick decisions that will affect just about everything important in family life. And I like that when the story ends, somebody’s trying to do something nice for somebody else.

There’s always at least one really creepy, dangerous person on the show, which helps me raise my anxiety threshold. I’m reading a slasher novel, too, just to do that.

Anyway, the cringe, the tension in Desperate Housewives is generally well-done, not gratuitous, and the plot can keep my interest. Like last week a teenager (we like him) is working a counter, pouring a latte in the corner coffee shop, talking to a customer old enough to be his father. Actually, the guy really is his father, but the boy doesn’t know this. His mother has made sure to hide this information, has run away, assumed a new identity. She knows bio-dad is a dangerous man.

So bio-dad is befriending the kid in the coffee shop and has confided the story line of a novel he’s supposedly writing. Now he asks his innocent son, “So what should I have him (the spurned father in the novel) do for revenge, now that he’s caught up with them?”

The kid thinks. The pause is pregnant.

“To get to the mother,” he suggest, “I’d have him get to the kid, get to her through the son.”

“That‘s what I’m thinking,” his father replies.

Cringe stuff. Anyway, this week we get a new plot, a completely new set of characters, one that is going to tie up many of the unsolved, ongoing mysteries on the show. “Epiphany” takes us through the life of a little boy, Eddie, whose father has left him at the age of four to his mother, a verbally abusive woman who is addicted to alcohol.

No matter what Eddie does, no matter what he thinks or says, she’s contemptuous and ridiculing. Having Eddie has ruined her life. She laughs at him, smirks at him, belittles him. It’s so well-done, so real, what you see, even if it is television, is actually a fine enactment of what happens in emotionally abusive, verbally abusive homes. We don’t call these homes toxic for nothing.

Eddie searches for nurturing people, and on Wisteria Lane there’s no shortage of these. But he makes the mistake of taking the relationships too seriously, thinking older women might really like him, or might like him for their daughters. And when he risks intimacy, when he tells a female, any female, about his feelings for her, she inevitably laughs, too. Like his mom.

Nobody takes him seriously. He just needs someone to love him. You think this is trite? I wish it were.

And wouldn’t you know? He’s had some very serious anger problems for a long, long, time. He’s a good kid, just can’t manage his anger very well. And yeah, he’s the killer in the neighborhood. One of them.

All I can say is, I liked it. And if I were on the jury, I’d go with the insanity defense. For some reason, my guess is, they’ll never pick me.

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Here’s the summary from the ABC website, but if you have time, watch the whole show:

We meet Eddie’s mom Barbara, a mean, slovenly drunk. She raids his room, looking for a bottle of Scotch, but instead finds his scrapbook with the clippings about the Fairview murders.

We flashback to when Eddie was just four, and his father left his mother — after loudly proclaiming that he’d never wanted any of this, including Eddie. Mary Alice tries to befriend her, but Barbara isn’t interested. Mary Alice stops by one day to give Eddie a teddy bear and finds him home alone while his mom is out drinking. She lectures Barbara about not putting her needs ahead of her son, but the lesson clearly doesn’t take.

Gaby first meets Eddie when she moves to Wisteria Lane and finds a lonely Eddie inside her empty house — he’d been sneaking in to play there since the previous owners moved out. He ends up coming over every day because Barbara has a new boyfriend. When he surprises Carlos and Gaby in the tub, Carlos orders Gaby to “cut him loose” and start making friends with other women, not nine-year-old boys. Gaby wants to go talk to Barbara, but Carlos advises her, “We don’t want to be known as the nosy neighbors.” After Gaby tells him they can’t be friends anymore, Eddie grabs a BB gun and shoots a bird.

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Rummaging through my parents’ basement, my son chose to salvage the bag below.

I grabbed a thousand of these.

This one’s a Lenox Annual Woodland Issue–Otters– the kind of stuff I’ll probably have to sell at a yard sale this summer. It’s that or create an e-commerce store for plates.

Plates Used to Be Us?

The Peanuts Mother’s Day Plates are going to be a big hit, I can just tell. They’re selling for a whopping $9.99 on Replacements., LTD. My mother, always the realist, asks, “Why would anyone want a Peanuts plate from 1972? 1973? 1974?”

“If they don’t sell,” I say, “I’ll start using them. I mean eat on them. I like the expression on Snoopy’s face.”

1.

One of my kids says to me, “You’re really not so into blogging anymore!” But I feel it’s not true. I am into it, even wrote a few things, just haven’t posted.

“Why not?” — the question of the day.

Don’t know.

Next day we’re celebrating my nephew’s engagement at my mother’s. It’s really a day-after-the-party visit, very informal. We all happened to show up at Mom’s around the same time to see how she’s doing. The engagement is only a day old, so the wedding’s on our minds, as is the sheer exhilaration of the proposal, the ring, it’s marvelous. I want to be excited, and am, but feel I’m not showing it, push a little to do that. That’s wha’ cha’ do, you know.

The kids are going through some of the junk in the basement, things of my fathers that he would have wanted them to have, golf balls, tools. FD finds a foot massage machine that doesn’t work, takes it home to fix it.

Later in the evening I tell him how nice this is, that he has fixed the switch, that the thing works, how proud my father would have been that he even bothered. Maybe it will help my mother’s neuropathy.

“The remarkable thing?” he exclaims. “Is that I did it in record time, didn’t waste all night on it.”

Uh huh.

2.

I’m downtown today at the corner of Michigan and Randolph, watching the people buzz by, note how many tourists we have, maps sticking out of pockets, interesting cameras, big lenses. It’s really cold, although the sun is so bright that most Chicagoans aren’t dressed for it. A young couple with two kids, probably 5 and 4 are ahead of me at the stoplight. She’s holding hands with the little girl, he’s holding onto the little boy. She calls to her son, concerned:

“Honey, are you okay? Are you cold?”

The little guy’s dad (it’s clear this is his dad) sweeps him into his arms and holds him tightly, all I see now is his head on daddy’s shoulder, peering down at me.

I kvell. (rhymes with gel, means melt, just how quickly he’s in his father’s arms. But the kid’s not smiling and I think, “He’s sick, somehow, not cold.” And that felt bad.

3.

I’m driving home, think about an exchange I heard at work, a common power struggle, the kind of thing any couple’s therapist has heard a thousand times.

It’s an argument over something that’s making both of them very anxious. He wants to solve the problem his way, but his way makes her worse. She says to him,

Do it for me. Can’t you just once, do it for me?

“Sure, I can just do it. But it feels like you’re cutting off one of my . . . That’s what it feels like.”

That line, or any other line that refers to a guy’s masculinity, usually ends the argument. Most women don’t want to castrate their spouses. So the job of the therapist, obviously, is to play devil’s advocate, say, maybe,

Did you really want them all for yourself?

4.

A friend listens to me describe some of the latest drama going on in my life. She tells me, slow down, play with your fish. Watch more TV.

I’m ashamed to tell her that I haven’t got the patience for teev lately, haven’t watched in months. I don’t recognize the names of the movies in the theater, either.

And my fish? It’s a miracle they’re even alive, I haven’t attended to them in so long. Usually I change water every two weeks.

I know I have to do it, take a couple of hours, get out the siphon, the salt, begin to stir up an instant ocean, and do this Sunday night.

They look a lot happier, that’s all I can say. Now if I could only remember to feed them

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Even if it is 40 degrees in Chicago in April, sometimes a boy’s gotta’ fish.
Last week was Passover, so we took a little time off work, hosted a few guests. Something of a family reunion. Although not everyone could make it, attendance was good.

We’re at Lincoln Park, here, FD’s showing the giraffes our kite. They were impressed.

Once or twice, if you’re a regular reader, you’ve found me depressed after a holiday break like this. The kids come, they go, they take my grandchildren with them. They threaten to leave one or two behind, but the little people somehow find their way to their car seats at the end of the holiday. Although I miss them already, it’s okay. It always was.

We played a lot of games, some indoors. This year’s indoor Bozo’s Grand Prize Game was even more of a hit than last year. I didn’t tell the kids that Bozo the Clown has passed on to that big circus in the sky.

There’s this idea that children really prefer a good cardboard box to the toy inside, and it has been shown, without a doubt, to be statistically significant. After they all left I spent a bit of time smashing boxes for recycling, and throwing things away. I spent about eight hours getting my house together, and will need another couple of weeks to find things, return them to their proper owners. (Empath Daught, if you’re reading this, I found some make-up with the chometz (rhymes with dumb-its, means not for Passover use), and someone’s sleeveless tee-shirt is still hanging in the bathroom upstairs.)

What else, what else. The best thing about a family reunion is that the generations divide. Sure, it’s great for the grandparents to bond with everyone, but leaving the younger people to talk until 3 a.m., just talk, catch up on their lives, and me and FD not hearing a word of it, is kind of wonderful, if you ask me.

This is the essence, really, of a family therapy, that siblings should have their own relationship with one another, not something based upon their relationship to their parents, although that’s obviously okay, too. The closeness is something to shoot for, and the way to shoot for it is to get the parents out of the room.

Same thing, really, with marriage. You have to get your parents out of that relationship, too, although it’s surely a good thing that they’re there, if they are there, when you need them. Nothing like having a parent around when you need one. Same, too, with kids. I called one of mine yesterday. Conversation went like this:

Uh, honey, are you around tomorrow at noon?
Son: I think so!
Great, the guy is coming to fix the dryer and I’m with patients until 1:00.
Son: No problem. Will there be food?

What else, what else.

You can establish a boundary around your practice, with enough practice. My practice is full and yet I was gone for 10 days and had maybe 2 phone calls while I was off, from new patients. I’m not sure how you do this, but it is worth working at. Using your team, using the patient’s resources, this is all in there somewhere, as is encouraging independence. I guess we should talk about it more sometime.

What else, what else. I read a good book by Colm Toibin, Brooklyn. It’s a post-war book about a nice kid from Ireland who comes to America, leaves her family behind knowing that at most she will see them once a year, traveling by boat. She’s here in America for a better life. It’s a wonderful novel, rich in character insight. The whole idea of separating from family for a whole year is mind-boggling, isn’t it? And yet people used to do it all the time, and many still do.

And I complain about a few months apart from mine.

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I know I shouldn’t, don’t have time, but I have to throw my two cents in here.

Every morning, Monday through Friday, although some weeks more than others, I watch the morning news. Local, national, international. I can’t help it. I like seeing people moving on teev while easing into the day with my morning coffee.

And all week long, nothing but talk of Sandra Bullock and Jesse James. Remember that spread in People, had to be over a year ago? How happy they were?

Since her recovery movie, 28 Days, I’ve been a fan of Ms. Bullock. And as a fan, it hurts to hear that Mr. James cheated on her. She deserves better. She didn’t cheat on him.

We hear it’s ego, you know. The spouses of several “best actresses” in recent years have cheated on their starlet wives, seeking to beef up deflated egos. Jesse James (gotta love that name) isn’t the first spouse of an Oscar winner, and he won’t be the last, to feel threatened by a woman’s power, popularity, fame, and beauty. The girl, if she’s the best, will be in demand.

Best actresses have egos, too, which can be a problem. Everyone loves them, they feel their guy does, why wouldn’t he? The doc tells us that stars should worry about this, that their men have egos and these egos will demand attention. If she’s on a shoot for eleven months, someone will fill in the emptiness. This is what it’s about, ego and power, and now we’re hearing, loneliness, chaval (rhymes with duh-doll, Hebrew meaning a shame).

The family therapy take? Cheating is transgenerational, at least it can be. Your dad shows you the notches on his belt, gives you permission. Alternatively, if he says, “That’s not what we do,” you listen, usually. Not always, of course, but some do. The psychological dope on cheating is that it’s some form of passive-aggression, anger, some sense of deserving. The affair is usually never as good, by the way, the sex is not as good, as it is at home.

The most important variable, the one not spoken, is commitment. It’s when the commitment is gone, or when the commitment was never there, that at least one of the two partners is vulnerable to extracurricular activity, regardless of sexual identification. This is why, when you do that initial assessment, commitment is the first thing you talk about with a couple, along with that transgenerational stuff.

And you do it in individual visits, too, not when they’re together all cozy on the sofa.

The good news is that a person can re-commit at any time. Those re-commitment ceremonies are cheaper than divorce and everyone loves them. You get presents.

But yeah, she’ll take that grudge to the grave, honey. You can count on it. Famous or not.

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That’s Jihad Jane.

Let’s talk. You should know we’re only talking because my 9:00 forgot about daylight savings time. Do I charge? Would you?

So Saturday I’m walking to shul (rhymes with “pull”, Yiddish for synagogue) and it’s wet out, the air is wet, wet to the degree that you flip up your hood if you have one, which I don’t. And there’s no sun, and you wonder: Why am I doing this? Better people than I don’t. They stay home and pray if they want to in the privacy of their living room, or not at all. What is this compulsion?

Upon arrival it’s no better, but why fight it, you know, because it is what it is. Half-way through the service is the reading from the Torah, the Holy Book, painfully inked in Hebrew by a religious scribe, and I read along in English, even though I could read the Hebrew, am captivated by what other people certainly find very boring, for we read the same readings year to year. This particular parsha (rhymes with Marsha, means chapter) is about the architecture of the traveling synagogue that Jews carried with them in the dessert, having left slavery in Egypt*, and the donations they gave to make sure the tent was magnificent, worthy of a very powerful, beneficent Resident. Reading it reinforces why I’m here, adds meaning to the things I do by rote, reminds me I’m not crazy.

Some of us take comfort in meaning, having a place in the sun, an identity, and religion fills this void very well. If you have one that is really old, that claims authority and irrefutable tradition, then you’re really set.

So we can’t really blame people for seeking that.

On the cover of the Wall Street Journal is this front page eye-catcher: For the Love of Islam

Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, looking for something to hold onto, has tried Christianity, returned to her books and found them lacking. Islam works for her. She finds a religious community on-line, falls in love with a Muslim man, and before you can say Jihad! is wearing a burka. Her mother and stepfather are beside themselves. Jamie runs off to Ireland with her son, ostensibly planning a murder/suicide attack against a Swedish cartoonist who draws cartoons about Mohamed that don’t make everyone laugh.

Enough to make me wonder what drives this behavior, preying on the vulnerable, people like Jamie, just looking for meaning, a self to call her own. Jamie finds a mentor whose translation of Islamic holy books is radical. She’s linked in a murder plot, along with Jihad Jane, Colleen R. LaRose from Philadelphia. I remember studying cults years ago, wonder why there isn’t more discussion about this in the news. We could call them Religious Predators.

Then today, never mind, they’re all free to go.

Jamie Paulin-Ramirez isn’t guilty, or has finagled a plea bargain and nobody’s telling us. According to WSJ online,

Ms. Paulin-Ramirez’s case is the second this month involving American women who converted to Islam, only to wind up attracting attention from law enforcement.

An indictment was unsealed this week against Colleen R. LaRose, 46, a suburban Philadelphia woman who authorities said used the Web alias “JihadJane.” Ms. LaRose was accused of plotting to kill the cartoonist and attempting to recruit jihadis via the Internet.

They’re free to go, although we are made to understand that they are not sure where to go or why. Perhaps they’ll have time to read other translations.

You wonder, at least I do, how anyone could be swayed to murder someone else. There has to be something very pathological going on there. A person with Antisocial Personality Disorder doesn’t have to be persuaded. The Jeffrey Daumer’s, the John Wayne Gaycy’s, people who commit murder after murder– nobody’s twisting their arms. It has to be a very vulnerable person who commits to a belief system that advocates an antisocial behavior. We can change children who have been fed terrorist propaganda in school, but changing a Daumer or a Gacy is much harder.

A story, how some people change: (details are fictionalized, down to the Lady Gaga reference)

A patient in her thirties, who has been slowly analyzing her depression and behavior over a lifetime, her miserable relationships, tells me she’s angry at herself for being so narcissistic, narcissistic from the get go. She sees herself more clearly now and no longer wants to be special, no longer cares if people think she’s great or talented. She’s worried, even, about making other people uncomfortable because she’s so smart. She hates that she used to gloat, loved it when they failed.

We go through the many variables that can contribute to narcissism:

(a) being a favorite child
(b) being treated as if you can do no wrong
(c) being told you really are better than other people
(d) being abused (how this loads is the subject of a different post)
(e) having narcissistic family members

She tells me that she hates herself for the years she spent in self-worship. She’s terrified she’ll lose it, her new-found focus upon others, that she’ll slip back to thinking she’s superior. She’s found the only thing that works, the thing that keeps her straight, is prayer.

Prayer? She doesn’t look especially religious. More like Lady Gaga, is the truth.

Right. She’s praying more and thinking about the things she’s learned now that she’s read some really good Christian literature. It has brought her back to the idea that there is a power outside of herself who is in charge, who has a destiny figured out for her, and that destiny isn’t tied into her being the center of attention, necessarily, certainly not her thinking that the world should revolve around her, and that if people don’t admire her, they’re stupid. “I’m just like everybody else,” she tells me, “and I’m going to start acting like that, take an interest in others. I’m going to be like everyone else.”

But what will you do with your talent, I ask? She is an immensely talented person.

“I can still use it, of course (silly). I just have to remember where I got it, and if someone compliments me I tell that person that if I have a gift, I had nothing to do with it, it’s a gift. A person has to say thank you, too, publicly, for a gift.”

Pushing the envelope I ask, But isn’t it narcissistic to think that you have been singled out, gifted? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that it’s an accident? A genetic stroke of luck?

“I’ve thought of that, but is it possible that humanity can be an accident? We do amazing things; someone is creating something amazing every day! A gorilla could be a fluke of nature, maybe, even a killer whale, but not the brains that put a man on the moon or created prostheses. To think that individuals are in charge, to think we’re really special, that there’s no higher power? That’s narcissism. When you keep that in mind, you begin to see other people, the worth of each one. You’re back in the world again.”

Whatever works, is the truth. Well, maybe not whatever.

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*The festival of Passover is not the “Jewish Easter.” It is a celebration of redemption from slavery in Egypt.

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