Minnesota Reunion with My Sisters

The TV is repeating a cooking show that has already aired twice today. I have it on because I am the only one awake in Susan’s apartment. I didn’t pack enough underwear and so I am waiting for the washer to finish so that I can put the load in the dryer. It has been such a wonderful day. Martha arrived this afternoon and she is so fun to be with. She looks great—confident and certain of herself. She says that they’ll be in Saudi Arabia for 13 more years. She is teaching Seminary—early morning—for the fourth time this year. This next year is Church History . . . her first year was with the D & C. I hadn’t known that Susan also taught early morning Seminary. “The best thing about it is that you really have to study the scriptures every day,” she said. She really enjoyed it, and agreed with Martha that it was one of the most challenging, overwhelming callings she had ever fulfilled. I feel left out—muddling through Seminary with Nathan during the years that he was home isn’t quite the same thing. I never thought about having to study for an hour everyday so that I could be ready to work with Nate the next day. He often couldn’t handle much more than 5 or 10 minutes worth—but even if he could have focused for a longer time, I didn’t really have much to offer him.
I went to ride with Susan and Nancy this evening. The temperature was cooler than yesterday and the wind was calm. Susan and Nancy laughed and talked and teased each other and then laughed some more. It made me lonely for Meg and La. As we were beginning to ride, I got a phone call from Brent. He told me about the supplies he had gotten to finish Nate’s bathroom and the glue and roller we’ll need to put up the stylized rabbit border around the room just below the ceiling. After being with Susan and coming to know more of the challenges that fill her days, I am so glad that I am me and have the problems that I have. Mine isn’t the life I would have wished for even a decade before—but I wouldn’t even dream of trading what I was facing for the difficulties that Susan has gone through. Nor would I consider exchanging lives with Martha. Exotic travels and insular living would push me into panicked anxiety about what I could not understand and what I could not control.
I met Susan’s grandson Evan today. He is 3 years old and an adroit manager of his domain. Susan confides that Evan is expert at “pushing his parents’ buttons.” I think that she sees what she has known before in her life. She became an expert at pushing mom and dad’s buttons herself when she was younger . . . as well as mine and M’s. The magic of the whole process is that it allows her an especially clear view of the situation now. “Inter-Family Dynamics” should have been required to graduate from high school, to get married, or to interact with any family member at anytime in the future.
*******Tuesday, 27 July 2009 noon
Nathan called me yesterday afternoon. He was at the pet store to buy shavings for the bunnies. “What kind of shavings do I get? Aspen, pine, the vacuum packed kind? One of the sacks looks like one of the bags at home, but it feels like there are just little pellets inside. Am I at the right store? And the bunnies have started to pee on the floor of their cage—what am I suppose to do about that?” There was no panic in his voice, but I could tell that he took the responsibility to care for our three buns very seriously. He is determinedly precise about anything that he undertakes. He attributes this characteristic to his Asperger’s Syndrome. I think that that may be a part of it—but he is also dedicated to making the environment around him better. Either way, I am grateful that he is as he is.
I miss Brent horribly. I have been away from him before, but I keep thinking that he would really enjoy hiking through the woods here. It is mostly flat land he could easily walk beside me as I rode one of Susan’s horses through the woods and meadows. Connections via cell phone are tenuous at best and we are often cut off in the middle of conversations, necessitating a quick re-dial so that we can finish our dialogue. It is OK though because we now say the most important things at the beginning of the call instead of waiting for the last moments before we hang up. To quote Martha Stewart: It’s a good thing.
Martha brought us both quilts. In Saudi she is the president of the quilting group that meets to make, amazingly, quilts. They are painstaking works of art: a sweet reminder that she loves both Susan and me and thinks about us when all of us are apart. I like that.

Dream Job

I have discovered today, after just a day and a half with my sister Susan, something that I could never have imagined.

My whole life has been dominated by the desire to be with horses: riding then, jumping them, showing them, brushing them, and loving them. My sister Susan has the job that—were I given the choice—I thought I would always want. She manages a horse stable and trains horses and teaches riding. After only thirty six-hours with her, though, I find that (were I given the opportunity to join Susan in her work) I would quickly become worn out and dissatisfied at the immense volume of effort, planning, self-discipline and sheer willpower that it takes to do what she does. In other words: I would hate it.

In living my life as I have, I have left myself with only the ability to pretend at doing what I love. I hear again my mom’s old complaint that I am good at lots of things, but master of none. What I really want is the life that I have—but with time and a horse to ride every day. I have become accustomed to being cosseted by Brent and protected by him from the grit needed to face the public and a real job.

At one time I think I could have worked as most people must, keeping to a time schedule, doing tasks that others have set for me to do, and being who my job needs me to be. I was ruthless in my approach to the “business” of running a family and keeping finances in order. Brent observed that in getting things done, I was unfeeling and aggressive. After almost twenty years of fighting the school system to get what my children needed, stomping down the feelings of others to get through the red tape, crashing through “established channels” to identify the person who could actually make the decision I wanted made, bullying the health insurance department manager into covering the surgery-meds-office visits-procedure-psychologist costs—after almost twenty years of this I was very good at it. But Brent asked me to please stop. I was becoming this “efficient” and “single minded” entity ALL the time—not just when on the phone or in the meetings. He wanted me to become me again. It was not worth the money I saved or the corporate compliance I achieved—my way of getting things done on schedule and under budget was turning me into something and someone that I was not.

So I stopped.

I do not think that I could go back to that “self” and ever come out again. I do not have the miraculous talent that Susan has to take care of business during business hours—and to take care of Susan during Susan hours. I have lost the ability to dichotomize. Brent can be at work and be an attorney and a manager—and still come home and be my husband and sweetheart. Both he and Susan can “leave the office at the office.” I have (if I ever really did have it) lost that ability. Everything I am is connected to everything that I do and think and feel and say and hear and ponder and read and desire. And at this moment of self-discovery, I don’t feel sad at the loss—only a great admiration for both my sister and my husband.

I am still smarting at Rob’s question of what I have that is worth putting on a blog. The only answer that I have, the only response that is genuine, is the contentment that consumes me as I put into physical form an approximation of the complex interchange necessary for my mind and heart to make sense of what my eyes and ears take in. I blog because I love to write . . .

. . . and because someday I hope I might make a difference with the words that I craft and send out into the wide expanse of the internet.