Voodoo

I have a particular fondness for the work of Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross because of her model of grief, and find that regardless of how great or small the loss I’m experiencing, her model serves me well by reminding me that my reactions are normal and to be expected.

By now, most of us know the stages of grief she observed among her dying patients: shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Of course, one doesn’t have to be dying or among the dying to experience these emotional and intellectual reactions to loss. Whether you’re in the ticket line and have someone cut in front of you or whether you’ve been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, you will most likely go through most or all of these reactions to a loss. The size of the loss isn’t as relevant as the fact that we can be so predictable in our responses along the path to acceptance.

Take, for example, the March event to which my husband and I found ourselves uninvited.  I discovered that several people in our family had been invited to a function from which we’d been excluded, and my first reactions were a sinking heart (“Oh, no!”) and “realizing with a start” the facts of the situation—the reactions of shock and denial. This was followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. From this example, you can see how the grief we experience over our losses, whether small or great, takes a worn path.

If you’ll think about the last reaction of shock or “Oh, no!” you had, you will probably be able to play your initial “Oh, no!” reaction forward and see how it ended in some sort of acceptance, even if only a grudging one. You may also be able to accept that nearly every “oh, no!” reaction is part of a response to loss. Many times we don’t acknowledge our losses as we go through the day, and finally erupt by day’s end in some surprising way because we’ve been unconscious to our own suffering. I’ve found that the more aware I am of the losses I experience throughout the day and the claims I have that back up my sense of loss, the more I am able to contain myself rather than projecting my unsolved mysteries outward.

When I first realized we were in the process of being cheated, the head’s-up came in a most extraordinary way through the person who has caused me the most pain in my life, which is my own mother. My brothers do not share this pain and in fact experience my mother quite differently than I do. They point to other familial sources for the etiology of their pain. This has made my family of origin losses harder to bear, as I have to bear them without any family sympathy at all. Even so, the grief I’ve experienced over being my mother’s daughter is real and is at the root of many of the disproportionate emotional reactions I have had. Just as children playing hide-and-go-seek must tag home before they’re safe, so must I tag my concept and experience of  “Mother” before I can proceed to untangle many a knot that appears in my life.

These people who cheated us could not have arranged a more elegant way of alerting me to the impending doom of our relationship, for delivering news of what they were planning through my own mother, who is quite emotionally distant and uninvolved in my life, was an extraordinary coup for them. The news traveled, in fact, from our deal-breakers to someone who is most beloved and trusted in my life, to my mother, and finally to me. I write about this because I have not only experienced this astonishing pattern of betrayal a few times in my life, but have furthermore observed it in the lives of others enough to recognize it as a pattern. Just as one can predict the path of grief, so too one can predict the path of betrayal. There is dark magic at work.

As I wrote in my entry about being uninvited, I no longer pussyfoot around conflict as I did when I was younger, less enlightened, and more anxious about being viewed as “nice” or “good,” “loving” or “kind.” These days, I deal with situations head-on, which I find preferable to being deceitful and fake. So, after receiving this elegant invitation to my own bereavement, I double-checked the facts of the matter and then confronted our partners. Once I illustrated the way the situation had unfolded, even they were shocked. They had never dreamed that news of their intentions would travel so quickly, much less to the very person who would elicit the most significant emotional reaction in me. They were enlightened enough to know how this looked.

They didn’t mean for things to happen this way, they said. They would never want to hurt me. This is what they said, but of course I don’t listen only to words any more. Intentions mean next to nothing to me these days, for nearly everyone will swear to his own good intentions. It says in Proverbs 20:6, “Most men will proclaim their own goodness, but who can find a truly trustworthy man?” A trustworthy man has more than good intentions. A trustworthy man produces what Buddhists call right action, good action. This is why Jesus said, “Judge a tree by its fruit.” Or, as Carl Jung said, the meaning of the behavior is in the behavior.

So when our partners with whom we covenanted protested their innocence and their many good intentions, I was not fooled. I believe that large parts of them want to feel good and perhaps, in theory, even to be good. I believe that they would not want someone else to do to them what they’ve done to us. But I know with conviction that they are spellbound by the deepest possible unconscious voodoo. Otherwise, they could not have drawn so much archetypal Bad Mother juju into the situation. Otherwise, they would have heralded a change in their intentions in a different, more conscious and caring way. Otherwise, they might have done any other manner of things with good end results. Instead, as we all do when we are driven by spellbinding forces unseen and thus unacknowledged, they made a mess of things.

“For they sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind” (Isaiah 8:7).

Cheated

cheat (v.):

1. to defraud; swindle. 2. to deceive; influence by fraud. 3. to elude; deprive of something expected. 

This year I have spent a substantial part of the year experiencing being cheated. In a written agreement with other adults, my husband and I have been defrauded. We kept our end of the deal, which was struck among fellow Christians, witnessed, and came with all the trappings of civic and religious ceremonies. Then, after we had spent years keeping our end of the bargain, our partners in covenant reneged on their end of the deal.

I, in particular, paid a high price to keep my end of the covenant, spending countless hours doing healing work at the expense of my substantially-sized family. The price I paid within myself is one of the highest I can ever recall expending. With my husband I made a choice out of fear and trembling intermingled with great hope, knowing that the rewards for success would be as substantial as the deprivations of failure. In spite of the risk, and true to my often naively hopeful character, I chose the leap of faith. I have always thought that anyone–yes, anyone–can be healed, restored, and redeemed. I’ve been willing to serve as a conduit of grace as God called and enabled me. And He did call. I am as certain of that as I can be certain of anything in my life.

But still I was cheated.

My husband and I made the decision to enter into covenant with these other adults in spite of the fact that several of our most trustworthy, wise, and sane confidantes and adult children advised against it. My parents, too, warned against it and my father stated that he would not participate until the people with whom we had covenanted proved themselves. “You don’t enter into a deal with someone before they’ve proved themselves,” he said. We countered with the evidence of many years’ worth of relationship, but his retort was that it was obvious who was getting the better end of the deal. “When you come out of this deal as happy and well situated as they are,” he said, “then I’ll consider changing my opinion.”

We have come out of the deal and we are not happy or well situated. In this win-lose deal we struck while hoping for win-win, we are the losers. I’ve been waiting for some six months now to see if the loss I see is, in fact, what I see. I’ve talked with our partners and told them that my husband and I not only feel cheated, but according to our five-page written agreement, actually have been cheated, our covenant broken. “You can’t break a covenant,” our partners have glibly replied, citing Biblical teachings on the irrefutable character of God-made covenants and ignoring the obligation of Christians to be people of their word, to go the extra mile, to apologize when they hurt others, or to do a great many other things that Christians are told we should do.

Maybe they felt we let them down first, I thought. So I went to our partners again and asked whether they thought we had kept our end of the deal. “You kept your end of the deal,” they said. “We have no complaints we haven’t voiced.” But still our partners have not budged. Still we are cheated.

Some years ago, my husband’s grandfather died, leaving his heirs land and other property worth millions of dollars. Before his death, my husband and his granddad had walked this land that had been in the family since the Land Run, and his sweet old granddad told him, “this part will all be yours, the home place, your great-granddad’s homestead too, because I know you’ll care for it.” He put his property into a trust and retained his two most trustworthy sons to administer it.

About a year after the trust was established, my husband’s grandfather went into a nursing home. While he was there and still in his right mind, one of his two trustee sons was murdered by vagrants passing through the area. Now only one son was left, the son who later developed Alzheimer’s and could not be relied upon in any way. And then my husband’s granddad died, and the remaining sons took charge and cheated my husband out of his inheritance as we sat by helplessly, in spite of having hired attorneys and gone to court and spent four years trying to litigate our ways out of being cheated.

It was easier to watch my husband go through being cheated out of his inheritance than it has been to be cheated myself. Being cheated has left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth, so much sorrow and humiliation in my heart. As King David said in Psalm 55, it doesn’t bother you as much when it’s an enemy who cheats you, but when it’s someone you trust, someone you’ve gone to church with, someone who has lived under your roof and with whom you’ve been intimate–oh, my. Oh my, oh my. When one you broke bread with cheats you, one who “dips his bread with me” at the table as Judas did with Jesus, then you know you’ve been cheated. Then you know you’re moving into God territory, for who has been more defrauded than God?

Everyone has been cheated. Everyone has had someone else make a promise they later broke. Everyone has been on the switch end of the old bait-and-switch cheat. You marry someone you thought you knew, and six years later you discover he’s had an affair. You raise your children with every value you can muster, and when you finally have an empty nest and can look forward to a comfortable retirement with your spouse, your oldest child is diagnosed with schizophrenia. You have to raise your grandchild. You get cancer. You finally retire and go on the world cruise you both always dreamed of, and your husband dies in Ireland, on the first leg of your journey. Your child is born handicapped and you learn you will always have to take care of her. Or, as actually happened to a friend of ours, the healthy kidney is mistakenly removed and the diseased one left. “You’ll have to be on dialysis unless a donor is found,” they said. At some point or another in life, everyone is cheated.

Even when they haven’t actually been cheated, everyone feels cheated from time to time due to expectations. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney wrote at length about expectations, which she called “claims,” and their use by wounded folks. She said that we often have unspoken expectations and go through life imposing them on others without getting enough reality checks to discover whether or not our claims or dues are, in fact, reasonable. What is owed is the stuff of psychology and religion.

What do you owe me? What do I owe you? What did I give you, and what must you give me in return? How do the laws of reciprocity, of sowing and reaping, apply?  Is an outcome, a hope, a dream, an expectation, a contract, a covenant something I should be attached to? Or does all attachment lead to suffering, as Buddha taught?

Can a person ever be truly free of expectations? Ought we be? Is being free of expectations a worthy goal? What do we do when we’re feeling cheated, or when we have, in fact, been cheated? What can we do with our feelings of sorrow, humiliation, shame, astonishment, and anger?

These are all feelings and ideas I’ve been grappling with for most of this year, and now I’m going to grapple with them in a most public way.

April Fools

The end of March and the beginning of April have seen me in fool’s bells. My husband told me a month ago that he thought our cow was pregnant. I went and looked at her myself, being an expert on bovine pregnancy and all, and declared him mistaken. “She’s not pregnant,” said I, “because she’s not nearly as big as she was last time.”

Just a week or so ago, Bossy proved me wrong. Loud moos were heard coming from the creek bed, and our daughters ran up excitedly. “Mom, Mom!” they cried, “Bossy is mooing really loudly! What if she’s having a calf?!”

“She’s not having a calf,” sez I. “She’s probably in heat. But if she doesn’t stop, you’d better go tell Dad. Maybe she’s hurt.”

No more than 15 minutes later, the little girls were back in my office. “BOSSY HAD A BABY!” they yelled.

“No way!” I exclaimed. “I can’t have been wrong!”

And several times since then I’ve been mistaken, too. Mistaken about facts historical and otherwise; mistaken about which way to turn to get to where I’m going; mistaken about my husband’s shaky hand which is (supposedly) not, as I had feared, Parkinson’s but simply nerve damage from using too many tools for too many years. I have been mistaken, wrong, confounded, hasty. Over-reaching, puffed up, vain, and sometimes downright pompous. I’ve been these in front of witnesses. And they have laughed.

I like being wrong when the resulting surprises are good ones. I don’t mind laughing at myself, or having others laugh at me, then. But I have to admit that there are times when I’m mistaken about something and I see my arrogance and it’s not a pretty sight.

Though I’m old enough to have been often wrong, I still think I’m right so much of the time. I must think I have lived long enough to know a pregnant cow when I see one, though (if truth be told) I have known only one pregnant cow in my entire life, and that one is Bossy.  So this month I am an April fool. I’m reminded to not take myself too very seriously, to keep a humble set of heart and mind, to smile, and to be a bit more tentative in my statements, declarations, and pontifications. To be a better listener. To demonstrate my respect for others by recognizing that they could be right!

As promised, I’ll be continuing with the series on leaving home and turning next to the coddled child, to the effects of being smothered or (a tip of my hat to the Librarian from Purgatory, here) to those of having a ravenous mother.