It’s the 10th of the month. [Now, try that aloud with that Warren G it’s the first of the month inflection.]
And the 10th conveys that it’s been four months since Mom died. I’m learning more of the Jewish traditions of shiva, the sequence of grieving, and am imitating those in my goy life and family, even if my family members aren’t following along. That’s alright, as I’m understanding that being different types of learners sometimes means that I walk or feel alone and it may be a few hours or decades before someone close to me gets me and gets my world view.
I’m naming who and what I am as a rainmaker in recent months and as a visionary, just in the last 24 hours. I’m one of multiple, as I play team sports more often than solo athletics, so I gravitate towards collaborative projects so I’m clear that this isn’t a world where there’s only one: not 1 right way, not 1 heroine/hero, not 1 best path just as there isn’t just 1 universe.
In the 4 months since Mom died, I’m delighting in friendships, particularly the meeting of making new friends and how this feels different in middle age. A tiny part of me broke when some friends (1 is newish, in the last 3 years, though her wife is a new friend who I met for the first time this Fall) described how they hadn’t made any new friends in the five years they’ve been living in their current residence. I was aghast and flabbergasted at their dry spell in the realm of friendships. The sense of no new friends after five years is their own description of the meagerness of their relationships in the multiple communities that they’re a part of: where they live, who they work with, the people they see with some frequency and even people they just see once and never again. And those perceptions, as they’re wont to do, make reality. So, I’ve taken my sadness at the notion — which may be one of those mental constructs that is not only a lie, but is disempowering — of no new friends in the past half decade, and I came to the conclusion of an equation metaphor:
friends = people who want more of me in their life + people who can be vulnerable about the real stuff in their own life
The equation is an antidote to not having new friends. The less/more (in symbols that’s < and >, of course) distinction has been immensely clarifying as I’ve stopped giving so much attention, texting, and questioning of people who have shown me that they don’t want so much of me. The people who have become stale, like a moldy bread, in my life. My outdated notion of friendship was where I thought that I was being a good friend by persisting. That I ought to continue to call on the people I’ve loved and cared for, cared about, even if they cannot call or text or write me back. Since Mom’s death, I’m doing much less pursuit of the flighty, those who runaway or avoid or turn away. It’s been so easy to gauge my relationships in the stark terms of: do they express, either through actions or words or other behaviors, that they want more of me or do they seem to want less of me in their life or in this conversation?
I recognize that my old friends’ lesser or lessened capacity is that some of them are simply confused about what they want in their own life. I’m not taking that personally (like Don Miguel Ruiz advised in that bestselling book at the dawn of the 21st Century) as they may not know what they want because wants and need are challenging, often times conflicting and contradictory, in a world where we are told to not be selfish, to work more, strive harder, and to keep up with the Joneses even though many people want some things other than what we’re bombarded with what were supposed to want and seek.
I’m resolute about how I’m interacting because I saw Mom spend decades of her life placating family members who harbored resentment, if not bitterness. Who assigned blame and meaning about how disruptive Mom was in their life, how she made choices that they believe adversely affected their life. That she made choices and lived a life that made their family of origin more turbulent. And after years of doing her thing, Mom still sought out her siblings, younger sisters and an older brother, who had no control over Mom’s life choices but who chose to fester in fear because Mom made choices that they dared not make.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 