Unconscious Mutterings - Week 527

An old familiar - Unconscious Mutterings.   When I was writing on this blog semi-regularly, I would occasionally post these from LunaNina's blog.  She actually has kept this up for 527 weeks - which is over ten years, kids.  Really - wow.  I am blown away by her ability to find ten random words a week for ten years.  But anyway - although I didn't have anything amazingly deep in response to these words, I give you:

1.  Schedule ::  timeclock, boundaries


2. Guest ::  welcome


3. Stall ::   work, put the brakes on


4. Cold ::   sweater weather!


5. Editorial ::   stupidity in the Times


6. Striped ::   yarn and knitting, especially socks


7. Curtains ::  hanging them up


8. Cramping ::  years of menstrual cramps, ugh


9. March ::  forward


10. Folder ::  files and organization, on the computer

Yes, you can see that even though it is creeping towards spring, I am still thinking about yarn, knitting and sweaters.  Not a surprise as I'm making progress on the Afghan of Death - steady progress.

I am also glad that I'm post-menopausal, so my years of severe cramps can now just be in memory and not something to anticipate on a monthly basis.  Thank the goddess for that one.

Back in the Day . . .

I have been wondering if I would ever re-visit this blog. For a few years, I was sure I would never and yet, here I am.

Obviously, life happens to us all. And we happen to life, too.

I'm now 55, not 51. My husband, the 'Publican, is 58. We're now grandparents to a sweet baby girl. We have attended our first wedding of the five sons. Luckily, or unsurprisingly (is that a word?), it was my husband's second son who got married and he's the father of the baby girl. She has a boy's name (my one snarky remark on her mother's insistence on this name), but they are probably just trendsetters in turning this particular name from boy to girl.

The baby was born in 2012 right about this time, so we're hurtling to her first birthday. Ten days after she was born, the 'Publican's ex-wife died suddenly. She was home on a Sunday afternoon, doing her laundry. When she didn't arrive for work the following day, her office called her oldest son. He didn't have a key and called his younger brother and the two of them drove down to her townhouse and found her sitting in a chair, quite dead. But, as they later said, very peaceful looking. Her cell phone was nearby. When a women who is only 56 years old dies this way, an autopsy is done which takes a while. Well, it doesn't take long to do the autopsy, but it takes weeks to get the final results due to lab tests and so on.

The final word was that she died of a massive heart attack. One that hit her so hard, all she could do was sit down and die. She wasn't able to call 911 or anyone else for help. So only ten days after her first grandchild was born, she was dead.

Obviously it's been hard on her sons. Her granddaughter will never know her "nana" but mom and dad are making sure she is not forgotten - my daughter-in-law had small tokens of her throughout her wedding which was very touching.

Thankfully, any issues between the 'Publican and his ex were over - we were all there when the baby was born and hugs went all around.

I have more to write about this, but for now . . . I am glad to revisit this blog. I'm glad it's still here. I've missed the contact with other human beings through the blogosphere, although I continue to read others' blogs. Frankly, I'm amazed by the writing I read - there is so much talent and heart out there.

As Religious As I Get

The 'Publican and I will be in Seattle next week so I can worship at the Church of Coffee, otherwise known as the original Starbucks. Have a great week, everybody and I'll be back with pictures and a few pithy posts to go with them, too.

Therapists We Love To Hate - Part 1

Remember the Bob Newhart show? Well, this clip is not the Bob you remember - he's a Bob who's struggling to survive in the age of managed care. Seriously, if you went to therapy with this guy maybe you would get better. As a therapist myself, I don't think I'm going to be using his technique anytime soon, although there is a good point here, too. Plus, the session's cheap!

A Walk Down Another's Memory Lane . . .

So yesterday for many hours, the 'Publican and I watched videotapes (yes, remember those?) of his home movies. We started out trying to find a portion from 1990 of a vacation trip from California to Washington, D.C. including the July 4th Fireworks display on the Mall. Growing up here, I've seen fireworks lasting about 20 minutes, sometimes 25 at the most. The ones in D.C. were a good 45 minutes and frankly quite spectacular, even on the videotape.

To get to the tape of the fireworks we waded (a fair amount of fast forwarding included) through about 6 hours of tape over a couple of hours. And did I mention - these were of my husband and his former wife and their much younger kids. It's 19 years ago, after all, and I've only been with this man for the past 5 1/2 years. It was just weird to see the ex-wife all over the place.

I should mention that I have only met her exactly once, and I was hardly at my best on that day. Frankly the only thing I remember was that she seemed a bit fragile. And by fragile, I think I'm referring to the voice and maybe the physicality, although I'm not entirely sure. Yes, she seemed thin, but it wasn't exactly that. By the time I rather accidentally met her coming in to pick up or drop off a kid and me just being in the kitchen at that exact moment she entered the house, I knew she was a bit older than me, and had had some issues with her bones, having to have a hip replacement at a youngish age. I also knew she had a lot of panic attacks and other mood issues like depression, so maybe all of that went into my sense of her as "fragile".

So here she was in the tapes, younger and healthier and not seeming to be at all anxiety-ridden (except for their trip up the Empire State Building where she really did look scared). The same for my husband. When I met him, the 'Publican had graying hair and male-pattern baldness. But watching the tapes he had a full head of lustrous sable hair - almost too "pretty" for a man. Amazing what 19 years can do to people, eh?

The fun part was seeing the kids, one of whom was 6, the other 9. The 6-year-old was so cute, running hither and yon, karate-chopping the air at odd moments, making those candid comments that parents just love (in Williamsburg's old stables, he can't help himself - "It stinks!"). That part was very enjoyable. And poignant. My father-in-law had given the video camera to my husband and his first wife as a present and they used it over the years to document their kids' lives as well as their own good times.

I never had a videocam and I never documented my son's life when he was young, except in still photos. I know this doesn't mean I'm a bad mom or anything, but seeing the videos sure made me wish I had had the living, breathing movement of a little boy on vacation or at play, to enjoy again. Although I can certainly see a picture and remember where we were, how old he was, what was happening. But more of it is in my imagination and memory and we all know how unreliable those can be.

Oh well.

After the 1990 trip video, we also watched a tape that had been edited by my in-laws which included a fair amount of footage with my husband's brother on it. It started with the wedding of my husband and his ex-wife in 1976 and went up to 1984 or so, when their second child was born, an eight-year period. In the middle of this somewhere, the 'Publican's brother was killed. Of course, I've never met him so it was interesting to see the videotapes, to see how much taller he was than my husband, to see who he favored in what features. In some photos the brothers look very similar but in most, they don't. Of course, it was his brother who stood up for him at his first wedding - at ours, it was the 'Publican's second son who did the honors.

I know it was emotional for my husband to see his brother, more so than it could ever be for me, since I never knew him. None of the kids knew their uncle, either, and he left no wife or children of his own, although he did leave a boat and other artifacts, some of which my in-laws still have, almost 30 years later. I sometimes wonder what it must be like to lose a young adult child, but I can't know because it hasn't happened and I hope it never does. I sincerely hope my son outlives me by many decades. But none of us knows what will happen when we have children.

Perhaps that is why faith and prayer are so important for most of us, religious or not. We have these kids, we do our best, we're imperfect, and at some point we have to send them out into the world somehow. I know I've posted some of this sentiment before and I still get those "I can't protect him anymore" twinges about my own son. Truly, parenthood is not for sissies.

It was strange watching the tapes of my husband's first wedding, seeing how happy and full of promise he was when he first got married with the knowledge of where it would eventually go. We both were left with some "what if's" since there were people (his brother for one) who didn't think they should marry, primarily because they were so young. But the 'Publican didn't know it then and wouldn't know it for a long time. I think watching this was like watching a movie, having read the novel beforehand, so you know the hero shouldn't marry that woman because it will only lead to heartache.

The "what if's" are fun at times, but obviously not the point. Because if not for that marriage and eventual divorce when it happened, maybe we would never have met and married. Certainly his four sons would not have been born, although had another marriage happened at a later time, probably other children would have been born, just not these kids. And they are the kids he knows and loves.

My story is similar, but I think I always knew in some place of my being that I was not in the right marriage for me. Of course, that nascent knowing didn't stop me from marrying my first husband or having my son. And I was married for nearly seven years, so it wasn't all terrible. But for me, too, I think the history was what it had to be to get me to the place where I needed to be that led up to my meeting the 'Publican.

One thing that my husband has always told me is that his first wife's weight had been up and down, but since I'd only met her one time and she was pretty thin, I'm not sure I believed it, but the videotapes didn't lie. Her weight was all over the place and I guess, in that petty girl part of myself, I wasn't totally unhappy with that fact. Who said I didn't have the capacity to be secretly pleased that my predecessor had weight issues, since I have had my own? Like I said, it's a petty part of myself, shared by most women. Hey, I'm not proud of it.

Ultimately, walking down someone else's memory lane was an interesting experience for a holiday afternoon and evening.

Folie a Deux a la Madoff

I was just over at Aldon Hynes' blog, Orient Lodge, leaving a comment about one of his posts. Of the many blogs out there, Aldon's is one of the more thoughtful, well-written ones around. But he stated that he thought Ruth Madoff should keep her $2.5 million and basically live with the shame of it all (I'm paraphrasing a bit).

I disagree. I remarked that Ruth had decided long ago to stay with Bernie and was his 'partner in life and crime'. Plus any money they made was the Madoff's victim's money, not theirs.

I think, and others have stated publicly, that Bernie Madoff appears to have Anti-social personality disorder. That may be. But at the very least, he seems to fit the classic pattern of a person with NPD (narcissistic personality disorder). The primary trait of which is a lack of empathy for others. What's interesting is what may have been the draw for Ruth Madoff. I suspect we'll learn more in the following months and years, but I'm going to throw in some armchair psychology. Narcissists don't marry other narcissists (d'oh - and share the spotlight?), but they do frquently pair up with individuals (mostly women) who have traits of BPD, or Borderline Personality Disorder. And these two can do the dance for a very long time. The narcissistic man can be just nasty enough and the borderline woman can have just low enough self esteem that they never leave each other - in fact, they desparately need each other.

(As an aside - although the full-blown personality disorders may not affect huge numbers of people in the population, traits of these two disorders can be found in much larger numbers. I'm not their psychiatrists, and I don't know if either Madoff has had a thorough psych evaluation by anybody, but at least as to Bernie, we're reading and hearing about Anti-social PD. I think the NPD is even more likley, though, with some anti-social traits. By the way - we now use the Anti-social term, but we used to call these people sociopaths which I prefer.)

Now, to all appearances, Ruth Madoff seems confident and attractive enough and so on to not be a sufferer, but borderlines can hide their affliction because their primary trait is a deep feeling of emptiness with a history of unstable relationships with important people in their lives like their parents or siblings or friends, and that kindof stuff might never show. Some borderlines do have histories of suicide attempts and/or other self-harming behaviors like cutting, but not all do. But the real deal is that they are in desparate need for affirmation that they are lovable and loving, that they even "exist" in a sense. Does this describe Ruth? We'll have to wait and see.

With such a pairing, though, you would expect to see a wife who, because she has invested so much of her self worth with her narcissistic husband, would keep his 'secrets' as conferring upon her a sense of being his special woman or love. What would she do for him? She would mirror him 'perfectly' which is what the narcissist so desparately needs. How that might look would be an almost hero worship of her flawed and imperfect man, of 'seeing' him completely AND accepting him completely. Basking in this, he would feel he could confide in her - and his confidence in her would, in turn, allow her to feel his specialness as her own, too. It's a perfect feedback loop. It's also a gordian knot that is not easily unwound. Under these circumstances, if true, Ruth would never rat out Bernie. Isn't it the case that everyone has said how devoted Ruth and Bernie were to each other? Even to the exclusion of their two sons who by all accounts may not have had much knowledge of Bernie's crimes. They had what I call a "marriage of two" which really didn't allow outsiders in, even the kids. And I don't think it matters that Bernie had a little black book of hookers; they only ministered to his body whereas Ruth mirrored his special and secret soul.

That's why we have a psychiatric term for the shared delusion - we call is a folie a deux. The "folly of two". It's a powerful reminder we ought not forget - we not only behave differently with others, we even think and feel differently, too. Scary, isn't it? Such is the power of the limbic system and our mirror neurons. It is why we can so easily learn our baby's specific cries and coos. It is why our animals "know" when we're happy or sad, and especially with dogs, behave in ways to soothe us when we're sad or agitated (yes, animals like all mammals have fairly well developed limbic systems). It's not magic or psychic - it's nature. It's the way we're designed to survive in families, packs, tribes and cultures.

The last act of Bernie is also an act of his narcissism because only HE had the power to save Ruth by falling on the sword and saying she had nothing to do with it. I don't buy it. But I can see how he might need to do this because it keeps secure his place as the only one who did it, and the only one who should be imprisoned. Ruth is secure, due to him and his omnipotence. As long as she's not culpable, he stays in the limelight, which is one place the narcissist loves and needs. It's just all about him with she the innocent spouse. Right. She was the bookkeeper in the early days and I don't believe for a second that she wasn't intimately aware of the scam.

I think the point is that, even if they had a folly of two and were in a marriage of two emotionally damaged people who found each other and eventually found a way to scam their friends, families, and others - what they both did was wrong. Ruth had the power to pull the plug at any time. Now I don't believe based on my possible scenario that this would have been easy for her, but this doesn't make her a victim of him, either. At the very least, she had to wonder how it was that only Bernie could do so well year after year, when others had dips as well as good years. She isn't stupid.

I'm not suggesting, either, that she should have an adjoining cell - but I do think she should suffer financially for these shared crimes. At least to the extent of their shared victims. If she has to rent a room somewhere or live with one of her sons, okay. If she has to get a job at Walmart or Starbucks to supplement her social security, I'm okay with that, too. Even if you think that she is innocent, like all 'good' wives of criminals, she may have to pay in other ways for the choices she made - even if that choice was only to be loyal to her husband. Even mafia wives have to get jobs sometimes, after their hubbies go to jail. Why is Ruth Madoff any different?

Once Again, The Survey Speaks!

Gee, it's been awhile since I did one of these silly surveys, but this one, thank goodness, came out okay. Can you imagine if it had gone the other way? The 'Publican would have been horrified, I tell you. He thinks I'm a feminine woman, after all. Joke's on him, almost.

Your Brain is 53% Female, 47% Male

Your brain is a healthy mix of male and female You are both sensitive and savvy Rational and reasonable, you tend to keep level headed But you also tend to wear your heart on your sleeve

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Trifecta of Death in Hollyweird

This week we had our trifecta. You know the "bad things come in threes" moment here in Hollyweird. Well, and if you add in Thailand, maybe it comes in fours (I'm thinking David Carridine, but for the moment, he's not in the discussion). So first up - the perpetual side-kick and pitch man - Ed McMahon. When we heard he had died, I turned to the 'Publican (aka my husband) and said, "well, no more ads for selling our gold teeth!).

And then yesterday we had a two-fer.

First up was 62-year-old Farrah Fawcett. I didn't watch her cancer documentary on TV that was on recently. I'm not sure why - maybe I thought it would be depressing and I might cry. Maybe I thought it was going to be fairly self-serving, badly done or just overly narcissistic. Maybe there was just something else on the tube that I was more interested in. But for whatever reason, I knew she was quite ill with cancer, didn't have that long to live and yet when I heard she had died, I felt more than a twinge of sadness. Now here's something interesting - everybody said she had cancer but nobody was saying what type of cancer she had. Yesterday for the first time, the radio announcer stated it - she had anal cancer. My husband opined that this was probably why nobody was saying much about the type of cancer she had and, in fact, he didn't even know you could get anal cancer.

Well, yes you can. In fact, since cancer is cellular mutation you can "get" cancer anywhere on or in your body. Even in yucky places that we don't like to talk about. Now if someone says, "well, you would have known this if you'd seen that documentary" - fair enough. Maybe they talked about the type of cancer on the show - and maybe not. It obviously was a sensitive topic for the family and friends of Farrah and one can only wonder what type of treatment was needed because she fought the cancer for awhile. Once again I say "Yuck" and I'm not all that squeamish.

So I say, rest in peace, dear Farrah. What happened was awful and you fought well and hard. You had an amazing life filled with career highs (think "The Burning Bed" and "Extremities" more than "Charlie's Angels", okay?) and you had love in your life, too. You left an impression on us - some of us more than others. That means that I, too, had a Farrah haircut for years in the 1980's, since my hair is basically the same type of hair. Not that I ever looked like her - drat!

R.I.P. Michael Jackson!
Originally uploaded by Double With Cream (away for a while)

Now to the third death of the week. Michael Jackson. This one just annoys the heck out of me. And here I may annoy you, too. What I wrote in a blip (blip.fm is a musical sharing site patterned about twitter) last night was that he was a "musical genius and a tortured soul" and I think that about sums up the nicest things I can say about him.

Musical genius - yes, absolutely. I remember the Jackson Five since I was a kid during their heyday. Great songs and little Michael was absolutely adorable. And I was certainly blown away by "Thriller".

What I didn't know - none of us did - was how he and the rest of the Jackson kids were truly brutalized by their father, Joe. I don't take this away from MJ - he was abused, at least emotionally and physically. Although I doubt his father sexually abused him, I would not be surprised to hear that MJ was abused by somebody close to the family.

So tortured soul - yes, absolutely. He was a man-child who never became a true man. There is enough evidence that he was a pedophile but because he was not the worst type of pedophile, many tend to dismiss his behavior as a quirky or idiosyncratic "lifestyle", and can't believe that he did the things we think pedophiles do.

Not all pedophiles have intercourse (RAPE) with their victims. Not all pedophiles stalk their victims. In fact, they tend to emotionally seduce their victims AND their victims' families. Most say they love their victims - and they mean it. Some, like MJ, just go to second or third base (touching and maybe oral sex) with their victims. Again, if he is emotionally about 11 or 12 years old, he's going to behave this way with other boys in close age proximity (his favorite victims). Sex play between pre-pubescent boys of the same age and maturity is not that uncommon. It isn't necessarily sexual abuse because the relationship is not, by its very nature, exploitive. Now if a 12 year old boy is touching a 5 year old - that is not mutual. It's not just sex play - it is abuse.

But here's the thing - it's still pedophilia. It's still wrong. It's still against the law. The fact that he wasn't convicted does not mean he didn't do it - it means the prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to prove their case to a jury of 12. It could also mean the prosecutors DID have enough evidence, but the jury of 12 wasn't going to convict MJ because he was a celebrity. Remember the idea of "burden of proof" and "reasonable doubt"? So for whatever reason, the jury did not believe the prosecutors had met their burden of proof and/or there was reasonable doubt. But . . . that doesn't mean he didn't do it. Remember - MJ paid off the first boy's family to the tune of $25 million.

Look- the bottom line is that he was a victim and a victimizer. I think he had erotic desires for boys of a certain age and those desires are not ones that we, as a society, tolerate. We are not a NAMBLA nation, nor do I want us to be. Children are too easily manipulated by adults, and even if I believe that MJ had the emotions of a 12-year-old and in his own mind, he was just playing with a playmate, he was legally an adult. In effect, he needed others in his world to say no to him - and there's no evidence that anybody ever did.

(By the way - don't get me started on the families of MJ's victims. As far as I'm concerned they pimped their kids out to a pedophile for their own needs and they are worse than MJ. After all, MJ was just MJ and wanted what he wanted, but the parents of the victims should have had enough sense to keep their kids away from him. They didn't and they preferred to cash their kids in. Unspeakable and disgusting.)

I suspect what we're going to learn is that MJ died from a combination of drugs that lead to cardiac arrest. Something like another sad soul, Anna Nicole Smith. Doctors kept him doped up - family members and sycophants never stopped it - and he's dead.

We'll see. MJ seems like a very concrete fellow without much insight into himself or his history or motivations so that much of his internal distress was probably somatized (that is, he would have a lot of physical complaints of pain, gastrointestinal distress, etc.) and he chose to find doctors who would continue to maim him or dope him up, rather than help him psychologically. I'm not saying that psychiatrists and therapists weren't ever called in - I'm just saying that they were probably not listened to by either MJ or his entourage. Easier to do another plastic surgery or give him another injection of demerol or morphine.

Had he been more psychologically minded it's possible that he might not have been able to live with himself - but I don't think we're going to learn this. I don't really think this was a suicide - although the idea of this is tantalizing. But it would mean that he would have to have the ability to see himself clearly - or to want to save his kids from himself. I don't think that was possible and I don't think the entourage would allow it anyway. After all, their paychecks were at risk.

Ultimately, he was a commodity - one that eventually just got used up. And that's tragic.