Yesterday in the early am's (i.e., the early 5 am's when I wake up potentially to go south for the yoga), I felt weird in the belly and head. The car then told me, in big red letters "STOP, TURN MOTOR OFF" as it was out of oil. An oil check a few hours later revealed NOT A DROP in there. No moisture whatsoever. So I didn't get the yoga done on Monday and it was probably a good thing. Then later I got properly sick, feverish, sleeping for 7 hours in the morning/afternoon, the real thing. Nothing gross, just uneasy sensations and chills and all that good business.
Each day that I make it to the studio, I do less. First day, well into Intermediate, with dropbacks and all. Second day, mightily sore, barely into Intermediate, no dropbacks. Today still with sore belly but without queasiness, only to Janu B and then the handstand festival, and then I backbent (no straight arms, no dropbacks) and closed. Not even jumpbacks or anything; it feels like if I clench my abs to pull my knees up, I'll toss my cookies, even though I've barely eaten anything in 24 hours.
Maybe in the future I will just go to different teachers' rooms and do whatever, with no expectations at all. In Indy I think of my practice as having a variable Intermediate stopping point: Kapo sometimes, Dwi Pada other times, Karanda other times, the whole thing other times. Here I've been OK'd for Ardha Matsyendrasana, but I can't seem to get to it.
Vacation with a kid means, basically, that you don't bring your work with you. It doesn't mean vacation. And having so much exposure to J and the kid means that I am getting a deep soak in how dead/on hold our relationship is, but I've also been reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for the first time ever, despite a thousand recommendations when I was in college), so many of my days here are spent thinking about the kind of crazy shit that well-meaning people can come up with and then have to live with. I wrote a whole draft of a post about my counter-vision of Western civilization, which as I said in the still quite-valuable "fascist tendencies" post, is all full of the same illusions as Western civ itself.
J sees the world through the lens of parenting: when she considers working out, it's never for her, it's so she "won't die young and leave the kid by himself." That sort of thing; a hundred examples. What she does, what she considers, even how she argues with me; it's ALL parenting, all the time.
I retained a split view; I remained "many" whereas J has, to the best of her ability, become "one" (parent). I still see myself as yoga guy over there, parent over there, interpersonal relating guy over there, and so on. But because J is locked strictly into parent mode, she can call my yoga "leisure activity" when in actuality it is a central element in my mellowing-out mechanism, which has on more than one occasion kept me from throwing her out a window, and she can call interpersonal relating "not the real thing" because being a parent is "the real thing." So basically we have no relationship, other than that we parent together. When we talk about intimacy, she says "well maybe you can find a certain intimacy in doing this hard thing together." When we argue about the relationship, she says that "we are responsible for this child, we have to make all of his choices." In short, J and I CANNOT talk about our relationship, because all she can see in any aspect of life, is parenting. In one argument, I said, "You treat me like I don't exist" and she said, "We both have to be on, all the time, to keep him safe."
How do those relate, you say? I was talking generally about how even when she leaves me "in charge" of the child, she is still the guardian. She doesn't trust me, at least not as much as she trusts herself. And also there was a clear note of interpersonal relating in there, because where that's concerned, there's neither me nor relationship. J was talking about child care, and whoever can be more cautious and more aware, basically "wins." She, of course, is always more cautious and more aware than I am because she has hormonal super powers where that's concerned and I do not. So I was trying to say that our relationship is wildly unbalanced and that I find that painful, and she was trying to say that the point of our lives is to be attentive parents. There's virtually no common ground there.
So it's all death. Grey skies, reduced yoga, belly sickness, parenting and relating being wildly unbalanced. It's all death and I don't even have any work with me so that I can escape it for a second to a world that's got less death in it. Well, there's Zen... of course, but that's just a story like mine, a guy with an obsessive and insane idea that he chases to the very, very end. I can't put it down, but it's hardly a comforting read.
5 comments:
This reminds me of something.
When new responsibility is thrust on me in the household realm, I simply decline. Wasps are building wax aqueducts in the walls and dive-bombing us in bed. Mold is growing on a basement wall and creeping in to heirloom holiday ornaments. Such is life.
Simultaneously the Editor responds with hypervigilance. The nervous system reacts even more strongly than if he were alone, because he not only has to take care of the house but also has to (hyperbolically) demonstrate to IMPORTANCE OF TAKING RESPONSIBILITY.
I give him no choice. He must over-occupy a role because I have entirely rejected it. His identity gets all responsibility-ish and his nervous system gets even more amped and my ability to calm and support him is reversed. Both the identity and the primitive brain are working like a lone primitive protector whose house/family are at risk. Thus he's stuck an escalating cycle of responsibility, reaction and stress.
But I am also stuck, because now I'm busy confirming his caretaker-caveman identity. On an epistemic level, I'm still in the game I created with that first opt-out.
But the thing is, unless the Editor turns in to Jesus H. Christ (sometimes he does this, but mostly he's mortal), the only one who can soften the binary is me. He can't because if he does, the bees and the mold will take over. Also, the division of labor is such that my nervous system is relatively at rest, whereas he just doesn't have the synaptic wherewithal to step away from the binary.
Here is how I softened the binary with the last incident and started acting like a partner, even though I thought the campaign against the bees was stupid and violent and deeply unnecessary. I got in touch with the caveman energy that was making him defensive (of the home), hyperbolically responsible (because of me) and stressed (because of his fight-or-flight system). Damn, I love that primitive strength, and I trust it. Even if it's not directed at me. There's a depth of character there.
Recognizing the caveman stuff, I then felt bad that I was cutting him off from his really developed side - the feminist, the co-equal partner, the person who grieves when insects die. I helped kill the bees even though I hated doing it because it was our only option - both to solve the practical problem and to start undoing a division of labor and identity that was also dividing us.
So much for laconic. Pish.
Yep.
Holy SEVERE bogarting of a comment thread. Sorry man.
Hey sister you're allowed to Bogart here; I dug that story, and it really is informative for my situation. Yeah, one says, "dude, mellow out" and the other says, "I don't understand why you don't see how important this is." Only one party can move. I may not be able to inhabit that intensity 24/7 but I can certainly pop up there now and then and make a good show of it.
Nice! Ok. You give me more space than I give myself in this sense. Good to know.
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