Why cant I take my own good advice?

Each week on Tuesday, I go to my son’s classroom to hang out with the kids, be another adult in the room (which is appreciated during this age of the 31 to 1 student/teacher ratio), and also to introduce the concept of mindfulness to an amazing group of awareness-starved kids.

Today’s session was especially fun.  We talked about the breath and how the breath is a good tool to bring one back to the present moment.  We talked about Now being the only moment one ever really has and that thinking about the past and the future takes us out of that ever-present Now.  We even got to talking about dreams – consciousness, unconsciousness….we ended up drifting so far out on that one that the teacher jumped in to reel me on back to the topic at hand.  I could have seriously sat there for hours and hours with those kids, they were so inquisitive!

So why is it that, here I am at home, stressed to the gills with a sick kid and a laundry list of work tasks that need to be completed, including my own tax return (not due in two weeks, but I need to make an estimate payment so that I don’t spend into what I think is extra money lying around, blah, blah, blah). And the still, small voice inside my head says “slow down. Breath. Sit. Still.” And all I can do is reply “fuck you leave me alone so that I can have my panic attack!”

Why is it that at the very moment I need my own, really good advice, I cannot take it, or is it that I don’t WANT to take it, because, god forbid, what if there wasn’t really anything for me to worry about?  What then?  WHAT THE FUCK THEN???

So, I am panicking and really feeling like I need another body to come over and take care of me, and that just isn’t a possibility right now, so I decide to sit down and write about it. And right now, at this moment, with Tommi the cat on my lap, I feel a sense of peace.  And after I finish this writing, im going to serve the Sun his dinner in bed and then draw a bath and read one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, and breathe.  

I don’t know what after that. Maybe I can actually sit for a moment and breathe. And touch in.  And locate that still small voice within, and listen.  Or maybe not. Maybe I will decide to eat my feelings or zone out on bad t.v. our just sit in a tight ball on my bed and worry.  But this I know for sure: when I am able to heed my own good advice, it works.  Am I ready for that?

Welcome to the “M-Oscars” (pronounced Mah-skurs)

And my #1 movie of all time is…

“RAISING ARIZONA”

Starring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, this little gem of a movie first made its way onto the big screen 27 years ago in 1987.  Wow.  Written, directed and produced by the now-famous Coen Brothers, this movie tells the story of   “ex-con” H.I. McDunnough (Hi for short) and his policewoman wife Edwina (Ed).  Hi and Ed meet in jail over several mug shots, fall in love and get married.  With their child-rearing years ahead of them, Ed is devastated when she discovers that she is barren.  To make matters worse, adoption is not an option for the couple due to Hi’s extensive criminal history.

Meanwhile, Nathan Arizona, furniture mogul and owner of the Unpainted Arizona furniture store, has just had quintuples and, seeing’s how “they have more babies than they can handle,” Hi and Ed decide that the answer to their prayers is to steal one of the Arizona babies.  

After a nail-biting, yet successful caper, Hi and Ed must now figure out how to raise who they think to be Nathan Jr. (Ed:  I think we got the best one!) under the rising suspicion of Hi’s con-artist friends, Gale and Evelle Snoats, as well as their swinging neighbors (as in ‘to swing’) Glen and Dot.   Not to mention the "warthog from hell" who calls himself  Leonard Smalls.

For those of you who have not already seen this film, where have you been for the last 27 years?  Go!  Now!  And rent this movie!  Originally rated 2 out of 4 stars, this movie has developed a hefty camp following and now boasts a solid  rating of 90/100 on “Rotten Tomatoes.”  Seeing as it is my all-time favorite movie, I must give it my highest rating - 4 out of 4 ritz krackas!

“What are you kidding?! We got us a family here!”

“I’ll be taking these Huggies and…whatever cash ya got behind the counter here.”

“Ma'am, you don't breast-feed him, he'll hate you for it later. That's why we wound up in prison.”

“Say that reminds me, how'd you get that kid so darn fast? Me and Dot went in to adopt on account a' somethin' went wrong with my semen, and they said we had to wait five years for a healthy white baby. I said, "Healthy white baby? Five years? What else you got?" Said they got two Koreans and a negra born with his heart on the outside. It's a crazy world.”

Maureen in the buff! Never before seen nude photos!

super-cute, eh!

xo
mo-ritz

Remember - There's ALWAYS work at the post office.

This morning, as I sat down to journal my daily gratitude list, I was rudely interrupted by the child’s barky-sounding cough.  “Damn,” I thought to myself, “I’m gonna have to keep him home again today.”  Which, of course, means that I will need to make adjustments to my work schedule, which had recently been obliterated by my own 2 ½ week illness. 

So, I decided to tackle that task I have been putting off until the last minute – calling Covered California (the state department affiliated with Obama care) to register my family for health insurance.  Before the office even opens at 8am, their automated message warns that they are experiencing “unusually high call volume.” “Damn,” I think to myself as I hang up the phone, “that doesn’t bode well.”

I call back promptly at 8am and wait on hold for 40 minutes, when a representative comes online.  I tell him my issue with the website (it’s not working properly) and he tells me the issue is that the child is still enrolled in Medi-Cal, so their system cannot register him for Covered California.  When I inform him that my son was terminated from Medi-Cal in back in August of 2013, he tells me that I need to call Medi-Cal and tell them to cancel him and then call him back.  Right.  Like a phone call to a government agency EVER goes down like that. I ask to speak to his manager, to which he replies, “you can speak to my manager, but there is nothing we can do.” I tell him that his suggestion that I call Medi-Cal is not acceptable and can I speak to a manager and he tells me “there is nothing we can do from our end until Medi-Cal has cancelled his coverage.”  I say “I understand that, and may I speak to a manager please” and he puts me on hold.  Connie comes on the line after a brief wait, and then, her system goes down.  She needs to call me back later, so I wait for an hour for her call.  When I realize that time is ticking and I will need to leave soon, I hop into my shower, start using my wonderful Aveda scrub and my phone rings.  It’s Connie.  

And then I go to work and, as I have been out for a substantial amount of time, I am behind.  In my rush to catch up, I make several silly mistakes and then have a brief meeting with my client, who, in addition to being a bit put off at my errors (who wouldn’t? I was too), appears frustrated that certain items have not been finished in a timely manner.  And I am now put off.  Because I have been sick.  And when one gets sick, things just don’t get done.  But I leave the meeting feeling like a slacker.  

And then I get a text from home that the child is breaking the limits I have set for him.  So I call home all agro and call him a lying liar who constantly lies out of his lying liar hole.  I apologize later at home. 

And then I jump in the car to get some much needed stress relief in the sauna, when I get a call from Constance at Medi-Cal who gets frustrated by MY frustration and asks me “What do you want me to do?”  “I want you to fix your goddamn bureaucratic mess!” But I don’t say this, I say something else she doesn’t like and we part ways.    I feel so much anger and frustration at this point that I almost don’t go to the sauna…I would rather go home and beat the child.  But a little voice inside my head (my intuition, god, spirit, higher self, whatever), says “go to the sauna.”  And I listen.  This time I listen. 

So I am in the sauna sweating the day out and I meet a man in there who is heavy with prison tattoos and he tells me the story of his recent hip replacement and getting beat up by three LA cops on 9/11/09.  I tell him about my recently diagnosed fibromyalgia and we commiserate for a while about nerve pain, and he tells me that he “just wants to find someone who can take care of him, a woman, not no man,” and I realize that I’m gonna have to extricate myself from this conversation somehow…when in walks Paul, my mailman!

Paul is a lovely, young 40ish Polynesian-looking man with long dark hair and a lisp.  We get to chatting about how I fear the US Postal service will cut mail service (they have threatened this before) and he tells me that’s not going to happen.  That they just got a billion dollar contract with Amazon.com and are in great financial shape.  

“Oh good!” I say to Paul.  “Because the US Postal service is the best deal going.  I mean 49 cents to transport a letter all the way across the country?” And Paul tells me that the US has the cheapest rates of any country.  And I tell him that they could probably raise the rates and folks would bitch, but still use the service, “cuz there really is no substitute for the US postal service.”  And then we talk about how shocked we were about the $1 raise in Girl Scout cookies this year.  But I have had time to think about this one and I am thinking that they probably do a big jump once every 4 – 5 years so that it doesn’t seem like they are nickel and diming you every year….$4.00, then $4.25, then $4.50.  So I figure that the price will probably stay at $5 for a few years, but this year, I just couldn’t justify spending $5 on a box of cookies, even though I like the Girl Scouts. 

And then, whoa, I look at the clock and it’s been nearly 30 minutes in the sauna, and I have left two sick boys at home to take care of each other.  I say goodbye to Paul, goodbye to Prison-Tattoo.  And by the time I finish my shower, I feel pretty good about life. 

I leave you with this, from one of my top ten favorite all-time movies:

 “If you can’t take pride in your job, there’s always work at the Post Office”

-         

                           -  Bobby Taylor, Hollywood Shuffle

Gilligan's Island - A Study in Abandonment

Today in my bath, I was reading a book by one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott.  In this book, titled “Blue Shoe,” the author was describing the main character’s ex-husband, Nicky.   She writes:

 "Nicky was like the shipwrecked Professor on Gilligan’s Island, constantly coming up with ingenious inventions made of foliage, generators made from coconut husks, ice chests made from seashells, yet apparently never getting around to repairing the SS Minnow."

And reading that description immediately took me back to my childhood, in the same strong way that a scent can trigger an old, old memory in a flash. 

I thought back... what was it about that show that kept me coming back week after week?  Each time I tuned in, my child-self hoping that perhaps THIS would be the episode where they are finally rescued and get the fuck off that island!  My child-self not understanding that, should a rescue have happened, that would be the end of it all, including a very important sense of connection I had with these characters. 

Week after week after week, I tuned in – empathizing with what I thought was a shared sense of abandonment.  Abandonment, one of my core karmic issues I have brought with me into this lifetime.  Abandoned at birth, abandoned by two foster families before being placed with the people who would become my parents, my family in this lifetime.  So there I sat, each afternoon, glued to our tiny black and white T.V. screen, wishing, hoping, longing for their salvation, and mine.

And the Professor, well, what the fuck was HE up to???  He could make generators out of coconut husks, but could not manage to patch a goddamn hole in the side of the boat?  The “Professor.” Most smart folks I know (myself included) long to be the “smartest” of the bunch.  Do you think perhaps the Professor was – intentionally or unintentionally - sabotaging their efforts in order to remain the smartest in the group?  After all, once back to the mainland, he is only one Professor in a sea of Professors, and there is ALWAYS someone smarter than you.  Always.

The castaways were never actually rescued during the three seasons the sitcom aired, originally from 1964 – 1967.  Apparently, there was to be a fourth season, but the show was cancelled in the 

interim, and the final episode of the third season became the “finale” episode by default, the castaways stranded in perpetuity.  Perhaps in response to consumer outrage over this anti-climactic non-ending, a movie was made nearly 11 years later, titled “Rescue from Gilligan’s Island” in which the castaways are finally rescued. I can remember watching this movie, and at the end, feeling a colossal sense of let-down.  It was over.  It was over, and so no longer did I have that shared sense of abandonment with these fictional characters…I was on my own now. 

And now, at almost 46 years old, I am finally coming to terms with this core karmic issue, this, this scary, lonely feeling I call “abandonment.” This sense that I will ultimately wind up a bag lady in Central Park with nobody to love me, nobody to care for me.  And on a good day, I can hold this feeling, that ultimately I am all alone, alongside a knowing, deep inside that none of us are ever all alone.  That we are ALL connected, “all-one,” and that it only takes my willingness to stop, get still, and sit with self that I can re-connect with this truth, and finally, even for just the briefest of moments, feel “safe.”

And then, like a flash, in the very next briefest of moments, my sense of  “safety” is gone and I am off and running again, separate from the rest, longing to come back together.  And on it goes, breathe in, breathe out, pause.  Breathe in, breathe out, pause…