When you can't have Mom, eat a Symphony bar

Last night will not go down in history as one of my favorite nights. In fact, if I had the ability to remember what happened every day of my life, and further had the ability to rank those days in order from worst to best, I think yesterday might make the bottom quartile.

I haven’t been at the height of my game lately, which is making my ability to cope with life’s doldrums more challenging.

And that’s where the Symphony bar came into play.

You ever had one of these?

If not, seriously guys, you’re missing out.  Go get yourself one. Now.

Let me tell you the story of how I came to be a card-carrying Symphony bar lover: 

When I was young, my mom used to take these grocery shopping trips to York about once a month. Here’s something you need to know about growing up rural: when you go to the nearest “city” (York had a population of around 7,000—practically a metropolis compared to Exeter, my hometown, population ~700), a place that has an actual Bag N Save, you don’t get just a few things. It’s not a “let’s just get some bread and milk” kind of trip. These trips were a “fold down the backseat of the minivan, get the cooler iced up and ready for frozen goods, clear the whole day for this” kind of endeavor. A $250 endeavor, in the mid-90s—that’s a lot of groceries, folks.

These trips, in the early years, would culminate in much begging for McDonald’s perpetrated by me and my brother. Because York had a McDonald’s, yo. All we had in Exeter was two bars and, starting when I was about 12, a Casey’s General Store. By default McDonald’s was the Mecca of food-loving, obese children from Exeter, of which I was one.

In later years, the “cool” factor set in and my brother and I stopped begging for McDonald’s. Mom would let us get ice cream in the food court area of Bag N Save, and we would sit back there in a booth with our food and read magazines while mom shopped.

And in later later years, Nate stopped going on the shopping trips but I thought I should keep going with Mom to help her bag groceries. (I might have also chosen to go because I needed some hair gel or butterfly clips or a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie or some other gratuitous 90s-Teen-Girl product at the York Wal-Mart, but whatever, let’s stick to the “trying to be a helpful kid” narrative). It was in these teen years, the just-me-and-mom-shopping years, when the Symphony Bar thing got started.

You see, they sold these HUGE Symphony Bars at Bag N Save. I bet they weighed a pound. A pound of the most delectable, delicate milk chocolate with perfect, crunchy little toffee bits and almond pieces. Heaven, I tell you. Mom and I were in tacit agreement that there was no ice cream on earth that could possibly taste as good as Symphony after a hard day of shopping. And so, we’d always get one, and eat part of it on the way home. The remainder of it, Mom would squirrel away somewhere in our house, never again to be seen by me— until the next trip to Bag N Save, when we’d start the cycle over.

For me, Symphony bars are synonymous with comfort. Yes, yes—I’ve done a lot of work over the years to move away from using eating as a coping mechanism, so these days it’s usually not my go-to. I’ve really done a fine job of transitioning my stress-coping into activities like crying, venting, and drinking. Oh, and shopping.

I kid. Mostly.

Last night my defenses were weak, and I felt sad, and what I wanted at that moment was my Mom. I wanted her to be right there so I could lay my head on her shoulder and let her wrap her arms around me. I wanted to smell her. I may have wanted to be fourteen, but I’d take any of these things even at thirty-three. I wanted comfort.

And I happened to be in Wal-Mart. And I happened to be buying Dark Chocolate Kisses in for my office (I have a psychological theory about chocolate and keep some around for my clients. Just call me Remus Lupin, y’all). And I happened to walk by the Symphony bars. And because my mom wasn’t right there to tell me that things are going to be okay, and because it was 11:20 at night and I didn’t want to call and wake her up, I happened to purchase the Symphony bar and eat a good long row of it on my drive home from the store.

Not as good as Mom by a longshot, but the taste and the smell of chocolate and toffee reminded me of home and of easier days. It gave me just enough hope to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Thank goodness I’m going home to my parents' house this weekend. I’ll get the real deal, not the proxy.

Maybe I’ll bring Mom what’s left of my Symphony bar. 

***
Tell me, friends: What things do you long for when you're in need of comfort? Leave a comment below; I'd love to hear your stories. 

Take me back to that place I can't go

I learned a new word recently: hiraeth (pronounced: “hear-eth”). Ever heard it? Neither had I. I think it’s pretty old-school, probably one that has fallen by the wayside in modern times.

But it’s such a good word. I think we should bring it back.

What hiraeth means is this: a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, or for a home that never was. It can also refer to the nostalgia, yearning, or even grief that you feel for the lost places of your past.

Whoa. Good one, right?

I found myself feeling some hiraeth, all of the sudden, last Friday while wrapping up a shopping trip at an outdoor mall. It was just past dusk, warm and damp. The air smelled like ice cream and rain. To my left, a college-aged couple walked with their arms around each other, laughing together at something one of them had said. Sixteen years ago, I was in a couple like that. I met my now-husband on a June evening. For a moment I had a strong, almost painful longing for that time when it was just he and I, sharing a private laugh as he headed to the bookstore, swatting away mosquitoes as we walked. Sharing a million little rituals and jokes and wasted time—all of this, I took for granted for the seven years we had together before Evie came along. And in that moment, I wanted it back. I don’t wish my kids away, but sometimes I wish for the ease and comfort of just the two of us.

To my right, a group of four loud teenagers clumsily engaged in conversation together, one of them stepping over another’s words, another making an attempt at a joke that no one seemed to get except for him. Yet then their conversation fell into stride; an easy flow, a spontaneous call-and-response. I remembered what it was like to talk when there was nothing important to talk about. The topics of their conversation were light, mostly meaningless—and to my ear it all sounded like freedom, and like fun. And then more hiraeth, for the times even before my now-husband, the times spent doing absolutely nothing of any consequence with longtime friends. Our windows down and dust flying in our faces, Limp Bizkit or Tim McGraw or possibly even Chicago providing the soundtrack for the night. Hearing the cracking voices and feeling wrapped in the cocoon of humidity and taking in the scent of their cigarette smoke tugged at something right at the center of me.

And then…then. The cigarette smoke. Menthols on a muggy summer breeze. I thought of my Grandma, who smoked for years and years. For me, cigarette smoke on outside air smells like comfort. I longed for my grandma. But not the grandma I could go see now—and let me take a moment to say that yes, she’s with us still and yes, I am absolutely blessed to be 33 and have all my grandparents alive. And I love seeing my grandma now. If I’m being honest, though, who I wanted to see that night was my grandma when I was 5, and she was maybe 50 and so vibrant, her hair as red as smashed bricks and her wit so sharp you might cut yourself on it if you weren’t careful. I could see her sitting on her hard front steps, lit menthol in hand, laughing at me as I tried to walk a straight line on cement strips that lined one of her many gardens. Laughing at me because I was extremely pigeon-toed and walking straight was damn-neared impossible for me. But laughing at me kindly, and encouraging me to keep trying. I remember Grandma this way. Especially when I smell menthols in the summer. And I long for her, that way, and I long for being a child who had nothing on her mind but trying to learn to walk straight.

The irony of it all is that even as I could taste simplicity and freedom on the tip of my tongue, I walked through that damp night to my beige minivan, a symbol of being tethered if I ever saw one. I got in and went to pick up my 8-year old daughter. Seeing her sweet, pool-drenched self made me forget my hiraeth for awhile.

And then Orlando happened, a horrific mass shooting. Innocents died, so many innocents. I looked at their pictures, I read their bios. I imagined what it must have been like to be in the club that night. Or to be a mother or a sister or a daughter of a victim. A client showed me a Snapchat she happened to receive, being a friend of a friend of one of the victims, showing the woman’s last moments in the club and the beginning of the chaos that would go on to take her life. Gunshots. Screaming. I wish I hadn’t seen the Snapchat. I wish my client hadn’t seen it, either.

And then a few days later a toddler drowns at the happiest place on earth due to a freak alligator incident.

Let's not forget about the girl who was recently raped behind a dumpster. Or the fact that somewhere in America, a woman is being raped approximately every two minutes. (That's a real statistic, folks.)

I hear about painful things every day. It’s part of my job to do this, and it’s usually manageable. But at the moment, the pain around me and in me is loud, so loud, and so heavy.

I know what I should do to cope. Stay grounded in the present. Breathe in gratitude for the good things, breathe out the illusion of control of things beyond my scope. Work towards acceptance of the things that hurt and that I can't fix. I know this stuff. I teach this stuff! But sometimes I don't want to do it.

Right now there are two things that I do want: 1) To go far, far away, to a place where no one can reach me and where no news exists, just for a little while. I've already read 22 books this year, all fiction. Now you know why. Otherwise, I'd also take option 2) To go back in time. To not know things, to have never known things. To be five, or maybe fifteen. Maybe even nineteen. I’m embarrassed to admit that I often, very very often, wish I could unlearn things.

Hiraeth. Take me back to that place I can’t go.

Joyful pain: Watching my baby grow up

This evening Jonah fell asleep in the van on our way home from Grandma’s. He’d had a weekend with his cousins, which I imagine was full of trampoline-jumping, Minecraft-playing, late night giggles and mischief. In other words: the kid was exhausted, and thus he was passed out before the sun made its nightly departure.

Even when the van came to a stop in our driveway, which usually wakes him, he didn’t stir. Jeb carried him into the house: still nothing. Jonah’s arms were wrapped around Jeb’s neck, his head lolled on his daddy’s shoulder, and for the first time in a long time he reminded me of his baby self. I said this out loud, and Jeb was thoughtful enough to ask if I wanted to hold Jonah for awhile.

Jeb handed me our boy, limp with sleep and much, much heavier than when we would pass him between us just a few years ago. Jonah snuggled his head into the crook of my arm, and I remembered how he would drowse there, milk-drunk and content, after nursing. Tonight he didn’t lay as comfortably as he had in those infant days. His solid six-year-old body proved difficult to settle into my arms and lap, his legs so long they overflowed onto the couch beside me. How can my child, my baby, be too big for my lap?

Finally, he settled and his breathing deepened. I dipped my neck so that I could lay my head next to his, close enough to breathe in the smell of him. He smelled like vanilla ice cream and outside air and unwashed clothes. Even though I cradled him like a baby, he smelled of little boy. 

It occurred to me that this time could be the last time I’ll ever get to hold him like this. I held him closer. I noticed how the curve of his dark thick eyelashes across his cheeks is the same as it’s always been, though now one cheek has a scar he will carry for the rest of his life. He’s the same as he ever was, yet he’s different today than he was yesterday or last year or five years ago. And, God willing, he’ll keep growing and learning and smiling and laughing and, day by day, year by year, changing, and I will watch all of this with bittersweet eyes.

But at the end of this day and every day, he’s my Jonah. Always my Jonah. 

Tales from the directionally-challenged: How I got lost in my neighborhood. Again.

I do a lot of fairly stupid things. Generally, I’m well-intentioned, so it’s not like I’m trying to be stupid…but intention isn’t worth shit when the outcome of what I’ve done is completely ridiculous. I swear, if ever I write a memoir, all it’s going to be is a compilation of all of the weird-ass situations that I’ve gotten myself into. Like the time I walked into my friend's house-- a house I'd been to many times--without knocking, set my purse down by the door, and then slowly realized I'd walked into the wrong house. (There were strangers sitting in the front room, staring at me…so I said “just kidding,” grabbed my purse and just walked back out the door without further ado. That’s how I handle shit.) Or the time I sucked laundry detergent out of my washing machine with a straw (read about that here). Or the (two) times that I got lost walking around my neighborhood.

Yeah, that’s right.  I got lost in my neighborhood. Twice.

To be fair, we live in a strange little place. It’s a tiny housing development that currently has one large block with a circumference of .5 miles. This neighborhood has been carved out of the middle of the Nebraska countryside, bounded on three sides by farmland and pastures. 

So we live in this weird (yet awesome. Don’t underestimate the awesome factor; I really love it out here) little enclave, and I like to go on walks. Especially in the Fall, when the combination of crisp air and golden sun is so incredibly alluring—so much so that I’d go as far as calling it delicious. If Fall could be bottled, I would drink it every day. I imagine it’d be tasty.  (And no, Fall DOES NOT taste like a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. You are unoriginal.)

Anyway, where I was going with this was: walking the same half-mile block over and over can get boring, and also, people get tired of looking at you. So every now and again I get a little wanderlust and strive off of the pavement and into new territory.

There are paths where new houses are going up, and some of these paths connect us to another nearby housing development—so we often use this method to get from our development to the other. It involves walking through some brush and over some pounded dirt paths, and in some places, hopping a short barbed-wire fence. It’s really not bad. (Yeah, if you’re reading this and thinking that I’m trespassing at some point on these journeys, you’re probably right. Shame on me for trying to be fit and adventurous.) Those who are less directionally-challenged than me have no problems on these off-the-beat walks. I’ve been on walks with my neighbors, so I know it is possible to stray off of our block, see some things, and get back to our block, no problemo. One of my neighbor’s dogs is even able to accomplish this.

The problem (for me, anyway) is that one of the roads back from the nearby development ends abruptly, cut off by barricades and, if that wasn't enough of a deterrent, a soybean field. Yup, the road literally ends in a beanfield. Welcome to Nebraska, y’all.

Small roadblock between me and home. 

The first time I encountered this field, I was pretty sure that the route home was through it. So I navigated through the beanfield, and when I came out the other side of it, there were two roads—one going left, and one going right. I chose to go right. Long story short, by the time I consulted my phone to figure out where the hell I was, I was several miles away from home. I had to call my (non-impressed, directional superstar, born with an effing compass in his brain) husband to come pick me up. “Why didn’t you look at the sun?” he said. As if that works.

The road I ended up on. It's pretty, right? I mean, at least there was good scenery. And mile markers.

My neighbors really do pity me, and so after I told them about how I got lost, they took me out to try to help me find the error of my ways. Under their tutelage I realized that my beanfield jaunt had been the CORRECT directional choice, but I should have turned left after I got through the field.

So you can imagine my excitement yesterday when I encountered the same beanfield.

This one! I know this place!

(For the remainder of those post, I’m going to give you the insides of my head in boldface blue italics, like this, because it is through seeing what happens up in there that you can start to appreciate how truly frightening my decision-making can be. [Side note: Is anyone else stoked that I have a super-serious big girl job in which other people PAY ME to help them figure things out, including decision-making? If you’re not jazzed about this, you should be.])

Oh yes, this field! I know what to do here. Walk through the field, turn LEFT, and I’m home free.

But then I noticed that the field, while dry, was still unharvested. This means that there were grasshoppers everywhere, and I hate grasshoppers. I wasn’t in the mood for dealing with their crunchy, sassy little asses. As I surveyed the field, I noticed that there was a large swath around its perimeter that had been cut down.

Oh, someone has cleared a path for the construction guys, so they can drive their equipment through this field. If I walk on it in this direction, I will hit a road that I know, and I know this because I see a big cement silo that I’ve walked by before. Yup, that’s the ticket!

So I started down the cut-down path. I had some indie station playing in my earbuds and was walking in time to a song. I turned a bend and this allowed me to see further up the path—and what I saw was movement. One…no, two…figures.  

Must be someone from the neighborhood walking their dog. Which means I’m on the right track.

More walking. More fiddling with my phone, in an attempt to find a non-sucky song. I was getting closer to the person and his/her dog on the trail.

Wait, that dog is really huge. Like, really, really huge. Is that a mastiff? No one in the neighborhood has a mastiff. Or a great dane.  Hmm, this doesn’t make sense, this is weird, maybe if I just squint hard enough I’ll be able to see…Oh Good Lord, that’s a DEER. And that person walking the dog is ANOTHER DEER.

You don't realize how big deer are until you're really close to them. 

Do male deer ever charge at people? Who’s more scared, me or them? Do they feel safety in numbers?

I’ve had staredowns with animals before, but none who were bigger than a breadbasket (if you really insist on knowing, previous staredowns have mostly with cats and dogs and once with a mouse while I was pregnant, and coincidentally, naked. Which is another GREAT story).  Thus, I found this intense eye contact to be mildly unsettling. The deer stopped moving and went still, probably having a similarly shocking experience to what I was having (“Oh, there’s something big coming, probably another deer like us, maybe we can hang out, eat some soybeans and stuff…oh wait, no, it’s making way too much noise and the hair is all wrong, that’s an EFFING HUMAN and THEY KILLED BAMBI’S MOM so RUN.”) 

They ran. I didn’t get my camera out in time to document this, but man do I wish I would have. They were probably 100 meters away from me when they bolted. And the reason I know this distance is because I remember running 100 meter dashes in junior high track. Which when I ran it looked less like a dash and more like a medium-paced trudge, because I’m slow and because starting blocks confuse the shit out of me. But, it was the shortest distance race that we ran so it was my favorite. Because less is better when it comes to running.

Which is, weirdly, a great segue into what happened next.

The deer-staredown incident behind me, I continued down the path. The indie song playing involved a woman singing a plea for someone not to leave her, and I was thinking about how this is yet another pathetic cog in the anti-feminist wheel of destruction that is our modern music industry. If I hadn’t been listening to music and thinking so hard, I might have seen (or heard) the next thing coming.

Which was a combine.

For you city folk reading this, a combine is a very large piece of farm machinery, used to harvest both corn, and in this case, soybeans. It’s like a ginormous tractor with a rotating head (when it’s cutting beans at least. The corn head is spiky and doesn’t rotate at all. But I digress). Here’s what they look like:

With a beanhead, doin' work. 

Would you want to see this coming at you? I don't think so.

I’m a pseudo-farm kid. Meaning that my dad was a farmer but we lived “In town,” and by “in town” I mean in a village of 700 people and in a house that was two blocks away from a cornfield on three sides. In any case, I’m farm kid enough to be appropriately scared of being on foot in the same field as a combine. I’ve seen what a bean head can do to a deer, and it ain’t pretty. (Note: The staredown deer from this story did not, to my knowledge, die by beanhead. The poor mangled deer I’m referencing was something I saw another time, because remember, my dad is a farmer and encounters all kinds of gruesome shit. Which you might not expect, depending on how much you know about farming, but which is absolutely true.)

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. Is this seriously the last song I’m going to hear before I die? THIS?

And at this point I was running. I mean, as soon as I saw the combine, it was off to the races. (Which you know from above treatises could not possibly have been THAT fast, but rather, as fast as a slow girl can go.) Now, granted, the above set of thoughts about my impending death was admittedly a bit histrionic, as the combine was pretty far in the distance and I wasn’t even sure it was coming towards me at that moment. Didn’t matter, though—I’m pretty sure that a moving combine moves faster than me, and so if there was ANY chance it was headed my way, I wanted out.

Ooohh…so that “path that was cleared for construction” was a swath of harvested field IN A FIELD BEING CURRENTLY HARVESTED, you dumbass.

My feet found pavement relatively quickly. I was safe. The only thing left at stake was my pride, which I could have totally preserved if I wouldn’t have decided to go ahead and post this whole debacle on the interwebs. Who needs dignity when you can completely (and intentionally) embarrass yourself in front of all of your friends, and probably even some people you don’t know? Pride is totally overrated.

You might be pleased to know that once I doubled back the way that I came, I easily found my way home—which is a step up from the first time I got lost. Also, I wasn't even gone that long:  the whole 3.75 mile round-trip ordeal only took about an hour. SO THERE.

And that, my friends, is the story of the second time I got lost in my neighborhood. Look for it in my upcoming debut memoir, Good at school, bad at life: How having a PhD did not save me from myself.

The era of secret poop

Flushing the toilet is easy, right? I mean, I’ve never, ever heard anyone say that it’s hard. Can you imagine?  “Jeez, dude, that toilet flushing I had to do today was just brutal.”  “Ugh, pushing that little lever down was tiring. I’m gonna need a rest and a beer after that fiasco.” Um, no.  

And then I had kids, and all bets were off. According to Evie (7) and Jonah (5), toilet flushing is an exceptionally difficult life task.

Our family attended an out-of-town wedding this weekend. It was fun, but even the best of events is kind of exhausting with kids in tow. After the hours-long "let's pack up our stuff and go" process, followed by the hour-long ride in the minivan, the sight of home was more than welcome. Home! My safe place, my refuge. I couldn't get in the door fast enough. Usually I’m greeted by the still-new-house scents of cut wood, paint, and something vague gluey…but not this time. This time, I was hit with a wave of stank that I’d consider to be a Nostril Assault. My haven smelled like a damn outhouse.

And I knew it wasn’t our kitty's fault. Willy ain't got time for that. He's all about that litter box.

No, I knew right away what the problemo was. And the problemo, as it so often is when something unexpectedly stinks, was the kids' doing. A poop was left in the kids’ bathroom toilet all weekend. So I got to return from a long weekend to a festering, stinking pile of poop.

This happens at our house sort of a lot. In fact, often enough that my husband and I have coined our own expression for it-- “secret poop”—because some kid poops and runs, we don’t know who did it, and we find it way later than we’d like.

Evie claims that she is scared of the sound of toilet flushing, yet she admits that she flushes at school. Jonah's excuse is that he is scared he will clog the toilet. He just started wiping his own ass, and so he goes through a lot of toilet paper in trying to get his rear clean. Understandable. It really is gratifying that he’s finally wiping on his own— it’s a victory, in and of itself. When it started happening, I thought it meant that I was going to get to have less contact with human excrement—always a bonus. Turns out that now I still get the esteemed privilege of being responsible for the care and keeping of everyone's poop, it's just that now I get to look at it, smell it, and maneuver it when it's not fresh.

 Sometimes (many times) the toilet is clogged, proving Jonah's point, but still, does he have to let it linger? (Yes, if you’re from my generation, you now have the Cranberries song in your head. I did that on purpose). Could he tell us about the problem right away so we don't have festering poop? Festering poop and TP leads to plunging, basically a poop post-mortem, and that's no fun on so many levels. Tonight my husband tried to teach Jonah about courtesy flushing, in an attempt to both salvage Jonah’s clean butt/pride yet prevent flush avoidance/poop festering/smell lingering/poop post-mortem. We'll see how that goes.

We've just been bribing Evie. Ten cents for every unprompted flush. Seems to take the edge off that whole “fear” thing.

After my third poop post-mortem this week, and hence my third time this week scrubbing out the bowl, I started making (possibly empty) threats. You know, like, you can't see your friends tomorrow if this happens again, I will take away your Beanie Boos, the legos are temporarily going to a secret place where only Mommy gets to play with them. I told them I’d punish both of them if I found any secret poop, since there’s no way to tell who did it. The kids were unfazed. I think they've got my number, and knew that this was just tired Mommy blowing smoke up their asses. I mean, am I really going to actually periodically check the toilet for flush adherence? Obviously not, or the whole evening poop post-mortem and threatening ritual would probably not occur.

But seriously, I swear to Pete if I have to clean the toilet one ore time this week, I'm gonna blow a gasket. 

Breaking the rules

I broke one of my own rules for being a therapist today.

I cried.

You wouldn’t know it from watching how “therapy” is done on TV, but therapists have a lot of rules to follow. Some of them are set for us by ethical codes of our profession—things like “keep client information private and protected” (duh) and “don’t have sex with clients” (double duh).

And then, most therapists have these other rules that we place upon ourselves, things that have less to do with the general ethical codes and more to do with our own personalities, preferences, and theories of how we help people.

“No crying” isn’t a hard and fast rule for therapists. In fact, it’s subject to some debate within our field. I poignantly remember getting close to tears once with one of my very first clients. Because I was still in training at the time, I brought it up with my peers and supervisors. Through discussion, I came to more fully appreciate a powerful truth: that therapy is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. I learned that probably each of us would handle this in our own way, and that this was okay, because we each have our own unique personalities and ways of helping people. And that day I set my own personal standard on crying in session.

But today, I deviated from my personal standard and cried. I will usually let myself get to “misty eyes,” and that’s my cutoff. That’s where I internally say to myself “Alright, this isn’t about you” and tuck in the tears. Today I couldn’t. My eyes filled up and a couple of tears spilled over. I wasn’t sobbing or totally losing my shit in any way. Yet it was definitely crying, and I know my client saw.

I like to think that I chose that no-crying standard for benevolent reasons—to benefit and protect the client. I want to prevent therapeutic interactions from becoming “the Allison show”—that is, the heart of therapy should be the client’s experiences, not mine. In order to really be effective, I need for clients to know and believe that I’m hanging in there with them, no matter what they’re talking about and what pain they are expressing. I fear that if they see me cry, they might start to think they are hurting me and start holding back on me. This is the last thing that I want, as people are often already holding back a lot in their lives outside of therapy, in order to protect themselves and others.

Yet, as with so many things in life, there is another way to look at this. And this other perspective could make me out to be a hypocrite (again, damnit!).  In my point of view, crying is simply an expression of sadness. I also believe that letting others see our emotions is a genuine and hence courageous thing to do -- showing others who we are and what moves us is one thing that helps us others feel connected to us. (I say these things to people all the time! All. The. Time.) So, in showing clients that I’m moved by what they have said, am I possibly modeling an appropriate expression of emotion and maybe even aiding our connection?

*big gulp, tiny voice* And, is it also possible that the real reason that I don't let myself cry in front of clients is because I dislike others, client or not, seeing my vulnerability? (Damnit.)

IDK, being a therapist and making therapisty decisions is hard.

What I do know is that my emotional control in therapy has been tested lately. I've heard some of the saddest stories that I've ever heard; often situations that are very personally relatable. And while I do work hard to keep my own personal baggage out of the therapeutic interaction, at the end of the day I'm still human. The things that people say, that I witness through listening to client's stories with my heart and playing those stories through in my mind-- they affect me. Some stories are told with such immediacy and detail that the hardest thing in the world would be to not see it through my client's eyes. Sometimes the pain in the room is so palpable that it steals my breath, like I’ve been socked in the gut.

To be both naturally imaginative and empathic is a blessing-- these attributes make me who I am, and they are the backbone of my work as a therapist. Yet these very same attributes are the ones that keep me up at night and that allow me to imagine terrible things happening to me and those that I love-- and they're the personal characteristics that are making me cry in session! Stupid paradoxes everywhere!

Anyway, yes, the tears have been happening and I think they’re likely to keep on happening. Sometimes they will behave themselves and stay in my eyes, and other times they may go rogue on me and escape. As you can probably tell from the rest of this post, I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about this level of personal sadness being out in the open for clients to see. I'm well aware that there is processing that I can and will do with clients if I cry, and that this can give me a sense of where to go from there. I'm just still not sure I should be letting it happen in the first place.

Instead of the nice tidy resolution that I seem to go for in these posts, today I’m going to have to leave stuff hanging. I’m still working on figuring this whole thing out. Maybe I’ll stick with my old no-crying rule. Maybe I’ll come up with a new rule. I'm just going to roll with the ambiguity of it all today, and find solace in knowing that I’m working on understanding.  Life’s messy, folks.

And in the spirit of dialogue and progress, I’d like to end this post with a question: If you were (or are) a client in therapy, what would it be like for you if your therapist was so moved by something you said that s/he cried?

On body image...and donut sex

Note: Originally published in 2011 on my old blog,  ideclarelifecrisis.blogspot.com, revised and re-published 2015.

9/21/2011

I ate a donut last night. My taste buds nearly imploded from all of the deliciousness. It was one of my favorites, a cream-filled longjohn (the fluffy white cream! None of that nasty Bavarian cream business). Granted, it didn't have nuts and its frosting was white rather than chocolate-- but these were forgivable shortcomings. Besides, it was a gift, and I don't look donut gift-horses in the mouth. I just shove the donuts in my mouth. Much easier.

So I’m sitting there, caressing my donut, devouring it with ardor. I rather paradoxically demolished that donut in the most gentle, most caring way you can imagine --think “food sex," that's how it is with me and donuts. Yet in the midst of my pastry lovemaking, this soft but audible thought pops into my mind, “I wonder how thin I could be if I didn’t eat this donut. Or if I never ate donuts.”

This thought came unbidden, just about as welcome as when "Oh damn, I forgot to put on deodorant today" or "Gotta add peanut butter to the shopping list" pops up during actual sex. (C'mon ladies. You know this is a thing.)

Those darned thoughts, they do what they want sometimes. The particularly villainous anti-donut notion of being thinner— and numerous variations of it—tend to come spilling out of the recesses of my psyche, often midway through eating something mouthwatering and not particularly healthful. In the past it was pretty easy to give in to the thought—to accept that yes, I’m supposed to be perfect, and yes, thinner is better, and Yes, I should feel guilty and shameful about eating donuts and YES, I'm a food/body failure, I suck at life, etc. Then I'd wallow for awhile.

I am pretty stoked to report that last night, something different happened. I'm eating my donut, and the thought about never eating donuts and being thinner occurs to me. But then my resilient mind bounced back with, “Heyyy....maybe thinner isn't better. Maybe I'm a worthwhile person, no matter what's going on with my body." Whoa.

This has not been an easy place to get to. For one thing, I'm curvy. Not like "curvy in all the right places" but like "curvy in a bunch of haphazard places where my body has decided to curve"). When I acknowledged that the wayward bumps and lumps weren't going away, I had no choice but to make friends with them.  I mean, we're not friendly every single day or anything, but I try to be kind to them even when I'm annoyed. Also, I've got stretch marks and sort of weird boobs and a big long scarred up place at the bottom of my abdomen (because BABIES) -- yet when in a good mood I'm able to see those as badges of honor. I healed from two major surgeries and got two kids out of the deal. My body has not failed me in doing its essential functions, so I'm striving for détente with it, rather than being a hater.

Furthermore, I love donuts. I really do. I’m not going to give them up to chase some illusion of perfectionism. Granted, I’m not going to eat one every single day. But I’m probably not going to pass one up if the opportunity presents itself-- I mean, that's insane. I don't recommend it.

So, if there's any point to all of this, it is this couple of things: 1) Work towards making peace with your imperfect body. It's totally worth it in the long run, and 2) Buy me donuts. I also like donut holes. And apple fritters.