( This is an excerpt from my book, One Hundred Open Houses. It has a hopeful message in it. Some readers don't like this book but the ones that do, like it a lot.)
Given my present
thought process, something really strange happened in church on Sunday.
Father O’Connell is on vacation and this other priest said mass. He was quite old and we could hardly hear him.
We were prepared to just sit through it, the way we did when we had a substitute teacher. Almost in a whisper, he began talking about reconciliation – that’s what they call confession now. He said, “Whatever you have done, let it go. You
aren’t children anymore with a laundry list of sins – I hit my brother,
I told a lie, I stole some candy - in order to be okay with God. Just
get rid of everything – let it go and you will be closer to Jesus. If
you’ve had an abortion, if you’ve been abusive to your family – just let
it go. Let it all go. It’s all right. One of you, “he emphasized, “sitting here today, will be transformed.”
The entire congregation remained still. Almost dumbstruck. We weren’t prepared to actually hear something we could use never mind being transformed. After
church, I saw this young handsome man – not your typical devoted
Catholic - go up to the priest and say – “I’m not from this parish but
that is the best homily I have ever heard.” There was a long line of people and they were all saying much the same thing. They
had been longing to find a way to get rid of all the things they were
ashamed of doing and this brilliant old priest had told them it was okay
to let it all go. He was telling us that he was certain – without a
doubt – that this was not only okay, but also necessary.
After mass, I did something I seldom do – something all of us seldom do – I sat in the living room. I sat on the couch I had bought at the Bloomingdale’s outlet store. There was nothing to do in the living room except look around. You
couldn’t cook there or eat or watch television. The living room, I have
to tell you, is a useless room that we have been told is necessary. I felt as if I was visiting and all the stuff in there was new to me. After the “letting go” talk, if you take it seriously, you have a lot of space in your head to think about other things.
It has resulted in putting me in a strange state of lethargy. I feel all dry and papery. I’m
made of parchment paper. I keep thinking that contrary to my current
fervor for staying alive, there might be something to dying. No more humidifying and dehumidifying. No more coughing at night or worrying about anything. If nothing else, the weight issue is moot.
When
you send the e-mail down to your psyche saying, “hey, it’s time to open
up, we want some life changing moves up here,” it reacts. I
had stated a purpose and begun a plan and although it wasn’t frontal
lobotomy or entering a non-speaking religious order, it was change and
there’s nothing like change to make the psyche squeeze out a miserly bit
of self-revelation.
What
was revealed to me on that chilly for June Sunday morning was that no
matter what I did or where I lived or if I chose to pitch a tent in the
Mojave dessert there was a fist sized hunk of worry smack in the center
of my chest and if I didn’t address it, I was not going to really move.
There was no media noise so I was aware of the silence in the house. In my Sunday morning clarity, I knew that it was a hunk of heaviness that had been sitting in my chest for a very long time. I
went into my default site of things to worry about, the kids’ safety,
my health, mental illness and plumbing problems in a town where plumbers
are the new rock stars. If you’re not going to follow the blueprint for the American Dream, you have to fight hard not to think ill of yourself.
This
wasn’t about the kids or the house. This hard impenetrable thing was a
hunk of worry about me, Rebecca, and what had happened to her. I
bypassed my instinct to find some quick answer and thought about what
my life was like from moment to moment. What I said to certain people
and what I said to others. Was I authentic with anyone? Did I have enough friends? What mattered to me? Did anyone really love me? Was there anyone who couldn’t live without me? Do you even want someone who can’t live without you? No, you don’t! I’ll give you a profile of that man without even meeting him. Needy, needy, needy. And possibly in need of long-term therapy. You want someone who can live without you but would like to spend some time with you.
I had an m.o. As
long as I could find the irony in everything that happened, I could
make a case for an existence that resided on the sidelines while
everyone else was actually living. Being ironic was no substitute for
living but so help me I thought it was. Louise was living all of the time. She knew at least a dozen couples that she and her husband saw on a regular un-ironic basis. She had friends she had known for forty years. She played tennis with her friends and went to baby showers. She had a sequential life. She definitely did not start over every morning.
I
thought about my premise that a move outside my comfort zone would
jump-start a new life, a new routine, new connections and a new me. I
was definitely ready to re-define myself. As what? A spunky middle-aged woman? Then
this British guy was on Oprah and he wrote a book on happiness and he
said you would never be happy if you had a destination addiction. First, why anyone would listen to a Brit talk on the psychology of happiness is beyond me. But I did take a little interest in his “destination addiction” theory. He
was saying that as long as you thought that your happiness depended on
something that was going to happen in the future, you were a dead duck. Or
an unhappy duck. What I got from that Brit was that if I thought I was
going to jump start my stalled writing career by moving to a monastic
cell in New York City, I was stupid, stupid, stupid. And misguided. And delusional. I
had to start being happy right here in Huffy The House. And while
moving was a good idea, I would already be the committed reclaimed
writer when I arrived.
So there was no avoiding it then. I had to begin thinking of the story I wanted to tell. What story was I just bursting to tell? First of all, no writer is bursting to write anything. Most are bursting to keep from writing. Writing is incredibly hard and beside it, everything else appears incredibly easy. But
this particular moment, I kept still and continued thinking until I had
an “aha” moment that sounded so simple, I didn’t trust it but since I
had nothing else, I went with it. Maybe the story was me! The
routines, the bad habits, the small pleasures, the calls to the utility
companies, the yanking of weeds, the phantom tandem life that I was
going to live one day. Not this
life but something better. Maybe this was the better life – maybe what I
was writing down in my journal would make a fabulous story. Maybe my
life was the story of the century. Every single day of it –
Louise and Shana and the rep for the Dubai place and Itzonlyphil were
what was in my life and if I shaped what I was writing in my journal
into the odyssey it had become, I could make sense of it for myself and
maybe for others, too. Maybe what was in my head was not the jumbled thoughts of a textbook AADD but LIFE.
I
had just read an article in the New Yorker about the dictionary of
mental disorders (I’m thinking someone is sitting around saying: there’s
stealing and let’s call that kleptomania and there’s unsubstantiated
euphoria and let’s call that manic behavior) There was a phrase in the
article that I liked. It said someone had an unruly inner life. That’s what I had to document! My unruly inner life. I would shape what I had been writing in the journal into a book.
It
was Sunday morning and my instinct was to turn on the television and
watch Meet The Press. Anything not to test my new theory that, at best,
seemed weak. I went to the computer instead. I wrote the date and Chapter One – 9-G I wasn’t looking for an apartment…
I started and before I knew it, Meet The Press was over and so were the McLaughlin Report and even Lydia’s Family Table. I had just plunged into the story in an unruly way. I
introduced the old priest and what he told us and Ms. DuBois at the
bank and KooKoofor$ and also Ben and Harry and even my mother and my
fear of the voodoo she might be doing on my life. When
I was done for the day I felt spaced out the way you do when you spend a
day at the beach and the bright sun glinting off the water makes you
feel surreal. And the salt air makes the indoors feel too quiet and unfamiliar. And your eyes can’t adjust. I turned off the computer and had a cup of coffee. There was no milk so I put some Turkey Hill vanilla Ice Cream in it. I drank it slowly, in the living room. Just me sitting there.