Closet Cleaning

Every few weeks, my closet blows up. The many pairs of folded yoga pants spill out of their baskets, onto the floor around my dresser, crucial layers get buried and I begin to dig frantically for the outfit I thought of in the shower. I finally sit down, refold and launder the chaos only to begin again. The hanging clothes remain mostly untouched. I finger them listlessly from time to time, when I'm meeting a friend for wine and sigh that I have nothing to wear.

I had been vaguely aware that I need to address my closet, face what I have, get rid of what I no longer need and fill in the gaps of what is missing. In short, I needed to take inventory, but the project kept getting pushed to the bottom of my to-do list.

One afternoon, I was admiring my girlfriend's easy, unique sense of style. As I asked where each item was from, she answered with Target or Old Navy. But her gorgeous understated boots and Italian leather bag were from Grethen House. She believes in investing in shoes, bags and the one-of-a-kind pieces you just can't get at Target, so she saves and waits for sales.

"It would be so great if you could look in my closet and help me figure out what I have," I said, half to myself. "I don't really know what I have anymore." The words were barely out of my mouth when her face lit up.

"I'd love to to do that," she exclaimed. "I can come over and we can look at what you have." It sounded so simple -- even fun -- and before I knew what I'd gotten myself into, we set a date for wine and closet cleaning.

I was touched. This is what girlfriends in sitcoms do for each other. Then I was scared.

Closets are private -- both figuratively and literally. They are for skeletons, for coming out of or staying in. They are for hiding. They are dark. There might be monsters. But mostly in my case, they are for forgetting, accumulating periods of my life that subtly weigh me down as they remain unexamined. My past hangs on hangers, obscure designer jackets and dresses (also from Grethen House) that I bought toward the end of my first marriage when I was fiercely lonely, anxious and comparatively rich. I never seemed to have enough, always needed one more piece to make it complete. My current life resides in baskets on the closet floor in the form of yoga pants, funky skirts and tops -- the clothing for teaching Gyrotonic and my everyday life of movement.

I gave my friend numerous chances to bow out, but she expressed unwavering enthusiasm to help me with my closet. The appointed Friday night arrived. She showed up exactly on time wearing a cute hat over her short bright blonde hair. We ate pasta and drank a glass of wine, until it was time to climb the stairs to my bedroom. She sat in a comfy chair that faces my dark closet. I opened the doors. Now she'd see my dumb choices, my bouts of ugly style and utter waste.

But that's not what happened. Piece by piece, she oohed and ahhed. Sometimes she tilted her head and said, "You could wear a simple white tank with that from Target." Or, "That would be great with a little black turtleneck." Occasionally, she said, "hmmm...No." But it was never as painful as I'd imagined. I almost always agreed that the piece didn't work on me or I just simply would never wear it again.

Most of the pieces I had bought from Grethen House were still amazing. My friend helped me remember that I can wear them every day. I don't have to wait for a special occasion. She reminded me how to dress things down, make them easy, make them me. Rather than feeling wasteful or embarrassed to see the money I once had, I was grateful that I was once able to do that. Even in my loneliness and compulsive buying phase, I still had a good eye.

We made a pile for consignment, a pile to give away. I tried things on, a little self conscious. But she said things like, "Oh my God, Susan, you have such an eye for detail. I'm going to have to borrow some of this some time!" She later referred to me as her "little fashionista."

At the end of the night, my floor was covered in things I'd be getting rid of. What remained had more space around it, enabling me to see my wardrobe in a whole new light. I had opened up my closet and instead of feeling judged, I felt absolutely loved. Friendship had taken on a whole new level. Now, I only need a white tank and a black turtleneck to make everything work.

Creative Recovery In Progress

I am taking a creative recovery retreat. Or, more accurately, I am retreating into the creative. I'm not going out of town or cancelling my clients. I am simply and radically making space every day to finish my novel. Or start it. Again. I am committing to show up at the door of what Butler calls my dream space. I figure if I keep coming to the door and knocking on it, it will open again. There may be a special knock, but I haven't found that yet. I'm just going to the secret cave entrance every day, because you can never get inside if you aren't even at the right door.

For me the creative is one and the same as the spiritual. It is not born of logic and rational thinking. I will not get far thinking of fame and fortune, or even of writing a good book. I am recommitting to the process of creating a work of fiction. This commitment is much like one to mediation and prayer; it is the act, the process, the certain alignment of my heart to the universe that makes the commitment not only worthwhile, but essential.

I am taking things apart to create something new. I am taking apart my assumptions about what makes me a writer (an audience), so I can rediscover the reason I loved writing when I was in third grade: to tell stories, to make some order of sensual and emotional chaos; because I believe our lives have a shape and purpose in the smallest, daily ways; because I love being alive and I have always been compelled to capture the myriad reasons for that love.

This is something that takes courage, commitment and faith. Each day, as I show up to the page, I am increasingly convinced that this process is essential to becoming my best self. The struggle to write fiction brings me face to face with deepest enemies (self doubt, laziness, fear, distractions) and helps me not only face them but come to love them, too. Because without these saboteurs I would not know how important faith is. The alternative is not acceptable: saying, 'I once wanted to write a book' or 'Maybe I could have written a book' is to not have lived life to its fullest. The only failure would be not to try. So let it begin. Let it continue.

If you don't see me here, it's because I've gained admittance to the most important, mysterious place I know: my own imagination. Wish me luck.

Unexpected Gifts

Sometimes it takes an act of aggression to discover random kindness.

Happy holidays! After circling around a couple of times in a small lot, I waited as someone got in her car and prepared to back out. The woman in the car behind me began honking her horn and wildly gesticulating from behind her steering wheel. I took some deep breaths, but the honking continued. Maybe she didn't understand that we were in a parking lot and I was waiting for someone to pull out. I got out of my car and as I approached hers, she swung her door open, screaming, "Move your car!"

"I am waiting for this parking place," I said. I got back in my car and pulled into the spot that had indeed opened up. She whipped her car around to the other side, got out and continued yelling: "You just couldn't walk five feet!" I explained again that there was no other spot at that moment. She continued yelling, her blue eyes blazing.

"Wow," I said. "Happy holidays." Okay, I was slightly sarcastic at his point, but still not yelling. "Let's calm down." My heart was pounding fast and hard.

"Oh, calm down, calm down!" She shrieked, mimicking my gesture of surrender. "You know you approached my car, I can report you for assault." I smiled -- actually, I might have laughed -- and I walked away into the coffee shop. As I tried to calm my flailing heart, a young man stood next to me and spoke. He had the nicest face I've seen in a long time.

"Wow," he said, "that was crazy. It was so obvious you were waiting for a place."

As I told him that she said she was going to call the police to press charges for assault, she walked into the coffee shop and continued her rant.

"I have your license plate number, I can report you for assault."

"No," my new friend said. "That was not assault. I was a witness."

I thanked him, bought him his coffee and got his information, just in case I did need a witness. As he wrote his name and number, I told him that a few years ago, I could have been that woman and how grateful I was that I was no longer allowed stress to destroy me. He nodded and handed me his information.

"Thanks, Alex," I said. Then I registered the last name. "Wait," I said, "you know my son!" I told him his name. "I'm his mom."

"Oh my god," he said, "I've heard so much about you! I've heard he's doing great."

"He is," I said, "he is."

We kept shaking hands and grinning, as though we'd each found our long-lost friend.

"Gimme a hug," Alex said.

There we stood, embracing in Starbucks. My heart calmed. Unbridled aggression and a hug, both with strangers, in the span of five minutes. There he was, a witness in more ways than one. In few words, we acknowledged the healing in my son, too.

Thank you stressed out woman, two weeks before Christmas, for reminding me what really matters: There is real random kindness in the world, healing is a force more powerful than sickness. Whatever  whatever my worries as I face a lean bank account on the edge of the holidays, they are nothing compared to my depth of gratitude for the goodness that is afoot.

Fast of Words

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
--Henry David Thoreau

In my family, I am the talker, the storyteller. I have always been compelled to entertain with my gift of gab. With my mobile face and energetic gestures, I can be a one-woman show. It gets downright exhausting sometimes. So on a recent spiritual retreat, I felt an instant sense of relief when the leader announced that we would be in silence.

Silence, for me has often been something inflicted, a punishment or banishment, a withdrawal of emotional warmth: "the silent treatment." But this was not a punishment. Instead, it would be 'fasting from words,' a phrase coined by Henri Nouwen in The Way of the Heart, something cleansing, purifying. Much to my surprise, I welcomed silence like water on a desert hike. When I told my husband about my joy meeting silence, he was also surprised. A quiet man in the best of mood, he is in a constant fast from words, except in the morning, when I do not want to talk. And sometimes I suffer in his silence, misreading it as a withdrawal of love, as I did when my mother sent me to room to think about what I'd done wrong.

I grew up in a mostly quiet house. The brown shag carpet, earth-toned upholstery and abstract paintings cast a cool shadow over everything as my mother wrestled with her private demons, sometimes talking to herself aloud in the shower or in her bedroom. Sometimes my parents listened to music, but it was sad music to my young ears, like Joan Baez, singing about the war in Vietnam. Anti-war politics was the soundtrack in our house. Our dinner conversations usually began with my father ranting about Berkeley-in-the-60s politics, as he fielded urgent phone calls about who needed bailing out of jail for refusing to be drafted, who had gone underground, who the FBI was watching, that suspicious van on our street that neighbors suspected was full of wire tapping equipment, or when the Black Panthers would be coming to our house to hold a meeting. These were not times to protect children from potentially scary stories. We were treated as little adults.

Then silence would descend over the table. That's when I would grow animated. Talking was a way of bridging our private loneliness, sometimes frantically trying to lift the energy gathered around our egg-shaped white laminate table. When I wasn't talking, I was writing. I spent much time filling journals, mostly trying to figure out what made my mother tick, what ailed her and how I might fill the hole of her own deficient childhood.

I loved to talk. I knew how to make my father laugh, or even cry. One time, after my first child was born, I told my father a story that made him faint. It was right after my son was born and the delivery was dramatic, complete with an emergency c-section and general anesthetic. It wasn't a bloody story, but apparently I conveyed all the loss of control and fear that experienced. With my little 10-day-old baby asleep at my side, my parents listened intently. My father grew annoyed, said he felt sick, told me to stop. I did. We stood to leave and he fell over like a tree onto the floor. Now that's a powerful story, he later told me.

While my chattiness has always been a stand against silence, a incessant attempt to heal the darkness that threatened to envelop my home, here in the woods, in the cozy lodge, silence was a gift, not a punishment. We ate in silence and far from awkward, it was musical; the clink of the silverware on the plates, the whisper of chairs sliding out as we served ourselves more food. My mouth was full of taste and scent. In the woods, during meditative walks, golden light fell through the trees and sound emanated from everything. Even light has a sound. I could hear the glimmering of the spiderwebs in the sunlight. I joke with my kids that I can hear so much better when I put my glasses on, but here in silence, it was true: Silence reveals.

Silence is space. The first time I experienced this space, I was in high school -- arguably the most chatty time in life -- on a 24-day survival course in the Sierra Nevada wilderness. We hiked over 200 miles, carrying heavy packs, twice for 24 hours straight, rock climbed and struggled to cooperate with people, some of whom we never liked in school and even less out there in the wilderness. In the middle of all that was solo. It was meant to be a vision quest, which I was cynical about for years until I realized solo was the most life-changing three days of my young life. During this fast from words, human contact and food, I saw no one and heard no human voice -- not even my own until the second day.

I had sworn I would not speak aloud as that would surely mean I'd lost my mind. But when I found myself anxious that it might rain and my mind raced ahead to hypothermia, I made up a little Winnie-the-Pooh-like poem: It's nice to know that if it rains, I'll be okay. I repeated this, while I rocked back and forth on a granite slab that overlooked a deep ravine. There above the tree line, I could hear the wind rushing through the trees below. As my voice calmed me, three deer ascended high plateau. They stood there, not 30 feet from me, a buck, a doe and a fawn. I froze. They froze. But I soon realized that they had come when I was rocking and speaking, as though I'd called them. I resumed my rocking and quietly mouthed my simple poem. They began grazing around me. Every few minutes, the doe and I locked eyes.

This story floated back to me during my silent retreat, reminding me as the deer once did that I am never alone, no matter how solitary. Though I will always be a social being, thriving on stories and the company of others, I know that there is nothing more restorative than silence. It is only in silence that we can really hear, see and feel -- which is perhaps also the reason we avoid it. You never know what will come up. But I fear it less and crave it more. After all, something wild, something magical might come up.

At the end of my weekend retreat, I returned home, excited to tell my husband all my discoveries about silence. I even find a way to turn silence into a story. But something else happened, too. At least in the immediate afterglow of my silent retreat, I did not feel so much pressure to speak. I became a better listener. I was able to hear those I love and in doing that, see them as they are. Not as I want them to be or remember them being, but as they are right now. That is the first act of love.

Season of Change

There is a quiet miracle going on in my house. The quiet part is amazing in itself, because the miracle involves my son and he has never been quiet. Not about anything. Since the moment he was plucked from my C-sectioned belly as a small, sinewy creature, my boy has stormed through life. Big smiles, loud cries, deep questions, he lives big. For a time, as recently as last spring, I could not help imagining how big his death would be, too. As a severe drug addict, his disease did what the disease does when left unmanaged: it got worse. Then it got much worse. He came home for the holidays and never went back to the Bay Area, where he'd been leading a secret life, barely hanging onto to socially acceptable activities like work and school. In January, I kicked him out of his childhood room into the freezing snow. He spiraled down steep and fast. He became homeless. 

Even when he had food, he didn't eat it. One day, I drove my son to an appointment. A pint of blueberries, grown in summertime on the other side of the world, sat between us. They were perfectly sweet and juicy. As my son got out of the car, I offered him the rest of the basket. He looked at them as though remembering what it felt like to enjoy food, but sadly shook his head. I watched him walk toward the office building, stopping to light a cigarette.   
 

He made it to his sister's high school graduation in June. He was rail thin. He looked dead, like a vampire who has mistakenly wandered out into the light. It didn't suit him. He was miserable. But he was alive. He was there. My daughter burst into tears when she saw him, flooded with relief that he made it and sad, too, for the shell of the young man he'd become. He made it to his sister's graduation party after a night of hallucinations. The morning of the party we called 911 in desperate hope of getting him admitted. The attempt failed when the EMT told him that he couldn't make him go and left. But the party went on.

And it was an amazing party, mostly for what occurred beneath the surface. Our 'broken' family caused by divorce, had become a larger, more cohesive family. There we were: mother, mother's husband, father, father's girlfriend, son and daughter all celebrating our daughter's completion of high school. That was a miracle in itself. But there was something else: as broken and battered as our son was, he was there, facing the pitying and worried stares of neighbors who'd known him since he was a child. His arms were marked, his face sunken and pale. He flitted from room to room, trying to carry on polite conversations, but mostly avoiding them. His friend chaperoned him, guided him, provided him a sane reference point and all the while tried to coax him to get help. This was the very friend who, years earlier, we were sure would be the death of our son. Now he was his sober savior.

 

In the kitchen, my son and daughter stood for a moment, their backs to the chatting neighbors and friends. As he looked out the window, he said: "This is the last place in the world I want to be right now. But because it's for you, it is the only place I want to be." They both cried.

I, meanwhile, had the strangest feeling of absolute acceptance for things exactly as they were. For the first time, I marveled at what we'd gained, the miracle that he was there, that we were all there, gathering in honor of daughter and sister. Rather than the sense of embarrassment that had dogged me for so many years during his high school years, as I hid from neighbors in the grocery store, unable to face one more question about whether my boy was still playing soccer, I felt immense freedom. If there was judgment, I was impervious to it. Yes, I thought, this is my daughter who not only made it through high school despite her ongoing worry that her brother would not live to see her graduate; and yes, this is our son, diminished by addiction, broken and battered. But he is our son. There he was. He sat beside me in the garden at one point as I chatted with neighbors. I could feel him shaking, he body tense. It was like holding my toddler again. Then he went out front to smoke a cigarette.

Over the next few months, he prematurely bounced in and out of two different treatments, tried to replace old drugs with new, guaranteeing he would be part of every new drug trend that hit the papers. He grew hopeless. But sometimes recovery and the depths of addiction are exactly the same moment.

I cannot tell you exactly how it happened. Neither can he, though he contends it is a deeply spiritual process. But I can tell you what recovery looks like today on this glorious fall day: my son is eating blueberries by the handfuls. He is eating everything. He has gained weight and muscle. He rides his beloved fixed gear bike everywhere. He is in school, addicted to learning and getting A's. His skin is clear. He walks around shirtless, no longer hiding marks on his arms. He is even-tempered, more so than I can ever remember. He has his bad moods -- and so do I -- but he says he would never trade his worst mood sober, for his best day using. Sometimes he feels lonely, as climbing out of a cave can be.

He is struck by the emotions he must have caused in others, particularly his sister. Sober, he was able to be fully present for her leaving the nest for college. "I can't imagine what she must have gone through seeing me leave under such unhealthy and scary circumstances -- it's hard seeing someone go, even when it's for something good like college." Indeed, he feels everything again. As a deeply intuitive person, this can be a burden. He feels sadness in us all -- and he is never wrong about that. But healing begets healing. He is living with me and my husband full time. Our family, brand new and old, is real and does what a family should do: gives us the strength and encouragement to be the best we can be in the world -- as we are right now, this moment.

I am enjoying my son as I never did before. I am doing what I wish I had the loving detachment to do when he was a toddler: I sit back and just watch him go. I have no ownership of his progress, just as I'd finally let go of the idea that I could cure his disease. I can no more cure this than I can cure diabetes. I can only bask in the joy of being around a young man who feels good in his own skin, perhaps for the first time since he was taken from my womb. He is 21 years old. Life begins over and over, each moment, if we awake for it.

Where We Are Now: Home

Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul -- but so have we...You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way, but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth...we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.

--Thomas Wolfe (You Can't Go Home Again)

When my son ran away from home for the first time nearly six years ago, he was 15. It was sparked by an argument that I could barely remember even then. I learned later that he slept on various couches and in leaking tents in backyards for two weeks. Miraculously showed up in uniform for his first day of school, but that was the first of many abrupt and premature departures from what was, by all measures, a safe, secure and loving home. It was the beginning of a convoluted pilgrimage that he was compelled to take. Now, at the age of 21, that pilgrimage has brought him back home again, to a house that looks the same but is nothing like the one he left so many years ago.

We are all different now. He is sober, six years older -- both ancient and newborn -- back in the place of his childhood, the place of our hopes, illusions and truth about family, then and now. He has come back to an entirely new family, to be sure. In the intervening years, his father and I separated, divorced, found new partners; his sister grew, wrestled with nightmares, found love, got her heart broken, discovered her strength again and is off to college in a couple of weeks.  Meanwhile, my son has been a soldier in a war against addiction that is inseparable, I now know, from his spiritual journey that began for him at his birth -- or maybe even lifetimes before that. And now, just when I was preparing to be both sad and free as an empty-nester, my first-born son is home again -- or maybe for the first time ever.

This was what Thomas Wolfe was talking about when he said you can never go home again. The structure my son left and visited for short stretches of calm sobriety looks the same, but the players are all entirely different. His dad no longer lives in the house and a new man, my husband, is there instead. I am changed, a different person than the insane woman who was trying to mother him by trying to lock him into the house, then when that failed, locking him out of it. I was at my wits end trying to save him from a disease that cannot be stopped, even by a superhero.

Even at five, my son had his eye on life beyond his home. He was in kindergarten, wearing a dinosaur shirt, waiting for the school bus, when he asked me how old he'd be when he had to move out. Some kids moved out when they go to college, I told him, but that wouldn't be for a long, long time. There's no hurry, I said, trying to assure him with a smile. But he had that faraway look in his eye, as though he were already obeying another timetable. Ten years later, during his first run of homelessness at the age of 16, I asked him if he felt he had no choice. "No," he said. "I know I have a choice and I have no idea why I keep choosing this hard road."

Though I am forever his mother, I have changed deeply. It is parenting itself that brought to my knees, helped me discover who I was beyond my firstborn's savior. I have become so many things since he left. I have learned most of all to open my heart and proceed with hope, despite not knowing if my son would make it to see another day. In short, I have been restored to sanity and health. That, in itself, is a miracle and gives me faith that healing is available to everyone.

"I haven't really had a home in six years," my son said recently, his clear gaze back. "I'm trying to figure out how to have that." And I am trying to figure out how to help him find it, without losing myself. My son is back. I can see it in his eyes. He has returned home. We are all trying to figure out what that really means. Trust is slow coming, but I have given my son a key to the house. He has put his clothes in his dresser drawer, devised a nightstand, where he keeps The Fabric of the Universe, agreed to regular drug tests, administered by a clinic. Today, he takes out the trash, respects my things; he is gentle and thoughtful; he is enrolled in community college and looking for work. Today, like yesterday and the day before, he is sober.

Last weekend, my son was in a bad mood. So we went to the park with a ball, mitt and a Little League bat.  I love to play catch. It's one of many activities I miss about having young children. I have no idea where the bat came from, because my kids never played baseball. But there it was, waiting for us to reclaim something that was never ours, or perhaps I just don't remember the normal times. As we pitched to each other and played catch, my son's face began to soften. We were happy, mother and son, remembering what we once had or just what we hoped for. I do not know what will happen tomorrow. But today we are home, at once brand new and very old.

Girl Fighting

Watching Lisa Van Ahn fight Veronica Vernocchi of Genova, Italy last night, I was reminded of what I love about a good fight and my own journey from fear and rage to loving self-respect.

Lisa Van Ahn in the ring with Veronica Vernocchi

The first time I kicked someone in the face, I apologized profusely. I was a green belt and the face I so crisply popped with the top of my bare foot belonged to my teacher, a surfer-turned-martial artist, a third-degree blackbelt and a force to contend with. "No," my teacher said sternly. His blue eyes shimmered. "Do not apologize for that." As another apology came to my lips, his blue eyes glittered and a smile spread across his tanned face. "That," he said, "was beautiful."

It was no accident, after all. It was what I'd dreamed of and practiced for; it was the vision that had first carried me through the doors of the dojo after being attacked and threatened on several occasions before I turned 17. Kicking Randy Smith in the face was one of the proudest moments of my young life. It was also the moment that rage and fear began to melt away; the moment my petite frame became a quick, lithe machine; the moment when grace and power were in perfect balance. Everything that I was -- fragile, powerful, sensitive and strong -- were no longer at odds. It was the moment I found true courage.

Van Ahn and Vernocchi demonstrated just the sort of grace and courage that comes with years of training in a fighting art. I find this particularly inspiring with women. Van Ahn and her opponent were the only female fighters in the line up last night and surely among the minority as they came up the ranks in martial arts both in the U.S. and Italy. Yet, this does not mean they, or we, become like men. Though we joined a long-established male-dominated sport, we have found our femininty within it.

What does 'femininity' look like in a fight with kicks and punches? As I quickly learned, it does not mean saying you're sorry when do what you've been training to do -- even if it's 'not nice' in the real world; it does not mean crying when you get punched or kicked (something that took me a while to learn); it does not mean taking it personally when someone tries to kick your face off; it doesn't mean letting someone win to preserve their ego. To win like a girl, you do it smart, skillfully, gracefully, passionately and with a heart full of love. The same goes for losing.

That's what Van Ahn and Vernocchi did last night in three grueling rounds that ended in a split decision in Vernocchi's favor. They punched and kicked each other. They were relentless, fierce, courageous -- and, in the end, loving and gracious. After Vernocchi was announced as the winner, she marched Van Ahn around the ring, holding her fist up high, as though the victory was theirs. Indeed, the victory was not Vernocchi's alone. She had a formidable opponent in Van Ahn who will go for the gold in three months. Win or lose, Van Ahn is "going for it." She is living life to its fullest, pushing herself with courage, determination and self-love.

By this definition of femininity, there were a lot of men showing their feminine sides last night, too:  Losing with grace, winning with humility. There were kicks that could have belonged to dancers and a surprising lack of bravado among all the fighters. Made me want to get in the ring again -- just long enough to kick someone in the face, shake hands and hug. But not any longer. Even after 25 years of tai kwon do, I still might cry when I get kicked. I'm a yoga, Gyrotonic girl now with a fighting heart.