With some disgust, I realized today that as a result of unfortunate factors influencing the lives of a few of those around me and subsequently, my life, over the past seven weeks, I have been neglectful of many activities that are extremely important to me. One of those pursuits is my writing. In addition to not writing daily as I normally do in my pen-and-ink journal, I haven't written recently on this blog, either. This is going to change today, right now. What better reintroduction to blogging than to describe some of the exploits that have taken me away from this, my favorite form of self expression, as well as my feelings about them.
The entire situation essentially revolves around my 89-year old grandmother, who was diagnosed on Feb. 2nd with a terminal form of bladder cancer. Those of you who have read my blog before have had an introduction, though brief, to the complicated family dynamics that I endure through clenched teeth and acidic stomach, most of which revolve around her, "B.E.",the matriarch of my biological family. I haven't before, however, described for you many details of her life and who, at some core level, she really is.
Beginning at the age of thirty-five, she fought and overcame five separate cancers, including two breast cancers, two colon cancers, and a previous episode of bladder cancer. This woman has never smoked, never drank more than a single martini ("dry, with just a whiff of vermouth, please") per evening, and has never, with the exception of the time during and immediately after her two pregnancies, been more than two pounds over or under her optimal body weight. She has consistantly participated in some form or other of mild physical exercise, either walking, swimming, or playing tennis or golf daily through likely her seventy-fifth year of life. She has lived with considerable wealth, coincidentally, since just around age that the first cancer hit. Nonetheless, she has been fighting cancer in it's above listed forms for the past five-plus decades of her life.
In light of recent events, I found myself wondering why this has been her fate, as cancer does not seem to be prevalent in any of my other immediate or even distant relatives. I have drawn one final conclusion. She is mean. Not just mean, but maybe even evil. She is regularly nasty, angry, often times cruel, and generally filled with such intense hatred for herself and those around her that undoubtedly, the stray malignant cells traveling on occasion throughout her system found, rather than filtration to the outside world via lymphatic cleansing, an absolute abundance of nourishment inside of her. Her very body provided an endless supply of ugliness and resentment within each of her tissues and organs upon which the cells were able to feed. I am actually surprised that she hasn't experienced more cancers in ever more violent and aggressive forms.
So now she has acquired the cancer which is to be her undoing. And suddenly, she needs from her family members something that she has never herself been willing to give: support. A lot of it. Funny how the tables turn. To truly begin to understand the degree of difficulty (on a purely functional sort of level) which I am having with this situation, this sudden need she has for me to become a caregiver of sorts to her, let me begin by explaining something about the way in which she has conducted herself throughout her time on this earth. This blog will no doubt have to be written in multiple parts, because the situation with my grandmother is so complex, and with such a trail of past wrongs lingering like so many used and tossed away prophylactics, I will be forced to describe everything in order to better understand the tremendous resentment I carry regarding the amount of time which I have been required to devote to her care of late.
This woman has incredible nerve. Her complete and utter lack of tact and inability to see the big picture and what is important in this life is most clear to me when I examine the way in which she believed I should have chosen my life mate. When, five years ago, I excitedly told my family that I was planning to marry my then boyfriend and now husband, her first question to me was, "What is it again that he does for a living?" I responded that he was a paramedic, a fact about which she was more than aware and clearly did not like. I said to her that, more importantly, he loves me and I love him and we have an incredible friendship and romance and shared goals and dreams. I said to her also that it didn't matter to him that I am very likely unable to have children because he has two wonderful little boys that we will be raising half of the time, (when they are not with their mother, his ex-wife, who has shared custody) together, and that is very exciting for both of us. Her reply to my statement was, "Paramedics, if I understand correctly, make about thirty thousand dollars per year." I answered yes, you are right, that is what he earns. I added that with my salary as a registered nurse, we would be doing very well financially. A newly married couple of twenty-nine and thirty-three making one hundred thousand dollars a year is nothing to sneeze at. She then said to me, completely unphased, "You can marry a rich man just as easily as you can a poor man, it is simply a choice. The only reason you will be doing that well is because of your income, not his. I didn't raise the girls in my family to have to work, and if you marry this man, you will always have to work. Don't make me tell my friends that my granddaughter is going to have to be a nurse, cleaning up bowel movements of various strange goyum for the rest of her life. That is nothing to be proud of."
My entire career and it's associated worth to humankind, summed up neatly in her mind as her granddaughter, the ass wiper for non-Jews everywhere. Four years at a university learning only this. Can this actually be what she thinks? She took this opportunity to remind me, with great enthusiasm, of the previous boyfriends over the past ten years who had, ("four of them!"), proposed marriage to me, and again, four of them whom I had turned down. The only unfortunate choice I feel I had made in the entire situation, the great error I was responsible for, was the part where I had foolishly told her about any of it at all.
"What about G", she said, a hint of angry desperation in her voice, just the way only a Jewish grandmother can make it sound, "what was so wrong with him?" G was the attractive-in-a-hairy-nebbishy-kind-of-way, controlling, emotionally immature and insecure about my level of commitment to him, (now clearly rightfully so), fourth-year resident ob-gyn with whom I had worked the first two years of my nursing career. We had dated for about a year, and just prior to completing his residency, he proposed marriage to me, only to meet, date for two weeks, and then marry the first woman he was fixed up with immediately after I declined his proposal. I explained to my grandmother that G, while meeting what were, at the time, my basic laundry-list requirements for the most part, as he was Jewish, fairly sexy, smart, and obviously on the right track in that rat race sort of way, it didn't matter, because he didn't come close to meeting requirement number one. He never "got" me. He didn't understood my inner workings, and I don't believe he really much cared.
I explained to her that S (my now husband) understood me more after our first conversation than G did after an entire year of dating and working together. And even better, S's knowledge of me and my life doesn't make him want to run like hell. He has always said that considering my childhood and life history, I never should have been capable of becoming a successful nurse, sustaining the healthy relationship with him that I have, or of being the kind of warm, open and loving stepmother that I am to the boys. Rather, I should be a soup sandwich. He says to me most mornings as we're hugging and kissing, "How's my girl? How's my most favoritest soup sandwich?" and I'll giggle and smile, seeing the love and respect always there, every time, in his blue eyes.
P. Second in the litany of men who didn't fit the bill and about whom my grandmother was quick to ask,"What about P? He was always such a mensch!" Another successful, semi-cute, pseudo-"good guy", with a nerdy way about him, an undergrad degree in electrical engineering, an MBA from a prestigious business school, and a plan to complete his PhD. He also had a wild attraction to me, based upon, for the most part, my craziness, and also, to some degree I think, my lack of desire to comply with The Plan. The Plan was the name he gave to the format for living successfully which he had followed religiously since back in the day, a young boy religiously (pardon the pun) attending Yeshiva in Brooklyn. Forever the Good Jew, he would peruse his Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn catalogs as if they contained not only overpriced tchatchkies, but the word of G-d as well.
He also found it incredibly sexy to ejaculate on my face. After about a year of that, and even at the tender age of twenty-two, it became exceedingly clear to me that he was as interested in degrading me as he was interested in managing his stock portfolio, and let me just say he loved his stocks. Nonetheless, my grandmother loved him.
In her defense, she did not know about his special affinity for planting his seed all over my punim, but his desire to make me feel somehow lesser was made obvious in lots of other little ways. He proposed to me, at home, with a stunning diamond and a comment that went something like, "We will have smart and beautiful children, with my brains and your incredible body...let's get married!" I was done. He, not much later, married a woman who looked and even acted a bit like me, sans the wild streak. I understand she is rather submissive, and according to a conversation that I had with him a few years after they were married, "she loves it" when he administers his special brand of facial cream. His willingness to pass this piece of ultra-private and sensitive information about his current wife to his ex-girlfriend makes it pretty clear to me that the desire to degrade women still reigns supreme within him.
Next in line on my grandmother's hit list of men with whom I missed my chance for extreme wealth (and, I believe, extreme misery) is L. Another MD, he and I met through an ex-roommate of mine that had apparently been in love with him for as long as she had been alive, though I did not know this at the time. He was Jewish and hot, and held the all time high score at that time on my possible mate-for-life scale. He treated me well, and I believe that he did love me. The only problem was that he had a particular syndrome, of sorts, that was not, for me, compatible with sustained love. It is known popularly as the "broken wing" syndrome, and he had it bad.
He was absolutely infatuated with my past, the abuse, the scars, the tears, and the pain. The more that I healed and grew and came to terms with my past, the less interested he became. When I would have a particularly rough day or something triggered feelings in me that were unpleasant and I felt insecure, unloved, and afraid, he would be turned on. When, after college was through and I had worked for about five years and decided that I was ready to return to the state where I grew up and face my family and my past and do it alone, he was suddenly interested in getting married. I think he feared that if I returned, I would finally close that chapter of my life and be fully able to move on. He did not want that to happen. Perhaps he thought that if I married him, I would just stay in California and stay as fucked up as I ever was. The fact that he wanted that spoke volumes on the level of insecurity he was dealing with, his own insecurity that is. Insecure men have never gotten far with me. Perhaps this is because while I have been forced to live with, learn about, and overcome many issues, being insecure about who I am and the goodness I have within myself to offer others has never been one of them.
L did the whole down-on-one-knee, ring in hand, "Will you marry me?" thing, and I think because he had tried for so long to keep me down and crush my spirit, I felt nothing. At all. I turned him down, and I encouraged him to get some therapy, though obviously not on the same night. I'm not a total bitch. I really did want the best and the most happiness for him that life has to offer. I just knew that he was not going to find it with me, and I also knew that whether he realized it or not, he very clearly didn't want the same for me.
In no way do I have a feeling of superiority, haughtiness, or pride about the fact that I turned down men whom my grandmother and her cronies felt were "very eligible young men that any girl in her right mind would have been lucky to 'get'!" (She and her friends believe that people are able to be acquired, much in the way that one might acquire, say, a set of 600-thread count bed sheets.) She may have been right, that any girl in her right mind may very well have been lucky to have any one of these men, but I have never claimed to be in my right mind, and it has been a very long time since I was able to see myself as a girl. I also haven't ever really seen men the way so many women I know do, as potential paydays, or saviors from all that is wrong in their heads, hearts, and lives. Quite the opposite, in fact. For me, men have usually been a source of varying degrees of pain. From an early age I knew that I would be completely satisfied to never marry, to stay single and have fun and play and fall into and out of infatuations with a variety of men, as well as falling into and out of bed with a variety of men.
I knew that unless I found a person with that special, wonderful combination of qualities, that intangible rareness, so difficult to isolate in anyone I knew or had ever known, that I would be content to remain unmarried, forever. These qualities, however, if found, would be cherished and nurtured by me for all time. That whatever form and package they arrived in, if they ever were to show up before me, (and if I were so lucky as to be wanted back by the person holding these rare gifts of heart and soul and mind), then they would be embraced as is, and held close and married by me, if that possibility was at all in the realm of reality. I even went so far as to date various women, though I hadn't ever been overly interested in women sexually, because I knew that I needed to be sure that if a female was the wrapper within which I was to find these things, I would be able to embrace them, and love them, passionately, and forever.
If they were black, brown, yellow, or white; short, tall, fat, skinny, quiet or loud, old or young, hairy or bald, male or female was never of much consequence to me. I knew what I wanted, and that it would likely never come, so I was content to have fun with my life and be open to it's unlikely arrival. He came to me and he was as close to perfect as anyone could ever hope to find. But not before the last in my list of my grandmother's golden boys.
B was the last. He was nerdy and brilliant. Short, red-haired, Jewish, and, much to grandmother's joy, a doctor. More specifically, a pediatric oculoplastic surgeon. His talent in the specialty for which he had completed not only a residency but also four separate fellowships was well known in this state, as well as throughout the country. He was a loving father to his three beautiful children and was very newly separated from his wife of fifteen years. He was also coping with some significant issues that concerned me enough to question him, to not take him completely, or even partially, seriously, most of the time. However, these issues, which may perhaps have been a very big deal to some, paled in comparison to the absolutely bizarre behavior he demonstrated one afternoon, sitting in my living room, just two weeks into our year long courtship.
B looked at me suddenly, grabbed the sides of my face, and yelled, at just an inch from my mouth and at the top of his voice, "I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU! DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M TELLING YOU? I LOVE YOU!!! YOU NEED TO BELIEVE ME. I FUCKING LOVE YOU!" To this I replied, "Yes, okay B, I can see that you think you mean this, but you don't even know me. Let's give this some time and see how you feel about me and us after the 'shine' has worn off a bit." He quickly commenced screaming again, this time with tears in his eyes, "THE SHINE WILL NEVER WEAR OFF, BECAUSE THE LOVE I HAVE FOR YOU IS TOO INTENSE! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL, INSIDE AND OUT, AND I WANT TO MARRY YOU. WILL YOU MARRY ME? WE CAN LEAVE RIGHT NOW AND BE IN VEGAS IN FOUR HOURS. LET'S GO, LET'S GO TO VEGAS RIGHT NOW, I WANT YOU TO BE MY WIFE!!!"
We thankfully never made that trip to Vegas. And, apparently, the shine did worn off...rather quickly, in fact, because he was sleeping with at least four other women by the end of our year together. That was a bit too much for me, and I called it quits one afternoon as we sat drinking coffee in his dining room. Interestingly, this is the same place we were sitting about six months later, where we, now as platonic friends, were discussing his medical practice. It had suffered a severe decline in revenue over the period of time beginning just prior to my meeting him, nearly two years before this particular day. After grossing $2.2 million annually for the previous three years, he was now scraping in only about fifteen thousand dollars per month. That money was coming in at all thanks only to those patients who were on payment plans and dutifully continued paying their bills, even after he closed his doors temporarily. This was because he was going through rehab for a nasty more-than-little addiction to Vicodin which had nearly caused him to lose his medical license. He was forced to put significant effort toward rebuilding his life, both in terms of his reputation in the community and in looking for love.
This is the state he was in when we had met, and therefore, his proposal was understood by me to be one of desperation and need to bring some order to his world by means of a joining with a stable, emotionally healthy woman who shared his faith and wanted to help raise children not of her loins. This sort of woman, apparently, does not come along every day. As such, even though our relationship had dissolved on a romantic level, he had continued to cling firmly to me, speaking on the phone multiple times per day, quizzing me about whether this or that woman would be better for him, and who was the best looking, that sort of thing. He also constantly referred to me as his best friend, as in, "You are my best friend...I can tell you anything..." So that day he decided to share with me the true depths to the feelings of hatred he nurtured regularly for his ex-medical partner, a man whom he felt was in some way responsible for everything bad that had entered his life in the previous three years.
My instinct was to support him, this man who was pouring his heart out to me, who had made love to me for months and months and who now considered me his closest friend and only confidant, but what the fuck? Who was he kidding? For someone so brilliant, so adept at repairing significantly difficult eye defects and making it possible for children to see again, unencumbered, he was completely blind! I couldn't believe what he was telling me, and I ended our friendship that day, for all practical purposes. My grandmother said that I was crazy. She said that it didn't matter that the guy had experienced a "little" problem with substance abuse, after all, didn't everyone these days? She said that I should march right back there and make up with him and thank him for confiding in me and pray that his wild streak would end and he would again want to marry me, and that this time I should take him up on it!
Fourteen months later, B was arrested on first degree murder charges for having that ex-medical partner of his killed. The man was stabbed to death outside of his medical practice, the one he had started up after being forced to leave B's rapidly sinking practice. B had payed a psychiatric patient for whom he had cured a minor eye problem ten thousand dollars cash to have this man killed. He then proceeded to tell each of about ten new women that he was sleeping with that he was planning this murder. Not one of them told anyone, and the ex-medical partner, this good, good man with a wife and two young children lost his life because B couldn't handle the fact that he had screwed up his own life. The day he was arrested was the same day that I knew, in my heart that he had in fact done that which he was being accused of. That was the last day I listened to anything my grandmother had to say. It was also the day when I knew that no matter what, I would not allow anyone's judgement of another's worth, based upon their career, social status, finances, or any other superficial factor, reign over that which I knew to be true about them, good or bad. I realized that I had been correct in assessing the relative worth of these men, despite all of the trimmings that had and would no doubt continue to turn other's heads in their regard, and that was a greatly satisfying realization, despite the pain and heartache that we all incurred along the way.
