Day Three: Sometimes I write and sometimes I don't and other tales of shameful inconsistency

This time it is 12:35 AM.  Terry woke me up cuddling against me while we were sleeping and I had fierce heartburn.  I made him grab me some Tums (they live on his bed stand) and I got up to go to the bathroom. I heard him start snoring again as I was sitting on the toilet and reading my favorite bathroom book, How to be Interesting by Jessica Hagy.  I bought it at Kinkos (or whatever that's called these days-FedEx Office maybe?).  I remember being there, waiting for some last minute stuff to print off for a program at Machar (my job at the time was at a secular humanistic synagogue in Washington DC--yes, I lived in Philadelphia and worked as a rabbi in DC for three years...that's a topic for another post).  I remember the sunrise was the most amazing reds and oranges.  The book has little pages of encouragement and advice for how to be interesting.  This is one of my favorite pages:

This is the page that our children completely reject from ages 7-15.  I have two children who do NOT believe that this is a REMOTELY good piece of advice right now.  They are pretty sure that magic only happens in your comfort zone, with your friends, and in the familiar vistas.  They are into wild ideas, though.  My daughter thinks we should join a club that would give us access to a private jet. Oh Elie, honey, I wish you could have been in our family during the private jet days...but sadly, they are over sweetheart.

The book is filled with all kinds of things that I believe in but tend to forget.  When I was in rabbinical school, I studied a spiritual practice called, Mussar.  Mussar is a word from Proverbs 1:2 meaning moral conduct, instruction or discipline (Wikipedia).  It is essentially Jewish ethics.  The Mussar movement was developed by Rabbi Israel Salanter in the 19th century.  Basically, he asked the question: Why are all these pious learned Yeshiva boys such jackasses?  How can people who sit around learning Torah all day still manage to be crappy people? So he had the boys begin learning a text on moral development, including one called Mesilat Yesharim (The Path of the Upright, 1740), written by Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato). 

Momentary tangent--I love that famous rabbis became known by these acronyms of their names: Rambam, Ramban, Ramchal etc.  One of my friends from rabbi school said that if she made an acronym of her Hebrew name Rav Aliza Shira, her acronym would be Ra'ash--which means noise in Hebrew.  I cracked up. Maybe one day people will call me Ranabmo--Rabba (rabbi for women used in Hebrew) Nehama Benmosche, the Rabbi Rambo Combo. I feel a Purim costume idea and a design for new business cards percolating ;)

Back to Mussar.  I'll never forget the introduction to the text that I learned from my rabbi, Ira Stone, the founder of the Mussar Leadership Institute. https://mussarleadership.org/ (BTW, Mussar as a contemporary spiritual practice in the non-Orthodox world has gathered followings around two rabbis--Rabbi Ira Stone and Rabbi Alan Morinis.  There was even an article in Hadassah magazine about Mussar that caught my eye a month or so ago!)

http://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2017/01/12/mussar-jewish-spirituality-modern-world/

(I'm pretty sure that person with their back toward the camera is Molly, my teacher/friend/crush from high school, but I haven't written her to ask. Though dopplegangers from behind, even with purple kippot, are a definite possibility)

Ramchal basically says: There is nothing in this book that you don't already know.  This book is not meant to be read and put back on the shelf.  It is meant to be studied.  You must read it over and over again. Because despite everything we know, this book is about the things that you want to forget. Studying reminds you.

Mussar is about character education. It is about learning how to be a consistently decent human being. It is about fighting your selfish ego-maniac self (your yetzer ha-ra) and spending more time being your altruistic self (your yetzer ha-tov).  Those Hebrew words are technically translated as the inclination for evil and the inclination for good, respectively, but Stone teaches that they are better translated as the instinct for self-preservation and the instinct to help the next closest Other.  

Wait a minute. Where is this going? Weren't you going to be writing about shameful inconsistencies? Do you NOT realize that I am siting here filled with shame because I'm up writing a blog at 12:55 AM when I'm "supposed" to be sleeping? 

I have been listening to Brene Brown's book Daring Greatly on Audible.  I hate NPR and I hate books on tape, but ever since I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2010 and went on a series of psych meds, I have lost my ability to read nonfiction books.  (INSERT SHAME IN BIG LETTERS HERE) 

I'm just getting into the book and haven't read the whole thing. I learned about Brene Brown from one of the first adult ed talks I attended when I was hired at Machar.  My congregant Danielle told me I HAD to watch the video that I missed and she was right.  I watched it.  I made Terry watch it.  (You can watch it too if you click below)

https://youtu.be/psN1DORYYV0

So that's the thing that I'm struggling with today.  My bipolar disorder (that word sure helps the Gremlins, as Brown calls the demons that tell us awful things about ourselves) makes me feel shame about my inconsistencies. Instead of feeling guilty about missing meetings, or not being able to wake up with the kids, or about giving twenty dollars bills out to homeless people because I wanted to see them smile--I feel shame.  As Brown explains, guilt is feeling badly that you did something wrong. Shame is feeling that YOU ARE something wrong.

I started seeing a new shrink a few months ago. She has been pretty amazing so far. Yesterday I was crying in her office about how I can't live like this anymore. About how I was hoping that she would be able to help me find some stability. About how I just wished I could be a normal person who got up when the alarm went off. Who felt tired if they didn't get all 8 hours of sleep, but who could drink a cup of coffee and go to work. I want to be consistent and predictable and reliable. It's not fair.

"Why?" she said. "I would rather be able to start a new blog, be a rabbi, write music and be you than be a Mainline soccer mom who always wakes up and gets the damn kids to school. You're a creative. You produce something amazing and then you crash. And then you build it back up and do it again. Most people who can wake up at 6 am and go to bed at 10 pm--that's all they can do. Why would you trade that in? Don't wish for normal. Accept your schedule and let's try to make it a little better, but don't wish you could soccer mom. Really.!."  The attitude of her really could only be conveyed by a little more description. Taliba is a strong, brilliant, African American woman who got her assistant to pull up the Cash me ousside, How bah dah video when she made a reference to it and I didn't know what she was talking about (I'm not putting that link in here. You can google that one yourself). She is the first psychiatrist I have ever called when I am in a crisis who actually stayed on the phone and picked up again at 3 am and helped me work out everything that I was going through. Not the first therapist to do that for me (I love you Karen) but she's the first shrink I haven't hated in the 7 years since my original diagnosis. If any of my former shrinks are reading this, I am sorry but IIWII--It is what it is. At least I didn't put your names in here. She's the first shrink who invited me to show up with my kids to session and who met two of them so far and actually talked to them about me and with me. And now when I complain about how I'm a shitty mom she can say, "What the fuck? Did you not listen to Eliyashu? The worst thing he could think of about you was that you signed him up for snowboarding lessons when he wanted ski lessons--and you even ended up changing it and getting him ski lessons!! Your kids love you and they don't feel bad about who you are as a mom--why are you doing this to yourself?"

Because I am not a fucking soccer mom.  I never will be.  I have the minivan and the fancy house and the parties and the play dates and I can still bury myself in a hole of shame about how much I suck at being the consistent parent who shows up and keeps her promises. I feel ashamed that I wasn't sick when I adopted Eliyashu and sometimes I think if I knew then what I know now, maybe I wouldn't have done it...and that makes me even sadder than not being a soccer mom. I can't bear thinking I could have lost the chance to do the only thing in life I REALLY wanted to do.

When I was 18, I was on a business trip of my dad's. I look back on this trip as one of the more fucked up trips of my life because both of my parents' future lovers were on that trip. In less than a year their marriage would completely implode. I was sitting with some people--possibly my dad's girlfriend Lisa was there because she knows this story like she was there--and I said that I felt this deep and intense compulsion to get pregnant. I told them that I felt certain that if I didn't get pregnant right away, that would never be able to. Lisa retells that story sometimes and says that she remembers talking to my dad and saying--Holy shit. We have a problem, Bob.  

But I was right. A year later I was diagnosed with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) and ten years later when I talked to a doctor about getting pregnant he told me that I should brace myself for the fact that I was likely to have a very difficult road trying to get pregnant because of my PCOS. It's even harder to get pregnant when you don't usually sleep with men. I asked few of my guy friends to have unprotected sex with me for a year or so.  A few said no. Some said yes.  And even though I had my first pregnancy scare when I was 15 (that was a fun week in the Benmosche household, right Joel?), I never got pregnant and stopped trying and started learning about adoption--since my dream as a baby dyke was to make an adoption plan, just like my father did and my mother's father and mother did, and the biblical Moses' biological mother did...and last year I sealed that fate with an emergency hysterectomy. The Gremlins just told me that the world is a better place because I never procreated.

It's 1:33 AM.  My tears have dried. I have poured my heart into a blog post so I can publish it on the Internet and have my friends and acquaintances validate me by viewing the page and reading my story and texting and commenting on my Facebook feed. When I woke Terry up a few nights ago, after my first post, and read him what I had written he said, "Oh baby.  You miss talking to your dad so much and he knew you and understood you so well that you need the whole world to listen to your story to try to make up for the fact that you can't call him anymore." I started crying and said, "Yeah. I do. Because he really listened. Even when he said--calm down, what are you getting so upset about?" I will always have a hole in my heart where his love for me used to live. Whoops, guess the tears aren't all dry just yet.

And you called it Carly Simon. I will follow the likes on Facebook and look at the views on the blogger analytics.  Because I'm vain. 

But honestly, the catharsis is in the writing. And the vulnerability is in the publishing. And the hope is for more connection, the salve for my aching heart.