Vicarious Rising

A Foundation for Building Dreams

I swear I'm not dwelling on it, but I am kind of rankled by the ass clown email I got a couple days ago. It certainly underscores the immaturity of the sender and helps me know that he truly is not my friend, if he ever was. It also was a blatant act of hostility from a guy who likes to claim he isn't emotional. It was provocative. I don't know what he was looking for from me, whether it was a fight or just to ruin my birthday.

Ok, I'm going to get right on letting it go. Any time now.

I finally have some photos to share of my house. Please excuse the construction mess. You can click on them to see a bigger view. I didn't get any of the exterior because there were a ton of trucks parked out front yesterday. We had our first inspection (and failed), but will have another on Friday. A light at the end of the tunnel, for real this time.

We still have a lot of furniture to buy, but we are going to take our time picking the right pieces. I haven't mentioned my quest for intimacy and the issues within my marriage here in my blog in awhile. I suppose it is because I am taking things slowly. I recognize that I am a bit of an intimacy idiot, not really understanding what my needs are. I cannot expect someone else to fulfill these for me when I can't define them myself. And one thing I have been certain of all along is that I love my husband and that he loves me, whatever shape or form that means. That alone is enough to hang on and see what develops.

What pics I put up here are the kitchen/great room, another of the kitchen (you can see the pantry a bit in the doorway, the counters are slate and the island is granite), the antique apothecary we had converted into a vanity (we got the granite sink from China), the inside of the "sleeping porch" off my office, and lastly, the walk-out basement rec room.

We may be closing next week if all goes well with the inspection. Then there will be a few more things to be done, including some more finish on the hickory floors. Then we can start to move in.

I can't hardly wait to get settled into my beautiful house on the hill.

Booby Prizes

I'm glad I wrote about my sudden melancholy regarding my broken friendship yesterday. To tell the truth, I was a little ashamed to bring it up because I was feeling like I ought to be over it already. Spending over an entire year in a tug-o-war with myself over the whole fiasco seemed like way too much time already. Then I'd spent two relatively quiet months at peace with myself over the decision to get the hell out. It felt like I was backsliding to indulge in mournfulness even for a moment.

I have to remember a couple things, though. This friendship lasted for 15 years. It was and will remain perhaps one of the most significant relationships in my life, regardless of whether it was based on the real him or not. I trusted him with parts of myself I gave to no one else. He mattered to me. A lot. It doesn't signify that he had been fooling me all along in regards to how deep my feelings went for him. How I felt was real.

Part of my annoyance is that I feel duped. I am someone who prides herself at good intuition about people, and it so utterly failed me in this case, I am embarrassed to my core. The funny thing is, my first impression of my best friend was so poor, I cannot believe I allowed myself to change my mind at all. I thought he was a self-centered boor with a stick up his ass. How and why I reversed my initial reaction to him is a real mystery to me that I may never solve.

The real question remains, why did I allow myself to become so involved in this fantasy? What does or did this man represent to me that was so important for me to hang on to? I have recognized that a large portion of my love/infatuation with him was an attempt on my part to hang on and get closer to someone that I felt was an enigma. The more distant he felt to me, the more I became convinced I needed to be closer. Pretty rudimentary stupidity psychology on my part, but given my history with my mother, hardly surprising. With my new sobriety and confusion about my sexuality and marriage, the whole thing snowballed into a romantic fantasy. I desperately wanted to talk about all of it with this person who was my friend and confidant, but he would have none of it. I'd never had a relationship outside my parents run so afoul, heck, my first marriage ended with less acrimony. The man I thought my best friend was would not have ever treated a friend with the disrespect he treated me. Not only was it a rude awakening, but I kept trying to convince myself that I had it wrong - that he had to be the good guy, not the asshole.

I should have done a better job of recognizing the warning signs that my friend was a man with a lot of sociopathy of his own. At 38, he's never married or even been close to it. By his own admission, he has never been in love. And every single one of his relationships has gone down because of his emotional immaturity, inability to communicate and fear of commitment. His way of handling conflict in a relationship is to make the other person feel like there is something defective with them and just flat out refuse to speak to them until they change the subject and are "rational" (re: not saying anything that makes him squirm) again. None of this had ever come up in our friendship before I got sober. My sobriety, I guess, changed how I related to him. It was the last relationship I expected to be a casualty of my getting well. It seems to be the only relationship to suffer for it.

I also think that a part of me thought that he was single because he held some sort of torch for me all this time. Very self-indulgent, I know. Now that harebrained idea has gone the way of the dodo, and I am left with little to console me.

I really screwed up here. I need to take an inventory and understand what happened and why. Try not to rip myself a new one over it. And most of all, try not to let what happened keep me from trusting another person again. I don't think I will ever stop missing the closeness I felt to him, even if it was a chimera.

The Yolk

Before I foray into any dissertation about my views on feminism, I feel I should state here that I haven't fully developed them. I've never wished that I were male, nor have I felt especially held back from doing what I really wished to in life because I was female.

But I would not say that my being a girl has been a non-issue in my life. Although I have tried very hard to imagine it so.

I received mixed messages about feminism from my parents. I suspect my mother wishes she had been born a boy. She has a rather vehement dislike for the Pope (any pope) and most obviously patriarchal structures, yet she flat out favored my younger brother and was quite vocal about how much easier boys were to raise than girls. I'm pretty sure she's got an apron string tied somewhere to my almost 30 year old brother. He lets her keep it there because he gets his own big benefits in other ways. It's not pretty. I really do not wish to perpetuate such a relationship with my son. I know I've got to let the boy grow up and out of my nest.

I was never a tomboy, but I often had as many male friends as female friends. Most of my friends were a motley crew of people from a diverse population. I didn't belong to any crowd. Things got murky for me around high school when my family moved down South and my mom became more paranoid and unpredictable. I had a steady boyfriend at the time, and once I left for college, he proposed and I used him as an escape from the looney bin. I didn't mean to use him, but he was a safe out and my parents thought marriage was an acceptable way for a young lady to leave her parents' home.

Clearly I was not busting out with feminist ideals in my early twenties. But then, I was also the main breadwinner in the household. Much to my then husband's disgruntlement. It was not a good match. We only lasted eight months of living together before I felt completely smothered.

It's interesting to me when femininism is brought up, a lot of men (those not rolling their eyes and clutching their guts) chime in that they like and support strong women. Mainly because who on earth would say the opposite? Or, taking it another direction, how often do you hear women saying they like and support strong men, as if this is something that needs to be clarified?

Honestly, what I am looking for, in some way, is a way to be who I am and comfortable and free to be however my "myselfness" manifests itself. I find it a little irksome to have to dither around saying I am in support of women to do this or that. For fuck's sake, I believe that all people should be supported to their greatest potential and treated equally. But somewhere a line has been drawn and even I can feel it. There's this thing called sexuality that matters. That matters to me, too, as it happens. I've tried to pretend it's not there, but I guess it is time for me to figure out this woman-ness of me because it feels important to preserve.

Damn if I know why. But this is where putting down that chardonnay has brought me. Hello, me.

Defining Innocence

Let's face it, the whole purpose of our existence is procreation, and to that ends, sex is the means. I can get all cerebral out my wazoo and at the end of the day it's still about whether people are still on the planet or not. Kind of basic and maybe a little depressing to look at it that way, but we're just creatures like everything else on earth.

But being human, we like to puff ourselves up with all sorts of importance, why we do this, I've no clue. I know I am plenty guilty of it. To a large degree we do control what lives and dies, where things flourish. We don't always make the best decisions, although whomever makes them believes they are doing the right thing. We like to have power.

This isn't really what I want to talk about, however. I've been thinking a lot about feminine sexuality, and human sexuality in general. My whole thoughts on it are hardly cohesive, so I am going to abuse this blog space to organize my thinking on it. I don't know whether this is a wise thing to do or not, but it feels like what I want to do, so I am.

My son just turned 13 and is experiencing the weird adolescent pangs and awkwardness that goes along with it. As his mother, I don't want to make things worse, but I am not a boy and we've got the whole wacky Oedipal thing going on. I'm constantly barraging my therapist with questions about how to handle my kid without making sex seem freaky or taboo. I wish my son felt more comfortable talking to his father about this stuff, but their relationship is a little hot/cold right now. And I think for my son to see women as sexual and to see mom as a female is weirding him out. It's all just.... yuck.

Of course, I saw how my mother handled all this with my younger brother, which was very, very badly. I will not go that route.

There is a huge part of me that wants to draw back and say "why does it have to be about male/female? why don't we see each other as just people?" I've had similar queasy feelings in the past about racial issues as well, this perplexed feeling about why everyone makes things so complicated when to me it seems like it ought to be easy. I'd just sit around looking at people, like, "I don't understand. Why are you so angry?" Does this resonate with anyone? It was just this strange sense I had that people had it all backwards. But then, I was the only one who seemed to see it that way, so I must've been the nutcase.

I like the things that make people different much in the same way I like what makes, say, a piece of granite interesting. The flaws or the variations are what makes it cool to look at and to find out more about. Maybe they shouldn't even be called flaws, just the inclusions of things that happened in a certain time and space. The things that make men and women different, too, should be revered and enjoyed. I can even buy into the ideas that some of our brain functions work differently, although I'd hold out a bit on that scientifically, just, well, just because.

But I do feel very much like there is something wrong with the world in regards to the status of women. I think we are still considered inferior to men, even in some of our own minds. I'm dismayed at the attitude of some men towards women in regards to sexuality. And one comment that keeps running through my head from the author Jessica Valenti of the Feministing blogsite is that the worst thing a man can call another man is a "girl." Or some other female body part slang starting with a c that ought to be appreciated rather than demeaned.

I'm troubled by these things. I don't understand how society's gone so awry. Well, yes I do. It's called fear. Humanity is rife with it. What's so frightening about a confident woman? Why can't everyone win?

Shit, I am so naive. I really, really am.

The World We Live In

Just a quick update on my nieces: my ex-brother-inlaw unexpectedly agreed to the change in jurisdiction for the custody hearing from Kentucky (where he lives) to Massachusetts (where my sister and the kids primarily live) and also to the Guardian ad Litem being put in place for the girls. He also agreed to the guardian of my sister (and, it should be said, my parents') choice, which is a woman and a psychiatrist and from what I hear, quite expensive.

So, all of these things were approved in court, which is very good for the children and my sister's lawyer says is in my sister's favor. Personally, I am rooting for the kids, whatever that ends up meaning. My therapist says these Guardian programs usually are quite effective at looking out for the needs of the children. I am praying this will be the case here.

Thank you to all who left comments and made kind thoughts and prayers for these little girls. They are sweethearts caught up in the middle of a clash they should be being protected from.

On another note, I feel like I have a bunch of huge blog posts inside me, but not the time to flesh them out. However, I would like to direct people to Slutty McWhore's blog (formerly The Judgemental Whore, which I was kind of partial to, but she can be Slutty if she wants). Part of what's been going through my own head lately is what is feminism. In part, I've been trying to come to grips about what it is to be a woman, which is partly tied in to my romantic and sexual needs and how it relates to my marriage and even how it related to my failed friendship and the politics of my relationship with my parents. I shied away from my feminine side for most of my life, and I am trying to understand this better also within the context of society.

For those of you who have not met Slutty, she is a Scottish woman living in the US working on getting her master's degree and supporting herself as a erotic masseuse. She is a wonderful writer and quite outspoken, and I consider her a strong feminist voice, maybe not because of or despite of her job. Frankly, I haven't decided which. Maybe I just think she breaks the mould. And, perhaps, maybe that's what I think feminism should be about.

Closer to Free

My horoscope is all over the place lately, telling me my head and heart and intuition are not in cahoots. I'm supposed to listen to my head and not my intuition, ignore my feelings, follow the advice of the guy in a red hat or some such nonsense. WTF? I think I am going to ignore horoscope man. He's going to paralyze me into hiding under the covers.

Said covers are not exactly a bad place to be... I am officially homeless. Yep. As of December 24, we were run out of our temporary townhouse living arrangement. And our new home is not yet finished with construction. The days leading up to Christmas Eve were complete chaos of moving shit out and into storage, cleaning up our former living space and hauling ass to Connecticut to see my mother-in-law. We missed Christmas Eve dinner. We made it onto Mrs. Claus's bad list. I would've skipped going to her house altogether if I didn't think she'd guillotine us all if we tried. Bad list is much better than headless.

Mrs. Claus-a.k.a. my mother-in-law also has her birthday the day after Christmas. We did the obligatory hoo-ha for that, and hauled ass back north to supervise the continuing saga of our home building project. Our homeless shelter is one rather elegant structure that pretty much is an upgrade of anything we'll ever live in. I'm not exactly sufferring.

At any rate, I've been too busy to do more than cursory blog reads, but I want to catch up with everyone. I also, fortunately, have not been crying in my cornflakes about best friends who I have finally realized were kind of lousy people all along (why I ever doubt my first impression of people is beyond me. It always ends up to be the dead on truth in the end.). It's amazing how little you miss someone when you realize you were creating all the good elements of their personality out of your own fertile imagination.

But I am not kicking myself for the pretty delusion. I required a knight in shining armor. He was the lucky recipient of my needful dreams. I can't hate him for not being Sir Lancelot. I can't hate me for wanting a man of honor, principles, loyalty and integrity in my life. I had a hard past filled with people I couldn't trust or love. I needed to believe in something, someone, better. He served his purpose. Now the fairytale has ended. Now, I can believe in me.

Today I feel good. Just plain good. Nothing more, nothing less. I feel ready to write, no urges to drink. I also want to write a couple posts about my mom's reaction to the necklace and about my husband breaking the no gift rule (naughty boy. one of his gifts is the Raw 7 tee to the left with argyle and a motorcycle on it. defnly me. i love it. weird it happens to be the exact same color as the everybody lies tee).

But not yet. Right now, just going to enjoy not feeling heavy. I'm glad you're here.

Froid, Freud, Fraud

The television show "House," with Hugh Laurie starring as the ill mannered yet effective doctor, remains one of my all-time favorite programs. House holds a belief that 'everybody lies,' especially patients. Even ones risking death. How many alcoholics have told the true number of daily booze consumption?

For Christmas, because of the large outflow of cash due to the new house, my husband and I have agreed not to exchange gifts. But while reading a magazine, I saw an ad for t-shirts for the tv show "House" that had proceeds going to the National Alliance on Mental Illness charity. The front of the shirt had one of Dr. Gregory House's favorite sayings: "Everyone lies."

And I thought this shirt was the perfect gift for my husband. I also bought a shirt for myself and our son. I packaged all three together and had my son and husband open it.

In the wee hours of the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Morn, I mused to myself, given the gamut of emotions I've run through this past year - what peculiar inner workings of my mind thinks that this House-ism is the most succinct motto for our little family to wear emblazoned on our chests?

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Ramshackled

A number of people have mentioned that any major home construction project is nearly always a major test of a marriage. Anyone endeavoring even to rent a place with another person, then a faucet goes drippy or a lightbulb needs to be bought and replaced, wait and watch the power plays and resentments begin. One need not be married for this relationship litmus to occur. In fact, starting with my sister and "get off my side of the car," learning to share space with anyone is difficult. Determining how to live harmoniously and combine your styles and living habits is a whole different level of game play. Add in all the other fun relationship nuances, and, boy, it's a cocktail of unstable proportions. Add too much of the wrong personality ingredients, and you've got "Molotov" written all over your Home-Sweet-Home.

My husband and I have lived in one rented apartment together and owned one townhouse (first owners, bought the model with all the whiz-bang extras), one Philadelphia historic (1865) row house and a retro New Jersey 1970s Colonial split level house. We have been living in a temporary furnished rental condo for nearly a year and a half. Back when we were in Philly, we also spent six months abroad living in a Milan "residence" (a tiny furnished room much like a Residence Inn, but much, much smaller) with our son for a semester of our MBA studies. Our son slept on an armchair - this was a neat exercise in family proximity. We even had my dear-departed best friend Allen (ok, he's not dead, just a mean, cold bastard ex-friend - did that sound pissy?) come stay with us a few nights in this ridiculous room. I think he slept on the floor. (There was another time I slept in the same bed between him and my husband. Alas, it sounds alot more titillating than it actually was). Since July of 2006 we have been working on building a house right from the drawing board.

The house in Philly badly needed a new kitchen, and being the enterprising MBA students we were, we went to Ikea and bought ourselves a bunch of boxes and built us a kitchen. Fitting those things into the not-so-regular walls of a home built in 1865 was the cause of considerable swearing primarily from the male half. Our then two-year-old spent a lot of time wanting to help hammer. It would have been cute if we didn't think he'd kill himself on the treacherous spiral staircases (which, not so ironically, I nearly did myself in on when imbibing too much more than once. Who's the real baby?) Did you know they used horse hair for insulation between the floors and walls back then? The kitchen came out great, we made a little money on our investment and got to be all proud.

In NJ we bought a house with great bones, land, location and floorplan but in real need of updates. It still had some rust shag carpet and kitchen cabinets falling apart. Termites. Leaky skylights. It was not exactly 70s groovey. Over the course of our seven years there, we did a kitchen addition, remodeled all three bathrooms and updated every room. When we sold the place, we nearly doubled what we paid for it, made a considerable profit over our improvement spendings and survived living in constant construction. I learned to do some basic electrical wiring. My husband "accidentally" tried to electricute me (our one fight). We also vowed never to do that again. We did the bathrooms simultaneously (although we did always have one working shower and toilet), and I never want to do dishes in the bathtub again.

Now, ask me about how my husband and I did during these projects? Unbelievably well. Probably sickeningly well. Not in a mushy, gushy way, but we complement each other, have similar tastes, know how we live, how to live well together, use our space and how to efficiently design, order, save money and manage these projects. We don't fight. We rarely disagree about decisions (granted, I usually make them, but he approves and it's not just to keep the peace, it's because he genuinely is very pleased with my choices). When it comes to dealing with the hired help, we're basically good cop/bad cop, but neither one of us is really all extreme. At the end of the day, it's the quality that matters and we are also respectful (unless the worker is really flagrantly awful. Then my husband deals with it.). We've never hired a decorator or designer. The only architect work done was stuff for the technical permits, etc. We do have a builder and both he and his foreman have great ideas. But this is definitely a collaborative project and we've had our fingers intimately on every step (to which I think much of the crew wishes we would get lost once in awhile, especially my husband who is at the site daily, often pitching in to work. But he does also bring coffee, lunch and praise too).

I would say for about three quarters of the process this go around with this new house, I'd been dragging my feet. I have not gone to the site anywhere near close to everyday, or even every other day. I have many, many reasons for it, none of them particularly good or bad. But I took my therapist's advice and just felt what I needed to feel and didn't do anything nuts. But I sure let my emotions go all the way where they wanted, even though I was terrified they -- and by extension, I -- might not ever come back.

And thank god I listened for once. But, hey, to give myself a little credit, somewhere inside I knew that it was what I needed to do. It was just fucking scary as all hell and ferociously uncomfortable.

I think it's going to be worth it. I'm worth it. Maybe I can begin to believe I deserve the home that I have so ardously built.

[The two photos are actual antiques I bought for the house. The first is a circa 1890 antique Japanese merchant choba chest I bought on eBay from an importer in California. The last is a Danish two door armoire from circa 1880 that was restored by a really cool couple in Vermont of The Country Gallery Antiques. Janet's photo is a little dark, but the finish is a pickled Prescott Green by Benjamin Moore. We bought several large pieces from them, but this is the only one I have an "after" picture of from their careful restorations. The wall unit is also from the Country Gallery, in it's "before" splendor. This sucker is giant, 76 inches wide. Perfect for our new TV. But the really big TV will be in the media room in the basement...]

Some Hole

Lately I've been drawn more and more to blogs of people who are in relationships with addicts more so than those struggling with the addictions themselves. I find this odd being the addict half myself. It's not so much that I am trying to understand the other side of the equation, those supporting addicts, although that would make sense. I actually feel a certain kinship with these people - and I should note that the majority of these bloggers have been women. I'm not sure why this is.

My own husband does not have his own program of recovery. He does not seem interested in having one. And, to be honest, doesn't seem to need one. I think it would be completely bizarre to see him suddenly going to meetings and sharing. It would be totally out of his character. I cannot imagine it. The closest I can come to imagining it is seeing him trying to help other people. But introspecting himself? He's more likely to analyze the quality of his toe lint than the status of his psyche.

How does this play into our marriage? Well, it doesn't make for deep discussions of any sort of spiritual matters. But I guess I can do that elsewhere. I've had other people to fill in those sorts of roles.

You know, I started this post, and I don't know what I am looking at here. I've been seeking intimacy, looking for it in my marriage and in my friendship with my best friend and finding myself back at square one. I kind of wonder why anyone would want to put up with me. And then I think, why wouldn't anyone want to be with someone so phenomenal as me? I'm see-sawing between megalomania and inferiority. Your average addict personality.

It's funny, one of these bloggers, Mantramine, mentioned in her post today that she feels like she and her husband spend most of their relationship thinking about him, the addict. A few of her commenters in similar relationships commiserated. I can say that this ain't the case in my marriage. Not that my husband never thinks or worries about me. But I can say with a great deal of confidence, it is not a good chunk of any part of his day. He worries much more profoundly about what is for dinner.

So, I do what I do best... I research.  What is intimacy? I don't think I have a clue. Maybe these people know what it is. They put up with those of us with the worst characteristics and love us anyways. Maybe they have the secrets to happiness. Maybe they can fill in the blanks for me.

I really am such a novice at this thing called life. Not much else to do but keep learning.

What is Home?

Recently I've been dreaming of creation. I have power and magic. I can make beautiful things, fanciful worlds. Music. In my dreams, I form these things with my will and sometimes with my hands. With my heart. I am making masterpieces, not mere trinkets.

I am also aware that I am dreaming. Often the things I am producing, I don't know how I am doing it, where the skill comes from or even cannot read the words of my own stories. They are written in languages I do not consciously know. But in my dream and in my head, I know that I really do understand what I am doing. While I may not explicitly comprehend my output, deep inside it all makes sense, it just has not been fully revealed to me. I simply need to let it flow out and see what comes.

I like these dreams, although I do find them rather frustrating as I never get a completed product and it is a little hard to take credit for something that you don't really know how you did it. But the thing is, I am the owner of these creations. That is the truth of these dreams, even as I am not fully aware of what I am making.

But I must say, these dreams beat the hell out of nightmares about being stabbed by my parents or running from a freak tidal wave. Maybe not so fun as a good sex dream with a hot guy. I really don't have enough of those.

Things have felt a little better for me the past few days. Some of the issues that I have been pushing to a head within myself seem to be falling one way or another, as I hoped they would. This is probably not the sort of behavior that I should be partaking in as a recovering alcoholic, but the letting go and all that shit was not getting me anywhere but more and more confused. I felt like I was giving myself too much of a leash and I was definitely hanging. Yes, I am being vague, but that's all I'm going to say about it today. Suffice it to say, I needed to quit wishy-washing myself and had to do some stuff to force myself there in ways that are probably not generally approved. I've got too much self-will that isn't popular with the AA-folk. Never fear, alcohol and drugs were not involved. Just my good old fashioned pig head.

In any case, my behavior is not recommended to anyone else, so I shouldn't spread the word. I pray I am done with this particular vein of nonsense. My wise inner voice seems to be saying it is done so long as I don't start wandering off the path again. I think I will stay headed in this direction. I see a light on up ahead and it looks mighty comforting.