The Perfectionist and the Misanthrope

Dodgy book sellers

The Butler loves community activities => pantos in the village hall, safari suppers, pop-up restaurants, carollers, table quizzes, fetes.  Me, I’m a bit of a misanthrope.  Our compromise is that if I participate, I can insult our host when he discusses his wife’s frigidity over dinner. 

Three guesses, what the Butler’s reaction was when the notice came about the open gardens. 

In preparation, our initial focus was on neat and tidy, but about five days before the dread weekend, the penny dropped that perhaps more were expected.  We’ve never really gotten the hang of June, you see.  In spring, there’s all those wonderful bulbs.  In late summer and autumn, we’re a bee and butterfly paradise, but June?  Everything holds its breath and waits. 

I laughingly told the Butler I couldn’t believe that people were paying money to see the expanse of dirt in our flower beds.  Later, I looked up from weeding the gigantic mauve thing and found myself alone.  I went inside, suggested the Butler get off his ass to help if he wanted the resident misanthrope to behave herself when company came.

After that, the Butler would jump to his feet whenever I came into a room and like a kid who hadn’t done his chores, announce he was headed to the garden.  He seldom made it outside before 2pm and seldom stayed.  The same man who loved all these goddam village events and being civil in his Irish accent to UKIP neighbours and putting his body between mine and the guy at Burns Night who said trans people were selfish.

Something weird, this way comes.

Something weird was afoot. 

The Butler hadn’t always gardened.  Presumably his superhero regime of work-by-day, single-parent-by-night had something to do with it.  I remember our first gardening projects – a dubious Butler watching from the sidelines, concerned the neighbours might look over the fence and see me showing my arse.  Figuratively, of course, although on occasion . . . well, that’s a different story altogether. 

Then a brazen hussy of a red dahlia sang its siren song to him and he believed he could make beauty happen.

To be honest, I’d led the poor Butler astray by approaching gardening the way I do manuscript drafts.  I tinker.  I toy.  I try to find the best place for ruffled basil by setting up plastic bottle mini-greenhouses in every flowerbed, only to learn there’s no best place and we really have to consider getting a life-size greenhouse one of these days.  Pansies live between the onions, and corn?  Well it grows in the meadow because it’s a grass.  The rose bed is carpeted with creeping thyme while glads preen themselves among the pumpkin vines and a nasturtium sprouts from the neck of a statue that lost her head.  Nature’s feedback means an oak grows in a pot where a passing squirrel planted it, and the feverfew knocks itself out hiding the oil tank.

Pansies & onions, o my!

People laugh, but I never think their derision is about me.  Ever.  Firstly, it’s a reflection of how rigid their minds are but also, it’s a boundary issue because the Butler and I should have a garden we enjoy, not one that meets the needs of Mr UKIP down the road. 

But with the open weekend days away, I now suspected the Butler’d taken it personally all along.  Worse, that my own laughing sent him off the ledge.  When did this stop being fun for him?  Had it ever been fun for him?

When we talked about it, the Butler reminded me of when he was off work a few years ago because of his back.  He literally convalesced while curled up in a ball, taking copious amounts of painkillers, imprisoned with his own thoughts.  During those hours of not being able to DO, he realised that he took about 80% of his self worth from what he did, and only about 20% from who he was. 

That 80/20 mentality got him through his superhero years of resuscitating patients during the day, cooking meals and ironing uniforms at night, squeezing in patient transports overseas while the kids were at school.  The open garden weekend brought this all back to him, the conviction that to be a good human being, our little space needed to be a horticultural wonderland.

Gigantic mauve thing.

Skipping forward to the weekend itself, when he and I trespassed in our neighbours’ gardens, the Butler was full of curiosity and wonder.  See how they do that!  Oh, I love that species of astrantia.  I’ll distract them, Lora, and you steal the seeds.  He didn’t have a word of criticism for anyone.

So why for himself?  Why do any of us set our own standards so mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa high that we will never be enough, so that whenever the Butler’s asked to bring a covered dish, he brings two and when we go to the barbecue, I ask him later how often I embarrassed him and when either of us stand up to protest that someone has treated us Less-Than, we’re ashamed that we made such a fuss.

I could blame familial/societal indoctrination.  As a trauma therapist, I saw this over and over, that the legal system and the family and society as a whole placated the person acting out, expected the target of insanity to always keep her cool, be reasonable, never respond in a sane way to the bastard.  It boggled the mind.

But I believe we’re more than that, more than the recipients of indoctrination.  If we see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothing, we certainly can be audible activists about the whole sordid affair but more importantly, we can take care of ourselves in the situation.  We can nurture our lives and seek out what we need, what we want, what we dream about. 

It isn’t easy.  And it isn’t a failing on your part if sometimes you hide in the house and think with dread about visitors tromping through your back garden.  It’s your back garden and it’s precious to you.  So while they’re kicking pots over and tugging branches off the buddleia, remember the lusty red dahlia you brought to life, the beauty you inspired in the space around you.

The weekend brought us lots of visitors.  I listened raptly when anyone felt compelled to say that an oak would outgrow a flowerpot.  No one who asked where I came from, then sang Country Roads got shoved ass first in the pond.  I feigned surprise that the statue had lost her head and couldn’t explain how a nasturtium took root there.  The poor creeping thyme will undoubtedly need therapy, considering the number of people who groped it to see if it were scented.

It’s thyme, people.  An herb.  Ergo . . .

Your own brazen hussy.

But there were people who were kind about annuals hastily planted in the bare spots, folk who appreciated that we’d welcomed them into our back garden – in effect, offered them hospitality.  Others shared their knowledge of pruning or species of holly or pond care.  People interested in the Latin name for the gigantic mauve thing (something only the Butler could answer) traded the Latin name for that yellow stuff we’d always called Vigorous. 

And a few people said as they left us, that we’d created a space of calm and welcome.  That’s what you want in life.  Not perfection, but a place that’s home.

Bootleg Shame

Whitney Thore

Whitney Thore is a dancer who, in her late teens, inexplicably gained a lot of weight.  By the time she received a medical explanation, the emotional damage had been done.  She did overcome it, though.  Still obese, she puts videos of herself on You Tube and does street dancing to promote positive body image.  In this interview, she said she didn’t know loving oneself could be so subversive for a fat person. 

http://uk.screen.yahoo.com/video/playlist/barcroft-media-videos/fat-dancer-campaigning-body-positivity-105804392.html?vp=1

I postulate that society considers self love subversive for all of us.

I thought myself clever, giving up self doubt for Lent, even concluded in my last post that it made me a better person.  As the Lent Prohibition progresses, however, shame speak-easies crop up all over my psyche, remind me of how many times I fell flat on my face.  It’s actually shocking, the negative messages contained in one human skull, and how few come from actual Bad Things I Have Done. 

F’rinstance. 

After a party we gave, a guest apologised for not spending more time with me.  I smiled that sweet smile Appalachians give when someone says something stupid.  Although he’d spent most of the party in another room, he’d managed to criticise my weight three times. 

His rude comments, exhaled breath that I inhaled. 

Speak not of Tuilleries

I run into a friend after spending my birthday in Paris.  She pushes my trip aside so she can talk about her life.  Not particularly interesting aspects of her life.  The same old, same old.  Whether she considers me a bore or is a crap friend, her message is clear. 

Shut up, Lora.

I am silenced.  I am erased. 

Then there’s the mother of three special needs children that folk around here say mollycoddles her kids.  They also call a man weak because his mentally ill ex-wife keeps taking him to court.  This mother and ex-husband, victims of circumstance yet unable to evoke sympathy from their neighbours.

Why?

We’re not weak.  We don’t molly coddle.  Who cares if you went to Paris when I had a nice ramble across the moors? 

Too fatolduglyskinny

The unfortunate consequence is that some people stop talking because we can’t be bothered to listen.  Other people won’t be in family photos because they’ve been told too many times how fatolduglyskinny they are.  Folk in dire circumstances stop asking for help because they’ve come to realise it was their fault anyway.

This has been one of my most difficult Lents, trying to fight the demon Self Doubt.  I’m not able to say what is true about myself and what is protective salt thrown over someone’s shoulder to land in my open wound.  For the moment, I feel displaced from my life, from my Self. 

Silenced.

  

Labels & Lent

Flight or fight.  Decisions.

Her eyes widened a fraction of a millimetre, the tiny jaw muscles tight as she calculated the distance to the door combined with her age versus  my own, her adrenaline extrapolated exponentially to my lack of anticipation, and predicted the likelihood of her escape. She thought she could make it.

You expect more than that from your GP.  Or I do.  Still.  After all these years.  Fat, dumb, happy, that’s me.  But the thing is, the Butler’s taking me to Paris for my birthday and feck me if I’m not having a good time.  And in order to do that, I need to be heavily medicated.  Which is a whole other story, but this GP looked more likely to hospitalise me than give me drugs.

So I say, ‘I used to work with children and some of them in the Asperger’s spectrum had this same inability to habituate certain sounds and vibrations.’ 

Ah, a manageable label delivered with big words.  I most likely wouldn't throttle her with the blood pressure cuff.  She gave me some beta blockers and now the world is safe again.  Everybody breathe deeply.

I don’t know if I’m on the spectrum, although if it’s a spectrum, I guess we’re all on it, but I proposed (tongue in cheek) to the Butler that people should be nicer since I have a label.  This wise ass remark made me decide that for Lent, I would be nicer to me.  No self doubt.  Just for Lent.

18 Things Creative People Do. Photo Andy Ryan

Don’t get me wrong.  Self assessment is a powerful tool.  Without it, you’re a narcissist.  Being disappointed in oneself leads to improvement.  Writers do this full time, I suspect.  It’s as I read recently, creative people ‘fail upward’.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/04/creativity-habits_n_4859769.html

But self doubt can become a constant negative voice inside our heads that we accept as reality. 

Too blue.

F’rinstance, I’m knitting two cardigans for Paris.  A normal person would buy something there or if pressed, knit one.  Me, I knit two.  And during the whole operation, I critique my work.  Too bland.  Too blue.  Buttonholes not where they should be.  Meanwhile, the Butler reacts to my knitting as if I’m spinning gold from straw.  To him, it’s miraculous that I can twist a couple of sticks and out comes a cardigan.  Who cares what colour it is?

Oh.  Yeah.  Right.

A friend of mine is doing 100 Happy Days – the challenge to post a photo of a reason to be happy each day for 100 days.  That’s the ticket with this Lenten vow for me, to look at myself and what I’m doing through happy eyes, so to speak.  Not – well what can you expect from someone with a label – but, it’s good that I exist.  I, who sing badly and often dance as I’m getting out of bed, who reacts to the Butler bringing me a fox skull with a rib breaking hug.  It’s not just alright, but good that I can’t remember to dye my hair and don’t cook and periodically dig up parts of the lawn for pumpkin patches and other inexplicable endeavours.

Too bland.

Sometimes it’s difficult, not sliding into Bad Lora mode.  Sometimes I have to say, ‘It’s just for Lent.  You can rag your ass after it’s over,’ to prevent myself from jumping on some inadequacy. 

The effort is worth it, because as I search for a belief in the beauty of my lesser components, I find more reasons to be happy.  To feel lucky with the life I lead.  And I actually think I’m a nicer, better person for being treated kindly by my inner critic.  Even if it’s only for Lent.