When Fear and Avoidance Mean You’re On the Right Track

sometimes your fear tells you that you’re crazy; sometimes it tells you when you’re on the right track. this was an example of the former. read on for discussion of the latter.

So a few months ago I got the impression that I needed to pray for compassion for my husband. I don’t remember exactly how. But I knew it was right because I stopped reading the Bible and writing my prayers for two weeks.

I’d prayed for tons of other specifics for my husband and for our marriage, but never for me to have compassion for him. Because compassion goes beyond understanding, or sympathy, or kindness, or patience, or tenderness, but is all of those wrapped up together with a big dose of “this isn’t about you.” Maybe I’m particularly skilled, but I’m able to pray for and practice all those other things while somehow keeping myself as the center of the emotional landscape.

* Look how understanding I’m being. Aren’t I doing a good job of not adding to his stress although I’m really angry?
* I’m gritting my teeth and acting sympathetic although I’m losing sleep and my general friendliness is suffering.
*  “God, you’re going to have to give me some of your patience and kindness, because I’m all out.”

Compassion is different, which is why I was so afraid. Compassion busts through the self-righteousness that can give this gal a great big Martyr Complex. So after two weeks, I couldn’t avoid my devotional time anymore. Couldn’t avoid the call to compassion. And I wrote/prayed this:

I pray for the thing that has made me avoid coming to this forum: please, Lord, give me compassion to [my husband] — not lack of anger, not sympathy, but compassion. I have no idea what that will look or feel like, but you led me to pray that and I’ve been avoiding it, but no more. Please give me compassion for [him].

The difference it made was startling. And not at all what I expected.

I talked more about the situation that was plaguing us. Yes, more. Before that, I’d been biting my tongue so I wouldn’t make an already stressful situation even worse by constantly bitching about it (although I sure was in the privacy of my own mind).

And why did I talk about it more? Because I wasn’t complaining about my difficulties, I was outraged for him, on his behalf. I won’t go into details, but I will say it involves a work situation, so it’s nothing I have any control over, and my husband doesn’t always feel he has control over, either. But compassion for him gave me the courage to apply my analytical mind to the situation. The topic was no longer ostentatiously ignored, so it no longer kept us captive in its shadow. Compassion for him gave me the courage to shine light on the situation regularly, which helped him talk through some of the issues, which may have helped him take action.

I told him about this recently, although that first prayer for compassion took place 3 months ago. I told him because I’d used the prayer for compassion again. It was 3 a.m., and I was fuming about something (Big Nagging Issue showing its ugly face again), my mind self-righteously whirling, when I asked myself this question: “What would the compassionate view be?” No surprise, it was very different from what I’d been thinking. And led to an utterly different conversation about it in the morning.

He pointed out something later that afternoon: compassion is related to passion, and while passion can be great, unchecked, it can blind us to the other. As a prefix, com means “together; with; jointly.” I so quickly get all heated up and passionate about my point of view, throwing my arguments at him. Compassion forces me to look away from my agenda and look at him. After all, we are in this together, jointly. I’m with him in this struggle. It isn’t me vs. him. It’s us.

Are there any prayers you’re afraid of? Any prayers you’re avoiding? Pray them anyway.

What’s Your Superpower?

What if you were normal and all your friends were superheroes? And at your wedding reception, your superhero wife’s superhero ex-boyfriend (the Hypnotist) hypnotized her into not being able to see or hear you. He went a step further: when you tried to touch her, her reactions ranged between muscle spasms all the way to stopping breathing if you tried to hold her in her sleep. How would you get her to see you? To know that you didn’t abandon her?

This is a different take on the issue of invisibility in relationships than I’ve written about here and here, more malicious and focused (because everyone else can see the main character except his wife), but just as devastating. Thank you to a blog reader for alerting me to Andrew Kaufman’s marvelous novella, All My Friends Are Superheroes.

Woes of the newly married

The situation in the novella is unlikely, but it got me thinking. How common is it, shortly after being married, to stop truly seeing our spouse? Maybe the rest of you had a glorious honeymoon period, but I did not have a smooth transition to the married state. The actual living with another person was fine. The having someone there to send out to the store when I had an ice cream craving at 10 p.m. (we were living in the Bronx without a car, and I didn’t walk around by myself much after dark) was great, although I gained back the weight I’d lost my first year of graduate school. And other stuff was … enjoyable.

The tough part was the mental adjustment to being married. Being married put me in a different category than my fellow graduate students, none of whom were married. Professors were married. Students lived together or had long distance relationships, or none at all. I was a feminist studying to be a philosophy professor. What was I doing, under 30 and married?

The conventionality of being a wife bothered me. I didn’t think of myself as a conventional person, but there I was, doing the conventional thing. It was odd to feel simultaneously unusual and conventional. I was a little embarrassed to be married. That changed in time and as we got to know other young married couples. But it was an adjustment.

My poor husband. I burst into tears once because he bought whole milk. Was he trying to kill me? Didn’t he care about my family’s history of high cholesterol? How could he be so insensitive? I became obsessed with what patterns of behavior we might be establishing, inflexible about him doing the dishes when I cooked and folding the laundry when I washed, about me never ironing his shirts (back when he still wore ironed shirts), not even to act “wifely” in a self-aware yet ironic way.

All this is to say that I spent much of the first year of marriage wrapped up in my own internal drama (deciding to quit graduate school during that year didn’t help). I don’t know how much I truly “saw” my husband, how much I thought about his experience of our marriage. After 18 years, I think I’m better about that now. And I’ve come to terms with my conventionality — for goodness’ sake, I’m a Midwestern stay at home mom who drives a minivan.

Unusual superpowers 

Even though All My Friends Are Superheroes got me thinking about the heavier stuff above, it isn’t a heavy story. It’s warm-hearted, and charming, and sweet and funny. I loved the superhero names and descriptions. Most of these superheroes can’t fly, and they don’t have superstrength. Their superpowers are ordinary things magnified. Here are a few of my favorites:

If you arrive at a party and suddenly find yourself completely relaxed, there’s a good chance the Stress Bunny is there. Blessed with the ability to absorb the stress of everyone in a fifty-foot radius, the Stress Bunny is invited to every party, every outing.
Her power originates from her strict Catholic upbringing (p.33).

All through her youth, the Battery had two things: an overpowering father and an over-rebellious mind. In combination, these forces gave her the ability to store great amounts of emotional energy and release it in one blinding bolt. But beware: the Battery’s allegiances aren’t to good or evil, but simply against whatever stands in her way. Friend, foe or innocent bystander — the Battery’s emotional energy bursts are unpredictable and she will strike at will (p.32)

Mr. Opportunity knocks on doors and stands there. You’d be surprised how few doors get answered (p.75).

The main character even talks about the difficulties this style of superhero has:

Try it, right now; boil down your personality and abilities to a single phrase or image. If you can do that, you’re probably a superhero already.

Part of the problem with finding your superhero name is that it may refer to something you don’t like about yourself. It may actually be the part of yourself you hate the most, would pay money to get rid of (p.71).

The Big Question

What is your superpower? What is mine? It’s easier to come up with someone else’s superpower first, so I’ll do my husband.

I’d call him Mr. It’ll Work Out, because he lives as if things are going to work out. This superpower only works in ordinary life situations; i.e. it doesn’t prevent people around him from getting or dying from cancer. But he doesn’t get stressed or anxious, not even about new things or experiences. And the thing is, things usually work out. It makes him a great person to have around, and a great leader. I both rely on this calmness and security, and get irritated by it (because it makes my anxiety seem so meaningless).

As for myself, I could be some combination of some superheroes in the book: Mistress Cleanasyougo, the Dancer, with a bit of the Battery thrown in. But I’m going to go on a limb and call myself The Presence. I have a strong physical presence; people always think I’m taller than I am. I have a strong presence on stage when I’m dancing. My face and entire body will radiate my emotional state, which will affect those around me. If you’ve known me awhile, I reveal myself as very passionate about many things, and I can express myself quite forcefully. I’ve got an effective “don’t you even think about doing that” parenting look I can put on. I don’t know if it’s as true these days, but people used to find me intimidating. A few people have told me that, before they knew me, they were scared of me.

There are mitigating factors, of course, but if I’m looking for a trait that has both positives and negatives, I think that’s it.

So, sharing time. What is your superhero name?

Are You Testing Your Invisibility?

I’ve been avoiding writing about this book (Calling Invisible Women, by Jeanne Ray), but there’s too much in there that hits too close to home. Clover is a fiftysomething mother of two (1 college student, 1 recent college graduate), married to a crazy-busy pediatrician, a dog owner, and writer of a gardening column for the local newspaper. She has one little brief blip of invisibility before becoming completely invisible: voice still there, body still there, but she cannot be seen. Her family doesn’t notice. For several weeks. As long as she does all her regular tasks (including sex with her husband), they don’t know anything is seriously amiss.

I picked up the novel in the library because of the cover and title, read the blurb and put it back. “No,” I thought, “that’s way too depressing to be as funny as the blurb implies.” I walked two steps away, pivoted, and picked it up again. Read the first line: “I first noticed I was missing on a Thursday.” Loved the off-hand tone of it, so I gritted my teeth and got it. I was going to read it like it was medicine.

And it was. The book is truly funny and the tone is comic throughout, yet I was on the verge of tears, if not actually crying, almost the entire time. Luckily, it’s a fairly short book (246 pages), and a fast read, so it wasn’t a terribly long time. But still.

The best parts of the book were when we meet the other invisible women and go along as they discover how to use their invisibility like a superpower. An ex-teacher goes to school on the bus (naked, so nobody can tell there’s a person there), whispering in the ears of bullies as their conscience, making sure shunned kids have a place to sit in the lunch room, interrupting cheaters, and generally making life at school better, fairer. Another slips off her clothes in the middle of a bank robbery and foils it. They hold naked meetings so they don’t have to pay for the hotel conference room. They learn how this happened to them (there is a physical reason, it isn’t magic), band together, confront the problem, and achieve a pretty good level of victory.

But Clover’s interactions with her family and the world at large made me so sad. Even a little panicky. I’ve got tears pressuring behind my eyes right now just thinking about it. As long as she’s wearing clothes, the vast majority of people don’t notice that the clothes are floating in midair. Even her doctor responds to her statement, “I am invisible,” with a bland, “We get a lot of that in here,” not even looking up at her from her chart as he talks. The only one who notices and didn’t know other invisible women first, was her best friend.

This is a nightmare that is too easy for me to imagine being real. The first time it happens, Clover panics and wakes up her son to ask whether he sees her. There’s some silly back and forth, including this nugget, “If you feel like I don’t appreciate you, well…it’s because I don’t. I will again, but not until at least ten, okay?” She’s visible by the end of the conversation. Next time, it’s permanent. She didn’t plan on testing her family, but the first time, when she stood in front of her husband as just a nightgown floating in air, and he didn’t notice, but kept up an ordinary conversation, she dismissed it as her own mental illness. And then it becomes a test, a dare.

Aren’t there tons of ways you test the people who love you? If I don’t change the toilet paper roll, how long will it take for someone else to do it? Will anyone notice that I cut/dyed/changed my hair? If I do job X that person Y usually does, will they thank me for it if I don’t mention it? If I don’t plan a night out with the husband, how long before he suggests it? If I don’t hand the camera to someone else and ask to have my picture taken, will anyone notice that there’s little evidence that I’m part of the family? Or that I’m sometimes part of the fun? Maybe it’s just me, but I bet I’m not alone.

What does it mean when they fail the test? It might mean that they don’t love you, but not necessarily. It might mean that they’re wrapped up in their own dramas and anxieties, with some tendency to take you for granted on the side. No matter what, it sucks for you. You feel crappy when they fail. After the first interaction with her husband, Clover cries out, “‘He didn’t notice!’ A pure grief washed through me. It was bigger than the problem at hand” (p.27).

But you also feel kind of crappy when they pass, because you’ve expended time and energy scheming and imagining both scenarios and every one of your interactions is fraught with suspense and expectation. And all the negotiating with yourself to explain every nuance. Clover does this, too: “The next morning when he leaned in and kissed my shoulder, my neck, I started to think about it all another way. Maybe Arthur didn’t see me because he knew me so well and his vision automatically filled in all the things I was, based on the slightest hint of shape or scent. Maybe when you’ve been with someone so long you don’t so much see them as you project them onto things. Arthur could have been making love to my twenty-year-old self, my forty-year-old self…Anyway, this morning, I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt” (p.48).

But it’s also kind of irresistible. Another character asks Clover why she doesn’t just tell her family. She admits that it would be better if they knew, “But after awhile it just becomes a point of pride. You start to wonder just how far it can go” (p.151).

Yet it isn’t only pride, it’s also fear. Fear of being unloved. Fear of being unlovable. And hurt. Hurt from all the times your loved ones have failed you in the past. Not to mention humiliation. It’s humiliating to feel like you’re begging for attention. Clover puts this messy soup together this way: “Maybe because we were timid and hurt, having already spend so many years feeling invisible before the truth of the matter kicked in. If we didn’t have the starch to tell our own families that no one could see us, then how could we be ready to tell the world?” (p.157).

Not to mention the mingled guilt and anger in those who’ve been tested. Anger at the person for putting them in that position, but also guilt at being neglectful and clueless. Hurt that the tester didn’t trust them.

It ends pretty well for the characters in the book, and Clover does apologize for testing them, but reading this has convinced me of the stupidity of testing. I’m going to stop it. In fact, I already have stopped it. I changed a door in our kitchen yesterday, and instead of waiting to see who’d notice, I told everyone that I did something big in the kitchen. My daughter wanted to know so she could anticipate it. My son didn’t want me to tell him what, so he could see whether he noticed right away — he did. And I tagged my husband in the Facebook post that had the picture of what I did. When I see that the toilet paper roll needs changing, I’m going to change it. I’m going to open curtains (while teasing my family about really being vampires). When we’re having people over for brunch and I’m busy cooking, I’m going to ask my husband to make the bed instead of wishing that he’d notice that the bed needed making and being hurt when he doesn’t. There’s more, some silly, some deeper, but you get the picture.

And there are more convictions to come because of this book, but I’ll save that for a future post.