Getting Your Oh Blah Dee Back
Jan 27th, 2008 by Kathy
Yes, I still belong to this blog. Jill has not created a clever marketing alter ego named Kathy and forgotten to post in her name. I still exist and I still, occasionally, can stay awake long enough at the end of the day to find time to write. Obviously not very often.
I give Jill huge kudos for her amazingly varied posts, the thought and care she gives to the site, the deft way she is dealing with these issues on a daily basis. Me, I seem to be having a hard time just finding time to keep up with her posts, let alone getting struck by a brilliant insight that will both inspire and/or instruct and/or amuse our growing readership.
Which brings us to the title of this blog. Oh blah dee, oh blah da, life goes on, bra… lordy how the life goes on.
My life is going on these days. I am working insane hours at a job I’m obsessed with, but do not really like. I am heavily involved in the kids’ lives, as always. I try to keep it together by meditating and yoga. As we used to say, my life often feels like 20 pounds of shit in a 10 pound bag. This is my life. Life goes on.
And when I sit here and wonder what I can possibly come up with to participate in this blog, I realize something pretty profound is happening: I have no issues to vent on this subject. Nothing. I don’t hate step moms, individually or collectively. I don’t particularly love moms as a class, at least not more than I love anyone else. I really have no opinion in any of this… except for one: I really very strongly feel that having no opinion is the best opinion to have of all.
This is just an observation… but the less time that I can spend on an argument that I will never be able to win, the more I can spend on stupid shit like my obsessive job. This argument about who is better — bio or step — is unwinnable, and absurd. There are no rules. There is no difference. We are on one side or the other, or both, based on a total of about five minutes’ worth of fate. I became a mom in an instant. Jill became a step-mom the minute she heard that rakish stud (G) say he had two kids and she chose to not run screaming from the coffee place. I could meet someone tomorrow and start a road down step-motherhood. Jill could get pregnant and start towards the land of bio-dom. It’s a toss of the coin. We’re both women underneath the labels. It’s like arguing about which is better — D# minor or E major. The answer is it depends upon the music being written.
Oh blah dee. Life goes on. I want my life to go on. I don’t want to be mired in rehashing my old dynamic with G or stressing about what’s going on at the other house. I did that for the year that Jill and I didn’t get along and it damn near killed me. I went so ballistic that I nearly nuked us all with my anger. I had my finger on the red button — in this case a lawyer’s phone number — for months, ready to annihilate us all because of the damage I could see this rift causing in my life and the kids’ lives. I know what it’s like for my fillings to start falling out because of the stress in my jaw. I know what it’s like to dread school functions and to leave with knots in my stomach because of all the unspoken coldness between the two camps.
We were not instantly able to wave a magic wand and make everything nice and sweet in an instant. But, as with all human relationships I’m finding, the “miracle” of us becoming a workable structure again did not depend on either me or Jill doing a 180 degree course correction. Or 90 degrees. Or even 45. I think we both opened up and allows ourselves to change maybe 5 degrees… edging a hair closer to being willing to try to understand, with deep misgivings and fear and resentments laced through all of it. I did huge amounts of personal work… venting my anger at Jill on reams of paper and burning it in ceremony after ceremony. I vented to my therapist. I took yoga. I gritted my teeth (until they fell apart). I asked my friends for the names of their nastiest lawyers.
But one day I was able to let a little of it go. I didn’t think for a second that she would ever change but all the paper burning got the frustration out of my system. I alchemized my rage and burned it and let it kind of blow away. And slowly I edged a little more back into oh blah dee land, where I belonged. And soon I was getting a nice note from Jill, because she was softening up her stance a little bit. We each moved a few degrees closer to facing each other… which is really all it takes to eventually get your lines to intersect.
It takes time. It takes a lot of legal pads. It takes fire. But now my life is going on in much the same over-worked, over-stressed, over-scheduled way it always used to. I have my oh blah dee back. My emotions are not caught up in the drama of my life from yesterday. Which leaves me with some room for my life of tomorrow.
Thoughts…
Ask yourself what is one thing you could do, that wouldn’t kill you, that would change your course by the smallest amount possible. Would it being saying hi? Could you ask how the other person is doing? Could you smile just a little bit?
Get out a pad of legal paper and a pen with lots of ink left in it. Using your sub-dominant hand (if you’re right-handed, that’d be your left), scribble out every hateful thing you possibly can about the other person. The worst of the worst of the worst. Call her on her stupid annoying shit, write down that you hate her voice, that mole on her left ear, the way she walks, the color of her shoes (don’t get paranoid, Jill.. these are just random examples). Fill up as many pages as you need, then fill up some more. Then take the whole stack and burn it in your fireplace or barbeque. Don’t just say you’re going to burn it: really burn it.
Try to breathe and forget about the stress of the situation for… one minute. Try it for one minute. Then maybe five. Some people advocate spending a certain amount of time really focussing on the matter and then stopping at the end of that time. I’m not sure that’s a great idea. I think it’s better to spend an increasing amount of time just not worrying about it. Let it go. Let life go on.
I don’t know about you, but these are just some of the things that worked for me. Let us know if you try any of them…. especially the burning ceremony. Trust me on that one: it works.
Kathy, you couldn’t have said it better. None of us are perfect individuals and we all have room to improve and move forward to make a relationship better than it is.
oh, I did the bonfire thang. In my bathtub. In my one-bedroom apartment. Therapeutic and stupid all at the same time!
Well said
I didn’t do any burning, but I wrote a lot, vented a lot, and cried a lot. After a while, I didn’t need to write, vent and cry so much and it became easier to use my good manners.
Laurie — that’s so funny! The plus of living in So Cal is that we actually have places in which to perform our fire ceremonies. The first time I burned a pile of letters (from my mom… nothing to do with Jill) the paper started such a plume of smoke I was sure the choppers were going to swoop down from the sky and douse me with foam. Getting rid of your personal shit is not for the faint-hearted!!!
Wow, this was great to read, Kathy. And in a way, I can totally relate. What the hell DO I write about, if the stepmom (Carol) and I are not at each other’s throats?! I have to go back and remember what it USED to be like and dredge up examples that other women can hopefully relate to.
It’s funny. As you so vividly outlined, once you get the structural part of a stepmom/ex-wife relationship working, then it seems to just fade into the background and become a regular part of your life, allowing other elements to move to the fore and “turn into” problems that take up most of your attention.
The thing that keeps me going with our website is thinking about all the women out there who are still in the throes of tooth loss(!), hair loss and have their stomachs in constant knots (me, for those last two). I also ache for the kids, having the two women in their lives at war, stuck in the middle. I wish I could just wave a magic wand and have everyone get along, so we could turn to other things, but at least have that strong, extended-family feeling that supports us when we need it.
At any rate, nice to hear your voice (although Jill’s doing a good job of keeping me riveted too). I hope your job calms down soon and we get to hear more of your perspective. Not so much along the lines of “taking sides”, but perhaps just sharing more about how you got from here to there, in terms of harmony between you two.