There

I wonder if I can get anywhere near articulating this … well, I’d like to try, and so I begin.

I just had a sort of breakthrough session with Bill, my coach … a half an hour talking with him and several hours since then absorbing it, and blubbering a good part of the time.

I started out by saying that every time I try to figure out what I want, I get frozen and can’t think. I go blank, my brain just won’t work. (!) I was telling him how yesterday I tried something a little different. I took an idea from the literature on negotiation, where instead of making demands that the other do things a certain way, you work on understanding what the stakes are, what is really important to you, what you really need to feel that things will be OK. (I made a little chart and put in one column the things that bother me, in another column what those things stir up in me, in another I tried to put what I really needed … and I couldn’t do it!)

So, says Bill, can we try now to think of some of those things? Tell me what the thing is about. Well, I tell him, it’s about a relationship that I’m having trouble with … and instead of going on about what makes me mad, it would be more constructive to think about what might help me feel better … but I can’t do it! I just get frozen … every time I try to identify something I want, I can’t do it.

Let’s play yes or no, says Bill.

Do you wish you could see more of him? Yes.
Do you wish you were more intimate? Well, we’re pretty intimate now.
Do you wish it were more open? Well, maybe …

And a feeling of panic started to come over me.

So I started to follow the physical sensation that came with the emotions I had as I said “maybe” and “yes” to his suggestions. I’m a great believer in learning from the physical feelings that go with emotional ones … they illuminate. In fact he asked me how it seemed to me to be actually saying “Yes, I want that.” and I said to him that it was illuminating to observe myself reacting to it. (This is a trick of Bill’s, to observe yourself reacting …) I actually felt I needed to go to the other room, away from the computer and implements of writing, and really get with the sensation.

It’s not a terrifically familiar sensation to me, not like some of the others that seem to crowd in on me. This one is like a dull ache at the ends of my collar bones, out where they join my shoulders,  and the hollow just below where those bones join.

I sink myself into it, go with it, see what it feels like to breathe into it. God, I realize that it’s at the top of a really deep breath, where breath goes after you’ve breathed deeply from your diaphragm and you go on and breathe more. And I take two or three of those breaths and find myself sobbing. It’s the ache that comes at the top of a sob, consistent with blubbering, those great honking sobs that seem to go back so far in time. Those great heaving sobs that only a big fat hug will help.

Then I put my hands on those hollows and I realize a bunch more things. That’s the place I used to rest my hand on Paul’s shoulder in his last months. I’m wearing his bathrobe now, I can feel his shoulder under my hand. He used to say “I’d know that touch anywhere, even if I’d lost all my other senses.” It was my last gesture to him just before I left from my goodbye at the funeral parlor and they closed the casket and took him off to bury him. It was a strange sensation then … he had grown so thin, they had put padding under his jacket to make him look real. It was only a shadow of him I was saying goodbye to.

I stay with it. That gesture with Paul was one that Paul Taylor uses a lot in his dances — a hand reaches out in all tenderness and touches a shoulder or the hollow of a shoulder, and it breaks me up every time. It’s a gesture so much deeper than love. Seeing it, I cross back and forth to the memory of Paul (Paul Skrobela, not Taylor!) … but the Taylor, and breaking up over it, came first.

Both hands now. Two things come up. One, it’s where the chiropractor told me to put my hands when I’m doing crunches, rather than behind my head, to keep from getting … aieeee!! … a pain in the neck. (Will crunches ever be the same?) No, three things come up. Two, it’s close to where they put the hands on princesses in glass coffins, waiting for a prince to come kiss them awake … or on other dead or only apparently dead bodies. And three, it’s like hugging yourself. Blubber some more! I’m remembering mothers saying, she has to learn to soothe herself.

Mothers. A photo of me, buck naked, about 1 1/2, climbing up my mother’s shoulder, trying to wriggle free. I can feel the wriggle! She has her back to the camera but I know her sweater. The buttons are carved ivory in the shape of birds. My face is bright, eagerly moving out, rooted in the confidence of that shoulder.

She has to learn to soothe herself.

We all have to learn to soothe ourselves. It’s so easy to say that, and so hard to do it! We just WANT Mommie to come wrap us in her arms and say “There there”. Or a prince. Or a princess. I want to lay my head on someone’s shoulder, in the hollow of a shoulder, and be comforted and never be alone. Or to hold a head in the hollow of my shoulder. To trade. To share … To yield, to turn myself over, to have someone else take care of it all. (And if no one will … can I live? That’s the fear. Can I live?)

And all those love songs … They’re not just about love, romantic love, however much they seem to be. (In fact, love isn’t about love either!) They’re about the longing for true relationship, true caring, family, faith, even God.

“Put your head on my shoulder.”
Oh please, somebody hold me too close!

“I promise you I’ll never say goodbye.” When Chris finished recording that song and we played it back, worked on mixing it, I would just cry every time. One time Chris and I were sitting next to each other in the studio and he remembered something about Charles in his last illness (for those of you who don’t know, Charles DeForest got colon cancer a year or so before Paul did and they shared an oncologist) and I remembered Paul and Charles in chemo together, playing Charles’ CD and regaling the room with thoughts of getting their cocktails intravenously. Chris and I put all four of our hands together and just cried and cried that time. “I promise you I’ll never say goodbye.” How much we want to hear that promise! How much we want to make it! And the games we play to duck the fact that on one level it’s a promise no one can make.

In my case I won’t let myself even know that I want to make and receive that promise, because if it’s known then maybe I’ll lose EVERYTHING, even what I have now. I’ll lose EVERYTHING.

When I asked my mother why she couldn’t stay with my father, she said it was because she felt he was never there for her. There. There’s no there there. 

There there.

There there, the head on the shoulder.

How strange. “There” isn’t really something a person can be in the way we’d like to think.

And I think once you know that, once you get it in your bones, in the hollows of your shoulders, then you can truly be there for each other.