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Family

Posted on May 31, 2008

I’m just back from a family wedding in Park City, Utah, only the second time I’ve been away from the Cotswolds on a weekend this year. My beautiful cousin, A., married her long-time boyfriend and business partner in the resort city in which they were engaged. I know this because the entire engagement — a faked ski accident during which a large diamond was produced from the snow– was professionally videotaped and subsequently made available on the couples’ official wedding website. My cousin and her husband have a penchant for capturing things for posterity. The entrance hall to the hoe down-themed rehearsal dinner was decorated with blown-up, black and white photos of them embracing on bales of hay. It was all a bit soft porn, and I felt vaguely dirty as I sat down to a buffet dinner of BBQ ribs and chicken. Once fed, the evening’s entertainment progressed to another video, this time narrated by the mother-in-law who had dressed up like a fairy godmother to deliver the humorous and not always fairytale story of how my cousin and her husband met.

The weekend’s events kept us busy, which is just as well. My entire family — sister, mother and father — were there, and as a family unit we are more or less reduced to observational dialogue at this point in our evolution. Politics are far too heated and enquiries from my parents into the lives of my sister and I only go one question deep. The potential for upset is presumably too great to dig any further. There’s only so long you can discuss the weather or the food or how nice the hotel is, but we’re rather good at it.

Unfortunately we’re in the company of some rather functional families and my father started making the inevitable comparisons. In particular, the groom’s family seems very bonded and very rich. There are loads of them and my father is exhibiting Jewish family envy, as evidenced by his “family values” comments at Sunday brunch, the closing event of the wedding weekend. Family is “all that matters” he tells my sister and me, the frustration across his face an unspoken indictment of my childlessness, my sister’s husbandlessness, and our dissection of the shellfish selection which has constituted the bulk of the morning’s conversation.

Later I ran into the fairy princess mother-in-law en route to the ladies room, who asked me if I liked the brunch. “It’s what the Stein Erickson Lodge is known for,” she added. I’ll remember it more for selling tampax at $10.74 per box, but the brunch was pretty good too.

Cotswolds Random

Making a Connection

Posted on March 15, 2008

Today on the Writing Time blog there was a quote from Walter Mosley: “The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day. There are two reasons for this rule: getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.”

That last bit is so true. Husband is generous with pointing out how disconnected I am with myself. (Sometimes I take this well, other times I tell him to fuck off.) It shows up in a variety of ways, from lost keys to a protracted series of chores where in the midst of doing one thing I remember another thing and pretty soon I am doing twenty things at once and none of them well.

It shows up in the way I check my Yahoo!Mail every morning for no particular reason. At best I have an email from my father with a collection of airplane nose art. This isn’t going to get any better now that he has discovered YouTube. Or there could be an email from a frequent flyer club, which can easily lead to an hour of flight searches for imaginary vacations.

It shows up with obsessive checking of my BlackBerry and working long hours despite my company going down the drain. Husband and I sometimes sleep in separate beds in London. One of the reasons I like it other than avoiding the farting and being yelled at for lying on my back (which may or may not result in me snoring) is because after my BlackBerry alarm goes off I can immediately check my email (Southeast Asia will have already been bombarding me with problems). Next I check my calendar to get myself mentally braced for what hell may or may not be in store for me that day. If I tried to do that while in bed with husband the BlackBerry would be promptly dispatched out the window to rants about what a complete robotic mess I am.

A month or so ago Vivienne Westwood was on Jonathan Ross saying something similarly brilliant to Mosley’s advice, about how distraction is one of the modern evils of society. Both Mosley and Westwood are right, and what they are saying is two sides of the same coin.

Writing is one answer, and I’ve just proved I have enough time to do it every day by listing out all the useless crap I do make time for. The Cotswolds also work in a forced “get in touch with yourself chamber” kind of way. There’s no Internet and the BlackBerry only works if you stand by the window in the kitchen. And trudging along the edge of ploughed field, up hills, through tall wet grass for miles on miles is as therapeutic as any couch.

Random

Consultation

Posted on March 8, 2008

The official email went out today. I and all my other colleagues in the UK are now under consultation, which is the British legalese word for “you might get laid-off.” It wasn’t a surprise. Job cuts were announced earlier in the year by the CEO in a dreary speech from the incongruous location of a stage in the Odeon Cinema. It was one of those speeches were reorganization masquerades as strategy.

The fact that everyone is in the same boat is not helping me take it less personally. I am trying to find solace in the fact that it’s a darn sight nicer than the same process in the US. I remember when my project team was “restructured” at my last job in L.A. Everyone was sequestered in a giant conference room then sent out one at a time to meet with the boss. I made the cut but my colleague, H., wasn’t so lucky. Upon being told to leave the building, she asked to go retrieve her purse from her desk. There was no need. While she was being told her fate, a security guard had collected her personal belongings and would you reunite her with them in the lobby.

One thought that has come to mind a little too readily is that pregnancy seems a daft option in light of all this. After all, employers in this country are not known for taking on waddling types of my age group and gender.

Books Random

Poor Precedents

Posted on March 8, 2008

Today I read an interview with author Peter Mayle in a FT Weekend column where famous people talk about their favourite house. “I go away less and less and each time I can’t wait to come home. That’s the true test of having found a place where you’re really happy.”

Our trip to Paris is the only one we’ve planned for the year, apart from a family wedding I have to attend back in the states. Our Cotswold cottage is passing his test.

I’ve also been thinking about how much more to blog about depressed husband and his adventures in pharmaceuticals. I read Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence when it first came out, but I don’t remember if his wife featured much in it. The FT article mentions he was on his second marriage when he wrote it. It doesn’t mention if his first wife divorced him for being mentioned in a book.

Years ago I read Frances Mayes’ Tuscany books, and I vaguely remember her mentioning her husband. My recollection was that he was wonderful and her second one. I am getting worried I may need to divorce husband and get married again before I can write anything useful on the subject of him and depression.

The only memoir of recent years I can think of where the husband features prominently is one of my favourites, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. That starts with her husband dropping dead.

This isn’t helping.

Random

Ritalin Vacation

Posted on February 23, 2008

Husband started taking Ritalin in December. This isn’t the first medication related to depression that he’s been on. That honour goes to a medication used to treat incontinence in old ladies that happens to have some kind of anti-depressant side effect. At least that’s what the shrink told husband, which made both husband and me wonder about the wisdom of venturing onto the anti-depressant meds frontier in the, shall we say, less progressive world of British mental health care. (Never mind the bedside manner issues associated with telling a depressed, middle-aged, adult male that he’s going onto pills that help grannies with wee problems.)

Husband and I are both veterans of therapy from our years in L.A. In the great nature vs. nurture debate, his southern California mental health professional favoured nurture, which in turn led her to an anti-medication bias. Her logic was that you need to deal with the underlying issues, not just rely on medication. And so husband dutifully dealt with those issues, putting in hard time on the couch and in group therapy with me. This gave us both awareness and fluency and comprehension of root causes, all of which were helpful and necessary, but only go so far towards managing the damn thing if you’re the person in the thick of it. The problem seems to be that if you are in a very dark place, you can’t muster the will to use skills you may have acquired when you weren’t in the dark place. You may not even be able to get up off the couch.

The depression kept coming back, as is its habit, until finally it got so bad that husband broke with principles and got a prescription. This was not without angst. The abstinence from meds to date had been something of a badge of honour. Husband was dealing with his demons the hard way, rather like I imagine John Wayne would have done it. There were a few things that helped to rationalize the decision, two of which came from our time in LA as zen practitioners. One was the lesson that as soon as you recognize you are standing on a position, it’s probably worth considering get off of it. The second was the memory of a woman priest who practiced with us and was dying of cancer. The pain had become unbearable, but she was wary of going onto pain killers knowing they might make her out of it. The sensai would hear nothing of it, insisting she take the morphine — he called it “dharma-cology” to make her feel better about it. And finally, I realized in a very real, living up close with the demons kind of way that whatever caused what was happening, be it nature or nurture, it was a physiological thing and it made sense that something that has a physiological effect might help.

The incontinence medicine didn’t work out so well. You might not wet your pants anymore but you’ll feel pretty speedy. That’s when Ritalin came on the scene, which is better known for treating hyperactive nine-year old boys than depression. Husband’s inability to focus wasn’t in the pre-adolescent, pogo-sticking around in circles sense. It was more a ‘what’s the point of anything when humans are all shit yet I still need to get this PowerPoint done by noon’ kind of thing. Since it is one of husband’s most life affecting symptoms of the depression, it’s what got treated. And it seems to work.

Which is why it was a surprise when husband informed me he’s decided to take a Ritalin vacation. Specifically he’s decided to forego the meds for the three days per week we’re in the Cotswolds. He says he feels better when we’re out here. There’s something about the fresh air, the peace and quiet, the wide open spaces. I buy this, but I also suspect this experiment is borne out of a lingering feeling that the meds are somehow wrong, and now that he’s found an escape valve from the stress of London he doesn’t or shouldn’t really need them. As Jessica Apple wrote in the FT on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Prozac: “We may indeed be a Prozac Nation, but one thing remains clear: we’ve yet to come to terms with our diagnosis.”

Earlier in my married life this news would have caused me great distress. I would have been on WebMD scouring the implications and freaking out that husband was making changes to his meds without consulting a physician. But not now. I’m married enough to know any protest would be a waste of energy. He is going to do this experiment whether I like it or not. On the one hand, it’s his body, and he has the right to determine what he puts into it. On the other hand, it is asking rather a lot of me. This means only his colleagues, many of whom he loathes, will be the beneficiaries of the drugs. Surely as the wife I should get something out of this too. He might be the lab rat, but I’m the hamster’s wheel, having to spin like crazy or not depending on the day’s experiment.