6/17/07
Sun 700
I’m hiding downstairs to escape Lou. I got up thinking to write a bit before he gets up only to find him asleep on the front room sofa.
It’s difficult to be around him. He takes up so much room. Even when he’s feeling happy and expansive. And I noticed that for the most part Gary was kind of withdrawn and remote which left me as a sort of buffer. I could not bring myself to nod any sort of assent or encouragement to some of the really strange things he was asserting so positively: that Muslims are “the problem”, and the gov’t of the US is too cowardly to call it that. It’s so bizarre to hear someone saying that an entire population of a least a billion people in the world are ‘our enemy’
I just took a diversion to look a bit online at some of the stuff he was asserting: this sort of ‘conspiracy’ first of Muslims to ‘kill us all’, then of Western wussy ‘appeasement’.
It was again one of those very uncomfortable situations where the assertions come fast and furious, based on some assumptions about shared assumptions, and seem to have an internal logic. All this frightening picture of beleaguered westerners and the Muslim hordes waiting to despoil us. From what he was saying, ALL Islam is equivalent to radical fundamentalist nihilistic Islam, and everyone who is Islamic believes literally in the Koran which says to ‘kill infidels’. He reads a lot, but it appears his reading doesn’t include the Koran, or any of the books about the faith—except the ‘they’re trying to kill us’ genre. Not that I’m that knowledgeable about that either—I haven’t read the Koran,
It’s one of these difficulties caused by the ‘ambiguities of the facts’ that “Happiness” talks about. The optical illusion of a cube that can appear to have one orientation, or another. He’s firmly in a world-view that has the ‘facts’ lined up to support it; that view tends to suppress and minimize facts that might alter it’s appearance: like Lou looking at the Batman emblem and seeing teeth. Once I was able to see that view, it took a moment to be able to shift back to see the bat profile. That’s the trouble of trying to take on some of this stuff that he was saying, and people like O’Reilly say, and my dad says.
Anyway, if his world view is true, the ‘logical’ extension of it is that we kill every single Muslim in the world. How’s that for an absurdity.
So it was the awkward position of listening to him say some really weird things that have an internal logic, and the underlying assumptions going by so quick that it was like some sort of traveling medicine show. So I only looked at him silently, without expressing anything at all That was uncomfortable enough. Gary had escaped downstairs to the boys, so I was alone squirming and trying to figure out how to just leave. Ick. I hate to think he thought I was in agreement about that stuff.
Later
Father’s day breakfast, which actually happened kind of haphazardly. I hadn’t really planned on fixing anything because I’d forgotten the significance of the day. So I made a nice breakfast. Gary was strange, though. Just sort of uncommunicative, obstructive in that subtle way by being resistant to small inconsequential requests. Said he was going to go take a shower. I said breakfast was almost ready. He said to ‘start without him’ if the food was ready before he came up. I said, “You want us to start the Father’s Day breakfast without you?” to his credit he did come back upstairs before breakfast was ready. I don’t know what he might have done had it not taken as long as it had to make the breakfast.
He was snippy about plates, which one he gave me when I asked. When I stood with the food on a serving utensil and asked for plates (always a source of some weird friction: he insists on putting the plates on the table, and then has to gather them up to give to me so I can serve.) So he gathered up the plates while I was standing there with the food on the server ready to put on the plate and he walked past me without giving me a plate and then did some other things with them that delayed his giving it to me. Then when he did he gave me a bowl. I asked him to give me the plate underneath and he challenged me on it. Finally I stepped over and got the plate myself. These are the kinds of weird things that he did, little things but still just sort of striking a negative feeling note. It’s as if I’ve insulted him for asking him to give me a plate when I’ve got food on a server. And he was right there. All he had to do was give me one while he was still at the table and before he’d gathered the others. These are the things that I’ve found hard to name, yet a few of these happening within a few hours really sets an unpleasant tone. Things like me telling him to come sit down as we were all sitting to eat and him saying, “I can’t. The bacon’s not done.” He’d given everyone else bacon, so I told him to let it cook, he could have mine if he had to have it right away. These are the things I’m talking about when I say he’s being obstructionist—just little things that make the passage from one moment to the next difficult. It’s nice to be able to articulate it this clearly—usually I just know that I’m all at once feeling sort of bummed, or frustrated, or angry, and it’s happened very quickly. And this was combined with the less than positive effects of the way Gary wouldn’t really respond to his father and would leave for extended periods. {So curious about Lou. He told me over the course of the last few days about friends he has. Many that he’s known since childhood and then lots of others he acquired living in Seattle. He talked about giving them trees, berry vines, fruit trees. I wonder what he’s like when he’s with these people. Does he have a level of ease and comfort that he doesn’t have with us? Does he feel at home with them and not with us? When he talks about things, dinners and stuff with these people I get that feeling that he has real ease and comfort. I can’t imagine that he would describe visits that have the feel of this one the way that he describes these times with his friends.}
Anyway, I’m grateful because Gary took the kids and Riser over to the school to play a bit, and did it at a time when I could finish up cooking for dinner tonight (with Darlene) and come have some of this prized time.
I feel better with part of the dread for the weekend I was feeling going away and the other part will be going away soon. Then there’s just Connor’s birthday party to get through.
I’ve still had a hangover from the unpleasant conversation with Kayla. I suppose there’s a ‘poor me’ element to it. The basic physiological feeling in my body is a weight over and behind my heart, a heaviness that makes my shoulders trend toward slumping, sort of my body curling in around this sensation. Just a continuous pulling downward. So that’s the basic sensation, and when I’m not thinking about it I still feel it and then drift into a sort of mournful state. Experience the feeling in a suffering way. I suppose another way of saying it is the reminder of deep note, a core of seriousness in the way I respond and interact with others. (“deep note” brings to me a flash of my dream from last night. I don’t remember much of it but it seems I might be at Kayla and Paul’s in it. Some flash of being in front of a window, in a house that’s not mine, and supposed to be somewhere. It seems it might be their house and it seems I see Paul at the window that’s at the corner of the kitchen.)
So, the physical sensation becomes a kind of mournfulness, and then I think it may accrete other sorrow sensations…just its presence seems to attract sorrowful emotions to it and stick to it, making a bigger target that other sorrow emotions might be attracted to, with subsequent overlays of emotional experience. So perhaps, all these years what I’ve needed to do is not try to ignore the fundamental feeling because I don’t want to be ‘fanning the flames’, but instead to stay very close to the emotion, notice how it changes in my body, and in it’s manifestation as a feeling. Respect it, I guess. The underlying event needs respect.
So what happened with Kayla was a severe blow to my emotional body, in the same way a twisted ankle might be a severe blow to my ligaments and muscles. There’s a trauma reaction, which is legitimate and requires respect, in both the physical and emotional bodies. And the effects can linger a while and that’s legitimate. I don’t know that I’ve ever considered the emotional body in the equivalency to the {dn) physical body. That response to trauma may be remarkably the same.
So, yes, there is cause to pause and understand I’m not quite up to speed yet as a consequence of that sort of transaction. It was hurtful, and meant to be, though it may have been indulging her anger in the heat of the moment rather than coldly premeditated kind of hurting. It seems that she’d rehearsed in her mind the things she wanted to say.
The way she spoke to me requires a set of assumptions of conditions {dn} {dn} that weren’t the case. For me to say anything about the discrepancy between what Jack tells her and what the teachers/principal are saying (unless they’re telling me one thing and her another, which I suppose is possible but doesn’t seem likely) is reasonable. I’m sure she would be as interested in that fact if it were Jack who was being accused. The fact is that the school has not indicated in any way that they think Scott is an aggressive-behavior problem, and also that they’ve seen nothing to make them think he is hurting Jack. That’s significant. The situation would be a whole different ballgame if I’d been getting calls from teachers all along, or even recently; if I were seeing a pattern of aggressive physical behavior, or a type of deviousness in doing things and deliberately concealing them…if other parents were contacting me about stuff with their kids…if those conditions existed, it would change my stance toward it dramatically, and appropriately. But it doesn’t make sense to me to get draconian with my kid when there is nothing else corroborating what a six year old child is saying. Under these circumstances I think the appropriate action to take is to heighten my awareness, as I’ve done, not leave the boys alone together, and gather more information. It is very possible that Scott is doing what Jack says he’s doing, but there is evidence that is not consistent with that. And again I’m sure if it were Kayla’s son being accused that she would also be cautious if the only evidence is a 6 year old’s when it’s unlikely the kind of aggression he describes would be unwitnessed by people who are on heightened alert in watching these kids. And if her accused child had no prior history throughout the year and no other warning signs that had been noticed before (it seems unlikely that the behaviors that would underlie the aggression would be present only in isolation with Jacob and in no other context.)
Another fact: Scott and Jack are observed to have a reciprocal physical relationship at school. They are also observed to really enjoy each others’ company, but that sometimes it brings out something in them that isn’t necessarily good.
Another fact: Both boys have been observed to be aggressive with another boy, Jacob. And Jacob does not retaliate. Kayla seems to be forgetting this; we were told this in that meeting that she and Paul called.
Another thing I notice is that Kayla is potentially in a glass house. She is behaving as if it’s impossible for her children to ever be in a position of being accused of something. Perhaps they never will. Still, her certainty that that will never happen underlies the righteous tone she’s taken.
Anyway, I don’t really know what she wants from me. I can understand the mother bear that just wants this stopped. She seems to hold me personally responsible, though, as if I were at the school and not stopping Scott from hurting Jack. As if whatever Jack’s telling her is directly my fault.
So I can see that she has no basis for telling me that I’m ‘in denial’ about Scott. For one thing, I didn’t make any defense of Scott as if he couldn’t have done it or that hitting behavior is acceptable: I only tried to say that it’s important information that the school is giving. And I have to consider that too. I don’t know where she got ‘denial’ but it was a really awful thing to say, and said in the heat of anger. I think she was assuming that I was angry with her, and that somehow I was aggressive toward her. Because that was the context that our talk seemed to be in, that we were having a fight and that I was a full participant in that fight.
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