possibilities and questions.

This Thursday I took a bus to the Union Station, took a train to Santa Barbara, took a shuttle to downtown, took a bus to Goleta, and walked half a mile, all to attend a brief presentation and Q&A session for applicants to the psych program I'm looking at in Colorado. I turned out to be the only attendee, but the 5 1/2 hour travel time was worth it, because being able to speak one-on-one with a graduate of the program I'm looking at was extremely rewarding.

The program is a synthesis between wilderness educator training and counseling psychology. You graduate ready to sit for licensure as a counselor, but also prepared with kayak, rope climbing, horseback, wilderness first aid, and orienteering skills for getting folks out into the wilderness where nature can do its healing magic. In addition, (as if this weren't enough!) the program is run through a Buddhist university, so there is emphasis on self-reflection, self-cultivation, and meditation in order to keep oneself centered as one goes about trying to help others. Right? This is my PLACE!!

However. As I have tried to justify my application to this 3-year masters degree program, I have run into a few seemingly insurmountable roadblocks.

1) Finances. Oh, it is expensive. And oh, I am under no illusions that I am going to easily find well-paid work in this extremely narrow and obscure field.

2) Children. How exactly am I going to haul them off to Colorado without a lengthy and world-rending custody battle? And what are they going to be doing when I am on my long solo expeditions in the second year of the program?

3) Self-doubt. Can I be a single mom and a graduate student simultaneously? Will I be able to pass the licensure exam? Will I be able to negotiate promoting myself and pulling a business together on my own?

But the conversation with this woman--Krista---allayed many of these fears. Now I know that she is an admissions representative, so there's that whole I'll-say-whatever-it-takes-to-get-you-in-our-clutches dynamic, but what was interesting about this particular encounter is that she also, as a graduate of a Buddhist program, meditates. And reflects before speaking. And is careful to find the most compassionate response. Her good intentions were palpable. And here is what she told me:

1) there is a reliable and frequent bus system to campus from just about anywhere. Very few students own a car.

2) students often rent houses together. She has known of several occasions where students of the wilderness program trade off a year of childcare: for instance, in my first year I could watch someone's children while she does the intensive trips on the second year, and she would watch mine in return the following year.

3) there is a new program by which payback of student loans is prorated by income. So I would only have to pay back what I can legitimately afford until I get my feet on the ground.

4) about 50% of graduate students at this particular university are parents.

That leaves custody...a topic for another time. Altogether I left the session with a buoyant, almost giddy sense of this could happen. This really could happen.

And then my sort-of boyfriend picked me up and we wandered the streets of Santa Barbara together, giggling and eating and listening to mandolin music played by a dreadlocked individual on a skateboard. We watched scores of bike riders, all wearing false mustaches, throng the streets. We drove up the winding mountain roads to his home, where I proceeded to--HALLELUJAH!!!--sleep for TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT.

For the duration of a full day I felt cared for. Someone was trying to help me resolve my difficulties, someone was holding me, someone was driving me home while I slept. How wonderful. I cannot adequately express what an overwhelming relief it is to let go and be cared for. It brings tears to my eyes even now. You forget what it's like.

intelligence test

This weekend brought an unanticipated (and desperately needed) visit from my friend Sarah--everyone should have a friend as devoted, intelligent, and generous as she. (Though if you take a walk with her you do need to bring a broom along to sweep up the bodies of prone men--it's worth it.)

Sarah caught me at a very very low point. I am a tough little animal, it's true, and can handle nearly anything, but lack of sleep is my Achilles' heel. Lately---what with cranky toddlers and maladapted kindergarteners and teeny spaces and midterms---I'm lucky if I get 5 hours. I'm a ten-hours-a-night kind of girl---wish I were kidding---and the upshot of this sleep starvation diet has been a general slow-motion implosion of my entire life. I become the mother who shrieks in the scary voice at 8 am "LEAVE ME ALONE! MAKE YOUR OWN @#$@ BREAKFAST! IF I DON'T GET BACK TO SLEEP WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE." Again--wish I were kidding. I look like a poochy eighty-year-old. I drop/forget/lose things. I get myself into situations where my toddler is standing on the kitchen table peeing on my laptop. True story.

Enter Sarah, haloed by SoCal sunshine on her trusty bike steed. While Anainn (belatedly swaddled in a diaper) threw things around and shrieked in striking imitation of his mother, Sarah sat crosslegged on my red futon and earnestly took in everything I said, asked questions, gave thoughtful responses, and worked out solutions. We wandered over for tea at my new favorite place and she handled Anainn's dish-breaking food-throwing propensities with grace, somehow making me feel throughout that not only was she having fun anyway, but that I was a great mother despite obvious physical evidence to the contrary. All while maintaining that stimulating let's-solve-your-life-problems conversation. Have I mentioned I adore her?

And, here, thanks to Sarah, is my newfound understanding of my life:

I am due for a change. When I am sure of what I want---not what others might want for me--- it behooves me to examine EVERY POSSIBLE METHOD of achieving it. The solution is there somewhere, and it is not necessary for me to compromise myself morally to get what I want (assassination was bandied about for a bit, but ultimately discarded, as a possible tactic).

In a wonderful example of synchronicity, this evening's psych class centered on problem solving methods. I'm going to do a work-up of the particularly intransigent problem I face---the custody thing---using every blessed technique in the textbook.

We also got our midterms back. Before handing them out, the professor asked us what professions we might associate with intelligence; how an archetypal "intelligent" person would look. We generated a picture of a 40-something male Asian astrophysicist in eyeglasses.

Then he wrote the current definition of intelligence on the board. This is amazing. Intelligence, according to the experts in the field, is:

1) skill at absorbing/processing information

2) strong and rapid problem-solving

3) ability to adapt to new or changing environments

Now this looks an awful lot like a skills list for motherhood, by my lights.

And it must be, because his next announcement was that the highest score on the midterm had not been earned by an astrophysicist or even an Asian. It had been earned by a part-time art teacher with two kids.

YIPPEE!!!!

(p.s. I'm awfully low on practical intelligence though. As evidenced by the fact that I drank a huge cup of coffee just before class and now, when I could be SLEEPING or studying for the midterm I have tomorrow, I am busily crowing here.)

critical thinking

I have begun a little ritual: every Friday morning, after I wake and run up the mountain and clean the house and water the garden and generally pull myself together, I hie myself off to the little tea shop a few blocks away and order a pot of their incredible rose-petal tea. Then I SIT STILL for as many hours as I can milk out of that teapot. My personal best is 2 1/2, so far. I bring my psych texts and read; I make flash cards; I watch the movie biz people lunching biz-ily.

That's really it, for me. The rest of the week is spent in a frantic whirlwind: home from class at 11 pm, off to work at 6:30 am, homework and children and cleaning and studying and boiling spaghetti and picking plastic dinosaurs out of tubs of hummus and shards of glass out of the bathwater (don't ask). So those few hours in the tea shop are more than a rest. They are an eddy in the ceaseless flow of the week, the moments when I remember who I am. That sounds pretentious, but I mean it. I am so busy doing things lately, things that must be done again almost immediately---sweeping the floor, washing the dishes, socializing the offspring, that sort of thing---that I entirely forget, for hours at a time, that I even exist.

It's funny what happens when I sit still. I remember that I do exist, and all of a sudden my brain does this funny spastic thing where it tries to remind me of all the things I am, all at once: you love the mountains you speak german you want to live in a cabin by the river and make your own snowshoes out of willow branches you understand soil salinization you write songs you have friends in the Pyrenees you believe in community and permaculture and biking you like tea you gather nettles in the springtime on and on and on until it runs out of breath. Or whatever brains do. I like it, actually. My brain emphasizes the positive, for the most part, and it's nice to have something going on in there besides AAAAAAAAGGGHHHH I'm late! or Ohhhh NO he just threw that thing in that thing after stepping in that thing!! which are, these days, pretty much the default settings.

But sometimes it makes me sad too. Wistful. For most of a half an hour I sat over my teacup this morning contemplating how very much I would love to live in a cabin somewhere. Just that. To have a kitchen looking out at trees. A wilderness to wander in. A woodstove to cook over, pheasants to track, neighbors few and far between but all with that wild look in their eyes, people who know how to skin a deer and rig up a water pump and sew together a wound if they have to.

All this studying of psychology has taught me to examine my thoughts, and that's what I did this morning, following the 5 steps of critical thinking:

1) what am I being asked to believe? That living in a cabin in the wilderness is the only thing that would make me happy.

2) what evidence is there to support this claim? I've lived in cabins before and I've lived in the wilderness before and it makes me feel roaringly alive.

3) are there alternative ways to interpret this evidence? Ummm, yeah.

4) what additional evidence would you need to rule out these alternative explanations? I would need to prove that I'm not happy anywhere else. I would need to prove that living in a cabin would make me roaringly happy NOW, with children, as the person I am now. A person who owns boots of the non-hiking variety.

5) what's the most reasonable conclusion to draw with the evidence you have?

I looked around the tea shop, and at the sunny autumn day outside. I looked down at my boot-clad feet and felt the warmth of the teacup my hands were wrapped around. I thought about how in a few minutes I'd be running to catch the bus to Xir's school to watch his Halloween Parade. I thought about how, before too long, Anainn would be wrapped around me like a little monkey, nestling his fuzzy head on my shoulder.

The most reasonable conclusion: I'm already happy.

And then: AAAAAAGGGHHHH I'm late!!

a query...

So let's say, hypothetically, that I am standing in front of the vending machines at UCLA and one of my classmates approaches me to talk about the quality of vending machine coffee. If he, hypothetically, goes on to say that he's been craving Starbucks and is thinking of going after class if I want to wait,

is he asking me out?

If so, I blew it. Hypothetically.

self-image, post-midterm.

Disclaimer: this might be interesting only to me.

I started out this semester (studying psychology at UCLA to get prerequisites for a master's degree) feeling like the elderly, out of it, unintelligent mom in a sea of bright young things who wouldn't dream of procreating a day before their thirty-fifth birthday or conclusion of their post-graduate research fellowship, one. I have never felt so conspicuous--or aware of my age-- in my life.

But this evening, upon conclusion of my first midterm, I noticed that I was the second person to finish--and the first woman. I'm pretty sure I aced the thing and didn't find it all that complicated. I sprang out of there like a spring chicken.

This tells me two things:

1) My self-image is strongly correlated to my perception of my intelligence. More so than to my prosperity, physical appearance, or age. And this is wonderful news, because although there is very little I can do to change my looks or the years I've logged, intelligence is something I can always build. (Apparently one can build one's finances too. But I remain skeptical. ) (We budding psychologists call that "repression"...)

2) Psychology comes easily to me and I adore the reading, soak up the theories, and feel high after class. Could it be that I'm on the right track?

a weekend of good childhood.

Rain. The scent of woodsmoke; a fire-blackened twig scratching patterns on the ground. Climbing up to the moon, high on the rain-greened hill, and looking down upon a city suddenly beautiful. Round moon, brave boys, laughter. A pitcher of garden zinnias. New-planted peas. Singed pumpkin, candle shadows, pancakes for dinner. Pippi before bed. Pumpkin bread. Long stories, and slippers by the door.

"female trouble"

Hmmm. So I've been up most of the night studying for my midterms in Abnormal Psychology, Psychology 10, and Theories of Personality. By "studying" I mean eating garlic bread, chocolate, and popcorn; making several pots of tea; cleaning the floor on my hands and knees with baby wipes; doing the laundry; signing my son up for violin lessons; ordering art supplies over the internet; planting fall peas in the garden; and washing dishes. So, as you can see, studying is extremely productive for me.

The recent incessant rains have had some interesting consequences. The damp seems to have weakened the plaster of the walls of the 12x12 such that all the screws in the wall are falling out. This led to my bookshelf falling over and spewing its contents all over the floor, bedding, kitchen, you name it. I have not had a free 30 seconds to clear a trail through the carnage since it happened 3 nights ago. My house looks like a bomb hit it. (I mean, more so than usual, and I can't blame it on the kids.) So I've been sleeping in a little ball surrounded by books, pens, rocks, and little bits of houseplant. According to my textbook, this behavior might qualify as "abnormal".

But, according to my textbook, that's to be expected, since I am a "woman", and "women", again according to my textbook, are disproportionately likely to be "abnormal". Yes, we are TWO TIMES MORE LIKELY to experience depression than men and THREE TIMES MORE LIKELY to attempt suicide. Cross-culturally. Also, we have special little syndromes that are ours alone, like PMS, postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis...

Several theories are proposed for why this might be. I find them fascinating. Here goes:

1) Men are not diagnosed with depression as often because they hide it behind aggression, which is more socially acceptable.

2) Frequent changes in hormones might predispose women to maladaptive behavior.

3) women experience more stress than men: we are more likely to live in poverty, more likely to do menial work, likely to face more discrimination, and also there's that whole childbearing and childrearing thing, though they DON'T MENTION THIS.

4) body dissatisfaction, or the constant rumination over appearance, is a stressor that affects women disproportionately; this is a habit that is encouraged rather than dissuaded by societal norms.

5) women are statistically more likely to blame themselves for difficulties and attribute successes to others, whereas men tend to the reverse. Thus women tend to direct their stress responses inward whereas men direct them outward, in aggression.

These are all theories, so of course there are lots of problems and over-generalizations, but the thing that struck me the most was how extraordinarily little control any of them give a woman to change things. Let's see, we can't stop having hormones. We can't stop being the ones that have children and only make 76 cents to the dollar. There's not much we can do about societal expectations and judgments based on appearance. What we CAN do, according to these geniuses, is a) try to be less sad for goodness' sake and b) start blaming others for our problems.

Or we can curl into a ball amongst the books and pottery with our middle fingers firmly in the air and get some sleep. We're going to need it.