Reality Chick

Cut Out of Each Other's Lives

 

Cut out of each other’s lives:  friendship was a casualty of illness, money problems, and divorce.

 A Short Story in Three Parts. Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog: www.ritawatson.com

Julie grew more angry and distressed at the strain of the mortgage, taxes, and unanticipated household repairs.

I dropped hints: “You could rent out your house and get a nice one bedroom and pocket the change,” I said. “You could refinance. You could use a roommate service and screen candidates.  You could place an ad.”

 Julie vetoed all suggestions.  She was not going to move, and she was not going to get someone in off the street. Candidates referred through friends proved unacceptable: “I don’t want someone else’s – stuff – all over my house,” she spat.        

Every time I talked to Julie things were worse. She descended into panicked thinking.  Instead of paying $75 to have someone look at her broken dryer, she hauled wet clothes to a Laundromat for months. Why didn’t she get her new boyfriend (a handyman) to look at the malfunctioning appliance?  She didn’t want to be “dependent.” My husband invited her to my 40th birthday luncheon. I should have told him not to, because it was held at a gaudy, overpriced restaurant, attended by prosperous people whose ostentatious materialism, I knew, she would loathe.

My best Wall Street-era girlfriend boasted of having just bought two mink coats. Noting the acid downward curve of Julie’s mouth, I thought, I ought to have told her not to come.  She hated these people, and she was starting to hate me, with my marital compromises, stay-at-home life, my new blond highlights.  About six months after Julie sent Dave away, she began to talk about her neighbor’s husband. “Don’t waste your time,” I told her, “flirting with married men.” This wasn’t what I expected when I handed her a check to help speed up her divorce.

More than half a year passed without a dollar repaid. My husband and I had money stresses of our own by then, and I had to come out and ask for my loan back. Julie had just spent a weekend with millionaire friends.  As I’d been talking about our own unexpectedly huge tax bill, I assumed she’d got the hint and arranged her visit to relieve me. I was wrong.  Julie was livid.

“Look,” I said in my defense. “You’ve had a boyfriend for six months. Why can’t you ask him for a loan, or to move in and help with the bills?”

Julie hung up on me, furious.  Within a month, I got a check for the full amount of my loan in the mail. We had no contact for a year. I finally called and learned that her handyman boyfriend was long gone, and her ex-neighbor’s husband was living with her, and that he, too was divorcing.

Sounding upbeat, but hardened, Julie dismissed my good wishes for her new relationship; she had no interest in marrying this man. He paid his share and did things around the house. His ex was awful, took the kids back to Maine.  She would make use of him till the expiration date ran out.

Hanging up, I thought back to Julie’s wedding — the white dress, the lilies, the dark cathedral, the hopeful, holy words, the peacock bursting into full plume. I thought of the dance performance the night she announced her divorce.

I suppose I often see myself in marriage, indeed, in any relationship, as the Minotaur – stumbling along, half an awkward hybrid body, struggling to reconcile the ugly with the sublime. I easily forgave Julie her bad temper and outbursts at the time of her divorce, but could not forgive the home wrecking, nor could she forgive my judging her dark side.

Naively, I’d thought our friendship would outlast our marriages; I thought it would flourish forever. But like the peacock’s fan, its glory was short-lived. I thought of her declaration: “All relationships have expiration dates.”

Ours, apparently, had run out.  ~~~

 

Chronic Illness strained my marriage almost to the breaking point. I chose to stay; Julie took a different path when she and Steve hit the rocks.

Expiration Dates: A Short Story of Friendship and Money in Three Parts.

Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog. www.ritawatson.com

 “You know,” I confessed over our Cobb salads, “when I was cleaning out my closet, I thought of throwing out the dress I wore to your wedding.”  It was a cheap, pale green catalogue dress from my days as a freelancer, when I watched every penny while saving the down-payment that finally liberated us from our suffocating New York apartment. “That was the only time I wore it,” I said. “I was only holding onto it for sentimental reasons. I guess it’s O.K. to throw it out now.”  She agreed.

There was another reason I wanted to toss faded green dress — it signified bad times and I was ready to embrace a new future.

I was enviably thin in those pictures at Julie’s wedding. I smiled, but my eyes belied deep distress.  If anyone had asked me then if I thought my marriage would make it, I couldn’t have answered. 

At the time Julie married, I had just found my husband out in a betrayal. He’d run up debts that nearly canceled out all the money I’d been scrupulously saving and investing for house, baby, and our future.  His betrayal of trust wiped out years of dreams.

Somehow, putting that pale green dress in the bag for Good Will, gave me a new sense of purpose. I wanted to believe that I could put an end to the hurt that I experienced during those four years between Julie’s wedding and her divorce dinner. 

I watched her eyes and wondered if people would see pain in my own if I chose to end my marriage rather than stick it out?   My husband and I managed to get out of debt and heal the emotional wounds, but overwhelmed by the strain of working full time while battling my illness, I lost my health and any hopes for a normal life.   

Perhaps learning from my example, Julie chose another route, refusing to take a financial hit for a man. Since she and Dave had moved in together six years before, she’d switched jobs several times, doubling her salary to afford the modest home they’d purchased in their third year of marriage. 

Dave, on the other hand, was in the same job, earning the same money, so they could barely afford their new mortgage payments. Despite her constant encouragements, which degenerated into nagfests, Dave did not jump-start his career, see a therapist, get tested for a range of physical maladies, lift a finger around the house bought with only Julie’s money, learn to balance the checkbook, shop or cook, or get a car so Julie wouldn’t have to drive him everywhere, as if he were the teenage son she never had.

Julie tired of screaming. As she explained over our salads, she was basically a happy, peaceful, loving person. Under the current circumstances, she could no longer act kindly towards her husband. “I just see myself as an embittered old hag at 50. I want to get out while I’m still young enough to meet someone else.” 

But I was worried about how she would manage. Under my fiscal guidelines, she and Dave could barely afford to run a house together. She claimed she could do it on her own, for at least a month or so. Then she’d get a roommate. 

Two weeks after our divorce dinner, Dave was still in the house. He couldn’t find a place he could afford. Julie dropped hints; I offered a loan to hasten his departure. I’d lent her money before, for her down payment, and she’d paid it back in full and in a timely fashion.     

“All relationships have expiration dates,” she announced philosophically at our next lunch.

“You’re getting a roommate soon, right?” I said, handing her the check.

But month after month went by, and no roommate, and no loan repayment. I knew she needed time on her own, without the additional stress of sharing her home with a stranger. But I couldn’t help noticing she had money for new clothes to cheer herself up, for entertaining her young co-workers from the city, for buying wedding gifts for people she hardly knew.

(End of Part II)

  

A Short Story of Money and Friendship in Three Parts

Featured in Rita Watson’s nationally syndicated Relationships blog: www.ritawatson.com.

When my best friend Julie told me she was splitting with her husband, it didn’t come as a complete surprise.  She’d sounded uncharacteristically tense when we talked on the phone over the past few months. We hadn’t had an in-person heart to heart since the winter before, when on her 41st birthday, she talked in desperate tones about facing the future with her husband, Dave. 

Since then she had stopped complaining about her husband, hardly mentioned him at all. Our telephone conversations skittered over the surface of things – updates of her hectic job and crowded commuting days, contrasting with self-deprecating anecdotes drawn from my less eventful life – which went from a corporate whirlwind to a first-time suburban housewife – thanks to a relapse of a chronic illness about which I am often in denial. Nonetheless, courtesy of my company’s short-term disability insurance, I felt a mixture of childlike glee and adult guilt at my first laid back summer in decades.

With the anticipation of a child going on a favorite play date, I awaited seeing Julie in person for the first time in months.  When I flung open the door to embrace her, I standing before me was a woman with a pinched, tormented face.  Her emaciated frame said it all before she delivered her news. It was painful to see her lovely, happy-go-lucky self suppressed; I was glad she was exiting a torturous situation.

She told me of her plans to divorce just before we sat down to watch a dance recital held in the Riverside Cathedral, whose majestic grey stone silhouette dominates the western shore of the upper west side of Manhattan. Four springs before, Julie and Dave were married just a few blocks east, in another great Cathedral, on a small budget but in great peripheral splendor, in one of the chapels of St. John the Divine. 

Four years before, I had shopped with Julie at Laura Ashley for her wedding dress, observed her arrange the entire event elegantly but cheaply — negotiating with chaplains and cajoling florists and caterers to offer their services as wedding gifts. I’d seen her research, book, and single-handedly pay for the honeymoon.  

The misty weather that day suited a ceremony in the dark cathedral. Outside, the spring foliage was bright green and new, the trees just bursting into flower.  She’d instructed the minister that Children and the Will of God be mentioned during the service. To honor her husband’s Scottish heritage, bagpipers played Amazing Grace at the exit, and the sounds moistened our eyes. As if on cue, one of the peacocks that prance around the rectory burst into plumage: a good omen. 

But four years later, as I look back, I see it was a false omen.

At the reception, as dry ice clouded the stage, eastern flutes piped over the soundtrack, and the dance performance began. The dance’s theme centered on the ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur — the half-human, half-bull god who, the program notes explained, “represents the collective dark roots of humanity that have been denied, repressed and locked away.” 

It was a bit too obvious an analogy to the realities of marriage Julie and I both knew too well — realities white-washed by images of happily ever after, Baby Gap and Range Rovers. We both knew what it was like to feel, within the framework of marriage, like the Minotaur, his dual nature a shame to be hidden by the ruling gods.

Julie and I didn’t have to talk much about the problems that killed her marriage, or the ones mine barely survived. We’d dissected them endlessly over the course of our eight year friendship, analyzing the challenge of asserting our feminist selves within the framework of marriage, deconstructing each power struggle in detail, all the while looking forward to the happy resolution when career, husband, home and child fell into place.

After the performance I drove us up to the suburbs where we now lived, and bought my friend dinner. The end of a marriage called for a solemn observance of its own. (End of Part One)

Is that it works.

Here are some remedies I’ve tried:

• Multi-dimensional Lifestyle Counseling
• Reiki Healing
• Infra-red sauna
• Brain Gym
• Acupuncture
• Chiropractor 
• Shamanistic Soul Retrieval
• Journey to Your Sexual Soul
• Cognitive Therapy
• Psychotherapy
• Yoga 
• Meditation
• Cranialsacral Therapy
• Massage
• Kinesiology
• Dream Analysis
• Graded Exercise
• Homeopathic Medicine
• Naturopath
• Pilates
• Psychoneurological Retraining
• The Landmark Seminar (aka, EST)
• Super Blue-Green Algae
• The Maker’s Diet.
•  Supplements: Greens, Fish oils, shitake mushrooms, NADH, Co-Q10, Goji juice, Chines herbs, Ancient Aryuvedic Medicine
• Elimination diets and nutrition regimes: Super Green, Macrobiotic, no red meat, carbs, gluten, dairy, the Anti-inflammatory Diet. 
• Pharmaceuticals: anti-depressants, sedatives, anti-virals, amphetamines.
• Programs: Dr. Jeffrey Teitlebaum’s From Fatigued to Fantastic, Dr. Bernie Seigel, anything by, at least a dozen books with a variation on the title, I Cured Myself of CFS and You Can, Too! The Highly Sensitive Person, by Dr. Elaine Aaron. Dr. Micheal Cheikin’s Nine-Step Pathway to Healing.

         What’s closest to a push-button cure? Traditional medicine, megavitamin and mineral IV drip with Dr. L in New York. Avoiding stressful people, situations. Engagement in productive and pleasurable activity. Moderate exercise. High protein diet. Warm weather, sunshine, laughter.  

      Or will you have to sleep eleven hours a night, meditate and self-monitor for an hour each morning, eat stir-fried broccoli three times a day, chant aloud affirmations at regular intervals in the relative imprivacy of your cube? Can you do it driving a truck, working in an emergency room, flying a helicopter, in a trading pit?

        “Well” to me means working at full speed.  Getting by on six or seven hours sleep a night, rather than  nine to eleven. 

        Earning a good living again — that’s my goal. And I’m calling all Snake Oil for help!

I have Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. Please hold the applause.

In the summer of 1991, an interloper fooled the bouncers guarding my otherwise -functional immune system, ducked under the velvet ropes and broke into my DNA. The miscreant might have been Lyme, Epstein-Barr, Herpes VI, or any combination of those viruses, in cahoots with some as-yet-unidentified evil-doer. The vandals left me with drastically reduced mental and physical functioning, a state eventually diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome. I’m a different person than the exuberant young New Yorker I was before, the person with who could work out twenty hours a week on top of a demanding job, run around town with my husband and friends and still spend a couple of hours at night writing short stories.

Having CFIDS means that over the years I’ve had to quit or cut down on most of these activities. It also means I’ve grown used to being labeled a hypochondriac, mentally ill, an alcoholic, and a drug addict.

So what’s it like? Imagine looking at this page and not being able to read it, to see only bugs jumping around. Or peering into the kitchen cabinet and not recognizing the box of Cheerios —you see the yellow box, but you don’t know what it’s for. Or driving a familiar route and suddenly not knowing where you are or how to use the instruments on the dashboard panel.

But it’s not always this bad, not every day. When people think “disabled” they think of someone flat-out in bed, confined to a wheelchair.

Lots of people with this thing spend a good part of their day on the couch. I had to, when I was first sent home from work. I don’t now. After ten years, I know what to eat and not to eat, how to enforce “down time,” that brain work is a morning-only thing, and sometimes must be banned all day. So no reading, writing, better keep away from the check book or there’ll be hell to pay later, be really careful driving — don’t want that premium going up again! Don’t go into any strange stores, it can only end in tears.

How do we treat it? With traditional medicine. And lots of Snake Oil.

Elaine and Austine Tracey in the 1960s

Stalking Irish Madness has been named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Slate magazine: http://www.slate.com/id/2206635/pagenum/all/

Years ago when we lived in New York city, my husband and I spent four or five hours every Sunday night delivering sandwiches to homeless men. The vast majority were Viet Nam War vets, out of work and homes because mentally ill. Most were clean, quiet, polite, grateful. A few – like the 6’3” drag queen up in Times Square – were angry, swinging at the air, arguing with unseen enemies.

“Schizophrenia,” we said to each other in whispers, gingerly extending a brown bag pre-packed with chicken salad sandwich, yogurt and an apple, which the drag queen snatched before stalking off in high heels, muttering.

Recently we travelled up to Brookline Mass, where our friend Pat Tracey gave a reading to promote his book, Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of my Family’s Schizophrenia. All four of his sisters — including the two affected by with the mental illness, were there.

I was struck by how normal they seemed. When one has a chronic condition, whether physical, mental, or a combination of both, it’s easy to fall into black and white thinking – the “normals” and the afflicted.

Eighty percent of chronic illnesses are invisible, and you’d be hard put to sort out at first glance which two of the four Tracey sisters were afflicted. Michelle, who has bi-polar schizo-affective disorder,  is as effusive and articulate as her twin Seanna, who is “normal.” Austine, once catatonic, merely appeared shy and sweet. There were no verbal histrionics, no talking to invisible people, no bursts of anger.

One in a hundred people suffer from the chronic illness schizophrenia. That’s five million people in America alone. So why is this genetic illness so stigamatized?

Staking Irish Madness has been named one of 2008’s Best Books by Slate magazine: http://www.slate.com/id/2206635/pagenum/all/

Searching for the Roots of His Family’s Schizophrenia

             A warm spring day, April 1979, broadcast journalism class at the University of Rhode Island.  Dr. Snodgrass, our instructor mutters, “Pat Tracey, not here again. That’s no surprise,” in his bizzarrely deep, newscasterly voice.  The professor was normally not sarcastic, but on the day our projects were due, he may have felt a small amount of disdain his right.

But it is characteristic of life that the one time Dr. Snodgrass took a liberty, it was unwarranted.

“His mother died,” piped a hippy girl. “A stroke.” Everyone in class, but especially the girls, emitted sounds of distressed sympathy. It seems everyone knew Pat but me.        

            It wasn’t until reading Pat’s book, Stalking Irish Madness: Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia, nearly 30 years later, that I learned his mother’s stroke was no random event. 

       His memoir, published by Bantam August 26, proves that, in the author’s words, “Real tragedy may be the best training ground for a memoirist.  Madness is a universal concern. It may be the deepest fear for all of us, because more than anything else we are our minds. We are a family that has experienced in a first hand way what few feel free to speak of.”

          Stalking Irish Madness has been picked by the association of independent book shop owners for their Indie Next List of Great Reads From Booksellers You Trust.

             So how are we feeling today? Mad – not just at the obvious – a free market economy and political majority that professes to hate Big Government, except when, like a drug-addict prodigal son, it needs cash for its next fix. Then he riffles through Dad’s wallet to fund another Middle East plunder, another Wall Street run up. And the well behaved siblings, those of us who did our homework, tried to play by the rules – we have to do without, can only hope to benefit through some vague future trickle-down, once this crisis is over. 

           But I’m also mad at us – the investing public, for aiding and abetting this mess.  Because we all own a part of it. We don’t complain in those quarters or years when our portfolios are going up 20%.  We don’t ask where those gains are coming from. We are willing accomplices, when we know every minutae of the Chicago Cubs or the Red Sox, but not the difference between a savings account and a mutual fund. When we don’t ask our broker or employer’s retirement plan manager – So tell me about this Hedge Fund thing, does this mutual fund invest in them? Does it own any securities tied to those lousy sub-prime mortgages?  

We can only vote for a president once every four years, but as investing consumers, we can ask questions every day, we can fill out those proxy forms we get in the mail, we can make a toll-free call and we can show up at shareholders meetings.

The willful ignorance of the average American investor frustrates me, because when I worked in the financial sector, I toiled so, so hard to follow the rules and make it clear to potential investors the risks they were in for.  I wore my eyes out reading the financial press, then boiling it down and making it easy for people to understand, and wherever I worked, we had to follow very stringent compliance rules, so we were never promising anyone anything.

          After my first Dummies piece last week I got more than a few letters from readers asking me how investments work.  What? You mean my 401K isn’t insured by the government? Not even my money market account? “I don’t have any money in the market, so I don’t really care.”  Oh yes you do, or should. Everyone has a stake in this crisis. If you have a dime in a savings bank, a car loan, a job in the consumer products sector, an elder or disabled person in your family involved in the Social Security system. We’re all one big intertwined dysfunctional family – that’s one thing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson got right, and it’s too late to do nothing. 

Big business has always looked to government as bailer-out, Big Daddy of last resort.  And if Big Daddy bails out Wall Street, you can bet someone else is going to get the short-end of the Government stick – the well-behaved siblings who paid their bills and mortgages, the most vulnerable and helpless. Here in Rhode Island, the state government is already balancing its budget by sending seniors home from Medicaid-funded nursing homes and cutting medical coverage for poor kids. 

            I applaud Congress and the American people for waking up and smelling the coffee, saying Not So Fast this time. We were scared into a costly Big Government-funded war with threats of Weapons of Mass Destruction.  President Bush looks like the Boy Who Cried Wolf now. Problem is, there really is a wolf at the door this time. At the beginning of last week, when Big Daddy Government refused to bail out Lehman Brothers, it froze up money flows in European Markets, and that froze up money flows here. So Big Daddy reversed course.

           Whoever voted for President Bush and free market evangelism owns the greater responsibility for this melt-down.  Mr. McCain — who, let us not foget, owns hundreds of millions of dollars in Wall Street securities — hates regulation but denounced Wall Street greed. 

        Congress is trying to enforce a policy of Tough Love on its prodigal son. But the rest of us siblings, whose needs are being brushed aside are going to have to start speaking up for ourselves. Are we going to start asking questions, not just of our politicians, but of the financial industry we pay to handle our money? Or are we just going to turn our attention to the Red Sox after the worst of this crisis is over?

***This post was an Editor’s Pick on Open Salon, read the conversation

at: http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=20088

“So how are you today?”  my neighbor Mel asks.

“To tell you the truth,” I reply. “Pretty freaked-out about this AIG thing.”

“Oh, don’t worry! It’s all covered! You’re completely protected!”

Mel then proceeded to relate a long series of misconceptions – starting with the idea that all of our retirement money was insured by the U.S. government, and that AIG was part of American Funds, where she had all her dough. ”Safe as houses, all taken care of!” 

I started to tell her that I used to work for AIG, that it had nothing to do with American Funds, that it was a whole different kettle of fish from Merrill, or Lehman, or WaMu, which were or will all be bought or allowed to fail. Then I stopped.

If world markets failed, and I knew they would if AIG went belly-up, she’d find out soon enough. And I didn’t have the heart to tell Mel that the value of her mutual funds was not guaranteed by the U.S. government or anyone else, that the whole pot of gold she’d stowed away for 30 years could liquidate overnight, thanks to one small division of the giant insurer AIG going under.

This was 911 week on Wall Street, and I haven’t felt so bad about the place since 9/11/2001. I’ve worked for most of the key parties concerned in this past week’s blood bath. AIG, the financial giant with a trillion dollars in assets, was my introduction to Wall Street in 1986. I worked there a scant 18 months, but the experience was formative. See War Zone, on my site: http://www.christinagombar.com/doc.php?doc=war-zone&p=1

I left AIG of my own accord, just after the crash of ’87, to work for brokerage firm E.F. Hutton. On on my very first day, it put itself on the auction block. For a few weeks my paycheck was stamped by the investment bank Shearson Lehman – since split off into separate entities, one of which went bankrupt this week.  At the end of that six week takeover, I landed at S&P, the ratings agency that failed for years to downgrade AIG and many other financial entities to accurately reflect their perilous balance sheets. Failed, along with two or three other agencies, to warn in a timely fashion, company management and the investing public that the companies needed to clean up their acts or they’d blow up.   

          At 9:15 last night, the Federal Reserve stepped in and basically bought AIG, to keep it from going bankrupt and bringing global markets — even those burgeoning Asian ones — down with it. It kind of had no choice, once the situation was explained to them. For a quick and clear summary of what happened, and what might happen, read Floyd Norris’s blog in the NY Times :

http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/16/socialism-21st-century-style/

Later this week I’ll explain how Credit Ratings are the opposite of bra sizes, how the financial markets are like a strip club, and how the relationship between the federal government and the financial world is like one of those families where everyone winds up in a 12-step program.

“Is Sarah Palin Exploiting Her Son’s Disability?”

A few nay-sayers in the bunch accused Blitch — who is quadraplegic — of exploiting her own situation. The writer deftly clarified her position in a response:

“Frankly, most Americans simply don’t understand how near-impossible it is for people with disabilities to stand on their own two feet (if you’ll pardon the expression). There is absolutely no reason for me, an educated, intelligent, capable young woman to be sitting at home taking disability (a whopping $600/month). I *want* to be working, paying taxes, contributing to society. I want my parents to be able to retire one day. And in pretty much every other developed nation, that’s completely reasonable. People need to know that the system their tax dollars are supporting is actually keeping people like myself *out* of the workforce, because there’s no middle ground, no guarantee of health insurance. In this country, either you have a disability and can’t work, or do work and are magically healed. People need to know these things, and they need to know that there is a candidate and party committed to making specific, necessary changes to fix the problem.”

 She lauds the Obama campaign for having a specific plan for people with disabilities; letter writers responded by reporting that Obama’s home-state, Illinois, has the worst policies for disabled children in the country.

Thanks to Becky for bringing this under-exploited  issue to media attention, both presidential candidates should be listening.  This young woman is a voice crying out in the wilderness, an amazing thinker and writer.  I wish Salon should pluck her from the electronic slushpile, give her a salary on their regular staff, and get her off of SSI.  She speaks for a largely voiceless population, and to a general population that would like to help the disabled become independent, but doesn’t know how.

http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=16273