The Breakdown Lane

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I’ve been sitting in the breakdown lane this weekend, watching traffic pass me by, (all their cars work!) and wondering why my car, which has been just fine, has suddenly stopped functioning.

We’ve probably all done this at least once, literally speaking. Metaphorically speaking, we’ve all done it many times. We go along in our small world, and as far as we know everything is status quo and just what we expect, and then, suddenly, it isn’t. Things go off the rails and all we can think is WTF?

Sometimes I’m the one who has suddenly gone off the rails. Except, looking back, I realize it wasn’t sudden at all. Sometimes the breakdown was years in the making, but I wasn’t present enough with myself and my feelings to notice the gradual fraying and come up with a plan. Grimly, I hung on, hoping, waiting, hurting myself, arguing with what was, denying my experience, trying harder, drowning in shame, crippled by fear, until I absolutely could not hang on any longer and my last fingernail tore out.

Then I let go, after it was far too late to problem solve or help myself or anyone else involved.

I still regret I have not always had the support or resources to make different choices. I hurt myself, and I hurt others. I take responsibility for my behavior and clean up what I can, but some things just can’t be fixed — and perhaps shouldn’t be in any case.

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I think a lot about these sudden moments where things fall apart, either within us or between us. The breakdown lane is like a time out, an enforced pause. In a moment or two, the whole aspect of the day, the future, and my plans have changed. I realize I’m not in control. All I have is an unpleasant snarl of disappointed expectations, thwarted intentions, frustration, anger and a need to blame someone or something, including myself.

A broken car or piece of equipment is one thing. An interpersonal breakdown is another.

Few things are more painful than feeling unloved, unwanted or rejected by someone we care about. Hell, it’s painful when we feel those things from someone we don’t care about. Imagine being an immigrant in this country right now.

I have felt unloved, unwanted and rejected. I’ve also had loved ones tell me they feel unloved, unwanted or rejected by me. As I know that’s not how I feel about them, I question my certainty that others feel that way about me. If they’re misinterpreting my actions, words and choices, perhaps I’m doing the same thing.

Our feelings are real. The stories we make up about them may not be. In other words, I might feel rejected when the person I’m interacting with has no intention of sending that message. The way I express love and affection may be so different from someone else’s idea of how to express it that it’s lost in translation.

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That doesn’t mean it’s not present.

I focus a great deal on language in this blog. I do that because words matter. They have layers of meaning. It seems to me nearly every interpersonal breakdown can be traced to a misunderstanding over a definition of terms. Getting at the bottom-line meaning of a word is as easy as looking it up:

Friend: “A person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.” (Oxford online dictionary)

Pretty simple, right? We all know what it means to be a friend and have a friend.

Except we don’t. We might agree on that basic definition, but I suspect we each assign a whole world of additional personal meaning to the word friend, and that world contains longings, memories, hopes and fears, expectations, deep needs, beliefs, and old scars and wounds.

I’ve been thinking about that. When I talk about, think about and participate in friendship, what does that mean to me? What is a friend, besides someone I know and with whom I have a bond of mutual affection?

It’s a great question. I wish I could ask everyone I know. I won’t, because for some reason this kind of question seems to make most people uncomfortable, but feel free to volunteer an answer!

At this point in my life, I’m not interested in constructing relationships out of expectations and an attachment to outcomes. I’ve always operated in a framework of both of those in my relationships, and it’s never worked. In the last four years I’ve taken a clear, cold look at my previously unconscious expectations of self and others and the myriad ways in which I’ve sabotaged myself and others with attachment to certain agendas and outcomes.

What I do instead (and a joyous, fascinating, loving process it is) is observe with curiosity and interest as relationships form and change. Viewed from this perspective, it’s like nurturing a child, a garden where we’ve planted seeds, an animal, or a piece of land. Freed from my extremely limited and limiting expectations and agenda, I can watch and appreciate all the unexpected, magnificent ways we are — and life is.

It’s the difference between saying: “This is who I (or the other) must or must not be,” and “Who are you?” or, even better, “I want everything you are and nothing you’re not.” Say that (and mean it) to yourself or someone you love every day and I guarantee your relationships will change for the better.

So, now, what do I mean by a friend?

A friend is someone with whom I can laugh, explore new information and ideas, excavate less-than-useful beliefs and patterns, learn and unlearn. A friend is someone with whom I engage in a contest of generosity. I want to ask questions, pull things out from under the bed and let the cat sniff at them, be wrong, problem solve, consider options. I want to practice boundaries, tolerance, respect and being real. I want to allow and be allowed. I want relationships that make my life bigger. I want to share reading, movies, music, memories, silence, work, nature, my truths. I want someone who says, “make yourself big!” while pursuing that same goal themselves.

(Not coincidentally, this is the kind of friend I strive to be to others.)

When I consider the above paragraph, and imagine each of us could write an equally long but different paragraph, the concept of friend goes rapidly from a simple one-sentence definition to something much more complicated and personal. This wouldn’t be so problematic if we were aware of it, but we’re not. We say friend, knowing exactly what we mean, and never considering the person we’re talking to, who’s also using the word, means something different.

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Then, one day, these two invisible sets of definitions, expectations and desired outcomes collide and we experience hurt, outrage, betrayal, anger, disappointment, rejection, fear, and disconnection.

I admit I have no fix for this ubiquitous problem. Even being aware of how differently we define terms doesn’t save me from ending up sitting in the breakdown lane. It would be good if the problematic words in any given relationship had a tag warning us of problems ahead if we aren’t careful to understand one another from the beginning.

On the other hand, that would take out the part where we sit in the breakdown lane trying to understand what just happened, how and if to fix it, and how our choices led to it. Uncomfortable as it is, I value that opportunity.

Sitting in the breakdown lane with my heartbeat and breath. Feeling my feelings. Curious about what will happen next. Confident that when it’s time to move on I’ll know it and do so. Considering what I might learn in this space. Getting bigger. Getting bigger. Getting bigger.

 

Just Deserts

Sometimes the inside of my own head astonishes me. It’s amazing how much of our internal framework is undetected bullshit that runs our lives. For example, this is a belief I’ve always accepted without ever thinking about it:

I get what I deserve
I deserve what I get

I have it,
therefore I deserve it

I deserve it
because I have it.

You have not got it
therefore you do not deserve it

You do not deserve it
because you have not got it

You have not got it
because you do not deserve it

You do not deserve it
therefore you have not got it.
R.D. Laing, Knots

This piece of nonsense masquerades as a Universal Law, and I believed it!

So, what does it mean to deserve something?

Interestingly, the word “deserve” comes from the Latin word “deservire,” meaning “serve well or zealously” (Oxford online dictionary). Serve as in servant? Serve as in slave?

Serve, as in somebody else has the power to judge the value of our service, regardless of how we evaluate it?

Now, there’s a slippery slope of disempowerment!

The more I mull this over, the clearer it is to me that being judged as deserving or undeserving is a human construct. It’s not real. It collapses when I try to examine it. Do we really believe we get exactly what we deserve? Children are starving because they deserve to? People die of cancer because they deserve it? One percent of the population has most of the financial resource because they deserve it and the rest of us don’t?

No. I don’t believe that.

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My reading of current complex systems science (please see my Resources page) teaches me life is defined by living. Life wants to live, be it a bacterium, a fern, a woodpecker, or a human being. Life is persistent, adaptive, and depends on the passing on of genetic material and energy gradients. Life is solely occupied with meeting its needs for life, and most successful life teams up with other kinds of life in complex systems.

There is no deserve in all that. There is no implicit guarantee of rights or resource. Successful life often leads to population overshoot, at which point the successful species uses up its resource and predators of the overshoot population increase their population to take advantage of the abundant food and energy supply.

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I did nothing to deserve the circumstances of my birth as a white female in the United States. I’m no more or less deserving of life than a mycelium spore. If I die of some kind of drug-resistant organism, my death is nothing more or less than the inevitable consequence of my species being in overshoot.

We humans spend a lot of time fighting with one another, as any overcrowded population will. There’s current buzz about hate, oppression, immigration and white supremacy. My own view is that all those issues are not the root of the matter, but distractions. The real issue is our unconscious and false sense of ourselves as human supremacists, superior to the sacred cycles and processes of life and death. Most of us believe, behave, and act as though our needs are more important than the needs of other human beings, and certainly more important than the needs of all the other countless and magnificent forms of life with whom we inhabit this planet.

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We will discover — we are discovering — we cannot stand alone, however. In fact, most life on the planet can do much better without us than we can do without it.

Life and death are the context in which all our experience is embedded. We’ve only begun to identify some of the laws governing the way they work together. We’re only now realizing how interdependent all forms of life are, even as we actively destroy other species we depend upon for food and water.

As human beings, we have needs. If our needs don’t get met, we die. This is so for every form of life. We either live as part of a sustainable complex system or we die as a species. As individuals, we are born and live because of those who have died before us, and our inevitable death gives life to those who come after us. It’s really very simple. Debating whether we ourselves or any other form of life is deserving or not is an idiotic waste of time and energy.

The concept of deserving is one more piece of mental clutter, along with pleasing others and arguing with what is, I’m ready to let go. For years I’ve hurt myself with it; it’s limited me and been a heavy burden to carry. Without it I feel lighter, freer, and I notice an increased sense of reverence and gratitude for my life and all the life around me. I am not supreme. I’m a child, a student, and one small life among many others, all of which have equal value to my own and much to share and teach, if I can set my human arrogance aside long enough to listen.

As Loren Eisley writes in All the Strange Hours: “Life, life for the purposes of life, and is that then so small?”

Respect

The word “respect” is jumping up and down in my life this week, hand thrust in the air, saying “me, me, me!”

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This post started with more from R. D. Laing’s book, Knots:

A son should respect his father. He should not have to be taught to respect his father. It is something that is natural.

It is the duty of children to respect their parents. And it is the duty of parents to teach their children to respect them, by setting a good example.

Parents who do not set their children a good example don’t deserve respect.

As usual, I have thoughts and questions. ‘Should’ is a word I shun. It implies arguing with what is. Who says a son (or any child) should respect his father? I believe this rule has its roots in the Bible and/or other spiritual traditions. Does that mean it can’t be questioned? (This is a trick question. If you say no, I will immediately start questioning it!)

Is respect ever a given? Do we (must we) “naturally” respect others? Are we born knowing how to respect others? Are we born knowing how to respect ourselves, or do we learn by watching those around us? (For more on parenting and respect, here’s the perspective of parenting expert and author of Connection Parenting, Pam Leo.)

What’s a “good example,” and who gets to define it?

What the heck does respect mean, anyway?

According to Oxford online dictionary, the meaning of respect includes “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicted by their abilities, qualities, or achievements” as well as “due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.”

Aha! Two distinct meanings.

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Across both digital and face-to-face human interaction, I see a troubling pattern of boundary loss and deliberate blurring of terms such as respect. It seems suddenly we are expected to blindly respect, in the sense of deeply admire, everyone, no matter their words or actions. Worse than that, we’re supposed to agree with the ideologies and beliefs of others. Respect and agreement have come to mean the same thing. If we don’t agree with someone’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs, we’re haters and bigots. We have no respect.

Newsflash: Agreement and respect are not the same thing. They are not mutually exclusive, but they have different meanings. They may appear together. They can and do exist independent of one another.

Additionally, disagreement is not hate and is no measure of compassion, which can be fully present with either agreement or disagreement.

I found a perfect explanation of this in the Wiki entry for conflation:

“In an alternate illustrative example, respect is used both in the sense of “recognise a right” and “have high regard for”. We can recognise someone’s right to the opinion the United Nations is secretly controlled by alien lizards on the moon, without holding this idea in high regard. But conflation of these two different concepts leads to the notion that all ideological ideas should be treated with respect, rather than just the right to hold these ideas.”

I can understand the desperate search for some kind of certainty in life, some kind of code-breaking formula to help us make sense of everything from relationships to global change. I also understand many people are so busy trying to survive and cope with their day-to-day lives that discussions, explorations and distinctions of the kind I’m preoccupied with have no meaning. The world is full of people who take the attitude of TLDR (too long; didn’t read). It’s so much easier to attach to a meme or belief system along the lines of they’re for me or against me.

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Unfortunately, reality is a lot more complicated than that and life is not black and white. Nothing is certain. People change. New information appears. We’re frequently trying to unlearn. In spite of how much we want to be right, much of the time we’re wrong. Refusing to take in any new information for fear it will threaten our safe place to stand will not keep us in control or protect us. What it will do is wither our critical thinking skills, our curiosity and our appreciation of others.

I endeavor to treat everyone respectfully, by which I mean I have space for people to believe what they believe. In general, I am successful in this intention. That being said, I view respect similarly to tolerance, as a peace treaty. Nobody likes to be attacked, and I’m no exception to that. I don’t attack others, but I will defend myself. I don’t think we’re all automatically entitled to respect, and I certainly don’t think I am. I’m also perfectly prepared for others to disagree with me on any given subject. That doesn’t mean (to me) we can’t have a respectful conversation about the issue we disagree upon, and it doesn’t mean I excise people from my life who hold different beliefs than I do.

I also recognize there are people in the world who intend to silence all disagreement and demand respect from everyone without giving it. This is cluster B behavior, and it’s about power and control over others. This population in particular seeks to conflate things like respect and agreement, using malicious and often ridiculous labels and jargon, threats, punishment and violence to silence and intimidate others. This behavior is called coercion. Some people say they want respect, but what they’re really after is agreement. Respect alone does not satisfy them.

I was once confronted by an extremely unpleasant woman who demanded to know if I am pro-choice or pro-life. It wasn’t her business, but I had no wish to escalate her drama, so I answered her truthfully and quietly: “Both.”

She immediately became both abusive and threatening, demanding I answer one way or another and telling me I couldn’t be both.

Excuse me? I can and am both. I said above I can understand why people adhere to black-and-white thinking, but I will not have it forced upon me. I don’t agree with such thinking or trust it, and I refuse to employ it. I was willing to respect her right to an either/or ideology, but I pushed back when she tried to force it on me.

Ironically, I find myself to be The Enemy, even among loved ones, because I disagree with some current ideologies, or I refuse to take a polarized stance. As I am one of the least judgmental and most respectful (in the sense of “due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others,”) people I know, this is a bitter twist, and the injustice of it hurts. Reciprocity is nice, if you can get it.

Which brings me to the last aspect of respect I’ve been thinking about, which probably should be first, if I wrote this essay in order of importance.

What about self-respect?

Who teaches us to respect ourselves, or is that innate or “natural?” If it’s taught, do we learn best if the adults around us model self-respect and support us in giving it to ourselves? If it’s innate, can the adults around us damage our self-respect or force us to choose between respecting ourselves and respecting them? If we have little or no self-respect, are we greatly compelled to persuade or coerce others to support our beliefs? What brings us more satisfaction, respecting ourselves or feeling respected by others? Can the respect of others ever replace our self-respect?

As usual, I have more questions than answers, but I can say two things with confidence:

Respect and agreement are not the same thing.

I have no power to make others respect me, but I have complete power over whether I respect myself.

Life’s Debris

Last week’s post was inspired by the work of R.D. Laing in his book, Knots. The first page of this book gave me so much to think about I worked with it for several days before reading all the way to page 3:

“It is our duty to bring up our children to love, honour and obey us.

If they don’t, they must be punished, otherwise we would not be doing our duty.

If they grow up to love, honour and obey us we have been blessed for bringing them up properly.

If they grow up not to love, honour and obey us either we have brought them up properly or we have not: if we have there must be something the matter with them; if we have not there is something the matter with us.”

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In my experience and observation, family ties are the most inescapable and powerful connections in our lives, regardless of our feelings about them. However we view our parents, they’re the only ones we have and nothing can change that. Those of us who have biological children must come to terms with the intimacy of conception, gestation and birth leading inevitably to loss as our children grow up and fly away into places we cannot and should not follow. Each of us must deal with these blood-and-bone connections as best we can; there is no escaping the shadow of one’s parents or the ghosts of one’s children, alive or dead. They are our greatest and most powerful teachers.

When I was a young woman, it was all so simple. I would find a good man to love and be loved by. I would get married and have children. I would love my children and they would love me.

Now that we’ve all finished laughing (or crying), let’s think about duty, just one of the thousands of hidden landmines in parent-child relationships. It’s hidden because we all talk about it without ever agreeing on what it means or questioning its role. Laing was writing in the 70s, so his language is a little outdated. Even so, is it true it’s our duty to bring up our children to love us? Can we coerce love, even from a child? Is it more important to teach them to love us as their parent or to love themselves?

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Do we deserve their love? Have we earned it? Are we entitled to it? Does our love for them obligate them to reciprocate? For that matter, does a child’s love for his or her parent oblige the parent to return that love in kind?

The point I’m trying to make here is these knots we get ourselves tied up in, these eternal loops of bad logic, are so often based on a questionable statement we don’t think to question. Breaking down the statement loosens the knot.

What does it look like, to love, honour and obey? Does it mean keeping secrets? Never asking questions? Being unfailingly compliant? Is a child to have no viewpoint, opinion, need or desire independent of his or her parent? What happens when love is lost in translation? What if what my child or parent calls love is something I call enabling, and refuse to give — out of love?

Punishment. What a great incentive for love! No wonder it works so well. On the other hand, are healthy boundaries punishment? Is refusing to lie for someone punishment? Is telling the hidden or unpalatable truth punishment?

Who gets to define all these terms? Who has the power in any given parent-child dynamic? Is there a desire to share power, or is someone determined to come out on top?

None of this is what really caught my eye on page 3 of Knots, however. What stopped me in my tracks was the endpoint, the either/or conclusion. If our children don’t love, honor and obey us in the manner in which we expect or feel entitled to, either something is wrong with us and the way we raised them, or something is wrong with them.

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I freely admit this is the same either/or conclusion in my own mind regarding both my parents and my children. Either I’m a total failure and fuck-up, or they’re unhinged. I’m like a dog with a smelly old bone. I dig it up, chew on it for a while, cry, rage, hurt, feel confused and regretful, hate myself, rehash old scenes and stories, feel sorry for myself and generally carry on until my mouth is bleeding from bone chips and I’m sick to my stomach, and then I bury the bone until something brings it all up again and I dig it up to gnaw some more.

It’s not just me, either. Every single woman I know does this, either trying to come to terms with her parents or her children. Or both.

I’ve always had a talent for untangling knots. I’m not sure why it is, but I really enjoy picking them apart. Mental knots are even more fun. I think for some this endless bone-chewing provides a kind of payoff, but it doesn’t for me. I hate chasing my tail. There’s no way I’m ever going to come to any kind of conclusion about my parents, my children or myself in relation to them. What I do believe is each one of us has in every moment done the best we could do with the information and resources we had in that moment. As far as I’m concerned, we all get a pass.

The first time I read the above page, I recognized that twisted knot of pseudo logic can be undone with good questions.

What if there’s nothing wrong with our kids and there’s nothing wrong with us or our parenting? What if love, honor and obedience are beside the point and not important? What if punishment doesn’t enter into it because it’s not useful or effective and nobody’s done anything wrong?

In short, what if we’re all just fine, not broken, not failures, not fucked up, not unhinged? What if we were good enough children, good enough parents, and our kids are good enough people, each one of us whole, loved and loving?

What if we just stopped all these contorted and painful mental gymnastics and loved ourselves, our parents and our kids as best we can, or our memories of us and them?

Peace.

Then I picked up the next book in my current stack, and read this, and smiled.

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“Why would I be embittered? It is far too late. A month ago, after a passage of many years, I stood above her grave in a place called Wyuka. We, she and I, were close to being one now, lying like the skeletons of last year’s leaves in a fence corner. And it was all nothing. Nothing, do you understand? All the pain, all the anguish. Nothing. We were, both of us, merely the debris life always leaves in its passing …” Loren Eiseley— All the Strange Hours

 

 

Games

Books

We have books all over this house. The majority of them are neatly alphabetized in what we refer to as the “cat room,” because that’s where the litter box lives. There are also books in our bedroom, in my workspace, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in the room where we eat, and in my partner’s small office, which is crowded and heaped and piled with extremely valuable and meaningful things (a.k.a. junk), liberally coated in dust. Just standing in the doorway makes me feel like tearing my hair out and bursting into tears.

But hey, we all deserve our own space, right? He doesn’t invade my space, and I don’t invade his. The peace treaty of tolerance in action.

Anyway. I digress. A few weeks ago he handed me a book, unearthed from his office, and told me I should read it. This is one of our favorite games —sharing books. I took it and put it in my to-read pile.

Yesterday I picked it up and fell in love.

Knots, written by R. D. Laing, was published in 1970 and cost $3.95. At first glance it looks like poetry rather than prose.

Here’s page one:

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

That’s all.

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I was sitting in the sun on the front porch. I set the book down and thought about this, feeling a smile on my face. Knots, indeed. I could feel the door this little paragraph opened up in my mind, and I wanted to find words to think about it, but my first reaction was pure amusement. That’s still my reaction, as I sit and type. Maybe there’s a lot I could say, but maybe Laing has already said everything worth saying. Maybe all I have to offer are some impressions.

Games, and the people who play them. Power and control games. Blame and shame games. Drama and trauma games. Triangle games. Have you ever noticed the most manipulative and malevolent game players never, ever admit they’re playing games? I’ve always wondered if that’s because they lack insight into their own behavior and motivation or they simply lie. Maybe it’s both.

I can’t imagine a world where everyone is just straight, saying what they mean and meaning what they say. It would be a world in which we all took responsibility for our choices and had the ability and willingness to be authentic. It would be a world where each one of us had integrity.

The human game, the social game, the money game, the professional game, the health game, the marketing and consumer game, the education game, the sex game, the family and/or parenting game, the significant other game. Our days and lives are filled with games, and we take them extremely seriously. Our identity and ideology, our hopes and dreams, our very lives seem to depend on how successfully we play our various games. Are all these games fun? Are any of these games fun? When I think about my life and watch the people close to me, I see despair, rage, fear, violence, a pathological need to win and be right at all costs, and grief. Fun? Not so much.

Do you remember the vain and not-terribly-bright Emperor who wore no clothes? His courtiers seduced him into believing he had on the finest clothes ever made and no one dared to say he was naked until he went out onto the street in a magnificent promenade. A child in the crowd said, “But he’s not wearing anything!” in the manner of small children who have not yet learned to play the game. The child was instantly hushed, but it was too late. That small arrow of truth could not be retrieved and the crowd roared with laughter.

Either everybody plays the game, or nobody does. No individual is allowed to call a game a game, however. No individual is allowed to challenge, ask certain questions, investigate and research independently, or have a different opinion. Such people are punished with tribal shaming, deplatforming, doxxing, threats and violence.

So we play the game, at least enough to escape notice. We try to stay camouflaged within the herd. We keep our heads down and our mouths shut. We pretend we think the game is real.

Some of us are better at that than others.

Some of us are born troublemakers and insist on thinking for ourselves, come what may.

Some of us are curious and play what we know is a game in order to find out what will happen.

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I was once with a bad boy man. He was magnetic and attractive. He was also filled with rage; collected gold, guns and ammo in an underground storage locker; grew illegal weed and mushrooms; and the local cops had a thick file on him. He said he’d met Jesus (while high). For various good reasons (trust me on this) I was with him for a few months during a bad time in my life. Everyone around me was appalled, which only added to my sense of reckless enjoyment.

I was sick and tired of being the good girl, the reliable one, the adult, the woman with no needs who always followed the rules and pleased everyone around her. I loathed my goody-goody, compliant self beyond words.

So, for a little while, I decided to be none of those things. One day he gave me a diamond ring, which I suspected had been stolen (you shouldn’t have!) while he was in another state a few years before. He asked me to marry him.

Now, not only did I have no intention whatsoever of marrying again, I knew he would never go through with it. I also knew this was not a man I would be in a long-term relationship with. He was meeting my need to be rebellious and reassure myself that I was still attractive enough, after two divorces, to fuck. Does that sound coarse? It was. But most women will understand what I mean. I didn’t go through a bad-boy phase as a young woman. I’ve always been a late bloomer. This was it. I needed it and I don’t regret it, in spite of some pretty severe consequences that made me a better and wiser woman.

The truth is I wanted to see what would happen. He was such a fruitcake. I wore the ring.

What happened was I got bored with the alcohol, the weed, and his insistence on dumping his pipe into the bathroom sink, which clogged the drain. I had to clean it out, naturally.

Also, guys who have a heavy alcohol and weed habit are not what you might call focused lovers.

So, ick. It was one of those things. Either you totally understand or your never will!

The point is I knew it was all a game. Did he? I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I doubt he would have told me if he knew, but I also doubt he did know. Chronic use of weed doesn’t make one smart. What was the point of the game? What was, if you’ll excuse the phrase, the endgame? How far was he willing to take it? I was mildly curious, but not curious enough (or invested enough) to stick around and find out.

I don’t think anyone in my life realized I was playing a game. They were far too busy disapproving, which gave me a lot of private amusement. Nobody asked me what I was thinking or feeling. In the atmosphere of criticism and judgment, I didn’t bother to explain or defend myself. The onlookers had already made up their minds about who I was and what I was doing. I didn’t feel I owed anyone an explanation. I was, after all, 40 years old.

If one person had sat down with me and said “WTF are you up to?” I would have told them the truth. Would they have believed me? That question makes me smile. All we do is play unacknowledged games in life on every side. If someone admits they’re playing a (temporary) game with a sexy bad boy man, do we believe them?

I wonder.