Let Your Liberal Freak Flag Fly

I realized something about reading, which is that we can fall out of practice, but it only takes one good book to get us back in the groove again.

Example: I was trying to read Adam Gopnik's latest "A Thousand Small Sanities" (The Moral Adventure of Liberalism) but was having trouble taking it in, in spite of an enthusiastic recommendation by My Blond Companion. Then a hold came in at the liberry for Lori Gottlieb's "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone" so I put Gopnik aside to read Gottlieb, whose 412 pages I put away in two sittings. Then I re-started Gopnik and lo and behold it's registering just fine.

I'm glad because I'm the Liberal both the Left and the Right love to hate these days, a neo-Liberal to the Left (well, sorry, comrades, but we've gotta make room for people who just wanna have fun and make lotsa money), a Commie to the Right (yeah, kinda, some days, but I like owning property and so do my friends on the Left, so hypocrites much, comrades?), and I want to better understand and defend why I hold to the politics I do, because I'm not really a middle of the road person otherwise.

Compromise is a hard one for me. Conservatives are stupid and mean. New Democrats are holier'n thou finger pointers who act as if making six figures and owning million dollar piles is barely scraping by in this regulated capitalist hellscape known as Canada.

I can say that because My Blond Companion and I are Plucky Paupers who together barely make five figures. So there. We were also born into the middle-class so we don't spend our days whining about our financial misfortune because we pretty much live like Rockefellers, thank you for asking.

No idea why double income families with their two car garage piles in suburban Ottawa and annual family vacations to Disneyland are having trouble making ends meet, but I see them on CBC news quite frequently, boohooing about how hard it is, the Canadian dream of taking up ever more space getting harder and harder to attain.

All this to say I believe now is the time I need to let my Liberal freak flag fly. The Right, which in Canada is Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party every bit as much as in the US it's Donald Trump's Republicans, is only too happy to employ violence for the purpose of intimidating Liberals into not expressing our support for Liberal politicians, so it's imperative we do so anyway.

Just ignore the tsk tsking of the Left for your moral failure. It's always something with the Left. Even if/when the NDP wins they'll be accused of governing as Liberals because they can't re-make the country in their socialist image anymore than Stephen Harper could re-make it in his fascist one. Believe me. Just suggest introducing wage parity at the ONDP (Queen's Park - '80s) and you'd think I'd suggested - as a unit member did once at a meeting - not going on strike for more pay when we were already better compensated than both OPCP and OLP staffers put together.

Apoplexy all 'round. I know I'm being mean but I'm tired of the bullshit. I worked in the belly of the beast.

Bob Rae is right.

Also, they weren't allowed to say it out loud but every teacher I talked to (except for the lone male) at my kids' elementary school liked the Social Contract.

By the way, not a single public servant of my acquaintance supported the latest strike, although they did their union duty, anyway. And the ones who did, I can tell you with absolute certainty, did so because they wanted to work from home, a right the union didn't want them to have any more than the government did.

My last job in government was near the bottom of the pay scale and anybody who thinks public servants aren't paid enough is full of it. It was a difficult job, the most challenging I've ever had, and as I argued at the time, under-classified, but for an entry level position it was absolutely well-compensated, as it should have been.

So signs, signs, and more signs people. Great big Liberal red signs. And Pride flags. Put 'em up. And make sure your Pride flag includes all the new colours because that's where us Liberals are at, in direct opposition to the Christo-Fascists driving the Conservative bus these days.

The polls, self-selecting as they are, indicate the irredeemably odious Pierre Poilievre will be elected Prime Minister. He's a phoney, living a lie, as is well known within the small town Ottawa public service, but he's at one with the Sovereign Citizen movement, too, and isn't hiding it even a bit. So if the polls are correct, well, we're not even close to being the country most of us grew up believing ourselves to be.

No Canadian, at this point, should be voting Conservative. That's just a fact. There are reasons Poilievre can't get a security clearance and it's deliberate blindness to pretend he just doesn't want one.

He has gone out of his way, time and time again, to show his allegiance to the most racist and misogynistic elements of our society. Neo-nazis are his people. I witnessed the Freedom Convoy. Mercenaries in the employ of Neo-nazi insurrectionists (convoy leaders actually made the rounds with envelopes of cash). Poilievre not only sat with them, he recruited them, signed them up, later marching in solidarity with its leaders, his handler of the day, Trump's man Paul Alexander, directly behind him the entire time.

He will, without a doubt, weaponize his Neo-nazi supporters against us once he's Prime Minister. He's not faking being one of them. He's all in. As I've pointed out a million and one times, he sat with the Freedom Convoy, mercenaries for Neo-nazi insurrectionists, while they tormented and harassed citizens living and working in downtown Ottawa.

He sicced Diagolon Accelerationists on a young female reporter for Global News just for asking about his publicly witnessed ties to them. They harassed her and her family right down to rape and death threats.

He declared himself our enemy, the enemy of civil society, as no politician in Canada has ever done before.

He's dangerous. Full stop. Shame on Conservatives voters. Shame, shame, shame.

The Freedom Convoy cost us millions of dollars and its victims our mental health and well-being. Poilievre could not give a shit about any of us, either, because he doesn't care about anybody or anything. Trudeau pegged it correctly the other day, Poilievre will say or do anything to win, and once he does win, he'll be working for the Sovereign Citizens he went out of his way to meet with the other day, and putting the screws to Liberals and liberal democracy.

He's a nasty little shit.

Conservative voters, by the way, secretly want this, although they'll pretend they're just voting against Trudeau when they cast a ballot for whichever local candidate is running under the Conservative Party banner.

They all - every single Conservative MP - including those phoney balonies Michael Chong and Scott Aitchison - voted against invoking the Emergency Act to end the illegal occupation by the Freedom Convoy of Centretown, Ottawa - in spite of its ongoing assault on citizens and threats of violent insurrection being bullhorned in our public streets and broadcast all over the internet.

They knew what it was. The Freedom Convoy even attacked LPC and NDP staffers on their way into work. Their own fucking colleagues. They sat in a party led by Andrew Scheer who probably voted for Donald Trump, ffs, and Candice Bergen in her MAGA hat who double-dated the insurrectionist thugs.

But there's no changing the behaviour of other people, never mind their politics, so I'm already thinking ahead to the strategies I'll need to cope with a Canadian government in league with Diagolon Accelerationists.

You should, too, is my advice. Many of us ended up needing therapy, even medication, in the wake of the Freedom Convoy's assault. It was just a glimpse of fascism and believe me it was terrifying enough. Pierre Poilievre owes them bigtime and once he's in power they will be there to collect payment.

Giving It Up

My hobby right now is watching YouTubes of different therapeutic methods for reducing anxiety (etc) and trying out the many practical methods on offer, my favourite being to hum a low "ohmmmmm" while sitting in a comfortable position, hands open and facing up.

The low "ohmmmmm" stimulates the vagus nerve (you're also doing a breathing exercise) and the open hands imply releasing yourself to the universe.

I've also learned we shouldn't label anxiety, guilt (etc) bad, but rather allow ourselves to feel these emotions while recognizing they refer to events in the past, and since we can't change the past, our job is to let it go, stop picking that scab and let the wound heal already, so those emotions will leave us, too.

Dr. Wayne Dwyer describes guilt as a useless emotion, by the way. He also advises we dump our resentments if we really want to lighten our load, stop blaming others, take responsibility for our own behaviour and leave everybody else's up to them.

Crazy the number of ways we need to be told, "You can't change someone else's behaviour but you can change your own."

By the way, no one needs to be told of an aggravating behaviour of their partner, either, as if we must have acquired magical powers over them through sex and can change them to better suit you.

I also just read Lori Gottlieb's book, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone".

It's so good I read all 412 pages in two sittings.

It's a names and details changed re-telling of her sessions with four patients, as well as her own sessions with another therapist. She's a good writer so it reads like a novel. The insights, thanks to her, but also her patients and therapist, were useful to me, the most useful being an image her therapist presents to her of a person shaking the bars of what appears to be a prison cell, except there aren't any walls.

Been there, done that. But freedom means taking responsibility, too, and sometimes, maybe even a lot of the time, it can be easier to believe we're trapped. Also, as noted, and this was a big one for me, change isn't just hard, it's loss.

I'd never thought of change that way but it explains a lot, doesn't it? I get vicarious thrills when other people make big changes in how they're living but it's because I'm not experiencing any loss when they do. I even get vicarious thrills from imagining changes to my own life but that's pretty safe from loss, too.

In the case of divorce, change doesn't just mean tangible loss, which is hard enough, but also the loss of how we thought our lives and the lives of our children, if we have them, would be. And because those thoughts were only ever imaginings, we never get to experience how unrealistic they were, and so are left believing we robbed ourselves, our children, our families, of the good life, the proper life, the life without regrets and recriminations, a life where everybody and everything turned out perfect.

It doesn't help that the lost life of our dreams was based on happily ever after Hollywood movies, either.

Also, families are secret societies, each of us left to believe we're the only fucked up one, friends showing friends pictures of adorable grandchildren, not their mother's mugshot for a DUI when she was 25 and fresh out of rehab.

I only recently learned of something called Radical Acceptance, so I've been watching videos about it and practicing RAIN - Recognition, Acceptance, Investigation, Nurturing. Compassionate inquiry (Gabor Mate) and self-forgiveness are helping shut up that Nabob of Negativity who pops up in my head on the regular.

I was drawn to the concept of Radical Acceptance, though, because I have a hard time facing the reality that most of life is out of my control.

There's nothing like becoming a mother to really bring out the freak in control freak.

I'm also both a catastrophizer and a magical thinker.

And yes, it's entirely unfair that being a magical thinker doesn't cancel out being a catastrophizer.

One of my favourite finds was a short video about cognitive behaviour therapy, showing a diagram linking thoughts to feelings to behaviour.

The therapist pointed out it's really difficult to change our thoughts, so what we should do is change our behaviour. So exercise, eat well, sleep more, socialize (in my opinion this can mean just smiling at someone in the street, whatever reminds us we're not alone but part of a great big tribe of misfits), cut out alcohol, drugs (Health Canada recommends 0 glasses of anything with alcohol in it) - and this one is for me - GO OFFLINE!

Social media is a helluva drug.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful.

Sorry about the alcohol and drugs, but therapists are pretty much unanimous on that one. And if you're having trouble imagining life without them, well, maybe you should talk to someone.

Sober Sally over and out.

Billionaire Progressive

I listened to this and recommend you do, too. It's Matt Galloway of The Current on CBC radio interviewing Scott Galloway (no relation). 

The only bit I would add is the nightmare of deluded young men addicted to online gaming and crypto currency. There's no talking to them. They've become one with the algorithms fed to them day and night.

Scott Galloway on "Big Dick Energy"

Estrangement

Lately I've been enjoying takes on life by older women, older women for whom it's all about letting go.

They seem happy, these women, so I've decided to be all about letting go now, too.

Say, you know that joke, how many fill-in-the-blank-ethnicity grandmothers does it take to change a lightbulb?

"Oh don't mind me, I'll just sit in the dark."

In fact, that lightbulb would be changed before it could go out, but I guess the joke is about what martyrs grandmothers are, how little they matter to themselves, never mind anybody else. We picture a stolid old woman dressed in black, sitting on a hard backed chair in the dark, the bare bulb long since having burnt out, mourning her dead husband, nothing to live for, her children grown and flown.

Somebody reminded me of it the other day and I realized I don't find it funny anymore.

It got old. The stereotype is dated. All the grandmothers I know are still working, or recently retired - but like recently retired energizer bunnies - married, divorced, children grown.

But not always flown.

Some of their children, grown for some time now, are still living with their mothers, some of whom are grandmothers, too. And it would be fine except they aren't very nice to these caring women I've witnessed love and nurture them all their lives, some even choosing to stay-at-home full-time, not wanting to trade time with them for money... for them.

Committed to the bit, as it were.

Experts and non-experts alike could no doubt point to a million and one reasons for this rudeness, but I only see excuses, now, finally, excuses for why these adults can't finish school, get a job, do much of anything other than play online games all night, sleep all day and blame their mothers for getting it, them, so terribly wrong, causing them so much suffering, that, well, they can't, like, leave home already.

We all tried so hard to get it right. We did. Love, love, love and more love. I don't know any mothers my age who didn't give motherhood their all. Our kids were our choice, 100%, timed to the optimum second of the cycle. All of our children so, so, so wanted. We followed the rules to get pregnant, be pregnant, all to ensure our children had the best possible lives from the get go. Pre-natal classes, post-natal classes, play dates, cooperative games, nourishing meals, reading, reading, and more reading.

No pop! Add twice the amount of water suggested on the can of juice! Cosy routines for happy bedtimes!

We were determined to be the best mothers ever in the history of the world.

No. Stop right there. Don't you dare pile on us, too, with your finger-wagging about our helicoptering or lack of boundaries, our enabling. We're terrified and have been terrified forever and none of us deserve to be treated this way by our adult children. It's inexcusable. Period. End of. Just pity the poor parents who only have one and so might actually believe their only adult child's accusation they ruined their life by being bad parents, no other adult children to point to and ask, "Then why are they doing okay?"

Kidding. Mothers with more than one child would never dream of doing such a thing. Fairness above all. Some children require more of us than others. Never compare apples and oranges, no two snowflakes alike, as an elementary school principal once put it to me.

One day, mother or adult child manages to cause a rip in their shared space/time continuum, and the adult child moves out with a "Thanks for nothin', stupid lady." All largesse forgotten.

Well, we must have owed them those extra years, extra years of living around them in our own home, these non-communicative roommates who paid no rent because, well, it's hard enough to break even online gaming.

I've been reading up on estrangement and what seems common to all the stories is this: none of the parents - or siblings, because they often get lumped in with their sibling's estrangement of their parents - have any idea, really, why it's happened, what they've done to find themselves estranged.

I've decided there's good reason for that, it's because the estranger themself doesn't know why, just that it's all our fault, whatever "it" is, and they no longer wish to suffer our acquaintance.

We are nothing more to them than toxic product.

Well, toxic product after they've exhausted themselves lashing out at us for a few years, sometimes several, while taking advantage of our maternal desperation to keep them in the fold, so worried are we about their mental health, which seems... not good.

Please, please, please do yourself no harm. Love yourself, be kind to yourself, give yourself a hug.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

Stay safe while I wish you all the best in the world, my precious darling child.

Love yourself, dammit!

So there's that, their mental health seeming, well, not good, and we go for therapy because they won't. Please, please, please help us. No, help us help them. We're at our wits end. It's not true, love isn't enough, love just makes them mad. They don't believe us anyway.

They don't love us so they don't believe we love them. They aren't mothers. They have no idea of this one way deal. They don't remember the golden years when mother and child love each other the most.

Alas, we do.

Yes, I know, it's not about us. It's about them. They don't love themselves. And we can't help them. We are each of us alone responsible for loving ourselves.

I understand the need some of us have to leave the fold, a desire to reinvent oneself out in the world away from ties that may bind too tight, the stereotyping of each other family members do. I had a domineering mother who couldn't understand me at all, said as much regularly, found me exasperating.

I don't think I ever did a single thing she wanted me to do.

Hence my sense of humour.

It never occurred to me to cut her off. I cared about her too much. And she me.

Who cuts off their widowed mother who supported them all the way through university and beyond?

Well, my older sister did. Cut us all off, was estranged from us for years. Still is, really.

I was the last to be cut off, accused at the time of all sorts of wrongs against her. Me, six years younger, who'd only ever been in her thrall. And for a long time I believed her, took it to heart, blamed myself, our mother. But she cut off our brother, too, and our sister nine years younger than her.

Whoever said math isn't useful didn't know what they were talking about and neither do many of our modern day estrangers. They don't make sense to the people they're estranging because the lens through which they view their past is completely distorted.

My mother was pretty private about the estrangement, as she was a lot of things, but her friends knew. It felt shameful to her, as it did me, too. At first, anyway. But the more I talked about it, because I didn't want to hide, the more I learned about others living with estrangement of one kind or another.

Maybe they were even the estranger.

It wasn't common, but it happened.

Well, all sorts of families are experiencing it now, except we talk about it even less because it feels even more shameful now than it did then. Why? Well, because we're supposed to be so much better at parenting it's just assumed we must have failed miserably to have a child not want anything to do with us.

Except, if estrangers don't want anything to do with us why don't they just leave once they reach the age of majority, stop communicating with us from elsewhere? What's with the years of lashing out before they finally leave us, blaming us for this, that, and the other, claiming to have only ever suffered in our care, as if they haven't long been adults with all the agency in the world, free to go their own way at any time.

Reading so many of these stories, and granted they're being told by shattered parents and bewildered siblings, it seems to me the aggrieved are the aggressors in every one of them.

My older sister could always talk circles around me and I remember being so desperate she not cut me off like she had everybody else. But nothing I said mattered, no amount of reasoning worked. She had her own version of reality and it made absolutely no sense to me. How could it? From where I sat, six years younger, she'd always seemed to do whatever the hell she wanted, she and my mother dual queens of the hive, frequently at odds and yet having more in common with each other than anybody else, often seeing eye to eye.

I know there's no point in trying to have a relationship with someone who doesn't want one with you, and yet it's hard not to try, anyway. And while I agree with what I've read about keeping an open heart and arms, I don't agree about continuing to listen to their grievances, trying to understand where they're coming from, offering to make amends for our many, many, many failings as mothers.

Enough. There comes a point when there is no point and we're looking for the truth in lies other people tell themselves to avoid facing reality, which is that blaming your mother is no way to go through life. Look in the mirror. Accept responsibility for the person you see there. Put one foot in front of the other. Repeat.

Believe me. I know. Been there, done that, bought the mom-blaming tee-shirt.

My mother hung up the phone when I called to tell her I was pregnant, pretended she had something in the oven (at 3:00 in the afternoon), had to attend to it. Didn't call back, either. I called again later after sharing the happy news with my sister-in-law and knowing she'd have talked with my mother about it. Or talked her down, more like. But it just became a funny story I told at my former mother-in-law's memorial, she being all in from the start. I never brought it up with my mother because, whatever her reaction was all about, I knew it had nothing to do with me.

Well, breakthrough, because that's what I realized this morning, too. The behaviour of adult children has nothing to do with their mothers.

We blame a lot on the pandemic now, too, but no, the pandemic has become just another in a long line of excuses for adult children to behave like toddler judges and juries of their mothers' - and society's - failings, instead of taking responsibility for their own and getting on with it by doing better for the next generation - as the rest of us tried our damnedest to do for them.

Anyway, thanks for reading.