Being Gretchen
Last night, I dreamed that I was being pursued by five lionesses. I was walking through some kind of animal exhibit, with door after door, and they shadowed me from the first moment that I stepped inside. I walked faster, and they stayed behind me as I slipped through one door after another. Each time I made it through a door with their hot breath on my heels, I shivered and wondered how I made it. When I woke up, I didn’t exactly feel the terror of having had a nightmare, but I did feel anxious and curiously hurried. It took a few minutes of quiet for my mind to settle down again. It was 4:50 a.m., and since I get up at 5 a.m., I did not go back to sleep.
The pipsqueak was snoozing happily near me, his body at an angle on top of the blankets. He was a reluctant sleeper last night. First, he patted me (“I’m patting you, mama”). Then he scratched my back, just like I sometimes scratch his. When he said, “I’m scratching you, mama,” I didn’t quite catch what he said. “Patting?” I asked. “Nooooo,” he said.
“Rubbing?”
“Nooo....”
I thought for a long time before it dawned on me. “Scratching. You said scratching.”
“Yes, mama,” he said softly, as if he thought perhaps I was a little slow. “I’m scratching you.”
I also dreamed that when I looked out the window of the nursery into the darkness, I saw a little blond head. The squeaker was crouched there, just outside the window on the roof of the sunroom. He was watching some motorcycles through the darkness as they zipped around our driveway. I tried to pull him through the window and into the house, but he shrugged me off and jumped noiselessly from the roof into the yard below. I could see him, so very small and shining white in the darkness as he ran around the yard.
I’ve related my dreams in reverse order here; the lionesses were the last. In the first, I got lost inside a building – a school? – with the lawyer-priest with whom I job share, and we wandered around empty cinderblock stairwells looking for unlocked doors. I have dreamed this before (though my colleague has never been there), and I knew while I was dreaming that it would pass.
I don’t know that I think dreams really tell us anything about ourselves. In recent days I’ve been wrestling with a decision that seemed to have at its core the mantra “Know thyself”; I have been trying to decide if I should try to make a change that appeals to the secret seed of ambition and adventure in me but that may require tasks that are so at odds with my fundamental, unchangeable nature that the change might fill each day with hurdles that unrelentingly feed my sense of anxiety. I am far more Piglet than Pooh, and while I might prefer to be Pooh-like, I know I am not.
In thinking about my dilemma, I stumbled across Gretchen Rubin’s excellent “Being Gretchen” post on The Happiness Project about accepting herself, including her limitations, but knowing that there is some loss in such acceptance. I agree very much about the importance of self-acceptance, and I appreciate the sense of loss. But how do you know when to challenge the part of you that has perhaps become too comfortable, the habituated self who sidesteps change just because it is different from the familiar self you have become accustomed to? Certainly being true to oneself does not require rejecting new experiences, but does it create the risk of steering clear of experiences that challenge our habits and our engrained perspectives? Does growth sometimes require consciously stepping beyond the comfortable and familiar – or is such action irreconcilable with the philosophy of “know thyself”? Surely scale matters: changing how you spend the afternoon will have lesser consequences that making a major life change that involves shedding some of what is familiar and comfortable.
Even in framing the issue that way, though, I am not sure if that’s what is at stake. It is hard to tell if I might be overdramatizing. In any case, I made a decision yesterday to pursue this change, though I do not know the likelihood that it will come to pass. We shall see.
In the meantime, the weather has turned cool and windy, and, to the pipsqueak’s delight, the cornfields around us have been full of large and noisy farm machines. The squeaker has doggedly been going off to school each day on the school bus, though he has a litany of concerns about school: he does not have friends. He is lonely. Other kids can read better than he can. He does not like waiting for the bus that brings him home because he waits all alone; it is the last bus. I’ve shrugged off all these worries (“You’ll make friends. I’m sorry you are lonely. You will learn to read just as well as anyone else, it just takes time. I’m sorry you have to wait for the bus, but that’s the way it is.”) But the complaint that gives me pause is his feeling that he is left out of things. He says he does not feel part of the group.
I feel that I know very much what he means, as I have always stayed on the margins, too. I like to think that I stay on the edges because I prefer it there. I am an observer, not a joiner. When everyone wants to do a particular thing, that alone makes me want to do something different. Something in me makes me resist being part of the group, even if a part of me feels vaguely sad about being on the edge. I feel like I belong on the edge, though sometimes I wish I wanted to be in the middle of things.
My husband questions the genuineness of what the squeaker is expressing; he thinks perhaps he is just echoing things he has heard in movies and in books to justify his general trepidation about school. But something about the simple words he chose to describe the feeling – and the way the feeling resonated with me – makes me think that he does feel that he is not exactly part of the group in the classroom. And that leaves me wondering: do I try to teach him how to join them, how to participate? Or do I try to help him see the beauty of being an observer? Is it his essential nature as an observer that he is discovering? Or is it just that he doesn’t know how to be engaged with the other kids, a skill he will learn with some practical experience? Is it again a question about “Being Gretchen”?
The pipsqueak was snoozing happily near me, his body at an angle on top of the blankets. He was a reluctant sleeper last night. First, he patted me (“I’m patting you, mama”). Then he scratched my back, just like I sometimes scratch his. When he said, “I’m scratching you, mama,” I didn’t quite catch what he said. “Patting?” I asked. “Nooooo,” he said.
“Rubbing?”
“Nooo....”
I thought for a long time before it dawned on me. “Scratching. You said scratching.”
“Yes, mama,” he said softly, as if he thought perhaps I was a little slow. “I’m scratching you.”
I also dreamed that when I looked out the window of the nursery into the darkness, I saw a little blond head. The squeaker was crouched there, just outside the window on the roof of the sunroom. He was watching some motorcycles through the darkness as they zipped around our driveway. I tried to pull him through the window and into the house, but he shrugged me off and jumped noiselessly from the roof into the yard below. I could see him, so very small and shining white in the darkness as he ran around the yard.
I’ve related my dreams in reverse order here; the lionesses were the last. In the first, I got lost inside a building – a school? – with the lawyer-priest with whom I job share, and we wandered around empty cinderblock stairwells looking for unlocked doors. I have dreamed this before (though my colleague has never been there), and I knew while I was dreaming that it would pass.
I don’t know that I think dreams really tell us anything about ourselves. In recent days I’ve been wrestling with a decision that seemed to have at its core the mantra “Know thyself”; I have been trying to decide if I should try to make a change that appeals to the secret seed of ambition and adventure in me but that may require tasks that are so at odds with my fundamental, unchangeable nature that the change might fill each day with hurdles that unrelentingly feed my sense of anxiety. I am far more Piglet than Pooh, and while I might prefer to be Pooh-like, I know I am not.
In thinking about my dilemma, I stumbled across Gretchen Rubin’s excellent “Being Gretchen” post on The Happiness Project about accepting herself, including her limitations, but knowing that there is some loss in such acceptance. I agree very much about the importance of self-acceptance, and I appreciate the sense of loss. But how do you know when to challenge the part of you that has perhaps become too comfortable, the habituated self who sidesteps change just because it is different from the familiar self you have become accustomed to? Certainly being true to oneself does not require rejecting new experiences, but does it create the risk of steering clear of experiences that challenge our habits and our engrained perspectives? Does growth sometimes require consciously stepping beyond the comfortable and familiar – or is such action irreconcilable with the philosophy of “know thyself”? Surely scale matters: changing how you spend the afternoon will have lesser consequences that making a major life change that involves shedding some of what is familiar and comfortable.
Even in framing the issue that way, though, I am not sure if that’s what is at stake. It is hard to tell if I might be overdramatizing. In any case, I made a decision yesterday to pursue this change, though I do not know the likelihood that it will come to pass. We shall see.
In the meantime, the weather has turned cool and windy, and, to the pipsqueak’s delight, the cornfields around us have been full of large and noisy farm machines. The squeaker has doggedly been going off to school each day on the school bus, though he has a litany of concerns about school: he does not have friends. He is lonely. Other kids can read better than he can. He does not like waiting for the bus that brings him home because he waits all alone; it is the last bus. I’ve shrugged off all these worries (“You’ll make friends. I’m sorry you are lonely. You will learn to read just as well as anyone else, it just takes time. I’m sorry you have to wait for the bus, but that’s the way it is.”) But the complaint that gives me pause is his feeling that he is left out of things. He says he does not feel part of the group.
I feel that I know very much what he means, as I have always stayed on the margins, too. I like to think that I stay on the edges because I prefer it there. I am an observer, not a joiner. When everyone wants to do a particular thing, that alone makes me want to do something different. Something in me makes me resist being part of the group, even if a part of me feels vaguely sad about being on the edge. I feel like I belong on the edge, though sometimes I wish I wanted to be in the middle of things.
My husband questions the genuineness of what the squeaker is expressing; he thinks perhaps he is just echoing things he has heard in movies and in books to justify his general trepidation about school. But something about the simple words he chose to describe the feeling – and the way the feeling resonated with me – makes me think that he does feel that he is not exactly part of the group in the classroom. And that leaves me wondering: do I try to teach him how to join them, how to participate? Or do I try to help him see the beauty of being an observer? Is it his essential nature as an observer that he is discovering? Or is it just that he doesn’t know how to be engaged with the other kids, a skill he will learn with some practical experience? Is it again a question about “Being Gretchen”?
posted by Blue Moon Mama at 8:01 AM
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