Contemplating My Navel (Personal Blog)

Perfectly Dysfunctional

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Pefectly Dysfunctional

Bob and I have been in a committed relationship for more than a year. Our first date occurred on February 28, 2015, and this watershed evening portended more than lasting love. It was followed by respective winning streaks that continued straight through New Year’s Eve.

My partner enjoyed a string of personal records and new achievements in his marathon career, lost some extra weight and celebrated another year free of Crohn’s disease suffering. My own list bordered on embarrassing. So many riches: eczema remission, a loving new home with doggie siblings for Dino, a more satisfying and remunerative day job, a warm welcome into Bob’s family, travel and a teaching offer. I couldn’t lose. And for a writer (already predisposed to darkness) with a stupendously maladjusted biography, the change in fortunes was most welcome.

As 2016 commenced, I felt optimistic but understood that the year was likely to be less fantastically eventful. Settled into the 9-5 position, relaxed into an easy domestic rhythm with Bob and the fur babies, I looked ahead to the new challenges offered by teaching and several trips we’d planned together. For a very long 2015 moment, I was aware that I had everything I’ve ever wanted and worked toward. It was exhilarating and frightening. So much of my life has been conducted on the operating principle that I have nothing to lose. Go for broke became enjoy and protect last year.

Yet the deep, haunted part of me that has experienced sudden, frequent catastrophe remained alert. Things can and do fall apart. I refuse any longer to let dread prevent enjoyment, but there’s very little benefit to Pollyanna-ism either. Hot streaks can’t continue forever.

So it seems only logical that a lengthy dash of “winner, winner, chicken dinner” (as my friend Meg characterized 2015) collided with reality early and often in the first quarter of this year. I welcomed January with viral pneumonia. Within a three-week February span, Dino and Meko died, breaking our hearts and leaving Jude a confused only child. With Meko’s passing, differences between Bob and I were exposed vis a vis end of life philosophy. There was a painful argument and for a brief spell, we turned our pain on each other.

Also in February, my partner’s clan received shocking news about a heretofore unknown family member. This led to complicated reflections on truth and the past. My beloved aunt broke three ribs and punctured a lung. My baby sister contracted shingles. Close friends lost jobs, buried loved ones and battled illnesses. And on Easter weekend, I experienced the first migraine of the year, causing several days of bedridden vomiting, alopecia and a vow to rid myself of my menstrual cycle once and for all.

But it’s April 6, a new month and quarter. With the benefit of limited hindsight I’m grateful for this early wave of challenges. Yes, I’m filled with gratitude. Because honestly? I think Bob and I were just a little too perfect, too untested to know how strong our bond actually was. In the back of my mind lay a lingering taunt that went something like this: “Sure everything’s just ducky now. But what happens when the rubber meets the road? What do we look like when confronted with life outside our love bubble?”

The answer? We’re a little bruised and one of us (Bob) even limped for a few days. The shine is off. We’ve seen ugliness. And it’s beautiful. Lovely even. We’re not perfect. We make mistakes for which we have to apologize. We’re capable of hurting each other. But we’re also absolutely certain there are two of us in this boat, doing our best to row in tandem against life’s tsunamis.

Take My Uterus, Please

Becky Sarwate1 Comment

Take My Uterus Please

When I was 14 years old, I made a summertime visit to the doctor’s office. The purpose was to receive immunizations meeting the state’s health requirements for incoming high school freshman. I braced myself for the question I knew would be asked and resolved to remain breezy.

“Do you have your period honey?”

“No.”

“[With conspiratorial giggle] No, I don’t mean now sweetie. I mean ever.”

“The answer is still no.”

There’s a reason I’m able to recall this scene with total clarity. Although that particular medical center has long since closed, if I were allowed into the building today, I’d walk to the space I occupied during this conversation. I’d feel the face flush, reiterating the embarrassing non-function of my reproductive system.

A few months earlier I’d graduated from primary school. I left young girlhood with an ignominious, and among my classmates, infamous distinction. I was the only girl who hadn’t begun menstruating. The only female who wore her training bra, not out of real need, but a simple desire to keep up with her demographic peers. WHEN, my angsty teen heart wondered, would I mature like everyone else and join the cult of menstruating womanhood?

That question was answered the summer after sophomore year of high school. I was nearly 16 years old and aboard a plane home from Poland, an exciting overseas tour with the Chicago Children’s Choir. On this flight back to Chicago, my period started. I was overjoyed. Yes, finally! I was a woman at last. When I tell my students today that I’m a late bloomer, I mean it literally.

The excitement was short-lived. That first “time of the month” lasted a full three weeks. Our family practitioner concurred with my mother, a registered nurse. This was an extreme exception, the result of late puberty mixed with the disorienting effects of international travel. The cycle would normalize.

A year later, after a string of periods that left me bleeding no less than 14 days at a stretch (sometimes I’d be “lucky” enough to get a full week off), my mom carried me out of a public library. I was nauseous, dizzy with cramps and weak with anemia. The decision was made to try to regulate my raging woman clock with birth control pills. For six years, as I finished high school and completed undergrad studies, life was tolerable. My periods were always on the longer side (7-8 days) and cramp-prone, but the 28-day ordered cycle was in place.

At 22, the migraines that plagued me in grammar school returned – with a vengeance. Believing that the pill’s hormones were the root cause of these blinding headaches, my then-doctor and I chose a non-hormonal IUD as a birth control option. I was free of pill reminders for the next decade and the headaches did recede. But the longer periods returned and with an Intrauterine device, cramps can be acute and prolonged. This was the better of the only two options recognized as available to me at the time. I lived with it.

When I was 32 and separated from my second husband Eddie, I made a visit to the lady doctor before our impending divorce brought the end of health coverage. It was time for the IUD to be removed and with great trepidation, I resumed taking the pill. Although the IUD had been helpful in tapering screaming headaches, as an uninsured, struggling writer, I couldn’t afford the $1000 price tag to obtain a replacement. The prescribed pill was possible at $30 a month. So financial concerns dictated reckoning with a known enemy. Maybe this time would be different. I was past the flush of hormonal youth.

Two years later I was enjoying Millennium Park with my then-boyfriend JC, his adult daughter Amber and young granddaughter Chloe. It was a beautiful Friday afternoon and I’d just finished splashing in the fountain with Chloe when it happened: a sudden, violent onset of blinding nausea that left me spilling the contents of lunch on public land. This would become the new normal. Headaches lasting up to 10 days, punctuated by violent vomiting, aversion to light and sound. These episodes had another fun feature: alopecia. Along with headache maintenance, I got used to another cycle: bald spot, steroids, regrowth, repeat.

After a CT scan and battery of other tests confirmed I wasn’t dying of a brain tumor, my current doctor placed me on a Progesterone-only pill. I was 35 years old. My cycle was winding down. Less hormones might do the trick. After I started taking the lower-hormone pill, a subtle (for the rest of the world) but vivid miracle occurred. For 14 glorious months I was period-free. No debilitating cramps, no extended weeks of blood and most wonderful of all, no headaches. Not one. All of the food I ate stayed in my belly. For over a year, I gleaned zero looks of disgust from commuters watching me throw up on train platforms or in garbage cans, drawing the understandable conclusion that I’d had too much fun at happy hour. My hair grew back and stayed rooted.

It’s probably no coincidence that this menstruation-free time coincided with concerted singlehood. After JC and I split, as readers of this blog may recall, I left the game for a while to get my head right. I needed individual and group therapy. I needed my friends and travel. I needed to sing “Besame Mucho” at a Puerto Rican destination wedding. One thing I did not need was another fucked up, co-dependent relationship.

So naturally when I’d grown comfortable with life as a gadfly, a now financially-solvent solo act, I met my soul mate. Bob. And as I fell it seems, so did my womb. A couple months after we started dating, my period returned. Nothing had changed but love and regular intercourse, but so it was. How could I complain? I’d found my person, and my body responded.

Predictably the headaches returned, mild at first. As time went on, they progressed in intensity and duration. This past December, I had to run (or more honestly, stumble zombie-like) out of a corporate Christmas party. It was 6 pm and the familiar flush of nausea and cold sweat let me know I was moments away from vomiting. I made it to a trash can a block away, aware once more of judgmental passerby assuming I’d imbibed too much. Bob came to collect me from the train station near our home. I’d thrown up three times during a 15-minute ride. Not for the first time, Bob placed a necessary bucket on the floor of my bed side.

Last week Friday morning I awoke with alacrity and dread. I stumbled to the bathroom just in time for the afterbirth: blood running down my legs, soaking my underwear as I clutched a cramped abdomen. I barely moved all day save to change tampons on the hour. The next day, Saturday, I attended an event and drank a little too much scotch. I went to bed at 9:30 pm with a headache and there remained until Tuesday morning. I couldn’t hold down water. I couldn’t turn my head to change the television channel without streaks of light hammering my head. My period and scotch generated a perfect migraine storm that left me unable to do much but lie awake for the better part of 36 hours with eyes closed. Plenty of time to think.

Yesterday I visited my long-time hairdresser Linda. Toward the end of our session as she was tousle drying wet locks, she stopped talking and bit her lip. She had something to say but because we’ve been friends so long, I sensed painful hesitation.

“You’ve got another bald spot. It’s at the crown of your head. Put your finger here.”

The day before, I’d taken a shower, the first pleasurable one of the week. Standing fully erect no longer bore the possibility of unconsciousness or dry heaving. As I rinsed conditioner, an unusually long and not insubstantial clump of hair ran into the drain. I blamed the phenomenon on days of sweaty, migraine bedhead tangles.

I’m nearly 38 years old. Long ago, I made the personal decision to skip childbearing. For any number of reasons, it’s not in the plan. Bob and I are on the same page. Like I said, I’ve found my match. On Monday afternoon, I have an appointment with the primary care physician who began treating me before the Millennium Park incident, and I have a very specific ask. I want a hysterectomy. Even I can’t believe I’m going to ASK for an invasive procedure, but I need to shove aside long and irrational fears of all things involving needles and knives. Because I’m done. I’ve suffered enough.

When Did Millennials Stop Taking the Constitution Test?

Becky Sarwate3 Comments

From time to time, I am pleased to feature a guest post from a talented up and coming writer. This week I’m thrilled to present the work of Noreen Hernandez, a gifted student in a 300- level English course I’m teaching at Northeastern Illinois University this term. I think you’ll agree we want to hear a lot more from Noreen…..

Consitution

One Tuesday morning, a little more than a week ago, I was drinking my coffee and decided my digestion couldn’t handle reading about another schoolyard brawl between Rahm and Rauner. So I opened the Red Eye and started to flip directly to the Celebrity News for a little mental relaxation. Instead of checking out the reaction to Beyoncé’s Super Bowl outfit, my eyes were drawn to this headline:

I’ve Never Voted: Here’s Why,

Oh ha ha blah…I expected a sad column trying too hard to replicate the humorous genius of The Daily Show.  However, instead of satire, I read a self-serious list of reasons why 24-year-old Chicago Tribune reporter Rianne Cole has NEVER voted, or registered to vote-ever. She offered the usual pro forma list of excuses: too much hassle to register and nobody else votes. I sadly have to agree with Cole and admit, with voter turnout at 40% for the last mayoral election, she is correct in acknowledging voter apathy.

But the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners does understand the “hassle” of filling out forms, so they made it possible to register to vote online. I wondered if Cole knew she could procrastinate right up until Election Day and register at her polling place. That’s right-it’s possible to register and vote on the same day! As I continued reading the article, I became aware of a certain futility in these attempts to “get out the vote.”  Because her reason for not voting is more insidious than mere laziness.

Cole believes it is not her “civic duty” to vote.

I sighed…deep breaths…I tried solving the crossword puzzle to relax. But I couldn’t overlook the implications of Cole’s total civic apathy. The next Presidential election is historic because for the first time we, (not including Cole of course) will elect either a woman, a genuine activist, or a pouting bully. How could she sit this one out? It doesn’t matter what her politics are. If the thought that TRUMP COULD BE OUR NEXT PRESIDENT doesn’t get her running to the polls to stop this madness, what will?  At this point I was wishing for an asteroid to enter our Earth’s atmosphere and just end it all quickly.

Which led me to another maddening statement in Cole’s article:

“So here I sit, going about my post-graduate life and still not registered to vote. I have plenty of time, but maybe like in my work life, I’ll do it on a deadline.”

Really Rianne? I hardly know where to begin. Do you understand why you enjoy a modern post-graduate work life with the freedom to make ignorant choices? While you think of an answer, look up Lucy Burns (1879-1966). She fought for the same right to vote that so disinterests you. She was arrested, went on a hunger strike, and tortured when authorities shoved a tube down her throat to force feed her-all this, so you can choose to take that struggle for granted.

Once Lucy’s battle was over, the next generation of women leveraged their votes to fight for Equal Rights-the ones that offer you a 21st Century opportunity to get an education and build a career. These women looked into the future, saw your potential, and battled for you. How do you repay them? By abdicating the responsibility you owe to our foremothers, yourself, and our children.

The responsibility to remember this history and show up at the ballot box in indeed your “civic duty,” and allow me to help you remember the definition from your 7th grade Constitution Test. Civic Duty is “the social force that binds you to the courses of action demanded by that force.” Like it or not Rianne, you are bound to a social force comprised of militant suffragettes and feminists of the Women’s Rights movement. Since this army of women fought, suffered, and died to provide you with the freedom of a comfortable post-graduate life, they have a right to demand your recognition.

Honor them by fulfilling your civic duty. Vote on November 8, 2016.

Noreen Hernandez has been a financial services professional for 10 years. A lifetime student with a passion for keeping her skills sharp, Noreen recently returned to university life, pursuing a degree in English Literature. She uses the power of the pen to synthesize and articulate her liberal, Catholic, and feminist viewpoints. Noreen likes a challenge. Follow her on Twitter: @Noreen_Hern

From Five to Four

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

From Five to Four

“Grief does not change you…It reveals you.”

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

If you’ve followed my adventures since I began blogging seven years ago, you know that many of them after fall 2013 involved Dino the Wondercat. I met him through an old friend when the kitty was 12 years old, and adopted him at 14 after the same friend moved to the Philippines. Throughout the course of our relationship, the tiny gray and white ball of fur with the light pink nose never topped six pounds. His smallness in no way prevented Dino from being one of the most handsomely demanding animals the world has bequeathed. Head scratches, love and constant warmth were high on the list of orders. He had his own heating pad. About food, Dino could be prickly and high maintenance. We had numerous conversations about it. I would alternately plead and threaten. He would listlessly yawn by way of answer.

It was love at first sight and for eternity. I adored my beautiful, little old man. We were a contented duo until a year ago when Bob, Meko and Jude entered our lives. Neither Dino nor I were entirely sure how we’d take to dogs and a strong, silent marathon man. Very quickly we wondered how we ever lived without them. And we became the five fingers of a hand – capable of moving individually, but better and more flexible as a unit.

At the start of the New Year, Dino was 16 and a half years old. Slower certainly but no less cute and plucky. After we moved in with Bob and the pups last June, Dino enjoyed a consistent second wind at his back – exploring the hallways and recesses of his new home, teasing the dogs and forming a particularly charming bond with Bob. Dino would often “help” my partner with the laundry, climbing hills of clean, warm clothes and stepping on Bob’s feet as he tried to sort piles. The two boys developed a call and response routine. The sometimes skittish Dino grew quite verbal, engaging with the human love of my life in soft-spoken dialogue.

The comedian Louis C.K. once labeled the adoption of a pet “a countdown to sorrow.” His painful humor hits at an essential truth of animal love. They return it so unconditionally and so well, yet they remain with us a relatively short time. In Dino’s case, I knew the era we’d enjoy together would be particularly brief. Always so kitten like, due to his tiny stature and sweet visage, but already 14 when he came to dominate my studio apartment.

We had two and a half wonderful years. But Dino could not live forever and with much anguish, Bob and I laid him to rest nearly two weeks ago. In the end, he was very ill, suffering a stroke and kidney failure. However in a cat’s dodgy way, compounded by Dino’s own perversity, he seemed just fine. Until he wasn’t. One Monday morning moment he was walking toward his Daddy for a perfunctory cuddle. The next second he’d fallen off the bed and was paralyzed. I did not witness this instantaneous end of our baby as we knew him. That cross is Bob’s horrendous one to bear alone, and there’s tremendous regret on that point. I want to share everything with him – including the terrible stuff.

I suppose if there’s a bright side to Dino’s loss from our family, it’s realizing that. I learned so much about the strength of mine and Bob’s relationship and our commitment to supporting each other in the hours and days following Dino’s collapse. In our shock and grief, we were nonetheless a well-oiled machine of solid decision making, emotional sharing and affirmation of our love for one another. My partner and I have been together almost exactly a year and we’ve encountered some tough spots, rather gracefully, but this was our first devastating blow. I’m twice divorced and walk in front of a trail littered with broken, dysfunctional bonds. I have failed, and been failed, in crisis.

This time when I went slack, and my significant other joined me, the experience was awful but strangely healthy. I’ve never felt so understood. In hindsight the observation seems relatively naïve but the certainty of a partnership can go a long way in soothing a broken heart. We turned toward each rather than away or against.

Dino is gone from our daily lives, but neither absent nor forgotten. After we returned from the vet’s office and cleaned out “Dino’s room,” once again known as the laundry and guest space, Bob embarked on a photo project. The result is what you see above – a collage of our favorite digital snapshots featuring the departed bambino. My partner printed, mounted and hung them on the section of the laundry room where his litterbox once stood. Dino remains king of the throne. We would have liked the doggies included but in eight months of trying, we could never get two energetic pups and an itty bitty kitty to sit still together for a frame. Go figure.

When Bob and I find ourselves in Dino’s room at the same time, we gravitate toward the family photos and without words, sink into a long embrace. We know what we’re feeling without speech. We miss him. We’re sad. But we have one another. Always. We suspected it I’m sure, but losing Dino made our essential togetherness as clear as his constant demands for attention.

The Uneven Road Home

Becky Sarwate1 Comment

The Uneven Road Home

At the turn of the New Year, Bob and I undertook our first co-habitational household project. We converted the unused, uninsulated, enclosed porch at the East corner of our two-bedroom condo into a full-fledged office space. We installed an electric fireplace and Bob assembled a new desk and chair while I cleaned five years of grime from windows, floors and walls. The Lady Cave – where I work from home on Mondays and write on nights and weekends – has become my favorite room in the house.

In an environment overrun with the testosterone of a marathon running man, a male kitty and dog, Meko and I have found our own X-chromosome respite. She stretches out in front of the fire on the new Memory Foam bed that Bob bought for her. I type, read, journal and think with the joys of warmth, companionship and lumbar support. It’s simply delightful.

On weekday mornings, I like to sit in the Lady Cave for a minute or two before the madness begins. As I collect my thoughts, I often find myself looking into the window across our alley, where Pilgrim Lutheran School’s fourth and fifth grade instructor prepares for the day’s lessons. I attended this parochial school myself from 1983 – 1988, returning in the fall of 1991 to graduate in June 1992. My mother Gloria also matriculated from Pilgrim in 1969, and my maternal grandparents were deeply involved in church and school activities starting in 1961.

As I passively watch the teacher ready her classroom, I sometimes feel the conflict between coming home and returning to darkness. 28 years ago my own fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Kiehm, probably performed the same routines. It’s a comforting idea of continuity. My time at Pilgrim was mostly happy. But in February 1988, I did not enjoy the luxury of a safe, warm, healthy household. Despite the palliative care school brought in the way of routine, normalcy and opportunities for achievement, my family was “that” one. The parents were bizarre and probably crazy. The children were unkempt, underfed and exhibited behaviors of the abused. The grandparents were well-meaning but seemingly helpless to keep their daughter and son-in-law from disgracing the family’s institutional legacy.

When these thoughts become too uncomfortable, or I’m aware that I’ve been staring too long, I turn my gaze rightward, North, to the buildings that remain of the former Ravenswood Hospital. It’s where my great-aunt Gloria worked for many years and where her namesake niece, my mother, attended nursing school. During the summer of 1993, my younger sister and I made daily walks between our grandparents’ apartment and the hospital’s hospice unit, where our beloved Poppa lay dying of congestive heart failure. The property has since been converted to a French school and senior housing development, but the façade that represents so many memories remains intact. Last summer when Bob and I would walk past to the grocery store, I’d ask him to stop with me for a moment. I wanted to see the bricks that protected the only man before my partner whose love was truly unconditional. As though my penetrating gaze could will more of Poppa’s long absence into presence.

When I walk out our front door and move South or West, I see a string of places and spaces along Irving Park Road that represent the paternal side of my history. The BBQ joint where Biasetti’s Steakhouse once stood. My grandmother June was a waitress there for decades. My father worked as a part-time bartender there in the early 1980s on Saturday nights. It was a real treat when our mother would take us there for Cherry Cokes (before Coca-Cola introduced the store version) and a visit. We’d sit on the high barstools listening to our dad have interesting conversations with regulars, feeling very important.

Up the street there’s O’Dononvan’s (formerly Schulien’s), another restaurant where June waited tables as a single mother raising six children. Across the road, at Lashet’s Inn, my dad and his brothers were able to buy beer while underage in the early 70s. The whole brood attended St. Benedict’s Catholic grade and high school, at the corner of Irving and Leavitt. My sister also completed her freshman year of secondary there in 1995.

As I make my new home with Bob and our pets, the ghosts of the past lie literally everywhere I move, visible even from the snug confines of the Lady Cave. During our quarterly check-in, I spoke with my therapist about the confusing feelings that can erupt from the tension. I’ve painstakingly built a present suffused with love, acceptance, peace and positive direction. I walk past landmarks of great childhood joy and silliness that remind me I’ve made it to 37 years old with important pieces of selfhood intact. That resilience and consistency makes me smile.

At the same time, I live amidst pockets of jarring trauma, with the phantoms of those both treasured and rejected as frequent companions. There is harmony and justice in coming home to live my way – no longer the pawn of the confused and dangerous. To be able to remake the neighborhood in my own vision of late-30s harmony. I stare the demons down every day knowing I’ve won, building new memories free of hurt.

Yet I’m not made of steel. I can’t totally disconnect then from now, even though the eras do sometimes seem as though lived by different women. I offer no conclusions. They’ve yet to be written – pen in the air, eyes peering from my favorite room toward the past and future.