no news is....

It's been so long since I last posted that certain people have been prodding me to post again--which I must say is flattering. So here I am. Looking back, I said I'd write about being a mother of a toddler, social work, and politics. Didn't I? And so here's the basic update on all of those things. Politics: we live by tenterhooks, or at least I do, feeling as though the entire world has become labile (there's the social work) as we try to understand what is happening to us. Every day we hear about a new economic meltdown that seems to have--right now--eclipsed the environmental meltdowns that previously occupied us. I was late to work this morning and so got to listen to the BBC and heard how England and Ireland and Spain have been rocked by unemployment rates. In Spain the unemployment rate is 13% and expected to climb. It makes sense following on the heels of unprecedented economic and housing expansion in Spain... some people were really objecting to that, as I recall. So we can't really be surprised by all this.

Nonetheless we are still gaping at the headlines and croaking to one another, "Can it really be?" People are beginning to say this won't be as bad as the Great Depression only insofar as it won't resemble the Great Depression--it will look like something altogether different. And yet McCain is still talking about capital gain cuts for the wealthy and trickle down economics.

Meanwhile, Kofi Anan is talking about how pathetic we are here in the so called "first world" countries, moaning on and on about our recessions or depressions or whatever we call them.  "Wake up!" he seems to want to tell us.  "There are thousands of children starving to death every day.  Your problems are really not that bad.  Really."  It helps to take another look at these things. 

There is such a split in this country in how the red and the blue folks see things, it makes the credit crisis look like nothing. It's more like the Great Schism. It's a credibility crisis. And ironically, both sides seem to feel as though the other is lazy and unwilling to be responsible and buck up to help others and do what it right. Both sides see despicable immorality seething around them and both sides draw back, repulsed from the other. At least that's how it seems to me.

I've been having a situation at work lately that has been really uncomfortable--almost repugnant--to me. As it arises, I keep noticing that I have such a strong desire to demonize this person with whom I feel increasingly locked in a passive-aggressive, smiling, subtle combat. You know the type. The type that social workers engage in. As I drive from one place to another, eat, take a shower, take a walk, all the time I find myself reviewing this conflict and coming up with new smiling, subtle things to say to make my point with this person who is, by now, not with me. Except of course this person is with me, since I'm chatting angrily with this person silently and frequently. Defending myself, trying not to defend myself, etc. When I notice this, I try to slow down and sit with it. I notice it in my body as a throbbing sensation and an constriction--my breathing becomes more shallow and restricted. I just notice that. I notice that at times I attack the other person in my mind, and when I notice that, I send that person metta (lovingkindness) if I can.

The thing is, it isn't about me.

If I can only relax into that--my own basic irrelevance--it is so much easier to get up and go on and just fall more elegantly into my life and the challenges of it and even--sometimes--get myself to listen to John McCain and even Sarah Palin rather than simply pretending they don't exist.

Generally, though, I pretend they don't exist.  I admit it. 



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Oh, and the mama thing: Ari now knows almost all the letters of the alphabet! And he regularly recognizes the letters of his name as meaning "Ari."  I'm going to start him on Hebrew soon.  We try to count in as many languages as I can think up--English, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, French.  I have to get Grandma to teach him Armenian. I relish almost every moment I spend with him, except when he wakes me up at night. Last weekend there was one night he kept me up all night and nearly the whole time I imagined blogging about it the next day in excruciating detail but you will be glad to find out that I did not have the time to do that. Oh, and over the long weekend Ari asked for his teachers at Tot Lot several times. So he has reached the point now where he feels as if they exist, even when they are not in front of him. So much I learn from him.  Every day.