By Maria Padhila
“My life is a sausage festival.” It’s not quite up there with the Weiner texts, but it shares something of the concept, if not their spirit, and it’s what I texted to a friend the other day when she asked about going to a wine festival. I had to say no. Overbooked is the norm.
I haven’t been poly long, but it’s been long enough to hear most of the standard jokes, like this one: “What’s the mating call of the polyamorists? Get out your calendars.” I have heard about people who use adding or subtracting a partner from the Google calendar share list as a signifier of the significance of the relationship. Issac and I live, love, and argue by iCal; Chris doesn’t have the technology, so I email him dates I’m booked with Issac and family and friends. And still, disputes ensue.
That’s because what we’re arguing about here doesn’t have anything to do with whether the format is Google or iCal. It’s about the way we believe time equals love, attention, care.
On the face of it, it makes sense. The popular programs of any time management gurus are predicated on the assumption that one sets priorities based on what one values, and allots time accordingly. From there also comes the notion of ‘quality time’, that is, you can stint on actual time spent on what’s important to you if you really focus hard on it for a few seconds. But I can’t lose sight that time management is an outgrowth of business; efficiency studies were birthed out of the same environment that gave us the assembly line. Could there be more to time than this?
The other day, as I rushed down the sidewalk, my daughter’s hand in one of my hands, my other hand holding a jar with some lemongrass stalks I’ve been rooting, a computer bag on one shoulder, a lunch cooler and two tote bags on the other with snacks, drinks and food for us for 12 hours, gardening clothes, costumes, party clothes, a work outfit, and all the appropriate underwear and shoes to go with, with actual curlers in my hair, trying not only to make it in time for my daughter’s rehearsal but to get the car off the street before official rush hour kicks in and I get a $100 ticket there’s no way I can afford, and feeling my phone buzz and not knowing if it’s work, Isaac, or a friend or family, and I just lost my train of thought.
Oh yes — time. (By the way, I have Saturn conjunct Jupiter in the 8th in Capricorn — meaning my time is about other people’s values and it’s hard to keep a boundary on it, when I keep trying to believe it’s expandable. Where’s your Saturn? That’s where the time goes.) I settle into the broiling car, open the windows and turn on the AC, and check back to see that my daughter’s strapped into her car seat.
“I’m sorry we had to rush, baby,” I tell her. “I just try to do too much. My mommy, your grandmother, she always tries to do too much, too, and granddad gets worried and mad at her about it. I’m going to have to find a way to stop.”
“But I like doing lots of things,” she says. “I want to do too much too.”
So do I. I don’t want to have to stop any of it. Yet how my time is spent speaks to others about how I value them, apparently. It’s an example of the primary/secondary conflict, where the primary partner feels like he or she is the tofu, the economy car, the sweat pants, and the secondary is the tiramisu, the Porsche, the sequined minidress. The practical one vs. the fun one. The one who gets things done vs. the wild-night-out one. Putting two complex personalities into these roles is absurd and devalues them, but I can’t argue with how someone feels.
Isaac looks at the iCal and sees what looks like a long parade of date nights and weekends away at festivals with Chris. But the truth is, Chris and I don’t have much money to spend, so what we do is not terribly glamorous — gardening, house parties, art — making it and viewing it. Isaac doesn’t always see our own leisurely vacation plans, our own date nights, our hundreds of breakfasts over the Sunday papers, our yoga classes together, our nights dozing off while trying to catch up with an episode of Treme on HBO, the hundreds of nights we go to sleep together and wake up together. He doesn’t always realize the way some people who are single or away from their families for whatever reason sometimes wish they had someone to doze off with, to hug and kiss them when they get home, to eat cereal with, to ask them whether they got that mole checked. My complaining text seems a little hollow when put in the context of people who aren’t getting as much sausage as they’d like at the breakfast buffet, certainly. Sort of like the way I feel when a friend with a high-powered job and a salary to match talks about how busy she is, when I’m wondering if I can hustle enough hours to keep the pay coming in. First-world problems, anyone?
I ask Isaac flat out if he doesn’t value that kind of time spent together. If it’s worth something less because it’s full of activities not traditionally regarded as exciting, not what we’re supposed to find fun. If it’s so dull and ordinary, why do so many people want nothing more than someone to wake up with? But there’s no arguing with the way someone feels, or what they want. I try to program more fun nights for us into the calendar, and work on babysitters.
Oddly, time spent with Chris begins to feel more regimented. We went to a regional Burning Man festival recently and felt a little like we were punching the clock, between setting up and running the camp, doing some cooking, tending the fire, keeping the air mattresses full, and taking care of our art projects. Around the fire the last night there, a younger woman, a performer who had been running herself all over the place, sat down and sighed: “I haven’t had any time to hang out with my boyfriend all weekend. And he’s been hooking up every night!”
People who are more spiritual say when you live in the moment, time becomes meaningless, that you can touch infinity. There’s not a place for that on the iCal. I’d like to be serene and graceful instead of always racing the clock. I’d like to never feel I had to count the time spent with anyone I love. Can we all get more time and more love than we’ve been told is possible? Can Saturn be bargained with?
mystes,
Thanks; I knew your intentions were good. :::smiling:::
Sarah, Thanks. You are partly correct; it was he that wanted to stay near me, not the other way around. I wanted him to go to Pittsburgh in the first place but he doesn’t want to be under his mother’s influence so he pressed me to remain near me. I allowed that because I felt sorry for him in his grieving but I don’t anymore. Now I just feel tired and frustrated and resentful.
toe-sipping. man, that takes the cake. edit me edit me!!!!
is there astrology to polyamory? i’m curious. conceptually, i’m all there… in reality i can barely even think of being involved with one person, nevermind more than one. could be this pesky saturn opposition. but would there be planet/aspects etc that would have someone predisposed to multiple relationships?
i hope that isn’t an ass question. i’m having some merc issues at the moment and am deadly affeared of offending people. unusual. but there it is.
oh… and if i wanted to dive into esoteric astrology, is baily the way to go for toe-dipping? (see: dive and toe-sipping in the same sentence. pro-fes-sion-al communicator.)
Maria, thanks for the article. Good chewing on stuff.
Mystes, thank you so much: “Outside of the nest, we dealt with ‘time’ — inside, we just made space.”
Your POV/story puts experience/words to my gradually shifting home environment; where a basis for life is sharing, not industrial age compartmentalization.
Okay, Carrie, I see your point and it makes sense at a certain emotional level. Legally and logistically, abuse is “To mistreat or neglect a person, particularly as to one for whom the actor has special responsibility by virtue of a relationship, e.g., spouse, child, elderly parent, or one for whom the actor has undertaken a duty of care, e.g., nurse-patient.”
I can see that you consider any familial or personal relationship the site of ‘special responsibility.’ I have had to evolve a thicker hide on the question of what constitutes ‘abuse,’ especially being a triple Crab. I remember as a child having the most exposed empathy bone imaginable, and as my Great Attractor ascendant became more fully expressed in this lifetime, I had to start turning down the volume on imagined or actual injury from (and toward) others. Did I want to speak and hear inconvenient truth, or did I want to flinch and cower at every upstart of reality that didn’t fit into the ‘nice’ or what-I-want-to-hear/say box?
Sarah Taylor’s view seems realistic to me, but truly, only you know what is really swirling around in this stew. My opinions are barely fluff, but the intention was to help. Meh. “Good Intentions Paving Company,” eh?
Hugs,
M
Maria – thank you for a thought-provoking series of articles. I look forward to them every week.
Carrie – I feel exhausted on your part just reading what you’re going through. A big hug. As an outsider who doesn’t feel the emotional pull of the situation, my sense is that your father is already halfway to Pittsburgh. It feels like the letting go – and the letting him go – is your own emotional journey. It’s your bond with your father that’s keeping him with you, not his with you. Therefore it’s your decision that you make with yourself, and then with him.
Hard to articulate. I hope I haven’t offended you. (((((Carrie)))))
Maria, the devil is in the details.. All interactions connect to all others, therefore we have the freedom to experience and create.
When all folks en-soul themselves,.. It’s just a matter of being You.
Love from a Friend,
Jere
“Carrie, My off-the-cuff opinion is that “abuse” happens to children, or elders who have returned to childhood. Arguments between adults are just that – arguments. If people are mean to you, they’re idiots or cruel or out of B-vits or coming off of meth but unless you are a dependent and they can threaten to eliminate some vital aspect of your existence, it’s not abuse. ”
We will have to agree to disagree then. In my opinion, people in a relationship know they matter to one another and that means that doing harmful things (and using harmful words or actions) when you KNOW the other person cares about you is abusing that close relationship. If I know it hurts my mother to throw something she did in the past in her face, doing so is abusive. If I know my grown kids care about me and what I think and I use that caring to say things I know will be deliberately hurtful or that I know will undermine their self confidence, that’s abusing the close relationship I have with them. Spouses, lovers, family relations, siblings all know that abuse can happen between adults who are not dependent on one another; it happens because people can be emotionally tied to one another and doing or saying hurtful things is what makes it abuse to me.
Viva la difference!
Maria :: “It was only in recent years that I had the nerve to try to move out of it and into something new and something more. And I’m bringing the ones I love along as I can. Maybe it’s just Libra-ness, but I can’t breach anyone’s autonomy and make demands that we all pull up stakes and move to an intentional community tomorrow. Persuasion, modeling, love, that’s all that gets results for me.”
Persuasion, modeling, love. Yes, is there any other way? The only thing I would add is that there’s going to come a point where you and your cohort will say: Really? is this autonomy or is it artificial ‘independence?’ I mark the word because for the most part our personal technologies only buttress the illusion of freedom.
And when conflict arises over the hyperscheduling, as it will, I just hope it doesn’t go on for so long that you lose your delight in one another. Move quickly to the position that opens when longing strikes. Do something different! If that longing is pacified by old solutions (bigger computers, more amusement, faster phones), ennui and disenchantment aren’t far behind.
That said, I have to say that all of the kids of the Mac household, myself included, have more than dabbled in monogamy. But it breathes differently, and there’s a DNA to basic openness.
Carrie, My off-the-cuff opinion is that “abuse” happens to children, or elders who have returned to childhood. Arguments between adults are just that – arguments. If people are mean to you, they’re idiots or cruel or out of B-vits or coming off of meth but unless you are a dependent and they can threaten to eliminate some vital aspect of your existence, it’s not abuse.
If they *can* threaten you at that level, you’ve given away some fundamental power of your adulthood. Take it back. Life is too short.
mystes,
Verbal abuse is abuse no matter how old you are. Adults still have feelings and parents are able to abuse them verbally over and over. Mine have and my husband’s have. The kids have heard that and they are NOT pleased.
I cannot pass around his care between five people. The teens cannot drive yet (they meant to learn this summer but the mess my dad has created means Dave and I haven’t’ the time to do the drive-with time they need) and none of them can lift him; he cannot lift himself or even walk, he messes himself and they cannot move him because of his size in relation to theirs and their lack of upper body strength (we all tried already in Vegas). My nine year old is too small, my husband works long hours at 58 and is also way shorter than my dad and cannot lift him (he has also tried). My dad is a big man and at 6 feet and over 170 lbs at dead weight he is not one we can move. He would get bed sores if we took him in. We have no room for him here unless making him sleep on the couch or making the kids sleep on the floor is the way to go. Why would I make them do that when he has tons of other relatives who can do it for him? He wouldn’t get the best care if we took him in, how could I do that to him? He hasn’t a lot of money either (the relatives think he has but they all think he is loaded when he is not; his wife gambled most of it away).
I think making the relatives care for him is the right answer because in my new desire to assert myself as a person, I am through being the martyr in my family.
Isaac called me (on the bluetooth on the prius, all of which is, yes, killing the universe and probably giving me brain cancer, but about the latter i don’t really care cause we all gotta go) after sending an I-love-you text, and told me he’d just read the post and that I should look at the responses, because they are “what you would dream of hearing.” He’s so right. Mystes and Yeti, that kind of life IS my dream, believe it or not. I’m well aware that from many perspectives I’m a privileged cliche. I could get all self-righteous about those Other Chicks Uptown who buy $90 yoga pants, but here I am with a phone chock full of conflict minerals in my hand. Laughable.
It was only in recent years that I had the nerve to try to move out of it and into something new and something more. And I’m bringing the ones I love along as I can. Maybe it’s just Libra-ness, but I can’t breach anyone’s autonomy and make demands that we all pull up stakes and move to an intentional community tomorrow. Persuasion, modeling, love, that’s all that gets results for me. And I find I always have to be open to the notion that I could be wrong, and their way could be right. It all takes…time.
Or maybe I’m just another weenie liberal.
In the meantime, I’m not going to discourage any incremental changes.
A hot fantasy: I live in an intentional community and we invite the head of a coal company to dinner, where he is so inspirationally seduced that he becomes a vegan goddess worshiper and the very next day starts taking the whole damn system apart. And we go back to hunting and gathering and theater around the fire, but this time with birth control, waste containment systems, and the OCCASIONAL use of antibiotics and organ transplants.
@Carrie: I have close friends where you are and worry I’ll be there myself in a few years. You’re making miraculous changes happen slowly elsewhere. Be clever and creative and keep your eyes open so you won’t miss the escape signals.
Carrie:: “I am sure they would care for him so to me it would be a win-win situation and why should HE have all the say in what happens to him when his choices so far have been really harmful to him?”
I dunno, kiddo. If he is compos enough to order you around, then he’s compos enough to provide $ for extra care, ne? I thought he was farther around the bend than that. There are five adults in your household, though, so I’m just not getting why the old dear’s needs and errands and demands aren’t divided by 5. Explain to him that he gets 1 hour per day per person and after that, you are all fresh out. Give him a little booklet with everybody’s names: one hour per person per day. Or twenty minutes, if you’d rather. Make it quantitative and then let him figure out the rest. It’ll do his sad old brain some good.
And just as an aside — how can a grown-up be abused? I have another friend whose family provided her with extraordinary benefits and assets as a child, and now she complains they ‘abused’ her by raising her expectations as an adult. Oh please. Once we are no longer a tax exemption to our parents, ‘abuse’ is not the right term.
You may have a crappy relationship, but that is between adults who don’t get along. I’ve made my choices and I don’t expect those choices to thrill my relatives. But their dour opinions don’t amount to abuse, and could not since I was 14.
mystes,
I should have clarified; my kids already do all the housework and so much more. They are even doing more and more of the cooking for me (though everyone is complaining about that) and the reason they want to learn to drive is so they can take on running errands and getting jobs to help support themselves and the family. What galls me is that they should be so impacted by this man who ignored them their whole lives and now wants them (and their mother) to dance attendance on him while he makes stupid choices that harm himself. They are not selfish, they feel protective of me because they see the toll this is taking on me and they feel I don’t deserve it. They have seen both their parents abused and neglected by their grandparents and they get very angry when that happens.
My son is only 9 and does a lot around the house as well; how is it right to expect him to give up even more of my time for a man who he doesn’t even know and who ignored him and his sisters (whom he worships)?
Sorry but I think my kids have done a lot already helping the old man move, holding his hand even when they dislike him, picking up the slack when Dave and I take care of business for him, and holding down the house while we were away doing all that my Dad wants. My dad does have other relatives; ones he does listen to so for his own safety I am really considering sending him back to them. They are already drooling over my grandmother’s money; let them have his and his stubborn self as well. I don’t care about the money but I do want him cared for and safer and my kids having a more peaceful life. I am sure they would care for him so to me it would be a win-win situation and why should HE have all the say in what happens to him when his choices so far have been really harmful to him?
…and Carrie, honey, let your kids *do more.* No, don’t just let or insist, just shift the dynamic. You work with/for them, they work with Gramps.
Or do throw the old gent back to his welcoming committee back East. I’m not a big fan of guilt-based caregiving. Resentment poisons everything.
I remember the first time I informed my son that he would be taking a city bus to get to his dad’s. You’d’ve thought I had offered to shoot off his fingertips. It was outrageous, a scandal, how could I? I rode with him 3 times, he bitched the *entire* time. So pleasant. (This is what comes of growing up with a split economic screen).
Now he knows the system like the lines in his palm. There may resistance. They’ll acknowledge it (maybe) later.
Carrie, I didn’t fully make my point to your side of the issue — kids are not just here to take, they are here to give. I did laundry for a household of 8 children, cooked for at least four, woke up adults, doled out lunch money, chased down shoes from earliest memory to 14 … until I left and found my *real* family in Austin.
Both households were uber-busy. The Macs in Austin were *way* more loving, fun and spontaneous. Kids did alot, but we didn’t call it ‘responsibility’ – we just knew it had to get done. And there were a number of adults who flowed in and around the 3 principals.
No, Half, it wasn’t a hippy commune. I did live in one in Arkansas for 6 months, but the Mac household didn’t qualify. It was just a great marriage: there was a Paterfamilias, there was a Queen Goddess mother, there was an adored Handmaiden and many very happy visitors/guests.
People did get ruffled for territory sometimes, but the QG was a master of smoothage. It worked because everyone worked with it.
Thans for your article once again, Maria.
I’m with Mystes on this point of organisation. It seems that we are more bi-amory herein, with some vision of multi-amory implicit, than we are fullest sense of poly. That’s not a criticism but it feels a bit like ‘double monogamy sandwich’ at McDonalds… “I’ll super size mine!”
Economy (in the broadest sense) of scale is not in view and this feels like an enlightened person with multi-proclivities, simply juggling more, with perks added! (Which is refreshingly more ambitious than monogamy, it has to be said).
Polyamory may be wrestling more significantly with the community aspects? The broad spectrum shared living – more like a hippie commune eh, Mystes – will be harder to broker when the value base is more evenly spread out?
@Carrie: I do not know your father obviously, but is there an emerging neuro-degenerative disorder in the mix? Behavioural trait changes often show before more ‘obvous’ evidences of deterioration. I’m speaking from experience with my own father and others.
mystes,
I not only cannot care for my Dad in my too-small house (none of us can lift him, even collectively) I don’t WANT to. He is an ass and I don’t even like him. I just care for him because I am too compassionate a person to throw him away. I suppose I could just put him on a plane back to his numerous relatives in Pittsburgh but he has said he doesn’t want to go there so I keep dealing with him here. If this goes on into the fall, I WILL put him on a plane and send him back; my time is even more limited in the fall because of my own 5 classes online and homeschooling my son as well as managing the teens’ schedules until they learn to drive. Something tells me his family would be overjoyed if I did that. Maybe that IS the answer.
Saturn- 9th house, Cancer, retrograde, on the Solstice point, talking distance from the south node in Gemini. Hermit style, with a beard and a pipe and a parrot on the side. iCal and Google Cal are part of our culture’s insanity. The same insanity that makes us think we have to use so much electricity to push away the night. The city’s sparkle seen from a pile of rocks lit by fire and moonlight seems violent and mean as it stabs the darkness, trying like hell to make it go away permanently so it can know and control everything. Wrap it in a grid so you can control it. If it doesn’t fit the grid, it doesn’t exist.
My Saturn is retrograde so I guess that says something about why I’ve always had a hard time manifesting the busy, well funded lifestyle. I think those lifestyles really have garbage and poison as their end products and purpose. I’ve noticed that the busier I am the less time I have to cook or repair and the more money I have the more I can replace rather than reuse. I guess the default culture may see me as insane since I move so slow I seem lazy. Someone told me last night that I looked like I was moving at normal speed and everyone else was in fast-forward. He’s from Alaska so I guess that makes sense.
Fuck iCal. Regimented time management leaves no room for finding solutions to problems like too many cars and too much garbage. Regimented time management leads to people thinking they need cars to get to all the things they think they can do when it’s just words on a grid. Meanwhile the world keeps on burning and getting more poisonous by the day. The world wrapped in grids, the ocean wrapped in plastic. Bravo, human. Stay busy enough and you won’t notice the burning or the poison.
Soooooo, what I am not hearing in either Carrie or Maria’s discussions is *everybody* in the same room/house/home sharing the things that are costing so much of the alpha-dame’s time. Want more time with your two husbands? Put ’em in the same house, or on the same block and then quit scheduling.
I lived in a poly household as a teenager before the word was invented. It was fun, loud and exceedingly chaotic. There were lovers, husbands, wives, children, goats, cows, cats (oooo Baskerville! I do miss you!!) everywhere. No one had Palms, iPhones, or Macs, there were roughly 2.5 cars in the household and things just gurgled and flowed. I made eggs, other people ate them and yet other people cleaned up. Who’s going in to town? Where is the laundry soap? Can someone bring the clothes in? I’ll fold them when I get back… Where’s your art project? I think it’s behind the table over there. Can someone please bring me some toilet paper?? Who the hell left the roll empty? Et. Cetera.
The one and biggest difference –besides the manic ‘time management’ that essentially keeps everyone in their compartments– was that the kids were a *big* part of keeping things rolling. We washed, swept, picked up, cooked, did each other’s homework — I have one friend from that same milieu (I wasn’t the only, trust me) who says that she rotated her family’s car tires!
Time is the pulse of not-now, not-now, not-now. We usually think of discerning and neutralizing that as the work of meditation. But my teenage household was a study in Nowness based on flow. Outside of the nest, we dealt with ‘time’ — inside, we just made space.
“My life is a sausage festival.” ::::::laughing hysterically::::: That is an amazingly funny pun; were you aware of it when you wrote it? ::::still chuckling:::::
On a serious note, I know about that time thing; every time I think I have a handle on my time, something comes up to drag me into using more of it for things I don’t always really want to use it for. Yet my duty (there’s a Saturnian and Capricornian word if ever there was one) seems clear and I feel compelled to do that duty, distasteful as it sometimes is.
What really bothers me is when I have to use my precious time (and I value my time more than money or other things, second only to my kids and husband) on someone I feel doesn’t deserve it; especially when giving them time takes away from the time I want to give my children. My children DO deserve my time, my youngest particularly needs my time; and I feel like they have been repeatedly cheated of it despite my best efforts to give it to them. Think about this: I am a stay-at-home mother but outside issues have forced me to have to either work outside the home or take college classes in order to bring in some income that supports my family without taking me away as much as a job would (the classes are online so they can be done around the kids’ schedule to some degree).
I also now have my father’s many increasingly time-consuming issues to deal with which also takes away from my kids. That last one especially is egregious to me because he ignored my kids their whole life; why should they be penalized time-wise by him now? Yet he seems to do things that cause me to spend more time dealing with his mess. I already spent a lot of time and energy getting him moved and set up in a good place but instead of doing what he should to make sure he could be there in safety and good health, the asshole refused to get medical attention for an accident-related injury and instead self-medicated himself into the ER, the ICU, and now out of the facility I got him into. Only three weeks later my husband and I have to move him out of that place, dispose of his furniture, and set him up in a different, higher-level of care place. Yesterday he was transferred out of the hospital to a rehab place where he promptly (within an hour of being there) and stupidly tried to stand up while in a wheel chair and fell AGAIN and had to be rushed to yet another ER to get stitched up yet again. The man is so difficult to deal with in that regard (he seems so nice but is so stubborn) that the doctors are now giving him Ativan to make him more malleable to treatment and taking orders. Trouble is, Ativan also makes him a fall risk. JC on a piece of toast. :::sigh:::
So time is my enemy; I don’t even have an iCal or planner or what have you; I just keep reacting to shit that seems to fall my way and I never seem to be able to stop the shit from falling.
Sorry to vent. I guess your article about time hit a nerve.