Just desserts

So I've more or less survived last night's festivities.  The neighbors came, the pizza was eaten, the Red Sox lost.  It was, you know, fine (except for the Red Sox losing).  It was nice.  It's nice that we got to know the neighbors a little better. It's nice that they got to know each other.  It's nice that we're trying to create the neighborhood that we want to raise our kids in by reaching out to the neighbors, even if we don't have much in common besides an address and the red-stitched letter on our baseball caps.  It's nice that the kids will be able to walk down the street and say hi to everyone they pass.  I'm glad we did it.  It was nice.

But, truth be told, I spent the whole frickin' week freaking out about having the neighbors over.  Freaking.  Out.   I cleaned, sure -- the house needed the cleaning.  I shopped, of course -- though there wasn't too much to shop for, since it was just pizza and paper plates.  But mostly, I freaked.

Here's the thing.  I've never been a gracious hostess.  I do my best, but no matter how well the party goes, I am always an anxious hostess.  Even when all we do is invite family over for a kid's birthday, I freak, at least a little bit.  I suppose that's more or less normal, worrying about guests having a good time and getting enough to eat and all that.  But I also worry about things that I suspect are not so normal.  I worry about being judged and found wanting.  I worry that everyone else is in on some widely agreed upon social norms that I have totally missed.  I worry that people will come into my home and realize immediately that this family is just weird, that something is just off, that we are just, you know, freaks.

It's funny, and stupid, of course.  In general I'm pretty damn comfortable with the ways in which we really do diverge from the norm.  I mean, I didn't run around the house trying to cover up all the books, even though the comment I most generally get when a new person comes into the house is something along the lines of, "Wow, you have a lot of books."  I didn't hide all the toys, or even pry all the stickers off the furniture.  We are child-centered people.  This is a child-centered house.  I'm not ashamed of that.

The shame is something else, something deeper.  The house needed to be cleaned anyway, but the shame is what made me brittle with tension while I cleaned.  I have to get this dirt cleaned or people will find out.  They'll know that something is not right.

What's not right?  What's this shame all about, this shame that I associate with cleanliness and entertaining, with opening my home to others?

I'm reading Biting the Dust right now for Chichimama's book club.  It's got a lot of interesting things to say about the associations we have about housekeeping and morals, housekeeping and social sanction.  I'm realizing that, while I've grown more comfortable in my own introverted skin -- becoming less shy, less worried about how I'm perceived in public, and better at finding strategies that make large gatherings in other places more tolerable -- I still have a deeply atavistic fear of being judged on my ability to keep a house and make a home.  But not just because of all the socio-cultural-historical baggage about a woman's worth and a woman's role.

No, what this ultimately comes down to is the same thing that everything seems to come down to, in the increasingly tedious close examination of my life.  The shame and the embarrassment are what I learned growing up in a home where things were always a little off, where my role was both to cover up what was wrong and to figure out how it was supposed to be done right, so that we could pretend better next time.  It's all about growing up with a mentally ill mother, about being the oldest child, about feeling totally bewildered by the real world because the home I inhabited was so very different.  It is about how incredibly humiliating it felt, having to learn my way around the real world by trial and error, without having anyone to guide me.  It is about how learning to fit in necessarily involved learning to be deeply ashamed of where I came from and who I was.

It was a nice evening last night, I suppose.  But I hardly noticed the things that went right because I was so busy being consumed alive with unbearable tension, rogue feelings of shame and embarrassment.   I should have dusted that ledge?  Why didn't I think to have ice for the drinks?  Why isn't anyone eating this salad?  Did I make it wrong?  (Is it because I washed it?)  Is LG driving everybody nuts?  He is, isn't he?  Why is LG behaving that way?  Doesn't he know that he's embarrassing me?

When the evening was finally, blessedly over, and all the neighbors had left, I marched straight to the leftover desserts.  I ate the melting ice cream straight from the carton until it was all gone; then I ate an enormous chocolate brownie with icing and chocolate mints.  When I finished, I felt sick to my stomach.  But I had to do it -- I couldn't do anything else until the bingeing was done.  It was like converting electricity from one current to another.  I had to take all that tension that had been building all week, all that shame, all that embarrassment, and convert it in a blinding bolt of calories to the self-hatred that it really was.

I hate myself sometimes.  I hate my fears and my anxieties.  I hate feeling like I'm irretrievably damaged, like anyone who's granted the slightest window into my life will see how messed-up I am and run in the other direction.  I hate my binge-eating response, and I hate the way my torso looks after a week of binge-eating.  (It was just icing on the cake of self-hatred that all the neighbors but one turned out to have one other thing in common: a love of running marathons.  While my fat self and I spent the week scrubbing the floors anxiously and bingeing on the bags of leftover Mother's Day chocolate.)

I hate that I woke up this morning in a funk of self-hatred, determined to skip a few meals and, you know, take up running marathons or something.  (Yeah.  Right.)  But mostly I hate, hate, hate that I was painfully embarrassed about the behavior of my brilliant, sweet, animated -- and terribly shy -- four-year-old last night.  Yeah, he acted up, and people didn't melt over him the way they melted over Baby Blue.  But really.  How do I think he feels when the house fills up with people he hardly knows, and his proud daddy makes him show off for the crowd?  Well, how do I feel?  Is it any surprise that LG took to making irritating loud noises and bouncing in front of the TV to drown out his own feelings of embarrassment?  Would I rather that he took his feelings out in shame and secrets, like I was trained to do?

I wish I had some great "I've learned so much from this experience" conclusion.  I wish I could say that I've reasoned myself out of my outrageous wild feelings of self-hatred, or that these struggles are all worth it, because now we'll be best! friends! with the neighbors, and friendship is so rewarding.  I hope I can at least say that I'll be more carefully interrogating my reactions to LG when he acts up in situations that must be uncomfortable for him, with his strange mixture of shyness and extroversion.  But beyond that, I got nothing.  Another fucking growth experience.  And I feel lousy about it.

But hey!  There are still plenty of leftover desserts I could binge-eat....