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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #98: Monsters and Ghosts

Sugar — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:24:01 +0000

Dear Sugar,

My mother left my father the month I was born. She remarried and had my brother two years later. My stepfather (the only father I knew) committed suicide when I was five years old. My mother became a raging alcoholic following his death. She didn’t physically or sexually abuse me, but was really good with manipulation and humiliation. She led me to believe it was my fault my step father had killed himself because I was gay, etc.

As a child I was the man of the house, and when I was 13 I staged an intervention for my mom (though I didn’t know there was a name for it until much later). She went away for the weekend, and when she returned, she didn’t drink anymore. We were never allowed to ask or talk about this, or any of the other family “secrets” (like my step father’s death). My mom was a difficult person to love, a dry drunk capable of being terribly awful and mean. She was also incredibly intelligent and could be very loving and sweet.

Thirteen years later my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, and picked up the bottle again. I was her caretaker, and witnessed her decline into alcoholism, until I couldn’t take it anymore. In order to protect myself (and get sober myself) I left my life, my home, my mother, my partner and our cats and my career. I packed a backpack and got on a bus.

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My mother and I had no direct contact for the next three years. We tried to meet once (with professional guidance) for a therapy session, but the stress caused her to go on a bender which led to another long stay in the psych ward. After years of extreme suffering, my mother died three months ago from alcoholism and cancer. I was with her for the last two days of her life. I held her hand and told her it was okay to go and that I loved her.

I have spent the past three years rebuilding my life: I am now sober, have a career-track job, a home, and a new partner. I should be great, but I can’t seem to escape the past and the memories. I constantly doubt my past actions. I feel guilty that I should have stuck with my mom or tried to reconcile with her sooner than I did. I am haunted by the legacy of alcoholism and mental illness and secrecy. As a result, I’m incredibly shy and insecure. I feel lonely, abandoned and damaged. I have a therapist, participate in AA and Al-Anon, and am often a meditation and Buddhist practioner. These things all help a bit, but I fear I will never be able to move past these experiences and have the happy “normal” life I deserve. I know I may never be able to “get over” these things, but what else can I do to feel better about myself, Sugar? Why do all the bad memories overwhelm the good ones? How can I let go?

Sincerely,
A Man’s Home Can’t Be His Castle If He’s Living In A Haunted House

***

Dear Haunted,

When I was eleven, my brother and sister and I went to visit our father. We traveled to the place he lived a thousand miles away from us and spent a week with him and his wife and one-year-old baby. We hadn’t seen him in five years. One afternoon my father made popcorn and told me I could have as much butter as I wanted on it. “More,” I kept saying as he poured the melted butter over the popcorn in my very own gigantic bowl. “More,” I persisted until the entire pile of it deflated like a popped balloon under the weight of all that liquid. I don’t know what posessed me. I couldn’t bring myself to stop saying more until it was ruined. In the end, there was nothing to do but throw the entire sodden mess in the trash.

I’ve thought about that for years. It’s one of those memories that haunts me. It makes me sadder than a lot of the actually sad memories of my father do. I think it’s because when we ruined that popcorn we were both trying so hard. He was, for once, trying to give me everything I wanted and I was trying to get everything I needed and it was way too late for either one.

There would never be enough butter for me in my father’s house. I had to find it elsewhere in the world. Just like you.

You are a fucking amazing person, Haunted, so strong and brave. In spite of every reason not to, you’ve spent your life relentlessly reaching toward the light. You’ve done everything that any therapist, true friend, or half-cracked advice columnist would implore you to do. You set healthy boundaries with your mother even though you had to teach yourself what they were. You faced your own addiction and co-dependency issues and joined a community that supported you in your recovery. You accepted your mother for who she was and forgave her for things many would consider unforgivable. You went to therapy in search of deeper understanding, pursued positive personal paths both professionally and romantically, and developed mental and spiritual practices that no doubt deepen and nurture each of those things.

You have done so damn well, sweet pea. You’ve reached the master level of healing thyself. And yet, here you are. Still you. Haunted and insecure, lonely and wounded, unable to “move past these experiences.” What the hell can you do?

I think the first thing is to recognize how much you have, in fact, moved past these experiences, even though you claim you haven’t. You would not be sober if you hadn’t moved past them. You wouldn’t have been such an astoundingly loving son to your mother if you hadn’t. You likely wouldn’t even have been capable of writing me a letter. While it’s true you’re haunted by your past, it’s truer that you’ve traveled spectacularly far away from it. You swam across a wide and wild sea and you made it all the way to the other side. That it feels different here on this shore than you thought it would does not negate the enormity of the distance you traversed and the strength it took you to do it.

It’s no wonder you thought you’d feel that other, purer way. That reel is playing in a lot of our heads, planted there by a jumble of sources, both mercenary and benevolent, none of which are very much help. We want to believe that on the other side of whatever crap we had to swim away from there’s a crap-free beach where we can lounge in the sun at last. Free and at peace. If anyone deserves that liberation, it’s you, honey bun.

But we can’t erase our lives. We can’t change what our mothers or fathers or step parents were like or what demons or gods ruled them or when they died or how. We can only change who we are in relation to them. We can revise how we narrate those stories of our lives.

A few years ago I lost my temper with my kids and in my anger I told them that they were lucky I was their mom. I yelled that if when I was their age I’d behaved the way they were behaving, my father would have hit me with a belt. They went silent and looked at me. They were so young. They’d never heard about anyone being hit by a belt. The moment after I said what I did I wished I could unsay it, but I couldn’t. So then I apologized and told them a bit about my why I’d been afraid of my father when I was a kid.

They laughed. They actually believed I was joking. Even upon further explanation, they refused to accept what I was telling them was true. It could not be true. They knew how grown ups behaved and it was not the way I described to them—“like monsters and ghosts”—my son said. Like monsters and ghosts.

I had to sit down. It was like after all those years of moving on and processing and letting go and forgiving and coming to peace with and not even giving a shit about it anymore disappeared and everything I ever had to feel or understand or release about who my father was to me was right there and finally decipherable, thanks to the unadulterated and perfectly reasonable perception of my two children, who had such a perception because they’d never in all of their lives encountered a grown up who’d hurt them. Because of this they could concisely and without reservation scoop the last remaining maybe-I-really-am-to-blame bullshit out of my innards and set it on the table so it wouldn’t any longer live inside of me.

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My children gave me a new story to tell myself. Not that my father is a monster or a ghost—he’s neither—but that, like your mom, some of things he did don’t make sense. And they never have to. Those things might as well have been done by some fantastical figure in a scary story that has nothing to do with you or me. We can let it sit like that. We can put it in its proper place.

There is so much about your story that hurts. So many things that shouldn’t have been said or done. Reading your letter feels a bit like being punched in the face. But there is one part that’s different than the rest. It’s this: I was with her for the last two days of her life. I held her hand and told her it was okay to go and that I loved her.

Every time I read those sentences it’s like a horse came up and nuzzled an apple from the palm of my hand. Like the world was all tipped over and the next instant everything was right again. I don’t know precisely how you find your way to the “happy ‘normal’ life you deserve,” but I know you will find it by remembering that in those two days you managed to be the man you aspire to be when it mattered most. Which is the only thing that actually matters at all. You weren’t haunted in those two days. You were flooded with light. You accepted your life for what it was. You allowed it all to be okay. You held love in your heart when others would’ve opted for rage.

You’ll never be someone who had a mother who didn’t fuck with him. You’ll always be a person who had to escape from a crap pile to make his whole amazing self up. There’s a lot of sorrow and ugliness in that. But there’s a lot of beauty too.

That’s how we find our way outward and onward. By holding onto beauty hardest. By cradling it like the cure that it is. By making it realer than anything ever was. The rest is just monsters and ghosts.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #97: You Have Arrived at the Fire

Sugar — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:41:50 +0000

Dear Sugar,

I stutter.
That is the truth that I have lived nearly twenty-eight years of my life trying to avoid. And of course there is no real avoidance because my stutter permeates every single goddamn thing that I do. My stutter is, as you would say, my Obliterated Place.

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There is no real help for me since there is no known cure. There is only acceptance. I have spent a large part of my 20s attempting to come to terms with this reality, only to find, over and over again that having a stutter is the one unforgivable thing. At least in my mind.

I know I did not ask for this. I know it is a hereditary affliction. I know there is just something in my brain that doesn’t work the way other people’s brains work. I know I am not the only stutterer in the world. Yet, I cannot shake off this shame that I feel. It is deeply imbedded in my psyche. The shame is as much a part of me as having brown eyes or being left-handed.

The shame and just pure, raw fear that I feel every single day has led me to abuse alcohol on a very regular basis. I find that when I am drunk, the stutter is less prominent. Incredibly so. I’ve learned that the stutter doesn’t actually go away when I am drunk, it’s just that my inhibitions do. The fear I have of simply opening my mouth to talk is gone when I drink.

I am not sure how to go about letting go of the shame. I find myself apologizing to people if I happen to stutter in front of them. If not with my words, than with my demeanor. Confidence? I am sure that must be a wonderful thing. I have never known it.

When I’m stuttering, I go to a detached place in my mind. It feels like my heart is being ripped out of my chest. For the most part people are kind about it. When they aren’t, the shame is a neon sign pointing to my biggest flaw. My most human part of me. I always remember the people who are not kind about it.

As a child, my family never brought it up unless it was to make fun of me. They did what they knew and I don’t blame them. But this is where the shame started. I was maybe five years old when the stutter became prominent and it has been with me ever since. I have never received any kind of therapy.

I left my home in San Francisco to move to New York because I have never wanted to live in one place my whole life. However, I feel like I have not really given myself a chance to live. Really, truly live. I feel stifled and buried alive by the shame, yet I am hesitant and even afraid to let go of it because a part of me feels that I need to be punished for being a stutterer.

And that’s the gist of it, I suppose. I hate myself because I stutter. Even though I know better and even though I know I did not ask for this, I still blame myself. I blame myself for stuttering and I blame myself for letting my fear of my stutter control me. The fear and the shame rule my life and I am ashamed of that too. I blame myself for that too.

How do I let go and how do I live better? How do I forgive myself for something that is not my fault? I feel like I already know what to do. I’m just waiting to give myself permission to do it and I feel as though time is running out. Help?

Thank you,
Ashamed and Afraid

***

Dear Ashamed and Afraid,

Last December I took the baby Sugars to a winter solstice ritual at a hippy retreat center in the woods. The ritual was held just after sun set in a big community room in an old lodge, where maybe sixty of us were packed in. There was drumming. There were speeches delivered in mystical tones by people bedecked in beads and feathers about the symbolic meanings of north, east, south and west. There was chanting followed by ten minutes of total silence that even—miraculously!—the baby Sugars managed to endure. And then there was a great joyous ululating celebration in which we together welcomed the darkness.

After the joyous ululating died down, the people who were bedecked in beads and feathers lit a fire in the fireplace and before it they placed several giant loaves of bread. We were all instructed to take a hunk of the bread and, from that hunk, take one bite. The rest was to be cast into the fire. The bread we consumed represented what we wanted to bring into our lives, to take in, or make manifest, they explained. The bread that went into the fire represented what each of us hoped to shed or push away.

When I reiterated this symbolic business about the bread to the baby Sugars they looked at me blankly. They couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea of bringing something that wasn’t a material thing into their lives and it was even more difficult for them to understand the notion of casting such a thing out. They did not have any real desire to be stronger or purer or better. They believed themselves to be that already. To them the word manifestmeans only bread in the mouth.

This is as it should be. They are children—so irrefutably of one piece that they’re incapable of making the psychic move it takes to see themselves from even the slightest distance. But you know what, sweet pea? You aren’t. It’s time for you to do the work you need to do to become the person you must be. That means tossing something out—the ugly and false notions you have about your stutter—and taking something in—the fact that you have the power to redirect the blow-torch of your self-hatred and turn it into love.

That you got frozen in the place of fear and shame that first gripped you when you were a child is not surprising. It’s not another thing about which you should silently condemn yourself. Your letter does not convey your weakness and failure to me, darling. It conveys your resilience and your strength. At five, you learned you had a communication disorder and no one helped you make sense of that. You received neither emotional support nor therapeutic treatment. That’s a travesty. But a greater travesty would be that you, at twenty-eight, allow yourself to go on this way.

I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to. It isn’t too late. Time is not “running out.”

Your life is here and now. And the moment has arrived at which you’re finally ready to change. I know it. The thousands of people reading these words right now know it. And you know it too. It’s the reason that you wrote to me.

It’s heart-squinchingly terrible that you’ve been so alone with your stutter for these twenty-eight years, but you have the power to end your isolation in ten seconds if you choose to. Just click on over to the National Stuttering Association, where you will find oodles of information that will help you connect with others who stutter, find therapists and specialists who treat those with your condition, and access other resources that will very likely play an important role in your ability to overcome the shame and fear you’ve gathered around you like a tomb constructed of the shame that has buried you alive.

I implore you to do everything you can to connect yourself to peers and professionals who will offer you support and guidance. Doing so won’t likely make you feel great in one day. You might not even feel great in a year. But you’re going to feel a whole fuck of a lot better, I can promise you that. There isn’t any reason for you to be alone in this, dear one. You are not alone. There are so many people out there who will nod their heads in understanding and recognition when you tell them all the things you just told me.

You have a right to know those people. You deserve to receive their kindness, camaraderie, and expertise. You don’t have to make the same choices your parents made for you. You get to have your real, giant, gorgeous life. As you so clearly articulated, your stutter is not what’s keeping you from that. Your ideas about what it means to have a stutter are. So you need to change them.

Nobody worth your attention gives a damn if you stutter. Write this down on pieces of paper and tape them all over your room. Put one in every pocket of all of your pants. Nobody worth my attention gives a damn if I stutter! They might blush when you stutter. They might awkwardly try to help you communicate. But not because they think you’ve got “one unforgivable thing.” They do that because they have a moment of surprise or discomfort, that in their desire to make you feel okay they don’t quite know what to do and some of them do the wrong thing.

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You don’t need to take responsibility for that. You need to find a way to laugh it off or address it directly or let it simply be there, unconnected to you. The people and resources I directed you to will help you begin to stop internalizing this crap. And so will a lot of other people. It might help you to remember that your struggle is ultimately so much like the struggles many of us have to feel right in the world. Many of us have had to make life-changing emotional and psychological shifts about who we are so we could become the people we’re here to be. You are not outside of us, even if it feels to you like you are.

I believe someday you’ll know that in your heart. I think years from now you’ll look back at this time of your life and you’ll see that this was your growing up. One of the hardest things about doing that—I mean, really, truly, actually growing up—is that in order to do so we must come to terms with the past. And for a lot of us who didn’t get as kids what we needed to get from the people who were supposed to give it to us, we can’t really grow up until we find a way to give what we need to ourselves.

But that’s also one of the most beautiful things. Because we can. We have the power to heal what needs to be healed. We get to give ourselves that. We have the capacity to stand before the scorching flames and decide what to swallow and what to cast out. That’s where you are, Ashamed and Afraid. You have arrived at the fire. Here’s the bread. Grab a hunk.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #96: The Dark Cocoon

Sugar — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:07:17 +0000

Dear Sugar,

Please oh please help me. I’m so mixed up and in so much pain that I’m beginning to be afraid I might kill myself, though I have two small children and basically know I can’t and would never, and I definitely know how crazy and self-dramatizing that is. The very fact that I think of killing myself when I am a mother is scaring the shit out of me.

I am somewhat unhappily married to a complicated man, who is also a wonderful man in many ways—aren’t we all both monsters and nice people? During my last pregnancy I very unwisely started an inappropriate correspondence with an ex from high school online. (Thanks, Facebook!) I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew I was lonely and angry at my husband for all the reasons people in their 30s with little kids get angry at each other (just a little more so in our case). Somehow I thought I could get away with crossing a little line without it turning into anything. I was faithful, a good wife, a good person, a pillar of her community, a good friend, “I would never,” etc….

Well, this ex and I fell in love. I turned out that he is a cross-dresser (I didn’t know about it in high-school) and I’ve always been kind of wanting to be a lesbian, but not really into girls (I’ve tried). We both have serious abuse in our backgrounds. We both feel like together we could be complete, ourselves, intimate in ways that we’ve never even imagined being with another person. I know how cliché that is, though it feels different in this case (another cliché!) because of the fetish and power-exchange aspects of our relationship.

I’ve only been aware of the extent of the physical and psycho-sexual abuse in my childhood since starting therapy a few years ago. (I originally started therapy with my husband, pre-affair, and it sort of improved things until this….) The affair has been mainly virtual, though my love and I have seen each other once. Though it has now been going on for over a year, the “active affair” have been only for short periods of time. I can correspond with my love for about a month, before the guilt and pain and horror and fear make me stop.

As I said, I have tiny children. I’m so afraid of leaving my husband to raise them on my own or without my husband’s emotional and logistical support. I’m so sad to hurt and abandon my husband, whose life has not been easy either. He’s done shitty things to me in the past few years, but he doesn’t deserve this. I’ve gone for periods of one to three months totally out of touch with my love, but I just feel sadder and more depressed and darker and more lonely without him. He can and would move to my city and be with me. But if I left my husband I would be in uncharted waters.

I often fear that I’m losing my mind. I am in therapy, and have discussed medication with my therapist, but it’s hard to believe that my problem is medication-requiring when it seems so situational. My therapist hasn’t come down strongly one way or another. I’m currently in another it’s-finally-over phase with my love, but it doesn’t feel over at all. Also, I feel so miserable around my husband that sometimes I can barely talk. I’m drinking, I’m smoking, I’m watching TV. I’m hiding behind the children. I want to just tell my husband the truth and then let everyone deal with the situation like adults, but I have received legal advice that says that it would be foolish and crazy to give my husband information about the affair and the fetish aspects (which I feel like is crucial to any of this making sense and being true) when facing a custody battle.

My husband works long hours and I am the primary caretaker of our children (see: how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place), but he has already told me that he’ll fight me for custody to his last breath if I try to leave him. He’s a powerful guy and very tenacious. I’m trying to love him and get over these feelings and absorb and accept that this is my life and I can’t change it, but, again, the darkness….

What can I do? Can you help? The last piece of semi-relevant information here might be that though I know I sound hysterical and dramatic and possibly dangerous, this is so out of character for me. I’ve always been the person with her shit together, self-sufficient, there in other people’s times of need and so on.

I really pray you answer my letter. Thank you.

Despair Girl

***

Dear Despair Girl,

The only time I’ve ever felt certain that I was about to die was on the last day of the year in 1991. I was 23 years old and sitting in the passenger seat of a borrowed SUV that was being driven by my ex-husband along a cold country highway at eight o’clock in the morning. We were heading north on an hours-long drive to a New Year’s Eve gathering with a small group of our friends who’d rented a cabin in the woods. We’d left our apartment in the city just after dawn in hopes of reaching our destination in time to go cross-country skiing before the sun went down.

There was no traffic. In fact, only occasionally did another car pass by, going the opposite direction. The road was set slightly above the rest of the terrain, the ditches dropping off steeply before flattening out and giving way to the woods beyond, all of it covered by a few feet of snow. Winter in the Upper Midwest. We were moving along at something like 58 miles an hour until suddenly the SUV was careening sideways toward the ditch on the other side of the road, having hit, apparently a patch of black ice.

“Get control of the car,” I said to my ex-husband calmly and quietly as we swerved perilously from one side of the road to the other, each correction an over-correction that sent us lurching horribly on. “Get control of the car,” I repeated in the same tone, as if I could will it to happen.

But he could not get control of the car. There was no relationship between what he was doing with the steering wheel and brakes and what the vehicle we were in was doing with us. We seemed to pick up speed instead of slow as we swooped sickeningly from one side of the highway to the other until finally, in one excruciatingly long glide, we left the road and became airborne.

I’ll never forget the feeling of that—flying in the car—and also how long that moment was, though I’m sure it was over in a flash. In this strange span of time, I understood that I was probably going to die in something like five seconds and my feelings about that moved from so deeply sad to so deeply accepting so quickly that it’s astonishing to remember it now. No! Please! Okay! is what I thought with breathless clarity. The other thing that happened in that glimmer of time between leaving the road and landing wherever we’d land was that neither my ex-husband nor I braced ourselves. Instead, we simultaneously reached to clutch each other with both of our hands and, together, in the same instant, shouted I LOVE YOU!

And then, instantly, we went down. Nose first. There was a tremendous slow motion thud followed by a ferocious blur as we tumbled end over end over end over end until at last we came to a stop among the trees.

It was so silent then. I don’t know if there’s ever been a moment so silent in my life since. Me. My ex-husband. The road somewhere like a mute film of a far off dream. We looked at each other. It took me a while to understand that we were upside down, hanging by the seat belts that had saved us. We were covered in tiny blunt shards of glass and drenched with a red liquid that I later comprehended was wine—bottles we’d brought along for the evening’s festivities that had shattered in the tumult. But we were alive.

I was shaken by the accident, but not for the reasons it would seem I’d be shaken—not the frightful careening or the terrifying flight or the violent tumbling. I was shaken by the beauty of that moment when my ex-husband let go of the steering wheel and we both did and said the exact same thing without thinking about it or agreeing upon it or hesitating. In the end, we clutched each other and shouted our love. I didn’t want to die, but if I was going to, I was glad to be doing it with him. It’s one of the purest revelations of my life.

This, even though I was already aching to leave him. Even though a little more than two years later I did. Even though it’s been more than a decade since I’ve even spoken to him.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with you, Despair Girl, and I’ve wondered the same thing. But in the eleven weeks since you wrote to me it’s the story that keeps surfacing when I ponder your conundrum. Maybe it’s because I can feel you almost viscerally sliding down the empty road, knowing you’re going to crash but not knowing what it is you’ll crash into. Maybe because the question you’re up against is who you’re going to grab when you go airborne. Maybe it’s because at the time of this car accident I was basically where you are, in the gnarly thick of transformation, and I didn’t know where I was going to land or how.

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I used to see a butterfly in my mind’s eye every time I heard the word transformation, but life has schooled me. Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It’s huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It’s sitting there in your pajamas, pregnant with your second child, flirting on Facebook with someone you dated in high school. It’s imagining you might leave your husband for a man you’ve seen only once during the most stressful time in your adult life and thinking it will work out. It’s the messy work you have ahead of you, Despair, of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hangups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become. The one who doesn’t wallow in her own despair.

It doesn’t surprise me everything seems like its unraveling for you right now. These recent years during which you’ve become a mother have been radically transformative, for both you and your marriage. Having children is the greatest joy for most parents, but it’s also a major mindfuck. All the terms change. Some are rewritten for you, others you rewrite yourself—personally, practically, professionally, romantically, sexually, financially, logistically and otherwise.

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My own marriage to Mr. Sugar during those first few post-partum years was not so different from yours. We were more bonded than ever because we needed each other like never before, but there was loneliness and anger too. After our second child was born we slept in separate beds for months so I could dedicate my nights to tending to our newborn while he tended to our toddler. One time I got so mad at Mr. Sugar about the fact that every time he goes to the grocery store he only manages to remember half the stuff we need, I stabbed him in the thigh with my toothbrush. One time I brought our kids to their preschool and I came home and told Mr. Sugar that I had the impulse to ask one of the preschool dads I’d chatted with at drop-off to go with me to a hotel, where we would spend the morning fucking each other’s brains out. Not because I had any real desire for this other fellow. Not that I wanted to cheat on my beloved and hot Mr. Sugar. But because I wanted to spend the morning with someone who wanted to fuck my brains out who was not also someone whom I’d stabbed with a toothbrush in the course of a conflict about groceries.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you began your online emotional affair while you were pregnant with your second baby and mothering your first. Nor is it surprising that you reached back in time and sought solace and excitement with a man who knew you long ago, who desired you before you were a mother and clobbered by all that being the primary caregiver of two small children entails. You say that you’re aware that your outsized feelings for your ex and your justifications about the affair you’re having with him are cliché, but your self-awareness does not let you off the hook. Instead, it tells me you already suspect what you don’t want to know: that this ex, as particular as he seems, could be anyone. That what you have with him is so steeped in fantasy it might be made entirely of smoke. That your affair with him is not about you and him, but rather you holding up a mirror to yourself, your every desire for a different life reflected back to you.

And that the whole shebang is stoked by lust. Which is famously unreliable as a life plan.

I feel sort of like an asshole saying this to you because I know your feelings for your ex are terribly real. I sympathize with your heartache. But I would be remiss not to tell you in the most direct terms possible that pretty much nothing you said about your husband makes me think you can’t work it out with him if you want to and everything you said about your ex sounds sketchy to me. Not because he’s sketchy—I trust he’s a perfectly lovely human being—but because you, Despair Girl, hit a patch of black ice and right now you’re careening around, unsure where or when you’ll stop. Do any internal alarm bells go off when you hear yourself say that a man you’ve known almost exclusively online in the course of a year-long off-and-on illicit affair makes you feel “complete”? Anything go beep, beep, BEEP! when you review the portion of your letter in which you mention in passing that you and your husband had “sort of improved things until” you began your affair?

I think the answer is yes. I think that’s why you wrote to me. I think your lusty virtual fantasy love is your delicious escape from a marriage strained by too much drudgery and resentment. And yet, where has this delicious escape brought you? To the place where you’re in so much pain you ponder crazy things like killing yourself, that’s where.

You have to go somewhere else, sweet pea. You have to move beyond despair. You have to find the next version of yourself, the more evolved iteration of the woman you used to be.

You don’t do that by choosing between accepting your misery with one man you love or giving way to the fantastical idea of another. You do that by coming to terms with who it is you’ve become and doing the emotional work it requires to let that woman fly. That’s where I was on that day in 1991 when I truly thought I was going to die: a woman about to lacerate the shit out herself while pushing away her own cocoon. When that SUV left the road, it wasn’t just any day. It was the last day of the year in which my mother had died and everything that year had changed.

I was on the brink of being forced to change too. I left a man I loved so much I was content to die beside him. I did it because my purer revelation—more pure than my love for him—was that I couldn’t be the person I’d become while committed to him. In another time, in my marriage with Mr. Sugar, I’ve had transformations that led me in the other direction—toward a richer, more profound commitment, and a happier one too.

I can’t say which it’s going to be for you—whether you should reinvest in the intimacy you have or squander it for the promise of a new love. But I know you have to work harder to find the answer that’s within you. The truth will come to you once you stop careening. Don’t brace yourself. Clutch onto whatever you love the most when the tires leave the road.

Yours,
Sugar

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #95: The Dudes In the Woods Debacle

Sugar — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:49:12 +0000

Dear Sugar,

Three of my best college buddies and I go away for an annual guys weekend at a cabin in the woods. We’re all in our mid-thirties and we’ve been doing these get-togethers for close to a decade. It’s our way of staying in touch, since we’ve all got busy lives and some of us reside in different cities. Though at times I’ll go months without talking to them, I consider these guys my closest friends. We’ve seen each other through several relationships, two weddings, one divorce, one of us coming out as gay, one of us realizing he’s an alcoholic and getting sober, one of us becoming a father, dysfunctional family issues, the death of another one of our close college friends, professional successes and failures, and—you get the picture.

On our most recent get together a few months ago, I overheard my friends discussing me. Before this incident occurred, the four of us had been on the subject of my love life. My long-time girlfriend and I broke up last year for reasons I won’t go into here, but I did go into with my friends back when she and I decided to end things. Not long before my weekend with the guys, she and I got back together and I told them my ex and I were making a go of it again. They didn’t say much in response, but I wouldn’t have expected them to.

Later that day I stepped out for a walk, but soon realized I’d forgotten my hat, so I returned to the cabin to get it. The moment I opened the door I could hear my friends in the kitchen discussing me. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t keep myself from listening, since they were talking about my girlfriend and me. I wouldn’t say they were trashing me, but they did make critical remarks about the way I “justify” my relationship and other things about my personality that were unflattering. About five minutes into this, I opened the door and shut it hard so they would know I was there and they stopped talking.

I tried to pretend I didn’t hear what they’d said, but soon I told them what had happened. They were extremely embarrassed. Each of them apologized, assured me they meant nothing by what they said, and claimed they were only concerned that I’d gotten back together with my girlfriend, who they don’t think is good for me. I played it off like it was cool and acted like I wanted to let bygones be bygones, but it’s been a few months and I’m still bothered by what happened. I feel betrayed. It’s none of their business who I choose to date for one thing and for another I’m pissed they were running me down like that.

I recognize that I’m possibly taking this too hard. I’ll admit that I have talked about each of them with the others over the years. I’ve made statements I wouldn’t want the person in question to hear, even secondhand. The rational part of me understands that these sorts of discussions among friends are to be expected. It sounds weak to admit this, but I’m hurt. Part of me wants to tell them to go fuck themselves when it comes to the weekend at the cabin next year. What do you think? Should I forgive and forget or find new a batch of buddies?

Odd Man Out

***

Dear Odd Man Out,

What a disaster. How dreadful it must have been to hear your friends saying negative things about you. How mortified they must have felt when they learned you’d been listening. You have every reason to be upset and hurt. And yet….and yet—you knew there was going to be an “and yet,” didn’t you?—in the scheme of things this is quite small, quite ordinary. I’m positive you should not toss these friends aside for a new batch of them.

Besides—those new friends? They’d only talk about you behind your back too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Perhaps the first step in getting over this is to talk to your friends and collectively acknowledge that what happened was indeed deeply unfortunate. By hearing what you were not meant to hear you punctured a social code that’s in place to protect your feelings. You heard your friends express opinions about you that they are too polite to tell you and they expressed them in blunt language they would not have used had they known you were listening. You witnessed a discussion that was being had about you that was unbound by concern for your feelings. No wonder you feel so stung. Anyone would.

That your friends have those opinions, however, does not mean that they don’t love you or value you as a friend or otherwise think you are one of the best people they know. That may be difficult to believe at this moment, when your feelings are so raw, but it’s true.

We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studied human communication behaviors. Even you admitted to doing this. Our friends are witness to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects of our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected. Like anything, there are healthy and constructive ways to do this and unhealthy and destructive ways.

A healthy way is rooted in respect and love. In this case, we make critical assessments and uncomplimentary observations entirely within the context of our affection and concern for the individual in question. Sometimes we talk behind a friend’s back in order to grapple with our doubts about or disapproval of the choices he or she has made. Sometimes we do it because our friends possess qualities that confound, confuse, or annoy the shit out of us, though we love them anyway. Sometimes we discuss our friends with others because we had a weird or rude or dumb interaction with one of them and we simply need to blow off steam. The baseline of these discussions is a grounded knowledge that we love and care for the friend—regardless of the things that irk, confuse, or disappoint us about him or her. The negative thoughts we express about this friend are outweighed by the many positive thoughts we have.

An unhealthy way to talk about a friend behind his or her back is rooted in cruelty, ill will and oftentimes jealousy. There is a lack of generosity and a cutting glee; one takes pleasure in ripping the so-called friend to shreds. Though we may pretend otherwise, we don’t truly want good things for him or her. We like to take him or her down a peg. We are judgmental and petty. We will not protect that friend, but are instead willing to betray him or her if the situation serves us. On the other hand, we are happy to use this “friendship” to our advantage, should the opportunity arise. Our affection is one of convenience rather than heart.

So. There’s a good way and a bad way to gossip, but either way it pretty much sucks to overhear it if you happen to be the subject of the conversation. There is no question that given what happened, Odd Man Out, you and your friends are going to have to repair a bit of damage. I believe that with some time, you can do that.

It seems clear to me that your friends were discussing you from a place of love and concern—the healthy place. My hunch is that your friends were unconsciously attempting to strengthen their bond with you rather than rend it when they were discussing you that day at the cabin. After all, when this “incident” occurred, you’d just informed them that you’d reunited with a woman they all apparently believe—fairly or not—is a negative force in your life. If they didn’t care about you, they wouldn’t have bothered to discuss this turn of events. Because they do care about you, they began speaking about it the moment they believed you were out of earshot. Collectively, they hashed out their feelings—in preparation, perhaps, to share a watered down version of them with you.

This is this because they love you. Don’t lose sight of that just because you all got caught in an embarrassing situation that I’ll guess every last one of us can imagine being on both sides of.

I suggest that you talk to your friends again about what happened, only this time you do it more forthrightly. No doubt, your hurt feelings are lingering in part because you so quickly attempted to brush them aside. Let the dudes in the woods debacle bring you closer to your friends rather than force you apart. Use this awkward experience as an opportunity to clear the air on the subject of your girlfriend and whatever it is your dearest friends think you’re justifying about your relationship with her. Tell them how hurt you were to hear what they said. Tell them why you think they are wrong. Tell them why you love your girlfriend and why they should be open to loving her too. Then ask them why they said what they did about you and her and do your best to listen.

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Your choice of romantic partners is none of their business, it’s true, but the reason they have an opinion about it is because they want you to have a good life. They know you. They have listened to what you’ve told them about your relationship with this woman and they’ve made their own observations. I’m not suggesting that you dump your girlfriend because your friends don’t like her, but rather that you hear what they have to say. Perhaps they have a negative opinion of her because when you broke up with her and shared the story of that break up with your friends you cast her in an inaccurately unflattering light. Perhaps they simply don’t know what they’re talking about and you need to set them straight. Perhaps they see something you cannot see right now, blinded as you may be by desire for this relationship to work.

We can’t know. Time will tell. But I encourage you to swallow your pride and hear your friends out, to look at the image of yourself they’re reflecting back to you. It might be useful. It might piss you off. It might help you get over the tender feelings you have about what happened at the cabin. The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it’s almost always only in retrospect we know which is which.

I have this dear friend I’ll call Beth. She fell in love fast and hard with a guy I’ll call Tom. Over the course of a year or two Tom took Beth on a ride of highs and lows. There was love, deception, abandonment, lies, passion, promises, and a whole bunch of absolute bullshit. She was up. She was down. She was standing on my front stoop shaking and crying or calling me to say how amazing Tom was. When I’d been witness to this relationship long enough that I’d formed my own opinion about it, I began sharing my concerns with Beth. I was gentle at first, but before long I could not keep myself from telling her exactly what I thought in the most blunt terms: this man was a player and by not ridding herself of him, Beth was only bringing pain upon herself.

It took another several months and false starts and betrayals before she believed I was right. By then she’d wished she’d listened to what I said way back when, but the thing is, I wouldn’t have listened either. Who does what a friend tells her to do? I can’t say I ever have, even when later I fully recognized that I should’ve.

After a while Beth began dating another guy. I’ll call him Dave. About a month into their relationship she called me up and told me they were engaged.

“To be married?” I stuttered, trying to conceal my disapproval and fear that this Dave person was going to be another disaster, another Tom.

“Yes! I know it’s fast, but we’re in love and we’re getting married,” she said. She was sure. He was great. She was so happy. She knew this was right.

I spent a half hour asking her one question after another in tone of voice that I hoped sounded upbeat, but when I hung up I didn’t feel upbeat. I felt worried. I immediately emailed another of Beth’s close friends—a woman with whom I’m only acquainted. I asked her what she thought about this crazy business of Beth getting married to this guy she’d only been dating for a month. We went back and forth, discussing Beth. We shared with each other her tendencies when it came to men, our observations of her strengths and her weaknesses, the things we hoped for her and also feared. We knew her. We loved her. We wanted her to be happy, but we were talking shamelessly about her behind her back.

Months later, after Beth married Dave, after I realized Dave really did make Beth happy and that he was good not just to her, but for her, I told her what I’d done. I told her how I’d emailed her friend because I’d been distressed about how quickly she and Dave had committed to each other. I could see the tension cross her face as I informed her that two of her best friends had been discussing her. I could understand why it made her feel defensive and uncomfortable. Who were we to weigh in on the subject of who she married and how fast? I understood that completely.

But I also understood who it was we were. We were two of her best friends. We were the people who listened to her tell all those awful and glorious stories about Tom and we would be the people who would be there for her regardless of how things turned out with Dave. We would be her friends no matter what. Because we loved her. If she needed us, we would go to her any time. We would stand by her. She knew this and I knew the same about her. I knew she’d always tell me the truth, even if it hurt, and I also knew that she’d take care not to hurt me. I knew over the course of our friendship she too might have opinions or concerns about me that she’d opt to discuss with someone else in words that would be best for me not to hear. And I knew that was okay, that it was a perfectly natural part of sustaining a true friendship over many years, that it wasn’t a betrayal, but a blessing.

That’s what you have in these men, Odd Man Out. True friends. Real blessings. Forgive them. Feel lucky you have them. Move along.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #94: The Amateur

Sugar — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:21:21 +0000

Dear Sugar,

I just heard that you plan to reveal your identity at a party The Rumpus is having for you on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know how I feel about that! I really want to know who you are, but I also don’t want to know. I’m afraid knowing will ruin the magic you’ve created here. You’ve thought this through and I trust you’ve made the right decision for yourself, but could you explain your decision further please? Does this mean there will be no more “Dear Sugar” column? Will you keep writing it under your real name?

Thank you!
Unsure

***

Dear Unsure,

In the beginning many of you assumed I was Stephen Elliott. Months later I received an email from a reader telling me she’d done her research and figured out I was Elizabeth Ellen. Later still many members of The Rumpus Book Club were sure I had to be Lidia Yuknavitch. I’m none of these people, though the company flatters me.

Whenever anyone asked who I was I told them I would tell them someday. I said it here and here and here and I said it every time anyone inquired over email or Twitter or Facebook. I want to tell you who I am because it feels like the right thing to do, like we’ve reached a point of intimacy where I really ought to introduce myself. I want to see what happens next, to experience the column as the Sugar who doesn’t have to keep that one big secret that hundreds of you have been told or figured out on your own by now anyway. The Sugar column won’t change, at least outwardly. I’ll continue to write it as Sugar. You’ll simply know who I am after February 14^th.

As if in so many more meaningful ways, you don’t know already.

I have a book of poems called The Only Window That Counts by a poet named Deborah Keenan that I inherited from my mother after she died. I read it over and over again all through my twenties. I loved that book so much, not only for the beautiful poems, but also for the brief notes my mother had scrawled in the margins in response to them. I read the book so often that I reached the point where I stopped reading it because the words inside had become part of me—both the poems and my mother’s notes. I knew them.

One of the things I knew was that there was a poem in the book called “Anonymous” and beside it my mother had written “someone who does something for Love.” Just like that—with love capitalized and underlined. I’ve thought so often about that poetic definition of the word anonymous over these past twenty-two months that I’ve been Sugar. It seemed the only definition I needed. Love was my mission and my reason.

So it came as some surprise when, as I wrote this letter to you mere hours before it was to be published, I pulled Deborah Keenan’s book from my shelf and paged to the poem I’ve carried in me so long only to see that its title is not “Anonymous,” but rather “The Amateur.” Though I was exactly right about the note my mother had made next to its title—right down to its capitalization and underlining—I was mistaken about the title itself and therefore wrong about the poetic meaning of the word anonymous.

An anonymous person does not do something for Love, it turns out. An amateur does.

That I was an amateur at giving advice when I agreed to take over the “Dear Sugar” column from the genius writer who wrote columns 1-26 was never in doubt. That I would write it anonymously was.

Why not simply call it Ask (my real name)? Isaac Fitzgerald, Stephen Elliott, the first Sugar, and I collectively wondered over email. There was no reason in particular not to, we all agreed. If I used my real name at least I’d get “credit,” which would perhaps make up a tiny bit for the fact that I wasn’t being paid. The decision was up to me. Anonymity won out because I was interested in doing something I’d never done before. I thought it would be a hoot to write whatever I wanted while hiding behind Sugar’s veil. I could be someone I made up—a funnier, snarkier, more outlandishly fucked up and/or more unimpeachably flawless version of myself. I could boss people around without consequences. At last, for once, nothing was at stake.

Or so I thought for about ten minutes.

Way up high on the list of the values and truths I most deeply hope to convey in this column is the fact that something is always at stake. Our integrity. Our internal sense of peace. Our relationships. Our communities. Our children. Our ability to bear the weight of the people we hope to be and forgive the people we are. Our obligation to justice, mercy, kindness, and doing the stuff in bed (or beneath the bathroom sink) that genuinely gets us off.

Given this, I quickly realized there was no way in hell I could write a column that offered advice about how to live and love while making myself into a cooler caricature of someone I halfway sort of didn’t actually wish to be. I had to give you the person I am in response to the people you told me you were; to hand over whatever stories or thoughts or opinions or observations that came to me through my authentic self—the one otherwise known as me.

So I gave her to you as Sugar, while dismantling what anonymous means.

Aside from my name and a few identifying details, I’ve told you many of the most intimate details about my life. I’ve shared my secrets and sorrows and fears and desires and innermost struggles and work-a-day realities. I’ve told you so much that I deleted the paragraph I originally wrote here, in which I summarized the things you know about me, because it went on too long and you know them already anyway.

And yet: you “don’t know who I am.” Isn’t that interesting?

I didn’t write all that stuff about myself because I was freed by my anonymity. I wrote it because I’m me. The way I write the Sugar column is the way I write. Because of this, many of you have figured out my name. You read something I wrote as the “real me” and you recognized me. You knew me without knowing me.

Maybe what scares some readers about knowing who I am is that they don’t want to see me. They want to see themselves against who they imagine me to be. Ruth Franklin wrote about this in her article about my anonymity in The New Republic last summer. She wondered if my “column can continue to maintain its aura of wisdom…if the woman behind the curtain is revealed,” and noted that “‘Anonymous’ swells in proportion to something far larger than an ordinary name.” She expressed concern that it will be harder for you to take my advice once you attach it to a particular person—me—rather than an online persona as “anonymity bestows upon an author something akin to a magical power.”

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I think it’s interesting that you both used the word magic, Unsure. As in, the magic will be ruined if I tell you who I am. Mr. Sugar worries about this too, as do many readers who already know who I am, which I find odd, since the “magic” of my anonymity either never existed for them (because they began reading the column already knowing who I was) or it was “ruined” long ago (because they learned my identity along the way). These people are some of my biggest fans. The “magic is ruined” for them, but they’re digging it anyway and so their worry isn’t about their experience of the column, but rather what they perceive as the experience of others who don’t know my identity and therefore must presumably have some level of perceived magic maintained in order to find it meaningful.

The magic of anonymity for women writers throughout history is that it allowed them to publish their work. They wrote under male pseudonyms or they didn’t sign their names at all. A woman’s name on a poem or essay or story or play was the opposite of magic. That has gnawed at me. Virginia Woolf famously said “anonymous was a woman,” but I never intended to be one of those women. I owe them too much to be.

But of course you and Mr. Sugar and Ruth Franklin are speaking of a different sort of magic—the magic of mystery, of knowing something but not everything. Perhaps you’re right about the necessity of this particular kind of magic. Maybe this whole thing will crumble once who I am is no longer a secret. I’ve embraced that as one possibility. I’ve even thought it might be for the best. I respect people who write advice columns for years on end, but I don’t imagine I’ll be one of them. I always believed there would be a natural end to the “Dear Sugar” column—or at least a drastic downshift in its regularity. I’ve written it as a body of work in a way more akin to a novel or memoir than a years-long Q & A. There’s a beginning, middle and end.

I don’t know exactly where we are now. I only know we’re at the place where the plot thickens.

A couple of years ago I was at a big reception where many writers were in attendance and someone pointed out a woman nearby and told me it was the poet Deborah Keenan. I asked the woman to introduce us and she did. I didn’t embarrass myself by expressing my admiration for a poem she never wrote called “Anonymous,” but I did tell her how much her book had meant to me and how much my dead mother had also loved it and how, as it happens, one of the last things my mother did before she was too sick to do anything was attend a reading that Deborah gave, where she also signed my mother’s book. She was gracious and warm to me—nodding and smiling at my little story—but it was difficult to think of what else to say as we stood there being jostled by people all around us.

Maybe that’s what’s hard about knowing people’s names. We don’t know how to tell them we love them. Their particularity makes us vague.

What you get from not knowing my name is that you don’t have to contend with whatever biases you might have about me based on how I look or what else I’ve written. Not knowing me allows you to have a purer vision of me. The actual me can’t interfere with whatever you’ve decided.

If you recognize my name when I tell you what it is, will it disappoint or delight you? If don’t recognize my name when I tell you what it is, does anything change? How am I less anonymous to you if my name is only a name? Here are the names of some of my favorite advice columnists:

Rob Breszny (who is not technically an advice columnist, but close enough).

There they are, but what really do their names mean to me? I “know” them, but I do not know them. Between us there is the porous wall of knowing and unknowing, intimacy and distance, familiarity and formality that exists between any writer and his or her readers. Perhaps with Sugar and perhaps because Sugar is anonymous that wall is more porous than most reader/writer walls and what’s discomforting is that if I tell you one big thing about me—my name—I might feel compelled to tell you fewer little things. Some of the holes in the wall might need to be plugged.

This is another thing about which we’ll just have to wait and see.

I didn’t exactly know that wall would be so very porous when I first began writing this column, but I quickly realized that telling stories about my life was often the only way I knew how to communicate the complexity of my advice. Your story spilled into mine and then I spilled it back into you, with hopes that we’d all find ourselves somewhere in the big story that belongs to all of us in a place we made up called Sugarland, where you know me already, even though you don’t know me at all.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #93: How The Real Work Is Done

Sugar — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:05:06 +0000

I’m answering two letters at once this week, sweet peas.

Dear Sugar,

I am newly civilly unioned. I love my spouse (wife?) dearly, though we have our issues. What appears to me to be our biggest problem—the one that keeps me up some nights—is that she won’t get a job.

We’re a quite poor couple in our mid-twenties, both in school. We’ve been together for four years, and in that time my girl has had three jobs: one she was laid off from because the job ended, one she quit, and one she was fired from. All these jobs lasted fewer than six months.

She’s made halfhearted attempts to placate me in the year and a half she’s been unemployed. Mostly though? We fight, she cries, she shuts down, she lies and says she’s been trying to find a job, even though I know she hasn’t. She has moderate social anxiety issues and says she can’t work any jobs involving other people because of it. She doesn’t even offer up excuses for not applying to any number of other jobs I’ve suggested (throwing newspapers! work-study in a low-traffic area of her school! selling her lovely quirky crafts online! dishwashing!). At one point, she suggested that she would rather donate plasma every week than get a job.

Sugar, I’m a full-time student working two jobs. We’re barely getting by on what I’m bringing in. We frequently must rely on my parents for money, and they’re rapidly losing their ability to keep up with my financial needs in addition to their own. I worry so much about this. I worry that my partner will never be motivated enough to hold a job. I worry about what her job prospects are going to be when she reaches thirty in a few years without ever actually having held a long-term job. I worry that, though she sees my struggles, she will never feel guilty enough to get things kicked into gear.

What can I possibly do to get her to take job searching seriously? She’s emotionally fragile, due to years of social anxiety, sexual and emotional abuse from her father, and a recurring eating disorder. Because of that, I don’t want to threaten her with any ultimatums, because I wouldn’t mean any of them and I fear it would do more harm than good. My girl’s got a good heart, but she is so afraid of failure that she willfully ignores how much I sacrifice to keep our rent paid. I love her, and she loves me, yet I feel I’m without a partner in this. I don’t know what to do next. Please help.

Working for Two

***

Dear Sugar,

My husband makes me laugh every day, EVERY day, multiple times. He’s been my best friend for years and is still my favorite person in the world. He’s enriched my life in so many innumerable ways and he has told me that I have reciprocated that enrichment. I do love him so. SO. And I am quite certain he loves me.

The issue is that he’s been unemployed for over three years. He did try to find a job for a while (and I believe he still occasionally does), but now I think he feels unqualified for anything other than the job he used to hate and also that he has no reason to be hired for anything else. Inertia has taken him over. He wants to write, but feels unworthy, so he doesn’t write. He is brilliant and funny and erudite, but he sees none of that. He doesn’t paint/sculpt/whatever might give him fulfillment or do anything that would move him forward in his life. I would be happy with him doing anything (and I truly mean that), yet he seems to be stuck. He’s also bipolar and self-hating and all of that.

Fortunately, my job carries us financially, but only barely. The house is clean, the laundry is done, the dog is walked, but in three years he hasn’t been able to figure out a way to financially contribute to our household. He’s stressed out about the fact that we have trouble paying our bills, but he does nothing (truly nothing) to change it. If I had plenty of money, I’d be fine with this, but I don’t. I’ve been carrying this load alone for a long time. I have repeatedly tried to talk to him about this, to no avail.

I love him so much and I’m so sad about this. I think my staying with him may be ruining both our lives. Perhaps my support is keeping him from fulfilling his dreams. What do you think, Sugar?

Responsible One

***

Dear Women,

As I’m sure you both know, there is nothing inherently wrong with a spouse who makes no money. The most common scenario in which it makes sense for one spouse to earn an income while the other does not is when the couple has a child or children who must be cared for, which goes along with a domestic life that requires constant vigilance of the cleaning, shopping, cooking, washing, folding, tidying up, taking-the-cat-to-the-vet-and-the-kids-to-the-dentist variety. In this situation and others like it, the “non-working” spouse is often doing more work, hour for hour, than the “working” spouse and though on paper it appears that the one with the job is making a greater financial contribution to the household than the one who “stays at home,” if you ran the numbers and figured out what it would cost to employ someone to do the work of the “non-working” spouse, it becomes apparent that one should probably shut their big trap when it comes to who is contributing what.

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There are other reasons, usually more fleeting, that one spouse may not be earning money in any given period: if he or she is unemployed or seriously ill or attending school full-time or caring for an infirm or dying parent or working in a field in which the money comes only after an extended period of what may or may not turn out to be unpaid labor.

Neither of you appears to be in any of those circumstances. While it’s technically true that both of your spouses are unemployed, it seems clear that something more complex is at play here. Your spouse, Working for Two, has such a spotty and brief record of employment that unemployment is her customary mode rather than a temporary state of affairs. Your spouse, Responsible One, has apparently drifted into a post-unemployment funk and has given up the search for a job. You both feel overly burdened and seriously bummed out. You’re both desperate for change. You’ve both shared your feelings with your partners and been met with compassionate indifference (ie. I feel terrible, sweetie, but I’m not going to do a damn thing about it).

What a mess.

I hope it’s not going to be news to you when I say you can’t make your partners get jobs. Or at least you can’t make them get jobs by doing what you’ve done so far—appealing to their better nature regarding what’s fair and reasonable, imploring them to act out of their concern for you and your wishes, as well as your collective financial well-being. Whatever dark angst is keeping your spouses from taking responsibility for their lives—depression, anxiety, a loss of self-confidence, a fear-based desire to maintain the status quo—it’s got a greater hold on them than any angry fits you’ve pitched about being the only one bringing in any dough.

It’s a truism of transformation that if we want things to be different we have to change ourselves. I think both of you are going to have to take this to heart the way anyone who has ever changed anything about their lives has had to take it to heart: by making it not just a nice thing we say, but a hard thing we do. Your spouses may or may not decide to get jobs in response to your changes, but that is out of your control.

The way I see it, there are two paths out of your misery. They are:

a) Accept the fact that your partner won’t get a job (or even seriously delve into the reasons he/she won’t seek one) or
b) Decide your partner’s refusal to contribute financially is unacceptable and end the relationship (or at least break it off until circumstances change).

So let’s say you went with option a. Both of you express love and adoration for your partners. You don’t want to lose them. How might you accept your dead-beat darlings for who they are at this era of their lives? Is this possible? Is what they give you worth the burden they place upon you? Are you willing to shelf your frustrations about your partner’s fiscal failings for a period of time? If so, how long? Can you imagine feeling okay with being the sole employed member of your union a year from now? Three years? Ten? Might you together agree to downsize and reduce expenses so that your single income becomes more feasible? What if you rethought the whole thing? What if instead of lamenting the fact that your partner is unemployed, the two of you embraced it as a choice you made together? Reframing it as a mutually-agreed upon decision, in which you are the breadwinners and your partners are the significantly supportive, non-incoming-earning helpmates, would give you a sense of agency that’s lacking now.

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Working for Two, you don’t mention if your partner does more than her share around the house, but Responsible One, you state that “the house is clean, the laundry is done, the dog is walked.” That’s something. In fact, it’s quite a lot. It’s not money, but your husband is positively contributing to your lives by seeing to those things. Oodles of people with jobs would be deeply pleased to return to a clean house that doesn’t contain mountains of dirty laundry and a dog demanding to go out. Many people pay people to do those things for them or they return from work only to have to work another, domestic shift. Your husband’s unpaid work benefits you. With that in mind, what other ways could your partners lighten your burden if they refuse to lighten it financially? Might you draw up a list of your household and individual needs—financial, logistical, domestic, and administrative—and divide the responsibilities in a manner that feels equitable, in terms of overall workload, that takes your job into account?

While I encourage you to sincerely consider coming to peace with your spouses’ perpetual unemployment, I’ll admit I’m presenting this option with more optimism than I feel. One thing I noted about both of your letters is that—while money is a major stress point—what worries you most deeply isn’t money. It’s how apathetic your partners are, how indifferent they are to their ambitions, whether they be income-earning or not. It would be one thing if you partners were these happy, fulfilled people who simply believed their best contribution to your coupledom would be as homemakers and personal assistants, but it seems clear that your partners have used home and the security of your relationships as a place to retreat and wallow, to sink into rather than rise out of their insecurities and doubts.

So let’s talk about option b. Working for Two, you say that you won’t give your partner an ultimatum, but I encourage you to rethink that. Perhaps it will help if you come to see what I see so clearly now: that you and Responsible One are the ones who’ve been given ultimatums, at least of an unstated, passive aggressive sort.

Ultimatums have negative connotations for many because they’re often used by bullies and abusers, who tend to be comfortable pushing their partners’ backs against a wall, demanding him or her to choose this or that, all or nothing. But when used by emotionally healthy people with good intentions, ultimatums offer a respectful and loving way though an impasse that will sooner or later destroy a relationship on its own anyway. Besides, the two of you have been up against the wall for years now, forced by your partners to be the sole financial providers, even when you have repeatedly stated that you do not and cannot continue to be. You’ve continued. Your partners have made their excuses and allowed you to do what you said you don’t want to do, even though they know it makes you profoundly unhappy.

Your ultimatum is simple. It’s fair. And it’s stating your own intentions, not what you hope theirs will be. It’s: I won’t live like this anymore. I won’t carry our financial burdens beyond my desires or capabilities. I won’t enable your inertia. I won’t, even though I love you. I won’t, because I love you. Because doing so is ruining us.

Don’t you get a little bit lighter inside just reading those lines?

The difficult part is, of course, what to do in the wake of those words, but you don’t have to know exactly what it will be right away. Maybe it will be breaking up. Maybe it will be mapping out a course of action that will save your relationships. Maybe it will be the thing that finally forces your partners to change. Whatever it is, I strongly advise you both to seek answers to the deeper questions underlying your conflicts with your partners while you figure it out. Your joint and individual issues run deeper than someone not having a job.

You can do this. I know you can. It’s how the real work is done. We can all have a better life if we make one.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #92: Your Invisible Inner Terrible Someone

Sugar — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:12:05 +0000

Dear Sugar,

I’m 29 and dating a man that I adore; we’re planning to move in together soon. I have a stable job that I hate, but I hope that I’ll one day find something I enjoy. I have family and friends and hobbies and interests and love. So much love. And I’m desperately afraid that I’m going to have cancer.

I’m terrified that sooner or later, I’ll be diagnosed. My mother had breast cancer when I was in college. She survived hers, but in some ways, she didn’t. It broke her, Sugar. My father died of liver cancer when I was in high school—he was never lucky enough to be counted “a survivor.” My grandmother had a brain tumor when I was a newborn; she didn’t live to see my first birthday. As much as I take care of my health, as much as I try to be careful, I have this niggling doubt that my genes are setting me up for failure.

I know you can’t tell me whether or not I will have cancer, and I know you can’t tell me when. But what I’m struggling with—what I need help figuring out—is how to make the decisions in my life while keeping this possibility in mind. You know the decisions I mean: The Big Ones.

How do I decide whether or not to get married? How do I look in to the face of this man I adore and explain to him what he might have to go through if I am diagnosed? And worse, if I don’t make it? I’ve already decided not to have children. How can I saddle a child with something that I don’t even think I can face myself? How do I plan for the future when there may be no future to plan for? They say “live your life to the fullest because there may be no tomorrow,” but what about the consequences of “no tomorrow” on the people that you love? How do I prepare them for what I might have to go through? How do I prepare myself?

Scared of the Future

***

Dear Scared of the Future,

There’s a crazy lady living in your head. I hope you’ll be comforted to hear that you’re not alone. Most of us have an invisible inner terrible someone who says all sorts of nutty stuff that has no basis in truth.

Sometimes when I’m all pretzeled up inside and my own crazy lady is nattering on, I’ll stop and wonder where she got her information. I’ll ask her to reveal her source. I’ll demand some proof. Did her notions come from actual facts based in ration and reason or did she/I dredge them up from the hell pit that burns like a perpetual fire at the bottom of my needy, selfish, famished little soul?

Is there credible evidence that my friends secretly don’t like me very much or were they all simply deep in conversation when I walked into the room and it took them a beat to say hello? Was the acquaintance who said, with class sizes that big, I’d never send my son to public school, actually saying that I was a second-rate mother, recklessly destroying my children because there are thirty kids in their classes, or was she simply sharing her own complex parenting decisions with me? When I receive letters from people who disagree passionately with a particular piece of advice I’ve given in this column is it true that it would be absolutely impossible for every reader to agree with me on every point or that I’m a stupid piece of know-nothing shit who should never write again?

If you asked me to draw a picture of myself I’d draw two. One would be a portrait of a happy, self-confident, regular-looking woman and the other would be a close-up of a giant gaping mouth that’s ravenous for love. Many days I have to silently say to myself: It’s okay. You are loved. You are loved even if some people don’t love you. Even if some people hate you. You are okay even if sometimes you feel slighted by your friends or you sent your kids to school someplace that someone else would not send her kid or you wrote something that riled up a bunch of people.

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I have to cut the crazy lady to the quick rather often. Over the years, my emotional well-being has depended on it. If I let her get the upper hand my life would be smaller, stupider, squatter, sadder.

So will yours if you let it, sweet pea.

You have my deepest sympathy and my most sincere understanding, but you’re not thinking clearly on this. You’re granting the crazy lady way too much power. Your sorrow and fear has clouded your ability to be reasonable about your mortality. And if you continue in this vein it’s going to rob you of the life you deserve—the one in which your invisible inner terrible someone finally shuts her trap.

You do not need to look into your lover’s eyes and “explain to him what he might have to go through” should you be diagnosed with cancer. Tell him about your family’s experiences with cancer and about how you made it through those difficult times. Share your fears with him, and your grief. But don’t make the illogical line from your relatives’ real illnesses to your nonexistent one. Only the crazy lady is pretty convinced you’ll get cancer and die young. All the rest of us are entirely in the dark. Yes, you need to be aware of your risks and monitor your health, but do so while remembering that in most cases a genetic history of any given disease is only one predictor of your own likelihood of getting it.

Any of us could die any day of any number of causes. Would you expect your partner to explain what you might have to go through should he die in a car accident, of heart failure, or by drowning? Those are things that could happen too. You are a mortal being like every human and June bug, like every black bear and salmon. We’re all going to die, but only some of us are going to die tomorrow or next year or in the next half century. And, by and large, we don’t know which of us it will be when and of what.

That mystery is not the curse of our existence; it’s the wonder. It’s what people are talking about when they talk about the circle of life that we’re all part of whether we sign up to be or not—the living, the dead, those being born right this moment, and the others who are fading out. Attempting to position yourself outside the circle isn’t going to save you from anything. It isn’t going to keep you from your grief or protect those you love from theirs when you’re gone. It isn’t going to extend your life or shorten it. Whatever the crazy lady whispered in your ear was wrong.

You’re here. So be here, dear one. You’re okay with us for now.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #91: A Big Life

Sugar — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:00:05 +0000

Dear Sugar,

My question is not about love or sex, but rather one of identity and striving for the best quality of life possible. I, as many other Americans, am struggling financially. Student loans are continuously on my mind and are the cause of almost every stress in my life.

My parents graciously cosigned for my student loans, however, I am being forced to consolidate in order to relieve them of this duty. I realize this is more out of necessity than spite, yet the situation greatly impacts my already poor financial situation and also my dream of attending graduate school. I’m so angry with my parents for putting me in this circumstance instead of supporting me to get a graduate degree for my dream job, and I feel selfish about that.

My relationship with my parents has always been rocky to the point that I’ve come to realize I’ll never get any emotional support from them. I am grateful they were able to help me with an undergraduate degree. However, I have never been close to them, and am often weary of their intentions. Our phone conversations are 100% concerning student loans rather than me as a person.

I struggle with student loans often defining me. I know my education, student loans, and occupation will define to me an extent. However, I am more than my job and these items combined. I am a 25 year-old woman who strives for the greatest possible quality of life and to be the best person she can be. But more often than not, I am defined by my “student loan” identity. It is on my mind when I grab a beer, buy new clothes, and in general, live my life. I do not spend excessively and have always had careful money management. Yet this situation extends beyond any careful money management.

I have always reached to have a positive spin on life. I fell into a deep, dark hole a few years ago, and have crawled out slowly myself. I purposely changed what I didn’t like about my life. It wasn’t an easy process by any means, but I am finally in a place where I can breath. Yet the stresses of student loans bear greatly, and I am having trouble keeping up any positive outlook.

Sugar, your perspective on life is always refreshing. I would love your perspective on this situation. I wish my parents would see me for the vibrant woman I am. I wish I could see myself as the vibrant young woman I strive to be and would like to be in the future.

Sincerely,
Wearing Thin

***

Dear Wearing Thin,

I received zero funding from my parents for my undergraduate education (or from relatives of any sort, for that matter). It wasn’t that my mother and stepfather didn’t want to help me financially; it was that they couldn’t. There was never any question about whether I’d need to fend for myself financially once I was able to. I had to. So I did.

I got a job when I was 14 and the money I earned went to things like clothes, school activity fees, a junked out car, gas, car insurance, movie tickets, mascara, and so on. My parents were incredibly generous people. Everything they had they shared with my siblings and me. They housed me, they fed me, and they went to great lengths to create wonderful Christmases, but, from a very young age, if I wanted something I usually had to buy it myself. My parents were strapped. Most winters there would be a couple of months so lean that my mother would have to go to the local food bank for groceries. In the years that the program was in place, my family received blocks of cheese and bags of powdered milk from the federal government. My health insurance all through my childhood was Medicaid—coverage for kids living in poverty.

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I moved out of my parent’s house a month before my 18^th birthday. With a combination of personal earnings, grants, scholarships, and student loans I funded the bachelor’s degree in English and women’s studies that I’m still paying for. As of today, I owe $4876. Over the years I’ve taken to saying—sometimes with astonishment, other times with anger, but mostly with a sense of resigned, distorted glee: “I’ll be paying off my student loans until I’m 43!”

But you know what? I’m waving to you from the shores of 43 and the months are peeling away. It’s looking extremely likely that I’ll still be paying off my student loans when I’m 44.

Has this ruined my life? Has it kept me from pursuing happiness, my writing career, and ridiculously expensive cowboy boots? Has it compelled me to turn away from fantastically financially unsound expenditures on fancy dinners, travel, “organic” shampoo, and high-end preschools? Has it stopped me from adopting cats who immediately need thousands of dollars in veterinary care or funding dozens of friends’ artistic projects on Kickstarter or putting $20 bottles of wine on my credit card or getting bi-annual pedicures?

It has not.

I have carried the weight of my student loan debt for about half of my life now, but I have not been “defined by my ‘student loan’ identity.” I do not even know what a student loan identity is. Do you? What is a student loan identity?

It is, I guess, exactly what you’re stuck with if you can’t get some perspective on this matter, sweet pea. It’s the threadbare cape you’ve wrapped around yourself composed of self-pitying half-truth. And it absolutely will not serve you.

You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t say this as a condemnation—I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too. I’m going to address you bluntly, but it’s a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you. You must separate the global injustice (why should some be shackled by student loan debt when others aren’t?) from the individual reality (I’ll be paying this damn bill forever).

As you and other long-time readers of this column may know, I’m a socialist at heart, but when it comes to the actual, individual way we live our lives, I adhere to an entirely pull-oneself-up-by-one’s-bootstraps creed. Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

You have driven out at least once already, Wearing Thin. You found yourself in a “deep, dark hole” a while back and then you courageously crawled out. You have to do it again. Your student loans will only hold you back if you allow them to. Yep, you have to figure out how to pay them. Yep, you can do that. Yep, it’s a pain in the ass. But it’s a pain in the ass that I promise will give you back more than you owe.

You know the best thing about paying your own bills? No one can tell you what to do with your money. You say your parents are emotionally unsupportive. You say you’re weary of their intentions. You say they don’t see you for the vibrant woman that you are. Well, the moment you sign that paper absolving them of their financial obligation to your debts, you are free. You may love them, you may despise them, you may choose to have whatever sort of relationship you choose to have with them, but you are no longer beholden to them in this one particular and important way. You are financially accountable only to yourself. If they express disdain for the jobs you have or the way you spend your money, you can rightly tell them it’s none of their damn business. They have absolutely no power over you in this regard. No one does. That’s a mighty liberating thing.

And it’s a hard thing too. I know, honey bun. I really, really, really do.

Many years ago, I ran into an acquaintance I’ll call Kate a few days after we both graduated college (though, in my case, I’m using the word “graduated” rather liberally—see The Future Has an Ancient Heart). Kate was with her parents, who’d not only paid for her entire education, but also for her junior year abroad in Spain, and her summer “educational opportunities” that included unpaid internships at places like GQ magazine and language immersions in France and fascinating archeological digs in God knows what fantastically interesting place. As we stood on the sidewalk chatting, I was informed that: a) Kate’s parents had given her a brand new car for her graduation present and b) Kate and her mother had spent the day shopping for the new wardrobe Kate would need for her first ever job.

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Not that she had one, mind you. She was applying for jobs while living off of her parents’ money, of course. She was sending out her glorious resume that included the names of foreign countries and trendy magazines to places that were no doubt equally glorious and I knew without knowing something simply glorious would be the result.

It was all I could do not to sock her in the gut.

Unlike Kate, by then I’d had a job. In fact, I’d had sixteen jobs, not including the years I worked as a babysitter before I could legally be anyone’s employee. They were: janitor’s assistant (humiliatingly, at my high school), fast-food restaurant worker, laborer at a wildlife refuge, administrative assistant to a Realtor, English as a Second language tutor, lemonade cart attendant, small town newspaper reporter, canvasser for a leftie nonprofit, waitress at a Japanese restaurant, volunteer coordinator for a reproductive rights organization, berry picker on a farm, waitress at a vegetarian restaurant, “coffee girl” at an accounting firm, student-faculty conflict mediator, teacher’s assistant for a women’s studies class, and office temp at a half a dozen places that by and large did not resemble offices and did not engage me in work that struck me as remotely “officey,” but rather involved things such as standing on a concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe-cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyer belt for eight excruciating hours a day.

During those years, I sometimes wept with rage. My dream was to be a writer. I wanted it so badly that it made my insides hurt. And to be a writer—I felt sure—I needed to have a big life. Which at the time meant to me amazing experiences such as the sort Kate had. I needed to experience culture and see the world. I needed to speak French and hang out with people who knew people who worked at GQ.

Instead I was forced, by accident of birth, to work one job after another in a desperate attempt to pay the bills. It was so damn unfair. Why did Kate get to study in Spain her junior year? Why did she get to write the word “France” on her resume? Why did she get her bachelor’s degree debt-free and then, on top of that, a new car? Why did she get two parents who would be her financial fall back for years to come and then—decades into a future, which has not yet come to pass—leave her an inheritance upon their deaths?

I didn’t get an inheritance! My mother died three months before I “graduated” college and all I got was her ancient, rusted-out Toyota that I quickly sold to a guy named Guy for $500.

Bloody hell.

So here’s the long and short of it, Wearing Thin: there is no why. You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding. And dear one, you and I both were granted a mighty generous hand.

Your parents helped you pay for your undergraduate education while you were a student and, presuming you didn’t graduate at 25 (a presumption which may or may not be correct), they also paid your monthly loan bill during the years immediately following your graduation. They’ve declined to continue to pay not because they wish to punish you, but because doing so would be difficult for them. This strikes me as perfectly reasonable and fair. You are an educated adult of sound mind, able body and resilient spirit who has absolutely no reason not to be financially self-sufficient, even if doing so requires you to earn money in ways you find unpleasant.

You say you’re grateful to your parents for helping you pay for your undergraduate education, but you don’t sound grateful to me. Almost every word in your letter tells me that you’re pissed off that you’re being required to take over your student loan payments. I point this out because I think it’s important that you acknowledge your anger for what it is. It does not rise out of gratitude. It rises out of the fact that you feel entitled to your parents’ money. You’re simply going to have to come to grips with the fact that you aren’t.

Your parents’ inability to continue paying your student loans will prevent you from realizing your “dream of attending graduate school” only if you let it. Are you really not going to pursue your dream because you now have one more bill than you had before? Are you truly so cowed by adversity?

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You don’t mention what you’d like to study, but I assure you there are many ways to fund a graduation education. I know a whole lot of people—myself included—who did not go broke getting a graduate degree. There is funding for tuition remission at many schools, as well as grants, paid research and teaching assistantships, and—yes—the offer of more student loans. Perhaps more importantly in your case, there are numerous ways to either cancel portions of your student loan debt or defer payment. Financial difficulty, unemployment, attending school at least half-time (ie: graduate school!), working in certain professions, and serving in the Peace Corps or other community service jobs are some ways that you would be eligible for debt deferment or cancellation. I encourage you to investigate your options so you can make a plan that brings you peace of mind. There are many web sites that will elucidate what I have summarized above.

What I know for sure is that freaking out about your student loan debt is useless. You’ll be okay. It’s only money. And it was money well spent. Aside from the people I love, there is little I value more than my education. As soon as I pay off my undergraduate debt, Mr. Sugar and I intend to start saving for college for the baby Sugars. My dream is that they’ll have college experiences that resemble Kate’s more than mine. I want them to be able to focus on their studies instead of cramming them in around jobs. I want them to have a junior year abroad wherever they want to go. I want them to have cool internships that they could only take with parental financial support. I want them to go on cultural exchanges and interesting archeological digs. I want to fund all that stuff I never got to do because no one was able to fund me. I can imagine all they would gain from that.

But I can also imagine what they won’t get if Mr. Sugar and I manage to give them the college experience of my dreams.

Turns out, I learned a lot from not being able to go France. Turns out, those days standing on the concrete floor wearing a hairnet, a paper mask and gown, goggles, and plastic gloves and—with a pair of tweezers—placing two pipe-cleaners into a sterile box that came to me down a slow conveyer belt for eight excruciating hours a day taught me something important I couldn’t have learned any other way. That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own, personal “educational opportunities.” They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth.

They gave me faith in my own abilities. They offered me a unique view of worlds that were both exotic and familiar to me. They kept things in perspective. They pissed me off. They opened my mind to realities I didn’t know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much. They put me in close contact with people who could’ve funded the college educations of ten thousand kids and also with people who would’ve rightly fallen on the floor laughing had I complained to them about how unfair it was that after I got my degree I’d have this student loan I’d be paying off until I was 43.

They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can’t buy.

Yours,
Sugar

***

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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #90: 94 Ways of Saying Thank You

Sugar — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:28:28 +0000

Dear Readers,

Last week I asked you to write to me about what you’re grateful for. The response was overwhelming. Hundreds of you sent me emails full of love and light, even when many of them were also threaded with sorrow and pain. I read every word of gratitude you sent me and I was touched by each email, though I could select only a portion of them to appear in this column. It was difficult to choose, as the ones I didn’t publish are just as wonderful as those I did

Together, the ninety-three letters that appear below will give you an idea of the wide range of people who are part of this community we’ve created and also a sense of what I experience each time I wander through my email inbox. There is so much humanity here, so much grace and good humor, so much strength and wisdom. Compiling these letters made me understand more profoundly how fortunate I am that you have shared yourselves with me so honestly and open-heartedly in the “Dear Sugar” column. I’m grateful for that every day.

Happy Thanksgiving, sweet peas.

Love,
Sugar

***

Dear Sugar,

A few months ago, I looked out over a cityscape in Indonesia and saw fireworks lighting the night in every direction, heard mosques vying to blare out the loudest call to prayer, heard voices ringing out in celebration and welcome. It was Lebaran (Eid ul-Fitr) and people all over Jakarta had just broken their final Ramadan fast of the year. My fellow freckly American expat turned to me and said, “Why are so many people so afraid of this?”

How sad it would be, to be one of those people. The staggering little moments of glory you would miss. I’m so grateful that what I saw that night was joy in abundance and pure love.

Emily Johnson

***

Dear Sugar,

I am grateful every single second of every day for my husband who dealt with the news of my MS diagnosis by saying, “That’s what taking the good with the bad in our vows meant. I have your back no matter what, I love YOU, everything else we have happen in our lives is just stuff. As long as I can be there for you I can make it through anything.”

Kogi

***

Dear Sugar,

This Thanksgiving will be the first with my baby son, Langston James Simmons. He will turn one year old on November 30. I’m grateful for this first year of his life: for having gained confidence in my mothering as a blind person. I’m grateful for him, even as now

he is crying with all his might as his father puts his pajamas on him before I get him to sleep. I am grateful for the support and love I’ve gotten this year from my husband, my family and friends. I’m grateful for words; I’m grateful beyond words.

***

Courtney Lavender, Death Valley, California

***

Dear Sugar,

In March 2004, my daughter Emily died 4 days after she was born, because of an overworked labor and delivery team and their errors, plural – one of those “all the holes in the Swiss cheese lined up” stories. During her life she was in a lot of pain. She could not hear, see, move or swallow her own saliva. After we made the terrible decision to take her off life support she fought for her life for 12 hours. I cannot honestly say this is a story where she taught me to live better or anything like that. The death of a child is only a tragedy. And yet, there was a nurse in the NICU who stubbornly, stoically, referred to my husband and I – first-time parents – as mum and dad; who told us we had better change her diaper, even when she was dying, and critiqued our technique. Who invited us to give her her first and last bath. Who told us we were good parents. Who made the unthinkable and abnormal into two parents caring for their child.

What she didn’t know is that we had been trying to have a child for 8 years. And the reason it had taken that long is that my uterus was scarred from childhood abuse. And that I had learned never to expect a helping hand, and then had done therapy to overcome that, and then had been so terribly let down by our L&D team. I would have lain down and given up, I think, had that nurse not reached out to me with the exact right words at the exact right time.

18 months later we had my son, now 6. This year we welcomed our second son. Our family still is missing my little girl, but it feels complete. I am incredibly, joyfully, happy. It is amazing the difference it makes sometimes when someone just reaches into the heart of your experience and names it, and sits there with you in it.

Jenn

***

Dear Sugar,

For eight years I was the founding director of a school for young children. It was hard, big, beautiful work, and my days were full of hugs, bills, questions, and creative energy.

At the end of every school day, the children in each classroom gather in a circle, along with their teachers and any parents or grandparents who have arrived a bit early, and each person in turn “says a thankful.”

Thankful circle can, to visiting adults, seem an interminable exercise. Some children say the same. exact. thing. every. day. “I’m thankful for playing on the playground and having lunch.” Some children say whatever happens to come out of their mouths, and they seem just as surprised as the rest of us. “I’m thankful that my dog, his name is Buster, he’s brown, and sometimes, he tries to get on my bed, and once, he ate a whole stick of butter of the counter, and…” until a teacher gently suggests, “how ’bout just one more thing?”

Some children never say anything at all, just a barely audible “Pass.”

But whatever the child says, or doesn’t say, each, in turn, has a turn. An opportunity to be heard, with respect. A moment that is theirs, to shape, to decide about, to offer something to the world if they choose.

I am thankful for that moment. For the chance each of us has to offer that moment to others though our listening and our respect, and the chance to make what we choose of that moment when it’s our turn.

***

Dear Sugar,

I take a dance class at Mark Morris in New York that saves my life. Well, I say it’s a dance class but it’s more like church and dance rolled into one. Everybody in that class is so beautiful and it is like we all throw off this big blanket, that heavy swathing that collects around us as we move through the week of obligations. As if to dull the scratchings of our own spinning creature, the one turning inside of us, restless, ready.

We throw off the blanket every week, hands flung upwards. And we wake the wildness in us, stretch, shake, perambulate, whatever gets it moving, whatever gets it to open a lazy amber eye, and wonder if it is time.

There was a man who came for a while. He flapped his arms like an injured bird, and his back was so curved, his hips all over the place. Everything flailing and wrong. And it was sad because wherever this creature that he was calling, it wasn’t answering, was not running to his aid. He shook and trembled and flailed and bucked, to every rhythm but the downbeat, and it seemed he was abandoned, alone in a body that had once known wildness, as we all have. He made me think of all those posters in the high school guidance office saying with enough practice and perseverance you will improve. For weeks, months, he came and he was very nice and all, and he kept smiling and leaping about but he never really got better at it. He continued to flail.

And one time my girlfriend came and we were sort of breaking up. She came at the end of the class and it was like she rolled in on this dark swirl, and that wild energy that the class had just danced up around us, vibrating the room fully awake, made me acutely aware that everyone could see her the way I knew her to be, and all her anger and sadness was like a hard smear all over her face, and it made her more beautiful, and more terrible, and it felt like everyone looked on as I kissed her on the cheek. Everyone knew the shape of us in that moment. People who saw nothing of my life beyond this room bore witness to the Jacobs ladder of our inside threads flipped outward. And she missed it. Was unaware for that moment. Unaware how clearly we were on display, and as terrified as I was of being caught like that, with it came a relief to feel that for the first time I wasn’t alone in seeing her this way.

Because the blanket, it was no longer there, obscuring things. Thus unpeeled, you can see shit. And what the class saw was not a divine being whose toes barely touched earth, whose charm and beauty left everyone graced with her presence slack-jawed and breathless. But instead, a dark and jealous creature stalking, and me so hopelessly trapped, deflating.

And the class? There is that tipping moment, before a reaction. Then they moved in waves, waves of love toward me, and that shocked me right down to my bones. The expression on the faces of these near-perfect strangers, I will never forget. That they were mine and not hers and it had been a competition this whole time, of course it was a competition. What could she take from me, who could I take from her? I usually lost. Untie yourself. They seemed to say. Come back to us and keep dancing, strengthen your muscles and quicken your steps so that you may be lighter on your feet. So that you may fight better in the future, so you may not be so easily felled. We are yours and we will teach you. I suddenly wanted everything she grew in me ripped out like a root, but such a complex network of veiny tubers cannot be pulled up like that, not unless you want a bunch of churned up insides and broken blood vessels.

I didn’t know yet about the slow dissolution it would take, the constant coaxing with a careful finger, to pull it out gently, examine it strand by strand. An unhurried vigilance. Patience.

Ella Boureau

***

Jfayestarr

***

Dear Sugar,

I am grateful for the opportunity to be uncomfortable. In the strange and lonely corners of discomfort is where I find those moments of beautiful sadness when life pulsates vibrantly around me and within me, opening my heart to accept the raw and the brutal equivocally with the selfless and kind.

Midwife

***

Dear Sugar,

I am thankful for second chances. Deserved or undeserved, but truly given without reservation. Given to me and to others, but most importantly, the one I gave to myself.

***

Dylan Emrys, Stacked Stones, Asilomar Beach, Pacific Grove, California

***

Dear Sugar,

I am grateful that my mum died quickly. She had 28 days from her diagnosis, to the end. She had only 28 days to go from a fully functioning human being to being unconscious and unresponsive. She had only a few weeks to experience the physical pain, but also to experience the loss of her independence and pride. Every day I am grateful for the speed at which my mum’s light burned out.

***

Dear Sugar,

Let it sound cliché – I am grateful for my family.

For my parents, who picked up their bags and moved across the world to make something of themselves and despite the hurricane of the American Reality, instilled enough faith to make something of their children.

For my grandfathers, the bittersweet legacy they left and the love they lived.

For my grandmothers, independent women running the world and who were throwing their hands up before Beyoncé could get down like that.

For my brother, engineering his clever way to great things.

And for my little sister, the light and joy of my life, eleven years old and the strongest person I know. Who needs a thyroid anyways?

Shahzadi

***

Dear Sugar,

I am grateful life beat me into submission, because that’s how I learned to fight with compassion instead of fury. I’m not broken, I’m bendable, and I can survive anything. Damaged goods are the best kind there are.

Liz Roberts

***

Dear Sugar,

I was pissed, I was virile, I was a clot of gamey teenager. I wanted to fight and draw and write and make messes and I was hoping maybe that I could go into an alley and get raped and then murdered and then maybe someone would rape my bones. That was the good type of mood I was in when I first picked up a copy of Leontiev’s Political Economy. And then suddenly I was critical and I started to get a little strategic and maybe even tactical at times. But then there were these people that welcomed me into this big house that used to be the Ukranian Cultural Center it was a big wooden house in West Adams with large banisters and upstairs there was a bookstore. The woman that worked there was an old Bolshevik named Esther and she was at least seventy years old and she joked about going outside and feeling a breeze and when she looked down she realized she’d forgotten her pants and if we ever had a rally and someone was gonna get arrested she raised her hand up high, because really who would want to arrest her? And we had meetings in that big old house and we plotted how we were gonna find a solution and my heart was on fire and I took all that gamey anger and pushed toward plotting for a revolution. At night sometimes when I’m reading a book I feel that same loud hummm in my bones. The hum of my heart and mind being on fire. Sometimes it happens when I’m writing or occasionally even if I cook something. It always starts in my head these things. I’ll close my eyes and write a story or draw a picture or imagine a meal and then when the image in my mind matches the world around me my hairs stand on end and I can even still have my eyes shut when I am doing one of these various things and I will just know know know I am getting it right. I don’t know what all I think about god but I think that music, and good books, and graffiti and whatever it is that makes me feel like I’m part of something wonderful (whether it be creating something new or blowing shit up) is sort of like whispers from god and I’m grateful for all of that.

Love,
Melissa Ann Chadburn

***

Sassy Queenpin Mama

Dear Sugar,

I am grateful for balance.

Things I have lost over the past four years:

1. A grandfather
2. A three-year relationship
3. A furniture set
4. A dog
5. A dining room table
6. My ten-year plan
7. Two cats
8. A relationship
9. Several friends
10. What I thought I knew to be true
11. My wall
12. Some rigidity
13. A relationship
14. My desire to be a therapist

Things I have gained over the past four years:

1. A sense of self
2. Armpit hair
3. A great queer community
4. Strong, healthy friendships
5. Boundaries
6. My writing voice
7. Support/love for who I am
8. A wider perspective
9. Spirituality
10. Feeling in my body
11. Access to my feelings
12. A greater sense of self-trust
13. Clarity on what I need and want
14. Confidence
15. A sense of joy
16. Courage
17. A hot pair of boots

In thanks,
Grey

***

Dear Sugar,

I just got home from an appointment with a surgeon. I learned about thirty minutes ago that my cancer is not metastatic and surgery will resolve it. Surgery is Monday. It is my second time with this cancer (melanoma). The first time I was 35 and now this time I’m 43. Who gets cancer twice by 43?

I did. And right now I am profoundly grateful for just my life.

Kathleen M.

***

Dear Sugar,

I’m grateful for taking out the trash. Every time I gather up the debris of the week — used ear buds, twisty-ties, a truly disgusting pile of dirt and dog hair — and race outside to the alley to get it set out before my trash guys come, I feel like a self-possessed adult. And for that, I am so grateful.

This wave of gratitude came over me about a decade ago in the first few months at my first real apartment. The place where I paid the rent with the money from my first real job. Where no one else was going to take out the trash or recycling if I didn’t do it. For some reason, that little chore brought it all home: I was on my own, in good health, held a job. I had put a roof over my head. I could have a party and friends would come over and dirty up the place. I had friends. That trash run meant in some small way I was making my way through the world.

There is nothing like feeling this way. Among the thousand of other things I’m grateful for (my wife, this little house, the mountains I can see from my city, food, beer, that my mom is alive another day). I’m telling you about the trash because:

It shuts up my whiny inner teenager on trash day, and
So many people aren’t in a position to even make trash, much less take it out. They don’t have a trashcan, or a kitchen, or a house. They can’t afford a dog to shed all over everything. They lost a job and can no longer pay for things that end up creating some trash.

Trash is a big deal, and I’m pretty damn lucky to take it out.

Loren

***

DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column: A Special Request

Sugar — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:16:49 +0000

Dear sweet peas,

As long-time readers of this column know, it’s my tradition that every time I reach a “new decade” of columns I write shorter answers to several questions instead of the usual longer, single question column. We’ve arrived at column #90, but I’d like to do something a bit different this time. I want you to help me write the column—not by sending me your questions, but rather by sending me your answers. I’ll choose a few of your answers (or more if length permits) and compile them into column #90, which will be published next week, on Thanksgiving Day.

Click Here to Purchase a "SUGAR SAYS" Poster

My question is simple, but complex: for what are you grateful? (And why, if you feel so inclined.) Every year when I was growing up my mother asked whoever sat at her Thanksgiving table to answer that question and we did, each of us taking a turn, even when my siblings and I were teenagers and we grumbled about having to do so. It’s a tradition I’ve carried into my own family, one I’ve come to cherish.

My inbox is full of your sorrows and complaints, of all the things you want and never got, the things that you lost or can’t understand. I’ll turn my attention back to those concerns on December 1, but for now, fill my inbox with what you have and what you treasure. The dark and the light. The sad and the sweet.

Please do your best to be brief, though if your gratitude demands a bit more space, that’s okay too. You may put your name on your answer or make up a name. You may email me your answer via my anonymous form at the bottom of this page or you may send it to me directly at sugar@therumpus.net. Either way, please write the word “gratitude” in the subject line, so I know what it is. The deadline for submissions is 9am PST Tuesday, November 22^nd.

I can’t wait to read what you send me.

Love,
Sugar

***

You can follow Sugar on Twitter here.

Or join her Facebook fan page here.

And don’t forget the Dear Sugar Google Group, where you can get a little extra Sugar once a week.

***

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