morethanenoughtruth

Will, as determination to be everything that you are, is complex.  My mother and I locked horns over this problem from the beginning.  We each were vested in our own version of truth, she with her favored neuroses, I with mine, and there was no compromise.  She often called me a willful child; I replied, “So what.”

One afternoon when I was three she forbade me to visit my friend down the block because it had rained.  Mud was a problem.  She insisted that I go upstairs and take a nap.  I wasn’t sleepy.  I wanted to visit my friend, but… I wanted to be a good girl and mind my mother.  A conflict.  When she was asleep in her bed, I crept downstairs and rummaged up two flattened cardboard boxes.  Starting at the end of our pavement, I stood on one box and placed the other one a calculated distance from it with a heading that advanced my bare feet toward my goal.  I jumped onto the other box.  Then I moved the first box to an improved strategic location and jumped yet again to the twice relocated box.  Repeating this tactic brought me to my friend’s doorstep without muddying my feet.  I congratulated myself at having resolved a conflict in service to the needs of all concerned, but hadn’t counted on my mother’s hidden agenda.   Her need was to control.  I was her creature who must obey.  It was ugly.

Another afternoon, banished to the ignominy of my childhood bed, I was told to take my nap.  I didn’t want a nap.  I wanted to go abroad, to explore and to frolic.  I needed to be my creative playful self.  Who was this person to so thwart my existential quest?  I slipped out the door and ran right into a Texas dust storm.  Mommy hadn’t told me about those.  I couldn’t open my eyes and wandered about the yard, running into tree-trunks that bloodied nose and forehead.  I howled in agonized affront.  Who were these trees to so abuse me?  “Mommy,” I cried.  “Help!”

She heard my loud mouth and came running, saved me but took my disobedience personally.  A good girl minds her mother.  “You are the Devil, she shrieked.   I can see it in your eyes.  He has taken over your body.  That’s why you do these things.”  I knew she was crazy and broke my life in two__her half and mine.  Mine was the better half; Hers was insane.

Will created a folie-a-deux for my mother and me, but it focused my healthy child narcissism into the ego strength needed to prevail.  Everybody won.

***

Will is a neutral concept, and serves both for good and for ill.   Living creatures share this feature.  How else would baby birds peck their way out of eggshells?  Cows decide if and when to let down their milk, when to deliver a calf, and when to hold back until a safer time and place conspires to bless the birth.  I saw this play out knitting in anticipation of incipient labor, waiting for no apparent reason for my daughter to be born.  Finally I understood.  She was waiting for me.  I put down the knitting needles and sweater-in-the-making, lay back, and determined to have a baby.  An hour later Melanie Rae Taylor entered my world.

Control of fluids is a ready example of harnessing will to good effect.  I have known since childish scraping of knees and elbows that we bleed when we allow ourselves to bleed.  I practiced telling myself not to bleed in response to a fresh injury.  As long as I remained attentive to the situation, no blood would exit the wound.  As soon as I tired of the job, capillaries would release, and blood would be everywhere.  Wait long enough for the clotting mechanism to work, and I could save a Band-aid.

I have always been a hard-stick, a lab tech’s nightmare.  They would complain that the needle was in, but no blood would flow.  A question!  Finally I decided to apply the converse of my childish determination to hold back from a wound’s right to bleed.  I blessed the needle and gave my permission for the blood to fill the tube to provide the results I needed.  Since that day, I do fine with lab techs.  I am no longer a bad-stick.

Once in New York’s Grand Central Station tagging along with my dad, I saw him reach for a cigarette.  He looked at the pack of Pall Malls and threw it in the trash.  “I don’t want to smoke anymore,” he said to me and_more important_ to the cigarettes.  He explained that with sufficient will we don’t need to be controlled by our bodies.  Addiction is for other people.  I never forgot that lesson.  He never smoked again.  When I got a Hashimoto’s diagnosis I set out to lose unhealthy weight and reclaim my thyroid, dropping fifty pounds in a year.  Daddy would be proud.

In 1963 a West Virginia byway claimed the life of my daughter.  She was too young.  She should not have died; I should have prevented it.  After the funeral I chose to return to my college classes without waiting for the grief to play out.  I sat in the lecture hall and watched the walls heave in rolling waves.  The only explanation that held was that we live in a holographic construct where everything that is, is determined by our hallucination of its existence.  In such a world I could have created a better future for Melanie.  I would have if I had known how.  The Ultimate must have a reason, a purpose, in her death.  I can accept that understanding for losing what I could not, should not, cannot bear to lose.  In such a world, she waits for me to learn all I must and move on to what comes next.  What lovely irony that she began by waiting to live, and now she meets herself coming around the curve of time waiting for me to die.

If self-determination is so predictable, we should be able to die when we want.  I have an ascending aortic aneurysm, a not-off-the-chart-but-getting-there condition that I don’t monitor.  I should, according to my cardiologist, but I choose not to.  A dissected aneurysm is a clean painless way to die.  I choose that for an exit strategy.  It bothers me to be alive when more viable people die.  I should not be consuming resources given my diminished capacity to contribute.  They owe me?  No.  They owe me nothing.  I gave from love, the only way to give.  All else is commerce.