Chain Control

El Capitan under the clouds

The night before Dar and I were to leave for Yosemite was a dark and stormy night. Well, dark except for the flashes of lightening which slashed the cloudy sky, illuminating the trembling white faces of the oak trees in our yard. At five a.m., as rain fell violently from the heavens, the three chihuahuas decided it was time for a bathroom break. They were willing to relieve themselves in the living room, but I felt strongly against, and so we all went outside.

As we came back in, unrelieved but wet, my phone chimed. A text message. “It’s really stormy out there,” my friend wrote. “Maybe postpone?” I was touched. She has two teenagers to worry about, and yet she thinks about me in the middle of the night! I texted her to go back to sleep. We’re planning to leave at noon. Let’s see then.

We left at noon. The sun shone feebly through massive clouds. A dramatic sky stretched before us as we made our way to Toyota to buy the extremely difficult to find snow chains for my car. Dar watched the movie explaining how to use the chains. Just in case, I watched from over his shoulder. After all, better make sure he does not forget any critical detail.

Rain overtook us as we crossed the great valley. Lightening chased the thunder, like a movie playing on the cloud-shrouded horizon. Inside the car I stayed warm and carefree. As we climbed the Sierra Foothills Dar kept watch over the temperature display and the altitude. “I think we’ll be good,” he said once in a while. Of course we’ll be good! I thought to myself and petted his shoulder. We’re going to be just fine.

We stopped for gas at Oakhurst. “You need chains seven miles up the hill,” three men loitering inside the store advised us. Eight miles later Dar breathed out a sigh of relief. “I think there must have been an accident earlier,” he speculated, “and they saw cars stopped. We won’t need the cha...” and before he could finish his sentence, there was chain control before us, waving us off the road. May I just say with pride: it took my man less than five minutes to put those chains on, wearing my purple gloves!

“That was easy,” Dar commented as we began to rattle up the hill. It was certainly easy for me. I didn’t need to do a thing! And suddenly the realization hit me. I sat in the car as we drove for three hours through rain and lightening and now snow feeling utterly protected, and why? Because I trusted Dar to drive us safely to Yosemite. I trusted him to know how to put the chains on (well, I did need to remind him about putting the tensioner on the right way, but I’m sure he would have eventually figured it out). In short, I had faith in Dar to take me to Yosemite and back home safe and sound. And he did. Trust.

Lying, Protecting, Loving

I’ve been thinking about overprotection a lot while reading Julie Garwood’s The Bride. Jamie and Alec, the main characters, lie to each other all the time. They lie for reasons which could arguably be deemed good: to avoid hurting each other’s feelings or to surprise each other, but mostly they lie to protect each other from bad news. Alec hides from Jamie that her life is in danger. Jamie rushes to prevent war without letting him know. Rather than use their marriage for the support and help it can give, they each treat the other as inadequate and weak. I see their overprotection of each other as a sort of power struggle, an attempt to discover whether there can be trust between them, whether each can safely cede some control.

Surprisingly, though Alec and Jamie lie and their lies are discovered, the only consequence for the lie is greater love and intimacy between them. I don’t particularly like their way of building a life together, and yet somehow, despite the lies and power struggles, Garwood manages to convince me of the truth of Jamie’s and Alec’s love.

I like this quote from Elena Gorokhova: “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” After a while, Alec knows Jamie is up to something and she knows he knows, and they both, in the end, come to depend on the lies as a form of upside-down truth. I guess it makes for an exciting marriage, at least within this book.

In many families I know, it is customary to protect each other from bad news. My parents have hid from my siblings and me a variety of misfortunes, from job loss or illness to smaller matters like the scandal behind the Bible teacher’s marriage or my second grade’s teacher’s disappearance a few months after the beginning of school. I know the secrecy originates from a desire to shield us, to keep us happy or innocent for a little longer, but invariably the news has to be revealed, and, as is the nature of bad news, time rarely lessens its impact.

When I find myself overprotected like that, whether by my parents, my children, friends or Dar, I begin to doubt my own resilience, my ability to recover from difficulties. Did they think I’d be incapable of dealing with this news? “Suffering is,” the Buddha said, and suffering exists everywhere in our world, even for someone like me who attempts to live in a bubble. Perhaps rather than sticking to the impossible task of guarding each other (children, parents, or any other member of our family, really) from pain, the better solution is to nurture resilience. And while I have no idea how to go about doing that, still the first step, I think, would be to stop overprotecting each other from all this imagined harm.

Trusting Dreams

Often before writing my blog, I look for inspiration in famous quotes. But today, reading about trust, I got pretty depressed. Most said: trust no one, or trust only a few. From Stalin: “I trust no one, not even myself.” Johnny Depp: “Me, I’m dishonest, and you can always trust a dishonest person to be dishonest.” It made me wonder, is trust really so rare?

Happily, I managed to find one quote that cheered me up. Golda Meir, the former Israeli prime minister, said, “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” Isn’t that a beautiful image? Sparks fanned by trust turning into flames. The thing is, it’s so easy to doubt myself, to think that I’m not good enough. How can I nurture that kind of trust in myself?

In her middle-grade novel, Dogsled Dreams, Terry Lynn Johnson answers this question. Rebecca, her young protagonist, yearns to become a dogsled racer, but doubts assail her. What if she is not good enough? What if she can’t run the race? She blames herself when the dogs go missing, when she loses the sled and the dogs race on without her, and when the sled overturns as she is giving a ride to a passenger. When Rebecca confesses her fears to Heather, her father’s new wife, Heather replies: “Rebecca, when people do things even though it scares them, that’s called courage. You should be a little afraid of racing. It means you know what you’re doing.”

Rebecca doubts her abilities as a musher even more because she senses the dogs’ trust in her. The dogs trust Rebecca because she knows them and trusts them, appreciating each dog as a unique personality. Racing is important to Rebecca. She desires to do it well. But it is the dogs and their passion and joy for running which bring the race alive for her. Her doubts, that constant questioning of herself, are what make her an excellent musher.

Seems to me that doubting must be good -- it bring about improvement and growth. So perhaps it is not that Rebecca lacks trust in her mushing abilities, but that her fears make it possible for her to become a better musher every day she spends with the dogs. She can trust that innate benefit of doubting. Like Heather said, being afraid means she knows what she's doing.

I’ve always tried to instill in my children the understanding that courage can only happen by overcoming fear. After all, if I did not fear speaking before an audience or receiving a vaccination, where would be the bravery in that? Similarly, without doubts there can be no trust. What an amazing and freeing idea! What is trust if not an overcoming of the fear that somebody (whether it is me or someone else) will fail me? Trust my fears, trust my doubts, trust me. Trust.