Back again with a here-and-now post…of sorts. A lot of this story is related to my past, so it’s in that mid-zone. I always tell people I am a Catholic by birth and a Buddhist by choice and that’s the absolute truth. However, I am not what I would call a ‘religious’ person. I’m a spiritual person, but not a religious person. I have great disdain for organized religion. I always tell my kids that it’s not God, or Buddha, or Mohammed or whomever your particular deity is that causes the problem. It’s what people do once they get hold of that religion and try to shape it in their own image and likeness.  It’s the organization of it by mortal men (and women) that I take issue with.

From the folks who brought you The Crusades and The Spanish Inquisition

The Catholic faith does not work for me on many levels. Right off the top, the church’s steadfast opposition to anything LGBT will rule Catholicism out. I really do not want my children exposed to the bigotry within those teachings. The incredible hypocrisy surrounding the whole issue of pedophilia is huge for me. I really think it’s over the top to condemn homosexuality when the church has spent years protecting pedophiles. It’s not so much that there are pedophiles in the church. I can see that happening. Becoming a priest gives them access to children and a great cover. Nobody questioned the Catholic church when I was young. Nobody. We didn’t know, but somebody did: Those in power. Instead of cleaning the mess up, they shuffled these sexual predators to new parishes and kept it hidden. I take issue with that. They should all have been prosecuted as perpetrators and accessories. Instead, when the story broke, they painted these sexual predators as homosexuals. I’m very much in command of two words in the English language: Fuck them.

Then, there are the nuns: Terrorists in penguin suits. I’m not sure how things are now, but when I was young we were terrified of them. I remember I wrote a story once called “Nuns with Guns.” I wish I could find it now. They ruled by intimidation when I was in grammar school. (By the time I got to high school, I wasn’t afraid of them anymore.) They also made you terrified of God. One false move and He’d smote you. Half of the problem was the outfit. It was like a klan outfit for the holy. Black and white. No gray. Appropriately enough, just like their teachings.

I was turned off to the Catholic religion for one other reason — a very personal one. This incident happened well before the whole church sex scandal broke. The catholic priest in my parish refused to come and give my dad last rites when he was dying because he had a golf tournament that day. In reality, the Catholic church lost me that day.

A brief foray into Judaism proves my theory of organized religion

For a while, Beth and I toyed with Judaism. We even began the process of conversion by taking the interfaith course in Westwood. The Rabbi teaching the course was a pompous, pretentious putz. It was when he got to Leviticus that I became uncomfortable. If you think the Catholics are tough on gays, try Judaism. During the time we were looking into Judaism, we were also trying to choose a temple to associate ourselves with. This was my second bad experience with the Hebrew vision of homosexuality. I’m not exactly sure what temple we had chosen. I’m thinking it was one on the north shore, since were were living in Beverly at the time. We were sitting in the Rabbi’s office and discussing the whole gay issue when he asked which one of us “plays the man.” Now, that was a real W-T-F moment for me.

I remember just looking at him and asking — in a very exasperated tone — “What?” He sat back and looked at me. “One will obviously be the mother, so who will be the father figure?” You know, ask anyone, I’m a very patient person. I’m loyal to a fault. My friends practically have to try to murder me to get me to dump them. I’m just not patient with this crap. I wasn’t going to try to talk to this guy and get him to understand because he clearly thought his question was perfectly logical. I remember saying to him, “Our child will have two mothers. Neither one of us will play the father. That’s not what this is all about. Thanks for your time. See you later.” I think Beth got up and followed me simply because she wasn’t expecting me to do that.  See, she’s a processor. I know she would have stayed there and tried to reason with the guy ad nauseum. No way. He did not want to “get it.” Sayonara, Judaism.

Those were the only two mainstream possibilities for me. The others, like Mormonism and Christian fundamentalism, have too many whack jobs per square inch for me. They are too overbearing and are always in “high conversion” mode.

Why Buddhism works for me

I chose Buddhism because I like its principles. It doesn’t ask for you to blindly go forward. In fact, it encourages you to question.

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, no matter if I had said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” (Buddha)

That’s what I like about Buddhism. I also like that Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama, don’t for a minute believe that Buddhism is for everybody. The Dalai Lama doesn’t force feed anyone his ideology. He puts it out there. If it works for you, fine. If not, fine. Buddhism also teaches that its followers should never look down on anyone else’s religion. That’s a far cry from what you get with the Catholics and the Jews.

“Here is my simple religion. There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart are temples; the philosophy is kindness.” (The Dalai Lama)

This works for me. The whole belief in Karma works for me, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t got issues with the “organized” side of Buddhism. I have issues with it. For one thing, they raise too much money for nonsensical things, like giant statues and ornate religious symbols. I understand the importance of the deities in Buddhism. I get it. Beth and I even have an altar with some deities on it. Medicine Buddha is very big in our household, for obvious reasons. It’s not an alter you pray at, by the way. It’s where you make offerings. But the Buddhists spend too much time raising money to build hugely ornate statues and temples. There is so much more they could do with that money…like feed their monks who basically subsist on nothing but rice, and eat just one meal a day. That’s crazy.

The other thing about Buddhism is the number of wealthier people who are involved in it because it’s seen as “fashionable” to be Buddhist. That’s not really anything that Buddhism itself can control, actually. I used to go to the Kurukulla Center in Medford every once in a while and you could see the hangers on. None of these people upheld the basic tenets of Buddhism. They had attitude. They were snobs. They weren’t nice to those less fortunate than they are. Those aren’t Buddhist qualities in the least. I really never get there anymore and I honestly do not feel as though I’m missing anything. I can be Buddhist here at home. After all, the Dalai Lama says so!

Okay, this is sort of a here and now post but, at the same time, I refer to stuff that has happened in my past. So, let’s call it a “that was then, here is now” moment. I was inspired to write this because, a few weeks back, I met someone I used to work with. I haven’t seen this person since before Thalia was born, and that would be more than twelve years ago. As is just so typical of lesbians, she asked me, “What do your kids call you?” I replied, “Ma.” She looked at me, “And what do they call Beth?” I looked at her and said, “Ma.” She got this confused look on her face, “What if you’re together and you both answer at the same time? What happens?” I though about it for a minute, and then told her that Thalia will usually point to one of us and say, “You” or “This one.” That seemed to disturb her.

What this person wanted was two distinct names. Like, maybe ma and mom. Or mom and mother. I mean, you cannot imagine how long she went on about this. It made seeing her again a real chore. I call that “processing,” and lesbians are notorious for processing. Not this lesbian, mind you, but most lesbians. Shit, get a room full of lesbians together and you can almost hear the whirring sound. Let me tell you where I come from on this one.

I live in a “No Processing Zone.” Seriously. I come from a home where both my mother and my grandmother were called, “Ma.” We used to congregate at my grandmother’s house after Sunday morning mass to eat meatballs and dip bread in her gravy (that’s spaghetti sauce to non-Italians). When I say “we,” I meant our family plus my aunts and uncles and their families. There were more people calling each other “Ma” than you could shake a stick at. We worked it out. There has been absolutely no lasting trauma from it.

Now, for the benefit of those who haven’t seen the evil mother-in-law, I’m going to include her photo here. Doesn’t she look like a lesbian? She processes too. Yes, she wants Thalia and Aaron to call her Mamé because that’s what “her boys” call her. Her boys, of course, are her other grandchildren. I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Miss Thalia would comply. When I told her, she looked at me and said, “I’m not calling her that.”

Now, there was a period in my life when I lost my fucking mind. I’m not prepared to write about that in much detail yet, but I’m getting there. Suffice it to say that I was involved with someone else, and this person was a processor par extraordinaire. To this day, I’m not sure WTF happened to me. This woman had every characteristic that I just about disliked in a person, and processing was just one of them. Needless to say it was over before it began.

I don’t say that I never think things through. I do, but I’m more likely to just “go with it.” I also don’t over-analyze a situation like my bride does. If someone does something that hurts her, she has to know why the person did it. I don’t want to know why. I just want the person to fucking stop. It’s simple for me. The less time I spend in the processing zone, the more productive my life is.

I’m not sure how we came to this conclusion, but we decided to try a different facility for a second opinion. Our pediatrician suggested Dr. William Dec at the Mass General Hospital.  This one didn’t go well from the beginning.  We didn’t actually see Bill Dec, but we did have an appointment with his fellow (I’ve wracked my brain, but I cannot remember this guy’s name). He was a jerk, but his assistant was just plain dumb. After studying all of Beth’s test results and the massive file that had been sent before our appointment, he — this pinheaded wanna’ be — had come to the conclusion that Beth could resume her normal activity. We just looked at each other. She was winded just moving around the house. There was no way that was either possible or advisable.

I’m not exactly sure how things transpired with this handful of caregivers. I know that we decided to see how it would go before jumping off the bandwagon. What actually happened was that they enrolled Beth in a drug study without consent or without her filling out any kind of paperwork. The drug was Carvedilol (generic: Coreg), which I myself happen to be on right now. Back then, however, it was an experimental drug. I may not remember much about this event, but I do remember that we found out on a routine visit when a nurse mentioned the study and why Beth had to come in that day. That really set Beth off and I have to say that I don’t blame her. Nobody wants to be a guinea pig when living and dying is the issue. That was the end of our experience with the proteges of the supposedly venerable William Dec.

It was at this point that Beth’s primary caregiver repaired her reputation with us, albeit temporarily. She suggested that we see someone named Dr. Abelman (sorry, can’t remember his first name) at Beth Israel. He was considered the last word in cardiology, but he was close to retirement. It didn’t matter to us; we just wanted a second look. Her office made the appointment for us and we went. This experience was so different from our experience at MGH that it was unbelievable. First off, we weren’t dealing with some lackey who had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. That was encouraging right off the top. We went to see Dr. Abelman and that’s who we saw. He had already had access to Beth’s files since all of the tests had been done at BI, so his first priority was to examine her.  We liked much better the prognosis when we left his office.

He did not offer Beth the heart transplant list. Instead, he differed with the original diagnosis of viral cardiomyopathy. He told us that he firmly believed that Beth’s cardiac “event”  was directly related to her pregnancy. This was the difference: He went back and looked at everything she had gone through over her pregnancy. He didn’t stop at the echo that was run after the pregnancy was over. I do remember the good doctor’s words exactly, “I don’t believe this is viral cardiomyopathy. I believe this is perinatal cardiomyopathy and that it is already remitting, and that it will completely remit over time with the proper care.” Unfortunately, Dr. Abelman would not be the doctor to follow Beth as he confirmed that he was retiring. He told us that his colleague, Dr. Carol Waksmonski, would be his choice of cardiologists to work with Beth.

Because of Beth’s fragile emotional make-up (is that a gentle enough description???), getting her to trust anybody new is a battle. She really felt comfortable with Dr. Abelman almost immediately, however, and she was willing to give Carol Waksmonski a shot. It was one of the best decisions she ever made in her life.

Dr. Carol Waskmonski to the rescue

I’m not going to paint Dr. Waksmonski as a miracle worker, but the one thing that stood out was that she could handle Beth’s illogical emotional forays into fear. Perhaps her biggest fear is of being abandoned. This is a constant underlying theme of Beth’s issues, and it’s no doubt due to the fact that her mother basically left her at home to be abused. It was abandonment of the worst kind. Dr. Wasksmonski knew Beth’s story going in because that’s my job. I make sure every health care provider that Beth will be interacting with on a regular basis understands exactly what’s going on in Beth’s head. The one ability Dr. Waskmonski had that I didn’t see in any of Beth’s other providers was the knowledge of how far to push back at Beth. She did with some success.

The focus of Beth’s care turned to perinatal cardiomyopathy. I believe that Beth came off the Carvedilol.  She had tachycardia, so she needed a medication for that. That’s when she began taking Lopressor (not generic back then, but now is — metoprolol). We moved from heart transplant to diet and exercise. I remember one of the most nerve wracking things I had to do throughout this process was check Beth’s pulse with a stop watch. She could not go above a specified level (although, to be honest, I forget what the number was now).

Beth, after a period of despair, went at it with her usual amount of determination. Her workouts started at 30 minutes, wearing a manditory heart monitor. By the time she was done over the two-year recovery period, she would be at the gym for nearly three hours a day, four days a week. In between, there were monthly visits to Dr. Wasksmonski and serial echocardiograms to track her heart’s recovery.  When Beth was diagnosed at the Beth Israel about four or five months after Thalia was born, her ejection fraction was 15%. At her most recent check-up, just about two months ago, it was 55%, or dead-on normal.

Beth’s achievement was huge. Two years later she was declared healthy, and Carol Waskmonski remained Beth’s cardiologist right on through Aaron’s birth and early life. (Today, Carol Wasksmonski is at Columbia in New York and she and Beth still keep in touch via email.) There were, however, losses in other ways. Somehow, Beth had managed to keep herself from bonding with Thalia early on because she believed she would not be around for long. I think that was a decision made in haste –a ’self-preservation’ effort that hurt rather than helped. Because of this, Thalia and I developed a very special relationship. Beth eventually got there, but it took a lot of work and happened much later. For sure, Beth missed a lot that I had the pleasure to be part of.

To Thalia’s credit, she “gets it.” This is perhaps because she’s been exposed to a lot of  what I like to call “adult stuff” a lot sooner than most kids. I feel badly about that, but I tried to keep her from it as best I could. There are just times when there’s no hiding some things no matter how hard you try. I’ve been in that situation a lot, and it never gets any easier.

Back from a death sentence

Beth would be totally healthy by 1999-2000. Did I mention that she has a short memory? By 2000 she was ready to get pregnant again, to my dismay. She wasn’t kidding either.  Ah, but that is a different post for a different day! Stay tuned for the next episode of WTF is with my life.