Author Archives: shrinkrapped

Medicare for Me

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A lot of people dread turning 65, but not me. Ever since a cancer diagnosis in 2012, there’s nothing I’d rather do than tick off the years toward old age. I’ve eagerly awaited certain milestones:

  1. 60 for most senior discounts at the movies
  2. 62 for the lifetime pass to National Parks (I lucked in at the $10 rate just before it increased to $80—still a steal!)
  3. 65 for Medicare
  4. 66 and two-thirds for collecting 100% of my Social Security.

This month, I achieve Milestone #3, and I couldn’t be happier. Not just because it means I’m still alive and well, but because of the hundreds of dollars I’ll save every month for the same insurance and doctors I have now.

Don’t get me wrong—as a self-employed cancer survivor, I was thrilled when the Affordable Care Act passed, and pre-existing conditions could no longer be used as an excuse to deny people coverage. I was lucky enough to have good coverage pre-ACA through my husband’s employer. But my husband felt he couldn’t leave no matter how unhappy he became as the job grew more stressful. Employer-provided health insurance, which we were fortunate to have, equaled golden handcuffs. The ACA changed all that. My husband, also a cancer survivor, was thrilled to join me in the ranks of the happily self-employed.

We paid through the nose to keep our good coverage through Covered California, and it was a privilege to do so (in all senses of the word).

Still, as great an accomplishment as the ACA is, it highlights the problems in our for-profit healthcare industry. It’s why single-payer, universal coverage, the public option, and Medicare for All are so front and center in the 2020 campaign. Democrats have varied but serious proposals about how best to improve healthcare, while Republicans continue to sabotage an imperfect but substantial reform, even threatening to eliminate the ban on pre-existing conditions altogether and putting healthcare out of reach for tens of millions of Americans.

Medicare for All has always struck me as a way to borrow a catchy name and a popular program as an umbrella description of our aspirations for universal coverage. There are different ways to skin this cat. My personal preference is to initially lower the age at which Medicare eligibility starts (a proposal that Senator Joe Lieberman thwarted in 2009), funnel much younger people dropped from their parents’ coverage into it, and allow an opt-in for everybody by expanding the public option—essentially the glide path described by many Democrats to achieve Medicare for All. I understand the appeal and economic rationale of a rapid and far-reaching overhaul, but a more gradual transition avoids the risk for major implementation glitches and has far more buy-in from voters.

Which brings me back to Medicare for Me, my “OK, Boomer” achievement that moves me higher up the ladder on which I was already born—a ladder whose bottom rung swings far beyond the reach of so many.  I am glad to have reached this milestone, which makes my life easier and more affordable. I will be gladder still when Medicare for Me becomes Medicare for All.

Women’s March, 2020

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This is the fourth Women’s March I’ve attended, and, I hope, the last one with Trump occupying the oval office. Still here, still smiling, from 2017-2020:

That sign I’m carrying is pretty heavy–at its base is a Hillary sign from the 2016 campaign, and I’ve been adding layers for various marches ever since–to save Obamacare, reproductive rights, our democracy, and a warming planet; to protest gun violence, Trump’s family separation policy, and his overall cruelty; to support the wrenching but essential impeachment of this craven and lawless president.

Soon after the 2016 election and first Women’s March, I wrote Signs of the Times, and it’s always a treat to see people’s creativity and passion on display. Here’s a sign about one of the few silver linings of the Trump era, plus those of my friends and I waiting for the bus to take us to San Francisco this year (photo courtesy of my husband, one of many men joining the throngs):

San Francisco’s own women leaders were prominently featured:

Plus my personal favorite:

And, of course, the number one guiding principle for all of us:

Here are some of my other favorites:

The crowds were no match for the millions who turned out the day after Trump’s inauguration three years ago, but the mood was one of exuberant determination. Besides, the numbers that really count are the thousands of groups formed by ordinary people-turned-activists, the phone calls and texts made, doors knocked upon, voters registered, ballots cast. We’ve flipped seats from Red to Blue from state houses to the U.S. House and Senate, and will march right through 2020 to flip even more, taking back the Senate, the White House, and the promise of a better future.

So march to the polls on November 3, and mark your calendars for next January, when we celebrate the fruits of our labors:

Passing on the Tradition

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The minute I saw the invitation, I knew the jig was up. Our daughter Ally and her boyfriend were throwing a tree-trimming party, a tradition I began with a roommate in my 20s and continued with my husband for many years. This party meant that the occasional knee-high tree grabbed as an afterthought from Mollie Stones would be replaced by a six-footer. It was time.

I’d been waiting for this day with mixed feelings since our daughters were born. Each year, we’d head out the day after Thanksgiving to select ornaments, one for each girl. We’d hang them on the tree, then, after packing them away for the season, I’d write the year and a detailed description of the ornament on hand-scrawled lists: “Ally’s Ornaments,” “Emma’s Ornaments.” All the eras of childhood were there: teddy bears, snowmen, rocking horses, Santas, dogs, cats, the more sophisticated choices of adolescence. Someday, I knew, I’d wistfully wrap them all up and present them as a starter set for the first real tree of their adult lives.

Ally’s first ornaments from us were a teddy bear dressed up for Christmas and a baby on a rocking horse.

I wrapped each one in tissue, along with all the others, and placed everything in a shoe box, wrapping it in extra cloth leftover from the tree skirt I’d made for us years before.

Ally’s jaw dropped as she unwrapped the first ornaments. “I can’t possibly accept these!” she protested, but her reluctance gave way as I assured her this had been my intent all along.

She sent me a picture of their very sparsely decorated tree as soon as they’d set it up, decked with her childhood ornaments and the two they’d gotten for their first tree. There was plenty of room for years and years more.

The tree-trimming party was wonderful. Ally made these adorable edibles:

And here’s what we brought, a homemade facsimile of both girls’ long-time favorite that a friend had given me at my first tree-trimming party almost four decades ago:

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What traditions have you passed along?

The Limits of Tolerance

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As the long-time clinical consultant for a crisis hotline, I grapple with an old question that’s arisen with a new and urgent focus: How should we respond to callers who use racist, sexist, homophobic, and other offensive language?

Therapists absorb and metabolize strong affect and hurtful words all the time. Our role is to listen and understand, to find the person behind barriers of hate, fear, and ignorance. We are also taught to meet people where they are.

But what if where they are crosses a line? Ventilation can offer relief, but it can also cause harm to the listener and the speaker. Setting limits is part of good clinical care.

Listening to intensely prejudicial language not only taxes the tolerance of the counselors, but makes them feel complicit in perpetrating trauma and injustice. The staff is skeptical about my talk of metabolizing agents, sometimes simplistically so, but often with good reason.

Hateful speech increases prejudice and dehumanization. Exposure to it has severe and long-lasting effects on both physical and mental health. Not only is it important to protect counselors from burnout and trauma, but also to safeguard those who spew offensive language. “We are not doing our callers any favors by tolerating behaviors that would get them in trouble everywhere else,” a wise African-American long-time staff member always reminds us.

This dilemma extends far beyond the counseling relationship. We are living in an era of vitriol unleashed by the President to devastating effect. Many counselors see it as their duty to challenge such venom on the crisis lines.

No one is proposing cancel or call-out culture, which the black feminist and activist Loretta Ross describes as toxic, a system of “punishment and exile that mirror[s] the prison industrial complex.” Ross goes on to say, “Call-outs are justified to challenge provocateurs who deliberately hurt others, or for powerful people beyond our reach.” This does not describe our callers, who generally come from the least powerful margins of society. The point of our work is to try to reach, not drive people further underground into isolated and silent bunkers of reinforced conviction.

Ross proposes instead a culture of calling-in: “a call-out done with love.” This is what we strive for on the crisis lines. We discuss in our meetings the balance between opening up and shutting down, countertransference, self-care, pitfalls of shame and self-righteousness, ways to limit-set that are constructive rather than retaliatory, the limits of tolerance.

Over the years I’ve reminded the staff of an old African proverb: “Sometimes your mind can be so open that your brains fall out.” Now, they remind me of the same thing, and we stumble on together.

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Originally published in NCSPP’s Impulse

For My Mother, on the Eve of the Public Impeachment Inquiry

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My mother was glued to the television every minute of the Watergate hearings when PBS began broadcasting them on May 17, 1973. I was a senior in high school then, and although I’m sure I must have left the house from time to time that summer before college, I was often alongside her, riveted. My mother had spent a lot of the preceding years chain-smoking and cursing every time Richard Nixon showed up on TV, and I lived with equal parts admiration and fear that one day her turquoise glass ashtray full of butts would go hurtling across the living room and shatter the screen.

The testimony itself proved shattering enough: John Dean’s complicity turned into conscience; Alexander Butterfield inadvertently revealing the White House taping system that eventually led to the “smoking gun” tape proving Nixon’s direct involvement in the cover-up and obstructing justice. I don’t remember at what point we put a bottle of champagne in the fridge in anticipation of celebrating the president’s demise after invincibility slowly turned to inevitability. But I remember popping it the night of August 8, 1974, when Nixon announced his resignation, effective at noon the next day.

Those times seem long ago and in a galaxy far, far away. They’ve been beautifully captured by James Poniewozik, chief television critic for the New York Times. I’ve been aching for my mother all day long, and his account makes me ache even more for a time in which accountability and truth mattered.

My mother would have turned 96 just last month, but she’s been dead since 1995. I often look up into the stars at night and think, “Thank God you’ve missed this, it would kill you.” I was grateful that my mother died with her adoration of Bill Clinton intact, unsullied by his impeachment scandal. I could imagine ashtrays hurtling once again through the air when the Supreme Court declared Bush the winner in 2000. Although I’m sorry she missed the Obama years (she would have been equally thrilled by Hillary), I was thankful she missed 9/11, Iraq, endless wars. Trump’s election would surely have finished her off. (I feel that way myself much of the time, and do not have my mother’s habit of smoking to relieve the anxiety.)

But I do wish I could have her on the couch right now, riveted, alive with fury. I love to imagine her devouring then adding to her shelves all the books about Trump (and his fall) to her extensive Watergate library.

Right now, the prospect of popping champagne seems dim. But if and when it comes, I’ll raise a glass to you, Mom.

Let Us Eat Cake!

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Five minutes after the power came on after a three-day outage, I started baking an ice cream cake. Not the usual kind, with yummy layers of Mocha Almond Fudge and hot fudge sauce layered into graham cracker crust and left in the freezer, but my own invention–a variation of “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

Fans of Shrinkrapped may recall that our emergency preparations for the “safety” power outages PG&E implemented as fire control mostly involved grabbing a spoon and enjoying our dozen or so pints of premium Haagen Dazs. We lost our power a bit before 8:30 Saturday night, and since I failed to set my alarm to get up at 2:00 to dig in, my Sunday breakfast consisted of a fantastic, very thick Chocolate-Chocolate Chip and Cookies and Cream ice-cold milkshake, rivaling the Creamy Dreamies we used to get at the Lagunitas market on our way back from a day at the beach.

Jonathan, insufficiently committed to self-destructive acts for the greater good, left most of the dirty work to me. But between the two of us, we managed to polish off close to three pints while the ice cream was still in this near-perfect state of soft serve. I nobly continued for another pint or so after the melted stuff resembled chilled creamy soup. But hey, if people get excited about vichyssoise, what’s the difference? Eventually, however, even I had to admit that suffering indigestion and weight gain for this salvage operation might not be the best idea.

“It’s mostly cream, isn’t it?” Jonathan asked as we forlornly surveyed our losses. “Couldn’t we use it to make cake when the power comes back on?”

Right away I thought of my recipes that used milk. The one that uses the most—chocolate chip cake—is also Jonathan’s favorite. I figured the melted ice cream also contained a fair amount of sugar and butter, so before we could reset our clocks, I was measuring out ingredients. I wanted to get that sucker into the oven in case we lost power again.

“I’m not making the frosting until we know how it’s turned out,” I told Jonathan. We had a test slice after dinner—our first meal not cooked on our Coleman camp stove in three days. Yum! I wasted no time in making the frosting to complete my masterpiece. Unfortunately, I had only one-quarter of the amount of confectioners’ sugar required—not because of power outages, but because of a lapse in my usual hoarding of staple ingredients (i.e., anything used for baking). So I made glaze instead of frosting, and the cake was even better. The only improvement would be to serve it up with a big scoop of ice cream.

Which, unfortunately, we no longer have.

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Here’s the original recipe, with comments for how to improve it, with or without salvaged ice cream:

Real Chocolate Chip Cake—12 servings (make in a 10-inch high-quality Bundt or tube pan; if poor quality, there’ll be hell to pay in the form of a lot of yummy chocolate-laden cake top sticking to the pan, which you then have to pry loose and patch onto the rest of the cake. Or eat from the pan, and call it a day.)

3 cups flour                                                 1 tsp. vanilla

3-1/2 tsp. baking powder                          1 cup butter or margarine, softened

`1 tsp. almond extract                                ¾ tsp. salt

1-1/3 cups milk                                          1-3/4 cups sugar

4 eggs                                                        12 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips–mini best

Preheat oven to 350. In small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside. In large bowl, combine butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in vanilla and almond extracts. Gradually add in flour mixture alternately with milk. Stir in chocolate chips. Pour into greased and floured 12-cup bundt or tube pan (approx. 10-inch). Bake at 350 for 60-70 minutes (I recommend checking at 50—it’s invariably overbaked if it goes for a full hour). Remove from oven and cool in pan 10-15 minutes. Then turn onto serving plate. If you have failed to use a high-quality pan and it doesn’t come out in one beautiful piece, enjoy the patching or gorging job ahead of you. Cool completely, then top with chocolate frosting or glaze (I recommend either doubling or at least increasing by 50% for good coverage of the cake; or, if you use less sugar to keep it at glaze consistency, you can attractively drizzle it over the cake assuming you don’t need to disguise broken cake from using a cheap pan).

Chocolate Glaze: Combine ½ cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, ¼ cup boiling water, ½ tsp. cinnamon, and 1 cup sifted confectioners’ sugar. Blend until smooth. I find it easiest to do in a food processor or blender, but if you double it, be careful so it doesn’t blow chocolate liquid all over your kitchen. (I doubled all the ingredients before I realized I had very little confectioners sugar, so only used about half cup of that–it made a fine glaze, though good to refrigerate it a little bit before topping cake so it isn’t so runny.)

Waste-Not, Want-Not Adaptation: Instead of the milk, I used 2-1/2 cups melted Haagen Dazs ice cream (I used Cookies and Cream, but any vanilla-based ice cream should do. You’re on your own if you favor minty or fruity flavors.) I used only one cup of sugar, and about 12 tbsp. of butter. I baked it for 60 minutes, and wish I had taken it out at 50 or 55 minutes—it will bake a bit longer as it cools in the pan.

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Also, the best things to have during a power outage: a portable solar phone charger; a Coleman stove; a sense of perspective; and a profession that doesn’t depend on electricity–in my case talk therapy.

Emergency Preparations

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We’re a little bit on edge in California these days, what with earthquakes, Trump’s vendetta against the state, and, of course, wildfires. Massive numbers of alerts arrive telling us our power may or may not be shut off, for some indeterminate length of time. Lines for gas and bags of ice are long. Ire at Pacific Gas and Electric, the utility everybody loves to hate for good and not-so-good reasons is mounting.

We live in an area where the power rarely goes out, and we can make a dash by foot and be at the main drag in 30 seconds if necessary. Last night we practiced opening our garage doors manually. I pointed out the easily evacuated boxes of Christmas tree ornaments I’ve been collecting for the past 30+ years, and Jonathan rolled his eyes. We determined that our battery-powered lanterns are dead, but located three flashlights, put out a bunch of candles, found our solar phone charger and respirator masks, and have a full tank and a full charge for our cars. We have about 30 bags of chocolate chips in the downstairs cupboard. And maybe a can or two of tuna, plus several cans of beans. Our mostly empty go bags are at the ready, which probably indicates that our evacuation plan involves looting rather than preparation.

BUT, we’re totally ready to observe the #1 rule of power outages if you kind of ignore the one about not opening your refrigerator and freezer: Grab a spoon and eat all that ice cream before it melts!

Stay safe, everyone.

It’s Time

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I live in a deep blue bubble where people have been jumping on the impeachment bandwagon for a long time. I mainline Pod Save America, and constantly read in “What a Day,” Crooked Media’s online newsletter, pro-impeachment arguments and lamentations about Nancy Pelosi’s caution. I love Michelle Goldberg, Charles Blow, and Jamelle Bouie, all New York Times columnists who favor impeachment and are passionate about removing Trump from office.

I share that passion. But until recently I have not been persuaded that impeachment is the right strategy. I distrust the preaching-to-the-choir fervor among many proponents, and I want to tear my hair out when I hear, “I don’t care if we lose seats, it’s the moral thing to do!”

As someone who spent a lot of time canvassing in a swing district in the run-up to the mid-terms, I can attest that people outside of deep blue bubbles care about healthcare, jobs, and traffic far more than impeachment, and that they tend to give the President the benefit of the doubt even if they don’t like his blowhard style. Nancy Pelosi has been right to worry about the vulnerability of Freshman Democrats from such districts who constitute the bulk of last year’s flipped seats. Like Pelosi, I have believed that the President wants to goad Democrats into a trap, that thorough investigations in the House should proceed, and that Trump and his entire party of enablers are best impeached at the polls. Plus, the prospect of a President Pence has scared me even more than the current arsonist-in-chief, who at least keeps people alarmed enough to actively work to defeat him.

My internal needle on impeachment has been changing, though. Trump’s continuing defiance of laws and norms, completely supported by the Dereliction-of-Duty Republicans, have stymied other options to hold him accountable, and we can’t continue with this erratic sociopath until November 2020 in what Pod Save‘s Dan Pfeiffer calls “Impeachment Purgatory.”

The silver lining of Trump’s presidency is that you don’t have to wait that long for his next self-destructive eruption. Now, thanks to the bravery of an intelligence whistleblower, clear lawbreaking by the Administration’s obstruction of the complaint’s delivery to Congress, and Trump’s public confession of soliciting foreign interference from the Ukrainian president for his own political gain in the 2020 election, there’s a fresh and clear-cut display of impeachable offenses. The latest revelations provide the hook to act now.

It’s time. “What took you so long?” some might say. Perhaps. But I prefer to think of it as “Now more than ever.”

ITMFA: Impeach the Motherfucker Already. I snapped that photo at the end of May in Oakland. I wasn’t there yet.  But I’m there now. Even if the Senate acquits, get every Republican on record. Then impeach at the polls. Every last one of them.

In Remembrance

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Candle in the dark

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I wrote this post on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, and offer it again today in commemoration. I hope we can some day live in a world where the best of humanity prevails.

As usual, I went to yoga Sunday morning, the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Mostly I go for the effect on my muscles, not my spirit. But on this solemn day my yoga teacher lit a candle in remembrance, and invited us to practice Tonglen, breathing in all that is troublesome in the world, acknowledging it, then transforming it into compassion and peace on the exhale. After a few minutes, the class continued with its typical focus on backs, necks, and hips, or, as one member put it, “the usual overall soreness.”

At the end of the class, after the stretching and the Namaste, another member shared what happened to her Turkish and Egyptian friends ten years ago. They owned a restaurant in Manhattan, which they managed to keep open after the towers fell despite the chaos and lack of customers. Late at night three white men came in. They trashed the place. One of the owner’s friends managed to slip away and call the police. Soon the men who had destroyed the restaurant were apprehended and brought back to be identified before they could be charged.

“Yes, those are the men,” the owners told the police, who were eager to throw the book at them.

But the owners refused to press charges.

“This is a difficult day,” they said. “We understand their grief and rage. Let them go.”

Incredulous, the police did so reluctantly.

A few hours later, the three men came back with some of their friends, pressing upon the owners fistfuls of cash for the damage. The men helped clean up as best they could, and continued to come for the next several weeks until things were put right again.

Sometimes forgiveness is the most effective kind of justice. It is much more likely than hatred or revenge to spawn atonement. This is the lesson so often lost in our decade of fear and grief and war. But it is one worth remembering as we light a candle; breathe in trouble and sorrow; breathe out compassion and peace; and seek to ease the overall soreness of the world.

Ties that Bind

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Tara Westover’s acclaimed memoir, Educated, is about many things: growing up in an extreme fundamentalist family under the thrall of a paranoid father, in an environment both idyllic and abusive; her attempts to break free; and education in both the sense of formal learning and its more expansive meaning–the process of self-discovery.

I happened to listen to Educated after finishing a monthly case conference led by Dr. Jane Rubin about working as a psychotherapist with developmental trauma. The memoir is a compelling example of the complexities we explored: the traumas themselves; the additional and more severe consequences of misattuned responsiveness from a child’s primary caregivers; and the terror of change that makes the dread not to repeat as powerful as the dread to repeat.  

A reviewer summarizes Westover’s dilemma: “Will she come home? Can she come home? Or will home be more damaging to her spirit than the broader dangerous world her father fears?”

A better question is can she leave home? Educated illustrates repeatedly the psychological difficulty and cost of doing so.

In “To Free the Spirit from its Cell,” Bernard Brandschaft (1993) writes of the danger change poses to attachment, and the pathological accommodations necessary to preserve “emotionally enslaving early ties.”

Therapists encounter these dimensions of trauma all the time. Patients who have seemingly progressed but who cannot go further remain, in Brandschaft’s words, “imprisoned in the gulags of their minds.” What might seem a baffling resistance is an expression of identity grounded in fierce loyalty and love.

In a Fresh Air interview, Westover says, “Abuse is foremost an assault on the mind. If you’re going to abuse someone, you have to invade their reality and you have to distort it.” She describes how abuse is normalized and depicted as deserved, how shame is internalized. She was only able to break away after she had “grown her own mind,” become a different self—one who still hopes for, but no longer awaits, signs that her family has changed.

A patient once gave me “The City,’ by C.P. Cavafy (1894), which reads in part:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

find another city better than this one.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong . . .

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

This city will always pursue you. . .

 As Educated so beautifully attests, it is not impossible to free the spirit from its cell, but it is heartbreakingly difficult.