"Normal"--The Emperor's New Clothes? & Mum Visit

I'm grateful for the tug of normality--normalcy, even, though I find that suffix ugly. People are polite: people are willing to countenance without comment changes in their friends' hair length, dress habits (ok that's a tautology, since a habit is a kind of dress), weight. Oh yes of course, everyone has a friend, sometimes a mere acquaintance, who will unabashedly ask about the obvious. But for the most part, people are willing to allow changes to be subsumed under normal, to assume this is how things are supposed to be. You could even say that normalcy/normality is a conspiracy we all agree to maintain. 

Good job, Ela, you just retold The Story of the Emperor's New Clothes, complete with dress/habit elision! And you thought you had something new and interesting here.

Hear me just a moment more! But we each inhabit several worlds. It's only when these worlds unravel into one another that the fiction of normal starts to come undone. Right now I look more like I looked all my adult life than at any time in the past four years, but so many other things have changed. My friends in dirt-hippie days were astonished when my visiting mom mentioned my hothouse academic background. I don't know that anyone now could imagine me as an almost-professional musician, with the lifestyle and time commitment involved, and my present life is mysterious to my friends from that time. Where would normal lie in these intersections?

I started out saying I was grateful for the capacious countenancing of normal: a squint of the eye here, a double take there. It's useful to me as I re-enter normal life from a very abnormal few months. People acquiesce in how I seem, generally. Accept as normal how/what I eat. I spent the last few months being told I had to be 'abnormal' going forth in my faithfulness to 'the meal plan' or else it would be all downhill. My faithfulness to the meal plan is about analogous to Phil's faithfulness to resting his surgeried left arm, and in both cases what we're doing steers clear of outright damage. Our friends would recognize it as normal for each of us. But if someone from the treatment centers saw either of us in action, there would be a rupturing of the veil of normal right there. On the other hand, I am never a person who breaks a contract or pulls out at short notice, and, having thought I'd tough it through teaching this term, I ended up pulling out at very short notice on my therapist's nigh insistence. I'm glad I'm not teaching this term, I have plenty of other work. And I'm even more glad that the Campus Director was so kind about it; that, in a sense, it was allowed to be part of normal.

And now my mom is coming to visit again! We're driving up to Anchorage to meet her tomorrow. I'm writing this amid cleaning and dusting and generally trying to get our tiny place presentable. I've been home two weeks and after three months gone, that's been a very short time to get things lined up. Of course, my mom is one of my closest connections, in a shared psychic love bond, together with lots of instinctive cultural knowledge, together with shared memories my whole life long. All that said, we've inhabited different worlds for the most part for many years now. Start with the fact that I've lived in the US for twelve years. But even aside from the tiny cabin, with its precarious position, lack of shower, scenic outhouse; what is she going to find totally other than normal in her unspooling into this world? 

Already, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I discovered the joy of having strangers visit: the overlapping of their worlds with my normal allowed me to see over again the visible magic of my surroundings (of course, the not-visible had never fallen off my radar). A step away, and normal can become luminous.

For the conspiracy of normal to work among friends, we assume that we'll each do our part to keep normalcy tidy, picked up, watered, arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I broke that responsibility last spring with my manic swan dive toward destruction. Although someone from the treatment center might see some of my choices as 'not normal', be it known I'm taking the actions that prevent me from being dangerous, or at least unpleasant, to be around (taking meds, keeping regular hours); that other intakes are firmly steered away from downward spirals; that my science with the scale is impartial evidence of maintenance.

I hope to be able to check in here during my mom's visit, but we'll see how that goes. Much love.