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Biddy is a woman of some years: a GenX'er, Riot Grrrl, survivor, traveler, tattoo collector, senior pet owner, music lover, former public school embattled public school retiree and amatuer vegan chef. Biddy Sounds Off is a thinking woman's bildungsroman and pirate radio station some thirty years in the making: featuring episodic writings and eclectic musical selections.
Welcome to Biddy Sounds Off, a place for episodic writing and music I love. I'm Biddy. In another episode, I mentioned the idea of inverting the idea of shame. Turning it on its head, reversing the stigma, a system that rewards those who seek help and therapy, rather than punishes them. Life is suffering.
Biddy:I'm sure I heard another comparison putting it this way, life is suffering times resistance. There is the suffering equation from Bill Scheinman, a mindfulness teacher, which states suffering equals pain times resistance. It may all be a jumble in my mind. In the acute stages of grief, the suffering equation helped me enormously to survive, to learn to manage my pain by getting granular, piecing things back together. Grief is so overwhelming and if you've not been there before, there is a tearing from your soul, and that emptiness is so vast.
Biddy:It has a gravity to it. And you think you might tip into it, and never make it back out. If you've already experienced loss, you can tell yourself, with some authority, that you will indeed make it back out. In order to do so, you must learn to manage that expansive grief. Realizing when the pain was too much that I was resisting it, helped me find the permission I needed to let go.
Biddy:On the other side of that grief, apparently, I've developed a shorthand with this formula. Life equals suffering resistance. Swapping out a word here and connecting a Buddhist idea there, specifically that all of life is suffering. A statement that is at once devastating and comforting helps me to cope. I don't come to you with religious upbringing or any special knowledge, other than my own lived experience.
Biddy:Whatever equation gets you through the day, moving forward, putting our energy towards progress rather than resistance. Pushing back or down on emotions that need to be expressed in full, Whatever fucked up feeling you felt requires the dignity of expression, recognition without judgment, which, internalized, causes more scar tissue to build up around it, more pressure attached and attaching itself, creating pain. I imagine a hand, my hand, pushing against my chest with a pressure that is light at first, maybe just a thin layer of anxiety. Will I be good enough? Am I deserving?
Biddy:If I feed those wolfish ideas, I am not advocating for myself. That pressure will calcify over time, turning to stone, hindering movement, the unyielding judgments of myself against myself ceasing progress. For a long time, I felt shame that did not belong to me, and I tried to be tough and push through it, pushing against the unmovable weight of my own self punishment. Resistance. Drugs, jail, hurting other people, burying everything so deep you use cognitive dissonance to make it through the day, a grave cycle.
Biddy:Child sex abuse survivors, trauma survivors, we do this. This is what so many of us have been taught. Our parents, raised by the so called greatest generation, told us what they had learned themselves, what had been modeled which is emotions are shameful, they make us weak, Drink it down. Beat somebody up. Drive drunk, and fuck up your relationships, and wreck your own potential.
Biddy:That was how a lot of us were taught to deal with life, the pain, the suffering. We thought it made us alien, but nothing could be more human. To live as a sentient being is to experience psychic pain. In the late eighties, I didn't know anyone in therapy. You'd see it on TV shows sometimes if someone broke the law or had drug problems.
Biddy:Therapy seemed like their punishment. Those people must be bad. Either that, or they were lily livered, weak. There were a few exceptions. But those were in the extreme, and existed somewhere apart from everyday, acceptable life.
Biddy:There is still a stigma. A mother recently shared her son's tragic story with me, and when I suggested therapy, she snort laughed, derisively. Oh, yeah. Of course. I'll get him therapy.
Biddy:He'll need it. I thought, bitch, everybody needs therapy. What year is this? You don't need to have therapy in worst case scenarios only. Rather, everyone deserves to have therapy, if for no other reason than to acknowledge the brain inside our bone heads.
Biddy:Drawing breath itself, a small act of suffering. The stigma of mental health care should be reversed. No shame in seeking help and therapy, with shame ascribed only to those who would actively deny themselves therapy. No one I knew was seeking therapy in the nineties. There was that time my mom sent me to see someone after I told her how uncomfortable my stepdad had made me feel, she pulled the car over and told me I'd have to see someone about this and that we couldn't talk about this together again.
Biddy:Eye contact was cut off. She avoided me. Being sent to see someone alone, it felt like I'd done something wrong, the same way it had when I'd been assaulted at age 7, which immediately preceded the break in our family. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was when immediately following this disclosure, my stepdad was cast out, not that it would be the end of him. I found the therapist's office and went on my own once.
Biddy:It was never mentioned afterwards. The therapist told me to write the word breathe on a piece of paper and carry that around with me in my pocket. I didn't get it. I was breathing all the time. Every time I pulled that piece of paper out of my pocket, I reminded myself that therapy wasn't working, so I must be doing it wrong.
Biddy:Wasn't I already breathing? Maybe that was the problem, I told myself. A few years later, after mom had sent my stepdad packing, she told me he'd become addicted to meth. We'd known him to be an alcoholic but not a drug user. Those years they were together, it had been my job to check on him when he came home before mom would deign to greet him.
Biddy:I'd have been 14 then. Go see if he's drunk, she'd tell me. It was easy to see in an instant. Red watery eyes and a wobble to his walk. He filled the room with the smell of booze and sweat.
Biddy:He worked as a day laborer and his hands were huge, rough. I didn't have any special drunk detecting abilities. Any idiot could see that he'd been drinking. Sometimes, she'd come out of her room hissing and swearing at him. Other times, she wouldn't.
Biddy:And he'd play that song, hey there, little red riding hood. Kinda slow to start with a lot of uncomfortable eye contact aimed in my direction. I'd make polite excuses while he followed me around the room. I hoped to make my escape before he reached the part of the song where he broke out into a full throated howl, at which time he put the guitar down and chase me with grabbing hands, just a tickle. Come here.
Biddy:He'd make kissing sounds, and I laughed because I didn't know what else to do. Many more years later, mom told me he'd got some kind of mouth cancer and had most of his tongue removed, a cruel fate I shudder to think of even now. This must have been after the time he caught up with me on the street. I'd been busy posting garage sale signs and hadn't noticed his approach. He'd been calling even though mom told him to stop.
Biddy:He stuttered an apology for scaring me. I apologized for being scared. He was only half drunk and my mind was racing for excuses to depart. He got right to the point, explaining that we were meant to be together. He wanted me to leave with him so we could be married.
Biddy:I must have been 19 then. He said he knew I felt it too, had felt it all these years. I had no voice. My mouth did that thing a fish does, bobbing open and closed. Tears began to flow.
Biddy:I was shaking uncontrollably. He pulled me to him in a rough hug, and whispered that he would call me and I was to get my bags packed. Mercifully, he released me, climbed back onto his motorcycle and thundered off. He kept calling and mom kept telling him to stop. I was more careful on the street not to let my guard down and did not see him again.
Biddy:When mom told me about his cancer, it made me feel awful. I didn't forget about the times I was 12 and woke up to his bulk, filling my bedroom doorway in shadow while he stood there silent, smoking, just watching me. The way he lost his daughter, Kelly, to domestic violence, it would have twisted up anyone. Mom married him a second time for boyfriend and was living with him. This kept me safe from the men who think of unclaimed women as so much free pussy lying about for the taking.
Biddy:Let's take a music break right now with the divine Beth Ditto and crazy again. My mom had this furious Scarlett O'Hara thing that shook my world. I gave her so much power and she lapped it up too. Cognitive dissonance is a term I learned in my early psych courses. It was an interesting elective along the bachelor's of arts pathway.
Biddy:I didn't cotton on to any real depth of understanding of the term until I was sitting in front of a therapist. I'd sought out to help me cope with the continued presence of my mother in my life. Another difficulty I had in seeking out therapy and staying with it was my inability to determine what my goals were for therapy. I'd managed to move her into a home of her own, a home of her own choosing. I told her I'd be joining her there, eventually.
Biddy:I was true to my word, joining her there during COVID. Had it not been for the pandemic, I don't know if I would have. Ever the self obsessed martyr, I relished the idea of protecting her. Her health had begun to fail. The therapist got my intake info and immediately asked me why it was necessary to keep my mother in my life at all.
Biddy:I blanked. No answer. He went on to explain the meaning of cognitive dissonance. By then, my capacity to accept lies without hesitation was deeply ingrained. Since childhood, having worked with children as a teacher for many years, I realized that children know when adults lie.
Biddy:The ones who've been taught self respect question the lies. The ones without self esteem accept that we deserve the lies, rather than the risk of questioning the lying liars. We lied to each other, mom and me. My older sister did not. She called us out for the lying liars and every time.
Biddy:She fought throughout her life, burning up along with her own combustible instincts far too soon. I respected her combative nature far more than my own, believing my own survival instinct, that of freeze, to be the most shameful of all the surviving instincts. Admonishing myself for not having fought or even fleeing danger, my instinct sister gave 0 fucks to those who would judge her drinking and drug abuse. She was quick with the fuck yous and would use humor to handily dispense with the concerns of others. When she moved in what would become her last apartment, she was visibly ill, malnourished, unsteady on her toothpick thin legs.
Biddy:1 of the new neighbors snapped a picture of her on a disposable camera and when her partner yelled at him, they ran off laughing. I didn't know there'd be papa ratzi, she quipped, tossing her straw blond hair back over her shoulder. It had begun falling out in patches. Several years later, watching Amy Winehouse's public decline, it was impossible not to find comparisons in their physical appearances. Despite a failing body, her wit remained sharp.
Biddy:She preferred to stay homebound in the last years of her life, like Howard Hughes, she said, talking on the phone rather than meeting anyone in person. I was unreachable then, careening off the rails in my own silent and subversive way while my mom and sister spoke daily. When they spoke on the phone, I heard my mother laugh. She lit up. When the phone calls ended, I knew I was a poor substitute.
Biddy:In person or on the phone, I was the same sulky, passive aggressive fuckwit who played possum in the face of imminent danger. Polite and pliant, for years I feared I had no personality of my own. My sister had the kind of charm and charisma that could effervesce a living personality into the hallowed eyes of a corpse. She was our home grown comedy queen, an auteur in her own right. She spun tall tales and lit up rooms.
Biddy:When we were little, she cast me in her improv comedy sketches, then sent me out to entertain on command. If we were waiting in the car for mom to come back from the bank, for example, she'd send me out to entertain in the parking lot. It was hot that day, behind Minnequa Bank, and the parking lot was full of boxy Oldsmobiles, station wagons with wood paneling, Buick Sedans with no AC back then, parked cars with their windows down. Some car doors hung open to let the air through, displaying splayed legs here and there, cutoffs, hairy legs, tube socks, tennis shoes, cowboy boots, not a lot of boat shoes, or name brands in Bessemer. It was the eighties, so kids roaming around unattended wasn't unusual.
Biddy:Plus, my sister said she'd give me her lollipop when mom finally returned from the bank counter. She was lying, but it was worth it to kill the boredom anyway. She dressed me in a red fringed vest and cowgirl hat to match, then slung a gun belt around my waist. I held onto the little plastic cap piece, tipped with orange, holding it to my face so I could smell the smoke from rounds I'd burned earlier, smashing the paper roll methodically with a hammer in the basement. They made little black cloudbursts on the cool concrete floor.
Biddy:My sister pushed me out of the car, shouting, go, hurry before she comes back. Her giggles were rapid fire staccato. I holstered my cap gun and hung my thumbs from my jean pockets. I tried to waddle bent leg like a cowgirl, shift my hips from side to side. She beat on the window, telling me to move faster.
Biddy:She scrunched down in the back seat and her blonde curls ringed her rosy cheeks. She was pointing at an old man engrossed in his newspaper, hunched over the steering wheel of a maroon Plymouth. I made my way up to the driver's side. Smoke billowed out from the open window. My clip clopping boots must have caught his attention, and he looked up at me with a kindly smirk.
Biddy:I'm Tex, I said. Can I show you a little dance? Suddenly, mom appeared. She was coming back, and had made a big deal about staying in the car. I could see her soft permed hair bouncing in the sunny distance as she headed towards the parking lot.
Biddy:I made it back just before she did, 2 dumb dumb suckers poking out of the fist of her fingers. Apparently, my flight instinct can be activated, so long as I'm dutifully following directions. A proper, people pleasing protozoa. I'm ending today with a correction. In episode 18, I misnamed my sister's boyfriend's band as Anthrax, which was a big name band of the time.
Biddy:Although some local junior bands may play in tribute to bigger names like some little league teams do when they name their teams the Giants or the Panthers. There was nothing little league or junior about the legendary Colorado Springs band I meant to name as Animosity. Fucking cool as hell band name and speed metal band, who as my sister said, did everything regular bands did, just twice as fast. Truly impressive, and thank you to my wonderful friend who brought that to my attention. Our last song today comes from Lung Leg, Put on Your Future Specs.
Biddy:It's time for Kung Fu on the Internet, circa 1997. If you'd like to get in touch, please email me at biddybiddybops@gmail .com. That's 2 biddys and bops with an s. This has been Biddy Sounds Off. Thank you for listening.