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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Copabanana" data-source="post: 671530" data-attributes="member: 18958">I want to tell you a dream I had early this morning as much of it as I can remember.First, I think I have been buying stuff. Actually it has been going on since my mother died, but I stop for long spurts. It has felt a way to make a life even though I was in bed. To want to do things and to be things and to as if do it by buying the material props that go with them. I bought scuba stuff and surfing stuff and camping stuff and fishing stuff. I bought easels and mountains of yarn and knitting needles and crochet hooks and paints and brushes. I bought canning jars and a pressure canner. I bought stuff for snow. Dog raincoats. Everybody including my son has snow boots. 100 pairs of wool socks. Parkas. Those wool hats. Like 50.  And all of it crammed into my garage and house. And I am in bed.And M watching this.Amazon will not let me shop. Because of how much I returned. And still there is a mountain of stuff.The last few months I have focused on clothing for me. For the winter. Still in bed. And when I would go out, these past two years, I wore just one set of clothes, washed each night. Cotton yoga pants and a cotton long sleeve shirt.So I ordered online a mountain of clothes to make outfits with the column of color concept. And shoes. And sweaters. And then I realized, I needed jewelry. My mother had jewelry. I had one pair of lovely 18k big gold hoops. When I was traveling I bought them. I love them but when I went back to work they got packed away. One cannot wear earrings in a prison.Perhaps 50 pair of earrings have shown up in the mail. M watches.So I need brooches. Actually the brooches started it: I saw Madeline Albright on the TV and remembered she used brooches as a signature piece.  And on and on. And M watches.So to the dream. I was in a home that I had bought. And I was alone. There was no M. There was nobody there. Nobody to reach out to. Nothing happening in the town. Nothing to do. And I was frantic with loneliness. Trapped. And there was so much money lost because I had invested badly and to fill the emptiness inside of me I was buying junk. The kind of junk that predators sell to dupe people. And I had been one of those dupes. And nothing would fill the emptiness. I wanted to move back to an urban area so that I would have near me the movement of people and the street that fills the emptiness in me. And there was obstacle after obstacle. My mother was still alive. I would talk to her on the phone.  Which was largely my relationship with my mother. But this did nothing to assuage the painful desperation and the longing.  I had the sense that my lifetime has been defined by this yawning pit of solitary desperation.And still, when I got up this morning I bought more. And there is the growing sense that I am putting at stake my security, M's security and the security of my son, by this trying to fill something that can only be filled in relationship with myself and with others.Last night I had trouble falling asleep. So I got up and ate a few dates and went to the bathroom.  And I began to hear moaning from down the passageway where the dogs have their room and farther down the hall, where we sleep. The moaning was kind of like the sound Dolly the boxer makes when she wants to go outside. She starts with a single squeak and escalates to moans and if nobody listens...a single yelp. But the sound was off, the moaning.I began walking towards their room, and heard that the sound was coming from our room. It was M moaning over and over again, quietly. Terrified I tried to wake him and saw that he was already awake. I thought he was having a heart attack. (In a way, he was.) Shall I call an ambulance?  What is it? What is wrong? No. If you want to use the computer, I will go in the other room. That is the pattern I have typically followed. Not the last few days, but last week, and before. No. I was hungry. M said: You do not know how I feel. What I feel.And that moment I realized he was in agony. And he did not know how to tell me, to reach me. So I climbed in bed and held him and we went to sleep, each sheltered like spoons.And then I had that dream.Men express their intimacy sexually. That is a fact. Even when it does not feel like loving to us.I am going to get raunchy here. I have withdrawn physically. When you get old, the saying use it or lose it, has a special meaning. Everything hurts and desire is not so ever ready as it once was. It is all just too much trouble. We have abandoned each other. It is like we are willfully pretending we do not know the language of the other. Not listening. And alone.This is exactly what happens with M and I.This is M.I think this is the way he is tapping his own emotions. He wants to feel. By doing it this way, he feels safer.Cedar, I think, told us that her D H cries at movies. But no other place and time. No matter how sad and desperate the situation with those he loves...he dos not cry.Yes.Yes.I think my M is in agony. I believe he cannot bear his pain. I believe I have isolated myself from him. I almost cannot stand thinking of the agony he must have felt for this 60 year old man to begin moaning with a sound so primitive that I thought it was my dog. He has never ever expressed pain such as this. He is stoic, too, mostly. Although he has cried.Yes. And there is no language to tell us the agony of it. Like my keening when my mother was almost dead and died.  That is the situation in which M finds himself with his Mother. He cannot go to her, without leaving me. And what I am realizing is that to some large extent I have left him. I have isolated from him and he has had no language to tell me. I want to insert here one more thing: Yesterday M and I went to visit his sister to ask her to help me organize the house and get to the next level.  She said this: You cannot be alone anymore, like you have. Whatever it is you have been alone too much and too long.When I woke up I had an idea.  There is a quilting guild in my town.  I have never had much interesting in quilting...all the other needle arts, yes. So, I had no justification for seeking out the group. Then the idea of crazy quilting came to me a few days ago and the infinite chaos of it appealed to me.  I thought. OK. There is an entre into the quilting guild, and friendships, here in my town.  And then I thought: What about starting a Spanish Speaking Needlework Guild with M's sister and M, if he wants? Our town has become almost fifty percent Latin American, mostly Mexican.M's sister is very social and because of her thrift stores knows many people. She is also very adamant she does not want to stay at home since she closed her last store.In closing, I cannot remember all of the pieces, particular the dream, but I think it relates to the matter at hand: Isolation, desperation, yearning, and not knowing where to go, how to meet the need, and the language to reach others. To fill the void.COPA</blockquote>

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