I was recently on the table of Bibi, our most excellent acupressurist, and as she pressed hot points on various meridians in my left foot, she asked with some urgency, “Are you frustrated?”
I’m sure you’ve had the experience of someone asking you a question that initially catches you by surprise, and then upon further musing the question leads to a valuable insight or two. Well that’s what happened to me when Bibi asked, “Are you frustrated?”
Had she asked, “Feeling a little anxious?” I would have replied, “Is the Pope Catholic?” Or if she’d asked, “A little depressed?” I would have answered, “Am I human and alive on earth in 2023?” But frustrated? About what? And though I couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head I was frustrated about, the word burrowed into my consciousness and eventually opened a rusty door in the cranial archives.
My mother was in many ways the embodiment of frustration. Possessed of an extremely high IQ, a gifted musician and actress, and one of the first women to graduate from Stanford Law School, she subsumed her talents to raise four children with little help from our abusive alcoholic father.
My mother was Jewish. Growing up during the Great Depression when anti-Semitism in America was ferocious, her Jewish parents changed their last name from Weinstein to Winton to improve their chances of survival, and they instructed my mother to disguise and deny her Jewishness, and if possible marry a non-Jew, which my mother did. She then raised her children without letting us know we were Jewish, which I’m sure was another source of stress and frustration for her, as it certainly turned out to be for my siblings and I.
My grandmother Goody, my mother’s mother, was also frustrated. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, she, too, was a marvelous singer and actress, but was forbidden from pursuing those arts by her deeply religious parents who equated Show Biz with the Devil. Hence for much of her life Goody felt her destiny had been stolen from her.
What does this have to do with me? Are you kidding? What does this not have to do with me? Yet until Bibi asked me if I was frustrated, it did not occur to me to include frustration in the sum total of neuroses that add up to yours truly.
What is frustration? In simple terms, frustration is a feeling of dissatisfaction arising from wanting something we don’t have. My mother wanted to do something with her talent and didn’t feel she could until her kids were grown. When that day arrived, she became a Special Ed teacher and eventually practiced law part-time. She also wrote children’s plays and was the leading light of an excellent play-reading group.
I was in my mid-twenties the first time I visited my mother at the law firm where she began practicing law at the age of fifty. I was stunned. Who was this serene, thoughtful, funny, brilliant person handling complicated cases with ease and aplomb? Where was my antsy, negative, complaining, beleaguered mother steeling herself for the next blast of abuse from my father? She was transformed! She was, part-time for a few golden years, no longer frustrated.
Recalling these things about my mother and grandmother, I could feel deep in my meridians how I had inherited my mother’s habit of frustration, and I also understood that my decision to dedicate my life to writing and music was in essence the path my mother and grandmother had longed to pursue, and not doing so was the cause of their terrible frustration.
And though I did follow my passion, I, too, was persistently frustrated until I was well into my fifties because what I wanted more than anything was to be so successful with my writing and music that my disapproving parents would finally approve of me, which was never to be.
Now I’m seventy-three. Over the course of the last twenty-five years my primary motive for writing and composing has evolved from yearning to succeed in a big way into wanting to share what I create however I can.
So why did my meridians tell Bibi I was frustrated? Because my desire to be recognized beyond my small circle of friends lives on in my subconscious and rose from the depths when we came out with our new CD Through the Fire. And who rides the horse of such desire? None other than the headless horseman of frustration.
And because frustration is a huge energy drain and gets in the way of enjoying life and doing good work, not to mention messing with my meridians, I have turned over several new leaves since that fateful moment on Bibi’s table.
One of those newly turned leaves is to begin each day with a dance of gratitude for my marvelous friends and for the infinite possibilities awaiting me in my studio and living room and kitchen and backyard and watershed.
I’m happy to report: daily gratitude dancing obliterates frustration.
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Really Really You a song from Through the Fire.
