fierce attachments

a mother-daughter blog about the fierce attachments in our lives… title inspired by Vivian Gornick's wonderful memoir
May 7, 2013

living with chronic pain – someone else’s: part 2

by nikki meredith

chopping vegetablesMy husband walks in the door from work. I’m in the kitchen chopping vegetables.  He kisses me and asks how I am. I shrug and then place the tips of my three middle fingers over my right eye – the sign that I have a migraine.   “Oh no,” he says. “I’m so sorry.” And he does look sorry though I wonder how he can keep feeling sorry when it’s  such a frequent occurrence. But even more than that, I wonder, why do I do this to him? Why do I need to tell him?

It’s easier for me to answer why I shouldn’t tell him than why I do.  I shouldn’t tell him because I assume that the hardest part of living with someone with a painful medical condition is the feeling of helplessness. I know how I feel when he’s suffering from any malady, large or small, especially if there’s nothing I can do to make him better.  When you love someone, you want to alleviate his or her suffering and when you can’t, it’s terrible. And when you can’t alleviate the suffering, over and over and over again, it must be terrible over and over and over again.  So, I repeat, why do I tell him? If I love him, why don’t I spare him this ordeal? Read the rest of this entry »

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April 9, 2013

the last on my list of the most amazing and possibly even true scientific phonomena that blow my mind, continued: Lucy

by nikki meredith

beach woman holding monkeyLucy was an unabashedly uninhibited girl of the ‘60’s for whom the sexual revolution was beside the point. She was able to tap into her erotic resources with no help from Masters and Johnson and she instinctively took responsibility for her own orgasms without so much as a glance at Our Bodies, Ourselves.   Lucy’s story made an impression on me. A big impression.  After reading about her,  I never felt quite the same about a lot of things – sex, the female anatomy, couches, naked men, images of naked men, vacuum cleaners.

Lucy was a chimp who was raised from infancy by Dr. Maurice Temerlin, a University of Oklahoma psychology professor, and his wife Jane.  The couple treated Lucy as a daughter and, as such, tried to socialize her the way they would a human daughter. They arranged for her to learn rudimentary American sign language, they taught her to sit with them at the dinner table, eat with utensils, dress herself and, to some extent, maintain personal hygiene. They had some success in each area, though they made more progress with table manners than with toilet use. And I first read Temerlin’s account of life with Lucy in the late 1960’s in an article in Psychology Today. All of it was interesting but the following was, well, mind blowing. Read the rest of this entry »

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March 18, 2013

my top ten list of the most amazing and possibly even true scientific phenomena that blow my mind, continued: the coolidge effect

by nikki meredith

rooster and his henI wonder if anyone will take offense if I propose that when it comes to sex, males have an appetite for novelty.  I’m not sure appetite is the right word when you’re talking about non-human animals but scientists refer to the male predilection for variety as the Coolidge Effect.  A bull, worn out from copulation, shows no interest in the cow he just had his way with.  But bring on a new cow, and he’ll be rarin’ to go. I remember interviewing one researcher who said that, in his experience, the Coolidge Effect in rams is nearly infinite. “As long as you keep supplying the male with new ewes, he’ll keep going until his body wears out.”

I came across the Coolidge effect when I was writing an article for Psychology Today about the differences between the sex lives of gay men and straight men.  At the time, gay men, on average, had vastly more sexual partners so seemed more predisposed to the phenomenon. Heterosexual men were barely holding their own and the theory was that in order to be in relationships with women, men had to tamp down their natural appetite for variety. There’s been a cultural sea change since then and in any case, one needs to be cautious when applying biological principles across species.  The term, however, does have its origins with humans. Some people say the following story is apocryphal.  I prefer to think that it’s not because I love it. Read the rest of this entry »

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February 19, 2013

my top ten list of the most amazing and possibly even true scientific phenomena that blow my mind, continued: body identity integrity disorder

by nikki meredith

amputeeIt’s spring on I-5, my favorite time to be driving to Los Angeles. Miles of apricot, peach and almond trees are in bloom. The experience is so inspiring, that I reach to turn-off NPR – I’m too happy to listen to the world’s problems. But my finger pauses half-way to the radio: a reporter from Australian Public Radio is describing a man who tried to find a surgeon to amputate his healthy left leg. When he couldn’t find a doctor to do it, he bought some dry ice and attempted to freeze off the leg.  By the time he was taken to the hospital, the leg could not be saved and a doctor had to amputate it.  What the hell?

I get off I-5 and stop my car at a truck stop so I can listen to the whole story.

From the time the man was a very little boy, he had the feeling that his left leg didn’t belong and having to live with it made him miserable. He was afflicted with a syndrome called  “body identity integrity disorder.” Read the rest of this entry »

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February 10, 2013

my top ten list of the most amazing and possibly even true scientific phenomena that blow my mind, continued

by nikki meredith

woman yawning

As I wrote last week, the criteria for this top ten  “best” list is a little mysterious even to me. From the raging river of data that flows through my brain daily, some bits and pieces stick. Sometimes they hang on because they reveal something startling or offer a little piece of a larger puzzle. Some because they are bizarre or funny. A considerable  number, as in today’s offering, have to do with sex. Again, as I indicated last week, I want new material. So, dear reader, send me something “amazing and possibly even true” from your list.

Yawning Orgasms

A number of years ago I started noticing that some of my friends who were taking anti-depressants were behaving a little off. Two behaviors come to mind: blurting that was short of Tourette’s but nonetheless a tad on the inappropriate side and a tendency to encroach on other people’s personal space. One night at a party I was talking to a friend when I noticed that she kept inching closer until we were practically nose-to-nose. She was so close that my eyes got wobbly. I started backing away so that I could keep her in focus. As I retreated, she advanced until our little pas-de-duex had me up against the wall with nowhere to go. I decided to write an article. The working title was Out of Whack on Prosac. I loved that title. My editor, however, was not enamored. She rejected it. I grumbled and secretly suspected that Eli Lilly was a potential advertiser. Read the rest of this entry »

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January 31, 2013

ten of the most amazing and possibly even true scientific phenomena that blow my mind

by nikki meredith

twin babies

When I was a little girl, my family camped in Yosemite Valley every summer.  My favorite memory from those trips was a night we slept outside on cots.  I assume the moon was a sliver because the sky was inky and I remember saying to my father that the stars looked like diamonds.  I must have been pretty young because when my father pointed out the Milky Way, I remember wondering it they named it after the candy bar. But the memory that stayed with me the most indelibly was when my father told me that some of the stars we were looking at had died. He explained that they were so far away that their light, or, rather, their lack of light, hadn’t yet reached us. That seemed unbelievable.   I remember trying to make out his face in the dark to see if he was kidding. When I was satisfied that he wasn’t, I looked back to the sky in awe.  I couldn’t quite grasp that I was looking at something that wasn’t there. It seemed like magic.

Last month when various news outlets were coming out with their 10 “best” lists for the year – best movies, books, t.v. shows — I thought about bests in my life and for some reason I remembered that night with my family.  Learning about unfathomable distances scored as a kind of best in my life and I wondered how of the many things I learned in 2012 stood out.  I couldn’t come up with ten for 2012.  Off the top of my head, I couldn’t even come up with one for the year. So I changed it to a lifetime and was able to list quite a few more than ten. Read the rest of this entry »

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January 4, 2013

the sessions the movie and more: part 2

by nikki meredith

The Intouchables

About 20 years ago, for a profile I planned, I interviewed Cheryl Cohen Greene, the sexual surrogate Helen Hunt plays in The Sessions.  (for part I of this post on The Sessions click here.) I found her irresistible. She had a way of talking about sex unlike anyone I’d ever met. She could be funny, very funny, though I can’t remember any specific examples, and while she could talk about sex explicitly, it seemed neither pornographic nor clinical. Her conversation about sex made sex seem like a part of life. A natural part of life. Imagine that. It seems remarkable that so few people can do that effectively. Even in the 21st century. Maybe especially in the 21st century. I squirm when I read Dan Savage, a syndicated columnist who writes an advice and sex column for both gays and straights. I love his writing, I love his politics but when he talks about sex, I want to dive under the table. When Cheryl talked about sex, I wanted to hear more. Read the rest of this entry »

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December 17, 2012

sex, surrogacy and supper: the movie the sessions, part 1

by nikki meredith

coming homeLast week I was having dinner with six of my friends – all of them, to one degree or other, hip or at least hipish. I mentioned that I saw The Sessions, the recently released film starring Helen Hunt and John Hawkes. I was fired-up about the film and I wanted to discuss it. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the following:

—  I know Cheryl Cohen Greene, the sexual surrogate on whom the Helen Hunt character is based in real life and as much as I love Helen Hunt, and as much as I admire her for tackling the role, I found her performance wanting. A characteristic that the real Cheryl Cohen Greene has, a characteristic that anyone who has ever met her will attest to, is her warmth. While Hunt portrays the quality all therapists must possess — unconditional positive regard — her version is crisp, clinical. Read the rest of this entry »

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November 2, 2012

living with chronic pain – someone else’s: part I

by nikki meredith

I woke up this morning smiling.  It was the first morning in three days that I didn’t have either searing pain behind my right eye or nausea. I took the dog for a walk with a sizable bounce in my step. I ate breakfast and after breakfast I took a shower and, as I towel-dried my hair, I thought about how good the day promised to be. It was, after all, a glorious fall day and I was without pain. And then I heard the unmistakable, high-pitched whine of a smoke detector. I was confused. We don’t have a smoke detector.  (Why we don’t have one is a long story but it has to do with high ceilings in the kitchen and low tenacity in life.) I threw on my bathrobe and followed the sound to our guest room.  I opened the door. Opening that door was a terrible mistake. There was, indeed, a smoke detector emitting an ear-splitting shriek. I quickly closed the door. In a matter of seconds, the fierce, penetrating sound brought with it the searing pain behind my eye that had vanished a few hours before.

All that happened in that room is that I heard a sound. Read the rest of this entry »

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September 25, 2012

what do I have in common with Julia Roberts? how being a dog owner is like being a celebrity

by nikki meredith

I have never been, nor will I ever be, a celebrity — not even for Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes.  But I maintain that having a dog shares some of the features of celebrityhood and if you walk around with two dogs, you’re on your way to being a super celebrity.

When our dog Alice was a puppy, I was astonished by how many people stopped to ask about her. And it wasn’t only people I encountered on the sidewalk or the hiking trail. People in cars would pull over, roll down their windows and shout out questions. Some actually parked and got out of their cars to ask about her.  Well, I thought, everyone loves a puppy. Read the rest of this entry »

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