chicitym-blog

[chicitym-blog]

Your friendly therapist

I’m starting to see a pattern with the clients...we don’t think that what we went through is a big deal.  I’m saying we because it also goes for me.  I don’t think that my insane past is a big deal.  It was, it no longer is.  It’s over. Are there remnants?  Sure.  Do I think it about it every day, I don’t think so.  There is one woman I’m working with who has two beautiful sons and an ex who is terrorizing her.  She wants to complain about work.  She talks about how great her parents are and she does not want to disappoint them.  Then once we got into EMDR protocol and did a history it was like - oh, yeah and my mother would be irrational for days on end and once took a baseball bat to the wall.

WOAH!

The perfect mom we’ve talked about?  The one we do not want to disappoint?

She will say goodnight to my children every night via Facetime and then scream into the phone at the end, “Tell your mother to pay us for rent!!!”

And the Eliza* has just blocked that shit out.  Like it took 3 sessions to get to the point where we saw this was a thing.  The layers our brains create are vast and spacious.  Does that protect us?  I know we talk about how it does, but does it?  It feels like instead of hiding cookies in the house so you forget where they are so you don’t eat them, that it is more like hiding cookies in the house so you accidentally find them on a day where you know you will eat the entire box in a moment of weakness.  When you could have THROWN THE FUCKING COOKIES IN THE TRASH. WHY DIDN’T YOU THROW THE FUCKING COOKIES IN THE TRASH?!?!  

*changed name

[chicitym-blog]

NFL Week 5

This Sunday was week 5 and the first day that I really missed watching the NFL. I have a friend that I worked with in sports radio who's from Dallas. He text me 5 minutes before the game reminding me that he would hate me for the next 3 hours, but then we could go back to normal. For over 10 years we have trash talked throughout the entire Dallas/Green Bay game.  Football has kept our long distance friendship alive.  I had completely forgotten to tell him that I was boycotting. Didn’t even know who the Packers were playing since I’ve taken them off my Google calendar.  Anthony is a ridiculous person who says the most obscene/inappropriate things when we're watching football together while he’s in Dallas and I’m in Chicago. I love him for making me feel like I am part of the game regardless of my gender. After my text of “I’m boycotting and angry”, I sent him the first piece that I wrote in August (I mailed it to Rodgers, Matthews and Nelson before the season started). He said he was happy that I was boycotting Kaep not having a job instead of boycotting because the players were protesting. It's as if he had forgotten who I was...

Tony and I lived in DC together in 2005. We had no idea who the other one was when both took jobs at XM Radio producing for the MLB channel. Anthony arrived a few months after I did - MLB on XM decided to “add” a Spanish speaking channel at the last minute and the rest of us were already in place. When he arrived I had already had a place to stay, and he was still looking. I told him, of course, he could move in with me while he was looking. He was in noisy couch sleeper.  His sister still thinks that we were “together,” but we weren’t.  

I have relationships like this with over 20 people in life.  Allen, also from XM, is a huge Bolts fan.  It’s his 50th birthday this year, and I’m flying out to DC to see him next week.  We usually spend the entire Sunday at the bar or now that we’re seasoned on his couch in the basement watching games.  We won’t.  Aaron and Purvis are guys who love the Packers, and we’re usually texting throughout the season about games.  Katie is a Twitter friend who’s a huge Packers fan.  It helps that she hates the Cubs.  We’ve even met up at a White Sox game to hang out together.  I sent her my piece, and she said that she agrees but she is not ready to give up her love yet.  The Saints onsie I bought for Julie and Susan’s new baby won’t be worn while we hang out on a Sunday and watch games together.  Julie gets why I’m not watching and posted the blog on her Facebook page.  My brother loves his Colts, and each week when he texts me an update I tell him that I want him to boycott and he hems and haws.  

This week I was at a book reading and signing by a brilliant Chicago poet, Eve L. Ewing, at the University of Chicago when Tony’s text popped up on my watch.  I felt like someone punched me in the stomach.  It’s a loss I haven’t really felt before that moment.  I thought that I mourned not watching the NFL over the summer.  I cried enough about it.  I’m sure that part of it is that my husband has been working during the games so I don’t really get to share football with him like I did in the past.  I loved the readings of Eve’s new book, Electric Arches, and the guest speakers she brought along.  It was a different and exciting setting for me.  

I missed my interactions with Tony to my core.

Sunday night I had a dream that I was in the stands at a high school football game with my mother’s family - the family that has forsaken my brother and me since we chose to live with my father, also the family that taught us how to love football.  They were lecturing my brother and me while we were sitting in the stands, and I couldn’t recall the specifics.  My brother can always tune people out just like the characters in Peanuts and was rolling his eyes.  I take things to heart.  I had a huge box of colored pencils with me, one with four different rows on top of each other.  I was trying to load them back in the box.  One row was horizontal, the other was vertical, then that changed again,but they wouldn’t fit.  I realized that I would be sitting here listening to the lecturing until that box was full and I finally just crammed them all in without regard to order or keeping the box intact and carried the rest in my hand when I walked down the bleachers grabbing my brother.

I feel this way about the NFL.  I know that all the pieces can fit.  I can see a world where the players I revere who put their actual lives on the line have guaranteed contracts.  I believe that the NFL could funnel money to high schools (and colleges, God knows the colleges with football programs don’t need the assistance) to teach financial literacy to all of America’s youth in advance for the small percentage of those students who later will grow up to make the League.  I expect the NFL to take a stronger stance on head injuries to children and responsibility to train all of the coaches in the US on how to protect our children better during sports.  I imagine a league with 70% black owners and coaches (maybe even some girls) to reflect the players’ demographic.  I want the organizations that I support to use their voices to lift everyone up to the same level. This would make the League stronger.  It would be an awesome, productive marketing tool to ensure that young fans grow up loving, playing, and supporting football.

I try to write to every player/protester each week thanking them.  I have 9 written this week so far. I bought a Bruce Maxwell shirt jersey and a #imwithkap tee.  I try not to be pissed at you for not having their backs in these protests.  But I’m angry.  I’m fuming that the coach/GM/president or whoever hoodwinked the entire team to lock arms.  This isn’t about unity.  This is about division.  And the people we, white folk, should be locking arms with are the ones who knelt first.  This leader and his friends (including the owners and maybe your team president) have changed this narrative to focus on the military.  Our flag does not represent our military.  It’s for all of us. But it’s just polyester. Cloth is not more important that lives.  And unity isn’t what we’re striving for here.  

We should be searching for a way where people are having hard conversations about the beliefs that they hold.  Then we should be adamant in telling people who think that people of color, gay folk, transgendered people, women are less or bad that their thinking isa wrong.  A silent protest was doing that until we let the owners turn this into about respecting troops.  These are two different conversations.  

Please don’t let them get away with changing the message of this protest into something else.  Black lives also matter.  Police should not be judge, jury and executioners.  You have the power to change this narrative.  I would love for you to make a statement about how racism is ALL our fight and kneel besides the players that you love and think of as brothers.

[chicitym-blog]

I love the NFL

I’ve always loved football. Like, LOVE, love. I was born in July, and by that fall I was posing for photos inside of one of my uncle’s college football helmets. This uncle later became one of the most-winning high school football coaches in the state of Illinois, and I was proud to attend his games, hear stories of his “no nonsense” (probably concussed-inducing) style and rantings about how “only Communists like Florida State” football. I have fond memories of a very Catholic and docile grandma screaming “KILL HIM” at the TV while watching an Illinois defense in the living rooms of my childhood.

I’ve been a Packers fan since high school. I grew up in the middle of Illinois where there was no pro allegiance until the Bears came to work at Memorial Stadium in 2002. When I was in high school, we got the game-of-the-week and I saw Favre develop into a quarterback with a style that I looked forward to each Sunday and again throughout the off-season: fearless, care-free, risk-taking, unapologetic, and brash. My younger brother grew up a Colts fan; my younger cousin became a Bears fan.  

Well before high school, I realized that I couldn’t play football. Learning how to throw spirals in elementary and middle school got me nowhere - just like my dream of becoming the Incredible Hulk was shattered because I was not born with a man’s body. And I mourned those losses. Hard. I knew early on that there was a ceiling that was different for my sex, and I tried to find different entry points. The only space football makes for women is asking them to don a skirt and root from the sidelines. I did what I could to be a part of it and gladly cheered and pommed my way through middle and high school.  

In college I decided that I wanted to work in sports. I started studying communications. Once I said that aloud, people gave me weird looks. Up-and-down looks, trying to figure out if I was hot enough. Once I started interning in Chicago at a sports station, some of those looks were asking if I was willing to put in the hard (usually sexual) work to get there. Some men would become outright enraged at my aspiration to be included in the sports not meant for me. The week before the 1999 playoffs, I was on my couch cheering for more touchdowns from the Pack against the Cardinals when they were already up big. Watching Favre throw for more than 300 yards in a game where they may not make the playoffs for the first time since he arrived was nerve-racking (as a Packer fan, losing is pretty foreign). The man I lived with said something like, “You’re such an idiot, and you actually think you’re smart enough to be on the sidelines. They won the game.” When the color guy explained that the Packers were trying to rack up more points in case they were tied for a playoff spot because the tie-breaker would be based on who in the division scored more points that last regular season game, I don’t remember gloating, but I do remember being up locked in the basement of my own house for hours as punishment for being right. It took me another two seasons to get out of that house. Covering the Bears training camp, I was once courted by a player and he touched my leg. A radio host once bruised my arm because I came to “his” training camp and didn’t sleep in his hotel room. I looked past these incidents in sports.

When Favre took pain medication and admitted that he needed them to get through his day, I was producing for Steve Rosenbloom on the weekends. Rosie asked if as a Packer fan I cared. I opened my producer's mic and said that I wanted him “to win.”  In 2002, when Mark Chmura was accused of sexually assaulting an underage babysitter, I said it didn’t affect me because he was cut by my team. Big Ben didn’t play for the Packers so those rape allegations didn’t impact my life, I reasoned  in ’10. That same year, Favre was, at the least, sexually harassing an NFL reporter while he played in Jersey, but again, he wasn’t on my team. Ray Rice was seen on video dragging his wife off of an elevator after knocking her out with a punch to her face; and the Commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell, lied to all of us and said he didn’t see the tape when we all know the NFL sees everything. I reasoned that this was part of the sport I loved and someday these asshats would get it together. Concussions will happen, and they are grown men deciding to play this game.  My justification for continuing to watch is that my own, not-yet-conceived children won’t play football until they are out of my house, but my nephews love to play in organized PeeWee leagues to my chagrin. This month Zeke Elliott, a smiley 22-year-old second-year player from my state who looks fun and unassuming, was suspended for six games for domestic violence accusations. He’s appealing the suspension. Today a black quarterback, a good quarterback, is not leading or waiting to play backup on any NFL team because he knelt during the National Anthem in protest of blacks being being shot by some of our law enforcement officers.  

I have not gone out with friends after Packer losses. I’ve texted thousands of times to fellow Packer fans during games. I’ve seen my Packers decimate the Bears on three separate occasions in three different venues. Last year one of my BFFs and I braved the Chicago -10-degree weather to see our teams face off, but I only lasted a quarter. We’ve hosted playoff games in our house where I was mortified seeing the Seahawks come back and beat the team I love. I’ve happily cheered for Aaron and his magical arm, Clay and his amazingly timed tackles, Jordy’s Mighty Mouse catches. Football has been my fall/winter self-care. It’s an escape I’ve used to get away from abusive men, and it’s been a way I’ve maintained ties to one side of a family that has abandoned my brother and me. It has been a release. I can hide in my TV on a Sunday and watch. I share this game with my husband, my friends, my brother, my cousins. I have won fantasy leagues. I have made friends with people over Twitter because of gridiron Sundays. In June I bought a friend’s baby a trio of Saints onesies. Football means so much that when I discovered a live-in boyfriend was lying about his third chance at honesty on a Saturday night, that next morning I stepped over him to watch the noon start before gathering my things and leaving that relationship for good.

I love this game. But I can’t support this game until the white players on the team I root for stand up and give unequivocal support for Colin Kaepernick and denounce the racism in “our America.” I mean HEAR HEAR to Martellus Bennett and HaHa Clinton-Dix for their bravery (don’t fucking @ me with your “bravery is only for our Vets” bullshit; we’re in a war with racist and not-yet-apparent racist assholes right now). I need Aaron, Clay, and Jordy to open their mouths and denounce what is happening in this country and to their fellow union brothers. Our white and non-white children look up to these guys, and I want the organizations I support to have decent, humane values. This isn’t an issue about one dude; and once we let the owners, the fans, and the players make it about Kap, the righteous side loses. The Players Association needs to also step up. Unions are womens, civil, workers, LGBTQIA, disability and immigrant rights organizations.  As a woman, I know that being in a union makes my pay fair. This struggle is about how we treat groups of people and what that says about us. The argument that sports aren’t political is an outright lie. We hear a song touting the U.S. at the beginning of each sporting event. The NFL lobby to receive and fought to keep tax exempt status for more than 60 years. The League and individual teams pick causes all the time, such as the American Cancer Society, which is politicking. Our owners threaten our states and city councils to move teams unless tax dollars go to build new. shinier stadiums. Sports are our lives; and if your life isn’t political, then you have a certain level of privilege—a privilege that others do not possess.  

A few years ago I told myself that I wouldn’t buy any more NFL gear for myself. I haven't been able to click “buy” on that Kap jersey I hate the League so much. Last year, I vowed to only watch games in which my team was playing. Now I’m ready to break up with this shitty BF who doesn’t give me anything unless I give them money and my unquestioning devotion. I’ve cried over thinking about leaving football. I’m crying now. Full disclosure: My husband is employed in a job where he has to watch sports. But I am willing to not watch any NFL game or footfall shows, not buy any NFL stuff, and take the Packers and the Bears off of my Google calendar until the Green Bay Packers and its white players make a statement about the injustice Kap is facing and that they agree with his stance that our country needs to address the violent treatment of our citizens of color. I get I’m only one person. My career now is as a school social worker on the West Side of Chicago, and I know that each and every day I am in the classroom those students and I change the world. Each of us has that power. We can be ripples in this ocean to end racism. This fall I will refuse to watch the game I love and tweet instead what I am doing in lieu of my Packers with the #BoycottTheNFL #ImWithKap. Maybe I'll bake.