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I am not going back to see how many times I’ve used grieving in past title lines on this blog, but I’m pretty sure that it’s been more than once. Last week’s trip to San Fran turned into a great big emotional roller coaster. I was there to work, work, and maybe do a little yoga on the side, but everything got turned upside down after dinner with a friend of a friend stretched into strawberries and yogurt the next morning. Two nights later, we did it all again, by which point not only had my heart (and other parts of me) stretched, but I was an emotional walking plate of scrambled eggs.
Being away from my kids, my friends, my home – so totally untethered – also gave me space to look at my life. The exhaustion of 8 months of single parenting caught up to me. All of the unfinished aspects of the divorce, including some of the messier issues yet resolved, bore down on me. And the very strong feeling – not necessarily based in truth, but nonetheless felt keenly – that I’m 43 and without any employable skills, flew at me like the biggest, scariest blackest crow ever. By week’s end, I was a wimpering, simpering child, as the song goes. Basically, I was grieving.
This happened after my father died — I was so busy when I was home that I rarely grieved as thoroughly as I wanted. But when I was away, supposedly doing something fun, I’d suddenly fall apart. In the opening created by distance, I could finally see and feel everything that had been too finely woven back at home to realize. San Fran was the same — life’s invitation to get all weepy about the losses and the hard stuff, a chance to just bawl for missed opportunities and injustices large and small.
So much hard stuff we’re all carrying. Sick parents. Struggling businesses. Broken hearts. Fleeting fertility. So much. Even my kids amaze me with the weight they carry. Last night, as I fell apart, weeping for about the fourth day in a row, Bea fell apart on top of me, crying: “First grandpa died. Then great grandma died. Then daddy left for Africa. And now you’re getting divorced. Why does everything have to be so hard?”
I kissed her tears, which were now mixed with mine — tears for the many different weights that I am currently carrying (some days I feel like a freak show, balancing buckets up and down my arms and several more on my head), and tears for the beautiful man back in SF who I’m already missing — and looked down at her face, which seemed to deny the possibility of an answer while also hoping mightily for one.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, sweetie. That’s how life works. But there’s been a lot of beauty in between each of those things [I named a few happy times], and this is how life works, too. If you look closely, sometimes you can even see beauty in the sadness.”
“I don’t want to look; it hurts too much,” she said. And I thought to myself: You will. With time.
Eight years ago today, I became a mama. I hadn’t thought I wanted to be a mama until suddenly I really, really did. And nothing has been the same since. My daughter has taught me so much since she first appeared in my life eight years ago tonight. Beginning with labor, she’s taught me to let go. Through her laughter, she’s taught me to fly. Through her kindness and enormous heart, she’s taught me to be a gentler person. I’ve also learned that I AM a good mother, something I feared I wouldn’t be, and that I have great strength and wisdom to impart to her. All of this is made only more true by being a single mother. I am staggered by this ongoing opportunity.
Bea in the bathtub playing a game with multiple characters: ”No, no, silly; he’s not my daddy. He’s my mommy’s friend.”
Bea while reading a variation of Cinderella before bed, looking truly concerned: ”You won’t let a step mommy turn me into a servant, will you?”
Thomas cuddling with me after school and laughing: “I’m your daddy!”
Me, smiling but still wanting to remind his of his grandfather: ”No, my daddy – your grandpa – passed away. Remember?”
Thomas: “Yes, but I’m your daddy now.”
Thomas to Bea: ”When we get married, do you promise we’ll stay married?”
Bea: “Of course. You’re my brother forever.”
I am not wracked with guilt about the effect of divorce on my kids. Maybe that’s selfish or short sighted of me, but I’m also so aware of how absent their dad is that it just doesn’t seem all that different than if we’d stayed together. It does strike me sometimes – and with a thud – that their concept of marriage and long-term relationships will always be different from mine. My parents were married for forty years, separated only by my dad’s death. They rarely fought. They were friends (though I’m not sure if they were really lovers). My concept of marriage as a partnership that lasted was formed by watching them. And now my kids’ will mainly know their parents as apart, not married. Alex and I were married 15 years, and yet in our children’s memories, we’ll be mainly unmarried. Thomas was only two when Alex started going to grad school out of state. He was five when he learned his parents were divorcing, and he’ll be 6 1/2 by the time it’s actually legal – an event he hopefully will hardly know about, as any disruption is hopefully done for him. What will “marriage” mean to him when he’s 16? 25? 45?
Bea is at work on a poster celebrating all things DAD. She went through my iPhoto files and chose every image with Alex in it. Both Thomas and have been conspicuously left out of this project. Now that she has the photos printed, she’s carefully cutting and gluing them onto poster board, which she plans to hang right next to her bed, Teen Beat style. As she works, she coos and giggles and, I swear, caresses the little thumbnails of his face.
Having lost my own dad, who I adored, three years ago, I get the daddy/daughter thing. I do. And maybe this is all the universe paying me back for not being more attached to my mom during those years, who know doubt suffered her own dose of “why him and not me?” blues.
But I DO have to bite my tongue sometimes from saying, “Can someone who left you for seven months be THAT worthy of your idolatry? What about the person who washes your socks and makes your lunch?” I don’t, of course. Instead I wince at these thoughts and suggest a good color combo on her poster, and remind her of something funny daddy did or said on the day a particular photo was taken.
Bea: I want to spend more time with dad.
Me: So you want to have more nights at his house?
Bea: No.
Me: You want him to pick you up from school more?
Bea: Maybe.
Me: Or more time on the weekend.
Bea: I don’t know.
Me: Where do you want the extra time to come from?
Bea: I don’t know. I don’t want less time with you, but I do want more time with him.
Welcome to the world, my darling, where time/space/wants often don’t quite match up.
After reading the comments and emails about my sleepless, fretful night (thank you!), a word kept coming back to me: entropy. Not entirely sure of its meaning, I looked it up online (I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t know the immediate whereabouts of my hard bound, real life dictionary; English major – who? me?). Here’s what I found: en·tro·py n 1. a measure of the disorder that exists in a system, 2. a measure of the energy in a system or process that is unavailable to do work.
There’s certainly a lot of disorder in my current system and, indeed, the fleas are just the material realization of the disorder that’s been building for years – a marriage unraveling like a sweater, patched here and there, but never completely mended. And I certainly have a very limited amount of energy to give to my overall system right now. What energy I do have is being used in its entirety to make PB&Js, vacuum up larvae, figure out a new online banking system, and call insurance companies to right the claims that went astray when I changed the kids and I to our own policy back in July. In other words, the Universe if finding multiple ways to use up my energy and there’s little left for reading a decent novel or working on my abs.
Commend yourself for what you do accomplish, one of you kindly offered, and so yesterday I did just that. Read the rest of this entry »
Beatrice is moody. She is sensitive. But I don’t want to use either of those words with her. Whenever I start to say, “You are being oversensitive,” I bite my tongue and would swallow it if I could because that’s what my parents said to me–again and again. I felt as though something was wrong with me. They were so cool, so calm. They never had outbursts. As an only child, there was no one to compare my emotional temperature to. With only Thomas around, Bea doesn’t really have much of a gauge either. Thomas is either hot or cold, thrilled with the world or pissed off, awake or sound asleep. Thomas doesn’t do grey. But Bea and I live in gradations of grey.
For seven, she’s amazingly attuned to herself. It’s a gift I’m trying to help her appreciate and nurture. I want her to understand that knowing one’s emotions, no matter how complicated or disarming they are, is a rare talent. It’s easy to interpret this skill–emotional intelligence, I guess you’d call it now–as an indication of freakdom, but I want her to value it.
Bea makes me wonder if this is a skill we’re born with. When she was three, trying to understand the crying jags that would occasionally beset her, she said, “Mama, sometimes rain falls in buckets from my eyes.” Wow. I practically ran to my journal to write that one down. Self-knowledge and poetry. Read the rest of this entry »
