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Bea is walking around the house just now absent-mindedly singing made-up lyrics to the tune of “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley,” which she’s currently practicing in chorus: ”You were a lovely couple, but you had to sep-a-rate.”
Sigh.
Just made a birthday dinner for Alex. The kids were so excited. I made risotto and a salad. It was ok – nothing like I would have made in the past. And his favorite cake.
The kids leave with him tomorrow for a week. I can already hear the silence they’ll leave behind. I’m torn between exhaling with relief and sobbing.
I will go sign the papers tomorrow. They’re ready. There are some tiny loose ends – numbers I still need to track down. The kids’ insurance… The amount I pay to an afterschool program … And then. And then. Done. Like that. Done. Signed. All that will be left will be the lawyers’ bills. Years of them, I suspect.
We sat in the dark tonight. A family of four. A single candle in Alex’s piece of apple cake the only light. The kids sang with gusto, Bea giving him pecks on the cheeks between verses and Thomas pumping his fist in time. The three of them blew out the single candle together, and I knew what Alex must be wishing – that he’d be able to remain near his kids, despite the fact that he’s currently applying for jobs all over the country. A wish that has little chance of coming true.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Light out. Dark.
Four people in the dark, unsure of what will happen next. Four wishes so hard to fulfill.
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.
Not that I’m recommending it, but should you feel a need to wallow in the sadness of a relationship’s end, it seems that the music of William Fitzsimmons would be a good place to start. I just heard him on NPR and darned if I didn’t cry. His new album, The Sparrow and the Crow, is all about his divorce. Ironically, his previous album was written during and about his parents’ divorce. Not surprisingly, he said he’s ready to move on to new topics. One song imagines what his wife would have said to him – I want back my youth, the years I gave to you.
As I look in the mirror lately, I sometimes hardly recognize the woman there. She looks so old. Her face is starting to do odd things. She wears her troubles in her jaw. Still, do I want back my youth to do it all with another man? I don’t think so. I was so young. Such a mess in many ways. Would it really have gone so differently with someone else?
When I’m tired, hungry and feeling down and anxious about, oh, you name it – EVERYTHING – and find myself staring at recipes online for things like Blueberry Boy Bait, then chances are, it’s time to go to sleep and hope that tomorrow brings a blue sky and a smidgen of good news.
1. Can’t sell the house because it’s worth more than we have in it.
2. Can’t renegotiate the loan because the mortgage company says I make too much money. (???!##$$@!)
3. Qualify for Federal “low-income” status but can’t get food stamps because I thoughtfully put money in a 401K way back when.
4. Need to work but everything I’m finding would just about come even with the expenses of childcare.
5. Want to kiss someone but can’t fathom who … or manage to meet anyone.
Wanting sun but standing in the rain today.
Hoping one of these boulders moves soon.
I feel lonely. It was my birthday today, so a hard day not to think back to where I was a year ago, five years, a decade…
I am struggling with what to do in terms of work, knowing that my chosen path as a freelance writer is not enough to take care of myself and my kids, and, increasingly, feeling it’s not enough to take care of my soul either. There is so much about it that I love – the freedom, the opportunity to be curious and find answers, the chance to talk to people I’d never meet otherwise. And yet… An interview I heard last week detailing a girls’ school in Afghanistan stirred me. There is something else out there I’m meant to be doing. The not knowing adds to my loneliness.
I am trying very hard not to struggle with the lack of a partner in my life. I am trying to just be with it; to take advantage of this time to focus on my kids and the work issue. Still, it was an effort not to sulk today – and I didn’t entirely succeed – at the fact that I spent my birthday engaged almost entirely in activities that were about and for my children. It drizzled all morning. We went to “Up!” when I would rather have watched an adult film (the fact that there weren’t any showing at this particular cineplex made that a little less sad), and then had pizza for dinner when I’d rather have had a salad and some wine.
But my children – exhausting as they are – are the best gift ever. Ever. This morning before she was even truly awake, Bea opened one eye and groggily mumbled, “Happy Birthday.” Hugging me goodnight, she said, “It wasn’t much of a birthday, was it?” I winced, thinking how prescient my 8-year old can be. “Hey, I got to spend time by the water. I saw a movie. I was with the two most special people in my life. That’s a pretty fine birthday, don’t you think?” She smiled. And finally, I believed it, too.
I know that I was lonely when I was with Alex but in a different way. Sometimes being in a relationship can stave off loneliness or help you to ignore it. But when it becomes too large or looming to ignore, the shortcomings of the relationship seem that much clearer. On our last vacation together, I was so aware of the silence between us, of the ways in which I no longer recognized him, or him me.
Walking along the beach tonight, as the kids dug holes, I declared aloud to the waves, “I’m not doing that again.” [Meaning to be lonely while in a relationship.]
“I will find a way to be okay with my solitude.”
On one hand, I really hope that I can make this so. On the other, I hope that I’ll be in a much better place when my next birthday comes around. Perhaps that’s hypocritical of me?
I dip in and out of hope these days. I think we’re all doing that with the state of the world – as they say (“the state of the world” – it sounds like something out of a 1930s sci fi comic). I drove into Chicago last Friday to see a friend and then go to Ikea to buy new kitchen counters that my neighbor is helping me to install. The whole trip was an interesting balancing act in hope and lack thereof. What’s the opposite of hope? Despair? I hope for a job; I despair there will be none…
Hope is such a slippery thing. A friend is doing a photo project on hope, and every time I look at her promo, I’m less sure than the time before what it’s about because I’m less sure than before what hope is. But I know that I bumped into it several times over the weekend.
Having dinner with a friend who I’ve known since I was eighteen, who I still adore and who made me laugh to the point of peeing my pants while standing in front of the iMac store on Michigan Avenue was the hope born of friendship. Going into the Hotel Intercontinental, with its bygone-era Hollywood golden ceilings, and seeing the pool where Johnny Weismuller once swam gave me a funny hope for the way things live in.
Weismuller – I’m reading now on Wikipedia – was born in Romania but grew up in Chicago. He had five wives and was buried in Acapulco, and they played a recording of his Tarzan yell at his funeral.
Being out on Michigan Avenue reminded me of my dad – specifically of an early December morning when that great avenue was nearly deserted and we’d gone out to look for breakfast, my mom still asleep back in the hotel. I was in my 20s, and had flown in from Seattle to meet them before heading back to Iowa for Christmas. The night before, we’d had dinner at a restaurant and our waitress had quietly encouraged us to look over the banister at a small seating area below: there sat Michael Jordan and his Bulls teammates right in the midst of their “three-peat” years. Another memory of my dad from years before: going out in the evening for a tuna sandwich and a Coke at the Woolworth’s counter on Michigan for my dinner before my parents went out for the night, and I stayed in the hotel with my homework and the remote control. My dad loved the Woolworth’s counter as much, I sensed, as the nicer restaurant he’d be going to later. I loved sitting there, pretending that we lived in a high-rise apartment, overlooking the Lake, and this was our Saturday night ritual – a sandwich at the luncheonette counter.
These memories hold hope and despair. The hope of my connection to my dad even when he’s gone; the despair of never seeing him again and the finality that still seems impossible to me.
Hope. Despair. What tips the balance? Hearing of couples who have been married for years and have sex every night – this reported to me by an excellent source – gives me hope. Learning from the same source that she has friends in equally long marriages who actually do it several times a night every night, shifts me to despair.
But then HOPE comes back in the oddest ways. I listened on the drive in and out to Adam Gopnik reading Through the Children’s Gate and the precision of his prose and the gentle humor of his voice gave me hope for writers and writing. Seeing the preview for Where the Wild Things Are — seeing that they’ve done something creative and different with such a beloved book, and that the filmmakers were emphasizing its very important kernels — inside all of is hope; inside all of us fear – gave me, well, hope.
Hearing my friend’s adoring stories of her well-adjusted teenaged daughter gives me hope for my kids and a world that’s not too far off. Standing in line at Ikea and looking into carts filled with items that declared a specific moment in life — a crib, diaper pail, and night light in one, or mixing bowls, cutting boards, and a tool set in another — made me smile. One must be saturated with hope to have a baby or to move in with a lover for the first time.
Even getting on to this blog and reading your generous comments gives me hope. In fact, awhile back, someone who lives in town who reads this blog said, “What nice friends you have,” alluding to all of the folks leaving comments here. She thought I knew everyone, as in face-to-face, in-the-flesh know.
“I’ve never met most of them,” I said, which pleased me greatly. That people reach out to someone they’ve never met, is the epitome of hope.
When I was stressing over the state of my house recently, a friend reminded me of the golden de-clutter rule: If you haven’t used it in six months, it goes. I looked at my books in horror. “Not books,” she assured me.
I just completed filling out the very onerous “Home Affordable Modification Program Hardship Affidavit”–a document that I’m guessing many people will never be able to accurately complete, or at least in the tiny window of time allotted, making this lifeline to negotiate mortgages a bit of sham. With luck, my taxes will be done by week’s end. All of which is April feel like an excellent time to start boxing up certain accoutrements of my marriage.
I have a big pile of cardboard boxes and my goal is a box a day. Target Numero Uno: Alex’s clothes and other stuff he never got around to before leaving the country. Next, will be the stuff that I don’t use any more. If I imagine it gone and feel lighter, it’s history.
More importantly, I need to find a really big, albeit invisible box, in which to put all of the mental and emotional stuff that I have used in the past six months but that I hope to get rid of now. There’s a heap of anger. Stacks of sadness. A few pounds of self-pity. And cases of fear. More than anything, I’d like to throw out every ounce of fear. It’s done me no good.
I wonder about my friends’ box. About the people out there reading this. What’s in everyone else’s boxes and what would it look like if we met at the spiritual dumping ground, passed our boxes around, giggled kind heartedly at them, smiled at our small human selves, told a few jokes, passed along a few hugs, and went home to our much lighter, brighter homes?
Last week was the commencement of taxes. It was putting down the retainer for the lawyer. It was no new work – again. It was tearing up my kitchen further to put down the floor. It was a mess. And yet it was good. I felt really clear. Everything was on its course. Slowly. But the right course. And I knew it would all get to where it was supposed to be. I knew.
Today it’s sunny. The house is just as much a mess. The bank account is as hollow as yesterday. But my belief is wavering. Will we be ok? Today: not so sure.
I’ve been thinking about relationships, the push/pull of them, the way one person leads and other decides to follow or not. In just a split second, you make so many decisions about where to pull, whether to follow. And so many decisions later seem like poor ones. The trust involved. … Do I have it in me again? I do for moments or even a day or two, and then I look back – like in NYC – and say, why didn’t I listen to my gut? That was true with Other Guy, too. There was that first kiss in the parking lot – a bright sunny day at lunchtime in a busy parking lot. He looked thrilled. My gut was less sure. Pleased. Flattered. Curious. Yes, yes, yes. But also sending out a definite: dangerwillrodgers signal. So why did I kiss back? Why didn’t I listen? What would I do the next time? Am I destined to always kiss back and always kick myself?
Watching my son play with an imaginary rocket right now in a stream of sun, the usually invisible dust motes floating around him, I wonder where I’ll be in a month. In a year. I’m scared, people. What’s out there that I can’t see.
Sad but lovely poem via G. Keillor’s daily poem email…
Meditation on Ruin
by Jay Hopler
It’s not the lost lover that brings us to ruin, or the barroom brawl,
or the con game gone bad, or the beating
Taken in the alleyway. But the lost car keys,
The broken shoelace,
The overcharge at the gas pump
Which we broach without comment — these are the things that
eat away at life, these constant vibrations
In the web of the unremarkable.
The death of a father — the death of the mother —
The sudden loss shocks the living flesh alive! But the broken
pair of glasses,
The tear in the trousers,
These begin an ache behind the eyes.
And it’s this ache to which we will ourselves
Oblivious. We are oblivious. Then, one morning—there’s a
crack in the water glass —we wake to find ourselves undone.
“Meditation on Ruin” by Jay Hopler from Green Squall. © Yale University Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
Remember how I wrote that a friend recently told me I”m not okay, just seeming okay out of necessity? Well, she’s right. Last night, feeling so on the brink of utter despair I talked to another friend over the phone. She only had a moment, but in her calm, sweet way she said, “You’re going to be ok. It’s all going to be ok. It may get reconfigured in ways you can’t imagine now, but you and your kids will be ok.” Somehow, this completely undid me. With the kids playing downstairs, I curled up in my bed and sobbed. I have cried so little throughout this – too little, I’m sure – but her words opened up doors upon doors and the tears came.
When I finally went downstairs, Bea took one look at me and asked what was wrong. “Just sad,” I said. “Oh, mama, you’re alright,” she said with a motherly smile. “C’mon Thomas,” she gestured to her brother, and they both came over and hugged me. “Family Hug!” Bea declared with happiness.
Ok.
Bea has been having trouble sleeping. She’s never been great at it, but lately she’s become so anxious about it that she’s often awake at 11 or even midnight. We went to talk to a friend who is a therapist about the problem. Our friend went through the usuals: a bedtime routine, the bed as a cozy spot, visualizations for self calming. We’d heard it before, and though Bea earnestly listened, trying to be good, I could tell she was disappointed that the therapist wasn’t going to give her a silver bullet, a surefire trick. But then, unbeknownst even to the therapist, she did.
“What do you every night? Maybe not right away, but eventually,” our friend asked.
Bea looks stumped for a second, then made a guess: “Sleep?”
“Yes. Has there ever been a night when you didn’t sleep?”
Bea nodded no and I noticed a light coming on behind her eyes, a light that simultaneously indicated that the idea was simplistic and yet very true.
Three nights have gone by since and it’s worked like a charm. Each night, Bea says, “I am a good sleeper. I am a good sleeper. Every night, I fall asleep.” And by-golly, she does it! Just like that. She’s recalibrated her relationship to sleep.
There’s a lot of recalibration going on in the world right now. Altering perception. Seeing gray where before there was only black. Feeling thankful where previously you felt presumption or even ignorance. A friend’s husband came home from work tonight in a much better mood than when he’d left that morning. A lecturer at the local college, he’d expected to be laid off today, but instead discovered that he and his colleagues would have to teach an extra class. For the time being, their jobs are safe. Though I know the same job has struck him as a ball and chain at other times, today it is a blessing.
I got a notice that one of the several jobs I’ve applied for is on hold until spring due to the employer’s financial situation. But a book project is suddenly heating up and I’ll be plenty busy through spring, even if some of the payment won’t come until later. Still, I have just enough money to get me through. So I’ll recalibrate and see it as a good thing – time to finish a project that has the potential to be fulfilling.
The snow is starting to melt. This weekend when it gets near 50-degrees, the patches of mud and the months-old dog poop will suddenly be an aesthete’s nightmare. But there will also be the tiniest whiff of spring in the air. The sun is starting to feel a bit closer, a little more intense. It’s a reminder that winter will end, and so much of what appears to be frozen or ugly will warm up to blossom and nourish us again.
