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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?
I am tossing out old cooking magazines and came across one from 1994, the year we were married and still living in Seattle. I could nearly smell our youth in its pages, not to mention life before arugula and chipotle and salted caramel. That’s what chokes me up the most, I’ve realized: not the end of the marriage but a loss of a certain era, a certain age. I’ll never be 28 again. I’ll never fall in love in just that way again, with the possibility of a house and kids still in the foreground. When we met, I believed I’d one day own a big puffy chair from Pottery Barn. I no longer believe that. I believed that neither Alex nor I would ever hurt the other. I no longer believe that. I thought I’d have many dogs throughout my life. Now, as I watch my 13-year old lab begin to falter, I wonder if I’ll even have another one. Not now, at any rate; I’m too tired. I’ve learned so much since 1994, but much has been lost, too. Naivete isn’t all bad.
I’m tempted to give my mother-in-law the marriage certificate, my ring, and the dress – humble as it was – for inclusion in her remarkable display: “A Marriage Dissolved but Ongoing In This House.” These artifacts might find their only use in further illustrating our once entwined life, as portrayed in image after image hung or propped in house. There we are on the mantle in Maine, Alex leaning against me. On the wall by the dining room table, we’re captured in all of our tight nerves on our wedding day. The fridge has me after Bea’s birth, flushed with love, and another of Alex in the park with Bea the day before Thomas’ birth. In a plexi frame on the bureau in the guest room, we’re posed with our dog, who is now decrepit. Along the stairwell, we stand in a tux and long black gown at his sister’s wedding, more dressed up and posh than ever before or since. I was the tall blonde shiksa that day; what an unexpected delight.
We are everywhere – courting, engaged, married, expecting, with children. We are mid 20s. We are 30. We are approaching 40. We are a year ago. We are in Israel, France, California, Seattle, Maine, Iowa. We are very much WE, still “us.”
There is no image of us coming apart, though I looked for telltale signs, the photo that gave a hint of things to come. I couldn’t find it. Only sadness at seeing us reproduced so many times when now I want to stand in my own frame, with only my children as points of reference.
It’s been raining for about 24-hours straight and I suddenly feel like I’m back in Seattle on some lazy morning when Alex and I would go out for breakfast and noodle around the Market or go to a movie. Ah, all the movies….
I started craving Greg Brown’s song All Day Rain. Greg actually lives a few blocks over, and I’ve been listening to his music most of my life, but it meant the most to me when I was in Seattle and his songs about thunderstorms and little Iowa towns brought me home. They made me ache. We played his song “This Band of Gold” at our wedding and bought most of his CDs together.
Alex put all of the music he wanted on his iPod before he took off. “You can have the CDs,” he told me. I have no idea if he copied any of the Greg Brown. But now I have the words and the memories. I love this music. I don’t want to get rid of it, but god, it makes my heart ache with a melancholy for what was and a longing … to be held, to be cared about, to not be alone.
I’m cleaning my kitchen pantry as I listen. The flour moths have returned with a vengeance and I decided to be proactive. There’s laundry going in both machines, and muffins in the oven. But my heart is full of rain.
by Jen Lemen
I have everything I need.
I don’t believe this statement. Why not? A lot comes to mind. I grew up in a house that was fearful. Not over-the-top, puritanical cringing fear – but a low-level anxiety that there wasn’t enough in the bank, that the other shoe could drop at any time. My dad was a fundraiser and worked his way up the ladder from an entry-level job for a small health-related foundation in the late 1960s to the president of a major university foundation. It was his job to be careful, to be a bit fearful. He clenched his teeth to the point that he had to wear a jaw guard. He ironed his shirts until they were crisp, shined his shoes once a month, and soaked and pushed back his cuticles. The current economic crisis would be turning his stomach in knots, if he were still alive.
I’m not sure if my mom is a worrier by nature, but he wore off on her. Now she frets about rotten garbage while on vacation and driving after dark. She suffers from a lack of confidence that is masked by her twin habits of smoking and drinking – three packs a day and two bottles of wine a night. Stripped of these safety mechanisms, she’s scared of her own self – not to mention The World.
There was a lack of love in my family that left me with a gap where a deep-seated surety of self-love should be. My parents loved/love me a lot, I’ve no doubt, but weren’t very good at showing it. They were better at helping me to doubt the ground on which I walked, to believe that it might open up at any moment and I should be ready to fall in.
I sought the love I didn’t get with them in men. No surprise there. I could have done worse than Alex (e.g., abusive, mean spirited, manipulative), but his love never felt like enough either. This was partly because of my own perception, and partly because of his extreme passivity. “I can take it or leave it,” is the approach he’s had toward our marriage, or, “I’m not asking you to leave, but I’m not begging you to stay.” For a long time – too long – this seemed to represent a marriage of equals (as I type this, I realize the huge gap in such a belief). But now it is just so obviously not enough.
I have a friend who believes the Universe brings whatever she needs. “My television broke, and I asked the Universe for a new one, and then next week I found one on the curb.”
I will never have such blind faith in the interconnectivity of all things. There’s some hubris, it seems to me, in taking this line of thinking to the extreme. Where does that put someone who wanted to escape a brutal environment? A hopeless situation? Did he or she just not ask the Universe in the right way?
Still, I want to believe that there will be enough when I most need it. That I won’t fall through a crack in the ground, swallowed whole. I want to believe the sentiments of this lovely painting by Jen Lemen, which seemed waiting just for me when I found it this morning on her blog. Hope, joy, love, wisdom – I possess them all and they will take me far.
