Large Format Reproductions
Posted on July 14, 2008
Filed Under suburban joys, career, Anxiety, challenges, horticulture, plants, work | 16 Comments
I have, in hand, large format reproductions of the property next door. Our neighbors have bulldozed and back-hoed their way to a blank slate, all smooth soil and anticipation. I have promised to help them, to select hedge material and shrubs that will thrive in deep shade, alongside a sunny pool deck and in front of unsightly pool equipment. They insist on ornamental grasses and red maples and flamingo willow and since I have no idea what grasses or willows or maples work here, I will pretend and follow their lead and learn the latin names of these plants they favor so I can, at least, sound knowledgeable. I will cross my fingers and hope these Acer palmatums and Miscanthus sinensis survive and prosper. I am their neighbor. If things don’t work out, they know where to find me.
This is my first landscape design project since leaving Florida. I have enjoyed an almost three year sabbatical and now it is time to put on the big girl panties and get back to work despite the fact that there are chinks in the armor, holes in the lingerie. Because I have studied and practiced in a subtropical climate, I am, decidedly, no expert on Zone 6. I am faking my way through this first endeavor and so far it proves to be no different than the barely managed chaos of the projects I’ve been used to.
Today the excavation crew hit the water main and took out service to my house and the neighbor’s to the South of us. After service was restored we had chunks of copper and mud clogging our hot water tank and our toilets and the water ran brown from the taps and into the washer. We spent the entire day clearing lines and blowing out faucets after which we have clean running water again and I have that “Oh yeah, that’s why I quit landscape design and installation back in 2005″ feeling. Same shit. Different state. ‘Tis the nature of the beast and all those other platitudes I could throw at the thing. I have, in hand, large format reproductions of the property next door and I am tired already.
Exchange Program
Posted on July 8, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, summer camp, bitching and moaning, summer | 11 Comments
So summer’s been on for fourteen days and, already, I have tired of hearing I hate swim team and it’s too hot for tennis and piano lessons suck. It’s a repetitive loop of thankless bitching, constant complaint. Mostly from my eldest, my naughty by nature son. He has deemed this Country Club Summer, all the lessons and sun block applications and snack bar purchases and lifeguard whistles, somehow sub par and he affects a sort of can’t be bothered attitude there beside the pool, wincing and moaning through planned activities and complaining about the recent change over from matchstick fries to thicker steak fries. I remind him that we all must suffer the deep-fried transition and it’s important to handle such disappointments gracefully.
I find myself uttering the hackneyed phrase you don’t know how lucky you are, daily, sounding like my parents and their parents before them and wondering when I turned into my Nana, convinced that I’m but moments away from donning a bathing cap and doing the breast stroke in the lap lane. And, like all children the world over, since time began, my children successfully ignore my reprimands and scolding, my attempts to remind them that in other parts of the world, hell, in other parts of town, whole families live in tents and share bedding with their sisters.
It strikes me that lucky is a relative concept. There is always bigger, better, more and until a person experience smaller, worse and less, true understanding is just not possible. And so it is that I am contemplating developing a Fresh Air exchange program in which we invite lower-income children from Detroit, Trenton and the Bronx to come to our town for the week and work on their butterfly kick, their golf swing and the proper construction of a sand mansion while my kids take their places in their inner-city neighborhoods, delivered there by Greyhound with only a knapsack and twenty dollars stuffed in their pockets. There they will learn about dodging street fire and they will come to know the stench of urine in the stairwell on a humid summer afternoon. They will play among the shards of glass and look forward to neighborhood children yelling ‘Narcos’ whenever the police ride ’round the block to hassle the petty dealers. There they will learn to associate the summer evenings with the sounds of sirens and car alarms and the occasional domestic dispute that has spilled out into the hallway. Maybe then, when I get them back, a little strung out, sleep deprived, a whole lot wiser, will they get what I mean by lucky.
Public Surrender
Posted on July 1, 2008
Filed Under marriage, bat-ass crazy, challenges, epiphanies | 10 Comments
The main drag through our town is lined with impressive antique homes, all of them tastefully restored and expanded upon and painted in an array of acceptable and historically accurate Benjamin Moore colors. So it follows that the one home that has NOT been meticulously scraped and painted Kennebunk Beige, the one whose front porch is broken and listing and appears to be trying to slink off unnoticed, that is the one that catches the eye when driving down Elm Street.
It is a scream in a quiet room, a berry stain on a white dress shirt. This house, that is the focal point of our historic district, stands as a sort of example, a warning to potential home buyers against buying beyond their means, against allowing idealism and romanticism to influence a real estate transaction, against stretching the family budget to accommodate the fixer-upper only to find yourself pushing a reel mower through the small patch of grass at the foot of the porch stairs, the one bit of maintenance you can still manage without paying a third party, the one thing that you can control while the rest of the property folds and begins to fall in upon itself.
And perhaps there is an element of empathy that sustains our interest in this house, as My Better Half and I feel a sort of kinship with the poor people obviously waging this hopeless war against time and money and wood rot. We have intimate experience with just such a battle as we struggle to prop up our own crumbling home. We are just thankful that OUR humiliation is safely set back from the street, sinking into its degradation behind the privacy screen of scrub maples and poison ivy. There is no public witness to the state of our neglect and only those we invite to experience our folly are privy to our leaking sink and faulty toilets and the bats roosting in the attic.
We can understand these strangers strapped to the weakening joists of their centuries old home, keenly, intimately, as we too watched one too many episodes of This Old House and convinced ourselves that it was possible. We can imagine the arguments sustained over how to spend the last dollars in the bank account, he insisting that he is up to the task of demolishing and rebuilding that listing front porch, she remembering the basement drainage project that ultimately involved hydraulic drill rentals, forty eight hours of rattle and roar and the choking drifts of fine concrete particulate floating up from the cellar to settle on upholstery and counter tops and, remarkably, on all food items in the refrigerator.
And we secretly consider adopting the very public surrender that seems to have earned this desperate couple some sense of connubial balance. As the weather warms and the swarms of black flies begin to dissipate, the residents of 12 Elm have pitched a large, accommodating tent on their small patch of grass just to the right of the porch stairs, assuming the attitude of squatters on their own front lawn while the whole monstrous mess behind them crumbles and disintegrates, unsalvageable at last.
Now that they have declared defeat, they are free to focus on manageable tasks like keeping the tent flaps closed to the clouds of mosquitoes moving through at dusk, repairing rips and rends with a needle and thread, stringing up a sort of clothes line between two tall pines they once considered removing and have now come to think of as just two more residents on this piece of property that has finally bested them.
Drunk Dialing
Posted on June 25, 2008
Filed Under bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning, book group, epiphanies, sadness, therapy, love | 15 Comments
In the effort to dismiss such things as my “reputation” as a writer; in keeping with he communal effort that is blogging, I am now indulging a sort of inebriated form of posting which, like drunk-dialing, is the solitary outreach of an intoxicated, lonely person with access to the tools of technology. It’s a blast of nonsense out into the atmosphere or blogosphere or, at the very least, somewhere other than their living room where there is only a cat asleep on the couch amid cracker crumbs, a few fallen soldiers (emptied wine bottles) on the coffee table, the companions to the remaining rind of a wheel of brie.
Tonight was book group night and a flock of female friends descended here to discuss everything but the book I’d chosen for this month’s read which is an excellent book, a fucking masterpiece but decidedly not a beach read and therefore was neglected by most in the group who gave up on all near-serious literature back in early May. I loved, loved, loved Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and could have underlined and highlighted and swooned over every damn line in the book but chose to really hyper-focus on one important passage conveying the true and consuming conflagration of new love,
“…there she was again. I was miserable with relief, afraid I might laugh for no reason, afraid I might look at her too long, trying to remind myself she was a stranger, though she had been my dearest, most inward thought for weeks, and that I might startle her with some unaccountable familiarity. I had been to the barber and I was wearing a new shirt, since it seemed only prudent to suppose that my constant, passionate, and most unworthy prayers might be answered. And I made a little experiment with hair tonic…and I thought, What an utter and transparent fool I am…If I had the same experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn’t understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense, or why they would say, ‘I know, I know’ when I urged a little reasonableness on them, why it meant ‘It doesn’t matter, I just don’t care.’ That’s what the saints and martyrs say. And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations.”
The fact that this soul-slaying description of one man’s utter devotion to a total stranger was written by a woman shouldn’t surprise me. But it doesn’t much matter who wrote the novel, man, woman or extraterrestrial I will be reading it over and over again in this lifetime just to occasionally connect with the single most significant passage of romantic literature that I’ve ever read. And each time, I’m sure, I’ll throw my head down on the pillows and inwardly wail, If only someone, once, just once, ever felt that I was “the only true friend they ever had on earth,” then all this other stuff, this preparing brown bag lunches and selecting foundation shrubs and changing the oil and remembering my mother’s birthday and weeding the front walk would all make sense, or better yet, will all just become the pleasant backdrop to the pleasing complexity of my own true love story.
Instead, I will wake tomorrow, slightly hung over and entirely irritated with my children who refuse to abide by the sleep-past-six-summer rules. The morning will be sad and stale and same. I will make myself rise to the smallness of my life, vowing to drink less, to run the dishwasher before going to bed at night, to write thank you notes and wash the dog and try to remember that life, true life, does not resemble a novel, even a novel perversely devoid of plot,a novel full of religious connotations far beyond my secular grasp, a novel of ‘life sucks, you finally fall in love and then you die’. Because real, non-literary life, though just as tragic, is no where near as succinct. There’s so much wandering and muddling through between here and there that doesn’t make for clever commentary or character development. And this is something I’m just getting used to.
How do you do it?
Posted on June 24, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, advice, bitching and moaning, challenges, apology, summer, work | 8 Comments
How do you do it? You with the kids up your arse and the lawn needing mowing and the bathtub black with dirty footprints? How do you keep on blogging when there’s a child-led high jacking of your Mom-life?
It is officially the first day of Summer in that there is no need to be out of bed, no bus to catch, no snack to pack or lunch money to remember and yet my kids are up with the sun and the birds and the damn waste management team, which hasn’t tailored the trash pick-up schedule to accommodate children and mothers who might like to sleep past day break if just to shorten the otherwise interminable day.
I hoped this day would have a lazy start. We were at the Red Sox game last night. The kids were over indulged. They had Cracker Jack and Italian Ice and Soft Serve ice cream and watched a little baseball in between stuffing their faces. G fell asleep in the eighth inning, just when the entire park began chanting Manny, Manny, Manny, banging arms against Fenway’s green wooden siding, clapping hopeful hands, rhythmically urging on the designated hitter, trying to will a win for the home team. She was right to give up right then and there. Manny was caught out, hopes faded and the line to get out of the parking garage rivaled the queue hopeful pilgrims encounter when trying to catch Mass with the Pope in Vatican City in July.
We were home some four hours past their usual bed time and still, still, the kids were awake this morning before sunrise.
How do you do it? You with the kids up your arse and the lawn needing mowing and the bathtub black with dirty footprints and new landscape design project added to the mix? How do you keep on blogging when taking on the neighbors backyard pool project, trying to design a garden using Zebra Grass and Japanese Lilac Trees and Weeping Maples when really you have no idea what to do with these plants since they distinctly deciduous and decidely un-sub-tropical and the entire project will require your faking Zone 6 expertise? How do you keep writing when there are latin names like Pennisetum and Miscanthus and Syringa reticulata to master?
What I’m essentially getting at is that I’m back at work as a landscape designer (it’s casual, it’s the neighbor’s project, yet it’s scary and overwhelming and complete change of pace). What I’m getting at is that my kids need me to drive them to swim team and tennis and the occasional golf lesson as that’s all I’ve got planned for them for the next ten weeks of their freedom. What I’m getting at is that I’m going to try and continue posting, I swear I’ll try, but I’m making no promises as I see my life sort of lurching away from me for the next little bit. And we all know how that worked out for me last summer, even without the pressure of design work. I think I posted once in early June, slipped off the grid and returned in September. I promise to try and do better. But I can only do what one woman can do and I bow down to those of you who somehow manage to keep up the writing energy when there are kids up your arse and the lawn needs mowing and the bathtub is black with dirty footprints and the children and the backdoor neighbors’ with their landscaping needs have high-jacked your Mom-life.
Summer
Posted on June 19, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, suburban joys, thanks, summer, memory | 5 Comments
G is conducting a countdown. Since the beginning of the week she has been reminding me of the minutes left in the dwindling school year. Each morning over breakfast cereal or an Eggo waffle she declares that, “Today is Monday and that means there are only five more days. How many minutes is that, Mom?” And the following morning it is Tuesday and she blurts out over breakfast, “Just four more days. How many minutes is that, Mom?” And now it is Thursday and she’s experiencing the thrill and adrenaline of someone immersed in a 48 hour vigil. Just two more days until she attains the blissful freedom of Summer which means God knows what to her six year old mind. And I’ll I can think to say is, “Then what?”
It’s not that I can’t remember the sort of lazy, free-form tangle of Summer, it’s just that I’m sure I’ve glorified those two halcyon months of childhood each year, because they couldn’t have been anywhere near as good as I remember them. My brothers and I, as children, never went to sleep-away camp or to the country club pool or took sailing lessons at the yacht club. There were no organized golf or tennis lessons and the there may have been only five days of the entire break when we even attended any structured day camp, it was an Audubon sanctioned program and we ran around in the forest, loosely supervised while capturing snakes and racing bull frogs and rolling in poison ivy. We learned the names of wild flowers, Queen Anne’s Lace and Purple Loose Strife. We earned our Audubon stripes by enduring the week-end MudWalk which was a swamp slog, waist deep in decomposing muck. It was all about emotional endurance, withstanding the indignity of leaches and mosquitoes and pockets of quicksand that captured your shoes and sucked at your shins.
The most one could hope for during this two hour trek was to avoid the urge to cry. (Jessie Allen broke down half way through the walk each year, providing the rest of us with the ammunition to make her next 11 months a living hell. In her defense, I still cannot watch a movie with American soldiers traipsing through the swamps of Vietnam holding their guns over their heads without thinking about that Mudwalk and Jessie Allen and the effort it took for ALL of us not to succumb to tears.)
Though we had a pool in the backyard, we were forced to take swimming lessons at the Town Pond which was really just a man made hole filled with startlingly green water, heavy with algae, stinking in the heat of August. The pond never warmed and there were pockets of still cold, deep in the middle, where the bottom was obscured by algae growth so thick you could feel it between your toes. We shared rumors about the various atrocities purported to lie on the bottom - dead horses, abandoned cars, the ghost of Minerva Graf who supposedly drowned a decade earlier while her mother bonked the life guard. As part of the Junior Water Rescue course we were made to swim the length of the pond and back, the whole time stroking for our lives, maintaining a speed we hoped would out-pace that of Minerva, up from the deep, surely intent on claiming a pre-teen companion.
In the evenings we played a loosely organized game we called Chase which involved a lot of hiding and running and suppressing the urge to wet your pants. Chase was best played after dusk when the fear of dark shadows and neighborhood dogs made regular old hide and seek a singular thrill. We were barefoot, we were dirty, we were probably put to bed that way each night leaving the happy smear of summer on our pillowcases.
I wish, for my children, these idealized memories of summer, memories full of taste and sound and smell sensation, singularly unique, familiar yet fabled, the sting of mosquitoes around the ankles while picking strawberries from the field, the smell of damp bathing suits and towels in a heap on the bathroom floor, the taste of salt surf on the tongue and the disappointment that is the last half of sandwich stolen by a shrieking sea gull, dinners eaten on the screened porch listening to the peculiar call of the Whipperwill just beyond the whir and pass of the lawn sprinklers at dusk, the drip of ice cream down the wrists on humid nights in August, the rush of wind while biking fast, down hill, with no hands, “the conscious yet not resentful sensation of being caught up in a web of something as tangible and fragile as thread.”
Eight weeks, 56 days, 1324 hours, 79,440 minutes of summer still to go, but who’s counting?
Quote from John Cheever’s The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well
Time Will Tell
Posted on June 17, 2008
Filed Under marriage, milestones, bat-ass crazy, My Better Half, Anxiety, challenges, therapy | 11 Comments
Now that I’m spending ridiculous amounts of time with various therapists, hired guns intent on fixing the inner turmoil, I’m learning that there are certain things that generally define a therapy experience. First there is the noise machine that fills the waiting room with crashing waves, chirping crickets, the strains of Tchaikovsky. It is an over compensation, this deliberate cacophony meant to give a person the assurance that their words, their tearful confessions, their angry cursing behind closed but flimsy doors, will not be over heard by the receptionist or the 10:30 appointment patiently waiting their turn to vex and keen while reading Women’s Day or People magazine in one of two leather arm chairs.
The hushed quiet of the private therapy room, free of the canned sounds of reception, is breathless and cool. Though it is dark, it is not dreary and there is some comfort in the fact that there is a Kleenex box and asian art work and a bowl of hard candies, butterscotch or peppermint, sickly sweet confections in a bowl, an oral diversion meant to ease the complexity of discussions about “relationship hygene” and the purpose of sexual encounters “to engage feelings of vulnerability and aggression which we have come to think of as taboo emotions and regularly suppress such frailties in most non-sexual human interactions.”
One can tell that much thought has been given to the arrangement of furniture in these therapy spaces. My personal therapist likes to sit in a straight backed chair pulled up to her desk while inviting me to take the seat that is directly adjacent to that desk. She can swivel to face me and put her feet up on the file cabinet. There is a window behind her and the filtered light illuminates the wisps of her short hair, glowing gold in the darkness of the room. Her visage is cast in shadow, completing the effect of deliberate anonymity. She is faceless, haloed even, playing the angel of benevolence whose expression I cannot read for the corona that surrounds her.
And our marriage therapist has his own contrived arrangement. He prefers a deep arm chair that faces a wide leather couch. There are two other arm chairs beside this couch. To sit one of these chairs would be to face the wall rather than the professionally dressed man who has greeted us gently, quiet but stern, paternally ushering us through the door. So we both sink into opposite corners of the long couch. We prefer to meet his gaze than that of one another, having shared a chilly car ride, a week of reserved hostility and patient withholding.
I get the feeling that he is making note of our seat selection. That our choice to sit together on the couch, however far apart, my habit of holding the throw pillow in my lap, hugging it to my chest as if for protection, tells him something about us as a couple, about the state of the connubial union. I only wish I could see the note he’s made next to “seat selection” - hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked. He must play a little game with himself. Upon first meeting a troubled couple, he must try to predict the outcome ahead of time, tagging the duo with some sort of premature prediction. He is, perhaps, keeping score of his ability to predetermine a couple’s destiny based solely on the place they choose to sit when first entering the inner sanctum.
But I have to believe we are learning things beyond where to place our fannies. Conversely, I fear that the learning, the progress, is supposed to be more efficient in its development, neatly packaged within the 50 minute therapy window, reaching its weekly conclusion by the end of each billable hour, when, in fact, we’ve both just managed to open a vein and are in the midst of a full soulful bleed on the oriental carpet when our fifty minutes have elapsed.
Almost as if there is an audible chime, a programmed alarm bell, we are ejected into the harsh glare of day, into the parking lot of our lives without the benefit of soft sounds and cushioned chairs and hard candies. We bleed and ooze a collective flow of unhappiness upon the pavement. And all the way home we wish for the mediator, the third party to help us frame and present our individual view points in a more palatable and digestible manner. I have thought to ask him how much it would cost to take him home with us for the week where he might spend some real time dissecting our likenesses, our differences, where he might really get a feel for the state of the union and can say, after seven short days, hopeless, helpless, hopeful, fucked with some measure of authority. That would be easier somehow than this slow burn that is perhaps progress and perhaps not and only time and countless seating arrangements will tell.
Literary healing
Posted on June 13, 2008
Filed Under marriage, praise, milestones, My Better Half, challenges, friendship, heartbreak, sadness, thanks | 10 Comments
I need to say a heartfelt thanks to you all who have been so kind and supportive these last few weeks. There is some shame and some gamble in letting it all hang out there, to call it what it is and hope that no one reading here will pass judgment on my decision to share the deeply personal aspects of my life. I wrestle with just how much to say here because I know there are a few readers who MBH and I know on a social and personal level and their knowing of the fragile space we inhabit as a couple might make us unattractive dinner guests.
But this is my place, a place a to write and connect and heal and vent and, so, social engagements be damned, I need my blog friends right now. And so here I am trying for candor while hoping to maintain some level of respectful discretion. It’s a fine line I’m walking. I know. But literary people hurt literarily (though I’m quite sure that’s not a word, I know it’s a state of mind). To not put this process into prose would be counterproductive for me. If I can see it on the page, it can begin to make sense. At least that’s my hope.
And the responses, the comments, the e-mails and the willingness of those who I’ve known in this space for a few years now to offer me their personal time, to offer a phone call, an objective ear and the symbolic shoulder of quiet support, has been an overwhelming boost to me. I know that like minded people gravitate toward one another, like kindred souls who end up in the same book stores, who frequent the same restaurants because they both adore the french onion soup, the blogosphere acts as a much more infectious and effective facilitator. We end up at each others’ blogs nodding our heads in sympathetic recognition, laughing, sharing, weeping through the complexities of this collective life.
It’s a humbling experience to be able to emote in this forum and to have that emotional outlay met with infinite understanding and little bits of wisdom. It’s as if a dear friend hears your call, your plea, even your quiet little whimpers and comes rushing over with a pint of ice cream and The English Patient on DVD and you sit side by side watching one of the greatest love stories of all time while eating Chunky Monkey from carton and wiping your noses on your shirt sleeves - that’s what this blogging thing is for me - comfort and acceptance and the knowledge that others, others with wisdom and intellect and darn good stories to tell, have also endured all manner of shit and lived to tell about it (unless of course your the husband in the English Patient who decided to fly his plane into a sand dune instead of doing the hard work which is required to achieve “lived to tell about it” status).
And while no one can say a damn thing that makes it all better, there is something very powerful in your verbal acuity, your willingness to recognize and acknowledge my situation as familiar or acceptable and to even share your personal anecdotes about your own marital difficulties. I am forever grateful for your cyber-companionship. I see people on a daily basis who do not know me anywhere near as well as you all know me because they do not know my mind.
This blogging thing makes for odd and unorthodox friendships but they are real and important connections that deserve to be acknowledged.
And so I leave you with some wise words I found in my in-box earlier this week as an example of the very thing that gets me through the day,
CCE, Your situation has been brewing for some time and has had a million tiny moments and choices to get you here. It is going to take time to deconstruct the myriad rudders to find which one, or which combination, will turn things again. I still maintain that you’ll inevitably find yourself doing the slow work of constructing a narrative for your life that’s going to put everything else in perspective. I don’t know what that is but I know it’s bigger than you and more than now. And I still say that faith that things will work out may well be the thing that, in the end, makes things work out.
Tiny moments, choices, slow construction, perspective, faith, bigger than you, more than now…all good things to ponder at this juncture. Thank you.
And, as an aside, I told you the peonies were primed to bloom. The picture included here is just a sample of what’s exploding in my garden this week. For that and for all of you, I am thankful.
Nowhere to go but up…
Posted on June 11, 2008
Filed Under marriage, milestones, My Better Half, Anxiety, challenges, apology, heartbreak, sadness | 12 Comments
I know I have left you all to linger on a sad, sad post. I apologize for the poignant pause but it’s the time of year that makes me crazy and somewhat resigned to sacrificing the blog in the interest of sanity. Truth is, I can’t quite figure out how to find time to actually contemplate sorrow or even write a post about resolution with all the end of school year parties and soccer parties to plan and birthday parties and baseball games to attend and Father’s Day to think of and field day rescheduling and yard work and house guests and the small task of looking for a job while panicking about what I’ll do with the kids all summer should I find one. And then it’s O’s 9th birthday this weekend which just seems entirely impossible. A fourth grader that belongs to me?
So there is the state of things…one big hassled frenzy, a breath taking whirlwind before the pause and linger of summer which should be spent poolside, sipping lemonade and reading mindless fiction but somehow, these next few months don’t seem to hold the promise of that quiet languor.
First there is the fact that, with nowhere left to go but up, My Better Half and I are attempting to make some changes. I wish I could call this team work but it feels more like each of us embarking on an individual and private effort to find some stable ground. It’s been shifting and tilting away from us for awhile and this is the moment, the crucial point at which we find ourselves searching for a way back to center.
While I’d like to think that people change, people who really, really want to change can find it in themselves to fight complacency, can recognize the tiny but significant ways they have failed each other and make the minute adjustments necessary for recovery and the sustained health of the marriage, I can’t quite shake the emphatic claim that MBH has made throughout the eleven years of our marriage. Until very, very recently he has been determined and resolute in his opinion that people don’t change, can’t change, won’t change. It was take it or leave it for so long and now, somehow, when leave it became a distinct possibility, he is no longer quite so certain that change is an impossibility.
And while no one sets out to find themselves here, staring at one another over a cup of coffee at a the Heartbreak Cafe, deciding whether or not to split the bill, share the tip and take separate ways at the fork in the road, I think it’s sadly common, almost banal. We aren’t the first people sipping at this bitter brew and we won’t be the last.
There is one jaded but clever waitress here, with her netted hair and her faded work uniform, who tells tales of the few who have decided to endure, who held hands awkwardly while on the way out to the parking lot, who climbed back into the very same beat-up, work horse of a marriage they arrived in and rode off together in some inexplicable state of stubborn devotion.
She says she never hears from these folks again. She tells it like it’s a good thing, this silence. She claims that only the lonely and the sorry send her postcards. The others, the few, that made it out together have each other. And that makes her glad.
Tears Together
Posted on June 6, 2008
Filed Under kids, parenting, Anxiety, challenges, sadness | 12 Comments
I’ve been holed up in my unhappiness and forgotten that the little lives of grade schoolers continue, with all the angst and despair of that fresh age, around me. Admittedly the majority of life has been occurring somewhat off stage for me as I wallow in my own internal drama and so it was tears after school today. Mine inspired his. We grieved together, my nine year old boy and I dropping fat, salty slips of sadness on each other’s shoulders.
O and G bounced off the bus, discarding back packs and sweatshirts and shoes on their way in for the daily snack and elbowed up to the counter saying the same thing they say every day, as if their continued nourishment hinges on their asking, “May we have a snack?”
Instead of replying, as I do everyday with my usual, “No. Only bread and water, twice a day, that’s all the food for you,” after which I would laugh or mockingly growl, I, instead, dissolved into sobs. It was so unstoic and ultimately unmaternal to let them see me weep and yet I couldn’t seem to stem the flow and they hovered, concerned and baffled about why a mother would cry at 3:30 in the afternoon with a box of Wheat Thins in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other.
But the saddest part of exposing this vulnerability to them was the reaction it inspired in my O who instantly teared up and demanded to know why I was crying, why WE were crying, a collective response to a persistent sadness. And I could only say that I was experiencing a profound and amorphous grief that would surely pass on in a few minutes - my paltry attempt to skirt the truth about the hours and hours of therapy I have endured lately, tearing open old wounds, leaving the soul to bleed and battle with bleak moments between sessions, and I’m still unsure of how to heal. I sat their on a kitchen stool, arms wrapped around his lean and, still little, body and couldn’t find the words to explain my wretched state of unhappiness. And so I stuffed a sob down deep inside the ache of my loneliness and simply said, “I can’t put my finger on it exactly. It’s just there sometimes - this sadness.” And I remembered a Free To Be Song called It’s Alright to Cry. I sang a little to him between hiccups, remembering days of riding around in the car with that very CD on loop. It only made me cry harder, these words -
Crying gets the sad out of me.
And O, braver, more concise and solution oriented than I, admitted that he, unlike his mother, knew exactly why he felt the urge to cry and explained that his presentation concerning the delivery of a four-seam fast ball hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped that day. He confessed that his classmates had clapped for all the other presentations - how to incubate and hatch a chicken, how to make samosas, how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich - all the other kids had earned at least polite applause from their peers while he felt his delivery was met with stony silence. He said, “It hurt me that my friends didn’t clap for me today.” And the two of us began to cry all over again, he for the absence of friendship and approval and I because I did not possess the salve with which to heal his grade school wound.
And I wanted to whisper, “I’m so sorry I can’t fix you. But, you see, I can’t even fix myself.”
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