feeling like a person

Hello, dear friends. Hello!

It's been a very long time since I've written. I've been out here flying free in the world, without the act of writing in this space to anchor and connect me to all of you.

And though I have missed it, the absence was intentional. 

A little over a year ago, I began learning about representation in the book business world, and tapping my connections in an effort to pitch my manuscript (based on writing from this blog) to agents. I discovered many things, including the fact that loss and grief aren't particularly marketable; despite that I used every free scrap of time I could find to further my project along. Each cold email I sent was terrifying and sometimes exhilarating for me, a person who has never easily identified as a writer nor tried to push my writing beyond the safety of the fuzzy internet and out into the bright lights and bottom lines of publishing. 

I'm glad I tried. But as a widowed solo parent in her forties with a demanding job who was unwilling to give up the treasure of sleep, it seemed there was never enough time to pitch and research and rewrite and package things as I wanted. Plus I secretly wasn't convinced I had something worthwhile to share. All the same, I took it for what it was, donned a classic fake it til you make it jumpsuit, and gave it a go. 

I attached samples and pitched; I got a few kind and thoughtful rejections in return. One agent encouraged me to try my hand at writing about my therapy clients, as readers are far more interested in the mental health of young people than in the grief of an unknown widow. 

In those days my imagination was forever reaching around, fueled by an amorphous urgency, drifting away from the stuff of life and towards the stuff of shoulds. I should write about my clients! Great idea. I'll think about that and write some notes after dinner with my kids. And I should rewrite the first chapter to make it less depressing. I should probably try to develop a social media presence and then pitch again, so agents will think someone out there will want to buy this book. Maybe I should write some op-eds. About grief. Or the pathologies of college students! Definitely. As soon as this session is over I'll start one.

Actually, I should just be a better writer. And a better self-marketer. I should be someone who is brave and talented enough to have taken some writing risks before the wizened old age of forty-seven. Let's face it: I should be a real freaking artist and yet, here I am! What am I even doing with my life, anyway?  

The shimmering should-cloth that had momentarily billowed gracefully, then settled over the complicated shape of my life with a dark weight, was becoming utterly terrible.

It was good to try something scary. It was bad to feel like a failure. And it was worse still to feel that the things I work at and pour my heart into every day and night were simply not good enough. 

It also kinda sucked that I was distracted by my scattered efforts and thoughts about being a Real Published Writer. I probably slid right by a lot of terrific moments with my kids over dinner.

So by Thanksgiving I decided to take a break from it all, and told myself that I would return to this in the summer, when I would have the entire month of July off work and thus time to dedicate myself anew to becoming the writer I imagined I should be.

When July came around, for the first time in nineteen years, I had two weeks to myself. Beatrice and Gabriel were at camp, and Frances was in New York. I drove Beatrice to our beloved UU retreat center in Western North Carolina to join Gabriel who was already there, then visited various friends in Asheville and the surrounding area and met my boyfriend for a few days at an airbnb in the woods. Beforehand I told myself: this will be your retreat! A traveling writing retreat. You and your laptop will occupy cafes and front porches in your favorite mountains and come out on the other side with something to show for it.

But guess what happened when I got there? I drove my car from place to place along winding mountain roads with the windows down, breathing in the green damp forest and listening to music. I reconnected with wonderful friends. Nearly every day I hiked in the mountains - sometimes alone, usually with someone special. I woke up one morning at a friends' home on a hilltop and watched two mother deer and two fawns grazing out my bedroom window. I wandered out to find Will on the screened in porch, settled in a rocking chair with the French press behind him and a heavy ceramic mug in hand, watching the hummingbirds swoop and flutter at the feeder. He had named them all. I sat beside him so that he could introduce me. 

When I met up with my boyfriend Thomas, we spent every day similarly in our little cabin: waking up slowly, listening and watching, making coffee, planning a day of hiking and then setting out to find the trailheads situated off serpentine roads, drinking local beer and cooking simple dinners at the end of the day. Everything tasted so good. 

Besides a few postcards, I didn't write a word. I didn't want to. 

I ended my independent sojourn back at The Mountain, where I volunteered for three days with the middle school camp before my children's sessions were over and we three drove home. But on the day I arrived, I sat on the dining hall porch in the misty weather with Gabriel and his friend Emerson to hear about all they had experienced over the past seven weeks, and to tell them about my trip too. 

I struggled to tell them why the past days had been exquisite, when I had been responsible for no one but myself. It's been so good, I told them. Every morning I wake up whenever I wake up. Then I pack a lunch and eventually take a beautiful long hike. Peanut butter and jelly has never tasted so good. And I sleep so well at night. My body feels so peaceful. I feel like...I feel like...

Hmmm. What did I feel like, exactly?

Sixteen year old lanky Emerson, who'd been listening with his elbows resting on his knees and his head bent low, suddenly lifted it and looked at me. 

Like a person?

Yes! That's it! I feel like a person. 

The boys smiled at me, and I smiled back at them. They'd had a whole summer of feeling like people. They knew.

It took a two week break from mothering, therapizing, leading my counseling service, taking care of my pets and my house and my community as well as consciously ignoring my long-standing intentions to write, for me to know in my bones that simply existing was good enough.  

I had to stop doing to realize the joyful sufficiency of being. 

Being alive! My animal self - fed and exercised and loved - shed her mind's layers of shoulds and not-enoughs in that gentle, welcoming landscape, and it restored me.

Adding "I should publish my writing" to my over-full life had turned it into a rat wheel. I spent last fall feeling bad about my limitations: my widowhood and unchosen solo parent status, my shaky ambition, my voice, my scant accomplishments. I could never arrive at the fullness of being alive because I was scrambling towards something imaginary that I did not have. 

I haven't written anything since those blessed days in North Carolina. Not until now. Because I wanted to!

I came away from that retreat (it turned out to be one of those after all) with a desire to dig into my life just exactly as it is. To bring my full self to my work, to be present to my children and all the people I love. To get the hell off my phone and spend some time staring out the window. And to walk in the mountains when I can.

 

Big hugs and gratitude to all of you,

Meagan

 

wonder-full

When I was a precocious toddler sporting a massive head of black hair in Dallas, Texas, we lived near a little girl who had renamed herself Wonder. My mom could tell you more about our old neighbor (including her given name), as I can only muster the fuzziest of memories. Blonde hair, skinny legs. Maybe she had accrued five or six years of experience to my two? I know I thought the world of her. We moved away when I was three.

Thinking of her now, given the late 70s timing, it seems likely that Wonder was an homage to Wonder Woman. But in my family, she lives on as the girl who wondered, who felt wonder before all this mind-blowing beauty - so much so that it became her name! 

I brought that spirit with me and my kids to Costa Rica in May. I found a window between AP tests and fifth grade promotion ceremonies, between the end of finals at Princeton and the start of summer internships, and I took it. We hadn't traveled internationally together since after Mike died, before the pandemic, when we went to an all-inclusive resort. That too was a major adventure for me, recently widowed and desperate enough to avoid the Christmas holiday at home without Mike that I signed on to take my 6, 11, and 14 year old children to Jamaica all by myself in December. I'd never done anything like that before, but the outrageous price tag was well worth it. It was a safe, abundant holiday spent sliding down water slides, licking ice cream cones, and basking in the sun.

But Costa Rica was something else entirely. Now I am a solo mother with an 11, 16, and almost-19 year old. I discovered my children can help me with navigation, managing stressful moments, and decision-making. They can hop out of the car to unlock the sliding gate that let us back into our Airbnb in the dark, laugh their way through class 4 rapids, speak far better Spanish than their mother, run through a Panamanian airport to make it to our connecting flight in time to board and indulge me when I insist they watch the video for Van Halen's 'Panama' on my little phone later on the drive home from BWI's long term parking lot. 

And because they are independent, capable young people, I could sit in the shade, digging my toes into the sand and watching three bobbing heads out in the clear blue Caribbean Sea, briefly imagining their conversation before turning back to my book in contentment or following the sounds of howler monkeys to take a peek at them climbing through the trees. 

I wondered at the stretches of time when I was not needed. When I was simply being, an animal in a landscape teeming with other animals who made themselves known to me whenever I sat still and waited. How did those novel states of non-vigilance - of embodied affinity with everything alive around me - come to happen exactly? It was mind-blowing. 

I wondered at my increasing sense of connection to my children. It was akin to their first days on this earth, when it was as if we inhabited one body, one nervous system, a fluid loop of call-and-response. Hunger, milk; exhaustion, sleep; touch and touch and touch. Except now our boundaries were blurring around our thoughts, emotional responses, stress levels. We picked up and put down conversations, told trip-generated jokes that somehow grew funnier the more times we told them, reacted to heat and hunger with the same brittle irritability. 

I kept on messaging my family, closest friends, and boyfriend to share what was happening during the trip because I wanted to. Those people still existed for me. But also, on an inexplicable irrational level, I began to feel that my children were all the community I ever wanted or needed. Sometimes we tease each other about the Brogan mind meld; this was something different, and just mine to experience. As we traveled home and my children began to reach out to their friends, talk about school and graduation parties, and plan their next social days at home, a part of me felt so sad. Reluctant to let go of our enclosed world of four. You guys, let's not go home! Let's stay like this, just a bit longer!

I don't think I've ever felt quite that way before. I love my children and their company, and I'm acutely aware of how important my other relationships are, in and of themselves, as well as in support my parenting. I really love the company of other adults; I really need breaks! And yet. I didn't even want it! It made me remember my dad's palpable grief every time we came home from a big vacation. My sister and I were happy to return to our friends and independent lives; he never wanted the trip to end. 

So, yes. I wondered at my big love for my children, and my utter satisfaction in their company. 

And finally, because the environment in Costa Rica is so extraordinary, I never took off my amazement goggles. Every time my eyes swept over a new landscape, I was looking for something special, and if I waited a moment, I almost always found it. Wonderful! Look, hummingbirds! Hibiscus! The clouds! A toucan! My eyes were always at the ready, and my hands ready to point out the special thing my eyes had found to my kids. 

I had a few experiences of seeing something out of the corner of my eye, getting excited, and reaching for one of their arms to get their attention...only to discover that the fin cresting the surface of the water far on the horizon was a snorkeler's flippers. Near the end of a steamy hike at the base of a volcano named Arenal, during which we had already spied incredible tropical birds, a rodent called an agouti hopping adorably in the forest, and unknown brilliantly-colored lizards, I gasped and grabbed Frances' arm as I heard crunching leaves and caught a flash of color around a bend in the trail. Quiet - there's something there!

I held my breath. My amazement eyes were ablaze in anticipation. 

Two hikers emerged through the trees. Oh, I said. Never mind. 

But actually, scrap that sheepish let down moment. Always mind. Why not be amazed? Two human beings! In this crazy jungle. Here with us. And the forty other people we've seen on the trail. Wow.

One afternoon, when I saw a little dog picking its way along the far off river bank from our raft, I was already in pointing mode. Because of the rushing water it was hard to hear each other, so I'd extend my arm and point with a flourish to indicate the amazing things I saw, like a heron flapping overhead. It didn't take long for my pointing arm to develop a life of its own. It flew out before I even registered what I was seeing. When it insistently thrust itself towards movement far ahead of us on the bank, within a second it became clear my pointer finger was not targeting a new fuzzy tropical mammal but rather a little black mutt. Someone's pet. Our guide in the back of the boat loudly objected over the roar of the river: that's just a dog!

I felt a little embarrassed. But then I smiled. I was being a baby all over again, pointing at this and that, amazed by garbage trucks and squirrels and other children, insisting on showing them to everyone else. When a baby points at a dog and looks at you with delight, amazement, and expectation of your agreement on the matter, who among us hesitates to offer it? A dog! Yes! There is a dog! Look at that doggie! Hi dog, bye dog! There goes the dog!

Babies see the world with amazement goggles. Or rather, they see the world. Later they learn to put on no-big-deal goggles. Business-as-usual, I-have-important-pressing-things-occupying-my-mind goggles. But it seems to me the beautiful constant impulse in a baby is: oh my goodness what is THAT? THAT is amazing! Let me show it to you! And then, finally, what is its name? Tell me, then we can keeping talking about it and holding it in our minds after it is gone. (Hence my futile flipping around in a Costa Rican bird book, searching for names).

So in that spirit, I dropped my embarrassment in the river and thought: I get to encounter this dog with my Costa Rican baby vision. I get to enjoy this transformation of the mundane into the incredible. That dog is amazing. It is walking around and sniffing and getting its paws wet, being super cute. 

Look everyone! A dog!

an early spring saturday

After a months-long hiatus that I feared was the natural conclusion to my nearly nineteen-year-long career as a maternal read-alouder, Beatrice surprised me last week by agreeing with some enthusiasm to the idea of reading Pride and Prejudice together. Thus began our rather agreeable turn about the room with Elizabeth Bennett, which has had no influence on my speech and writing whatsoever. 

The only problem was I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere, which seemed crazy in this house. It must be in the basement, I told Bea, where so many of Papa's program books are (boxes upon boxes, filled with all the St. John's program and philosophy books I couldn't bear to part with). I promised I would search for it over the weekend, and in the meantime, I read to her off the dread phone. 

We've been reading at night before bed, and in the morning on the walk to school and work. I arrived at my office on Thursday and Friday glowing, both with the pleasure of all that fantastic funny dialogue and the effects of the outrageously cold and windy March weather we've been having. The thing is, when we're reading I don't mind it at all. The shivering adds to the fun. After we part ways and I head to my office, I find the cold intolerable.  

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and in the afternoon Beatrice and I went to see Perfect Days with some friends. We curled up towards each other in the reclining seats, heads and knees just touching, a bucket of popcorn tucked into the triangle of space my body made, and holding hands through many of the scenes. I wasn't sure what she would make of such a quiet movie, but she (and I) loved it, and we agreed we would have happily spent another two hours with this taciturn public toilet cleaner as he went about his solitary day, smiling up at the Tokyo trees.

After we said goodbye to our friends and came home, there was laundry and kitchen clean up to do, and some trip planning over cocktails with my mother, as she and Gabriel are taking a vacation together this coming weekend to make up for their Iceland fiasco in the summer. Then Gabriel left to play poker with friends, and my mom invited Beatrice and I to come over for dinner a little later. She left to cook, and I realized I still hadn't looked for Pride and Prejudice.

So down I went into the kitty litter-strewn basement, where one by one, I slid boxes off their shelves and tipped them towards me, balanced on my thighs while I rummaged in their shadowy insides. Philosophy, philosophy, and more philosophy. Some Shakespeare. Theology. More philosophy. What time was it? I squatted down next to the very last box and slid it out. Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and ... a shoebox beneath these books labeled Mike's Keepsakes in Mike's handwriting. I've seen that box before, but surprisingly I can't remember ever opening it. 

You can guess what comes next! My feet were going numb in my weird squatting position, we were going to be late for dinner, and I cracked open the lid. Inside were birthday cards, letters, photos. A silly poem in rhyming couplets I wrote for him on Valentine's Day in 2003. I didn't go through it all, but most of what I found was from his twenties, perhaps because we communicated more often in those days on pieces of paper. 

There was a postcard dated March 6, 1998 addressed to Mike in Brooklyn, three weeks after we first got together and sent from Spain, where I was for spring break. And there was a postcard from the island of St. John, where my mother had taken my sister and me for a week-long graduation gift (we graduated from high school and college in 1998). I described some of the things we were seeing and doing, and ended it with this postscript: 

I've been thinking, we shouldn't honeymoon here. Too hot. Maybe in our flabby forties, when the kids are at camp. 

After I read that, I put everything back, closed the lid, and pushed the box back onto its dusty shelf.

I wrote those words when I was twenty years old, three months into my relationship with Mike. Where did I get that kind of ballsy assuredness? We loved fantasies about the future, about being middle aged with kids, about being retired (back to Brooklyn for long walks and cheap afternoon art movies and a tiny apartment!). In our very first romantic walk in the woods, that very first weekend, Mike - who was a year away from even applying to graduate school - told me he couldn't wait to be a professor emeritus. Now that would be living. To be a wise old man, give the occasional lecture, have lots of time for books and contemplation and yes, walks in the woods. He didn't mention the grandchildren gathered round his knees. We hadn't even kissed yet! But they were there, unspoken, part of his picture. 

I came upstairs, told Beatrice to get ready to go to Grandma's, loaded some dishes into the dishwasher. And in my quiet kitchen with the darkness falling outside the windows I was seized with the most painful anguish. The kind that makes you gasp and curl with its impact. March 12th marked six years without Mike, and March 22nd marked twenty-eight without my dad. I feel very attuned to the absence of my husband and my father at this time of year, and sometimes intolerant of the presence of everyone else's.

Beatrice came down and could tell I was off, despite my best efforts to conceal it. What's wrong Mama? she asked in her open, caring way, and because we had had such a connected afternoon together, despite my worries about burdening her with my own grief, I told her about the postcard. 

But I didn't get to have any of my flabby forties with Papa, I said. I hate feeling sorry for myself, but sometimes I do. 

And then I cried. She hugged me tightly, and cried a little too. 

I told her that I don't like being envious of my friends who have their dads to support them and their husbands to go on trips with. I wish those feelings didn't come up at all.

And Beatrice, who is entering a time of adolescent turmoil and growth, looked at me and said Mama, of course you're mad. I see my friends' dads do things with them, play with them, take them places, just be there, and I feel so angry. It makes you really mad! You have to just let it out!

We were in the bathroom together. I looked at her. 

You have to just - scream!

I still had so much twisted up sorrow in my chest and throat and face. And I held her eyes and opened my mouth and let out the strangest noise imaginable. 

We both laughed. Then she let out a big yell. We laughed some more. We tried out some pretty weird vocalizations, agreeing the low register ones felt best.

We ran in the dark, just because, to my mother's house, letting so much dark energy out our feet and our mouths, continuing to yell and make strange angry noises, cracking each other up the whole way there.

Who knows what the neighbors thought. Who cares. Mike and I didn't get our not-so-very-flabby (as it turns out) forties together, but we did get the kids. They weren't here when I wrote that postcard, and now they are! Three exquisite, loving, growing people that I cannot fathom the world without.

We found a hefty volume of the collected novels of Jane Austen on my mother's bookshelf. We read last night until we were both overwhelmingly sleepy, yet just awake enough to groan together over the absurdities of Mr. Collins. Gabriel had already gone to bed, a bit poorer after his game. I fed the cats, put the dog in her crate, locked the doors and turned off the lights. I slid my hand along the cool, smooth bannister that so many unknown people have slid their tired nighttime hands along before me on my way up the stairs, sank under the covers, skipped reading my own book and, exhausted and content, fell right to sleep. 

in the chute

 

It's a snowy day here, and the kids are off school. I'm at work where meetings were canceled, and so had a bit of time to think about Beatrice's upcoming birthday and look at her Amazon wishlist, which she has been curating whenever she gets her hands on my laptop over the past couple of weeks. 

I never use that feature of Amazon. I scrolled down through K-pop albums and bells-and-whistles water bottles until I hit something just below Star Hair Clips/Y2K Snap On Hair Barrettes that stopped me up short: a book called Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Martin Laird, who was (and apparently still is) on the faculty at Villanova when Mike was in his graduate program there. And below that? The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Family Happiness and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy. The Sources of Christian Ethics. And quite a few more titles in the characteristic theology and Russian literature veins...until I hit the very first thing that had been added to this wishlist, in June 2017. A burr grinder. That made me smile. Mike was on a perpetual mission to perfect his morning coffee. 

The Laird book, the last thing Mike put on his wishlist, was added on February 8th, 2018. One month and four days before he died, just as the cancer was beginning to come back after his transplant. Five years and 360 days before today. 

It's that time of year, observed my boyfriend as I cried exhausted tears last week, thinking about my dad in the midst of an AEDP training weekend that, as always, centers attachment in the therapeutic work. My beloved dad who gave me the gift of secure attachment, of feeling safe and loved, and who was taken from us far too soon, leaving me with an enduring envy of everyone I know who has a father that happens to be alive.

He's right. It's that time of year. I'm in the chute. I'm in the chute and I can't get out until March 13th, the day after Mike's deathaversary. It happens every year. I get more brittle, more weepy, a bit more anxious and angry in defensive gestures against the grief the stirs and lurches within. This time six years ago became more traumatic and painful with each passing day, and my body cannot forget. 

I fantasize, as I did this morning on my snowy walk to work (even the brilliant white tree limbs couldn't deter me!), about snapping at someone who complains about child care on snow days, or having to manage things on their own because their partner is away at work, or even (god forgive me, the latest person on the planet) in response to a colleague with a living spouse who arrives late to work just because. I want to say: are YOU a widowed solo parent with three children getting to work everyday, even when it SNOWS? NO?! You're NOT? Okay well just TRY DOING THIS LIFE for a couple of days and THEN talk to me. 

When Mike was sick, and even before then, he confessed to a fantasy: a stranger would walk up to him and hit him in the face. Because then he could hit back! Hard! Justifiably! It would feel amazing to hit someone for a good reason. 

So, Mike, same. It would feel amazing to FREAK OUT on some innocent person who doesn't have to live this reality and stumbles into triggering me. I would love a tiny reason to inappropriately rage.

But it's been six years, you say! That's a long time, right? Will you ever stop talking about your grief? In some ways, yes, it is very long. I'm so far from my identity as Mike's wife. So far that I often feel like a different person, like I can barely recognize the woman I used to be. (That's a grief in and of itself, even though I like the woman I've become).

We're used to it. Sort of. The kids and I are used to this new life we've made together. It's a good one. But then sometimes, like on my walk to work today with my head down against the snowflakes blowing into my eyes, watching my thighs do the work of walking along the slushy sidewalk, already deep into the chute, I think to myself: 

I'm a widow. I'm alone. 

And it feels just as absurd and unfathomable as it did on March 13, 2018. 

How did I get here? How am I alone in making every decision, caring for every sick kid, navigating every day off school and every tearful bedtime? How did this become my life? This is crazy! 

So I'm used to it. And deep down, beneath that, I'm never used to it. 

How old are the cats? asked a beloved friend while we chopped vegetables together, surrounded by our families on Sunday night. 

The cats have been alive as long as Mike has been dead, I said casually. We think they were born two or three weeks after he died; we adopted them when they were so tiny. They're almost six. 

I say these things out loud, to make bridges between my life now and my life then, between my inner life and my outer one. But sometimes it feels like I'm shouting and shaking the shoulders of the people around me. It's real! It happened! It was terrible! 

It's been six years; it's been six seconds. And six seconds is not very long at all.