my life is too hard for me today

Here's what I want to do: rant.

Swear and rant. Rant and swear. Fuckety fuck fuck.

I want to tell you about my too-hard day, my too-hard week. I do recognize that people in Florida have lost their homes, that Brett Kavanaugh is now a Supreme Court justice, that there are families in my city that don't have enough to eat tonight. I know. It's just that I'm having a Melania moment. I hear she is the most bullied person in the world. Yes. Exactly. And I, it turns out, am having the hardest week in the world.

It started with my final visit to our house in Annapolis, the last place Mike was well, the last place I lived in which I didn't have to ask friends for help every other day. I was collecting the last pieces of furniture before the settlement next week. I asked three friends to help me on the driving/loading side, and three more friends to help me back in Lancaster on the unloading side. I found a picture of Gabriel, aged three, in his Halloween costume in the garage. I found the hand weights Mike got for his thirteenth birthday. I said goodbye to the house.

It was a challenge to fit everything into our new place, which continues to feature chaotic disaster zones that are beginning to make my skin crawl. If I leave a box full of the contents of Frances's desk when she was nine in the corner of the kitchen, it remains in the corner of the kitchen. If anything, it grows, as other things are gradually placed on top of it because there is nowhere else to put them, things like a basket of scarves, a box of framed pictures, and Mike's old Latin textbooks. Because I am the only person who will ever move them. Because this big pile of bricks filled to capacity with stuff is my responsibility. People occasionally see me and say, congratulations on your new house! And I say ...huh?

And then they cheerily say, so how's the move going? Are you all settled in?

And I say, well ... no. No I'm not. And I want to add that it's unsettling as hell to live in a jumbled museum of our family's history where nothing seems to have a proper place yet, where reminders of the life we used to live are everywhere. No object has become part of the landscape yet, so all of it retains its power to recall past times and places with a vividness that scrapes at my insides. The Freiman Stolzfus print I gave to Mike for Christmas six years ago is resting on my old dresser, propped next to the Fra Angelico Anunciation that I hung opposite Mike's bed in our last house while he was hospitalized at Penn last December for his stem cell transplant. It was part of my Christmas present for him: making our bedroom a more beautiful place in which he might convalesce. I remembered how he loved that image, how we both did, when we visited San Marco in Florence during our extended traveling honeymoon. Two small images lean against a white wall opposite my too-big empty bed, but they stir up many stories: everything from our honeymoon to a Christmas years ago when Mike was healthy and Beatrice was growing inside me to the torment of Mike's near-month in the hospital and all the emergency rides back and forth between Lancaster and Philadelphia to the site of the Anunciation hanging above Mike while he sat in the orange chair and I set up the IV tubing on the floor at his feet every afternoon, leaning my head against his bony knee while I primed the pump.

So this move is just killing me. I am brittle and short-tempered with the kids, who are less independent than usual because they don't know where anything is or how anything works. My patience has bowed and broken under the weight of all these damn boxes. I repeat phrases with increasing irritation and volume to the disoriented children as if they were tourists who didn't speak the language and I a rude native.

The guitar picks are on the blue shelf. The BLUE shelf. They're on the BLUE SHELF. The BLUE SHELF. THE BLUE SHELF NEXT TO THE PIANO.

Finally a bewildered Gabriel will ask, but which blue shelf?

All I can muster is one more useless bellow. THE BLUE SHELF NEXT TO THE PIANO.

I harangue them; they protest. They don't want to do chores; they don't want to practice their instruments; they don't like it when I come home from work; they don't like it when I go to work. They don't like it when I cry. They don't like it when I make whole wheat pasta for dinner, when I ask them to scoop the kitty litter, when I get mad that they still haven't taken the books on the stairs up to their rooms. Beatrice doesn't like it when I have to interrupt bedtime reading in order to help Frances find a new place to plug in the keyboard because the piano tuner hasn't called me back and she needs to practice. Gabriel doesn't like it when I make him come home from his best friends' house, where he'd much rather live, because their parents are nice and fun. They don't like it when I'm texting when they want to talk to me. No one likes it when I ask one kid to stop talking so I can hear what the other one is saying. No one likes it when their homework was left outside in the rain and is all smeary and ruined and all I do is calmly suggest seeking out a hair dryer. When I asked Beatrice if she would please take out napkins and put them on the table before dinner tonight she said no.

Beatrice. Please put them on the table.

And do you know what she said then? My loose-toothed, dirty-footed, book-loving, Abba-singing kindergartener, while rolling her gorgeous blue eyes with adolescent flair?

Oh fine. Fine, Mama.

Sometimes people tell me my kids will look back and admire me for all this. That they will see what we went through and how I took care of their Papa and them and they will really, truly appreciate how hard it was. They'll see how much I loved them and love them still.

But I don't know. I fear I am not being the mama they need right now; why would they look back with admiration? I fear they will resent me. Stay mad. Because what if I stay sad? Having a dead Papa and a sad Mama is no good way to live, especially when you're a kid.

I'm sad and I'm stretched thin. I go to work and wash the dishes and feed the cats and arrange transportation to lessons and look for all the paid house-related receipts to scan and send to my realtor in advance of the closing next week and pay the bills and wash Beatrice's hair and lock the doors at night. It's so fucking hard.

I can't be all the things they want. I don't even know if I can be all the things they need. I wish Mike were here.