dogs help

After dinner the other night, I hit a parenting wall. I can't recreate what exactly happened, but I know we were sitting around the table talking before cleanup had begun, and the conversation turned to more painful subjects. There was anger and accusation and open resentment. I'm pretty sure it got ugly, fast. I stood up at a high tension moment to move a pan into the sink and hide my face from my kids, but they could tell I was about to cry, replete with my own barely contained frustration and anger and coming-up-emptiness. I remember that I felt I had nothing. No idea how to handle this argument. I thought it best to stay silent. 

But they could see that I was crumbling. Frances suddenly pivoted and suggested I take a break and go upstairs, they could finish cleaning up. I looked at her blankly. What?

I decided to accept the role of ineffectual broken-down mother and went to my room, where I found Ramona the dog sprawled luxuriously across a pile of clean laundry on my bed. She lifted her head and looked at me standing in the doorway with her soulful eyes for a long spell, then let her head drop back down heavily, exhausted by the effort of momentarily holding it up. This gesture got me. I knew just how she felt. I crawled across the underwear and socks and t shirts until I lined myself up against her back and slid an arm across her warm ribcage. I cried into the little space between her shoulder blades, which happens to be one of my favorite parts of Mike's body, and that made me cry harder.

My dog rolled on her back to face me, belly mostly up (a favorite position, always hoping for a rub) and put her sinewy bony forepaws around me while I cried and yes, scratched her belly. We stayed like that, entangled, and I let all the thoughts come and go in the safety of her doggie embrace. They need Mike. I can't do this alone. I usually feel like I'm doing an okay job as a parent but what if that is a lie I tell myself, what if I am letting them down? What if they need a stronger leader at the helm? What if I indulge them too much? What if I am the weaker parent, and weaker still without Mike's sensibility and presence to inform me? What if 50% of what they once had is simply not enough? 

My dog was the only being in the world I could have tolerated with me at that moment. The aloneness of widowed parenting in these moments of doubt, of not knowing, of wishing desperately for my partner with whom I once shared the responsibility and path-forward-making, is something that reliably shakes me deeply. There is no one alive on this planet who knows and loves our babies like Mike. Only silent, simple, soulful Ramona could have comforted and held me like that. I'm not sure how I managed before, without her.

Gabriel recently commented during a trip to Market that sometimes I treat them more like a grandparent than a parent, getting them all the empanadas and donuts and chocolate milks they ask for, clearly taking pleasure in the indulgence of it all. Oof. That didn't sound great to my ears. They're soft! I'm soft. I started spoiling all of us after Mike died (Who cares? Papa died was a frequent refrain) and once the pandemic hit I cranked it up a few notches. Who cares, it's a pandemic! This is hard, we deserve chocolate milk. And nice beer, and staying up late, and movies, and a huge bowl of popcorn drenched in butter and salt. 

Griefing, parenting. Maybe I've gotten a little too confident lately. I've been all I got this, occasionally looking back and considering how bonecrushingly hard everything was two years ago, one year ago, and reassuring myself that I somehow survived that pain and am in a new phase of our lives. Whew! Good thing that's over. I'm so normal now! But c'mon, who am I kidding? The holidays are upon us, my bones still ache, and the absurd brute unfathomable fact of the death of someone I love, someone my children love, still makes it hard to breathe. 

I'm still afraid of the questions my children ask that I cannot possibly answer, the sorrow they bear that I cannot relieve. I'm still afraid of the holidays. I'm afraid of sustaining and adapting traditions in a way that will fall short of honoring Mike, a great lover of Christmas and general wholesome festivity. Last year we opted to skip it rather than face the wrongness of Mike's absence around the tree; we had a fabulous time in Jamaica instead. 

I do think I'm ready to be here this year. (Good thing, as we can't escape to the Caribbean anyway). In so many ways we are  in a new phase of our lives. We're finding a way to be a family, to be who we are, to grow and change without registering frequent bouts of panic over the inevitable fact of time carrying us farther away from the family and people we were when Mike was alive. There's just occasional panic these days. But there's no being done with our grief. There's no nestling it into a quiet drawer that we close because everything's okay now. It's never okay. We're finding a way to live in the world with the not-okayness, and love it all anyway, love it even more tenderly and ragingly than we did before. 

Thank goodness for Ramona.