I went with my friend Stacy to see Nicole Holofcener's last movie, You Hurt My Feelings, when it came out in our local arthouse theatre over the summer. It centers around a couple in their later fifties. They have a young adult son and careers in New York, and their lives are overly settled when the subtle action begins. It was lovely, so funny, nearly painfully relatable (as all her movies seem to be) and I slid through it with the ease of someone on a gentle touring-about sort of ride at Epcot Center. The movie begins and ends with an anniversary date. When the credits rolled, Stacy put her hand on my arm.
I began to sob. The tears came so quickly and suddenly in response to that gentle contact, I was shocked. Where was that from? But also, I couldn't stop crying. So we sat together in the theatre while I cried through all the credits, and after the lights came up, and I eventually realized I was devastated because I would never have an anniversary dinner date like that. I would never build up comfortable habits of white lies with a partner I'd known and loved since we were very young. I would never inhabit a late middle age, comfortable kind of marriage. That was taken away, and I felt kicked in the heart all over again.
Because, I sobbed, even if I'm still with Thomas then, we won't have that kind of relationship! We won't have habits of relating, topics we tacitly avoid, and mannerisms we've established as a unit because we won't have had that long together. Also, we met in our forties and that's just different. Also he lives in Philadelphia and not in my house.
I was really mourning the mediocrities and complacencies that forty years together might have brought me. I will never know. The boring bits. The quotidian things we would talk about and the important things we would avoid. I cried for that.
With dismaying regularity, every 6-8 weeks I have what my family has come to call a Total Meltdown Day. Whenever it happens, I don't recognize it as such and announce that I am getting sick. I feel exhausted, headachey, incapable. Then the kids tell me I'm probably not getting sick, I'm probably just having a Total Meltdown Day. Typically I rest, and by the next day I'm fine. It seems to be a cumulative stress response. I hate it because it gets in the way of everything and it makes me feel vulnerable and limited. I blame what I imagine to be fast-approaching perimenopause.
Okay but really, more than that, I blame the madness of working a demanding full time job and parenting three young people without the partner I had every reason to expect would be here to help with this.
Here's the confession part: sometimes I feel SO mad. And small, and bitter. One never 'gets over' the loss of a partner and co-parent because this shit is never done. They're not there for graduations, performances, games. They're not there for college move in day. And they're not there for the last cross country meet of the season to say dad-type things to our son and cheer him on as he works so hard to come back from a concussion-induced running break. The future comes up to meet me every day, and more often than I like to admit, it can be an occasion to register my aloneness and strain anew.
Because they're also not there for a Wednesday night after work. I don't want to be responsible for every broken dryer door, dog walk, dinner, trip to the orthodontist, mortgage payment, grocery run, ride to a friend's house, or late night clean-out and devilish difficult removal of license plates with rusty pliers in the dark on the street while bass pours from passing car windows (something, truth be told, I normally enjoy) from our ten-year-old minivan in preparation for it's donation to public radio this morning. I was the only one to figure out how to make the ancient screws on the license plate budge and I was the only one to figure out what to do with all the feelings that job elicited as I fished Mike's church name tag, cds with images of pet scans and cds of bands from college, a pink cup with a lid from preschool days from the Sienna's shadowy bowels beneath a street light.
So yes, I really miss and love Mike. But there are a lot of layers to this widowhood thing, and one of them is resentment. To be doing everything alone, without the person I set all this in motion with to even see me, or know I'm doing it all, or say, oh wow, I remember that little plastic cup, it's been here all this time! I observe my peers and friends negotiating with partners about who will make dinner and what it will be, who will pick up which kid, what they'll do this Saturday. I watch one partner taking care of the yard while the other sits and chats with a friend or reads a book or explores a new fucking hobby. (Warned you about the resentment). I watch them ease into life with older kids and the more expansive time it offers, and God help me, I feel sorry for myself. Excluded.
And feeling excluded is the worst! Right? It makes me mad-sad-bad, as we used to say when the kids were little. In those moments I feel acutely the compressed quality of my days, how tired I am, the brute fact that I can only offer 50% of what my children's friends enjoy and have to rely on favors from friends and my mom regularly to make all this hang together. I feel like a twelve year old in braces with the worst, healthiest lunch in the cafeteria, sitting alone and staring longingly at the cool kids with great hair who laugh together and pull Twinkies from their brown bags with ease, not even registering the power and treasures they thoughtlessly enjoy.
Yep, you're right, cleaning out the minivan did a number on me. It sent me straight into mad-sad-bad, into twelve year old excluded angst, which was so powerful that when I woke up this morning it was still there hanging on me, pulling on my shoulders and arms and face, and that darkness kept at it until it ballooned into a Total Meltdown Day. I felt so ill that I left work early and stretched out on the couch next to my dog and ate two bowls full of popcorn and watched tv.
For like half an hour. Then I had to pick up Gabriel to take him to the chiropractor. But damn, it was great.
I don't have a tidy end to this post. I don't have a lesson learned, or a moment to describe during which the mood lifted and gratitude for all the wonderful things in our lives came rushing in. (Though let's be clear: I am very lucky, and we do have a lot to be grateful for, and the meltdown has already passed). Sometimes you just have to experience the pain of things, the darkest, most unpleasant parts, and let them be. All I can do is try to hold the insistent mad-sad-bad with compassion, and let that terribly awkward middle schooler know that yes this situation really sucks. I'm sorry today is so hard.
