my brilliant friends

This slippery season started late this summer, when I read Dave Eggers' latest novel, Contrapposto. It's the tender story of an unlikely artist's life. As you move from childhood through the years with him, his identity as an artist and one friendship in particular anchor and shape the person he becomes. 

The novel's epigraph is from Georgia O'Keefe: to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

The ending is beautiful, but I really started crying after I read the acknowledgments. I can't quote it exactly here, because I loaned the book to Beatrice and it's deep in her messy room somewhere. But he lovingly thanks the friends he has had for decades. 

Decades! Really? But Mr. Eggers, you and I are roughly the same age! Then I realized I too have had friends for decades. We're kind of old now. 

To have a friend takes time. Maybe it's not just that you can't become friends overnight. Maybe to have a friend takes months, years, decades - at least to know the full, vast treasure of friendship.

Since reading the novel, in the weeks leading up to Gabriel's college drop off, a lot happened on the friends-for-decades front. I ran into a friend from high school whom I rarely see at the grocery store. I was waiting in line, and felt a gentle hand on my back. I started. Who touches me with that kind of tenderness out here in the world?

Someone I knew when I was fourteen years old! I thought that was you, he said, smiling. How are you?

Nothing really seemed to matter beyond the fact that we knew each other as children and wished the best for one another. No weird comparisons, judgement, social debts to pay. Just - it sure is nice to see you.

I reconnected with a friend I first met at camp this summer, and met his darling new baby. Being together, a similar emotional softness and simplicity permeated the space around us: it's you! You are here, you're good, I love you. It happened again, over an email exchange in August, with another friend from college whom I haven't seen in many years. It's you! I love you! All the rough edges and doubts of being young have fallen away. What a deep down joy.

When I took Gabriel to school, I was saying goodbye to him, and to this chapter of our family life. And I was taking him to college without his papa, who would have been tickled and stirred down to his toes to drop his boy off at Swarthmore College. Sitting alone amongst all the other parents in the amphitheater, the acute wrongness of his absence hurt. But there's more! I seemed to also be awash in memories from my own first semester on that campus. Before Mike. The past kept tugging on my sleeves. 

I was seventeen. I met my best friend. I met my boyfriend. I struggled to pass bio and adored my religion and literature class. I started running and returned to dance. I ate purple blueberry bagels and lucky charms cereal out of clear plastic dining hall cups. I felt weird, alienated, deeply uncool, lacking in sophistication, inspired, excited, independent. My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer that November and I fell into a confusing darkness, never sure where I should be. Neither home nor school was right; my heart was in tatters. 

At drop off, Gabriel met another boy whose mother was in my class. After a few moments, we remembered each other with big smiles on our faces - as we were that first semester. Another friend with whom I am rarely in touch texted to tell me about discovering someone else from our class has a daughter at Swarthmore. 

The first memory that came up of that particular parent? Mike and I began our love affair when he was visiting campus during my senior year. We had been spending time together, tentatively, unsure what was happening, and walked in the Crum woods before my afternoon class and his train back to New York. We ended our walk at a stone wall where we lingered, and kissed. I said goodbye, my heart doing it's thing, about to beat right out of my chest, and ran into a classroom that was slowly filling up with familiar faces. I stood in the middle of the room, unsure what I could possibly do with myself in that moment. 

I just kissed Mike Brogan!! I breathlessly announced to any who would hear.

My eyes rested on this man who is now a fellow middle aged parent of a member of the class of 2030. He smiled back. Okay, he said. 

That was it. I sat down in a desk. But I remember. 

Tomorrow night I'm signed up to take a 'lifelong learning' class over zoom with the same professor, now retired, who taught that class. I've never done anything like it before, but it was an opportunity to reread some of my favorite novels with an amazing teacher; that compelled me to sign up earlier this summer. 

But what was I thinking? More of this time-tangle?! My body can barely contain all the times and places layered throughout my muscles, organs, and bones that light up at the slightest provocation. The girl I was, unformed, passionate, afraid, lovestruck. She visits often these days, and I am full of compassion for her and her extraordinary friends. Precious then, even moreso now. 

It's so hard and marvelous to be young; it's so hard and marvelous to have children who grow up beautifully, and remind you. 

And yet, to have our wise and hilarious friends with us in it all is an immeasurable comfort!

forest walk

I just talked to Gabriel for the first time since dropping him off at college on Tuesday. What had orientation been like?

Well, he said, in the first couple of days he tried to keep it all trees, no forest. 

He was referencing a conversation we had shortly before we said goodbye, sitting on a shady bench outside the dining commons. It was all so strange: to not go home together after our nice day at Swarthmore College, to have a slew of small talky conversations with strangers, some of whom may prove to be lifelong friends, to be bright and cheerful while teetering on the edge of an irrevocable change. To participate in icebreakers! Given the glorious sylvan setting, the tree-forest thing came readily. Maybe just stick to the trees. One thing at a time. Maybe, for now, don't dwell too much on the forest. 

So that's what he'd done. Lots of new people, new places, activities, a trip to Target, class registration. Aspen, birch, oak, oak, oak.

That's why I'd waited. I knew he had to be there all the way at first, and not feel the tug of home. But by yesterday afternoon I could barely stand it, and decided that it was okay to consider my own needs too so asked if we could talk. Sure, he responded. 

There have been a lot of trees in my life over the past four days. Today, for example, I walked to barre class, stopped for produce at the market, regretted the cantalope the entire walk home, made chocolate chip pancakes for me and Beatrice, facetimed Frances for assistance in procuring all the forgotten items she wanted me to mail to her at school, picked up my mom's dog and brought him here for the weekend while she is away, packed up and addressed a box of Frances items and a smaller one of Gabriel items, waited in a long line at the post office balancing said items and hoping the postal worker would look down at my packages and say "Gee, Princeton and Swarthmore! Are these addressed to your brilliant kids? You must be such a great mom - " (she did not), drove to the mall to return my old laptop to the Apple store, drove to Whole Foods to return Beatrice's too-small Adidas, drove downtown to pick up Beatrice and Willy at the new Nori Taco place, brought them home, pet the dogs, and sat down to write. 

Gabriel called while I was at the mall. I found a beige plastic couch outside a quiet department store. My entire nervous system reset.

After I'd heard all about everything, I told him I wasn't worried about him. He's got this. And I wasn't worried about Swarthmore. It's terrific! I just needed to hear his voice, all the same. 

Is it because I miss him? I mean sure, I do. But by now I'm used to him splitting for long stretches, and often in places where he isn't easy to reach. He's been at camp in the summers, spent a month in the wilds of Wyoming, hiked the Appalachian Trail, and backpacked in Oregon for two weeks earlier this month. But those were all adventures. This is the next chapter of his life.

When you love someone it is trees and forest. You have no choice. The forest is breathing, alive, everywhere. It holds a thousand histories. The story of my own beginnings at Swarthmore, of formative memories all over campus, sweeping romantic love and deep friendship, of the family I made with Mike, of Gabriel's surprisingly quick and peaceful birth, his sweet contemplative nature that shone so bright even as a baby alongside his love of motion and stories and music. Of everything we've been through over the past eighteen years. So much. Of long conversations and silliness and Gabriel making me laugh so hard I cry or pee or both. 

Every time the sunlight moves the temperature shift tells my body this will never be the same. 

And so I find I am in a forest of grief. The trees are all pretty nice. I love trees! But an insistent heavy part of me wants to stop all this busy back to school tree work and curl up in the dark coolness of the forest floor instead, where I will let the ragged weight of my grief anchor me in stillness among the moss and beetles and leaf litter. Just for awhile. 

Even the most ideal, happy change can really knock a person off her feet. 

laugh it off

And what did your father do then? 

My dad, embodying a very serious analyst character, would look at me over the tops of his glasses, head positioned at a thoughtful tilt.

Go on. Say more, Meagan. 

That was how he dealt with questionable parenting moments, microconflicts between us: imagining how I would describe them to my therapist decades hence. He played both parts, with gusto. 

Well, Dr. So and So, he meant well, but he was always tossing the cats off the counters when he got mad.

And ... how did this cat-tossing make you ... feel?

The dialogue always made me laugh, even when I was seven years old and not really clear on why the exchange was funny. I hadn't yet encountered Freud cartoons in the New Yorker or watched the Sopranos. But as with so much of my father's humor I went along for the ride. It was thrilling to be in on adult jokes, indecipherable ones included. 

The therapist routine wasn't just funny; it was an elegant emotional pivot that communicated: I recognize I did something that upset you. I'll be self-deprecating and reassuringly in charge of the narrative all at once. Let's acknowledge it without getting too mired in it. Let's have a laugh!

My dad is surely to blame when it comes to my predilection for silly voices and accents. And my tendency to use humor in tense moments. I just love a big cathartic laugh.

Once on the walk to school when Beatrice was in second grade, I tried to make her laugh a little too soon after talking about some hard feelings. She did laugh, then paused abruptly on the sidewalk and looked back at me with anger in her eyes. 

You always do this! You make me laugh when I'm upset! Mama, you really invalidate my feelings when you do that. 

Whoops.

As one of my clients said after I was interrupted in our session yesterday by my kids, whom I'd left unable to make it to band camp by accidentally taking the car key to my office, Wait - Meagan - are you a bad mother?

Sometimes!

Anyway, I've passed on the goofball humor coping strategy to them too. Gabriel is now eighteen years old, back from the Appalachian Trail, and confronting all the complications of adult life. He has to let the doctor know they're allowed to talk to me so I can help him upload health forms. He has to register to vote, and with the selective service system. And he has to give his new college permission to let me have access to his student account so that I can upload the documents financial aid wants from me and ensure the bill is paid correctly while he's at work.

Right now I can't see the status of your bill; only you can see that.

Gabriel, sweaty and tired after a day of mulching, stood over my little work station at the dining room table, looking a bit lost. My financial aid notes covered a section of the Sunday paper next to my laptop.

So... you just need to log in, then make me an authorized payer...

In an instant Gabriel's beleaguered mind returned to his body. He knew just how to handle this situation - a new schtick!

Um...hello, Swarthmore College? Do you know Mama? Just talk to Mama! 

Still in character: Mama is...Mama. You know Mama. She's Mama! 

We both laughed so hard. When you are 18, a part of you is four years old, and a part of you is 30. You are independent and responsible and ready for anything. You are so capable! But also, you are wanting Mama to just take care of it. 

Little G keeps coming back. This morning, when I offered to put a book on hold from the library for him, he responded with a vacant smile and lispy voice, a hapless child looking up at the librarian. Mama has a library card! Do you know Mama? She gets books for me!

Gabriel and I have a long history of this. We play our cats as 1930s mobsters (how we cope with the dark suspicion that we are neglectful pet owners - imagining asthmatic Lulu as Lu Capone). We pretend to be Winston Churchill-adjacent clueless arrogant colonists (how we cope with the moral discomfort of our privilege - what what!). We are affectless Russian dissidents straight from the gulag (a check on complaining about minor discomforts). 

Sometimes we voice insects, just for fun. Gabriel and Beatrice still reference my old man caterpillar voice, a character I invented many years ago while watching a slow caterpillar face off with a bunch of energetic ants.

So of course we're managing the strangeness of this transition summer with absurdist humor. 

When I was expecting a second child, I thought: this will be a breeze! I know how to get a baby to take a nap and a bottle, no problem. But then the second child arrived and he was a completely different person with completely different needs. One has to learn how to do things all over again.  

Going off to college? Same delusion. I did this with Frances (yep, it was brutal). I even did a trial run and said goodbye to Gabriel at the AT trailhead. He was on the trail for roughly a semester. So this is no big deal, right? I'm practiced! 

But I am beginning to realize it doesn't matter. You can't prepare for these massive upheavals in life. (You can pretend to all you want). They happen. That is all. 

I will not be able to laugh all the way to move in day. I know. I still carry the memory of my dad's grief when he and my mom dropped me off at Swarthmore over thirty years ago, so palpable in the way he fussed over setting up my desktop computer and stereo, and the uncharacteristic quiet leading up to our goodbye in a strange parking lot. His sorrow. It crushed me. 

Gabriel and I will do this our way. I'm gonna try not to do any damage with my sadness. (And how else did your mother burden you with her overpowering emotions, Gabriel?) But I know he already feels it. You can't get around it, not even with the finest hijinks and hilarity. Mama is Mama. Gabriel is Gabriel. My dear boy is growing up.  

best day of the year

Tomorrow my dead husband would be 51 years old, and my alive boyfriend will be 51 years old. 

Isn't that super weird?

It'll be my fifth attempt to celebrate their birthdays on the same day, and I'm not sure repetition has made me any better at it. On the first May 23rd, I drove to Thomas' place in Philly for lunch, handed him a gift, and burst into tears.

I learned that they were born on the very same day on our first date. Also gleaned from that conversation: like Mike, Thomas grew up in a Catholic family and has three sisters. I asked for a tour of his (visible) tattoos that night, so didn't learn until later about Jacques Derrida's face inked on Thomas' shoulder. Mike went to grad school in part to learn about him from a particular scholar, and once, in the pre-GPS era, wound up chauffeuring Derrida to dinner during a conference; thank goodness Jacques was unaware that Mike possessed the worst sense of direction on the planet. Despite this they somehow arrived on time, without incident.

This strange cosmic alignment feels like God taking me firmly by the shoulders and saying: you can't have a second love in your life without confronting the fact that you do because you lost your first to tragic illness and death, because of the person you became in the aftermath, because many realities live inside you. It is all deeply, intimately connected; don't try and pretend it isn't!

Once, lying in bed in the harrowing days after his stem cell transplant, Mike and I were talking about what would happen after he died. I didn't want to be having that conversation. I remember looking away at the blue walls, the embroidered bedspread, anywhere but his face. He said something about how I'd probably have another husband someday. 

But I don't want another husband, I said, suddenly turning to him. I have a husband! 

Yes, he replied. But after I die, we won't be married anymore. Until we are parted by death. That's what we said to each other. 

That was more than I could take in at the time. What could he possibly mean? Of course we would still be married after he died. 

But he was right. I am a widow and we aren't married anymore. And the idea of marrying again? Now I kinda like the idea. I even like that I like it. On May 23rd God shines a light on the fact that the me who once curled over in pain at the very idea of having a different husband, and the me who smiles thinking about how on my wedding day my girls could style me however they'd like for once live in the same body. 

The desperately besotted twenty year old, the young mother reading aloud contentedly to her children, the purist, the perfectionist, the philosopher's wife who too often swallowed her anger, the caregiver, the advocate, the cook, the yogi, the sounding board, the woman uncertain if she would ever find her own professional footing, the tentative writer, the woman who was too quick to turn away from her own heart to accommodate the needs of others. Mike knew all those parts of me well. 

He didn't live to know the other parts that have grown stronger in his absence, and how the aforementioned parts have morphed and stretched, as our marvelous children grow older and I become more closely acquainted with my own heart. My confidence and skillfulness as a therapist, widowhood-anchored strength, growing comfort with my own imperfections, intentional efforts to release the preoccupation with being good. Now I can be boundaried, pissed, absurd, disagreeable. Not often. But it's possible. I treasure that possibility! I can be a protagonist who lets herself want things, all kinds of things, including a middle-aged, serious, playful, inconveniently long-distance love with a man born on May 23rd.

Mike always said it was the best day of the year. 

Thomas is evidence supporting that claim. How wonderful that he was born and lived a whole life whose paths curved closely to - but never touched - my own, until our respective contained multitudes collided at the moment they did. And that he generously and patiently makes space for my mixed up, grief-tinted May 23rd feelings - and on his birthday no less! 

I can't wait to see him tomorrow.