But sometimes in the morning I sit before all those pictures with my coffee, while everyone in my family is talking to/at me at once, and I feel so lonely. The pictures are of beautiful people in beautiful places; of children and families doing things like hiking or swimming, generally exuding health and happiness and taking those things for granted - because they should. Why shouldn't they? But oh, those photographs are from a place I haven't been in a long time.
It's the way I feel at a party. Like a mother returning to a job, having spent the last year consumed by the work of caring for a baby day and night, uncertain as to whether she knows how to make conversation with adults any longer or possesses whatever skills she once utilized in the workplace. Like an immigrant trying to operate in a new culture, looking for a way into a foreign social flow, feeling disorientation at the periphery all the time.
I've left Mike sick at home multiple times over the past few days to strike out with the kids to holiday events, held in homes filled with a delightful mix of old friends and people I haven't yet met, tables strewn with gorgeous food, everyone looking downright excellent in their new Christmas finery, spaces filled with the good cheer of the season.
And I walk in, and I feel like an alien.
I love a party. But now I can't remember what I'm supposed to say. The gears are stuck. I'm afraid of crying when someone inevitably asks me something innocent and light. Like how are you. I cringe when I am introduced to someone new, a poor unsuspecting soul holding a drink and standing ten inches away from my face, listening with polite inquisitive eyes while I fumble (still, so many months later, still I fumble) around for a low-impact, non-burdensome way to explain that the reason we are living in Lancaster is that my husband has cancer. And we couldn't stay in our house in Annapolis. And we really, really needed a lot of help, and this is where we found it.
Now tell me about you.
I cringe for my awkwardness, for the other person who has to figure out how to respond to this sad tale, for the friends standing a few feet away who know it all too well and have to hear it again. I feel tedious. I am the person you might want to avoid while partaking in holiday good times because I am, no doubt about it, a serious downer.
When I walk into a room filled with normal healthy people doing normal healthy people type things, and my heart is already disquieted without my beloved, I simply don't know what to do with myself. Traveling from our home sick planet to an oblivious healthy planet, where people talk about books and movies and the news and work and kids? The culture shock hits pretty hard. Every time, I try to harden up inside (to avoid aforementioned crying) but then eventually I talk to someone who I love and loves me too and end up crying anyway. I'm like one of the beeswax candles the kids made just before Christmas: a little lumpy, seemingly solid, but when the heat from a pair of caring eyes gets within a few feet of me I begin to melt, dripping tears rather than wax.
Friends, don't worry. I don't cry all the time. It's just this whole party season thing has really thrown me off my game. That, and almost six months of a bullshit cancer treatment nightmare. I told Mike about how I felt so awful and outsider-y at today's social event and he said, that's how I feel at every meal. Excluded from the world of enjoying food.
What a long, beastly road.
Thank you for walking it with me.
1 comment:
Brave young woman. My daughter. I understand and both wish I didn't and that you never had to know this loneliness. And, yes, the holidays make it all that much more real. And, yes, this feeling will have an end to it. But you've all been melted a little by the fire - changed, morphed into deeper souls. I love you.
Post a Comment