gratitude

Everything is exactly the way it should be, he said.

It really is, this particular friend continued, smiling earnestly, looking for eyes to meet and drill home his point. This day is so beautiful. No one is sick. We're all here together. We should appreciate perfect times like this.

I looked down. I felt my throat close up. Everything is not exactly the way it should be, though who could reasonably object to his gratitude? It was Sunday and I was about to practice yoga beneath a stand of river birches on a golden May morning, gathered with a group who are warm and welcoming and well-established in their friendships and with whom I sometimes, depending on my mood, understand myself to be a charity case, a strange interloper with bad skin and ready tears in their healthy-happy-beautiful midst. 

We were in a shady corner of a tree nursery that belongs to one of the families in this group. Children of varied ages were milling around, putting together plates of bagels and lox at a table set up nearby. I prayed Beatrice would find a way in socially with the other kids and allow me this interlude, and she did. We unrolled our mats in the grass. A tiny speaker filled the air with languid reggae. The sunlight moved back and forth across my face, quiet in warrior 2, as the breeze gently ruffled the leaves of the birches. The roots beneath my mat pushed against my forehead as I rolled it back and forth in child's pose. Flies buzzed contentedly and settled on my ankles in downward dog; I blew them away and saw the blue sky overhead. We rested in savasana in the warm prickly grass. Yoga is a safe place for me; wherever I am, whomever I'm with, those movements bring the comfort of home.

But there's that time before and after the practice. Through it all those tears sat in my throat. Everything isn't the way it should be. Not for me. It truly was a glorious morning, but the greener the season, the deeper the gray.

Beatrice ran over during yoga, carrying her flip flops which were splattered in salsa because her brother is sloppy with tortilla chips. What to do? I directed her and returned to a twist. In lizard pose I looked up to see Gabriel running past, absorbed in a game, looking impossibly tall and old, his long hair flopping rhythmically with his footsteps. Like a teenager. How Mike would love to see them in their long summer bodies. They were doing just fine, despite my worries that they'd feel uncomfortable in a new place. Until of course Gabriel started feeling awfully itchy (walking through poison ivy will do that) and desperate to go home and Beatrice was starving because she refused to eat anything and they both reminded me that they always hate farms. Oh. Right. Later that afternoon we visited with a dear friend on his way to New York, and that evening had dinner with my mom in her garden. It was good. But the tears were stuck.

On Monday it was Memorial Day. After breakfast, on a whim, while Gabriel and Frances slept, Beatrice and I made a terrarium using the glass bottle I found to house a birthday terrarium for Mike years ago; in this one she selected a tiny fawn to nestle in the moss. Later I walked Beatrice to her piano lesson. Her kind teacher asked me if this was a hard day, full of memories of fun family traditions with Mike. Maybe she picked up on my heaviness. No, I said, no. No fun memories of pools and barbeques. It's fine.

But those tears eagerly crept upwards as I said it's fine. I had to wait for them to slide back down to their crying waiting room just behind my clavicle and pick their knitting back up before I could safely speak again.  

We walked to the market. Beatrice took her scooter and Frances met us for chocolate chip cookies outside. I lugged milk and yogurt and eggs home. I mowed the lawn. I pulled the heavy plastic drape off the grill that came with our house and that I have never once used and tried to turn it on while Beatrice and Gabriel watched, bemused. No go. So much for my hazy plan to make pizzas outside. Our neighbor, a rather fit lawyer, came outside and began energetically scraping and cleaning off his grill eight feet to my right. I tried a few different things while attempting to exude dignified capable parenting (rather than pathetic-weepy-widow-who-cannot-handle-a-manly-gas-grill vibes) but alas, I couldn't get our grill to wake up after its long sleep. 

My mood was plummeting. There is nothing comparable to the pure bereavement I feel when trying and failing to tackle typical dad chores in public. Mowing the lawn, dragging out the trash, using (or failing to use) a fucking grill. 

Then, just to rub it all in, Beatrice leaned over and brightly asked if we could take out her new hand-me-down bike and have our first bike-riding lesson at the park. I sat back on my heels in the bright sun and squinted at the grill instructions printed on the inside of the base and felt the sweat adhering the backs of my legs together. Um...Beatrice...did you happen to notice I'm not your papa? And did you forget that he's the one who does that kind of thing? And that I will just get testy and irritable and you'll lose your patience and probably start crying and the bike will topple over and you'll scrape your ankle and there will be no band aids and strangers will watch us and judge and the whole thing will suck so bad? 

But I didn't say that. Instead I said: great idea!

We abandoned the grill and pulled out the bike. I couldn't make the front tire move. I mustered my most superhero-like reserves of strength and fussed with the problem until I fixed it. But that didn't really help my mood. I didn't care that counter to all reasonable expectations I had single-handedly fixed a Mike problem because I don't want to fix Mike problems. I want him to fix them. I don't want to be a brittle single mother limping along through fun Memorial Day weekend activties.  

(Mike always said he hated fun. And he did! But he was a good teacher and patiently guided the kids through many firsts; he would have enjoyed teaching Beatrice to ride a bike.)

We went to the park. It wasn't as disastrous as I feared, and when she'd had enough I coasted down the grassy hill on her tiny bike to the playground where Beatrice proudly showed me how well she can do the monkey bars (a new skill) and we spent some time swinging and I couldn't get over how damn resilient she is. And cute. Frances had put make up on her earlier and she was so tickled that she had on eye shadow at the park. Scandalous! Like, anyone might see! And they'll think, oh my goodness, does her mother let her wear make up and she's only six? (Trying to capture her musical kindergarten cadence here).

We came home. Everyone was a bit limp with the humidity and draggy feeling of the late afternoon. I vacuumed. I put in a load of laundry. I began making dinner and everyone started asking me for things at once: could I open this water bottle, did I see the journal brought home from school yet, could I make a snack before dinner, could I watch this trick. Suddenly, the terribleness of it all hit me then with such force - as grief does, it will knock the wind out of you - that I couldn't beat it back a moment longer. I bent over the cutting board and cried. 

Why are you crying Mama? said Bea. Because Papa died?

Yes. It's okay. But I need five minutes.

The girls were in the kitchen. Gabriel and a friend were playing upstairs. I didn't know where to be alone so I went where all mothers who can't hold it together for another single minute go: the bathroom. I slid the door shut and sat on the cold tiled floor and leaned against it and sobbed. Moments like these illustrate the aptness of the expression wracked by grief. It hurts. When I get that overwhelmed I talk to my husband. 

I can't do it, Mike. I can't. I can't do this anymore. I know I'm really strong and blah blah blah but actually it turns out I'm not and I can't and please come back. 

It's so lonely, being a widowed parent. It's damn lonely, and wrapped in the black paper of that particular day's nadir I felt incapable. Terrible at this solo mothering gig. Fucking up left and right. Mike, Mike, I can't do this. Please help. 

Beatrice kept calling for me while this was going on so I went back to the kitchen. Frances walked to me and held out her arms for a hug.  I kept on crying, hard. Who are these children of mine, who readily volunteer to help me carry the sorrow and loneliness, who can tolerate and even accept a mother who cries? 

They are Mike's children! How many times have I said that I don't know what I would do if it weren't for my kids? It never really occured to me in all the times I have asked Mike for help since he died, that alive or dead he has always been a very real and very big part of the three people closest to me. They have his emotional wisdom. They have his humor. I love them so much.

After the Big Cry with the girls the heaviness lifted. The tears had finally been dislodged. I finished making dinner. We sat down and had an absurd, hilarious conversation about all the types of men I am not allowed to date (racists, magicians, and hair gel enthusiasts give up hope now) - if I should ever feel ready to date, that is. We cleaned up. We went outside and I put the bricks some of the the kids had painted while the adults practiced yoga on Sunday into our garden path while Beatrice and Gabriel fought each other in a crazy game with pvc pipes and paint stirrers that they had fashioned into disturbingly realistic weapons resembling bayonets and a basketball. There was a lot of screaming and laughing. I deadheaded the asters and told them to stop pointing their pipes at each others' faces. The light was fading. I could hear neighborhood kids in the alley on their bikes. 

Beatrice will join them someday. When I felt so gloomy and overcome by sadness, I was trapped by a sense of my own futility, trying to operate like a normal person in the thicket of my own grief. I can't do this. And it is true that I can't do this like I once did. Yet puttering in the garden dusk I realized that in fact I had accomplished about a hundred things on Monday, some of them while crying (which need not detract from the accomplishment). They were small things, mundane things, but meaningful things; the kind that make a house a home, and a collection of people - imperfect, lovable, muddling-along people - a family. 

lost worlds

In this, the first spring in our new home, we have planted a small garden. There are peas climbing with wild determination up purple yarn that I slid through the metal loops anchored to the wall of the garage and staked to the ground with takeout chopsticks. There are lettuces that we have harvested for two whole salads thus far. There is a tidy strawberry patch featuring six demure white flowers waiting to magically transform into six tiny strawberries that a squirrel will eat before we find them.

And all around our little rectangle of baby foods at the back of the yard is a beauty that shifts every day, an established flower garden that the previous owners tended for years before we arrived. Before Mike got sick exactly four years ago, before Beatrice was born two years before that, they were planting iris bulbs and allium and tulips and clematis. They were babying the lilac tree and building a fish pond. They didn't know that we were coming - they didn't know that our path of illness, uncertainty, and loss would one day lead us to their idyllic backyard. And yet, even so, their work is a gift to me every morning when I wake up and check to see what is blooming today.

Who would love this? Mike would love this. He was a passionate gardener. The two homes we owned together had very little going on in the way of landscaping when we arrived and he created beautiful spaces from scratch.  He loved the idea of being a steward of the land - whether it be a postage stamp front yard in the city or a sprawling yard in the suburbs - he wanted to nurture native plants, foods, flowers, and tender trees that would live on and beautify our neighborhoods long after we had left them.

So I am happy for the established flower garden, and happy for the chance to plant something new, because it is a tether to Mike and our old life. He was the real gardener - the soul gardener. We just do our best.

Last weekend we went to Annapolis. Our dear friend was delivering the commencement address at St. John's graduation and I wanted to see it. I realized enough time had passed that I wouldn't know any of the graduating seniors - nor would Mike - and this was both relieving and devastating. None of them would run up to me with concern and sadness in their eyes. I could be anonymous. But then again, how could I possibly be anonymous? How could life in this community go on so seemlessly without Mr. Brogan?

It was the first visit that was not occasioned by a traumatic purpose: no moving out of the old house, no post-death business to attend. We stayed with Katie and Chester and had Taco Saturday the night we arrived, as we had together at least two hundred times before Mike got sick. I drove past Frances's old school, visited old friends, parked behind Danielle's minivan in her driveway and walked right into the kitchen as I once did every day to pick up baby Beatrice after work. My minivan sensed that I was a bit wrecked by all this and nosed itself in all the right directions without my having to remember where to go. All I had to do was sit in the driver's seat and rest my hands on the steering wheel; it took care of the rest.

It poured all weekend. Graduation was thus held indoors and I sat up front and watched all the faculty process in, many of whom I had not seen since Mike's diagnosis. I'm not sure they all recognized me with my now-big kids and without my husband at my side. The past president walked up to me afterwards to congratulate me on my performance, thinking I was an actress he had seen in a play recently.

But Robert's speech was perfect. I don't think I'm exagerrating. It was perfect. It captured what is so special - so idealistic and beautiful and never-cynical - about the experience of learning and growing at St. John's, and reminded me of why we had to move to Annapolis so Mike could be a part of that. It was worth the sacrifices we made. Mike was a really good tutor. I cried on and off throughout Robert's speech in recognition of that: this is what he had, this is what he lost when his illness took him away from work, this is the place that - whether or not everyone there knows it - is dimmer, less complete, without him.

Yesterday I read some of the Homemade Time posts from 2011. Just ended up there, moving through that year in our lives story by story, feeling sadder and sadder. Who was that woman? I can barely remember what it felt like to be her. I was yearning for more all the time then: more beauty, more truth, more community, more connection, more love. I had enough energy to take care of two little ones all day and then have plenty left over to imagine everything I would like to give them, to debate things like school and church with Mike, to think about craft projects and cooking challenges for the next day, to wonder about my place in the world. I spent so much time with Frances and Gabriel. We made so many things. We read so many books! Candy was for special occasions; videos were rarely and judiciously permitted; everyone was in bed by 7:30.

I know it wasn't perfect. But it was an ambitiously quiet, creative, bookish life.

Can you blame me for comparing their experience to Beatrice's? If you asked her, she'd probably tell you her favorite tv show was The Office. She begs for ice cream nightly. She mimics the adolescents around her with impressive accuracy. We read before bed, but that's about it, and she was up until ten last night, hollering every few minutes at me that she was scared and absolutely could not fall asleep. I just hollered back, because I was feeling sick and too exhausted to employ the every-five-minute bravery marble behavioral technique I've been using for the past two nights: I know you are, and I know you can do it!

Where are her tender, quiet hours spent arranging bits of yarn and cardboard? Who will she be, with no Papa stretched out on the couch reading King Lear and Aristotle and The Brothers Karamazov, modeling the joys of a contemplative life as he did for her brother and sister? I would get so annoyed at him, oblivious to the encircling chaos while I tried to make dinner. The only sound that got his attention was a grammatical error: he'd abruptly lift his head, look towards its source, and with his characteristic, infuriating authority say, "fewer, not less" before returning to his book.

What I now realize is that I cannot make dinner - and mow the lawn and pay the bills and bring them to the dentist and help them with their homework - and model the joys of silent, focused reading. I can't do it all. I have no one to show them the treasures of quiet, focus, contemplation, comfort and stillness in being at home. I have no one with whom to show them the challenges and joys of marriage, of partnership, of balance. It's just me, and I am one-half of what they used to have. The loss to who they were, are, and will be is staggering.

I worry they have been stiffed in a way that I cannot possibly make up for. I have none of that excess of energy and ambition that I once gave them, and Mike, and our little community. Nowadays it seems I use everything I've got getting us through the day as best I can.

I know our family is in a different developmental moment than we once were. A lot happened during the crisis-laden cancer years. My big kids are now independent, identified with friends and interests, heading off to an activity most nights of the week. Our dinners are quick and simple so they won't be late to soccer. And Beatrice, as the youngest, would be getting dragged around with them whether or not Mike was alive.

But. But Mike isn't reading on the couch. Or tending the garden. Or taking them to the lab or a concert at St. John's on the weekend. If he hadn't been taken from us, I might not be as thoughtful about creating a home and supporting our kids as I once was, but I think the person I am now would be more continuous with the person I was then. My body and heart and soul would be more spacious. The relentlessness of grief, the responsibility of being the lone parent, and the task of making us into a new kind of family shrinks that space. There's less room for yearning. There's less for setting boundaries in order to make a nurturing space apart from the noise and violence of consumer culture for my children to find peace within. I simpy don't have it in me to create the family space I once held with Mike.

I can't be a father and a mother. I can't be Mike and me. Hell, these days I can barely be me. Without him, I have to do so much more, and I fear, as a result, be so much less.

While there are plenty of things I wish Mike were here now to do for this family, more than any of it, I wish he were here to be. I wish my kids could have the gift of growing up in the presence of his unique and precious being.  Can you blame me for worrying I will fail them?

the fair and the show

Every May there is a fair down the street at Buchanan Park, and every year that we've been here since we arrived in the wake of Mike's diagnosis I have taken the kids on Wednesday night, the first night, when good vibes abound and the whole neighborhood hits the cotton candy and the scrambler and walks home with little flashing goldfish who may live one night or a thousand in clear plastic containers. One year Mike was well enough to come along and squeezed into a couple of kiddie rides with Bea. This year, I got home from work just as Gabriel was returning home from his guitar lesson. He wolfed down a snack and ran out the door to meet his friends. Frances was at a school event and made it there much later. I picked up Beatrice from ballet at six, brought her home to change, and then walked down towards the lights and music.

Recently Beatrice asked me, have you noticed how I'm afraid of everything lately? Did you notice that I always have to call for you and ask you where you are when we're at home, even if I know you just went into the bathroom? Yes, I have noticed that, I said. I think it's why I can't fall asleep at night, she added. I'm too scared.

She clings and pulls on my arm when we go places with so much ferocity that it hurts. She digs her nails into my hands. I've taken to walking next to her with my arms resting on my head so she can't yank. At the fair it was no different. She wanted to go on the ferris wheel like we did last year, and as the line inched us towards the the benches that slowly descended, swinging gently, she clung harder and harder. When we got on, she squeezed my hands and immediately begged me to take her off. At the top she screamed to be let off. I convinced her to stay and give it a try; she managed to stop screaming, but it wasn't easy.

I had bought her a wristband so she could ride as many rides as she wanted. We walked all around the fair, stopping to say hi to friends, taking in everything, deciding what would be fun to try. I would spot Gabriel sprinting by with his friends every now and then. The more we looked around, the more tightly Bea clung. She pulled me in this direction and that; she rejected every suggestion with increasing anxiety. I was getting so irritated. I had to continually pull my arm away from her. Come on. This is fun. This is the fair! So many of our friends are here, enjoying themselves! We can too.

But she couldn't. Nothing was right. Everything was scary. I tried to get her to try the teacups with her brother, who I had somehow pinned down for the moment.

No no no. Only you.

But I'll throw up if I ride the tea cups, I explained. Gabriel won't.

But I only want you.

I felt exasperated. I stood in the middle of the fair and looked at Bea with her missing teeth, her dirty feet in plastic flip flops, her big pleading eyes, and some stubborn angry part of myself abruptly gave way. I asked her what snack we should get.

She lit up. Kettle corn!!

I bought a big bag. We walked out of the fair, into the quieter park that surrounded it, and decided to sit under a tree just on the periphery of the action. We settled on the damp grass as darkness fell, Beatrice finally relaxed and leaning against me, sharing an open bag of sweet and salty popcorn and watching unseen as our friends and neighbors walked in and out of the fairground. She said, Mama, this is the best part of the fair. I'm having such a good time with you.

I smiled. It definitely was. It was as if I finally accepted that we don't quite belong in the midst of all those lights and games and happy families. Rather than force our participation in something that felt wrong, we took our place in the dusky outer edge. I watched with a kind of contented sadness as couples we know whose children are off at college walked by hand in hand, aglow with nostalgia for fairs gone by, and younger families we know wrangled their exhausted toddlers into strollers, and all of it was happening over there, lit up by the rides and games, away from us, sitting among the safe, sturdy roots of a very old tree in the dark.

It makes me think of Lear.

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.

10We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

15Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon ’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out

In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones

20That ebb and flow by the moon.

When you are grieving you are God's spy, sitting apart in your prison, watching it all go by, knowing you are no longer a part of court happenings as you once were but somehow closer to the mystery of things. That kettle corn was my offering, my way of kneeling down and asking Beatrice's forgiveness, so we could nestle together on our perch and watch the stories unfolding below.

There's so much I want to do. I get frustrated with her anxiety and fear, her clinging, along with the weight of all my children's grief, the million things I haven't done - the emails I've neglected and plants I haven't watered and milk I haven't bought - the enormity of tending this family without Mike while my heart is so broken. I long to go to this party, that play, a retreat on Sunday, a yoga class, a drink with a friend, the couch with a book, a manicure, a concert. So little of it happens. My kids need me. Maybe I need me too. My golden birdcage prison calls me: come inside, you don't really belong in that world anyway, you feel alien and strange at the art show, the fair. Come snuggle with Beatrice and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, give her your arm, accept the confines of this new life.

Tonight was the school art show. It's a wonderful event, full of art and music and friends. Frances performed. I volunteered at the snack table (after hearing repeatedly how I am the *only* parent that doesn't volunteer at school) and when there was a lull in the action, I wandered the show and took pictures of the kids' art boards. It was a habit. I had always texted them to Mike, who never seemed to be well enough for this event and would be waiting for us at home.

After I took the photos I realized with dismay that I had no one to send them to. I wandered back to my post. I felt lost and tried to busy myself. I thought about sending them to a friend but that seemed lame. A man introduced himself to me, explaining we had gone to high school together. It took me a minute, but I recognized him. His daughter is in Beatrice's class. I smiled and chatted and felt that my lostness - my questionable departure from my prison cage - was as obvious as if I had busted handcuffs dangling from my wrists. Yeah, we went to high school together, we're both pretty nice people, we have six year old daughters, we're both forty-one years old, but I belong back in my cage with my grieving freaked out little girl while you are at your ease in this beautiful room with your wife and your health and your plans to go out for ice cream after the art show.

Then Beatrice, the grieving girl in question, tore past, deep in a game with her friends from school, shrieking and sweaty. Unlike her mother, she didn't look like an escaped convict at all.

Afterwards Frances went to a friend's house and Gabriel was out playing Magic so it was just the two of us again, reading in bed, when we heard booms and crackles outside. We opened the door to the upper balcony off her bedroom and sat outside, Beatrice nestled on my lap, watching the fireworks being set off at the fair down the street. We had a perfect view up there. It was beautiful.