wayward time

Yesterday evening I ran up to my bedroom, having just arranged to share burgers outside with my mom and friends for dinner, with the intention of quickly changing and squeezing in some exercise before I had to get started in the kitchen. I peeked into the family room and found Beatrice and Frances sprawled on the couch watching Queer Eye. They looked at me with smiles frozen on their faces.

We can stop this episode here, it's fine Mama.

I looked at them, suspicious. How many episodes had they already watched?

Now I love Queer Eye as much as anyone, maybe more, but I have been on a desperate mission to separate Beatrice from screens for the duration of this pandemic and I feel I am failing even more miserably than usual lately. Since my job has been on break for the summer I have no excuse. I'm not in a session; I'm just talking to a friend on the porch or puttering in the garden or engaging with one of the other children or reading the three-day-old Sunday paper. Because I want to. And trying to ignore the nagging awareness that if I cannot see or hear Beatrice, 99% of the time it's because she's absconded to a quiet corner of the house with a screen.

She's supposed to ask me first. She rarely does. So I was totally, completely annoyed to find her hanging out with the fab five, charming though they may be, without my permission.

I told her as much. I stomped to my bedroom and bent over to step into a pair of running shorts. Beatrice, undettered by my grouchiness, burst cheerfully into the room and attempted a flying leap onto my bed to bring some levity to the situation. She wound up kicking me in the face instead.

I stood up, dazed. My eyes teared up with the impact. I was SO mad. Like, blazing, irrationally, fiercely pissed.

I don't remember what I said, but it was harsh. Her offence most definitely did not merit my response; my irritation was more about my own ineffectual parenting when it comes to screens. The kick sent me over the edge. She fled my room and ran to her own. Then another kid needed my attention, and I got distracted by some other task, and the clock was ticking and I wouldnt be able to exercise after all, and I stomped back down the hall with wisps of steam still drifting from my ears.

Until I saw Beatrice's closed door in front of me, and heard the quiet behind it. Inhale, exhale. I knew I was in the wrong. I peeked in and saw her stretched out on her bed, still and sad. I came in and got in bed next to her. She turned to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. I told her I loved her, and tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. I held her close, and tried to not make any crying noises that would tip her off. It was Father's Day, and what with my youngest child's warm back and easy forgiveness and the floor of her room strewn with slime-making supplies and LOL dolls, and the thoughtful friends who had been reaching out to me since the morning to let me know they saw and honored my loneliness, I simply couldn't not cry anymore. It was a relief.

Beatrice flipped onto her back and looked up at the underside of the bed above us for awhile and then said Mama. Mama. When you cry I feel like crying too. It makes me sad when you're sad. It's like when someone is laughing so hard, and you don't even know why but you have to laugh too.

I know. I know you don't like it.

But Mama, it's okay. I want you to cry when you're sad, because I don't want you to pretend to be happy when you feel bad. You don't have to smile if you don't feel like it.

Thanks. I don't think I do, do I?

You do! But when I feel like crying I can't stop it. I just cry. Even if I'm at school. I hate crying at school.

Ugh, Beatrice, I used to hate that too.

In the months after Mike's death I worried Beatrice would willfully push her father away from her because she had so little tolerance for negative emotions. She'd jump up and put a hand on my lips or tell a joke if she noticed me become tearful. Sometimes she'd just say no crying! like a fed-up schoolteacher barking the rules at a wayward child. I was afraid it wouldn't be worth the sadness of his absence to recall the joy of his presence.

But as we lay warm and tangled on her bed, which is really a mattress on the floor beneath her loft bed because she discovered sleeping up that high was too darn scary, Beatrice told me a different story. She used to find my sadness intolerable because of the way it made her feel. Now she is old enough to recognize that it's worth enduring that discomfort if I am being honest. She wants to know that her mama's insides and outsides match. That she can trust me.

I wish Papa would come back, she said.

Me too, I said.

Then I found something for her to do, and said fuck it and exercised anyway and let dinner be late,  and sat outside on the first summer night and watched the fireflies and talked about dogs and ate mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches with some of my favorite people.

Then today I woke up way too early because it was Frances's fifteenth birthday.

Time can be such a bitch, pulling us all along day after day, ever farther from our life as a family of five that shines in the distance beyond the fault line of Mike's death. Gabriel is now taller than I am. Frances is running her own Spanish tutoring business. Beatrice talks about her feelings like a boss and sings along to pop songs. We have a dog who has run away and come home again. Life keeps on happening! It's exhilaring; it's crushing.

Sometimes I wish this narrative arc would bend into a shape that makes a little more sense.

seeing

After I finished my graduate program and had my very first baby, Mike and I moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster. These events happened within a six week period. I was overwhelmed, underslept, and delighted to get to know my hometown in a new way, no longer from the vantage point of a child but with the transformed vision of a new parent.

I started working at what was then known as SouthEast Lancaster Health Services three months after Frances was born, which may have changed my relationship to this diminutive city even more than parenthood. I had many appointment slots every day, and my patients taught me a lot, perhaps most powerfully by offering me a window into the intimate quotidian struggles that come with being poor. They taught me about the barriers to health and mental health care in my town that, even with the aid of my new-social-worker-oblivious-white-lady-can-do energy, were often insurmontable.

That job invited me to sit down with people I had never seen before. These were people I had willfully looked past on street corners, sitting in wheelchairs, walking in pairs carrying plastic bags, hanging on stoops, talking strangely to themselves, wearing their age and chronic illness and poverty in such a way that others gave them a wide, silent berth on city sidewalks. They were part of my city too.

I remember telling Mike a few weeks into that job that I can't not see them anymore. I couldn't not know their stories. I couldn't return to the comfort of my privileged ignorance; the door had been opened and now I couldn't shut it even if I'd wanted to. I saw the poor all around me, and I understood that my looking away had been a form of complicity. It hurt.

What did I do with that new awareness? What am I doing? Getting through the day, mostly. Needless to say I didn't fix our busted health care or organize a new system of accessible mental health treatment. I'm not working tirelessly in service of the underrepresented and underserved.

I remember having a conversation then with a community leader who was visiting our clinic. She sat down across from me and said, without losing eye contact for a moment, that it was time I started serving on a board. Volunteering with more intention and purpose. My town needed people to step up, and I should respond to that need. But, I said, flustered, I have a baby! She's still nursing. And I work full-time. And I'm just figuring all of this out. How could I add anything else?

I think back to that conversation and smile at 29-year-old me. The parent kid ratio in my house then was 2:1. My back didn't hurt in weird places. My hair wasn't gray. I had so. much. energy. Now I'm still working full time, but the ratio is 1:3. My husband is dead, grief freights my every limb, I'm quicker to cry than ever before. How can I add anything else?

The past months have been an exercise in the scales falling away from all our eyes over and over. People in our communities have been hurt deeply; hurt and sometimes killed. We cannot not see it anymore. The #metoo movement ripped a scale away to reveal the brutal ubiquity of misogyny and sexual assault; now the incessant brutality of white supremacy is being revealed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And the pandemic is exposing injustice in every corner my privileged eyes chose to glide past and thereby condone.

It hurts.

In March and April, isolated and scared and struggling with work and school and a house full of difficult feelings, I found myself sliding back into the sense of alienation and disconnect I felt in the earlier days of my widowhood. I missed Mike acutely. I cried often; the loneliness weighed so much more than usual. I couldn't bear to see or talk with anyone outside my safest people. I wanted to withdraw.

Now my job is on summer break, and school is over, and the weather is perfect. I can breathe again. My loneliness has not subsided, but my resiliency is returning. I am looking around at this beautiful broken world, which somehow mirrors my beautiful broken heart, and recognizing that my own hurts do not mean I am in a worse position to be present to my community. Maybe my suffering has marked me in ways that will help me to serve it; maybe better than I ever could have at twenty-nine.

For now I'm reading, and watching, and listening, and mourning. I'm reluctant to speak in a time when so many seem compelled to speak because I'm still confronting the deep grief and pain the Black Lives Matter movement has invited me to truly see and take responsibility for. I'm feeling a lot of feelings, and waiting. I want my words and actions, whatever they may be, to come from my own pain and love and desire for healing, rather than reactivity. I'm trusting God to help me know how and when to respond to that woman's urgent invitation in my clinic office fourteen years ago, with whatever cracked and bruised gifts I have to share. She really saw me then; I'm grateful to her still.