lights in the dark

Last Friday around 4:45, I checked my phone and saw a text from my mom that read martinis tonight? I had just finished my last session of a long day, a long week. There had simply been more than I could handle with equanimity and I felt shaky. I had a pile of notes to write and it was nearly dark outside. 

My response? OMG YES. I decided the notes were for the next morning, packed everything up, and walked home through campus, through the park, down the cracked sidewalks to my house which was dark and still on the outside, bright and busy on the inside. I dumped my bag by the door, checked in with the kids, and made a screen time plan with Beatrice that I knew would be flouted the minute I shut the front door behind me. Then I walked to my mom's house, taking the alley and entering through the tall gate into her backyard, where I saw a sight that stopped me in my tracks. 

There was the menorah, aglow in the center of the bay window that faces out back. It was the sixth night. Each narrow candle wore a beautiful halo around its flickering flame. The bright light it cast into the darkness in which I stood outside was so improbable. The only reasonable response was to breathe, settle, and allow the stillness to touch me, if only for a moment.

Then I went inside and told my mom all about my crushing week, and drank and ate a lot, and felt like a grateful imperfect human connected to another human in a fragile precious world.

Before I sat down early the next morning to tackle the notes, on a whim I found a squat little candle and set it on my kitchen table. I made coffee and lit the candle and pulled out my laptop. Inhale, exhale. There I sat, picking up the clinical pieces of the week and putting them where they belonged, with a tiny fire to remind me that a person can really only do one thing at a time.

Beatrice and I went to our old church - the one we once attended with Mike, and left soon after he died - to make an advent wreath a few days before that. I had gone to services two or three times by myself, nudged when a friend kindly invited me sans pressure to give it another try (shortly after I mentioned I was feeling adrift at/about church in a previous post). Beatrice was totally not into busting in a new-to-her social environment and I can't remember now what I initially bribed her with. Turns out there was cookie decorating so that worked pretty well. In the end I made the wreath outside in the courtyard without her, chatting with old friends, as she hooked up with two other kids and ran wild and free all around the church campus. I couldn't have been happier.

Then on Sunday Beatrice grumpily agreed to come to church with me. On the walk there she replayed her worries about me ditching her to have boring adult conversations with old ladies and also what if the kids don't include her? But the kids are, it turns out - at least sometimes - angels. They welcomed her and just before the service, one of them ran up to Bea and asked if she wanted to torch with her in church.

Sure! she said, happy to be included.

Then Bea paused and looked at me. What's torching?

I explained it meant being an acolyte. Carrying a tall candle and being part of the church service. Wearing a red and white outfit. Ruthie, her new friend, insisted she could train Beatrice up in the next ten minutes and pulled her into the sanctuary. 

I sat there, dumbfounded. What was happening? My shy and hesitant Beatrice, my church-averse darling, donning an acolyte's ensemble?

I need not tell you how full my heart was, watching her process in, smiling beneath her mask. I tried not to be embarrassing or weird, or make eye contact for too long and cause her to second guess the whole thing. 

The part that really sent me over the edge was seeing three or four friends - women who have welcomed my presence back in this old stone building after such a long absence with nary a question or hesitation - whipping out their phones and snapping photos of this unexpected bright moment, grinning at me with their eyes, indicating they'd text the pictures later. They knew. We all shared it.

That evening we listened to Sufjan Stevens sing Christmas songs as we do every year and decorated our tree, which is now dripping with symbols and reminders of the many chapters of our lives, including Mike's childhood with ornaments from his family and mine with the candy cane I made in second grade and the little wooden church to commemorate my dad's new job in Providence in 1980, and all the Christmases of our children's lives. It was the least sad, most sweet tree-decorating since we lost Mike. After that we went to my mom's and ate latkes and lit the candles and opened her presents with friends. 

How I long for ritual, for everyday ways to invite the sacred into our lives. How bounteous is this season in the ways it answers that desire for holiness! There are so many lights in the dark. 

Last night Gabriel and I went to Target. We needed a few odd things and were already out after picking up books at the library. We so rarely run errands together; it felt good. We strolled past an aisle of candles and he noted I was on a real candle kick these days. 

Yep. Let's look.

We pulled down our masks to stick our noses in all of them and commented on their fake smells, until we found an enormous glass candle with three wide wicks. Three! It smelled fake too - but awesome-fake. Amber Applewood. Whatevs. We called it a mobile fireplace (wish we had a real one) and decided we absolutely needed it. It's your advent present, Mama, said Gabriel. We'll light it at dinner and feel warm.

And that's just what we did. 

wading out

I have never spent so much time in solitude in all my life. 

I grew up inside a family. I went to college and lived with roommates. I graduated and moved in with Mike. We lived together, and then got married, and never spent more than a few days apart. We had three children and parenthood took whatever sliver of boundary between me and other people that I once possessed and made it more diaphanous, more translucent, at times bordering-on-nonexistent (after a birth, or after Mike died). The way I have learned to move through the world is in direct response to other beloved people. All the time.

And here I am at the midpoint of a five day mindfulness retreat, led by a student of Thich Nhat Hanh in the spirit of his particular Buddhist school of practice and thought. When I planned this trip, I only knew I felt compelled to heal in a deeper way, to take a risk in the hope of becoming more whole. I clicked register and gave this retreat center lots of money because I wanted to accept and be present to whatever is, without fear and without shame. 

When I spoke to Beatrice at the tail end of the first day and heard her plead why can't you come home now, for about five minutes I seriously considered it. I mean, yeah, why can't I come home now? A big part of me wanted to. That part of me was extremely uncomfortable. Why exactly did I drive five hours away, leaving my children and my clients, burdening my friends and coworkers and mom, risking all kinds of domestic mishap, and inviting nearly a week of worry about all of it just so I could sit on a diminutive bean bag in a silent room doing absolutely nothing at all? How insane was that choice?

Now I've been here for three full days, and I'm beginning to understand. I think I needed about two days to fully wade out of the fast-moving stream of everyday life. In the beginning I couldn't truly comprehend that there was nowhere to be and nothing to do. I wanted to make a snack for someone. I wanted to drag myself up the stairs to do a bedtime routine. I wanted to reach out to a client I'm worried about and try to squeeze them into my overfull schedule. I wanted to make friends with the other people here and listen to their stories. But I resisted that initial impulse, in part taking a cue from our teacher, and instead I spend meals and open time mostly alone. 

Somehow my mind and my body have come into alignment. I almost look forward to sitting on the beanbag; at the very least, I feel at ease climbing onto that humble mount. I noticed right away that whenever I walk the path back to my little shared cabin and open the door to my room I smile. Hello little room, I actually say out loud. I'm back. It feels so safe and welcoming. I noticed I was also doing that with my meditation cushion - I didn't greet it out loud, that's just too weird in a group setting, but I felt an inward sigh of happy recognition - ah, I'm back. Here we are. 

This spontaneous at-homeness has made me curious about the experience of being at home in my own imperfect body, in this very imperfect moment, whether I am alone or with my people. Of having arrived, and arriving, over and over again. I'm back. I'm here.

Though I've resisted my usual ways of caring for others, I did bring four or five books because I didn't know before that I would find ways to feel like myself here, and a good book is a reliable way for me to feel at home. I've been reading The Overstory by Richard Powers which I feel like you've probably already read so you probably already know where I'm going with this: a book about trees is the perfect book to read when one is surrounded by trees in all their autumn glory with more time than ever to notice and admire them!

I just read the most moving passage this afternoon, which we have off from formal practice, in which a very lovable and solitary tree scientist reflects on how interconnected and cooperative trees are in the forest. She thinks that the more she and her colleagues learn, the less sense it makes to consider individual trees or even distinct species. "Everything in the forest is the forest."

OH! Non-self! I suddenly understood a Buddhist teaching in a new way. Everything in the forest is the forest. There is no part of me, and no part of you, that makes sense separate from our family, community, ancestors. We are trees, yet we are forest. 

Then I tucked my book into my backpack and took a walk in the forest here. I kept losing the path beneath the quickly accumulating layers of dead leaves underfoot and backtracking, uncertain which way to go. I was a little stressed and thinking things like they should really mark this trail better and maybe I'll let guest services know because someone could get lost! But then I took a breath and thought: I'm home. I'm home in my body, on this path/non-path, in this forest, on this retreat. And it was so beautiful there. I sat down on a rock to fish a pebble out of my sneaker, and I didn't get back up. I watched the birds in the canopy, the chipmunks scurrying along moss-covered rotting logs, the drifting brown and yellow leaves that floated in and out of shafts of sunlight on their way to the forest floor, each one landing around me with a quiet dry settling sound. After awhile I thought to myself shouldn't I get going? And then responded: I don't want to.

So I didn't. I stayed for a long time. There was nowhere I needed to be. I don't think that reality has ever registered quite so peacefully with me before today. 

This practice has been hard. I have felt a lot of pain inside me, and done my fumbling best - is this right? is this how? - to greet it with compassion and love. Inside me I find an ocean of love, and an ocean of grief, fathomless and deep. I imagine they are there inside you, too. I have cried inside my mask, gumming it up with mucus and tears, and wished to hide. I have confronted how afraid I am by the very idea of transforming my suffering. I have thought oh come on and inwardly rolled my eyes and then later sat with a book in my lap and looked up with surprise: Non-self!

I've felt spontaneous bursts of gratitude. For friends, family, work; for trees, sunlight, delicious food I don't have to cook, the moon, meals taken alone in a room full of people, for everyone who has supported me in making this possible. For my body. For all the places in this world where I can be at home. For two more days, and how I will hold it all with tenderness at the end and remember as I step gingerly back into the stream.  

brimming over

Lately, I can't seem to sleep in. It's Sunday morning, and I was awake long before six. I spent some time lying very still, trying to trick myself into falling back asleep, but my thoughts had other plans. 

Without my consent, they tried to work out why I feel so alienated from church, and what it is exactly that I am looking for. My thoughts reviewed my thus far failed efforts to find someone to stay with my kids and animals while I go on a mindfulness retreat later this month, and worried about a student I am seeing who is struggling. They reached for the threads of an evocative dream I had been moving through just a few moments before. And they took me back to this past Thursday, when Frances and I met up with two friends from Annapolis to tour Swarthmore in the morning and Penn in the afternoon.

My mom told me that Frances later described me as a puppy on Swarthmore's campus. That sounded about right. As we drove into town, past the old dilapidated apartment where I once lived, I became borderline giddy. The last time I had visited was with Mike and the kids when they were little, to meet up with some friends who were there for a reunion. I don't remember feeling like a puppy then, but I was making space for countless others who had their own stories and expectations and mixed-up histories; this time it was just me and my college-bound daughter on a brilliant sunny Thursday at the end of September. It smelled and looked and sounded exactly right, and I felt free to embody all my big feelings about taking in that abundance with her.

And sometimes, as happens when you re-enter an environment that is rich with memories and meaning, I could feel my twenty year old self taking center stage. And when that happened I often stood back and smiled at her, delighted by her, which is a much nicer feeling than looking back and feeling ashamed or convinced that she wasn't enough - or was too much - which I have felt at other times in my life. 

There were no formal tours offered that day, so I got to play tour guide for awhile. I immediately took our little group to the amphitheater on the edge of the Crum woods. On the way we passed a stone wall, where I paused and told Frances, Milena and Nathaniel that this was the exact spot where Mike and I had first kissed. 

Maybe because of the weird time-space magic going on, I felt not a shred of sadness in sharing that tender early moment with my husband who no longer walks the wooded paths of this earth. Rather, the sweetness and excitement of that afternoon filled my body. I told them how I had run directly from that kiss to my next class, walked into the room half-full of other students taking off backpacks and settling into desks, and grinned at them all. I could not hold it in; I announced to everyone: I just kissed Mike Brogan! and danced to my seat, where a male friend looked at me with a slightly embarrassed expression that meant: really, Meagan? wasn't that a bit much? - and I could have cared less.

Maybe that kind of behavior is acceptable when you're a senior at a very small college. Or maybe I was out of my mind, in total untrained puppy mode. Mike himself, as I later learned, would have been mortified by that kind of behavior. But none of that matters to me now. I treasure that memory.

Later we met up with an old professor of mine. We had been out of touch for nearly twenty years; I was a little nervous that she might not remember who I was, it had been so long. But she remembered well. 

She graciously answered questions and chatted with Frances and Nathaniel about Swarthmore, and then we sat down to talk while the rest of the group toured the lower campus. She had known Mike, and had not known that he died. And she had long ago divorced her husband who was also a professor in the religion department; he had known us both well, too. I used to babysit their children. They came to our wedding. They had modeled a kind of admirable adulthood to us when we were considering what we wanted our lives to be about, and that mattered. 

It was only when I sat down across from her, and she looked at me with her kind and generous eyes and my own filled with tears, that I flashed back to a memory with her from the first semester of my first year. My dad had just been diagnosed with cancer and I was going home for his surgery before chemo began. I hadn't told any adults at school; I was trying to muscle through all the work and confusion of that time on my own. She and I had a meeting to talk about my final paper for her class. When she asked how the writing was going, I started to cry, and told her about my dad.

She scooted towards me on her rolling chair, making caring maternal noises as her feet pushed her along her office carpeting, and wrapped me in a hug. I can hear her now: Oh, Meagan. Meagan. I'm so sorry.

She told me that my dad having terminal cancer was a big deal, and that I could have extensions on my papers. She told me my family was the most important thing and that I didn't need to do everything all by myself. She told me she would help.

What a gift that was! It changed everything about that moment in my life. And what a strange feeling, to be telling her about Mike, while that seventeen year old me experienced her care and support yet again. 

I gave her one of the little books I made from Mike's memorial service. We talked about everything. I got to see pictures of her daughter's adorable new baby and show her pictures of my other kids and talk about how exciting it was to visit colleges with Frances. She saw me then and she saw me now, and I was so grateful. My heart felt stretched and pulled in every direction. 

After we said goodbye, I found my people and we had lunch outside at the Swarthmore coop and headed off to tour Penn. Everything that day was filtered through the conversation of Frances and Nathaniel talking about their hopes for college, where they were applying, acceptance rates, SAT scores. This talk is normally off-putting to me - the endless strategizing about how to best position oneself part of it - because why can't young people simply work on becoming who they are and colleges could consider who would learn and grow well on their campuses and have that be sufficient rather than this anxiety-riddled money-fueled evil game - but anyway, I didn't mind at all on Thursday. I liked listening to their conversation. They are both such cool people. We ended back at Swarthmore, said goodbye to our wonderful friends and made one last stop at the college bookstore where Frances and I bought matching sweatshirts then walked under the tracks and up the big hill to our waiting car. 

It is as if one's life is an exquisite collection of oddly-shaped jewels, a thousand moments that if seen in the proper sunlight shine brilliantly. Maybe some are made of glass and have sharp edges that hurt, but these shine too. Normally in the rush of everyday life they sift through your fingers, one or another briefly popping into your awareness and sliding back into darkness, leaving a feeling behind for a little while. But on Thursday I magically held more of them than seems possible in my cupped hands. They didn't fall through my fingers; all those shining colors and shapes and surfaces stayed with me as we moved through the day. 

Because of this, my heart brimmed over with love for people past, present and future, including myself, again and again and again. 

quiet time

Today is the first day of third grade. And tomorrow is the first day of eighth and eleventh grades. It's happening people. Buckle up.

Yesterday comprised a series of obligations and duties. A big grocery shopping trip with special emphasis on desirable lunchbox items, a stop at dreary Office Max with the third grade supply list in hand, loads of laundry, an errand for a friend that took too long, ordering new dance shoes and leotards as Beatrice has outgrown everything, counter and sink scrubbing in service of the ongoing battle against our current fruit fly invasion. It rained on and off all day as I crossed various parking lots pulling mask loops around my ears. In the late afternoon, gripped by box store-induced malaise, I walked into the house and announced I had to lie down with my book for 15 minutes and could everyone please not talk to me. 

I am crazy about the novel I am reading right now. Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin. It's about a nearly perfect person behaving imperfectly, and the toll it takes when one's outer and inner lives do not match up at all. At least that's what it's about so far; I'm midway through and so eager to find out what will happen to Polly Solo-Miller, the privileged cheerful caregiving woman at the center of the book who is having an affair. It was published in 1982 and I think I am supposed to stand back every once in awhile and think: wow, things were so different then for women! So glad the work of countless determined feminists stand between what it was like to be a 40something mother in 1982 and 2021! But I identify so much with Polly and absolutely never stand back and think that. I only think about how I should probably be thinking that. 

The book in part is about what happens when life breaks through the stories you were told growing up, then took inside and kept on telling yourself, about who you are supposed to be and what your life is meant to be like. Sometimes something happens that is not supposed to, and the pages of the script fall uselessly to the floor all around you. Your forty-two year old beloved husband dies of a rare cancer. Or in Polly's case, you fall in love with someone who is not your beloved husband. Everything you expected and operated according to the logic of no longer holds up. Who are you, exactly, if not the person in the story that once framed your life?

Her problem was not that she had fallen in love with Lincoln, or even what had made it possible to fall in love with him: her problem was herself. It was the yoke she put herself under, the standards she chose to adhere to, and the fact that underneath all the service, cheer, care, and nurturing was some other Polly she had not quite confronted.

Three years in, I have begun to interrogate my insides. It's so uncomfortable. Yet I am compelled. I find my own stories there, and I am not so sure about any of them anymore. 

Gabriel came to see me in my room ten minutes into my declared quiet time and stretched out next to me. The dog had already come in and draped herself across my feet with a sigh. (One of my strongest moments of recognition: Polly and I both love 'horizontal life' and would do most everything lying down in bed or on the floor if we could). I put down my book on my chest and told Gabriel I loved it. I read him a passage out loud about how to recognize people who had been to progressive schools that made us both laugh (they hold their pencils funny, because they were never taught to do anything until they felt like learning it). Then he went to get his book and came back and we both read for awhile. Then Beatrice found us and arranged herself crosswise over my hips, legs hanging off the side of the bed and arms outstretched towards Gabriel, reclining Superman style. I told her she could get a book too if she wanted.

No thanks. 

Okay, but this is quiet time. 

Okay.

After about five delicious more minutes, I checked my watch and groaned. There was lots more to do before dinner time on the last day of summer vacation. All I wanted was to stay right where I was. I made pathetic gestures towards getting up.

Poor tired Mama, said the children.

I laughed. I told them I wish I was better at being an adult sometimes, meaning I wish I was better at putting a brave face on doing things I don't feel like doing, and thus modeling pleasant dutifulness for them. Tricking them into thinking keeping this family afloat is easy peasy.

No, no, said Gabriel. It's better like this. Remember? In our family we tell the truth.

Yeah Mama, Beatrice agreed. You should be honest about how you're really feeling. We like it that way.

That response gave me the strength to shake the dog off, dislodge myself from under Beatrice, and slip on my shoes. 

In that moment I saw clearly that being a functional adult does not require papering over one's pain with false cheerfulness. I suspect that might actually be a fucked up vision of adulthood, especially womanhood, and an unfortunate set-up for the generations that follow us. It ensures inner-outer disconnect. It's okay to be tired and want more than anything to read in bed, and it's okay to do the things anyway. 

The enlivening sweetness for me was in the fact that my children were teaching me about it. Believing our stories so intently, both Polly and I had only begun to face our inner knowing - that being depended upon to gracefully take care of people without proper acknowledgement is exhausting and ultimately enraging - when we were well into our forties, and only then in the wake of life-upending events. But my kids seemed to know something about this with charming and improbable simplicity. Duh. Just tell the truth. You're tired. It's better that way, for all of us.  

It can be hard and lonely to take care of my children by myself. Also, I love them more than anything. And I do, amazingly, feel appreciated and seen by them. 

I hope the stories they are learning about who they are and what the world is like leave lots of room for the vast beauty and heartbreak of their real life experiences. 

I hope their insides and their outsides are never too far apart. 

vacation's end

On Friday I wrangled Beatrice into bed way too late per usual, and was rushing us through her goodnight routine with a distracted mind. It ends with a sacred 'two minute snuggle' which is typically performed in silence. If we start talking it messes everything up and we have to restart the clock and begin again.

So after the final five goodnights, I draped an arm lightly around her ribs two-minute-snuggle style and quietly settled in to think of all the things I still had to do before I could close up shop for the night, feel annoyed at myself for not doing more to mitigate Beatrice's perpetual sleep resistance, and begin to think of steps I could take to support earlier bedtimes. Until she interrupted my thoughts. 

Mama. Mama! C'mon. Snuggle like you mean it. 

She explained she is always the little spoon and as such depends on the big spoon to come a little closer and provide a proper nest for her to nestle into. She wanted full contact. All the way. Like I meant it; like my mind and my body were in the same place, right next to her.

Oh, you're so right. Sorry about that. 

I scooted up as close as I could and wrapped my arms and legs around her, tight, then let all that weight relax and crush her a bit. She laughed. 

That's better!

Before I confess the following, please forgive me for articulating challenges that are associated with having two months off in the summer. I know I'm really lucky. But this year in particular I felt oppressed by my own expectations. In June and July I expected myself to complete various house projects, train our dog, teach Frances to drive, teach Beatrice to ride a bike, make time to nurture and care for myself, garden, provide the kids with fun summer adventures, help Beatrice go to sleep at night in her own bed and stay there until morning, and...oh yeah, finish writing that manuscript. I wouldn't be working, so there would be plenty of time!

Well. A few days ago I told the three of them that I couldn't wait to be a working parent again. Turns out this whole stay-at-home gig is too exhausting. I do a lot of dropping off and picking up, grocery shopping, hopefully putting things on the stairs where they sit neglected until I take them upstairs myself, pleading with Bea to get off a screen, struggling to balance the often-conflicting needs of three people, nagging them to do chores, feeling guilty when they struggle. Just because I have two months off work doesn't mean anything about parenting gets any easier. I forgot. 

And it fills all the spaces. Every available nook and cranny. 

A friend and I wallpapered my bathroom but I haven't made the dining room curtains or put up paint samples. The hanging basket of flowers on the back deck has turned to a shriveled symbol of my inability to water regularly. Beatrice still doesn't know how to ride a bike; it is my widow's shame. It's so easy to focus on the things left undone. 

And it's the last week of July! A week from today I will go back to my office, where I haven't worked since March 2020. It's shocking to think how long it's been since I enjoyed lunchtime chats with my coworkers and in-person therapy in the quiet and cool of my office. These are wonderful things to look forward to. 

And when I begin, I will say goodbye to the summer expectations because my summer will be over. Honestly, there is some relief in that.

But I'll also have to say goodbye to 9:15 barre class, open time with my kids, sleeping til seven, admiring the sunflowers, and companionable hours during the day with my adorable, infuriating untrained dog. It's okay. And luckily I'll have August to acclimate before the kids' fall schedules begin and I will have to crouch inside my barrel and brace myself for the rapids and inevitable trip over the falls of multiple evening activities and transportation coordination and childcare and so. many. emails every night about school and dance and cross country and mock trial and music lessons. 

At least that's how a part of me is feeling. Serious Sunday night dread. 

But then I remember like you mean it. I want to mean it. I want to be there for my life, even when my life is being a stretched-thin solo full-time working parent of three. If I don't mean it, I'll miss the snuggles. I'll miss the sky, the taste of coffee, the outrageous pleasure of a hot shower. I'll miss them.

I saw a photo of someone I don't know's baby shower on Instagram this morning. My mind immediately took me to the memory of baby Frances's fat hands pushing down on my bare thigh to pull herself up to standing while I sat on the floor at my sister-in-law's baby shower so many years ago. Our baby with her enormous brown eyes and soft wispy hair, taking everything in, leaning into my body when there was a barely a boundary between us; she knew the warmth and solidity of me would always be right there for her like her own hands were always right there whenever she lost her balance. My heart hurt, the memory was so vivid. Frances. Now she drives herself to work with increasing confidence while I watch and direct her from the passenger seat.  

The pull of the current can be so strong. I have learned the powerful expectations I have of myself as a parent from my culture, my peers, my own perfectionist bullshit. It's impossible; a set up. You can't be there for your life from the inside of a jolting, bouncing barrel. You can't shiver with the pleasure of a baby's hands on your skin. I want to set an intention right now, on the cusp of this new almost-post-pandemic approaching-a-normal-that-never-was season. 

Here is my prayer: God, give me the strength to say no, to take a breath, to resist multitasking, to tolerate and even embrace imperfection. 

Help me to make the space to live like I mean it. 

sing a song

A few nights ago I dreamt I was writing a song. In the morning I told Frances about it. She listened with an open, smiling expression, and when I was done asked, well, want to write a song with me?

Hmmm. Yes! I mean, I think so. Can I do that?

Her invitation was delivered with simplicity and an implicit faith that writing a song was something we could definitely do, no big deal, like taking a walk or making a phone call. Like making breakfast. She happens to write amazing songs so speaks with some authority about the apparent mundanity of all this. So the next morning when I woke up way too early, even though I don't know how to write a song, I tried out some lyrics at the kitchen table.

She found them later - you wrote a song! - and then asked if she could try setting it to music. Which she did, I kid you not, in about eight minutes. We sat down at the piano and identified the parts that sounded way too sentimental, the lines with too many syllables, figured out what was missing and what could use more rhyme. The back of my throat gathered tears throughout this easy collaboration with my musical daughter. I kept telling her how she was blowing me away. She kept laughing and telling me it was just basic music theory, nothing special.

Are you kidding me? I don't think so. She is a songwriting goddess. The way she can arrange chords and make simple words fill up with emotion and meaning they didn't have moments before, when they were sitting flat and pencilled on the page, strikes me as magical. 

We went through a few versions and finished it yesterday. We sang it together for my mom, Beatrice, Diana and Teb last night after dinner; I could barely hold off the tears. It's a song about turning forty-four next week, which is the same age as my dad. It's about having to grow up without him, and not wanting to leave the space his years made, and I sang it with my daughter who will someday turn forty-two and contend with being the same age as her dad. 

Later, Diana emailed me the poem she had recently written after her uncle died, about the experience of going to the site where his plane had crashed with family. It took me breath away. Reading it, I felt something of what it was like to be there, the quiet and light, the absence and presence.

And then this morning I received a letter from my friend Christine, inside of which was folded a poem she wrote that will be published next month. The poem is about learning that Mike died while she was at the beach. After dropping Beatrice at camp and Frances at work, I only had time to read the letter before going to a barre class. Afterwards, sweaty and content, I climbed back into my car and sat parked on Prince St with the windows down, the cool morning air and sounds of street life gently pushing against me as I unfolded her poem. 

You can read it in The Southern Review soon, if you're interested. It is very beautiful and like Diana's poem, took me right inside her experience: the water all around, the sun too bright, the shells on the beach.

I held that piece of white paper lightly in my fingers and a raucous brass band outside the Market nearby began to play. The joyful music fully cracked opened the pain of Christine's loss for me - her son's godfather died! - and it filled my whole body. Just for a moment, a gasp. Then I took a breath and nosed into the flow of traffic.

And all of these brushes over the past twenty-four hours with words and music that stretch towards what it is really like to live in the face of loss, mystery, and love have left me with a feeling of poignant tenderness that pulsates right at the surface, right where my skin and the air touch one another. The tenderness is for our particular stories, but even more than that I am moved by our human impulse to take pain and make it into something beautiful we can touch and give one another.

A song, a poem, a porcelain teacup, a photograph, a dance. Art can contain a crushing avalanche of hurt and transform it into glistening veined pebbles, the kind you can't bare to leave on the beach but take home and save in a glass jar instead. It can take the brute absurdity and outrage of death and transform it into an exquisite shape we can hold in our hands.

I love that. I love being a person and living in this world with other gorgeous maddening yearning people who make exquisite things out of what we are given. 

After we sang our song last night, Frances asked me if I wanted to write other songs (that is, after she trains me up so that I can actually sing the songs I write, which she insists is possible). 

I think they'll all be sad, I said. I can't really imagine writing any other kind of song.

That's okay, she said. Me neither. 

(The Frank O'Hara poem up top was on the wall of an exhibit at MOMA,where Frances and I visited last week for her 16th birthday).

the best day of my life

On Saturday night I sat down on the floor beneath Beatrice's loft bed (after a decent effort we concluded it was too scary up there for sleeping, so long ago we slid another mattress into the ingenious space-saving nook beneath and kicked the furniture back out into her crowded tiny bedroom). She beckoned me closer, to snuggle for her bedtime routine, so I stretched out long next to her and wrapped an arm around her tidy ribs. 

How old will I be when Didi goes to college?

I had to think. Hmmm...you'll be ten.

And what about Gabriel?

Then you'll be thirteen.

Silence. We lay entangled, our private thoughts about that eventuality unraveling within us.

It will be just us. 

I know.

I told her I've thought about that a lot. Will we be lonely for them? Will we love being a pair, or will we find it unsettling and fill the house with friends?

As we talked more about it, Beatrice became increasingly concerned about what it might be like for us to be alone, until suddenly she looked at me and said, but wait - I've been thinking about this as if I will be the same eight year old person when they go away! I'll be so much older, I'll probably feel differently about things then.

I agreed, and brought up all the teenagery things she sees her older siblings doing now that she will probably want to do then. It will feel really different, to be so much older. But that ushered in a whole new wave of discomfort. The shift was palpable. 

...But I don't want to be really different. I want to be me. 

Ah, but you will be! You'll be YOU, just older and wiser, more and more yourself. Beatrice, you're more you every day, all the time. It's so cool.

This brought some relief, and the freedom to pursue a series of math challenges and figure out how old everyone in our family will be when she is fifteen and eighteen and twenty-two. It felt exhilarating to both of us, imagining all the incredible futures ahead, all the things we have yet to experience, what it will be like to be a family of young adults, doing extraordinary things out in the world and loving each other through it all. 

But as the numbers got older (especially mine, in relation to theirs) I could feel a dark turn towards mortality waiting in the wings and so put an end to our endless bedtime routine, extracted myself from the pile of blankets and pillows on the floor, and said goodnight. 

Don't go!!

I'm going. Goodnight Beatrice. It's very late. 

Can I read?

Yes, but only for a few minutes.

I went upstairs to say goodnight to Gabriel, and almost cried as I shut his door in parting, imagining him as a twenty year old (which is how old he'll be when Beatrice is fifteen, as we had just discovered). 

I went down to the kitchen to give the animals their last bit of care for the day and lock the doors and turn out the lights. I remembered how Beatrice said earlier: I love today! I think this is one of the best days of my life. Nothing particularly amazing had happened. The older kids had had their second vaccine shots the day before and were feeling low energy, thus we scrapped some other plans. They were off the hook for chores and we watched Sing Street together in the middle of the day. I blasted The Cure afterwards, and made a plan for us to go to the beach in July. Beatrice and I went to our friends' house for a little garden party and she practiced her cartwheels on the pristine lawn. I grilled hamburgers for dinner. I always feel like a badass widow when I use our grill. We ate on the front porch and watched people with their dogs wandering by in the lavish evening humidity. 

It was a beautifully uneventful, unbusy Saturday, and we spent it together. It was one of the best days of Beatrice's life.

No wonder she worries about the changes ahead. I do too. 

The thing is, I notice myself oriented towards the unknowable future often and casually considering the present to be transitional, in-between, on-the-way-towards. On the way towards what exactly, I'm not sure. A time when I'm a better therapist, more knowledgable and authoritative? Maybe a time when our house is as it should be instead of in-process, when the walls are all painted and the washing machine doesn't leak. When my body has achieved optimum fitness and strength, when my hair color is just right, when my dog  has developed some modicum of impulse control and doesn't bark at the neighbors. When I write that book already. And when I have fallen in love again with a beautiful wise and funny man with whom I will want to share all this poignant, abundant, messy life.

Because then this scrambling grieving widow interlude will end, and prove to have been the creme center of an Oreo, sandwiched between chocolatey parts one and two.  

The only problem with being in-between the times when my real life happens is that it makes zero sense. How could I think my life isn't already real, here and now, all the time? If I believe myself to be treading water, waiting for something new, something better, to happen, I will entirely miss the fact that I am a fucking ace swimmer, and that I've been kicking out towards the vast horizon for a long time now. 

Sometimes I practice this little Tara Brach thing to help me remember. I recommend it. Basically, whatever is happening, you respond with yes. I tried it last night while I was squinting in the sun, waiting for an outdoor choral concert to which I had brought Beatrice and our friend Annika early, in preparation for their performance. Yes. I'm hot, it will be another hour til the concert, I don't know a soul here, I'm irritable, yes. Those yeses encouraged me to wander around until I found a sweet library porch with comfortable chairs where I could read. Yes to my novel, yes to words. Yes to the sadness that overwhelmed me while I was listening to their beautiful music and Mike's absence squeezed my heart. (That yes invited tears that had been patiently waiting to come out). Yes to the sweaty summer crowd of families all around me, still a novelty. (That yes brought a smile). Yes to cicadas falling from the sky. (That yes, a laugh, tickled by their absurdity). Yes to not being able to find the car afterwards. Yes, definitely yes, to an ice cream stop on the way home, yes to licking towering cones of soft serve and sitting at a shabby picnic table at a country intersection, billboards and a shadowy crane dark against the sky that glowed its last gasp in brilliant pinks and oranges before the darkness fell, and it was finally time to go home.

I love walking to school with Beatrice. We have one more morning to go before second grade is over. Last week, we were playing a game on our way, and she dared me to tango across an intersection with her. Well, that yes was an easy one. Yes to tango. Yes to silly. A couple of days later, a woman waved us down near the school. 

I saw you two tangoing across the street the other day. I was waiting at the red light and you danced in front of me!

Beatrice started to turn red and covered her face. She peered at me between her fingers and whispered I'm so embarrassed.

I smiled at her. I smiled at the woman. Yeah, I admitted. That was us. 

You guys made me happy all day long. I just wanted to thank you. It was awesome.

That was it. She waved, we waved. That was my life happening, right here and now. 

I got distracted with something and forgot to tell Beatrice to turn out the lights on Saturday, after our long talk about growing older together. I ran back up the stairs and saw her light on and groaned. It was after 11. I'm so bad at facilitating healthy sleep for that girl.

I called out, Beatrice! Lights out!

She didn't respond, so I went in and found her sound asleep on her back, a book tucked under one arm, her face turned away from me, beautifully lit in profile by the warm glow of her reading light. She was wearing one of my shirts. 

Beatrice won't be eight forever. We know, we've done the math. But she is eight today! To which I say yes. 

feel it all

I took the afternoon off, and went for a hike. 

It was a perfect breezy green kind of day. There were wide expanses of gray rock along the trail, and the sun made undulating shadows of the still-leafing treetops upon it like the shadows cast by suspended schools of fish moving with the tide on the sandy bottom of the ocean. I didn't see another soul, so I could stretch my sweaty arms wide, and move at the speed I wanted (rather than the pace I sensed the person in front or behind me preferred), jump off a big boulder for no reason at all, pee indiscreetly, wonder if the turkey vultures circling overhead were there for me, and generally let my thoughts move around like those gentle shadows in the breeze. 

I thought of my dad, and how he loved to crash around and yell in the sacred quiet woods. He'd run off the trail looking for a burnt-out dead tree he could easily topple with a triumphant grunt, his inner five year old who reveled in destruction and breaking rules on delightful display. Sometimes he'd holler like Tarzan. You couldn't help but smile.

Dad, I said, as I walked around a bend and was caught off guard by a beautiful window in the trees that opened onto the Susquehanna River below. Dad, my life has been so defined by loss. I'm not sure I like that very much. 

I'd been thinking of his unguarded, irrepressible him-ness, and those moments of ebullience when it would overflow. The unexpected view of the river and the birdsong and breeze gave me a tiny moment of that, my me-ness. It was like a tearing open, though the torn pieces quickly began to knit themselves back together. I've been seeing so much through that alone-filter lately.

My first post-loss relationship ended about six weeks ago. It concluded with kindness and care, which felt very right, but it left me with a renewed attunement to my widowhood, my outsider status. Oh, right. I don't hang out with other couples because I'm not part of a couple. I don't fit. So there's that, plus the more encompassing emergence we are all finding our footing in together, rejoining other humans after such a long time apart. It was just me and my kids and those closest to us defining what's 'normal' for such a long time; now we're returning to the larger community whose default mode is couples and parents, summer camp forms in which to fill the names of parent #1 and parent #2. School events and concerts where families stand in groups, and mothers and fathers exchange knowing glances over their childrens' heads. We had a long break from all that. I think I forgot we were weird.

I mean, not really. We're totally weird. And not just us; we all have our outlier moments of not-belonging. 

But there's nothing quite like grief to rudely pull you out of the flow of everyday life. And have there ever been more people grieving a recent loss around the world at the same time? All of them - all of us - standing just outside things, struck by the raw strangeness of living and dying. I think of that a lot. The collective sorrow that must be rippling, unseen, just below the surface.  

But Dad, geez. Must I be so freaking melancholy, even on this perfect day? Ever anticipating and mourning endings? I wish you were here to reflect and shine back the rest of who I am. You were so good at that.

How do we hold the endings, honor the people who should be here with us, and make lots of room -  big sky, endless vista-style room - for joy? Abundance? Ferocity? For Tarzanian outbursts and laughing too loud, for never-having-been and never-ever-being normal - in the best possible way? 

For wonder at being the person you are in this very place, in this very moment?

Luckily one doesn't really need to know how. Because when I think about it I see that life, unburdened by sorrow, bursts through with a kind of unpredictable regularity. I feel it. On a walk with the kids, in the kitchen listening to music, when a new poppy muscles it's frilly wild orange skirts out of one of those tiny furry pods in the backyard. Good lord, how do they do it? It's incredible.

I don't want my life to be defined by loss, to see through the loose fibers of a shroud. I want it all to be clear, sharp, and brilliant. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

purring

Over the course of the pandemic, the rules about sleeping in Mama's bed slackened. The allotment for Beatrice doubled, from once to twice a week. I say this as if I had nothing to do with it, as if the rules slackened themselves. As long as she remembers how to sleep in her own bed, I reassure myself, this is totally fine, even though she has been surreptitiously trying to move into my bedroom full time for awhile now. She sneaks off to my bed with an iPad when no one is paying attention, reads in a spot on the floor obscured by my bed from the vantage point of the doorway so she cannot be easily discovered when it's time to set the table, or digs into my basket of scarves when she needs to accessorize. Last night before I said goodnight I gave her a stern talking-to about respecting my space when I found some dirty dishes on my dresser - no one can bring crumbly snacks into my room Beatrice! Okay, okay, sorry, she muttered, staring at the ceiling, totally disregarding that this talk ever happened before it was even over.

And when she is asleep in my bed and I crawl under the covers - after I say goodnight to Frances and Gabriel and shut the cats in the kitchen and the dog in her crate and head upstairs to the hum of the dishwasher in the dark - I am glad that I resisted the urge to burn the old king size mattress purchased to fit a four poster frame that no bedroom has been big enough for since we moved in 2008, a bed so enormous Mike and I often commented on how ridiculous it was to have to inch and scoot across its wide expanse to find each other at night. After Mike died and I bought this new house, I felt absurd sleeping in our big bed that crowded the few other pieces of furniture in my room. Besides the scale problem, why sleep in a spot that exaggerated loneliness?

But it turns out to be an ideal bed in which to weather a pandemic. There's room for the dog to nap, for the whole family to snuggle, for just about any vaccinated friend to sleep over comfortably. And there's room for a lanky eight year old to sprawl across it in sleep and still not touch me when I slide into my side, worn out by the day and unable to tolerate anything but clean sheets grazing my skin.

But in the morning when sleep - even lackluster sleep - has worked its wonders, the sight of her body, slid down past the pillows in a nest of covers with her long hair spread out around her sweet cheek-squished face, opens up a tender nostalgia in me for a moment that is in the middle of happening. I go downstairs, I feed the cats and empty the dishwasher and help Gabriel get breakfast and pack his lunch, listen for Frances getting ready upstairs, and head back upstairs to my sleeping girl. Today I woke her by opening the blinds and pulling out clothes.

Mama?

Yes.

She stretched and reached in my direction, and as I was reluctant to start another busy weekday I dropped the pants I was about to pull on and climbed in next to her. She slid over to me, half asleep, and I felt the warm solidity of her skull nestle against my sternum, bone fitting against bone, just so. A thin arm slid around my back, her tangles tickled my neck and face, I held her heavy breathing body against mine. My heart dropped and pooled and released everything it had been holding onto inside me. I felt a contentment that defies description. It's actually amazing that I've held the line at two nights a week.

Early on in the pandemic I seemed to encounter media stories about how we really know now how much more women do at home. There are so many problems that emerge when one is in the house with your co-parent and life partner who also grew up in this dumb misogynist world all the dang time.

Those stories really broke me. I began avoiding them because they hurt. All I could think was are you fucking serious? I mean, I know what it's like to do too much at home, to live in an unequal domestic partnership. Totally sucks, definitely. Sucks even harder in a pandemic. Men, be better, okay? (Also, one quarter of women are raising kids alone and this oppressive narrative that assumes heterosexual partnership, no matter how messed up, really makes a widowed girl feel like a weirdo). But anyway. I would hear and read about these challenges from women and think: your partner is alive, and right there in your house, with you. You get to touch him. 

Because you can endure a lot when you can touch and be touched. When I think of my husband and my dad, the people I have lost and miss every day, I don't think of what I want to tell them. What is there to say? Everything and nothing. Words are just a series of strange sounds coming out of my mouth.

No, I long to speak to them with my body, to touch their singular selves with my hands, arm, face. To be enveloped and to envelop in a hug. To feel their warmth again, and that contented heart-settling together. A felt, shared sigh of peaceful nervous system entwinement, of loving connection. That is what I miss.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the past months. My heart breaks daily for my student-clients zooming class alone in their dorm rooms, far from the kind of hugs I'm talking about, for my kids who can't bear hug a friend at school, and for my friends - and really, for everyone in the whole wide world - who has lost a beloved person to Covid, unable to kiss their hands at the end, unable to cry in each others' arms in the days that followed. What deeper wells of resilience are running dry in this screen-mediated world, deprived of physical contact?

On Sunday afternoon, I plucked a tiny kitten from the engine of our friends' car. It had been trapped there all day, and a group of neighbors gathered in response to the pathetic meows we could hear coming from under the hood. We tried tempting it out with food, cream, and an alluring piece of purple yarn, but the poor scared thing just backed itself further into the awful black engine-forest. In the end our friend disassembled part of the engine so we could free the kitten. When my hands closed gently around its tiny panicky body, this soft gray kitten whose distress calls had been echoing inside me all afternoon, my knees shook. I wanted to cry and laugh. It surprised me, how overwhelmed I felt, from head to toe. Such a tiny being, such a huge feeling.

As I held her against me and she quieted and even purred, my own body quickly settled too, not unlike the settling that spread inside me with nursing babies, or with a steadying gentle hand on my chest, or my dog's warm body stretched out next to me, breathing slowly in sleep. Or when I invite a student to put a comforting hand on their own body and I do the same while we practice a short meditation together. Or what happens to me in a long overdue hello or goodbye-for-a-long-time hug, if it is the lingering sort; a greater settling and sense of safety unfolds inside until a hidden door swings open in me, and I start to cry.

I've really missed you. We might have to hug for my body to tell me just how much.

complicated heroines

At 8:42 pm last night, I remembered that Beatrice had choir homework due by 9. I had been cleaning up the kitchen to a predictable Spotify-generated playlist of early nineties hip hop, singing and dancing for my dog, enjoying our solitude and trying not to wonder what my kids were doing upstairs. When the thing I had forgotten hit me, I predictably found Beatrice huddled up with an iPad, rushed her downstairs, and set her up with my laptop. Ah, pandemic life: one screen for another! And while she listened and sang, I sat next to her with last Sunday's Book Review. An essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld immediately caught my eye: Heroines of Self-Hate. 

She was talking about the protagonists of some of my very favorite novels from the past few years, that is to say, my widowhood. Of the books I read after Mike died, those that lingered longest were cited in her essay, including both Sally Rooney novels and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I would add Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan to the list, and Fleabag, which isn't a book but is the best show I've ever seen and seems to speak to a similar experience. The women of these stories are whip smart, ambitious in varied ways, and alarmingly detached from their own feelings, unable to operate from an integrated place of core emotion. There is a sense of dangerous careening about in their interpersonal lives, though the narrative voice is often cool, deadpan. They seem completely unfazed by masculine cruelty and sometimes welcome it with unsettling detachment. Sometimes there is a flicker of the possibility of real connection in queer relationships, or more rarely, with vulnerable men. 

But most striking to me, beyond their protagonists' psychological bent, was the way these authors wrote subjective experience as fully embodied. The physical, sensory world seemed more present, more important in those books.

So it was interesting that Rosenfeld focuses on the way these fictional women hurt their own bodies without recognizing that their bodies are central to these books in a way that was more aligned with the stuff of real life - especially life in a particular kind of body that is subjected to scrutiny - than nearly any book I’d ever read before I stumbled upon this genre that is maybe capturing something new and complicated, something far more interesting than simply being about Young Women Who Hurt Themselves.

Have you ever read about what the pain of undiagnosed endometriosis is like? Frances in Conversations with Friends has shocking, inexplicable period pain; how she responds (and doesn't respond) to the pain is woven into her character. It's not the point of the story that she has an emergent chronic condition, but it's important to who she is. When does that ever happen? It's not a cough that leads to pneumonia and a death scene; rather it's a monthly experience of pain that informs how she experiences the world, and that she just lives with. That's it. Like life. Connell in Normal People similarly experiences depression in a physical and incapacitating way, on the floor. Sally Rooney describes the dull headache of fatigue, the cold stone beneath your thin pants on a damp day, the tenderness of a bruise. I was so close to my own experience of trauma and loss when I read her books, not far from the horror of entrenched insomnia and its associated headaches and upset stomach. The memory of being unable to eat, of barely feeling my own body, of moving through the world anyway, was close to me then.  

I encountered those characters as a reader, yes, but also as a woman, a widow, a mother, a therapist. The essayist, I suspect, didn't grow up in a world lit by social media, like the young people I spend my days listening to and the protagonists of these novels. They have always known surfaces take priority over actual flesh, alongside the quiet pressure to package and display oneself, market oneself in a marketplace of likes and followers that never goes dark. They inherited a world that denies the inevitability of pain and loss, the universality of fragility and finitude. Emotions are strangled and pushed and pinched, seen as interruptions and annoyances, even threats. Relentless misogyny sometimes goes underground but is no less trenchant. Young people have been taught to never stop; this is what they expect of themselves.

Is it so surprising then to encounter extraordinary young women who hurt themselves, or who seek out men to hurt them? Whether it's pharmaceutical-induced endless sleep, starvation or violence, a deep pain animates the gesture; unable to feel their own feelings that they must, at some level, desperately need to. So often the characters in these books have parents who have failed them, or worse, abused them; their communities and culture have fallen short too. It doesn't seem accidental that Connell is the one character who enjoys a secure attachment to his mother in Rooney's books; he had to know being loved to find his imperfect way to seeing and loving Marianne.

And Rosenfeld cites the mainstreaming of "therapy" (maybe those quotation marks are indicating the broader culture of wellness/self-care/therapy language) as something these young women have grown up with that marks their difference from previous generations of screwed up women. Yes, that psychiatrist in Rest and Relaxation was hilarious. Absurd! But those quotation marks definitely smelled snide to me. And geez, I don't know, maybe what I do all day serves a cog-in-the-machine purpose of helping people remain functional within an exploitive capitalist system whose very nature is dehumanizing. Whose very nature makes people sick inside. Maybe The Man fucking loves therapy. But I find it instead to be, at its best, inherently radical: the work I do with my clients hopefully leads to questioning those systems that have taught them they are no more valuable than their surfaces, skin, earning potential, brand. Unconditional embodied care and acceptance hopefully helps them know that they are always already incalculably valuable, simply because they are. 

Take that, you big dumb Man.

So anyway, yes, the human condition can be a real bitch, as Rosenfeld concedes, and these female characters enact the pressures and pains of our particular time: not being able to feel, longing for connection, inhabiting inchoate ambition and creativity. A reluctance and fear of stepping inside one's own life and filling the space, overflowing it. Living inside a body that hurts, gets hungry and tired and drunk and horny, bruises, bleeds - within a culture that denies imperfection and rejects bodies that do not adhere to an airbrushed problem-free pale form. An awareness of the crushing injustices we live inside of. A complicated relationship to power. And within all this, every time a character risks hope, vulnerability, connection, creation, valuing her own existence, love - even in small, mundane ways - it reads like a triumph. 

I loved reading these books because they were honest.

Now I'm about halfway through Deacon King Kong, by James McBride. You could say a lot of things about Sportcoat, the 70-something always-drunk deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church in the Cause projects, but he is a man that lives smack dab in the center of his own life. The other characters populating the Cause do, too. Their feelings and their bodies are their own, despite the forces aligned against them, giving shape to their experience. They know how to love one another. The contrast makes the lonely young white women of expansive Hong Kong and Dublin and New York seem all the more alien to themselves, strange silver fish in a very peculiar kind of tank, swimming along because despite it all, because of it all, it is simply good to be.

dear Michael

Mike. I woke up so early, like I have been every day over the past few weeks, as if my body has been preparing for this by recreating a whisper of the terrible fatigue of those days in the hospital three years ago with you. Between our old blue down comforter and Beatrice snuggled up asleep on my right, little lanky oven that she is, it was too hot. The weather has been changing. Last night I went to a tennis lesson at Buchanan Park in a t shirt. 

Tennis lesson? you say, with a little skeptical lift in your eyebrows. Yeah, for real. It's not pretty but it's fun, and I can tolerate how bad I am without crying (you of all people know that's no small thing), and my teacher is this Trumpy sociable older guy ...the whole thing is so improbable. I hadn't had a lesson since the fall, and I ran after work to the tennis courts, through crowds at the dog park and the playground and along all the paths, people who were joyfully emerging from their winter bodies and soaking in the sunshine together. I was one of them, grinning the whole time. You know how the sunshine and a chance to move can infect me with an irrepressible bounce. Well, it still does. Even on the eve of your day.

I had that thought out there: I am smiling, and tomorrow is your day. We call it Papa's Day. What it means to us is changing, just as our grief is changing. There is the work of time on us, of having accumulated so much life without you (that part is brutal, impossible). But then there is the fact of the children growing up. They think and feel and move and touch and listen differently now than they did then. They have grown in courage, in words, in capability, in soul. It's that sweetness of parenting that we got to experience together, the shared delight in witnessing a beloved person become more and more who they are. Their struggles, their triumphs, all of it, the acute moments of their becoming. The things they say. Always, Mike, it's the things they say. You understand. They are amazing.

I love them so much it hurts. It's a comfort that so many other people love them too, but Mike, only you love them like I love them. It's so hard to do this without you. It's hard to hold the ache of motherlove by myself. I don't have your clear eyes to search for across their heads so many times a day - or below their heads, as the case may be. You wouldn't believe how tall Gabriel is. What would that have been like, standing back to back and having to contend with the back of your boy's dark head triumphantly leaning against the top of your blonde one? 

When we went through the years of cancer-soaked crisis, and to be honest, for a long time before that, everything was about you and the children. Your illness was yours. You were the one who had to endure so much pain, unthinkable to me now. I was driving to the store after dropping Beatrice off at choir rehearsal the other night, thinking about an easy peasy semi-processed dinner option I might get, given how late it would be by the time we got home, and how happy food in packages makes our children. And that line of thinking suddenly got derailed by the memory of trying to find packaged microwavable foods that were transplant-friendly and calorie-rich, that you could both swallow and tolerate the taste of, and that we could keep in the mini fridge in your hospital room on the transplant floor. It took a lot of our collective brain power. Those awful little pasta containers with bright red plastic lids, the whole milk yogurt cups marketed to babies. I thought of that, and then I saw your pale arm resting on the chair in your hospital room, emerging from your thin white t shirt, a posture that spoke sadness. I saw just that, Mike. And I nearly broke at the wheel of the minivan at a stoplight on Lititz Pike. Sometimes the unbelievable cruel facts of what we went through hit me so hard. I wailed. I wailed for you, and for me.

That's a change. Only lately have I begun to know in my bones that it happened to me, too. I was not simply a vessel for your pain and the children's pain; I was not just a hand to hold or the caregiving I did my imperfect best to provide. People used to ask me then, how are you? and I honestly had no clue. Now sometimes I feel compelled to go back to those hard memories and touch them with my own hands, my own heart. How was I? Oh. I was hurting, so much. 

I remember telling you one morning in the sunny kitchen on Elm Street that we would be okay. You didn't have to worry about us. I could handle it. Ha! Like it was something I could add to the endless to do list: tackle a lifetime of widowhood and solo parenting. Without you. What the fuck did I know then? I could handle scheduling staging procedures in New York and Philadelphia hospitals, I could handle giving you those awful shots in your belly and operating the IV tubing after the transplant. Living through this grief, raising our children without you, this has been something else entirely, requiring every ounce of love and strength I have been lucky enough to soak up since I arrived on this earth.

My heart has stretched and broken and stretched and broken again. I didn't know anything could hurt this much. It was shocking, after you died. 

But also Mike, we are okay. It's weird. I'm becoming a really good therapist. I love my friends so much. Our dog Ramona is a source of pure delight and endless irritation. I started therapy over the summer and it's good. The kids are just amazing. They surprise me all the time.

I laugh my way through missed shots on the tennis court. I surprise myself too.

What I miss the most is your singular spirit and body. Your you-ness. What I would give to climb into bed next to you asleep on your side, to slide my cheek along the smooth space between your shoulder blades, and not say anything at all. 

Love,

Meagan

going places

My mom and I decided to take a little trip together for her birthday in April last night. A trip! Together! It was a thrilling idea to put in motion, one that will also feel unreal until we are slamming the trunk shut on our packed bags. We will both be vaccinated by then and as cautious as ever. We will take a sharp inhale and remind ourselves that it's okay, and then put our toes into an old/new way of life that we've nearly forgotten how to live. I think it will be really good. 

This past week two of my three children reclined in the orthodontist chair for an impossibly long time while braces were carefully and painstakingly applied to their teeth. Musical auditions were prepared. The cartwheel was perfected. I went to the dentist who told me I clench my teeth in my sleep. Another mock trial scrimmage was successfully completed. The dishwasher broke again, and the garbage disposal followed suit. The tv repair man came back for a second time and finally fixed it. There were in-school days, and at-home snow school days. I conducted about thirty therapy sessions from my dining room. Ramona ate one of my running shoes. On Wednesday after dropping off Gabriel at martial arts, I got out of the car and walked carefully around the mounds of dirty snow to get to the sidewalk with an ache in my chest, a tightness that takes me right back to the worst days when Mike was sick. Everything has been happening so fast.

And then last night, I dreamt I was driving a van as evening fell on mountain roads. The darkness became increasingly opaque, and there were no lights along the highway. I was driving a little too fast but couldn't seem to slow down. Suddenly I looked at the interior of the car and realized there were no lights within either, though the van continued to hurtle around curving roads that I could barely see. I couldn't tell how fast I was going, if there was a radio to turn on, or how much gas was left. All was utter darkness. I held my breath, knowing this couldn't end well. 

Suddenly everything was bright and loud, and I knew another car had collided head on into us. A huge truck, with a shining grill approaching me at eye level. In the moment of impact time slowed down and down, and I turned to the passenger seat on my left (why? was I in England??) instinctively, desperately trying to shield Mike from whatever might fly through the windshield with my arms and hold him against the seat. I could see his illumined form in profile, thin limbs, short blond hair, in a favorite faded navy short-sleeved shirt, bumped and thrown about in slow motion, lifting off the seat into the air over and over. My arms moved too slowly, as if through molasses, unable to hold him and keep him safe.

An electric buzz resonated through my own bouncing body, I heard scraping metal and felt my eyes burning with the brightness of headlights and flying sparks. All I could think was please let him be okay, please let him escape this unharmed, please. But I knew I was helpless to stop it. 

And then I woke suddenly, an hour before my alarm, heart racing, arms reaching across the empty bed. I opened my eyes, took in the darkened room, the closed blinds and basket of laundry on the floor, the sound of an eager neighbor already out shoveling the sidewalk, and reflected back the reality to myself to calm my panic: that was a dream. A nightmare. 

I rolled onto my back, looked at the ceiling, put my hands on my chest and waited. 

It came to me: you can't save him Meagan. He's already dead.

Oh. Yes, I know. I do know that - though my racing heart took a little while to catch up. 

The truth is that in real life we four keep barreling through time, up and over mountain passes and around tricky curves. We keep growing and life keeps happening. Beatrice will turn eight in less than two weeks. One of the last times she saw Mike was on her fifth birthday, and so much has changed since then. 

I can't save him, and I can't keep him with us. Every day we partake in this rich and challenging and unpredictable life is another day farther from the life we shared together, the treasure of being a family of five. The panic of my dream is the terror of losing him all over again, of losing him again and again and again, helpless to stop it, as we travel forward into the future - a future, it is worth pointing out, that beckons to us with special weekend trips, unfolding children who delight me anew at least once a day, old and new friends, a deepening of my therapy practice, novel experiences, a growing confidence in myself and my ability to drive this van full of people I love. It is good. And yet. 

It scares me too. 

we have the weather

On my drive to and from a state forest to meet a friend for a short, sweet, snowy camping trip this weekend I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie's short story Zikora. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, where Zikora, a powerful DC lawyer originally from Nigeria, is giving birth to her son. His father abruptly left the moment she told him that she was pregnant and refuses to answer her texts and calls. The only family with her is her mother, severe and quiet in the corner, nearly ready to slap her if she screams too loudly or otherwise exposes her vulnerability before the assembled nurses and doctor.

I was rapt. The reader was great. The raw descriptions of the indignities of labor, delivery, and postpartum tenderness had an immediacy that took my breath away. I might have sighed and grumbled and even yelled at Kwame, his controlled, frightened voice recognizable in the mouth of the female reader which emerged tiny and tinny from my phone's speaker, nestled in my lap as I crossed muted green-gray Central Pennsylvanian hills. Clearly Kwame is not a real person. Yet I raged at him all the same. He looked so good on the outside; inside he was useless.

But when all the feelings that a short story that touches on single motherhood, misogyny, mother-daughter resentments, abortion, racial disparities in maternal mortality, an infant who cannot latch and screams at the breast, and at least three or four other issues that naturally send a woven ribbon of anguish, anger, tension and love straight through me had settled and calmed before the quiet trees and brilliant cold stars at night, I was left with a palpable, awed closeness to my own first days with a newborn babe. 

The world became small all around me. I ceased to be interested in much that happened outside my house; there wasn't any available brain space in addition to what was required for nap schedules, breastfeeding adjustments, diaper changing and laundering, worried tracking of weight gain and ribcage-exposing sharp baby breaths. I was always sticky. My breasts became enormous, hard and engorged; my milk didn't come in until the fifth day. Our bodies' boundaries blurred. I wanted to touch my baby's skin all the time, and when I grew exhausted and couldn't stand to hold her for a moment longer and handed her to another pair of eager arms, I grew impatient to have her back. Sometimes the not-having-her felt like a physical ache, more acute than the fatigue and worry. 

Everything that mattered in those days fit inside a room. Time felt like one long day: there was daytime and nighttime, but very little distinguished them from one another. 

Babies grow, and gradually one is able to reconnect with the world outside that room. Night reacquires its blessed significance. Weekdays and weekends, summer and winter, each becomes meaningful and distinct once again, and when they do, one is more than ready.

The only other time that mirrored that degree of world-shrinking was when Mike was sick. Other people did things outside our windows - they took vacations, argued about politics, planned to have drinks with friends and went for long bike rides. Not us. After the stem cell transplant, day and night blended together, stitched together loosely with routine gestures of care: assembling the IV meds, applying cream to the strange rashes that a baby immune system could not prevent, taking his temperature, bringing his meds. We were on a tiny island where time slid by strangely. Like with our first newborn baby, we were beset with worry. 

My children will go back to school for the first time since March over the next three weeks. I am thrilled for them, especially Beatrice, to finally be with other children - yes, definitely, thrilled - but I am also sad to say goodbye to this particular island we've inhabited and decorated and refined together for nearly a year. 

Not long ago Gabriel reflected that the quality of time has changed since the pandemic started. 

It feels like it's been forever, and it feels like it's been no time at all. 

Does it ever. We talked about it, speculating that without external markers of the seasons like sports games, music performances and holiday parties, without places to go throughout the day to mark morning noon and night, time slides by undifferentiated. We don't register it passing the way we used to. 

All we really have these days, he said, is weather.   

Truth. But also, weather isn't too shabby, Gabriel! The sky is pretty nice. I can't get enough of it. 

(They all roll their eyes when I start talking about the sky.)

The other thing we have is our connections to one another, which run deep and deeper still. Do our arms ache when we aren't together? Probably not. We could all use a break for sure. But I know the attachments we share and the rhythm with which we move through our days of work and school in this snug little house (punctuated by screams when the wifi drops out, or someone's favorite spot is taken, or the dog tears a misplaced book to bits) is precious to me. It's weird to say it, but I love this island. I love the sound of my children's teacher's voices in the next room. I love movie nights and lazy pancakes on the weekend and feeling like a hike is a major outing. I love our little pod of neighbors and I love the intimacy the island has gifted all of us. 

I'm excited to walk Beatrice to school next week. But I'll miss her.