crybaby

Yesterday I joked to a friend at the playground after school that I hadn't checked Class Dojo in a week because I couldn't bear to. Not another bit of school-related app-facilitated information could make it through the sinister shine of my phone screen and into my brain. Thus, Beatrice didn't know to wear pajamas and bring a stuffy for the cozy fun last day before break and was dressed in her customary jeans and sweatshirt. 

Hahaha! She feels left out and it's because I couldn't make myself pay attention. Haha! 

Jokes are funniest when they are true. Uncomfortably so is best. I had arrived at the playground in the drippy cold weather pleased with my decision to take the day off so I could luxuriate in the after school experience. I'd make Bea happy, see friends, and get to feel like the kind of mom who can pick up. But alas, instead I was the kind of mom who doesn't keep up with school communications and whose daughter is annoyed at her because of it. 

I felt that heart-tug again submitting college applications with Frances (why haven't I done more to help?), and watching Gabriel get a ride that I could have given him a half-hour later but not at that moment. I feel it all the time, even though I know that I am doing the best I can and my Oura ring reminds me that I average between 0 and 4 minutes of 'restorative time' daily - meaning I never stop. And I don't like that! I desperately want regular down time, for reading and writing and watching TV and staring at the ceiling and cooking up plans and ideas. I am not proud of being stretched thin. In fact I hate it. 

But even more, I hate that my kids only have me. I don't want them to be made aware of their status as children of a single parent, which translates as having 100% less parental and adult support than they came into this world with and could reasonably expect to continue enjoying for the foreseeable future. They arrived as children possessed of two adults who loved them more than anything and would coordinate to accompany them through preschool tantrums, difficult homework, athletic events, class parties, college visits - two adults that would coordinate in such a way that they wouldn't have to be achingly aware of the sacrifices involved in being that kind of parent, an involved and engaged parent who shows up on time, knows where the game is, can give other kids rides and contribute to the bake sale. 

I know Mike is dead. And I know I am half of the adult force I once was. Yet I can't quite accept that reality for my three children. That stubborn refusal means I feel terrible, just terrible, whenever those brute facts break through everyday life.

Friends will reassure me that even with a co-parent they too drop balls, and can't always make it to events, and generally struggle to balance work and kids. And their husbands are useless anyway! They never remember dentist appointments! Uh huh. Yeah, totally. And I want to spit at them. And cry. Like a three year old who is told her fear is irrational. There's nothing to be afraid of honey! My mistakes and limitations feel like evidence of my children's loss-in-action; theirs do not.

This is our fifth Christmas without Mike, and I feel the pressure as much as ever. If I don't make a proper Christmas for my kids, their half-orphaned status will push against the day from the inside out and threaten to topple all the chocolate and presents and the whole damn tree festooned with ornaments from other times. As if it weren't bad enough to have Papa's stocking hanging below the stairs, empty on Christmas morning. (Though it seems worse not to hang it at all alongside the rest of our stockings). I don't want this holiday to be a shred harder than it naturally is. I want them to feel loved and cared for, to feel joy without the pinch of absence. 

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this method of self-compassion: when we find pain inside, we can hold it tenderly, imagining it to be a crying baby. There is no need to argue with a crying baby, or to scold or reason or shake a finger at her tear-streaked face. All you can do is hold her gently in her inconsolability, waiting for the distress to peter out within the safe container of your warm arms, and the quiet, fatigue-laced peace to come. 

On the fourth day of the mindfulness retreat I went on last fall, in my growing and unexpected comfort with meditation, I noticed some nasty thoughts come up there on my round cushion. You aren't really meditating, Meagan. You aren't doing any of this, you're pretending to do it, you're pretending this is meaningful. You're not even on this retreat. You are so full of shit. 

Oh man. I felt an immediate, familiar sinking, a heaviness, a recognition. It's so true. I am totally full of shit. I can't believe it. How could I have proceeded this far without remembering my own glaring fraudulence? 

But then, with nowhere else to go, I sank even lower, past the thoughts to a deeper recognition. Wait. Hang on just a minute. These fears are just more crying babies inside! And they need me. 

So I stroked their hot red cheeks, and and held them in my arms. I nursed them, an imagining that brings the same deep embodied calm from the many years I spent nursing the crying babies who live outside of my body. Eventually they settled, and fell sweetly asleep. 

That day I learned in my bones that there is no pain that can't be transformed by love. 

And now, over a year later, when I am a little bit more grounded than usual, I remember that. I do believe treating the pain - the smallness, resentment, grief, and fear I feel for my children (and by extension myself) as they grow up in a community of friends who mostly enjoy two involved, imperfect parents - as the nursery full of crying babies that it is is the only way forward. The only way that promises healing. 

To pick them up, whisper shh, shh, shh in their tiny delicate ears, tolerate their heaviness in my arms. This is so much harder than crying to my boyfriend how impossible this all feels sometimes, or attacking housework with aggressive desperation, or waking up far too early to get things done so I feel some sense of control. I imagine I'll always do those things sometimes. But this season, I want to remember to occasionally pause all the maneuvering, the pursuit of an illusory dream of greater efficiency, the strained effort to be two parents when I am only one. It is advent, after all. I am trying to pause, invite tenderness, and wait.  

happiness

I went out for lunch yesterday with a woman I don't know very well. Her husband died three months ago and she bravely reached out to me after a mutual friend connected us; I was touched and truly happy that she did. We talked about widowhood and how impossible the first weeks and months are, about cruel paperwork and finances, about her husband and how terrible it is for her to do things they once did together without him.

She wanted to know how I did and do this. When do things got better, how do they get better, how does one make it through this darkness? If only I could offer her a blueprint, a map; instead I shared some books, resources, people who were helpful to me. I told her it stays awful for a long time and I honestly don't know how I journeyed from there to here, but I did, and that's saying something. 

Then she asked if I was able to enjoy things. Can I feel happy now? Does it come back?  

Oh, yes, definitely, I told her. It comes back. Just not the way it was before. Now joyful moments are lined with tender ache. When one of my kids triumphs, when I behold a beautiful sight or experience something new, a part of me squeezes because Mike is missing it. I can't share it with him, I can't look across a room and smile at him with a quiet mutual understanding that yes, this is marvelous. That absence lends a bittersweet cast to moments that were once simply happy.

It's been a packed week. So many things have been happening, and I've been scrambling to keep up. During the height of busy-ness I wasn't sleeping well, and by last night I was completely exhausted. I got into bed, read half a page, fell deeply asleep within minutes, and woke up eight blessed hours later to the sounds of my teenagers getting ready for school. 

Under the covers in my quiet bedroom it was warm and dark, and beyond that, out in the hall, it was bright and chilly. I couldn't force myself into that space. So I called to Frances, who came in to hug me and explain she and the rest of her morning ride-to-school crew were leaving early to stop for coffee en route. Gabriel waved from the hall on his way downstairs. Buried in my nest, I waved back. I listened to Frances, Gabriel, Tahra and Leo bustling around in the kitchen and the cats wandered into my room to walk back and forth across me and meow their wonderings about when I would come down to feed them. I was undeterred. I scratched behind their ears peacefully.

Wrapped in a blanket, Beatrice came in and stood next to my bed, looking down at me and my uncharacteristic sloth with mild concern. 

Mama, it's really time to get up. We'll be late. 

Yes, but it's so cozy in here. And I like listening to everyone downstairs. 

She paused, then cautiously lifted the edge of my comforter and felt for my arm. 

Oh Mama, she smiled. You're so warm. 

I beckoned to her. Come on in, I said. Just for a minute. We won't be late. 

She slid under the covers and stretched out long next to me, then rolled to face the painting of a comet on my bedroom wall in her little spoon position while I wrapped an arm around her ribs. Our legs arranged themselves into their customary alternating stack. We sighed in unison, warm and safe in the dark, while below the teenagers shouted to each other and slung backpacks and clomped heavy feet on the way out the front door. In their wake the house grew suddenly quiet, and sighed along with us.

Beatrice's back nestled warm against me. My nervous system whistled a happy tune and kicked a pebble contentedly down a tree-lined dirt lane, blue skies overhead. My bed was the very best place in the world to be, and my awareness of the ticking clock - pulling us towards animals in need of breakfast, the busy morning ahead, the evening of dance class and guitar lessons and making dinner and even towards Bea's fast-approaching adolescence and greater physical independence from me - didn't diminished it's best-ness in the slightest. It made it even better. 

In that precious moment, I felt perfectly, peacefully, simply happy. It lasted a few minutes, after which I threw off the warm covers to force us into action, and the day's cogs and wheels began whirring away. 

But the feeling lingered. I haven't forgotten. I'll tell my new friend the next time we have lunch.  

everyday heroics

After my last session this afternoon, I searched my inbox with the words 'teacher conferences' and found the itinerary for my evening at the high school. It started in 30 minutes, and would last until after eight. The only problem was that I hadn't arranged for anyone to pick Bea up from dance at seven. 

I'd asked my mom a few hours earlier when I finally confronted the fact that I could not be in two places at once, but she couldn't do it. And I couldn't bear to ask anyone but the woman who gave me life and is biologically determined to love me for a favor. Not after the cascade of asks prompted by Tuesday's cross country banquet which coincided with dance class drop offs and pick ups, my minivan not starting that morning, a sick babysitter, losing my phone for four entire hours while I was on call, yesterday's early dismissal from school, arriving a few minutes late to every session I had today because I squeezed in an orthodontist appointment and Beatrice's teacher conference before my morning sessions and those ran late, and needing a ride for Gabriel to get to his guitar lesson tonight. 

It seems that all I have done this week, actually this life - at least this widowed single parent life - is ask people for favors. Sometimes I can't make myself ask, even though I'm thinking about it before I go to sleep for the six nights prior, not until the last pressured minute, and then I have to ask in a much worse, less respectful of other people's time kind of way (I can't believe I'm asking this but is there any way you could grab Bea after swim tonight blah blah blah I appreciate it so much blah blah blah I can't believe I forgot to ask earlier UGH GROAN put me out of my misery already make me stop putting exclamation points on the end of the countless thank yous I text a day so I appear somehow less threatening and like the kind of person you can't help but take pity on and don't resent having to help all the time.)

So yeah. There was nothing to be done but cancel the last four conferences of the evening, since Beatrice was already at dance class and could not be left outside in the dark in the middle of Lancaster County when it was over. I scrambled to sign into the school website to use their messaging system and sent a bunch of apologies to my kids' wonderful teachers, probably with lots of unnecessary exclamation points in them, decided I'd finish my notes tomorrow, and ran out to the parking lot.

A new favorite album filled the gray spaces of my car as I drove from my office to the high school. I slowed to a stop at a busy red light and my eyes rested on a beautiful pair ahead of me on the sidewalk. They were a young mother and her skinny seven or eight year old son, walking side by side. They both had excellent posture, and they both wore capes. Wait - what? As I rolled closer to them, I could see from behind my windshield that their capes were in fact a white towel around the boy's shoulders and a pastel striped pillowcase around the mother's. They held the linens clasped around their necks so that they fluttered behind them. They wore the slightly off ensembles of recent immigrants or refugees, people I often met with when I worked in the clinic, dressed by church clothing drives or the mission at the other end of town. They looked a little out of place yet so regal, the way they proceeded together in those capes. 

I suppressed an urge to roll my window down and smile and wave and say: you two look like superheroes! To somehow salute them, acknowledge their brilliant presence on the cracked city sidewalk in the golden November light, already fading fast, a sight so arresting that it tethered my racing, fretful mind back to this body, this earth.

When the parts of me came back together like that all at once, I cried. A thousand tender thoughts moved like a rushing river through me, unformed awarenesses and memories more felt than truly thought. They were about motherhood and childhood, perseverance and untold stories held quietly inside, the kind my clients entrust to me, about love so big it can't help but push against the edges of your heart and ache there until something gives and the space expands. About aloneness, about fearing you aren't enough for your children and knowing you are at the same time, and about how everything changes and changes and sometimes the best you can do is stay close to the people you love and walk proudly through it in a cape of your own design. 

It was sudden and surprising. I felt my throat tighten, the gasp and sting and heat. The light glowed green, and tears gathered as I drove on. One overflowed, spilling a hot trail down my cheek that then cooled in the evening air, becoming a soothing stripe just as comforting as a cold pack fetched by one of the kids when I hurt myself. 

When I left work, I wasn't feeling like a superhero at all. Then I saw two superheroes right there on the street, shining their humanity so brightly that I could feel my own, such that the mere sight of them let all the you're not doing enough and you're a burden slide out of me in a few big sobs. I made it to the school, where I ran into other parents I know and met a few of my kids' teachers. They like and support Frances and Gabriel a lot, which made me smile. Beatrice enthusiastically described her final across the floor sequence on the way home from dance and though I couldn't really follow, that made me smile too. Then dinner, dishes, laundry, tv, a snuggly goodnight.

It was enough. More than enough: it overflowed.

 

the descendants of hwyel dda

Sometimes I share a show with one of my kids. During September, aka The Ailing Month (colds, then my first and rather brutal round of still-lingering covid), Frances and I watched Better Things. Okay, after I tested positive and kept getting sicker, I left her in the dust and finished it on my own. But it was still fun to share.  

She and Beatrice return again and again to Gilmore Girls, which I sometimes dip into with them. Beatrice and I loved watching Ghosts. We all watched Never Have I Ever together. And for years Gabriel and I have been watching The Last Kingdom. 

It's about Saxons and Danes in late 9th century England. The Last Kingdom has its immediate pleasures, like the sexy cast covered in leather and furs and tattoos and aerial views of warriors on horseback hurtling towards each other on green hillsides. But there are other pleasures in it for me that ripple out, like remembering watching this show with Mike after the children were in bed when it first came out. And how Mike enjoyed my historical curiosity and, while sick, discovered a mostly-forgotten titan of historical fiction from the 1950s, Alfred Duggan, who wrote a novel about the life of Alfred the Great. He found me a copy and I gobbled it up, telling Mike about Wessex for days (and I happened to have just read a Thomas Hardy novel set much later in a fictional Wessex; synchronicity!).  

There's the pleasures of sharing that historical curiosity with Gabriel now, and looking up real figures from the show like Aethelfled, Lady of Mercia and just the other night, Hwyel Dda, a king of Wales who is, we are convinced - based in no small part on my grandfather's stories - our ancestor. King Howell the Good! Yes! That's our guy.

On this general history kick, last night Gabriel told us about the lead up to World War 1, which he is studying in school. He made sense of the tensions and allegiances that developed following the Franco-Prussian War for Beatrice and explained to me, a wizened old woman of 45, that Prussians are simply Germans. Holy shit. I always wondered who those Prussians were. I mean, they rhyme with Russians. Yet...no. My mind was blown. 

His storytelling skills are considerable, honed over hundreds of hours as dungeon master. In time we pulled out the enormous atlas for some visual aids. A sheaf of charming imaginary maps in Frances and Gabriel's childish hands from years ago fell out of it. We moved them and the forgotten dinner plates aside to spread the maps of Europe out on the kitchen table and trace old boundaries on top of new ones. Gabriel explained that Tsar Nicholas, King George, and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins, yet even intimate family connections couldn't stop the war.

I got distracted and began studying the pages of the atlas that showed European UNESCO world heritage sites, dreaming of our vacation next summer. I found a gorgeous photograph of craggy Skellig Michael and its impossible monastic settlement founded by Saint Finan in the 9th century. 

Mike, check this out. It's Finan! 

Poring over another map, Gabriel didn't hear me clearly. Neither did Beatrice. But I did. A little shock registered, then a momentary grasping of my heart. It just came out in the excitement of the moment. I called Gabriel Mike. That never happened before. 

He looked up at me, a question on his face. I felt very still. 

I just called you Mike by accident. 

I could see him bracing quietly for some unknown big emotion to escape from me as I stood there looking back at him, still leaning on my hands, flat against the photographs on the table. A big feeling from Mama could upend the pleasurable momentum, moving through stories and maps and summer plans. 

It's okay, I said, wanting to reassure us both. That was just...strange.

Finan is our favorite character on The Last Kingdom and we are gripped by fear for his life during every battle scene. Obviously Mike would feel the same way about charming Finan. And Skellig Michael's name comes from the archangel, just like Mike's. And sometimes we teasingly call Gabriel Dad when he is being very Papa-like and giving Beatrice a hard time for wasting food or reasonably suggesting consequences for wayward sisters and pets. And, you know, perimenopausal or covid- or age- related brain fogginess naturally leads one to screw up loved one's names all the time.

But still. I said it like I expected Mike to come into the kitchen and look over my shoulder. 

Because a part of me did. And in the end, after the disorientation subsided, I decided I treasure that part of me, formed over twenty years, that hasn't gotten the memo. That still lives connected to my old way of being, a part whose first thought after encountering something cool, beautiful, exciting, tied to our shared interests is: I can't wait to show Mike. 

And how very tender, how very lucky, that we hold so many of those shared interests in common with our children, fellow lovers of this mysterious, precious world, glorious descendants of Hwyel Dda. I can't wait to show them, too. 

in which the relentless passing of time, made glaringly explicit by the first day of school, left me beset by melancholy

Yesterday I came in from walking Ramona in the cooling humidity, the still air just like the air of a thousand last-day-of-summer-vacations past, and went upstairs to find Beatrice asleep and drooling on my bed, stretched across bare mattress and a tangle of stripped dirty sheets. It was around noon. Beatrice never naps, but she'd been up past 1 am the night before. 

She and her brother arrived in Philadelphia Saturday afternoon after a week at Experience Camp. After I picked them up, per Beatrice's insistence, we went in search of fast food. On our way, Gabriel told stories about camp. When I asked Beatrice for her stories, she started to cry. She told us through tears that she didn't know why she was crying and also didn't know why she couldn't tell me about camp even though she wanted to. When I pulled over so that Gabriel could pee, I climbed into the backseat with her and hugged her. Then the tears slowed. I could feel her hot limbs and face begin to relax against me. When Gabriel got back into the car and I made a move to slide back into the drivers seat, she clung to me. Just a few more minutes Mama. I eventually had to remove her little iron paws forcibly.  

Eventually we made it to an odd, desolate Wendy's where my mom met us with Frances and her friend, fresh from the King of Prussia mall, and we swapped. She took Beatrice and Gabriel home, and I took the girls to see Brandi Carlisle back in Philly. Which was, as you might have already guessed, a completely amazing show. But we got home so late and Beatrice was waiting up, confused and fretful. I told her to get into my bed and close her eyes, an order she gratefully complied with. By the time I joined her I felt too exhausted to sleep. I read for a long time, listening to her even breath.

Then Sunday was the last day of summer, and as I wandered in and out of my house and yard a part of me kept looking around and asking: shouldn't you be doing something? Shouldn't you have taken Beatrice to church for the blessing of the backpacks? Bought more lunchbox snacks? Offer some fun end of summer activity? Isn't this house a mess? Wouldn't you feel better instating some order, or buying new shoes for someone?

But after talking with my wise boyfriend I mostly let go of the anxiety that fuels my wheel-spinning and gave in to what my tired, melancholy body wanted, oppressive notions of effective, responsible mothering be damned. Beatrice and I re-watched Never Have I Ever with her siblings, read from our favorite book series, and shared some of those stories from camp that weren't ready to come out on Saturday. I read the paper in bed while she listened to an audio book. We did nearly nothing all day, and what we did do was mostly enacted in a horizontal position. 

This morning, I drove Gabriel and his girlfriend to high school for their very first day. He forgot his sneakers and we circled back for them. We asked someone holding a clipboard in a parking lot where they should go and they jumped out of the car, heading in two directions, anxious to arrive on time. Good luck! I called after them. I looked down and saw Gabriel had forgotten his water bottle in the car. Beatrice and I figured his cross country coach wouldn't let him collapse from dehydration in practice later. Right?

She and I went home to gather her things, and then walked to school. Now I'm realizing that I forgot to put a note in her lunch. Sigh. On the first day of fourth grade too! As she explained to me earlier, we're both in denial about this transition so avoided dealing with all the related preparations. 

I watched her line up with her friends in the playground before entering the school. I met and chatted with a mother whose son is in Beatrice's class. I looked around the sea of adorable children and parents and felt so heavy. When they filed into the building, I reluctantly shuffled towards my office.

The tears gathered in my throat and sat there, waiting. As I passed the front of the school, a goldfinch fluttered right into my field of vision, swooping in showy wild loops before landing on a wire over the school parking lot. I began associating Mike's spirit with bright male goldfinches after he died; this one really took my breath away. 

Mike! Gabriel is in high school, tomorrow is Frances's first day of senior year. It's all happening so fast. Please. Look out for them, make sure they're okay?

But the way that goldfinch was making himself known to me, alone on the sidewalk, meant I really didn't need to ask. It was a visitation meant to reassure. 

And like a child lost in the grocery store who begins to cry once she is finally found and safe again, that's when the tears came, and they kept coming all the way to my office. When I walked in, my boss Lauren took one look at me and asked what was wrong.

My kids went to school, I sobbed. She smiled. I cry-laughed. 

They did? They went to school? That's terrible.

I know. They're the worst. They keep growing up and they never stop. Can you believe this shit?  

yesterday's madness

Yesterday this day's madness did prepare. -Omar Khayyam

Today I am watching a continuing education training in my office, listening to the presenter explain that neuroscience has discovered that the human brain is far more plastic than originally believed. That emotional learnings can be erased and replaced with new learnings. He is describing methods of memory reconsolidation, how we can unlearn the unhelpful things the past has taught us and update that learning into something new. We can release this day's madness through therapeutic erasure.  

He's talking about unlearning stuff like agoraphobia, compulsions, panic attacks, suicidal ideation. Stuff that really gets in the way. But I find myself feeling protective of the pathologies the past teaches us.

I remember Mike telling me once, in our twenties, that it seemed I would periodically twist the knife in my heart that was my dad's death. On purpose. That I wanted to feel the pain afresh. Mike wasn't so sure that was a good thing.  

What would he say now about how reassuring I find the bouts of pain I suffer over his absence? What would this presenter say to the way I welcome the wave of knee-buckling grief when it comes for me, relief mingling with its crash and swirl? Because for me, the acute heartache of grief isn't pathology; it's a sharp tug on a chain of love. It's a reminder of my tether to the past I am afraid of losing, anchored deep in my bones and muscles and organs.  

I know that I am relearning lots of things, and it's a good thing. The time of trauma response is ebbing away, only rarely stirred up in felt ways. I sleep and eat, I send my children off on adventures, I ask for help, I offer help. No one wants to hold onto the emotional learning that makes life hard to live. But still. Our past is a precious thing, no matter the pain we lived then. 

I've been taken up by unsought, shockingly painful grief waves more often than usual over the past few weeks. It's because of a lot of things: I am in a serious, loving relationship and for the first time in well over four years I am considering what partnership might mean for me. It stirs up lots of fears, old (unwanted) learnings from past hurts, tender memories. I started watching Station Eleven (whew), a show and book I had been afraid of for quite some time. Frances has been writing exquisite poems and sharing them with me. I'm reading Homegoing. Beatrice and Gabriel are at Experience Camp, an amazing week-long camp for children who have lost parents or siblings. As we packed and prepared, we talked a lot about Papa. 

And oh yeah, all my stolen writing time this summer has been dedicated to editing a Homemade Time-based manuscript. I'm sorting through a thousand moments, trying to train an objective eye on their shifting surfaces and how I spoke them then. I've changed.  

Time keeps pulling us along; my grief yelps in protest. Art is holding and offering up time's strangeness; my heart takes it in and nods. Yep.

Monday is the first day of school; Frances is starting her senior year and focused on college applications. Gabriel will begin high school. Beatrice is growing fast and furious into a lanky fourth grader. I'm back at work, thinking about what I want for myself professionally and how to sink into this time we have before our family changes in very big ways next fall. I've been seeing us through my boyfriend's gentle eyes, treasuring who and what and how we are right now. 

It's light years away from who and what and how we were before Mike was diagnosed. That's because children grow exponentially in seven years, sure, but it's also because he died. We're different.

I'll take a little madness. Let it conduct me to other times and places. Let nothing be erased. Let it hurt, and let us shine in the hurting.

a stranger's touch

Most of the time I'm a pretty competent person. I manage a house and a job and three kids and a dog and two cats on my own. I've walked with countless clients through times of crisis, I've logged more hours on the phone with insurance companies than I care to count without killing anyone, and my kitchen, right now, is more or less clean. The InstantPot is on the counter slow-cooking stock from the chicken I roasted last night while Beatrice and a friend slumber in the family room in a pile of blankets and pillows upstairs. I mean, seriously. Sometimes I'm a fucking ace.

I do drop balls. All the time. Like the birthday party for a friend of Beatrice's that I clean forgot yesterday afternoon. I'm getting more used to it but honestly, I really hate when I screw things up like that, especially for the kids - things like missing an event because I didn't rearrange my work schedule in time, or the broken retainer the dog ate a week ago that I still haven't called the orthodontist about while Beatrice's teeth slowly shift back into mess. I definitely fret about them missing out because they only have one stretched-thin parent, about having to feel different because they're the kid whose mom didn't show.

In those moments of faltering competence when the balls are bouncing around my feet and rolling into the corners, I usually keep it together. Remember to breathe. Make a self-deprecating joke. Apologize. Act, more or less, like an adult. 

But the people in my life who know me best know that I also have a not-adult-at-all part of me who sometimes takes over in moments of exposed imperfection. She's pretty crazy. She cannot be reasoned with. She behaves like an overwhelmed toddler and I cannot remember life without her unwelcome visitations, so I imagine she is very, very young. 

I once described her appearances to my therapist like this: if I were waiting on a subway platform, most of my feelings would approach like the local train. Ah, here comes some grief. I do believe joy is approaching. I can be there to receive them. But when my freaky panicker bursts into my life, it's on the express. I can feel the wind and rush of her, the unstoppable nature of her insistence. For most of my life, when this happens, I feel helpless. All I can do is cry.

The environment that triggers her crazy more than any other is the sporting event. 

I experienced no early trauma in a baseball stadium. I was never yelled at by a shaming coach. Yet growing up, my lack of athleticism and paltry experience with sports always led me to panic when invited to play in a kickball game at a picnic, or when a gym teacher directed me to stand in front of a volleyball net. Didn't those people know I simply couldn't do any of this? That I would embarrass myself, let my teammates down, get very confused about which way to run? When someone throws a ball in my direction, my instinct has always been to duck. 

Somehow I made it through my eighties childhood, when one (especially a girl in underfunded public schools) wasn't always expected to be an athlete, without too much social stigma attached to me. And the older I got, the better I could keep my pathological fear of sports a secret. But the panic I felt when asked to play a friendly game of frisbee (no joke, panic) never really abated. 

As a parent, the lurking freak out beneath the surface has most often rippled into awareness at my children's sporting events. Even though I've been going to games and meets for years now, I still feel uncertain of myself in that role. Should I be yelling something from the sidelines like the other parents? Why don't I ever remember to bring a chair in my trunk? Was there a memo about the right kind of snacks to bring?

The last time it broke the surface was nearly a year ago, at the end of last summer, when I had to bring Gabriel for a sports physical at the high school in order for him to participate in cross country. I lost track of him in the crowd. Eventually, after long minutes searching, I found him sitting outside patiently, in the most obvious place that I hadn't looked simply because I didn't want to walk out there and be exposed as incompetent before all those other sporty-looking parents whom I didn't know (and some that I did) chatting happily with each other. The moment I saw him the express train barreled through me and I bit back tears, unable to even look at Gabriel as we walked to the car. He would know too. I was no good.

Because that's what that tiny toddler part of me believes: I'm not good enough. It is blatantly discernible when I screw up. Everyone I love will leave me; I cannot trick them any longer. They know. 

It sounds dramatic. It is. She's so little, she just doesn't understand. And so the feeling is huge. But I'm trying to learn to take care of her, rather than be mad at her. 

I hadn't heard from her since the sports physicals. But last Thursday, I arranged for Beatrice to be picked up by a friend from Girls on the Run and made sure Frances didn't need the car. I blocked the last half hour of the work day and rushed out so I could finally see Gabriel run in a track meet. I had missed every other meet, or arrived after his event, because it's been so busy at work and I can't seem to leave early enough. But this time I could, and I was determined.

I arrived at a sprawling complex of schools and athletic fields that was unfamiliar to me. All the parking lots seemed to be full, so I chose one, got out, and started walking in the direction other people were headed. I passed a lacrosse game, a baseball game, and began to feel confused. Was I at the right place? Where were all the runners? I called a mom friend whose kid is on the team, and then another, asking if they were here and could direct me. They are both amazingly competent and kind people so between their directions, I realized I was as far away as could be, on the opposite end of the complex from the big multi-team track meet. 

I checked the time. I was getting mad - local train mad - imagining I would miss him run again, despite my efforts. So I myself, in my work clothes and yellow platform sandals, broke into a run. 

And you know how when you run out of fear the fear gets bigger? Like that time in fifth grade when my best friend and I got convinced there was an evil ax murderer in my house when we were home alone, and started running in the dark streets back to her house, becoming more hysterical with every step?

Yep, that was me. I passed two fit moms out on a run and one called to me that she liked my running shoes. Surely this lighthearted comment was made in kindness. Ha ha! Yet I took it as if my yellow sandals were my own personal scarlet letter, and she a nasty puritan drawing attention to them. For shame! A mother who cannot find her son's track meet!!

When I finally made it, red-faced and sweating, I could feel my scared toddler inside beginning to rouse from her long nap. There were hundreds of parents and coaches and siblings and friends milling about, and multiple schools competing, so packs of teenagers in various team colors traveled the field and areas around it. I didn't see Gabriel at his school tent, nor on the field. Had I really missed it?

A kind, freckle-faced mom at the chain link fence surrounding the track saw me standing there, scanning all around, and offered to show me the schedule. He hadn't run yet. Exhale. I confessed I had just run across the entire complex because I had no idea where I was going. She smiled. I did that too, she said. 

Oh. 

I found a spot at the fence wedged between other spectators and took some deep breaths. I told the threatening-to-freak-out toddler in me it was okay. She curled back up in my heart, still watchful, in case things started to unravel again, but quiet. 

I watched the girls' relay and saw Gabriel and his teammates get ready for their relay. I waved, he waved back. I kept breathing. And then something happened that took me from fragile to healed.

Something grazed my hip. It was a little girl who was maybe three years old, standing close beside me. As I looked down, she threw her head back to look up at me. Our eyes met long enough for her to know that I wasn't her mother, and yet with our brown eyes locked like that, she smiled. I smiled back. And then she reached up - for a moment I thought she was asking to be picked up, but no - she stretched out her arms and placed her palms on my ribcage at the highest point she could reach. Along my thin blue sweater she slid her hands, down the length of my body, smiling even bigger without losing my gaze, delighted with her own audacity as she bent in half at the waist, pushing into her father's legs as he cheered on his older daughter. 

Someone called her, she turned and ran, yet I could still feel the pressure of her touch. It was a blessing.

I was good enough again. I knew it. I think my own inner little brown-eyed girl, seen and delighted, knew it too. 

After Gabriel and I got back from the meet I made lots more mistakes. When I went to pick up Beatrice, our friends who were hosting her handed me a glass of wine and invited me to sit on the porch in the twilight, where we watched her and her friends and other kids in their neighborhood play with a parachute in the street. The kids performed odd rituals they invented, lifting the parachute high and then sitting inside the crumpling dome of it, chanting strange sounds and laughing. Sitting on the porch, I forgot to pick up Gabriel's sandwich. I forgot Frances needed the car and she came looking for me, angry. I didn't mind. It was all repairable. 

I sat on a wicker chair beside a new friend, and my heart grew and grew in the peace of the night.

farewell time

Today we woke up in Buffalo with our friends, having drunk our fill of Niagara Falls over the weekend, and tonight we will sleep in our own beds back in Lancaster, having spent a good portion of the day driving through New York State and Central Pennsylvania. Some spirit of that beautiful country seemed captured in a tall billboard we spotted today that declared Every Day is Hump Day at the Adult Outlet, featuring a personable peach nestled up against a rather tall eggplant on one side, and on the other, Find out who Jesus REALLY is! with a phone number in bold below that read something like 1-800-I REPENT.

That, coupled with the gun outlets and flags, really brought out the snobbish asshole in me on the way there. I was joking around with the kids in an increasingly unhinged way every time we passed another XXX sign. But on the way home, I felt a lot milder about the whole thing. I mean, it's not my culture, not my language, but really, is it so very contradictory for lust and spiritual longing to be pressed up against each other like that? Can't crass sexuality and Jesus occupy two sides of the same sign? You might think they are there to cancel each other out, so to speak. But maybe they just bring out something potent in each other, by seeming but not actually being opposites. 

I missed church today, but I also felt a bit off the hook by the fact that we were traveling. I never know what to do with Easter. Ever since becoming a widow, I don't feel that comfortable with anything that's supposed to be all good, all triumphant. (And growing up UU and Jewish, Easter was never a big holiday for us; I only began to figure out my relationship to it as an adult.) I will always remember Mike positively glowing on the last Easter he was alive, so close to the pain of Good Friday and the miracle of resurrection, so delighted by the fact that He is risen! which he smilingly proclaimed only 10% ironically to me that morning on the sidewalk after church. The other 90% was pure faith and joy. He was alive, the sun was shining, he was well enough for church with his family, Jesus was risen. Sound the trumpets. 

I was genuinely happy to see him happy. I treasure the photos we took that day. But I wasn't singing out He is Risen! from the rooftops to anyone who would listen, because I wasn't feeling that way myself. I mean, is He really? Is anyone? Will they be? What if they just get cancer and die and leave you all alone? What if suffering is always here, even and especially contained within the joyful moments, and you can't ever blast it out with lilies and brass?

Like last week, I began the termination process in earnest with two of my treasured clients. 

One is a junior, and as long as all goes as planned we have another year together before graduation brings our work to an end. One is a senior, and though we haven't worked together for long, it has been very meaningful, and the fact that we have but a handful of sessions left before she launches out into the world struck her as terribly sad.

Termination is the weirdest, coldest clinical word. It simply means ending. Maybe we therapists use it because we need a little distance from the emotional reality of investing in work that calls on your whole self and that, if successful, ends. 

In an ideal world it happens when the client is truly ready, in their own time. The saying goodbye is bittersweet. Happy-sad. It represents the beauty of compassion born of suffering, growth, and a readiness to part with a source of support because it is no longer needed. But if the therapeutic experience really has facilitated all that healing, the relationship was central to it. It means the client felt deeply cared for. So the goodbye can't not hurt.

And the goodbye is harder when it's not time yet. In my work with college students, sometimes we have to end because it's time to graduate, but there is so much more we could do together.

But like being alive, like everything we do and every relationship we treasure, the fact that we are ending and our awareness of it makes the present moment together extra tender and deep. Deeper than it could ever be if our work were open-ended. Because of this, and so many other reasons that you likely share, spring is full of feeling for me.

Being brave enough to talk about it, to share the sadness, to say the words I'm afraid to end with you - this blows me away when it happens spontaneously in the chair opposite. This kind of vulnerability takes so much courage, it overflows one's heart. It's especially moving because I myself am often afraid to bring it up, and put it off longer than I should, knowing it will hurt to make it explicit. 

So my junior is someone I have worked with for years now, and who has taught me a lot about being brave. She has serious trauma in her past, and carries a lot of anxiety in her body as a result. When she admitted that she was afraid she might be making up her struggles, or that maybe she isn't really unwell, or maybe she doesn't deserve to be in counseling anymore, I just waited, listened. We listened together. It didn't take long for her to discover she was afraid I would leave. She was afraid this would end. 

So we talked about what it is like that her struggles are real, that she should be here with me, now, and to face our eventual ending, together. When she walked out of my office and I shut my door behind her, I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and hugged my knees to my chest.

Right now I am dating a man that I care deeply about. It's crazy how vulnerable it feels to care like this. Sometimes I feel so frightened that the door to my heart threatens to shut of its own accord. It's scary for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that somehow or other this relationship too will end. Sometimes I can feel the ending pulsing within its beginning. The two are so intertwined, they can't be opposites. They are two threads of connection: openness to a deepening future, and grief that the openness cannot go on forever.  

I think the mystery of resurrection has something to teach me, if only I could be brave enough to receive it. Something about a tenderness that transcends the tenderness of endings and permits fear to slide from its fingers, no longer needed. That beaming joy Mike embodied five years ago wasn't premised on a forced forgetting of his own suffering; he never turned away from hard truths. He knew this would all end far too soon, yet on that spring morning, for a moment, he opened his heart wider still. 

Maybe next Easter I won't spend seven hours in the car. Maybe I'll go to church, and like my client, I'll find the courage to tell God the truth about how afraid I am, how Easter makes me want to brace myself for all the endings.

I'll be scared, and I'll try to listen.

graduation

Tuesday was Beatrice's ninth birthday. 

The year she turned five, March 1st began very early. Not that night and day were meaningful categories in the hospital. But it was still dark when I accompanied Mike from his room on the eighth floor downstairs to surgery to repair the ruptured feeding tube apparatus inside of him that was causing acute pain with every tracheostomy-facilitated cough. And the coughing was constant. Everything hurt then, for him and for me, though nothing more in that moment than the awareness that I was missing Beatrice's fifth birthday because of all this. This torrent of disease, pain, medical system failure, constant uncertainty. The torrent took everything away with it. 

My sister was in town and she and my mom helped make Beatrice's party happen. It was at a trampoline park. They sent me pictures while I sat anxiously in the waiting area. Life kept happening, even the lives of our children, and we were missing it.

This year I planned Beatrice's party at a little bowling alley/arcade in town. It was last Sunday. I met some of her school friends for the first time and admired their flashing smiles, buoyant energy, nine year old naughtiness, long limbs, deep down sweetness. Three parents spontaneously decided to stay with me during the party, and later my mom joined too, everyone shrugging off the fact that staying was a kindness, knowing I would likely get overwhelmed by the responsibility of all those children running wild in an open space filled with so much fun. I felt quietly cared for by their presence, and watched Beatrice glowing, dancing with triumph with her friends as their bowling balls bounced like enormous slow motion pinballs, back and forth off the bumpers, eventually making contact with a handful of pins. 

Yes!!!

I thought to myself: maybe I've outgrown the grief that has accompanied her birthday over the past three years. Maybe I can finally experience this simply as a special day for Beatrice, unsullied by the trauma of Mike's final harrowing days on earth. Wouldn't that be great?

On Monday night while Beatrice was at dance class I was feeling overly sensitive to various unimportant domestic irritants and my own parenting shortfalls and so announced I was running out to get some final bits to gussy up the birthday. In the car, alone (finally), pulling out onto Walnut Street, I felt a geyser of pain rise up within me, completely shocking in the suddenness of its presence. I cried and cried. Moaned and sobbed is more like it. Vocalized something dark and sharp while hot tears fell onto my lap in the driver's seat. 

Wegman's is about a six minutes' drive from my house, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot the geyser was spent. Only the shuddering aftershocks remained, and those soon passed too. She was so little. That was the thought that started and ended it: she was so little. 

How could Beatrice's little body have received all that pain around her? Where did it go? Is it stored still in her lengthening bones, her soft warm skin? 

Lately I myself feel like a human lightning rod. I receive the hot energy of other people's feelings; they pass through the safety of my body on their way into the earth. I sit cross-legged and tall in my soft burgundy chair at work all day and invite, welcome, receive the crackling emotional energy of my clients. Then I walk home and do my best to be present to the changeable kitchen weather that three children generate. I remind myself to breathe. I conduct lightning. It's a lot, but I can do it.

The difference for me is that now I really can conduct emotions; they move through me and I am unharmed. Tired, sure. Sometimes I need to retreat to my bedroom with a book. And when I can't take a lunchtime walk to shake out the morning sessions' emotions that didn't quite make it into the soil I'm bummed. 

But the essential experience has changed because my own feelings now also fill my body, and I try to listen to what they tell me. I am learning through faltering, earnest practice to permit them to come and to go, to hold them compassionately while they are here; because of this I can ground other people's energy in a sustainable way. In those crisis cancer days and the months that followed Mike's death everyone else's feelings swirled in a scorched field inside me. By the time he died I was burned to nothing. When someone asked me how I was during those years, I went blank. How was I? I wasn't. Nothing could grow. The pain of my husband and my children and to a lesser extent the circles of caring family and friends around us seared every available space to ash. I didn't believe my own pain to be relevant. 

But being human is an exquisite, surprising thing, and so much has been sprouting in my ash-enriched insides. My own therapy, work with my clients (in which recent trainings have empowered me to be more deeply compassionate and present), my immersive experience at the mindfulness retreat, meditation, reading, yoga, dance, all of it has been teaching me to cherish this imperfect body, this vast inner space, this spirit. In stolen quiet moments I sometimes rest my hands on my body with all the tenderness motherhood has taught me. 

There is more room here than I ever knew. 

My clients who are preparing to graduate are taking stock of the past four years, realizing how much they have grown, mustering up the courage for their next uncertain steps. They are entering a time of transition and new possibility. On March 12th it will be four years since we lost Mike, four years since I held his hand. To be without him, to know what we all endured, to witness the pain of my children - it hurts so much, just as much as it ever did. It is my relationship to the pain that is shifting. 

I look back on the past four years, and I am proud of how much we have all grown. I know now my pain is relevant; I know how precious I am to me. I am ready for the next unknowable chapter. 

 

now and then

Lately my inner and outer life have been encountering one another with a particular curiosity and fizz, which every so often results in an alchemical story-busting magic. Like an onion that you had no idea held layers beneath its taut brown skin peeled back and then peeled back again. I have held old stories tight to my chest about what my life and I am supposed to be like - tight as the layers of an onion pressed against one another. I have held them so close I didn't know they were there. 

When circumstances conspire to allow me to hold an old story out away from my body so I can see it properly and recognize the thin places where it isn't really true, I feel exhilarated. And scared and sad. Stories about what I am supposed to perform for others, how I am supposed to look, what I can control, what I should accomplish and desire, what I should be able to contain and manage when it surges inside me. 

I found myself unexpectedly crying the other day in the middle of telling someone how amazing it is that we can keep growing and becoming more truly ourselves as time passes, despite our culture's suggestion that aging is a one-way trip to something smaller, lesser than what we once were. I am thrilled that I get to set down old stories that are no longer and maybe never were true and consider new ones that reveal something closer to what really is. 

The tears were for Mike, who never got to experience this distinct stage of life, one defined less by striving and articulating one's path and more by consolidation of and learning from all those grasping years before. 

I was forty when Mike died. I felt crushed by the almost immediate awareness that an essential part of me died with him. I mourned for my children who lost both their father and the mother they used to have, someone happily partnered and far more resilient and cheerful and competent than the raw grieving wreck I knew myself to be. 

They really did lose the old me. She is never coming back. The strange thing is that now, nearly four years later, I don't want her to.

I like my forties. I like how I make decisions and communicate and reflect on what I want. I like swearing freely and learning to ask for help and my fledgling efforts at growing spiritually. Even more surprising, I like the family we have become, the relationships we push and pull and play inside of as everyone keeps growing in his or her unique, relentless, stunning fashion. 

But so much of who we have become finds its roots in Mike's cancer and death. It freed us to be more honest, loving, angry, mindful of things other people often aren't. We like that. Which is, to say the least, confusing. 

It is profoundly sad to feel your strengths, the things you like about yourself, inextricably tied to your deepest loss. I long for sturdier bridges to connect the before times to the abundant present. I would like my children to know that all of this links to all of that, even if our world hadn't ruptured in between.

Last night at bedtime I told Beatrice how proud her papa would be - is - of her. 

Why? 

It's just the way you are, Beatrice. The way you think and move and make jokes and sleep and snuggle. Just being who you are is being someone your papa is proud of and loves so much.

Oh. 

And that brought forth a wave of anguish, a deep grief over her rapidly fading and lost memories. She feels left out. She wishes she had had more time. So we took out the book of photos I made for her birthday last year and told stories about all the images of Beatrice and Papa, all the moments captured that prove they were together and loved each other well. 

She feels guilty for not feeling sadder. She always tells me this with her eyes filled with tears. She feels guilty for liking our family the way it is, and not knowing what it was like before Papa got sick and died. If he walked in the front door right now, would he be a stranger to her?

No he wouldn't, I said. It might take you a few minutes. But you would know Papa, and he would know you. That never changes.

We cried for a long time, for how awful it is that he never met Ramona the dog, or our funny cats, or lived in this house, or knew about Beatrice's third grade teacher - so much of what structures everyday life. It's terrifying to think the gulf between us widens as we all grow. In one way, I know it never really does. But still I feel frightened. I can't lose him over and over. 

Many years ago, when our friend Edith asked Mike how he knew he was ready to marry me even though there was no way to know how I would change and he would change and what would happen for the rest of our lives, he said he felt confident that he would love whoever I became. However much changed, at the root of it, he had faith that I would still be me, a person he deeply loved. 

That can be true in the other direction too, even though it didn't occur to me then. However much I change, my love is unaltered. Maybe that slippery abstract truth is one of the bridges I long for. Maybe it can support all of us as I keep learning new stories and tentatively stepping into the truth they offer. 

Even so, I wish he'd met Ramona.