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.