the golden thread

Nearly every morning Beatrice and I walk to school. When we can't because of dentist appointments and other such errands requiring a car in the middle of my work day, we're sad. Once when I told Beatrice at the last minute that we had to drive because I had to pick Gabriel up from cross country right after work, she huffed and stomped in protest, angry as heck because without sufficient warning, I was taking away "the best part of my day!"

It is pretty good. Part of the joy of our walk for every morning of third grade, and fourth grade, and the few weeks of second grade when there was actual school to walk to, was that while we walked, I read aloud from books one through five in a charming series called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. Brilliant, plucky Penelope Lumley is the star, fifteen when the story begins and a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. She is sent to be the governess to three incredible children who were found naked in the woods of the wealthy Ashton estate, apparently raised by wolves. Because of their upbringing, they often interject awhoooo! and other eccentricities into their language, which, in addition to a wild collection of characters including a family of conflictual, passionate Russians, makes for an excellent read aloud experience. (You may not have heard my Russian accent, but I learned it from my theatrical sister and brother-in-law, and over the years it's improved considerably). 

We would coordinate our steps, I would read in an exaggerated silly manner, and we'd crack up the whole way to school. By the last block, when other parents and kids were more present, I'd be instructed to whisper the story to make it less embarrassing, or just tuck the book under my arm. Then we'd hug goodbye and I'd walk as fast as I could to work, arriving five minutes late, smiling. 

Things started to shift at the end of fourth grade. The sixth and final book was getting bogged down in details and authorial asides; the action wasn't moving fast enough for us. We skipped reading a few days. And then for awhile, we seemed incapable of leaving on time, getting snappish with each other and realizing we'd need to drive at the last minute, which was demoralizing. And then when fifth grade started this fall, we couldn't even find the book that we were halfway through, and tacitly agreed to forget about it.

But wow, did I miss it. And I couldn't bear to think of us abandoning the series that we only read on the walk to school a hundred pages before the end and six months before the end of elementary school, after which our walking to school and work together days will be over forever. 

Because then she will go to middle school, get a little prickly, become a teenager, learn to drive, head off to college, start a career and marry someone I may or may not like, live anywhere on the planet she chooses and call if she feels like it. I mean, really, you can see where this all goes after fifth grade. Away. 

I blame Frances going to college this year (even though it has proved thus far to be a wonderful development for all concerned, about which I have zero complaints) for my sensitivity to Beatrice's surefooted path away from childhood and towards adolescence. I'm holding a child on the cusp of adulthood at one end of my reach, and a child on the cusp of teenagehood at the other. A widowed mother cannot help but feel more confused and moved by the mysterious passing of time than ever. 

Beatrice has always invited my silly side. She pointed out while we were waiting for tickets to the F&M Dance concert last week that most mothers don't speak to their children in meows. (They don't? No? Well, most mothers don't have you as their daughter - that explains my behavior.) I can still wrestle and tickle bad moods out of her. We snuggle through her bedtime routine every night. But all this is changing gradually beneath our feet. And so when we found Book Six of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place on Thursday and I suggested we read it on the walk to school and she said, Um...why don't we just read it tonight instead?, I must have registered the disappointment on my face, deepened with mixed up hard feelings about my youngest child growing up and feeling embarrassed by such things, because she said Oh Mama, now I feel bad. I know you want to read it. We can read it tomorrow, okay?

Oof. She took pity on me. Also, my children find my disappointment and sadness unbearable; their guilt flares and they quickly apologize or in this case, submit to me reading aloud to them publicly. I try not to exploit this situation. 

That said, I'm not scary or firm or disciplined. I really have no other power to effectively wield. So this morning I tucked the book under my arm and once we were across Lemon Street, I flashed it at Beatrice with pathetic, naked hopefulness in my eyes.

Okay, sure, she said, casual noblesse oblige coloring her tiny shrug of agreement.   

So we read a few pages about Penelope Lumley's plans to escape from Saint Petersburg in order to be reunited with her beloved Incorrigibles, up until the corner where we now part ways, which is two blocks from school and a little closer to work, as I'm now the Head of Counseling Services and arriving two minutes late instead of five is slightly more seemly. 

As we hugged goodbye, I asked, how was that? Do you think we should we do it again?

I liked it, said my five foot nearly four inches tall ten-year-old, smiling her gray blue eyes at me. Yeah.

Since we started saying goodbye on this corner, I have a habit of looking over my shoulder as I hustle towards my office, watching her walk on her own the rest of the way to school in the opposite direction. Sometimes she catches me, and we laugh and wave at each other across College Avenue. I can feel the invisible golden thread spooling out between us, sometimes tugging, sometimes long and loose, floating on the breeze. She looks so marvelous and independent in her backpack bedecked with plastic buttons she has selected that flash in the sun, dark golden hair flapping in rhythm with her gait. There she goes. That's my kid.

When I first began staying home with my little ones, when Frances was three and Gabriel a little baby, I could not believe how hard it was. At the end of every day I was exhausted. My emotional resiliency was regularly stretched to the brink, and my body was rarely my own. It seemed absurd that the hardest work I had ever done was mostly invisible - the bulk of it took place in my home, with no peers around to talk things through or share the burdens and joys. Mike had thrown himself into his new job at St. John's, which required not only long days but teaching two nights a week plus Friday night lectures and lots of Saturday prep. I was often on my own. It was SO hard, and no one knew about it! There wasn't a boss to pull me aside after a skillful response to a tantrum or peacefully executed transition to nap time and say, hey Meagan, great work. I really appreciate what you're doing for the team. Let's talk about a raise at your next evaluation!

(Okay, no boss ever said anything like that to me, but still).

That said, I've never understood when other people say congratulations to me after one of my kids has done something great. They did it, not me. Right?

But here I am with three children who are growing more independent with every passing day, who each have their own world that is quite separate from me and from their siblings, in which they make decisions and take risks and decide how much of themselves to share. It's extraordinary, really, to glimpse them out and about, living their lives. It's thrilling. 

And lately, for the first time, I do feel proud of myself. There's my work, no longer invisible. It's walking to school, it's at a mock trial tournament in New Jersey, it's at a track meet an hour away. There's every time I gritted my teeth and walked away instead of yelled, every ride to an orthodontist appointment, every conflict I mediated, every bedtime routine, every harrowing pain I held and helped absorb - and there have been so very many. They are doing the hard work of growing up and becoming themselves, and I am doing the strange work of holding them close without holding too tight, doing my imperfect best to not get in the way of their growing - being here so they can be there. 

Time! You are so impossible! My heart squeezes as we leave each stage behind; my heart thrills at what the present whispers about the horizons ahead. 

 

 

confessions

I went with my friend Stacy to see Nicole Holofcener's last movie, You Hurt My Feelings, when it came out in our local arthouse theatre over the summer. It centers around a couple in their later fifties. They have a young adult son and careers in New York, and their lives are overly settled when the subtle action begins. It was lovely, so funny, nearly painfully relatable (as all her movies seem to be) and I slid through it with the ease of someone on a gentle touring-about sort of ride at Epcot Center. The movie begins and ends with an anniversary date. When the credits rolled, Stacy put her hand on my arm. 

I began to sob. The tears came so quickly and suddenly in response to that gentle contact, I was shocked. Where was that from? But also, I couldn't stop crying. So we sat together in the theatre while I cried through all the credits, and after the lights came up, and I eventually realized I was devastated because I would never have an anniversary dinner date like that. I would never build up comfortable habits of white lies with a partner I'd known and loved since we were very young. I would never inhabit a late middle age, comfortable kind of marriage. That was taken away, and I felt kicked in the heart all over again.

Because, I sobbed, even if I'm still with Thomas then, we won't have that kind of relationship! We won't have habits of relating, topics we tacitly avoid, and mannerisms we've established as a unit because we won't have had that long together. Also, we met in our forties and that's just different. Also he lives in Philadelphia and not in my house.

I was really mourning the mediocrities and complacencies that forty years together might have brought me. I will never know. The boring bits. The quotidian things we would talk about and the important things we would avoid. I cried for that.

With dismaying regularity, every 6-8 weeks I have what my family has come to call a Total Meltdown Day. Whenever it happens, I don't recognize it as such and announce that I am getting sick. I feel exhausted, headachey, incapable. Then the kids tell me I'm probably not getting sick, I'm probably just having a Total Meltdown Day. Typically I rest, and by the next day I'm fine. It seems to be a cumulative stress response. I hate it because it gets in the way of everything and it makes me feel vulnerable and limited. I blame what I imagine to be fast-approaching perimenopause.

Okay but really, more than that, I blame the madness of working a demanding full time job and parenting three young people without the partner I had every reason to expect would be here to help with this.

Here's the confession part: sometimes I feel SO mad. And small, and bitter. One never 'gets over' the loss of a partner and co-parent because this shit is never done. They're not there for graduations, performances, games. They're not there for college move in day. And they're not there for the last cross country meet of the season to say dad-type things to our son and cheer him on as he works so hard to come back from a concussion-induced running break. The future comes up to meet me every day, and more often than I like to admit, it can be an occasion to register my aloneness and strain anew. 

Because they're also not there for a Wednesday night after work. I don't want to be responsible for every broken dryer door, dog walk, dinner, trip to the orthodontist, mortgage payment, grocery run, ride to a friend's house, or late night clean-out and devilish difficult removal of license plates with rusty pliers in the dark on the street while bass pours from passing car windows (something, truth be told, I normally enjoy) from our ten-year-old minivan in preparation for it's donation to public radio this morning. I was the only one to figure out how to make the ancient screws on the license plate budge and I was the only one to figure out what to do with all the feelings that job elicited as I fished Mike's church name tag, cds with images of pet scans and cds of bands from college, a pink cup with a lid from preschool days from the Sienna's shadowy bowels beneath a street light. 

So yes, I really miss and love Mike. But there are a lot of layers to this widowhood thing, and one of them is resentment. To be doing everything alone, without the person I set all this in motion with to even see me, or know I'm doing it all, or say, oh wow, I remember that little plastic cup, it's been here all this time! I observe my peers and friends negotiating with partners about who will make dinner and what it will be, who will pick up which kid, what they'll do this Saturday. I watch one partner taking care of the yard while the other sits and chats with a friend or reads a book or explores a new fucking hobby. (Warned you about the resentment). I watch them ease into life with older kids and the more expansive time it offers, and God help me, I feel sorry for myself. Excluded. 

And feeling excluded is the worst! Right? It makes me mad-sad-bad, as we used to say when the kids were little. In those moments I feel acutely the compressed quality of my days, how tired I am, the brute fact that I can only offer 50% of what my children's friends enjoy and have to rely on favors from friends and my mom regularly to make all this hang together. I feel like a twelve year old in braces with the worst, healthiest lunch in the cafeteria, sitting alone and staring longingly at the cool kids with great hair who laugh together and pull Twinkies from their brown bags with ease, not even registering the power and treasures they thoughtlessly enjoy.

Yep, you're right, cleaning out the minivan did a number on me. It sent me straight into mad-sad-bad, into twelve year old excluded angst, which was so powerful that when I woke up this morning it was still there hanging on me, pulling on my shoulders and arms and face, and that darkness kept at it until it ballooned into a Total Meltdown Day. I felt so ill that I left work early and stretched out on the couch next to my dog and ate two bowls full of popcorn and watched tv. 

For like half an hour. Then I had to pick up Gabriel to take him to the chiropractor. But damn, it was great.

I don't have a tidy end to this post. I don't have a lesson learned, or a moment to describe during which the mood lifted and gratitude for all the wonderful things in our lives came rushing in. (Though let's be clear: I am very lucky, and we do have a lot to be grateful for, and the meltdown has already passed). Sometimes you just have to experience the pain of things, the darkest, most unpleasant parts, and let them be. All I can do is try to hold the insistent mad-sad-bad with compassion, and let that terribly awkward middle schooler know that yes this situation really sucks. I'm sorry today is so hard.

what we are here to do

Recently I finished the second four-day training module in a series of five modules (spread out over the course of the year) in the therapeutic model I like best. The more I learn and practice, the more emboldened I am to commit to this approach with my clients. And the more I commit, as with so many things, the more deeply meaningful the experience becomes. 

The first task of the AEDP therapist is to "undo aloneness." The idea is that facing danger and pain and cruelty, even facing our own dark feelings, becomes truly terrifying and often traumatic when we we are completely alone in the task. And so nowadays when I sit across from someone, I think about how to undo their aloneness; how to help them feel safe enough to permit me to draw closer and help them carry the pain inside so that it becomes bearable, feel-able. 

Using this model has been bringing out the human in me and my clients. The really real, the tender and precious, the profoundly connected. I always say the best part about my job is how it continually teaches me that everyone is lovable and no one is boring. (The worst part is sitting in a chair all day). If I can help someone feel safe enough to be their authentic self with me, they're easy to care about and be interested in. But now, with this new level of therapeutic engagement, I am learning something more: that our deepest nature is to be in communion. Connected. With ourselves and others and the infuriating glorious world around us. To participate in love.   

Big claims, I know! But seriously. I have been so moved this week by what can happen therapeutically within the felt sense of connectedness. 

Last night when I picked Beatrice up from soccer practice she was upset. Without saying too much about her experience, it boiled down to feeling excluded and alone - not only in practice, but in the lonely predicament. It was that awful sense of "I'm on the outside, and no one can help me get in, and I will always be in this terrible isolated place." We were in the car together. Darkness quickly fell outside, and as she told me about practice her pain filled the car's shadowy interior. I felt a vise tightening inside; my heart ached with her ache. I wanted more than anything to fix it! To distract with humor, to point out the positive things about soccer, to remind her of the times she'd felt good after practice.  But all this connecting I've been doing lately has strengthened my pain-tolerating muscles, so instead I listened and let her cry and told her I was sorry she felt so bad, that I've felt that way too, that it really and truly is awful.

We pulled up at home and walked through the gate to the back door. We set her soccer ball and water bottle and my book and jacket down in a pile in the kitchen and I hugged her close. Gabriel was in the kitchen and he asked if she wanted to talk about it, and she did, and he hugged her too. We ate dinner and kept making space for her darkness, and as we did it began to ebb; the tide drew it back out of Beatrice's beloved body leaving lightness and spaciousness behind. Then she was ready to do some problem-solving and talk a little about how to make things better. Then we watched a documentary in which someone with a lot of struggle in life manages to try anyway, to have new experiences and take risks. Beatrice really connected with that.

My children's pain is as hard, maybe harder, than my own to bear. Holding their grief during Mike's illness and after he died was the most difficult thing I've ever done. Sometimes I was afraid their pain would break me, perhaps in part because I had to carry it alone, without Mike. Widowhood introduced me to the most acute aloneness imaginable. 

And even though all I wanted then was to cry in someone's arms, someone who wouldn't advise or judge or try and shake me out of it but simply be there with me, I can forget that truth when my arms are the ones doing the holding. Or rather, deny that truth. Ignore it. 

Because damn, it can feel nearly impossible to be present to another human being! To offer yourself fully and completely, and stand in whatever true thing is happening together without trying to change it or push it aside. I mean, wouldn't it be easier to get some takeout? Check your phone? Yes, it definitely would! 

But the being together, the attending completely, might be the most exquisite gift anyone can give anyone else. And when you give it, you are nurtured by that generosity too. Because you are together. Because the whole experience is shared. Because we aren't meant to do any of this alone. 

Maybe you are thinking: uh, yeah, Meagan. Haven't you figured this out yet? What with all the parenting and caregiving and therapizing and being a person in a world full of people for forty-six years? Did you really need a weekend of talking secure attachment and core emotions with a bunch of emotive therapists to figure out that love is more or less what we are here to do?

And to that I say, well, yeah. Maybe I did. Because love is SO HARD and heart-stretching and scary that I need lots of reminders and inspiration all the time. I need a lot of support! I need an enormous zoom room full of therapists. And people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Richard Rohr and Glennon Doyle. And my family, clients, coworkers, boyfriend, friends, ancestors. September skies, cool mornings, sunlit leaves. Also novels and music and documentaries about people who are brave. Tearful daughters who sit in the car and tell me how much it hurts. 

I can't just show up with my whole heart and stay there without a thousand hands at my back.

Thank you world, for reminding me every time I forget, and teaching me anew. 

saying goodbye

Four years before this photos was taken, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good fortune to land a field placement with Fox Chase Hospice on the northern edge of Philadelphia. My supervisor was wonderful and the nurses were hilarious, compassionate and wise. When I walked into the office after a home visit one afternoon feeling discouraged, unable to help a family resolve their longstanding conflicts before their mother died as I'd hoped, a seasoned nurse named Debbie took one look at me and sighed. "People die the way they live, Meagan." 

That stayed with me. People die the way they live. It isn't fair or reasonable to expect them to do things differently while going through a whole-being transition, a whole-world change. Just getting through the day during times of loss requires tapping into our deepest reserves; it's nearly impossible to find the energy and wherewithal to do things with a new spirit or perspective. Of course sometimes we do, despite the odds. Maybe that's grace. 

I kept thinking of Debbie and dying the way we live, in the lead up to Frances's college move-in on Friday. Yes, everything was about to change forever, and yes, we had been anticipating it for years and named countless big feelings about the event as we moved ever closer to it. But we were still us. We were handling this little death the way we handled life - with flashes of anxiety, dark humor, conflict, dog walks, domestic chaos, and ice cream. It seemed that something really big should happen, something to reflect back the momentous cusp we all stood upon. A ceremony of some sort? Collective weeping and gnashing of teeth? A brilliant rainbow arching over our house?

But no. Nothing unusual happened. Life kept barreling us ahead, and then on Thursday evening Frances and I lugged everything from her room down the stairs and into the car, occasionally looking at each other in bewilderment and asking, "what are we doing?"

Was she going to college or something? 

Friday morning we woke up early and got on the road, and it was good. We arrived on campus and followed the mobs of parents and students and figured out where to park, where to unload, how to find the dining hall. We kept doing the things, and the things kept moving us closer to saying goodbye.

And when we did I felt it deep down in the taproot of my heart. I felt it all: hope and excitement for my daughter, gratitude to see her already finding her way in a beautiful and extraordinary place, a hint of pride in the path we have walked together, the role I was given to play in this exquisite human's life, and ragged grief over the brute reality of the moment: I would go home without her.

No matter how long we anticipate these shifts in our lives, it's shocking to become a parent, to lose someone after a long illness, to say goodbye to a child. To undergo a structural change that you can't reverse. Anticipation is its own thing, its own difficult path one can't avoid. But the event itself is something else entirely. And the word 'prepared' has no place here. How can you prepare? You've never done this before!

For instance: I didn't know how much I would miss Mike as I moved Frances into her dorm room and watched her chatting with her new roommates. I didn't know how it would ache as I walked amongst couples on their way to parent orientation. After our big goodbye hug outside her dorm, I walked to the waiting car in a lot on the far edge of campus and cried. Those tears were not so much about saying goodbye to Frances as they were about saying goodbye to her without Mike. 

Then as I crossed the enormous parking lot, he sent me a memory. When Frances was born, less than an hour old, Mike had a vision. It was a flash, a scene, one so powerful that he never forgot it. He saw her as a tiny, frail old woman (not so very different from a tiny, frail newborn) with fine white hair. She was in bed and people Mike didn't know were in the room with her - except he did know them, because he knew that small crowd of adults and children were her family. He was seeing her on her deathbed, surrounded by nieces and nephews, grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren too, and they were all loving and supporting her as she made the passage.

But that wasn't all. Mike saw the scene, and knew he would be there too. He was there too. It was as if time spread out in every direction in the moment of Frances's birth; everything was happening all at once. Everything was. Impossibly, the love he felt for a tiny person he had only known a matter of minutes was the portal to briefly entering everything-is time. Mike was aware that he couldn't possibly still be alive when Frances died, an old woman surrounded by future generations, and he knew he was going to be there with her all the same. 

I remembered all of that, and I thought: if you're going to be there when she dies, why not be here for this passage too? 

People die the way they live. They live the way they die, too. We are all dying all the time: to our old selves, to chapters past, to relationships and narratives and identities. But the small deaths we experience, like saying goodbye to Frances, can lead to bounteous, ardent new life. She is on her way. We all are.

Driving and crying through New Jersey, I talked to Mike, her proud papa, her first teacher and the biggest nurturer of her bright intellect. I don't know what dead people do all day, but after I remembered his vision from her birth, it seemed possible that I wasn't alone. It seemed possible that the only person in the whole world who loves Frances like I do - who listened with me to the music the sound of her breath and a cricket outside the window made as she slept nestled between us on her first night on earth - he was somehow there with us. With her in her beginnings, with me in my endings, maybe even with us forward and back through all the moments, and somehow helping me ensure that when Frances sleeps her last night on earth, she will also be surrounded by boundless love.  

the longest day

Yesterday was my official last day off. Our offices reopen next week, and even though I chose to delay my return and squeeze in one last trip, I felt the usual clutching sadness about Friday. My last real day of summer. Last day to wake up whenever I wake up, drink tea and bustle about in the quiet kitchen, go to barre class in the morning, spend open time with my kids, deal with one of the endless house things on the list I wrote on the back of an envelope that sits on my desk by the window in the living room, spend a few minutes flipping through a magazine or cookbook on the couch. The last day to live inside the languid pace of summer.

Sure, Gabriel was leaving in the afternoon on an epic trip with my mom to Iceland and we had to gather all the last minute items he needed to pack. And sure, Beatrice and I had to pick Frances up at the airport in Philadelphia that night, back from her trip visiting a friend in the Pacific Northwest. But there would be so much time in between it all to let summer seep in.

I woke up and came downstairs where I found Gabriel clad in a tank top and shorts and his golden skin, burnished over countless summer runs, getting ready to go for a bike ride. We chatted for awhile and made a plan to head to Target later for sunglasses and an eye mask (recommended in a land where the summer sun barely sets). I didn't notice when he slipped out. Beatrice, the most teenagery ten year old, sleeps in later than any of us and so while she slumbered on, I put on my leggings and headed out the back door. 

Just as I slid into the only parking spot left on Prince Street, four minutes before class was due to begin, Gabriel called me. 

Hi honey, I said. What's up?

Mama - inhale, pause - I got hit by a car. 

My body reacted before my mind could register what he said. My breath seized and caught in my chest. He told me he was okay, some police officers and neighbors were with him, and that an ambulance was coming to take him to the hospital. 

I tried to breathe and steady myself. I told him I'd be there in two minutes. 

As I headed down Orange Street towards the corner where he'd been hit, I could see two police cars and a firetruck double parked nearby, and just as I pulled up, an ambulance arrived. There was Gabriel, standing in the middle of people in uniforms that I didn't know, the side of his face scraped and bloodied.

I could barely figure out how to open my car door. 

I ran to him awkwardly, confused by what was happening, thanking the police officers, halfway taking in what they told me. They offered to drop his bike off on our porch. I was aware that Gabriel wanted me to not freak out, and so tried my best to not freak out. Some other people seemed to be waiting to make sure my son was okay, and when we left to go to the hospital ourselves, they waved and smiled at Gabriel and wished him well. 

For awhile we were quiet in the car on the way to the Emergency Department, a path I'd driven too many times with Mike when he spiked fevers. Then Gabriel explained the accident, and how so many neighbors and people walking by had stopped to help. The only time I heard any emotion in his voice was when he said, Mama, everyone was so kind to me.

By the time we'd made it through triage Gabriel was sliding back into his usual self, cracking me up with jokes about the hospital and the police. They made sure the whack to his helmeted head hadn't done any serious damage and tentatively bandaged up his scrapes. The doctor told me that he could go to Iceland, just skip the hot springs with those oozing wounds. We came home around eleven and Gabriel suddenly said, I haven't even had breakfast yet!

Oh! A caregiving task, that would make me feel like my normal self! But as I made him toast with almond butter and apples and boiled water for tea, my hands started to shake. I put down the plate and leaned on the kitchen counter, took a breath. Gabriel got up and pulled me into a hug, wincing a little when my head grazed the bottom of his injured chin.

It's okay now, Mama, he said. It's okay.

Later he showered, Beatrice wandered downstairs to discover all the drama she had missed, and I left for Target, adding antibiotic ointment and bandages to my list. I called my mom and told her what happened. I came home and worked on his suitcase. I noticed Gabriel reading on the couch. I went to sit with him and  found he was feeling shaky himself now that the adrenaline had worn off. Exhausted, beat up and unsteady. I worried about putting him on a plane with my mom. 

But they did it. Beatrice and I performed an upbeat two person wave for them in the heat as they pulled away, and then Beatrice dropped the act and told me how stressed and strange and ignored she felt. 

So we did what any Howell Brogan would do in such circumstances: we planned to bake a peach pie with the many peaches we'd picked the day before, and went to Wegmans to collect supplies and cheer ourselves. It worked. We got sushi for dinner, picked up extra to bring to Frances at the airport. She complained about having to come along in the car. I explained everyone we know is on vacation and I wasn't going to leave her at home alone all night. She said why can't I just stay home. I said because I want your company.  

And just as we closed the door behind us, the darkening skies opened and lightning began to flash. We were soaked by the time we got into the car - even with our umbrellas. I thought of the water in the basement. I thought of the dog all alone. I thought of Frances in that sky. I clutched the steering wheel and joined all the other freaked out drivers who cruised along at 42 miles per hour on the Pennsylvania turnpike, while Beatrice and I listened to a blessedly diverting audiobook. 

The plane was late. I turned on my hazards as the rain continued to pound us and parked along a ramp near other cars waiting for their late-arriving family and friends. Unwanted thoughts of plane crashes and how I would find out flashed briefly in my mind, which led to similar thoughts of Gabriel and my mom crossing the Atlantic. Was the storm following them too? 

But Frances (and they) survived. She finally landed. They had gate checked her bag and there were problems getting the bags from the plane to the baggage claim; they weren't allowed to take it out when there was lightning. We waited. Frances ate her veggie sushi and remained faint with hunger. We waited more. Beatrice draped her arms around my shoulders and hung there, all out of complaints. Throngs of tired, vaguely annoyed people surrounded us. We went to the office and waited in a line to talk to two incredibly good-natured women who were joking to each other that today was the wrong day to come to work. We decided to have them deliver the bag rather than wait indefinitely, then lingered in the airport wondering if that was a dumb idea. In the end, we left bagless and doubtful about its eventual arrival.

We went through a McDonalds drive-through around 11:30. I accidentally slopped bits of my McFlurry into the cup holders and smeared ketchup on the steering wheel as I drove through more relentlessly stormy weather. We made it home by 1. I apologized to the confused dog, who seemed to think it was morning and our arrival marked the day's beginning. The girls slept together, and I climbed into bed with a big book, asking its words to soothe my still-shaky hands. 

There is an undeniable loneliness in being the only parent to three precious people. No one else loves them like I do and no one else can, because no one else is ultimately responsible for their exquisite beings. That job belonged to me and Mike, and now it's mine alone. Tapping the reserves of energy and calm that yesterday demanded pulled me down below the surface, down to where my solitary solo-parent vulnerability that normally putters along agreeably began to heat, to throb, and find its raw center. 

*

Thanks for listening, and easing all my tattered edges. It's a gift. And now? Off to bake a peach pie. 

the uncomfortable cusp

Here I sit on the old L-shaped couch, surrounded by a bulging duffel, piles of laundry, backpacks, travel information gathered for my unaccompanied minor when she flies home from camp later in July, the napping dog, the black sharpie for labeling. I've been packing and organizing all morning for our week vacationing in Asheville followed by camp pick up (Gabriel) and drop off (Beatrice) at the beloved UU camp of my youth. 

It is a rare thing, to be alone in my house on a weekday, with only the sounds of foot and car traffic outside the window to give some texture to this silence. Normally I long for a morning like this. Even if it's spent doing laundry and ticking off packing list items! But damn if I don't feel melancholy today. 

Also. I feel very annoyed that I feel melancholy. I mean, wtf Meagan?! This is a beautiful thing you have going here! Why you gotta mess it up with the whole heavy pit in your stomach furrowed brow thing? What a waste!

(Isn't it outrageous when we judge ourselves for feeling bad and thus feel way worse? The dreaded second arrow, it gets me every time.)

It's just that everything is changing. Frances and I have been getting all her health forms together for Princeton, and yesterday she found out her roommate assignment. Gabriel is away at camp and not here to talk with me about what to make for dinner. Beatrice is turning into a new kind of being, taller than ever, stunning me with her bright insights and new flashes of anger. 

I told my boyfriend I was worried that being on my own for five years had ruined me, that maybe I'm no good at partnership anymore. Maybe I've grown too attached to my own clannish family, my own ways of doing and avoiding things. As I grow closer to him I have to contend to what it means for me, a person who was with her husband for twenty years and then alone for five, to share the fretting and pleasures of daily life with someone else. To let that someone else help! Hoo boy, that one's big. Trusting someone else to help. How strange to recognize that having to do all this shit by myself - even though I often do it through gritted teeth - is something I'm reluctant to give up. It's my shit, darn it. Don't touch it.

I mean, do! Please! Please help, please hold my hand. I'm exhausted, really. I can feel so mixed up. 

Everything is always changing all the time, in fact everything has already changed all the time, and I'm just struggling to catch up and adjust. I know, I know, that's just life. Flux may be the norm for everyone everywhere all the time, but when you let the fullness of it touch you, it still rocks your world. 

Sending my oldest child off to college is a fullness-of-flux kind of moment. Raising my children on my own, and before that raising them while caring for my ill husband, and before that raising them with a husband who worked way too much and left the lion's share of it to me influenced my nearly 18 year long habit of being pretty cavalier about the whole 'kids grow up' business. Like, yes. They do. They should. That's the idea. Fly little birds, fly! Can't wait to see you soar while I get back to chilling in this nest on my own, enjoying my own agenda and time and space for once.

But here I am in my empty house and I feel terrible! About two months ago, after Frances returned from a Taylor Swift concert and played me all her saddest songs, it hit me with shocking force: she's leaving. They're all leaving. I knew this, I've always known this, but not like that. I cried and cried. Frances, Gabriel, and Beatrice are the center of my world, and what will I have (what do I have) to show for all these years of pouring my heart into them once this house is truly empty? Have I written any books,  become a world class therapist, done anything fancy or impressive with my time? 

They will leave and I will be old and alone and unimportant. At least, that's what the dark whispering suggests when something external triggers her release within. 

This moment is a bookend to those early Homemade Time years, when I was mostly staying at home with my little children and wondering how I would ever return fully to the world of adults. Could I pass as functional, productive? Could I conduct conversations with nary a reference to my children? Could I ever do the things I dreamt of doing when I kept on loving these children so damn much?

I am always keenly aware of the things I want to do and can't, because when you're working full time and parenting three children alone and have to remember trash night and figure out how to deal with water in the basement there isn't time for a whole lot else. Yet I sit here and think about the dining room full of lanky boys playing D&D, the sleepovers, the family dinners with friends, the porch sitting that leads to chats with neighbors, the way one of the kids reading on the couch next to the dog fills the room with quiet peaceful energy. And while I can't travel on my own, go off on writing retreats, read lots of novels, pick up a new instrument or spend as much time in movement classes as I'd like, there is so much here and now. So much that takes from me, and so much that fills me right back up. It's an abundance that is always changing. I might not have much to show for these overflowing days, but it's good to remember I am part of it all, and it is all part of me. 

Fullness of flux, fullness of life. The thumping reggaeton and the birds singing and the whoosh of tires outside my window; a rippling current that never ends. 

I've missed writing to you here. 

moving forward

We moved into a new house last Saturday. It's around the corner from our old house, and promised peaceful mornings with its second full bathroom and spacious dining room to accommodate friends waiting to ride to school. It has an open living room that, while still full of boxes, has already facilitated more time together. The neighbors on this block are tight, and have welcomed us kindly. I hear buses rumble by on the street below my bedroom window in the early morning and find it a comforting sound. On this street we are more pulled into and embraced in the flow of life. 

Yet what big change agrees to leave one's tender hurting places alone? Our first morning in this house fell on the five year anniversary of our lives without Mike. I decided to welcome that synchrony; while it is a terrible day, even more than that it's a day about honoring and remembering my children's papa. 

Since I last wrote here in mid January, I became the Head of Counseling Services and thus took on a lot of new responsibilities at work. I bought this house on January 31st (renting to the sellers until March), packed up my house (including many unexamined boxes and objects brought in from our life before cancer), celebrated Beatrice's tenth birthday, helped Frances through college and financial aid applications (still waiting on most of those decisions), prepared my old house for sale, marveled at the sheer quantity of objects we possess, and moved into this new house. All of these things were accomplished with the loving support of an army of friends, it's true. But seriously. A week into my new role at work, it hit me: now I'm the mom at work and at home. Shit. All the things eventually fall into my lap. 

I may need a bigger lap. 

(Possibly already in the works, given the copious amount of ice cream, chocolate and wine this season has led me to consume). (Though the anxiety, plus carrying countless boxes up and down stairs, may be effectively counterbalancing those influences).

I'm telling you all this just so you know. Just so someone knows that all this has been really, really hard. I've worried about so many things. My adulting capacities have been pushed to the brink. My brain is operating at a pretty sad pace, and I forget every 12th word I intend to utter. And when I can't think of the 12th word, I say fuck. Like, when I can't think of the word radiator or router I say instead the fucking thing. As in: you guys, we're going to have to learn how to bleed the...the...the fucking things.  

And my kids look at me blankly. Okay, Mama. On our way out to dinner on Sunday night in honor of Mike, after the taxing moving weekend, after picking up the cats at a friend's house and stopping by the cemetery with them and Lulu peeing all over her carrier in a total fit of feline freak out and all of us screaming in the car and frantically rolling down windows because of the astonishingly awful smell, after all of that, I called my car a fuckhead when it wouldn't shift into reverse immediately. The kids started laughing.

Mama, the common usage is fuckface.

And also, you've said the f word 800 times since yesterday morning. It's really not like you. 

Yeah, well, I'm not really like me right now. 

But I took this week off of work. And I have had days to unpack, to organize and figure things out, and even more wonderfully, to be alone in this space, and I am beginning to be me again.

As I unpack boxes, I've been touching so many objects that were once essential, and now no longer are. Yesterday I found a bulging binder given to us by the hospital, with neatly labeled dividers in Mike's handwriting, full of insurance documents and experimental treatment options. A notepad tucked into the righthand side whose first sentence at the top was How chemo works. Mike's notes from our first meeting locally, before treatment began. A clattering collection of PET scans tucked into a pocket. 

I had to touch all those pieces of paper and shiny CDs that once held the possibility of Mike's survival, read all those reports and look at all the words he dutifully wrote. Then I threw it all away, feeling weightless and strange inside.

This week I've found cards made by much smaller hands for me and for Mike, photographs, abandoned craft projects, journals. I've found lumpy ceramics, colorful paintings, and so many picture books that no one is young enough to want to read anymore (with the exception of George and Martha, which I think we will always want to read). I read those books aloud hundreds of times, snuggled next to one or two or three rapt, quiet, freshly bathed children. I love those books. They hold our history.

But we have too many, so I filled a box yesterday with beautiful, beloved picture books and put it outside our house with a 'free' sign. And the flow of life plucked them up and took them along with it, and within an hour it was empty. So I filled the free book box again.

I'm saving the most special ones. But you can't save them all, can you?

All these objects are comforting, tender reminders that it was real. We were a young family with regular young family cares and pleasures, then we were a suffering family struggling to live with cancer, then we were a grieving family struggling to live without Mike. It all really happened. Here, all around me, in half empty boxes, is the proof. Letting go of the evidence isn't easy.

One of the perks of this week off work has been picking up Beatrice after school and hanging on the playground with other parents while the kids play. The other day, Joshua and I were talking about how hard it is to be consistent when it comes to discipline, structure and routines. The authoritative aspect of parenting was never my strong suit.  

But, said Joshua, I try to remember that the most important part of all of this is joy. That's what I want to prioritize with them. 

I nearly cried. 

Me too, I said. 

I want to always make space for ... for the fucking thing. The joy. That's what moving to this house was about, and why all the angst is worth it. Keeping the doors and windows open, having plenty of places to pee, extra space for guests, places to curl up with a book or watch a movie or eat a meal. A home where we can be alone and be together. Where we can know where we've been, accept who we are now, and not be afraid of the changes and growth to come. 

radically precious you

Even though I myself have sought out all of the following influences, sometimes in life it feels as if a story is trying to reach you. Like a message is being broadcast, and your job is to listen and make sense of it. Over the past week or so, here are the forms the message has taken, the result being that I am very stirred up, cracked open:

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, read compulsively late at night all week and just finished at my kitchen table while a group of boys organize themselves for a game Gabriel invented in the next room

The prophetess Sonya Renee Taylor on We Can Do Hard Things, listened to on a drive to Philadelphia on Friday

Tracy Kidder's profile of Dr. Jim O'Connell in the NYT Sunday magazine, read in bits since last Sunday

A Man Called Otto, viewed big and tall in a movie theatre of all places yesterday

Going to church this morning with Beatrice, a Sunday service for Dr. King, a gathering of imperfect people imperfectly registering the pain of injustice and the yearning of coming closer to heroic people who have gone before us.

All of these things have left me a bit agitated, shaken. I have been thinking about our radical responsibility to one another, and the radical belonging and love that comes with taking up that responsibility. I've been thinking about how I shirk that responsibility and pretend like I don't know about it all the time, and how that shirking takes a toll. 

I remember telling Mike how, for better and worse, I had been transformed a few months into my first social work job at my old clinic. I could never not see people again. I'd heard too many stories, I'd sat with too many people that occupied corners and libraries and food pantry lines, the kind I once walked past in various cityscapes with just a shiver of discomfort that I would quickly shake off once something else occupied my attention. But now I saw those people everywhere. Did it change my behavior, no longer being able to pretend they weren't there? Not really. Though in those days, I could greet some of them by name. 

I am aware of the times I hold back friendliness and welcome, when I offer a more shuttered version of my face to a stranger or acquaintance. It's because I can sense their need, and I'm afraid of becoming responsible for them - except of course in a real sense I already am. I'm afraid of having to care for them, of having to make more space when my scanty available space already feels paper thin. 

My job offers me a way to lavish people who come into my life as strangers with attention and love, in a way that feels so very right, deep in my bones. Meeting another person's eyes and inviting their truest self to be with me like that. I welcome their vulnerability. But it's safe because there are boundaries around the relationship. My responsibility is limited. As many have reminded me over the years, a therapist is not supposed to take her clients home with her and feed them dinner and tuck them in at night.

And I'm not taking issue with that! I couldn't do my job without those boundaries, and I'm very attached to my job. Plus I have my own dear children to care for at night. But damn if all these stories and voices I've been letting in this week haven't been reminding me that everyone is someone's beloved precious child, just as precious as my own, and I love those three people so much it nearly breaks me on a regular basis. 

Do you see where I'm going? How do we live in this world that tells us it's fine to walk right past another person's pain, when we know in our guts it's really not? And how can we begin to live more aligned with our own radical preciousness, and every other person's radical preciousness, when it's genuinely hard to get everyone ready and out the door in the morning and remember the orthodontist appointment and the work emails and the friends to check in with and find time to walk to dog and there's laundry six loads deep in the basement? And also. I need a little time at night to be with myself in the dark in the tiny glowing circle of yellow cast by the clip-on book light, a novel balanced on my chest, my breath easy and slow. Otherwise I just couldn't do it all.  

I can read late, when the day's duties are done. But then I go and read a beautiful book about a hungry child. Geez. Are the day's duties ever really done? I mean, okay. Time is finite. Love is not. But how else do we express love, if not through gestures enacted within the bounds of time?

I felt like this in my teens and twenties. I think I'm supposed to have outgrown it by now. But since it appears I haven't - and I honestly do feel a little adolescent right now - I'm genuinely interested to know: how do you think about liberation, your infinite connection to others, the ever-present invitation to care? I don't really mean do you volunteer on Sunday afternoons or a write a check to Unicef. 

I mean: what is it like for you to be a precious hungry child in a world of precious hungry children?