this is mean mama

Can there be a sound more threatening to whatever shreds of inner peace a mother manages to shelter in her fragile heart, a noise more deeply irritating, a noise more deeply saddening, than the escalating tit-for-tat music of her children bickering?

It's been harrowing around here. Beatrice, so much younger than her brother and sister and thus far less adept in the sophisticated eye-rolling and sarcasm department, has resorted to screaming the brutally direct phrase STOP IT the moment the tone shifts to a tiny bit combative, or worse, a tiny bit dismissive of the importance of her day to day activities and feelings. I would argue that this is a natural response to being objectified - treated explicitly as "cute" in a way ultimately intended to demean the cute person in question - though my older children would probably disagree. In any case, now the problem is so entrenched that I seem to hear Beatrice screaming at her brother and sister many, many times a day.

She screams at me, too.

On Sunday night I took Gabriel and Beatrice to the contemplative evening service at our church. Oh, what a very bad idea that was. Beatrice wriggled and whispered and pushed at her brother who insisted on claiming the lone meditation cushion (she periodically whined in a very audible stage whisper to me: he won't let me sit on the whoopee cushion, Mama!). He smiled triumphantly at her, chin high, wriggling himself more decidedly onto the cushion, while she was left with one of the boring meditation benches.

Truly, it was torture. The two of them could not break their bickering rhythm and most of the hour-long service was spent in either complete silence or silence while one person quietly spoke. But of course since we were there it was never silent. The children were pushing each other, taunting each other, leaning on me, pulling on my arms, softly groaning. In fits of frustration, I would occasionally stare at them and hiss STOP IT.

Wherever did Bea pick that up?

Anyhoo. Church finally ended, and we basically ran out of that chapel, into the welcoming embrace of the cold fresh air and evening street sounds. I was feeling brittle. Desperate. Mad at myself for thinking that that service was a good idea, mad at Gabriel for quietly taunting his sister, mad at Beatrice for being unable to sit still for more than thirty seconds. (I just can't stop moving my body right now, Mama!).

We drove back home and I tried to explain to Beatrice why she can't continually scream at her siblings and at me - incidentally have I ever mentioned that explaining ANYTHING of this sort to a five year old is usually a bad idea? - including the concept of being respectful to adults, and not talking back, and knowing that I, her mama, am most definitely in charge ALL the TIME. This went over as you'd expect. Talk about escalation. Our absurd conversation, if transcribed, would make you laugh. Heck, it might even make me laugh. But in the moment I was holding back tears and rage and had no perspective whatsoever. It was awful. I sent my black ship past her little gray rowboat in the dead of night again and again through gritted teeth to absolutely no effect, and in the end only worsened our fraying dynamic.

At home, we pulled up to the curb and I said, I need a minute.

Gabriel, who had been quiet the entire ride home, said, yes you do. C'mon, Beatrice.

So he and Beatrice got out and walked around the corner to my mom's house, where we were due for dinner. And as soon as the automatic minivan door slid shut I let loose a keen like no other, an ongoing rage/grief scream of epic proportions. Man, did it hurt. Like there was an alien lizard-like creature inside of me, and it was on fire, and it had to come out. The hard way.

Mike, Mike, Mike! Take these children. Tell them to stop it. Give me a break already. Exert some fucking authority, please, because apparently I have none. I need you here, being their papa, being my partner, the one person with whom I can wade through all this muck.

Finally I pulled it together - barely - and stiffly got out of the car. Just then I saw Frances coming down the dark street. At my mom's, Beatrice had started yelling at her (something about the wrong take out order, a miscommuncation on Frances's part that had struck Beatrice as a personal affront) and so she decided to leave. I can't take it. 

I know the feeling. But I convinced Frances to come back with me. Grandma had ordered us pizza! That was nice. It would be delicious. We can take it. Let's go.

We walked in, and the tension in the kitchen was worse than it was in the car. Things were looking more and more grim. Various people volunteered to leave, or rather escape, Beatrice began to cry and scream all over again, and louder still, because everyone was acting like she is too horrible to eat dinner with, and just as my mom poured me a glass of wine I took stock and decided to send Frances, Gabriel, and my mom to my house with a box of pizza. I told Beatrice she and I will stay, because it is time to Take a Break.

The dreaded time out! She protests. I put her on the couch. I pull up a stool in the open kitchen a few feet away, get my glass of wine, and open an old Martha Stewart Living magazine that is on the counter. Breath, breath, breath. Beatrice continues to bellow and writhe. This is a torment she cannot endure quietly. I continue to breath and look at the pretty pictures. The magazine is open to a little section showing Martha's calendar with her daily items listed in each square of the month.

Polish the silver.

I hate you, I hate you!

Make a delivery to a local food pantry.

You don't understand me at all!

Organize the wine cellar.

She slithers desperately off the couch and onto the floor. Why is everyone so mean???

Deadhead the roses, take dogs to be groomed, horseback ride.

I clung to Martha's orderly, waspy domestic dreamlife as tightly as I did the stem of my wineglass. Oh, to have but a single item on the daily to do list, and to have that item be wrap Japanese boxwoods with burlap.

I told Beatrice we wouldn't talk until her time out was over. My heart was pretty cold at that point; my eyes stayed fixed on the glossy paper shining beneath the yellow kitchen lights while my little girl wept and screamed in a manner not unlike my partial grief-demon exorcism in the car thirty minutes earlier. But my earth had been salted, nothing could live in there. In that moment, in my mom's kitchen, my highest hope was to endure the next few minutes. And then the next few after that.

And then, as faithful readers of this blog have probably already guessed, something good happened. Grace or a love demon or something moved me to the couch when her minutes were up, where I picked up my limp, red-faced girl, and found the strength to work things out with her. It wasn't easy. The talking was tough, and there were many more ships-in-the-night moments, but our vessels were slowly and surely cutting through waves towards a common point on the horizon. We did the work, together.

A friend in grad school taught me the phrase 'stay in the boat.' She learned it from a marriage counselor, who used it with clients to describe the goal of getting through times of conflict in a marriage. (It is such a useful concept that I feel certain I must have mentioned it here before). You can't step out of the boat and push it downstream and wave with a resentful frozen grin at your partner when the going gets painful. You have to stay in the boat together, tolerate the awfulness, until you find your way back to connection, to love. There's no hope of reconciliation for people who refuse to stay in the boat. When I was gazing at waspy fantasy chores and walling off my broken heart, feeling pushed past the capacity to empathize, I was sitting right on the teetering edge of the boat. It would have been so easy to slide off, wade through the water, and climb onto shore. See ya, Beatrice. Have a nice trip.

Instead, I fell back in. We got to the point where Beatrice told me that when she screams deep down she feels afraid. And sad. And that she would like it if I could speak quietly and nicely to her instead of being a mean mama in those moments, because she could feel better and probably calm down if I did.

And when I asked what to do about her siblings, who were feeling so hurt and angry, Beatrice said, remember the day that Papa died, how you and me and Gabriel and Didi got into Grandma's bed together and had a family snuggle for a long time? I would like to do that.

I think about Mike's death every day. I think about the hospital, and everything that happened before, during, and after he died. I think about it whether I choose to or not - my mind is compelled. My heart just barely tolerates the pain of it. But the very worst thing I've ever lived through happened a little later, and that was telling the kids. I can barely write that sentence. It is unbearable, unrevisitable. I cannot think about it at all.

Beatrice remembers though, and brought something beautiful from that pain right into an evening that I had thought was unredeemable. My girl wants to stay in the boat. So do I.

Love is real. Family snuggle it is.

trigger finger

Sometimes one part of one of my fingers - like, the little section from one knuckle to the next, or one knuckle down to the base - will spontaneously bruise. It turns purple and gets tender, then after a couple of days resolves. It started happening the first year that Mike was sick. I mentioned it once to my nurse practitioner, who shrugged. She and I were pretty much on the same page during Mike's aggressive and often symptomatic illness: it was natural that I had various unusual body ailments while coping with chronic acute stress, and it was natural that I worried about them, and it was worth investigating some even though stress was a far more likely cause than cancer for my skin problems, hair loss, and back pain.

It's annoying that my hands bruise, but I had relegated it to a low and rarely considered area in my anxiety cabinetry, the weird-body-stuff-that-isn't-dangerous-and-you're-supposed-to-quietly-endure-now-that-you're-in-your-forties drawer. Open it occasionally, toss something else in, maybe consider the other items in there briefly, and shut it again. Moving on. But a couple of nights ago I was snuggling up with Beatrice before saying goodnight, and when I stood up I noticed I could barely bend my middle right finger. It was swollen and starting to turn purple. Both sections, from my hand to my main knuckle and up to the second knuckle, were mottled and numb.

My fingers had never swollen before. I walked down the hall, concerned. What the heck?

I came downstairs where the older kids were reading in the living room. I sat at the foot of the stairs and asked my phone to tell me about spontaneous finger bruising and swelling. Gabriel drifted over to me and rested his chin on my shoulder, looking down at the phone.

What are you doing?

Just looking up why my finger might be so swollen and bruised like this.

Of course Google produces a number of questions when one enters medical symptoms in the search bar, such as what are the signs of cancer? when does spontaneous bruising mean cancer? and what are the symptoms of leukemia?

It might as well have topped the list with an article designed to squeeze all the peace out of my boy's heart: Your Mother Has A Bruised Finger; She Probably Has Cancer Too. Say Your Goodbyes Now While You Still Can.

Geez. I hadn't even thought it was cancer. Maybe some rare neurological disease that would leave me twitching and drooling within the year. Possibly a bleeding disorder that will drain me of all color and make it very ill-advised for me to use the mandolin/spiralizer I just bought myself as a present for making it through the holidays. But cancer? Naw.

But now that we had both already seen the cancer references, I felt we should keep looking until we found a more reasonable cause for my sausage-like digit in order to assuage our fears. Finally we hit on something called Achenbach's Syndrome that occurs most often in women over forty. It is benign and merely annoying, though patients usually get freaked out and will relax if you (the doctor) tell them the condition has a name. Achenbach's. Ah. Toss it back in the middle age irritations bin.

I could feel Gabriel's whole body relax next to me. Mine probably did, too. It's not cancer! Whew.

After Mike died, the kids slept in my room with me for about six months, until we moved to this new house. We rotated who slept in my bed and who slept on mattresses on the floor. We all had a lot of fears (still do), which were especially insistent at night (same) but one the kids held that I didn't always fully recognize (which is silly because I had and have the same worry) was that something terrible would happen to me and they would be left without any parents at all. I would die in the night. A heart attack maybe, or a deranged murderer would climb in the window. A freak fall out of bed in which I landed exactly wrong. They had to stay close to ensure my safety. Because as we all now know - and as I have known since my dad was diagnosed with cancer when I was seventeen - anything can happen at any time. Sometimes one must monitor the remaining parent out of sheer self-preservation.

They're still afraid. Nightmares abound. There is a heavy fear-door that one very bad thing happening to you will pry open, and afterwards it is always left ajar. You can't shut it again. It's not supposed to open up when you're only five years old; you're supposed to enjoy your childhood without knowing in your bones, beneath language and logic, that the people you love best can and will die.

When Mike and I would linger in a hug, Beatrice would laughingly squeeze herself between us and push us apart. Mike called her The Hugbuster. It was a little joke that developed a life of its own, as she would occasionally laugh and hugbust other people and absolutely loved to get squished inside the hug, whereupon she would always announce it's dark in here!! So funny.

But we were always her favorite huggers to bust.

When I cry these days, Beatrice will go to great lengths to make it stop. On December 23rd, we spent the night at Mike's parents' house. As she was getting over pneumonia, Beatrice slept in bed with me to spare everyone else her nighttime cough. I was snuggling with her at bedtime, and after a busy day, in the quiet and dark, I felt the sadness pushing on me from all sides. I must have made a sound or gesture that tipped her off before any tears actually appeared because suddenly she sat up, turned towards me, and said in a voice set comically deep, Meagan, this is Michael. It IS! This is Mike. Can you get me a peanut butter sandwich? Anyway, Meagan, there's no crying allowed on Christmas. NO CRYING! 

Mike, you know I cry a lot. Can't I cry now at Christmastime? I'm so sad that you're not here.

Nope! No, not at all. This is Mike. Meagan, no crying at Christmas. Only being happy. I'm being funny right now! So you should be laughing!

I could only converse with my dead husband via our five year old daughter's heartbreaking imitation for about a minute before I really did start crying, despite the strict prohibition, and then Beatrice dropped the whole thing and pleaded with me to stop. I pulled it together eventually. I tried to tell her it was okay to be sad because her papa wasn't here at Chrismas, but she wasn't buying it. No crying on Christmas. (Funny, I can easily imagine Mike saying that with gusto and exagerrated authority, though more in response to a tantrum over a broken toy or general holiday overload).

I'd always thought that her strongly expressed objections or seeking after distraction in the face of my sadness was just about her general discomfort with my powerful grief. I've had vague worries about her intolerance of negative emotions. But the more I think about it, a puffy purple finger and my tears and even my lingering hugs with her Papa in which we would relax and some of our many feelings would begin to seep out in that island of quiet safety all amounted to the same thing: an awful, undeniable vulnerability that she is powerless to stopper. It's terrifying. It threatens her very survival. All my cracks, physical and emotional and spiritual, point - albeit, at times, circuitously - to my mortality. I won't be here forever. I think for my youngest, it is better to try and paper over them with some crazy song and dance number rather than confront that reality.

Who among us can unblinkingly consider the impermanence of those we love best for more than a moment or two anyway?

the year of the narwhal

Mike hated fun.

I can hear him right now, in response to me asking him to participate in some event we'd been invited to with feigned innocence and a determined looking away from my own ambivalence about such things: Meagan. You know how much I hate fun.

He meant commonly understood fun, like an amusement park in August or a fireworks display that goes on and on or a beer-themed 5K or standing around in the middle of Times Square in fifteen degree weather crushed by thousands of people wearing stupid hats and blowing noisemakers. Also anything that someone tried to convince him to do by saying c'mon, it'll be fun!

Mike found New Year's Eve to be mildly annoying. The pressure to have fun, the mustering of renewed celebratory energies after one has been bulldozed by the sugar and alcohol and family tensions and sheer consumerist weight of Christmas. Mike's new year was really early September anyway. He loved the ritual of school supply shopping, making new systems, getting organized and ready for the coming semester. That was the time for excitement and resolutions. We figured out once that he had only lived through six Septembers that didn't involve going back to school. Two of those were the window between college and grad school during which we fell in love. I was there and can attest that even though he wasn't actually going back to school, his heart was in the going back to school spirit, and he walked with an extra bounce in his step down our cracked Brooklyn sidewalks. Force of habit.

So our New Year's were mostly quiet ones, though even Mike succumbed to proper parties at times. I am thinking of one occassion when he uncharacteristically drank too much and danced with friends in a darkened Philadelphia apartment strung with Christmas lights and sticky with spilled drinks, wildly and even, with me, a bit suggestively, singing along with pop songs (because he knew all the words to all of them) and I was absoultely grinning inside and out at my reserved beloved- ha! Mike! What fun we're having! 1999 was more typical: we hung out with friends earlier in the evening and made it home to our apartment by midnight. We brought wine up to the roof and watched the fireworks and waited for some Y2K disaster to unfold before our eyes. It didn't, so we drained our glasses and climbed back in through the window. Thus began our 21st century.

So many friends have kindly commented to me that it will be a good thing to leave 2018 behind. That it was the very worst year, and it's time to be done with it. This is sort of true. But what is more true is that a year that Mike never got to see is in fact much worse than a year he lived in with us.

I feel afraid of 2019. I feel afraid of a future that just keeps going and going without my husband in it.

Grief feels like terror sometimes. It evokes particular fears: what if I forget, what if I dishonor him, what if I can never feel simple happiness again, what if there is no life after death, what if I could have advocated for him better, what if my children are hurt in ways I cannot help with, what if I squandered our time? But sometimes, without any content at all, I am gripped by it, the pain a mix of fear and anxiety and acute, acute sorrow.

Last night I went to the movies with my friend Diana. The movies! I was so happy to sit in the dark with an enormous bag of popcorn between us watching something decidedly inappropriate for children. We got home, we chatted and laughed with all the kids and her husband Teb who had fed them and stayed with them and mercifully cleaned every inch of my kitchen, including the dread stovetop. What wonderful friends I have! Everyone went home, my exhausted children went to bed, and I sat up late, feeling lost and alone. The beginning of the day and the end of the day are always the hardest for me, but this was worse than usual. Finally I cried and cried and talked to Mike until the tightest tangle of the terror feeling loosened.

I'm just not ready for 2019. I can't put on Mike's cavalier cloak of who-cares-about-New-Year's. Instead I'm just standing here naked, wrinkles and cellulite and all of it exposed, defenseless against the relentless ticking away. The numbers are changing, the date will be different, there's a new calendar in the kitchen and in my office, the world is screaming it from all sides. Time keeps barreling us along. Part of me wants it to, so that I will hurt less. A bigger part of me wants it to please slow down, or better yet, stop and move backwards instead.

Our friends Sarah and Robert visited us a few days ago and Sarah suggested we make a mural about what we want 2019 to be about together. I felt so grateful to her. We would never have done it on our own; we are all, I think, in our own ways, afraid of the future. Better to avoid considering it too much. But instead there we were with paints and crayons and markers sitting around a long piece of brown butcher paper unrolled on the kitchen floor, nudging the cats out of the way. It slowly filled with trees, leaping dolphins, handsome men, starry skies, cats, mountains, yogis, cups running over, mandalas, flowers, more cats.

And one narwhal.

I treasure Beatrice's narwhal. I delight in it. It was the first thing she drew, a creature both magical and real.

A narwhal is so improbable. Just like enjoying going to the movies in the midst of this sorrow, or laughing and crying over fancy drinks with Robert and Sarah in a new dress purchased with Heather in New Orleans earlier this month, or an amazing, wild mural hanging on the front of this house that Mike never lived in illustrating the beauty and love that awaits us in 2019.

2019, a year that terrifies me.

2019, the year of the narwhal.

win-lose

Tonight I am taking Gabriel to meet a new guitar teacher. He happens to play in a band with a gentle and poetic sensibility, which seems a good fit for my big-hearted boy (or at the very least a good fit for my big-hearted feelings about my big-hearted boy).

Mike and I listened to one of their albums, Befriended, over and over during the 2004-2005 academic year, driving in my dad's old Nissan Altima between our home in Germantown and our schools in Villanova and Bryn Mawr. I graduated with my social work degree in May, and gave birth to Frances in June. That album is the soundtrack to a tender time of growing into parenthood, saying goodbye to our life without children as it had been, and welcoming with not a little trepidation an unknown way of life that would be dedicated to an unknown person. I remember sitting in a parking lot near Bryn Mawr's library, settled in the Altima's passenger seat with my feet propped on the pale glove compartment door, watching sunlight filtered through moving trees overhead play on the windshield, feeling Mike next to me in the driver's seat, letting a song finish before I broke the magic space of the car to pick up a book I needed, my heart aching with a kind of love-anguish, my baby's feet digging up underneath my ribs.

Nobody knows, darling. Nobody knows how they are loved. 
Don't worry my darling, the sun's coming up. 

My baby didn't know how blasted open our hearts already were.

In those days I was seeing an outside supervisor to help me with my field practice. I went to her because I felt like a complete failure, a useless deer in the headlights during my therapy sessions. I was devastated by how surprisingly ill-suited to psychotherapy I seemed to be. I started crying whenever I talked about it, which made my on-site supervisor begin to question the whole arrangement, which made me cry more.

Rochelle did not make me cry. She definitely made me laugh. Her office was in Chestnut Hill, and felt like a very well lived in living room, full of overstuffed pillows and books and battered furniture from decades past. The first time I knocked on her door she hollered 'Come on in! I can't get up!' and sure enough, as I cautiously peered in and scanned the room looking for her, my eyes lit on a 70-something woman wearing brilliant fuschia lipstick sitting in a wingback chair with her foot, set in some kind of orthopedic contraption, propped on a pile of blankets that slid around on an ottoman as she moved, which she did when she talked, thus requiring frequent tending, smiling and beckoning with sweeping arms for me to stop hesitating at the door and come in already.

How I loved her. We talked about my fieldwork for maybe 12 minutes over the hours that I met with her. Mostly what I remember talking about is the sense of loss I felt as my body moved closer and closer to giving birth. I told her my fear that what Mike and I liked to do most over the course of a leisurely evening - cook, listen to music, eat, drink wine, talk and talk and talk, and talk some more, and then be quiet and listen to music, and then talk again - would never happen again, once this baby arrived. We would only pay attention to it. We would never have the space and freedom to be together in that way again.

She leaned forward in her chair, hovering over that boot. She nodded and clucked and made a lot of empathetic noises; she smiled often. Rochelle had heavy plastic-framed glasses that made her eyes seem even bigger than they were. She told me of course you're worried about that; she told me don't worry about that. She told me that she and her husband liked to do that best, too, and that it didn't stop when they had kids. She told me we would always be us, even though we would also be forever transformed by parenthood.

She spoke personally, warmly, with an authenticity that I soaked up and took a lot of comfort in. We ended up focusing on the transition I was in the middle of, but now that I look back, I can see that her example helped me with my field work more than any case review could have. I walked away knowing that I could be a therapist, and be myself while doing it - that that, in fact, would be ideal. I had been laboring under the notion that I had to act like a therapist, that is, back myself way up and out of the picture in order to put on a nice counselor face and say all the right things and have lots of amazing insights. Rochelle taught me that I could just be present and real, and the rest of it would flow from that.

I would go home to our cozy apartment on the third floor of an old stone house on Germantown Avenue, and tell Mike while we washed dishes in the galley kitchen with a black and white checkerboard linoleum floor that glowed beneath the overhead light and an enormous warped window that opened to the lush treetops from the estate of the historic home next door, Rochelle says it'll be okay. She says we will still be us. I'd offer this information with a little smile and tone that suggested I knew that Mike did not in fact recognize the Authority of Rochelle but I wanted to tell him anyway, so he would know it was reassuring to me at the very least.

We slept then in a double bed, with an iron frame painted white that came from my family. Frances sleeps in it now. Over twenty years of spooning with Mike, I was always on the outside, and that was true throughout my pregnancy too. Somehow my huge belly still fit just right (though that bottom arm was/is always such a problem - where to tuck it, without it falling asleep?) and the baby always seemed to start practicing martial arts, or acrobatics, or driving a truck, or whatever it was she did in there, just as I would lie down to go to sleep. So it became a routine at night, to snuggle up next to Mike, happy in anticipation of the baby kicking me and through me, him. She threw little punches that landed square on his back. We would lie there smiling in the dark, feeling her shake things up.

I played the Innocence Mission for Gabriel this morning and I thought of all those times. I thought of the bittersweet tenderness that a you-can-never-go-back change ripples through a person, a family.

We were very happy; we were very sad. In the spring we made plans to leave Philly. Mike made plans to leave academia. I began to make plans to find my first social work job. The baby would come, and everything would change.

Earlier this week I was supposed to have lunch with a new friend who is also going through a terrible loss. She works near me, and because we had to cancel the lunch, I asked if I could run up to her office just to give her a quick hug. I took the outdoor stairs leading to her part of the building, hearing my steps echoing on the metal, feeling the cold emanating from the railing. It was a crisp, sunny day but in the shade of the stairwell it was awfully cold.

Then at the top I stepped into a patch of dazzling light and it felt just marvelous, the warm sun on my cold cheek. I closed my eyes. The light and warmth penetrated my eyelids, so unexpected, so gentle, such a contrast to cold metal and shade. Was it a minute? Thirty seconds? I didn't stand there long, but it was long enough to begin to relax into the brightness. Finally I stepped across the landing towards the building, back through shade, and felt the temperature drop again what might have been fifteen degrees, back to a land of bracing oneself against the elements, rather than inviting them in, as I had a moment earlier.

Moving from sun to shade is so dramatic, especially in the height of summer, when the sun can feel like a relentless beast pushing down on you and the shade offers gentle respite. Now in this cold, dark season, the sunlight is a precious gift. The color of the whole day can change, depending on where you're standing.

Sometimes that's what grief is like. Frances calls it a grief attack, when you're tooling along as best you can, fairly steady, and suddenly you're knocked off your feet by acute sorrow. You're in the winter sun, doing just fine, letting your guard down, and then suddenly, without warning, find yourself in the shade, shivering.

As we approach Christmas, for me the grief is more like holding the sun and the darkness simultaneously, all the time. The warmer it gets, the colder it gets. The more delighted I am by the children and the more zany their holiday energy, the more devastated I am by Mike's absence. The more beautiful our tree, the more heartbreaking our tree. The more "normally" I am able to move through a day, the more alien I feel.

A few days ago I went out to our garage and used my very fussy elliptical trainer. It was procured by loving friends as a response to my perceived predicament back in early March - it seemed then that I would be bringing Mike home on hospice care, in charge of suctioning his tracheostomy and managing his feeding tube and basically continuing to live out our days in an increasingly intense and demanding caregiving role. I'm the kind of person - or at least through this experience I became the kind of person - who starts to lose any semblance of emotional balance if I can't sweat at least every couple of days. And it didn't seem like leaving the house would be in my future for quite awhile. Hence, a big beautiful piece of machinery was moved into my house while I was at the hospital with Mike, and now lives in the corner of my new garage.

Anyway. I had half an hour (a win), and the elliptical was working (another win), and I watched part of an episode of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Mike's iPad (yet another win, figuring out how to download a show in order to play it later, the kind of thing that was Mike's job, not mine), and it was funny. When I was done, fueled by a sparkling ripple of endorphins and good jokes, I did a little dance as I hopped off. I kept doing my funny happy dance on the way to the garage door, before I had to open it and start acting like a more sedate adult again in my urban, exposed backyard. With my hand on the doorknob, waiting for my hips to settle down, I suddenly had this thought: this is my garage. I bought this garage. This is my house!

I laughed out loud. It was the first time I felt that way - pride in having pulled it together and bought a house - a house with a garage! no way! - and happiness in my accomplishment and excitement over all I wanted to do to keep making it feel like our home.

A minute later I sobbed. The warmer it gets, the colder it gets. I told a friend about feeling that surprising rush of happiness later in the day, and cried again with her.

But I can take it. At least for today, I'm game. If I open myself up to joy, I know what comes with it. I know the deal. It's okay. Nothing is the same, there's no use in pretending. Nothing is just good. It is all bittersweet, not unlike those days when we teetered on the edge of the abyss of parenthood, holding hands.

As my new friend and I observed, once I finally made it inside and found her office, nothing is win-win anymore. It's either win-lose, or lose-lose. If you don't give yourself permission to register the wins, or make space for them, then it will be lose-lose all the time. Maybe a slightly muted, muffled, numb sort of lose, as compared to the win-lose lose, which really fucking hurts, but it's all lose all the same. Might as well go for the wins when you can.