anything might happen

Long before personal pronouns were a thing, Mike and I spent hours talking about a philosopher named Luce Irigaray and the gendered nature of language, the limits it puts upon our ability to express the fullness of our realities to one another. Masculine ways of knowing were built right into grammar: the subject of a sentence wants an object, not another subject. How to speak to one another without violence, without reducing one gender to a lesser status, if the structures and forms of our sentences tacitly lead us to do just that?

Actually, I don’t know if I’m remembering any of this right. I do remember a sense of overwhelm, confronting the depths of masculine privilege that plumbed right down to the ways I speak and think. My impression of it all is hazy mostly because her work is difficult and Mike, who was extraordinary at translating complex theory into comprehensible language, could only speculate as to what the heck she was trying to say. He wanted my help figuring it out.

Before Mike, time fit into years in school – this or that happened when I had Mrs. Craig in the fourth grade, or during my junior year of college. After Mike, and before the children, I can identify memories by sorting them into a series of inscrutable continental philosophers. As in: we would run in Prospect Park on Sunday afternoons the fall when Mike was reading Gadamer. We moved into that fantastic apartment during the summer of Merleau-Ponty. Levinas came and went and came again; one of his more memorable returns was while I was in the shower one morning and Mike burst in, excitedly explaining a new approach to his dissertation in which he would differentiate the early work, in which we humans are fugitives, from his later work, in which we are hostages. From and to The Other, I suppose. I had just started a new job then.

I never read any of it, but I might as well have. I was a naïve philosophy midwife, asking questions and trying to grasp some part Mike's inner world and thus helping him clarify his own thought. Sometimes I felt like a frustrating (and frustrated) piece of furniture as he talked and talked and I simply didn’t get it. Yep, there were some serious subject-object moments. Sometimes we transcended the specifics and had thrilling dialogues about things like whether or not men and women can truly communicate intersubjectively, despite the limits of grammar. Those talks about Irigaray fell into the latter category. 

But I’d never thought about the masculine structure and logic of stories as limiting what we are able to imagine, see, and know until I read Brit Marling in the Sunday Times over the weekend. She is outrageously smart and cool and, incidentally, I think she should be my friend. But anyway. I loved her piece on rejecting the premise of the ‘strong female lead’ because it’s really just a strong male lead who looks hot naked – meaning she typically embodies masculine virtues of domination, power, linear ambition. These are not values that guide my own life, yet as I thought more about it I began to see that I have often judged myself against them, and when I do I am always lacking. 

(Including during some of those long philosophy talks with Mike. If I had an intuitive objection to an idea Mike was testing out, I could never out-argue him to prove my point. I couldn’t prove any point. I talk in circles, I seek collaboration in my thinking, I look for narrative. I would always drag his pure abstraction down to the ground, testing out ideas in the real world, which was complex and multilinear and troubled just about any bold claim about the way morality, or existence, or human subjectivity works. This could drive Mike absolutely nuts.)

Marling is honest about confronting the limits of all our imaginations – colonized as they are by stories by and about men since forever – in envisioning a female protagonist that does not respond to male desires so much as acts and speaks for herself, from her own desires. A female hero. What even is that?

The story we all know of the hero’s journey, from epic poems and books and movies and songs and fairy tales, is structured, she explains, as follows: inciting incident – rising tension – explosive climx – denouement. Which sounds a lot like a male orgasm. 

But really, why wouldn’t our stories reflect our sexuality, which reflects the totality of our gendered, embodied experience in a world that seems to want to polarize, exaggerate and ultimately distort masculinity and femininity? 

A male orgasm is an excellent, exciting thing. But it is only one way. The linear nature of it is what doesn’t map onto my own inclinations and ways of understanding. I can never be the hero of a story like that. 

A female orgasm is something else. Or rather a female erotic experience, because I don’t think the beginning-middle-end structure necessarily works for a female hero – the female sexual experience is often multilinear, diffuse, complex, shifting in intensities, inclusive of one’s whole being, driven not so much by a singular, directed urgency. One orgasm can just set the stage for another. Anything might happen.

That sounds more like the structure of a plot about someone like me. Anything might happen, and it often does. Denouement? What’s that? This story keeps spinning out in many directions, touching many levels of experience, intimacy and imagination. But I have no idea how one might tell that story.

I think of a friend I had in high school who was marvelously charismatic and funny and smart but also, over time, increasingly abusive and manipulative to the people around her. I struggled for many months with private thoughts of anger, hurt and confusion over how to protect myself in a situation that was decidedly bad and getting worse all the time. But she was part of a network of relationships that I knew I would risk losing if I separated from her. The social costs would be painful to bear. Eventually I made a series of quiet gestures that indicated I was pulling away. She objected, demanded I explain myself. I passively demurred, spent a lot of time with my boyfriend, and avoided her as much as possible, until it was finally clear we were no longer friends. I hated what I then saw as total, despicable cowardice on my part. Why couldn’t I have confronted her as some better version of myself might have in a movie? (A glamorized masculine narrative type movie!) Why didn’t I stand on a table and spit all my anger at her in the middle of the cafeteria for all to see? 

For years I considered this episode as illustrative of my interpersonal wimpiness, my inability to make a hard and fast break in a blaze of confrontational glory.

That is, until a few months ago, when I reunited with a few friends from high school. We hadn’t stayed in touch. I had been right about the social costs to separating from that friend, who came up in conversation that night. My closest friend from that time pulled me aside. I envied you, she said. You were the only one brave enough to get away. The rest of us got sucked down into the shit. 

Huh. That was a complete surprise. As we talked more, I saw through her eyes, and came to see that trying to preserve other relationships and ultimately choosing self care was, in its own way, brave. Braver than staying for the abuse. Heroic, even. I got out the only way I could: messily, quietly, and with many conflicted feelings. But I did get out. 

The only time I have exploded in violence and anger at another human (besides my children, God forgive me) (oh yeah and my parents and sister when I was growing up, forgive me those tantrums too please) was when I arrived home from the hospital in a terrified, free-falling state after a doctor suggested that the only sensible explanation for the inexplicable fevers Mike was suffering - after every possible alternative had been ruled out - was that his lymphoma was back. That relapse was a devastating moment unlike any other. I had parked down the street from our house as the space out front was blocked by a delivery truck. Another neighbor pulled in just after me, and as I ran up the walk I could hear him muttering loudly, clearly so that I would hear, about how rude some people were who parked in his spot right in front of his house. 

I stopped, breathless and shaking. I turned to him, glaring, and said excuse me? Are you talking to me right now?

You can imagine where things went. I was furious. I yelled that a city street was not anyone’s personal parking spot. I yelled that I was coming home for JUST A MINUTE to get a charger for my husband who is in the hospital with CANCER. Because he has cancer AGAIN.

I couldn’t speak afterwards. I shook on and off for hours. It was terrible, terrible. Treating another human like that (whom I learned later was attached to that parking spot because his wife is chronically ill and has difficulty walking any distance at all) was awful for me. Turns out the triumphant take down of the movies isn’t really my thing. Explosive climax, sure. That sounds great! As long as I’m up for the traumatized, anxiety-driven full-body shaking afterwards. 

So. If the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are stories undergirded by a particular, somewhat extreme version of masculine desire and sexual release, maybe we have to retell our stories, and retell them again. All of us, not just women. Widowhood has brought me a loneliness deeper than any I have ever known, but it would be only partly true to stop there – it has also brought me a new willingness to uncover my own tangled up ferocity, my own desires which do not line up with the male hero’s. To reach down and invite my imagination and intuition and curiosity and weird circular tangential embodied way of thinking to consider whether I have been more heroic than I ever knew, or even wanted to know. Being a social outlier has some unexpected silver linings. 

What does it mean to be the hero of your own story? I reframe and rewrite personal narratives with my clients all the time, because it’s powerful and gets us closer to the truth. And I think people are good simply because they are. I love that about us. Which suggests the ways of knowing and being that are gendered feminine, just as ways gendered masculine, are good simply because they are, too. So how to reimagine a story that takes into account your many ways: feminine, masculine, a mix of the two, something outside of that binary completely?

Some of my ways are

talking and thinking circuitously

valuing connetion, empathy, relationships

expressing creativity and curiosity

a keenly embodied, sensory-attuned way of understanding my response to the world

feeling a kinship with animals, especially other mammals

bringing my feelings into every part of my life as a way to live more deeply, including and most especially in my work as a therapist and mother

honoring and supporting other people

moving

listening to stories

telling the truth

embracing expansiveness and inclusion

fearing conflicts

longing to see and touch the natural world

crying easily and often

Now. What are your many good ways of approaching this broken tender world, and living out your story within it? 

don't blame me

Tonight Beatrice and I finished, for the third time, Ramona's World. For those of you who haven't read it recently, it ends with Ramona's archenemy, snooty Susan, breaking down in tears at Ramona's birthday party. She initially refuses a piece of birthday cake because her mother told her about the germs that rain down on cakes when someone blows out her candles, and because of the cavities, and of course because of the sugar. But it creates such a stir amongst the other girls at the picnic table at the park that she can no longer maintain her superior manner and loses it under the sheer pressure of having to be perfect all the time. She's mad that Ramona is blatantly imperfect and people like her. She's mad that she tries so hard to be perfect and things still don't work out in her favor.

Poor Susan, said Bea. I'm glad she got better about being perfect in the end (in this case getting better = deciding it was okay to eat a piece of germy cake).

Do you ever want to be perfect?

Not about being good, like Susan. But I do want to be perfect with my work at school.

What happens when you aren't?

Bea was looking at me upside down, settling the top of her head and her feet on my bed with her butt in the air, one arm extended to pet the cat next to me, one arm gesturing wildly as if it belonged to another expressive person who was deep in an unrelated conversation.

I get so mad at myself.

Yes. That must be hard.

Because I know it's hard for me. I know how the homework anguish tests my waning evening patience, the meltdowns over mistakes that lead to sobbing at the kitchen table, the anxiety over timed math facts worksheets. It's agony for all of us, and the familiarity of it all (my own tantrums come to mind) doesn't help me parent with wisdom and grace. It just makes me more short-tempered.

Earlier tonight she and I were sitting in our minivan, waiting outside the high school for Frances. Our minivan is pretty old. Old and crusty. And sticky. And trashy, good lord. But anyway. Because it is so old there isn't a good way to play music from my phone through the speakers, so we are mostly limited to the piles of CDs tucked in compartments and under seats, relics from the CDs-in-cars era. It means certain treasures of my past get cycled through and my favorite of them all, I do believe, is Cat Power's You Are Free album from 2003.

Actually, not the album. Mostly the first song. I Don't Blame You. 

I could listen to it a thousand times. In fact I probably have listened to it a thousand times and I'm not sick of it yet. Mike found it mildly irritating and somewhat amusing when I would hit rewind to hear a song once or twice or three times in a row; he would roll his eyes. He prefered to experience the album as a whole. It was another time then.

The song is, possibly, a letter to Kurt Cobain. It's addressed to a musician who is trapped in other people's sense of ownership of him, their expectations and projections. I might be totally wrong but I think the act for which she doesn't blame him is his suicide. None of this particularly connects to me; what I respond to is the spare chords, the tenderness and ache in her voice. I don't blame you. It's a song that captures what it's like to love someone who is in pain.

It was echoing in my mind, pacing my steps through the damp gray February air as I walked to work this morning. I don't blame you. What can it mean? Blame suggests a false loading of responsibility onto one lone set of shoulders, when we all know it's never that simple. There are always already others involved, and history and hurt and endless perspectives. You can take responsibility for a mistake without taking the blame. The blame is more than your fair share. The blame can never be true.

What would it be like to sing this song to myself? To see the pain I am in and love me with a gentleness that doesn't judge? I tried to incline the tenderness of the song playing in my mind in my own direction. It wasn't easy; I'm not sure I can really do it. But the very idea, the very effort, lent a sense of possibility and exhilarating mystery to those last moments in the damp chill before I arrived at my office. My heart was lighter.

I don't blame you. I don't blame you for how much or how little you cry. For saying the wrong thing. For saying too much. For sweating when you're nervous, and for the myriad everyday things that make you nervous. For hurting a friend's feelings. For your enormous feet. For what you did and didn't do for Mike all the days he was sick. For the pain your children feel. For being irritable. For having shadows beneath your eyes. For your enormous smile. For picking at your cuticles. For seeking distraction in places you know cannot truly comfort. For being imperfect, so deeply and obviously and glaringly imperfect, every fucking day.

To sing to myself with a heart full of love, to remind myself there is nothing here to be ashamed of. It's a radical, disorienting serenade.

Every day is full of our shortcomings if we look for them, but that doesn't mean we are to blame. We make mistakes that do not diminish our preciousness; rather they put our preciousness into sharper relief. How I long for Mike's skinny calves and bouts of anxiety and tear-filled eyes and hairy toes.

I took that picture at the top of this post in the bathroom at work yesterday to try and convince my sister to buy the pants I'm wearing because she discovered the very same ones were on sale but was on the fence and wanted to see how they looked on me first. It's the kind of picture I can only send to my sister. I felt silly, but not embarrassed, because she loves me no matter what. Now I'm sending it to you, too. I'm practicing behaving as if I don't blame me. Maybe it will overflow and seep into Beatrice's growing heart when neither of us is paying attention, and she won't blame herself either.

It's just a picture. I'm just a person.

Hello.

wanting

I just did the math. It's been 680 days since I held Mike's hand and looked into his clear eyes. 

So much has happened since then.

In the months after he died I entered a kind of freefall. I was part of a finetuned, intricate system for twenty years, and on March 12, 2018 half of the machinery was suddenly and irrevocably yanked out of it - and not just on one discernible half, as you might expect - but rather a hidden gear in this corner, a series of cogs in that, a wheel in the very center of the operation, all violently removed - tiny bits and big pieces, all of them essential to keep the old me humming along as I once had without giving the miraculously complex nature of it all a second thought. Without Mike I could imitate my old gestures and impulses, but they felt empty. Absurd. Like a robot full of busted machinery masquerading as a human.

How did I do any of the things that I did then? I sold our old house, I bought our new house, I brought home the kittens, I got us through holidays and birthdays, I got us all the way to the one year mark. We all took the day off and volunteered, baking cookies at the local food bank and being so loud and obnoxious about it that after a few dozen the staff did everything short of beg us to leave to gracioulsy usher us off the premises. Much of the time it seemed I was hanging on by my fingernails. And I bite my fingernails! I worried the kids would hate me. I worried I was letting Mike down. I replayed his death in my mind many times a day. I said the word 'widow' aloud as often as possible, to try to make myself believe it. I continued to feel like a busted robot.

In the summer after the one year mark, I redid our kitchen. The new floor looks like a watermelon rind; the cabinets are so white they glow. I gardened a little. We had friends over and sometimes I didn't cry; I always laughed. I began to look around, and for the first time I felt proud of myself. That's my garage, damnit. I drove us to North Carolina and back without incident (and with adventures). That's my full time job that supports us with a decent salary and nice benefits. And I even like it!

I went to California all by myself to visit a dear friend. While basking in the desert silence I missed a flea invasion at home and I didn't feel guilty (though I definitely felt grateful to the family and friends who battled those nasty bitty beasts in my absence). I felt content with stillness on that trip. Something was starting to shift, imperceptibly at first. But I think the first clue to the shifting was that I was able to know in my bones and through my tears that I was pulling us forward, into and out of the very worst thing imaginable, and at least for now we were okay, and sometimes even more than okay. Sometimes we were kicking ass.

Somewhere around day 615, maybe 620, the shifting began to feel more like a rumble. And that's kind of where I am now - rumbling. I am leaning into and fumbling around the open spaces in my robot panel chest, and the cold air and lack of jagged metal edges is rarely about panicky disorientation these days. Instead those spaces feel like beckoning potentiality, like something I want.

Wanting! That's what I do now. I want things. I want things I could never want if Mike were alive, or at least not within the system we were together before and up until he died. What's more, I suspect I want things I could never want if Mike and I had not gone through his cancer together, and if I had not had to suffer the unthinkable loss of him. Add that to the list of goods we now enjoy with the strange, melancholy awareness that we have them because we don't have him: a full life in Lancaster, a trip to Jamaica, the naughty cats, and now all this wanting. I am able to admit to and even revel in wants I have never been able to articulate to myself or anyone else until now, 680 days into widowhood.

I want to write a book. I want to not anticipate and facilitate other people's wants. I want to assert my authority. I want to hold your gaze and not look away. I want the exhilarating responsibility of claiming my own desires.

(That's a big one. After Mike died I had no fucking clue what appeal various aspects of the world held without anticipating his responses to them. It was just me, all alone inside, and I was at sea.)

What else? I want to take up a lot of space.

The other day I slid unexpectedly on the ice and caught myself just before I fell. Sorry! I said breathlessly to the air. There was no one else there. 

So, yeah. I want to stop apologizing. And to admit my mistakes with courage.

I want to be held. I want to hold. I want to tell the truth. I want to feel my wildness and ambition without any shame at all.

I want to treasure this brokeness within me, touch and see every last shard, and then give it all away.

fan letter

Dear Kevin Wilson,

I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to. I don't want to put your other books on hold at the library, or follow you on social media, or see your name pop up in the table of contents in the next New Yorker I miraculously manage to crack open because more details would make you into a more real person, which would dim the magic of the world you made in Nothing to See Here. I want the inner fabric of the story to stay real, so I think it's best if you remain in its shadowy periphery. But I also want to say thank you to someone because it was so good - so very good - and I feel a lot of hope for myself and for my kids in the wake of finishing it under a little spotlight on this airplane gliding through the dark night sky somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe Florida. I can't see a thing down there so it's hard to say. But it feels good to point one's gratitude in a particular direction. (Which is, incidentally, a big part of why I believe in God.)

I started your book a couple of days into a trip to Jamaica with my three children, after I had finished Nora McInerny's second memoir, No Happy Endings. Somehow that seems pertinent because the two stories have been talking to each other in my mind. My husband died twenty-one months ago after nearly three years of experimental treatments for his rare lymphoma. Five days before we departed for Jamaica, the first man I've dated since Mike died broke up with me after three very disorienting and exciting weeks. My children were not at all pleased with this brief romance; not that I wanted them to know about it, but predictably the cat yowled and scratched its way out of that bag almost immediately. So it was a thing. And its ending was strange and sad for me but eventually - like two days later - I came to see that it was right and felt peaceful about it. He wasn't well enough, and I've done enough caregiving for the time being. But now I know that kind of thing can happen.

Needless to say, there were many moments while swimming and sunning and ordering three Shirley Temples and one mojito at the swim up bar at the Beaches resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, surrounded by healthy happy not even sunburned mom-dad-and-two kids families when I felt like a total weirdo. I felt marked by all we have been through, like there must be a big flashing sign over my head blinking the word GRIEVING or LONELY or BUSTED or maybe just NOT NORMAL* with a big arrow pointing at my heart. I couldn't help but notice that I seemed to be the only single parent in the whole strange alternate world of the resort. I was definitely the only person who cried the whole boat trip back from snorkeling, thinking of the calm Papa presence my terrified Beatrice didn't have with her in the water, and the wonderful guide who offered her his own impersonal version of that, which totally worked.

But I also had so many moments of gratitude, and awareness of the closeness and understanding I have with my kids. They are weirdos with me. They know. They didn't glom onto the packs of privileged children that roamed the resort, ice cream cones in hand, dripping chlorine in line at the water slide, yelling to one another. That would have been fine, and they could have done that, because they have decent social skills, plus they're pretty privileged too and took to the endless supplies of sweets and thrills just as effortlessly as any well-tended American child would. But I think we preferred each others' company. Only we knew what their Papa would say about the late night karaoke that kept us awake at night, or the curly fries we ate every day, or the way Beatrice, eyes shining, loved snorkeling in the end. Only we knew that we were there because he died - no way would Mike have set foot in that place. Also we're smart and funny and good company. And excellent huggers. And we are, actually, ready to embrace everything, to eat it all, drink it in, tolerate fear and cheesiness in equal measure despite our (to varying degrees) cautious temperaments, because of all we have lost.

So anyway. Your quiet/not quiet excellent book gave me hope for weirdo children, and weirdo adults too. For the possibility that lonely weirdo adults can take good care of lonely weirdo children, and not let them down ever - at least not in any big terrible ways. Right now my heart is so broken and so big, so vast, in this strange and unplanned and porous moment in my life. Your novel offered an unexpected version of that state of being. I recognized myself in it. Who wouldn't, really? I love that.

Thank you.

yours truly,
Meagan



*I do realize that these are feelings most all humans experience, even gorgeous moms with living husbands sipping frozen drinks on the beach in Jamaica. Nothing to see here, I know. It was just hard to remember that sometimes during our trip.