notes on a quarantine, week three

Now: Gabriel is playing guitar upstairs, the many voices of Beatrice’s classmates are echoing in the kitchen during a school meeting, Frances’s thoughts are quietly whirring in the living room with Little Women on her lap (we trade it back and forth, she rereading it and Beatrice and I reading it aloud, usually on the front porch after I’ve finished work for the day, wrapped in a blanket as the sun sets where Walnut St ends in a T at Race Avenue, down the hill from our house), and I am responding to student emails and planning out the remote therapy session schedule for the rest of the week. My thoughts bounce around: when will we be able to take a walk today, how to plan Beatrice’s activities during my next two sessions this afternoon, how to keep Gabriel from the cave of his room for extended periods, can we finish a birthday card for a friend before the salt-and-pepper weathered handsome mail carrier arrives, will the coffee will be kind and stretch itself magically and not run out before I am ready to again address grocery-acquisition, how can we resume our fun outdoor workouts with our neighborhood friends in a safe way (as the track at the college has become overcrowded, impossible to properly distance oneself now). I imagine the contents of my mind are a lot like yours. How will we secure our simple pleasures, how will we make it through the small challenges of today?

This week has, so far, been much better than last, when the stress of remote school and work starting in earnest had me at my wit’s end, or to be more specific crying my eyes out at least once a day in a fit of overwhelm. I am not a doctor, nor a delivery person, an epidemiologist, a grocery store worker, a nurse, a sanitation worker - I am none of these present-moment heroes, and I have had to sacrifice very little. But this is hard. It’s really hard. I think it’s okay to recognize that others’ burdens are immense, and still name and share our own feelings: sadness, isolation, frustration. As my dad would often remind me, there’s no comparing pain. We all have some, that’s all there is to know; so be compassionate when you can, to yourself and everyone else, too.

I’ve been thinking about him a lot, and dreaming often of Mike. Weird, vaguely upsetting dreams mostly. I have a lot of latent cancer-and-immediate grief-era fears that have been stirred up by the threat of this virus living everywhere. (That’s maybe a thing anyone who has gone through trauma or loss recently can understand.) But the normal emotional difficulties of being a parent, a therapist, a friend, a widow, a human sometimes feel extra difficult right now. So many normal life avenues like seeing a friend unexpectedly, making eye contact (video chatting, incidentally, does not provide proper eye contact!), hugging, stepping easily onto a neighbor’s porch, meeting for coffee, resting a heavy head on a welcoming shoulder, these usual gestures of connection and care that allow regular old moments of fear, sadness, and conflict to move through a person peacefully - that help us digest the shifting challenges of a Tuesday afternoon - these mundane moments of microhealing are no longer there for us. It’s just me, my feelings, my kids, and my kitchen. We have to hold it all somehow, and then find new ways to let it go.

Some things that have helped this week: lowered expectations, particularly of my ability to oversee school activities while working and my kids’ abilities to stay focused and productive while I am unavailable, small domestic routines I’ve been working on establishing like lunchtime walk/jogs with Beatrice on her scooter and daily chores and kids’ dinner-making nights, the purchase of a new iPad to bring our person-to-screen ratio to a far more functional 1:1, digging into domestic pleasures like gardening and baking, long walks without the kids, and too-long hot showers (also without the kids) (okay, actually sometimes Beatrice slides in, which I begrudgingly allow because someone has to make sure the shampoo gets properly rinsed out). Oh, and taking advantage of every shred of sunshine that we can.

But nothing makes up for the loss of tight-squeeze bear hugs, which I now realize I typically enjoy multiple times a day, because I am very lucky and surrounded by people I adore in my usual home-work-school life. My kids are all excellent huggers, but my widows out there especially know one’s children cannot take the place of an affectionate adult.

Beatrice has been attending Sunday School via Zoom over the past two weeks, and during the story of Jesus’s life, told with striking illustrated cards in muted colors, the teacher lingered over an image of Jesus’s thumbs gently pushing on the eyes of a blind man. When Jesus touched people, he changed them, she said. They were never the same again.

I miss touching, and being touched. I miss the change wrought in me with every hand squeeze and arm graze and knee knock.

I miss you.

two

Before Mike died, church was our Sunday morning default. My kids were acolytes and children's choir participants and long ago, when Frances was a baby, Mike and I were youth group leaders. After he died nothing was the same, and nothing was less the same than my children's attitudes towards church and God. I won't speak for them, but suffice it to say, I don't believe forcing children to do something they feel strongly opposed to is a great way to foster warm, safe feelings about said thing. I find myself the lone member of my family who still feels at home in a pew. As I am never alone, going to church by myself is nice. But I miss the kids snuggled next to me. And worry I am handling this all wrong for them. And that Mike's worst fears are all coming true. Thus every Sunday morning, because I am unsettled about this, I am pulled in a number of directions, uncertain which is most right.

Sometimes I go to church on Saturday evening and take the kids out to breakfast on Sunday. Sometimes I drag a complaining Beatrice with me to church. Sometimes I go to yoga class with friends and on my way out the door say next week, please, will you guys join me at church, knowing they will not. Sometimes I let everyone sleep in and I read the paper in the quiet and nothing really happens at all - I just think about various scenarios happening and then in the end make pancakes and sit around and drink coffee and talk with my kids instead.

May I point out that all of these Sunday mornings seem pretty decent to me, each meeting some very real needs? And the religious education problem is uncomfortable, and definitely counts as a problem, but it's not as tormenting as it once was. I'm trying to take the long view. And I'm trying to forgive myself for not knowing what to do about it, for needing and sometimes taking time for myself, for not having the energy to put much time or thought into it - besides the last minute handwringing on Sunday, twenty minutes before the service begins.

What I want for myself is to feel the receptive space within me, to know it is still there and hasn't been elbowed out by parent-teacher conferences and social media and remembering not to forget snacks for rehearsal and messing up my schedule at work and worries about people I care about traveling during a global pandemic. Church and yoga are both good for that.

So today it was yoga. And as I may have mentioned here before, about 90% of the savasanas I have practiced since I lost my husband end in tears. Like, it doesn't matter what was just on my mind or how good or bad I felt during class, the moment I settle in, flat on my back and exposed to all the universe, something shifts, my chest and throat tighten, and all I can do is try not to distract the yogis around me with audible sobs.

On a recent Sunday morning the teacher gently suggested we slowly scan our bodies for points of tension in order to release more fully into the pose. Instead my mind began to slowly scan Mike's body, starting with his marvelous stubby hairy toes and moving up to his skinny calves, eventually lingering on his clavicle, his shoulders, his cheekbones, his eyes. I cried and cried, for the preciousness of him.

Today, as I let my heavy legs relax and roll outwards and tucked my poky shoulder blades under my back, I remember thinking that I totally wasn't going to cry this time. Not happening, no way. I felt a bit detached, pleasantly tired, far from any kind of intense emotion. Neutral.

But then my mind began to wander back into the church dilemma, to my heathen children bickering at home and my dead husband sighing in disappointment, and in the midst of all that discomfort I was suddenly struck by a dreamy yet vivid vision - the kind that only happens in savasana - and it was Jesus. He was kneeling just behind and to the left side of me, gently stroking my forehead.

The aching, grieving part of me rose to the surface to feel his cool, smooth fingers soothe the tension from my head. The self-doubting and ashamed part of me felt Him reach over my shoulder and put a hand on my heart, and in my mind I covered it with my own hand, trying not to clutch, and cried, awash in that tenderness and compassion, and in my own tears, and in gratitude for something new growing in me.

I don't care if God sent me that vision, or I conjured it out of a need for some forgiveness, or to reassure myself that it's okay, really, I can be receptive to God wherever and however I am, because maybe those things aren't really in conflict with one another. Maybe they are all versions of the same thing.

It will be two years this Thursday. I've been more exposed, more pierced by the brute facts of what we went through over the past weeks. But I have also had occasion to confront some of the challenges we faced in our marriage in a more open, wholehearted way, a way I wasn't able to a year ago, or even four months ago, because it threatened my sense of safety in the world. I couldn't bear to consider and embrace it all, including our struggles and the responsibility I had in those, because I feared it would invalidate our lives together, the person I was and the person I am. If I fully admitted to our problems, would it mean I loved him less, loved him wrong?

But now I'm not afraid. I feel a peacefulness that I don't quite understand about all the parts of who we were together, maybe even most especially the extremely imperfect ones, and I find myself telling the truth about those to dear friends who patiently listen, helping me to discover things about my own extremely imperfect self that I am only now learning because I was too afraid to confront them when Mike was alive, or at the very least before he got sick.

And so my moment with Jesus's healing hands today felt like a vivid expression of a kind of grace I have been noticing and definitely not taking for granted lately. You can't really forgive someone, including yourself, if you don't bring the truth of what they did or didn't do into the light. And so I feel as if I've been looking at Mike, and myself, in the morning sunlight. What is revealed isn't always pretty, but I still love us very much. I also forgive us. I forgive Mike, I forgive me. And that gesture, of pulling darker things into the light, and blessing them all the same, has brought me a new peace that I am holding with the awe and lightness of touch that I would a baby bird. It is delicate, beautiful, mysterious, very likely about to fly off somewhere else, but I will know it was here always.

We've nearly made it two years. I never could have envisioned what this moment would be like, the toddlerhood of my grief. I'm definitely sturdier on my legs; walking is no big deal now. I can even run sometimes, though I do fall often and sometimes barrel into things which I immediately regret. I'm quick to cry, rather self-involved, and always seem to need help. I talk a lot. I can't have everything I want, and I want so much, and that's hard. I respond with my whole broken being to reassurance, an open blue sky, music, a flock of snow geese, a soothing hand on my brow. Acts of love. Sunshine. A beloved face. The arrival of spring.

When the older children were little, Mike and I used to comment knowingly to other parents that three is the new two. Like, it's the terrible threes, not the terrible twos! A parent really should enjoy two while she can. But my own infant widowhood, always terrible, is also becoming, so strange and unsettling as I enter this third year, increasingly spacious, surprising, peaceful. I did not expect my persistent pain to gradually and gently invite a more fuller, more accepted, more messed-up me to emerge. Yet here I am.

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.