wayward time

Yesterday evening I ran up to my bedroom, having just arranged to share burgers outside with my mom and friends for dinner, with the intention of quickly changing and squeezing in some exercise before I had to get started in the kitchen. I peeked into the family room and found Beatrice and Frances sprawled on the couch watching Queer Eye. They looked at me with smiles frozen on their faces.

We can stop this episode here, it's fine Mama.

I looked at them, suspicious. How many episodes had they already watched?

Now I love Queer Eye as much as anyone, maybe more, but I have been on a desperate mission to separate Beatrice from screens for the duration of this pandemic and I feel I am failing even more miserably than usual lately. Since my job has been on break for the summer I have no excuse. I'm not in a session; I'm just talking to a friend on the porch or puttering in the garden or engaging with one of the other children or reading the three-day-old Sunday paper. Because I want to. And trying to ignore the nagging awareness that if I cannot see or hear Beatrice, 99% of the time it's because she's absconded to a quiet corner of the house with a screen.

She's supposed to ask me first. She rarely does. So I was totally, completely annoyed to find her hanging out with the fab five, charming though they may be, without my permission.

I told her as much. I stomped to my bedroom and bent over to step into a pair of running shorts. Beatrice, undettered by my grouchiness, burst cheerfully into the room and attempted a flying leap onto my bed to bring some levity to the situation. She wound up kicking me in the face instead.

I stood up, dazed. My eyes teared up with the impact. I was SO mad. Like, blazing, irrationally, fiercely pissed.

I don't remember what I said, but it was harsh. Her offence most definitely did not merit my response; my irritation was more about my own ineffectual parenting when it comes to screens. The kick sent me over the edge. She fled my room and ran to her own. Then another kid needed my attention, and I got distracted by some other task, and the clock was ticking and I wouldnt be able to exercise after all, and I stomped back down the hall with wisps of steam still drifting from my ears.

Until I saw Beatrice's closed door in front of me, and heard the quiet behind it. Inhale, exhale. I knew I was in the wrong. I peeked in and saw her stretched out on her bed, still and sad. I came in and got in bed next to her. She turned to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. I told her I loved her, and tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. I held her close, and tried to not make any crying noises that would tip her off. It was Father's Day, and what with my youngest child's warm back and easy forgiveness and the floor of her room strewn with slime-making supplies and LOL dolls, and the thoughtful friends who had been reaching out to me since the morning to let me know they saw and honored my loneliness, I simply couldn't not cry anymore. It was a relief.

Beatrice flipped onto her back and looked up at the underside of the bed above us for awhile and then said Mama. Mama. When you cry I feel like crying too. It makes me sad when you're sad. It's like when someone is laughing so hard, and you don't even know why but you have to laugh too.

I know. I know you don't like it.

But Mama, it's okay. I want you to cry when you're sad, because I don't want you to pretend to be happy when you feel bad. You don't have to smile if you don't feel like it.

Thanks. I don't think I do, do I?

You do! But when I feel like crying I can't stop it. I just cry. Even if I'm at school. I hate crying at school.

Ugh, Beatrice, I used to hate that too.

In the months after Mike's death I worried Beatrice would willfully push her father away from her because she had so little tolerance for negative emotions. She'd jump up and put a hand on my lips or tell a joke if she noticed me become tearful. Sometimes she'd just say no crying! like a fed-up schoolteacher barking the rules at a wayward child. I was afraid it wouldn't be worth the sadness of his absence to recall the joy of his presence.

But as we lay warm and tangled on her bed, which is really a mattress on the floor beneath her loft bed because she discovered sleeping up that high was too darn scary, Beatrice told me a different story. She used to find my sadness intolerable because of the way it made her feel. Now she is old enough to recognize that it's worth enduring that discomfort if I am being honest. She wants to know that her mama's insides and outsides match. That she can trust me.

I wish Papa would come back, she said.

Me too, I said.

Then I found something for her to do, and said fuck it and exercised anyway and let dinner be late,  and sat outside on the first summer night and watched the fireflies and talked about dogs and ate mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches with some of my favorite people.

Then today I woke up way too early because it was Frances's fifteenth birthday.

Time can be such a bitch, pulling us all along day after day, ever farther from our life as a family of five that shines in the distance beyond the fault line of Mike's death. Gabriel is now taller than I am. Frances is running her own Spanish tutoring business. Beatrice talks about her feelings like a boss and sings along to pop songs. We have a dog who has run away and come home again. Life keeps on happening! It's exhilaring; it's crushing.

Sometimes I wish this narrative arc would bend into a shape that makes a little more sense.

seeing

After I finished my graduate program and had my very first baby, Mike and I moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster. These events happened within a six week period. I was overwhelmed, underslept, and delighted to get to know my hometown in a new way, no longer from the vantage point of a child but with the transformed vision of a new parent.

I started working at what was then known as SouthEast Lancaster Health Services three months after Frances was born, which may have changed my relationship to this diminutive city even more than parenthood. I had many appointment slots every day, and my patients taught me a lot, perhaps most powerfully by offering me a window into the intimate quotidian struggles that come with being poor. They taught me about the barriers to health and mental health care in my town that, even with the aid of my new-social-worker-oblivious-white-lady-can-do energy, were often insurmontable.

That job invited me to sit down with people I had never seen before. These were people I had willfully looked past on street corners, sitting in wheelchairs, walking in pairs carrying plastic bags, hanging on stoops, talking strangely to themselves, wearing their age and chronic illness and poverty in such a way that others gave them a wide, silent berth on city sidewalks. They were part of my city too.

I remember telling Mike a few weeks into that job that I can't not see them anymore. I couldn't not know their stories. I couldn't return to the comfort of my privileged ignorance; the door had been opened and now I couldn't shut it even if I'd wanted to. I saw the poor all around me, and I understood that my looking away had been a form of complicity. It hurt.

What did I do with that new awareness? What am I doing? Getting through the day, mostly. Needless to say I didn't fix our busted health care or organize a new system of accessible mental health treatment. I'm not working tirelessly in service of the underrepresented and underserved.

I remember having a conversation then with a community leader who was visiting our clinic. She sat down across from me and said, without losing eye contact for a moment, that it was time I started serving on a board. Volunteering with more intention and purpose. My town needed people to step up, and I should respond to that need. But, I said, flustered, I have a baby! She's still nursing. And I work full-time. And I'm just figuring all of this out. How could I add anything else?

I think back to that conversation and smile at 29-year-old me. The parent kid ratio in my house then was 2:1. My back didn't hurt in weird places. My hair wasn't gray. I had so. much. energy. Now I'm still working full time, but the ratio is 1:3. My husband is dead, grief freights my every limb, I'm quicker to cry than ever before. How can I add anything else?

The past months have been an exercise in the scales falling away from all our eyes over and over. People in our communities have been hurt deeply; hurt and sometimes killed. We cannot not see it anymore. The #metoo movement ripped a scale away to reveal the brutal ubiquity of misogyny and sexual assault; now the incessant brutality of white supremacy is being revealed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And the pandemic is exposing injustice in every corner my privileged eyes chose to glide past and thereby condone.

It hurts.

In March and April, isolated and scared and struggling with work and school and a house full of difficult feelings, I found myself sliding back into the sense of alienation and disconnect I felt in the earlier days of my widowhood. I missed Mike acutely. I cried often; the loneliness weighed so much more than usual. I couldn't bear to see or talk with anyone outside my safest people. I wanted to withdraw.

Now my job is on summer break, and school is over, and the weather is perfect. I can breathe again. My loneliness has not subsided, but my resiliency is returning. I am looking around at this beautiful broken world, which somehow mirrors my beautiful broken heart, and recognizing that my own hurts do not mean I am in a worse position to be present to my community. Maybe my suffering has marked me in ways that will help me to serve it; maybe better than I ever could have at twenty-nine.

For now I'm reading, and watching, and listening, and mourning. I'm reluctant to speak in a time when so many seem compelled to speak because I'm still confronting the deep grief and pain the Black Lives Matter movement has invited me to truly see and take responsibility for. I'm feeling a lot of feelings, and waiting. I want my words and actions, whatever they may be, to come from my own pain and love and desire for healing, rather than reactivity. I'm trusting God to help me know how and when to respond to that woman's urgent invitation in my clinic office fourteen years ago, with whatever cracked and bruised gifts I have to share. She really saw me then; I'm grateful to her still.

bright morning star

Last night, in a mad competitive rush for second helpings of an unusual and prized dish around here, one enormous gooey baked mac-and-cheese comprising shocking amounts of butter, cheddar, and gruyere which I couldn't not know about after having made it, one of the four dinner plates broke. We began with six, a gift from my mother after I admired their hand-painted dogwood design in a second hand shop many years ago. Now we have three! Yet we are four. And we should be five. Only three plates! What kind of family can't set a proper table?

Also I dropped my phone Tuesday, when I stupidly took it out to return a text while walking Ramona who predictably lunged for a squirrel at exactly the wrong moment, and now the screen is completely shattered and held in place with two strips of packing tape. I've missed multiple school meetings this week as well as street cleaning/car moving, a handful of emails, and a dentist bill. I forgot Gabriel's well-planned and oft-reminded-about bunk reunion for his special grief camp from last summer. I forgot things I still haven't realized I've forgotten.

Pandemics bring out the worst in me. I know, I know, in all of us - and it's not that we're bad, it's that we're overtaxed and bereft of routines and need human contact to feel normal. So we forget where our keys are and don't show up to meetings. I know. But it feels shitty. It triggers my childhood fear of being imperfect and thus unloveable.

A deeper grief still slips out during my morning walks with Ramona the dog. (I happened to have sought out and adopted Ramona for the express purpose of ameliorating our emotional challenges. Ah well.) Those walks make me wonder if all my surface level fretting about screwing everything up is just to distract me from this particular pain: walking the streets of this town, this neighborhood, being tugged along by my sweet new pup through the hushed morning air, I always seem to wind up on bittersweet corners. I walk by our old house, where my family lived happily, raucously together, and where my dad died in a hospital bed in the living room when I was eighteen years old. I walk by the first house I lived in with Mike, when we had one tiny baby named Frances and he grew a tidy garden. I lost them in the prime of their lives - they were healthy, powerful men, the center of my world, and I had to watch them become sick and die right here.

What the fuck Meagan, you might say. (I say that too.)

Or you might, as Gabriel, observe that God really does keep on smiting you, Mama.

To which I counter, honestly, that I had the very best dad and the very best husband for me in the whole wide world. That doesn't feel like being smited. That feels like fantastic good fortune.

But on those walks the grief over having lost the very best people hits me with an inexplicable freshness. It's searing. Sometimes I cry. This morning, instead, I found myself singing.

bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
day is a-breaking 
in my soul

If you know that song, you know it is a lament, and a quiet celebration too. Oh where are our dear fathers is a bewildered, broken question that hangs and lingers, but then the song comes back again and again to the only answer that makes any sense: day is a-breaking in my soul. 

That's how I feel, walking my dog on the new-day streets of my city where my favorite people died. Cracked open to my grief, and with it the beauty of the pandemic-quiet, the spring that has stepped into full array, the chattering squirrels that Ramona runs after, the neighbors in tight pants and sneakers walking briskly in pairs. Sometimes I have wondered why I didn't take my children and run far away from this landscape that speaks so many painful stories. I think: who would stay here and keep walking these paths?

But it is all very precious to me. I don't want to leave it. On our walks I feel as I did in the early months of widowhood: alien, broken, awed. Like then, the late nights and the early mornings hurt the most. The pain of the whole world pushes on me.

I come home with Ramona and make myself coffee and feed her breakfast and we walk up the two flights of stairs together to wake Gabriel and then Beatrice as the rawness subsides and my day of carrying and anchoring others begins. I make breakfast, and then like parents everywhere I organize Beatrice's schoolwork and set up the computer for her class meetings, I review Gabriel's morning work plan, I set up my own work space. At nine I retreat to the dining room, shut the doors, set my ipad on a stack of books amidst many other papers and books on the table, plug in my ear buds, and begin my first session, hoping the sounds of kids negotiating screens and the dog barking and the dishwasher running on the other side of the door aren't too distracting. I run out between sessions and drag Beatrice away from Netflix and place her before something that makes me feel less awful, say hello to Frances, remind a kid to let the dog out, answer various questions before heading back for the next session. At lunchtime we always take a walk. Sometimes I do something awesome, like yesterday when I felt compelled to bake a lemon rhubarb bundt cake in the morning and did and it was a triumph, and later was present for a very beautiful and sad culminating goodbye session with a student I've seen for a long time. After work I exercise with the kids or alone or with friends distanced outside. This evening I joined some for Zumba which I executed badly, albeit enthusiastically, before countless park-goers, enjoying how little I cared that they saw me in all my confused, hip-shaking, which-way-are-we-supposed-to-be-facing glory. Then we got take-out pizza to celebrate the completion of Frances's first (of three) online AP exams this morning. The days roll on like this, one after another, in our very small world. I dole out hugs and tortilla chips and bandaids and songs and chores and advice and jokes and tears and funny dancing and memories and games and irritation and efforts to meet everyone's needs and help them feel heard and seen. Sometimes I have a pretty good time. Sometimes I feel like a total fuck up. But overall, it goes okay.

Until late, when the last kid is finally in bed, and I stand in the bathroom drying off after a shower or in my underwear with a toothbrush in my mouth and see my own reflection looking back at me, and she is a little confused - what exactly happened here? - and the loneliness comes rushing back. Then I am filled with a scoured out tenderness so deep and so wide that it seems my skin and muscles and bones cannot possibly contain it.

But they do. I never break. I crack and stretch and ache; I expand. It hurts, but I know I am making more space to endure the quiet beauty of the world when I wake tomorrow, click on Ramona's leash, and open the front door.

say yes

Ramona the dog is actually eating. A little. We just got back from our morning walk, our third-ever morning walk, in the early quiet of a pandemic spring morning after a day of ceaseless rain, when all felt washed clean, the cloudy filtered light hitting the wet pink dogwood petals just so, and a scant few runners and fellow dog walkers and even fewer cars shared the streets with us. We adopted her on Tuesday evening, from the Delaware Humane Association. She is nine months old and since her arrival on West Walnut Street has been too excited, overwhelmed, and busy sniffing to be very interested in food or water.

But slowly that's changing. And slowly the cats are considering the possibility that she might be here for good. Beatrice is too. We shared her arrival on Facebook and everyone has been kind and congratulatory; on our walks we always see someone we know who shouts from the other side of the street: the new puppy! Hooray!! So many people have asked things like what made you cave? or you finally gave in, huh? but the truth is that I wanted this dog. The kids were ambivalent. I have wanted this dog since ...well, since the spring of 2015, before Mike got sick, when I was scrambling to rent our house and get us ready to go to England, and Beatrice was just-two. I told Mike we had to do it when we got back from his sabbatical year, when potty training would be a fading memory and his tenure meant we would be in Annapolis for the very long haul (he loved to imagine being a tutor at St. John's well into his seventies; the example set by older tutors who continued to teach and mentor inspired him). A dog could roam our big backyard and delight the children for years and years.

Amazingly, he agreed. What was amazing about his agreement is this: Mike had the most special dog in the world when he was little. Ralph. When he lost his beloved old Ralph at the tender age of six, he made a vow that he would never love another dog again. True to Mike's singleminded, veering-into-obsessive determination, he never did. But at forty, his heart was ready to open the dog-door back up. Just one more of those secondary losses; Mike never got to love our family's dog.

I think he'd be cool with Ramona. Her puppy energy would test him, for sure. But she's a lovely dog, who stops to sniff red fire hydrants and look longingly, ears perked and head cocked questioningly, at other dogs she wants to play with on our walks. I watch her and think: she's acting so doggy. Is this dog really our dog??

I advocated for her starting about two weeks after Mike died. The kids were initially game, and we planned to adopt in the summer, when I was off work. But gradually it became clear that what with selling and buying a house, our general grief-laden state of semi-functionality, lots of travel, and the kids’ aversion to chores, a new dog made zero sense. We adopted the kittens instead, who as you may know have provided us with an inexhaustible source of joy ever since, and limped along as best we could. Every time I revisited The Dog Question, the children would, with varying levels of intensity, object. We’re not ready, they said. Beatrice is afraid of dogs, and the older kids told me in no uncertain terms that I already had too much on my plate, we’re a busy family, and if we had a dog I would nag them incessantly about taking better care of it (“because we’re lazy, Mama”) and wind up doing too much myself, making me even more snappish and grumpy. The overall stress level in the house, already too high, would creep higher still. It would be disastrous.

Well, that’s possible. I don’t even care! I wanted a dog! A panting sniffing smiling muddy-pawed exasperating adorable mutt. Animals make me happy; they always have. I forgive them for pooping. Picking it up seems a reasonable price to pay for their shaggy sweet company.

Maybe widowhood is lonely. And losing a parent is hard. And facing your fears is empowering. And tapping extra love that we all have on reserve can be healing. It’s a lot of pressure to put on Ramona’s furry shoulders but I think she can handle it. This strange time, along with its terribleness, has offered me a number of unexpected gifts: time for noticing, gratitude for the natural world, freedom from our car and too-busy schedule that driving said car facilitates, long walks, fresh attunement to my grief, dance classes in the kitchen, appreciation for my community. Now Ramona joins the list. A doggy dog who will invite more love, more freak outs, more delight, more frustration, more nagging, more playing, more life into our tender family. I say yes to that.