we have the weather

On my drive to and from a state forest to meet a friend for a short, sweet, snowy camping trip this weekend I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie's short story Zikora. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, where Zikora, a powerful DC lawyer originally from Nigeria, is giving birth to her son. His father abruptly left the moment she told him that she was pregnant and refuses to answer her texts and calls. The only family with her is her mother, severe and quiet in the corner, nearly ready to slap her if she screams too loudly or otherwise exposes her vulnerability before the assembled nurses and doctor.

I was rapt. The reader was great. The raw descriptions of the indignities of labor, delivery, and postpartum tenderness had an immediacy that took my breath away. I might have sighed and grumbled and even yelled at Kwame, his controlled, frightened voice recognizable in the mouth of the female reader which emerged tiny and tinny from my phone's speaker, nestled in my lap as I crossed muted green-gray Central Pennsylvanian hills. Clearly Kwame is not a real person. Yet I raged at him all the same. He looked so good on the outside; inside he was useless.

But when all the feelings that a short story that touches on single motherhood, misogyny, mother-daughter resentments, abortion, racial disparities in maternal mortality, an infant who cannot latch and screams at the breast, and at least three or four other issues that naturally send a woven ribbon of anguish, anger, tension and love straight through me had settled and calmed before the quiet trees and brilliant cold stars at night, I was left with a palpable, awed closeness to my own first days with a newborn babe. 

The world became small all around me. I ceased to be interested in much that happened outside my house; there wasn't any available brain space in addition to what was required for nap schedules, breastfeeding adjustments, diaper changing and laundering, worried tracking of weight gain and ribcage-exposing sharp baby breaths. I was always sticky. My breasts became enormous, hard and engorged; my milk didn't come in until the fifth day. Our bodies' boundaries blurred. I wanted to touch my baby's skin all the time, and when I grew exhausted and couldn't stand to hold her for a moment longer and handed her to another pair of eager arms, I grew impatient to have her back. Sometimes the not-having-her felt like a physical ache, more acute than the fatigue and worry. 

Everything that mattered in those days fit inside a room. Time felt like one long day: there was daytime and nighttime, but very little distinguished them from one another. 

Babies grow, and gradually one is able to reconnect with the world outside that room. Night reacquires its blessed significance. Weekdays and weekends, summer and winter, each becomes meaningful and distinct once again, and when they do, one is more than ready.

The only other time that mirrored that degree of world-shrinking was when Mike was sick. Other people did things outside our windows - they took vacations, argued about politics, planned to have drinks with friends and went for long bike rides. Not us. After the stem cell transplant, day and night blended together, stitched together loosely with routine gestures of care: assembling the IV meds, applying cream to the strange rashes that a baby immune system could not prevent, taking his temperature, bringing his meds. We were on a tiny island where time slid by strangely. Like with our first newborn baby, we were beset with worry. 

My children will go back to school for the first time since March over the next three weeks. I am thrilled for them, especially Beatrice, to finally be with other children - yes, definitely, thrilled - but I am also sad to say goodbye to this particular island we've inhabited and decorated and refined together for nearly a year. 

Not long ago Gabriel reflected that the quality of time has changed since the pandemic started. 

It feels like it's been forever, and it feels like it's been no time at all. 

Does it ever. We talked about it, speculating that without external markers of the seasons like sports games, music performances and holiday parties, without places to go throughout the day to mark morning noon and night, time slides by undifferentiated. We don't register it passing the way we used to. 

All we really have these days, he said, is weather.   

Truth. But also, weather isn't too shabby, Gabriel! The sky is pretty nice. I can't get enough of it. 

(They all roll their eyes when I start talking about the sky.)

The other thing we have is our connections to one another, which run deep and deeper still. Do our arms ache when we aren't together? Probably not. We could all use a break for sure. But I know the attachments we share and the rhythm with which we move through our days of work and school in this snug little house (punctuated by screams when the wifi drops out, or someone's favorite spot is taken, or the dog tears a misplaced book to bits) is precious to me. It's weird to say it, but I love this island. I love the sound of my children's teacher's voices in the next room. I love movie nights and lazy pancakes on the weekend and feeling like a hike is a major outing. I love our little pod of neighbors and I love the intimacy the island has gifted all of us. 

I'm excited to walk Beatrice to school next week. But I'll miss her. 

 

   

hello future, meet the past

I had a long overdue mammogram this afternoon in the dread Suburban Pavillion outpatient medical center, which is connected to the Cancer Institute by a long shiny hallway that features blocks of rainbow colors on one white wall and long open windows overlooking a parking lot on the other. The entrance to the Center for Breast Health (what a weird assemblage of words) is next to that hall, and to the diagnostic imaging area. 

How many hours did we spend waiting for PET scans and chest x-rays in that open, exposed waiting area, listening to the incessant fountain nearby and watching parents hover over their small children while they hurtled wishing pennies into it with awkward toddler gusto? And how many times did little Beatrice dance down that long inviting white hallway from the Cancer end of things? I would take her for walks to occupy her while we waited for Mike's radiation or chemo to end. She was tickled by the colors.

So was it so weird that when I walked out of the Center for Breast Health, with flattened breasts basically unharmed and hopefully healthy, I turned and headed down the rainbow hall, tugged by habit and a compulsion to visit the past? The fluorescent lights bounced off the linoleum underfoot and the moon was full and rising to my left in the pale purple sky, shining above the cars and scattered ultrasound technicians and administrative assistants and nurses that were hunched against the cold in masks and coats, walking towards them. I traveled the entire hall without thinking much about what I would do when I reached the end of it, until my toes touched a line of thick blue tape and my eyes noticed a sign that said I could not cross it unless screened by a Cancer Institute staff person. 

Well, of course. No one belongs in that space who isn't a patient, caregiver, or medical staff person. I've often thought about people going through what we did now - how much scarier it must be, going in for treatment, battling low white blood cell counts, gauging which fevers to do something about, all within the heightened anxiety cauldron of the pandemic. 

So I stopped. I peered into the Cancer Institute territory, which was calm and quiet. There were no humans to speak of in any direction. I wondered what I would have done if the blue tape hadn't stopped me. Visit the nurses at the infusion center? Check in on the green treatment team downstairs and see if anyone remembered me? Say a cheerful happy new year to everyone through my mask, patients in wheelchairs and therapy dogs and receptionists alike?

But they wouldn't know me. I wouldn't know them. It will be three years in March. And why would anyone want to revisit a chapter of life dominated by cancer treatment, anyway? A person who spent nearly all of that chapter with her husband who is no longer here, maybe. A person who still wonders what exactly happened then, and how, and why it happened too, and is visited by vivid memories of it all at least once a day.

But even though it never leaves me, I can never really go back to it. I sent a holiday card to our old doctor in New York and to the nurse team at the hospital because I'm not ready to let go of those people and places, but my time with them is complete. Bea doesn't remember dancing down that hallway. Frances is thinking about college, and Gabriel is now taller than Mike was. I've gained weight, I sleep at night, the smile lines on my face deepen. Many good and beautiful things keep happening. Time is so strange.

Our family has changed, the staff at the Cancer Institute has surely changed too. The whole world has changed! The pandemic experience in some ways feels like my own writ universal: stress, disease, confinement, isolation, uncertainty, and now, after so much worry and loss, we are all looking to an unknown future with some true hope, not really knowing where we are going or how we will be transformed but trusting nonetheless. 

I get my vaccine tomorrow. 

Happy new year, everyone. I'm taking my mask off to say it, I'm smiling, I really, really mean this: I'm grateful to be moving forward towards the unknown future with all of you.

dogs help

After dinner the other night, I hit a parenting wall. I can't recreate what exactly happened, but I know we were sitting around the table talking before cleanup had begun, and the conversation turned to more painful subjects. There was anger and accusation and open resentment. I'm pretty sure it got ugly, fast. I stood up at a high tension moment to move a pan into the sink and hide my face from my kids, but they could tell I was about to cry, replete with my own barely contained frustration and anger and coming-up-emptiness. I remember that I felt I had nothing. No idea how to handle this argument. I thought it best to stay silent. 

But they could see that I was crumbling. Frances suddenly pivoted and suggested I take a break and go upstairs, they could finish cleaning up. I looked at her blankly. What?

I decided to accept the role of ineffectual broken-down mother and went to my room, where I found Ramona the dog sprawled luxuriously across a pile of clean laundry on my bed. She lifted her head and looked at me standing in the doorway with her soulful eyes for a long spell, then let her head drop back down heavily, exhausted by the effort of momentarily holding it up. This gesture got me. I knew just how she felt. I crawled across the underwear and socks and t shirts until I lined myself up against her back and slid an arm across her warm ribcage. I cried into the little space between her shoulder blades, which happens to be one of my favorite parts of Mike's body, and that made me cry harder.

My dog rolled on her back to face me, belly mostly up (a favorite position, always hoping for a rub) and put her sinewy bony forepaws around me while I cried and yes, scratched her belly. We stayed like that, entangled, and I let all the thoughts come and go in the safety of her doggie embrace. They need Mike. I can't do this alone. I usually feel like I'm doing an okay job as a parent but what if that is a lie I tell myself, what if I am letting them down? What if they need a stronger leader at the helm? What if I indulge them too much? What if I am the weaker parent, and weaker still without Mike's sensibility and presence to inform me? What if 50% of what they once had is simply not enough? 

My dog was the only being in the world I could have tolerated with me at that moment. The aloneness of widowed parenting in these moments of doubt, of not knowing, of wishing desperately for my partner with whom I once shared the responsibility and path-forward-making, is something that reliably shakes me deeply. There is no one alive on this planet who knows and loves our babies like Mike. Only silent, simple, soulful Ramona could have comforted and held me like that. I'm not sure how I managed before, without her.

Gabriel recently commented during a trip to Market that sometimes I treat them more like a grandparent than a parent, getting them all the empanadas and donuts and chocolate milks they ask for, clearly taking pleasure in the indulgence of it all. Oof. That didn't sound great to my ears. They're soft! I'm soft. I started spoiling all of us after Mike died (Who cares? Papa died was a frequent refrain) and once the pandemic hit I cranked it up a few notches. Who cares, it's a pandemic! This is hard, we deserve chocolate milk. And nice beer, and staying up late, and movies, and a huge bowl of popcorn drenched in butter and salt. 

Griefing, parenting. Maybe I've gotten a little too confident lately. I've been all I got this, occasionally looking back and considering how bonecrushingly hard everything was two years ago, one year ago, and reassuring myself that I somehow survived that pain and am in a new phase of our lives. Whew! Good thing that's over. I'm so normal now! But c'mon, who am I kidding? The holidays are upon us, my bones still ache, and the absurd brute unfathomable fact of the death of someone I love, someone my children love, still makes it hard to breathe. 

I'm still afraid of the questions my children ask that I cannot possibly answer, the sorrow they bear that I cannot relieve. I'm still afraid of the holidays. I'm afraid of sustaining and adapting traditions in a way that will fall short of honoring Mike, a great lover of Christmas and general wholesome festivity. Last year we opted to skip it rather than face the wrongness of Mike's absence around the tree; we had a fabulous time in Jamaica instead. 

I do think I'm ready to be here this year. (Good thing, as we can't escape to the Caribbean anyway). In so many ways we are  in a new phase of our lives. We're finding a way to be a family, to be who we are, to grow and change without registering frequent bouts of panic over the inevitable fact of time carrying us farther away from the family and people we were when Mike was alive. There's just occasional panic these days. But there's no being done with our grief. There's no nestling it into a quiet drawer that we close because everything's okay now. It's never okay. We're finding a way to live in the world with the not-okayness, and love it all anyway, love it even more tenderly and ragingly than we did before. 

Thank goodness for Ramona.

open the gates

Six months after Mike died I bought this house. The move - bringing the remains of our old house in Annapolis whose contents we had stored three years earlier, just before Mike was diagnosed, and the household we'd built over the intervening crisis-laden years in Lancaster - was an effort I found so emotionally and physically taxing that at times it felt simply impossible. My knees would buckle and I'd figure it was time to give up, leave the chaos and the artifacts of another life all around me where they lay, and pitch a tent in the backyard. Just call it quits. Too hard, never mind. Kids, start looking for the sleeping bags...they must be around here somewhere. 

About two weeks after we'd moved, I had a vivid dream. Mike was walking through the new house, looking around in dismay, at times in anger, asking me things like why did you get rid of the desk? this room is so small; didn't you realize the couch wouldn't fit? what were you thinking, buying this house? 

In my dream he hated it. In my waking life I hated that he had never lived in it, and now we did.

Last night I had another such dream; Mike was on the periphery during a weird dream-logic vacation and my only direct contact with him involved him being upset with me, noting ways I had changed, responding with some judgment. In the dream moment I remembered that I had a boyfriend. I didn't want to upset my husband so I decided not to mention it. But I couldn't hide the fact that I wasn't the same person he had been married to, because his death had changed me. He could tell, and he didn't like it. 

Terrible dream. Awful. My waking mind does not for a minute think Mike is upset with me for changing. I don't even think he cares too much about the boyfriend; I really do believe he wants me to be supported and happy. But I struggle with accepting these things. My brain twists them into painful narratives at night. 

And yet I notice changes happening inside me, without even trying to make them happen, and I notice that they are good. Beautiful, even. Life is hard as heck but I feel good about my work, my parenting, my friendships; I am kinder to my own body. And then a little part of me says but how can you be more you, more expansive, more accepting of yourself, after losing Mike?! And even scarier: did losing Mike enable you to become more fully yourself? 

And what would that mean about me, about my marriage, about Mike, about us, if it did? 

When my mom had a hysterectomy in her early 50s, she had not yet begun the process of menopause in earnest. After the trauma of that surgery - after an organ in her body that had reminded her of her own fertility for decades, had housed my and my sister's growing bodies and spirits, and had stretched and twisted under the insistent heft of fibroids was removed in a moment with cold metal instruments - menopause was kicked into high gear. She got thrown into it hard, and there was no turning back. She had to figure out how to respond to hot flashes on the fly. 

If her uterus had not been taken suddenly from her body, she would have eased into that change over a span of years. She would have wound up on the other shore eventually; the journey would have been remarkably different.

I think what is happening to me is something like that. My husband was taken from me. He was a person I knew intimately, like an organ in my own body, a part of me so essential that I did not know who I was without him. I fell in love with him when I was an uncertain twenty year old woman-child. There was a lot about myself I didn't like then. He seemed to love me anyway, but I was afraid to expose that darker shameful stuff to the light of his gaze any more than necessary. I loved being in love with him; I didn't want anything about either of us, especially me, to screw it up.

Much later in our years together, those pushed-aside bits started to emerge, to insist on being part of the conversation. Quietly, mostly in the background but also occasionally in loud and inconvenient and interpersonally painful ways, I was trying to change. To brave friction, disappointment. When Mike got sick, that process inside me, that becoming more me, was interrupted, complicated, somehow both sped up and slowed down. 

If being more fully myself would better support him in those awful times, I was into it. Up for the challenge of more honesty, more connection, more vulnerability. If it seemed like swallowing my own pain or anger or hurt would be easier, which was often the case with a beloved man who periodically lost hair and weight and the ability to speak and could barely swallow anything at all, it was hard. I mostly opted for honesty anyway, because I couldn't bear to feel any alienation between us. I'm not sure it was always the right move.

Then he was ripped from my body. Taken from me in a moment. I was thrown into the cold disorientation of grief and there was no way out but through. Actually there is no way out, not really, but there are ways to move forward. And I think after the initial months of shock, the uncomfortable process of being more myself that had hesitatingly begun before Mike's illness was thrown into high gear. Because what else could I do? Who else could I be? I could no longer take refuge within the structures of my marriage. There was nowhere else to turn. 

It was just me in here, and it freaked me the fuck out. 

I have to tell a story about it, you guys. I have to tell and retell this one. (You're thinking no duh, Meagan). I have to figure out why it's okay that I feel less shame and more openness about who and what I am now than I ever did when my husband was alive, when my life fit into easier, more comfortable compartments, when decisions weren't so wide open, when my own values and inclinations and wisdom were integrated within a two-person system. 

I started seeing a therapist, someone adept in the therapeutic approach I've been learning about and utilizing with my own clients over the past two months. In our session yesterday we somehow ended with the image of a gate, the metal kind used to corral animals maybe, like in a rural English village or Vermont farm, rather bucolic, a gate the swings wide on its hinges and opens onto a meadow, green and lush in the autumn evening light. I like the sound of it squeaking a bit as it opens outward. 

I would like to leave the gate wide open like that, always. I would like my mind to learn to make space for truer and gentler dreams.