everyday heroics

After my last session this afternoon, I searched my inbox with the words 'teacher conferences' and found the itinerary for my evening at the high school. It started in 30 minutes, and would last until after eight. The only problem was that I hadn't arranged for anyone to pick Bea up from dance at seven. 

I'd asked my mom a few hours earlier when I finally confronted the fact that I could not be in two places at once, but she couldn't do it. And I couldn't bear to ask anyone but the woman who gave me life and is biologically determined to love me for a favor. Not after the cascade of asks prompted by Tuesday's cross country banquet which coincided with dance class drop offs and pick ups, my minivan not starting that morning, a sick babysitter, losing my phone for four entire hours while I was on call, yesterday's early dismissal from school, arriving a few minutes late to every session I had today because I squeezed in an orthodontist appointment and Beatrice's teacher conference before my morning sessions and those ran late, and needing a ride for Gabriel to get to his guitar lesson tonight. 

It seems that all I have done this week, actually this life - at least this widowed single parent life - is ask people for favors. Sometimes I can't make myself ask, even though I'm thinking about it before I go to sleep for the six nights prior, not until the last pressured minute, and then I have to ask in a much worse, less respectful of other people's time kind of way (I can't believe I'm asking this but is there any way you could grab Bea after swim tonight blah blah blah I appreciate it so much blah blah blah I can't believe I forgot to ask earlier UGH GROAN put me out of my misery already make me stop putting exclamation points on the end of the countless thank yous I text a day so I appear somehow less threatening and like the kind of person you can't help but take pity on and don't resent having to help all the time.)

So yeah. There was nothing to be done but cancel the last four conferences of the evening, since Beatrice was already at dance class and could not be left outside in the dark in the middle of Lancaster County when it was over. I scrambled to sign into the school website to use their messaging system and sent a bunch of apologies to my kids' wonderful teachers, probably with lots of unnecessary exclamation points in them, decided I'd finish my notes tomorrow, and ran out to the parking lot.

A new favorite album filled the gray spaces of my car as I drove from my office to the high school. I slowed to a stop at a busy red light and my eyes rested on a beautiful pair ahead of me on the sidewalk. They were a young mother and her skinny seven or eight year old son, walking side by side. They both had excellent posture, and they both wore capes. Wait - what? As I rolled closer to them, I could see from behind my windshield that their capes were in fact a white towel around the boy's shoulders and a pastel striped pillowcase around the mother's. They held the linens clasped around their necks so that they fluttered behind them. They wore the slightly off ensembles of recent immigrants or refugees, people I often met with when I worked in the clinic, dressed by church clothing drives or the mission at the other end of town. They looked a little out of place yet so regal, the way they proceeded together in those capes. 

I suppressed an urge to roll my window down and smile and wave and say: you two look like superheroes! To somehow salute them, acknowledge their brilliant presence on the cracked city sidewalk in the golden November light, already fading fast, a sight so arresting that it tethered my racing, fretful mind back to this body, this earth.

When the parts of me came back together like that all at once, I cried. A thousand tender thoughts moved like a rushing river through me, unformed awarenesses and memories more felt than truly thought. They were about motherhood and childhood, perseverance and untold stories held quietly inside, the kind my clients entrust to me, about love so big it can't help but push against the edges of your heart and ache there until something gives and the space expands. About aloneness, about fearing you aren't enough for your children and knowing you are at the same time, and about how everything changes and changes and sometimes the best you can do is stay close to the people you love and walk proudly through it in a cape of your own design. 

It was sudden and surprising. I felt my throat tighten, the gasp and sting and heat. The light glowed green, and tears gathered as I drove on. One overflowed, spilling a hot trail down my cheek that then cooled in the evening air, becoming a soothing stripe just as comforting as a cold pack fetched by one of the kids when I hurt myself. 

When I left work, I wasn't feeling like a superhero at all. Then I saw two superheroes right there on the street, shining their humanity so brightly that I could feel my own, such that the mere sight of them let all the you're not doing enough and you're a burden slide out of me in a few big sobs. I made it to the school, where I ran into other parents I know and met a few of my kids' teachers. They like and support Frances and Gabriel a lot, which made me smile. Beatrice enthusiastically described her final across the floor sequence on the way home from dance and though I couldn't really follow, that made me smile too. Then dinner, dishes, laundry, tv, a snuggly goodnight.

It was enough. More than enough: it overflowed.

 

the descendants of hwyel dda

Sometimes I share a show with one of my kids. During September, aka The Ailing Month (colds, then my first and rather brutal round of still-lingering covid), Frances and I watched Better Things. Okay, after I tested positive and kept getting sicker, I left her in the dust and finished it on my own. But it was still fun to share.  

She and Beatrice return again and again to Gilmore Girls, which I sometimes dip into with them. Beatrice and I loved watching Ghosts. We all watched Never Have I Ever together. And for years Gabriel and I have been watching The Last Kingdom. 

It's about Saxons and Danes in late 9th century England. The Last Kingdom has its immediate pleasures, like the sexy cast covered in leather and furs and tattoos and aerial views of warriors on horseback hurtling towards each other on green hillsides. But there are other pleasures in it for me that ripple out, like remembering watching this show with Mike after the children were in bed when it first came out. And how Mike enjoyed my historical curiosity and, while sick, discovered a mostly-forgotten titan of historical fiction from the 1950s, Alfred Duggan, who wrote a novel about the life of Alfred the Great. He found me a copy and I gobbled it up, telling Mike about Wessex for days (and I happened to have just read a Thomas Hardy novel set much later in a fictional Wessex; synchronicity!).  

There's the pleasures of sharing that historical curiosity with Gabriel now, and looking up real figures from the show like Aethelfled, Lady of Mercia and just the other night, Hwyel Dda, a king of Wales who is, we are convinced - based in no small part on my grandfather's stories - our ancestor. King Howell the Good! Yes! That's our guy.

On this general history kick, last night Gabriel told us about the lead up to World War 1, which he is studying in school. He made sense of the tensions and allegiances that developed following the Franco-Prussian War for Beatrice and explained to me, a wizened old woman of 45, that Prussians are simply Germans. Holy shit. I always wondered who those Prussians were. I mean, they rhyme with Russians. Yet...no. My mind was blown. 

His storytelling skills are considerable, honed over hundreds of hours as dungeon master. In time we pulled out the enormous atlas for some visual aids. A sheaf of charming imaginary maps in Frances and Gabriel's childish hands from years ago fell out of it. We moved them and the forgotten dinner plates aside to spread the maps of Europe out on the kitchen table and trace old boundaries on top of new ones. Gabriel explained that Tsar Nicholas, King George, and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins, yet even intimate family connections couldn't stop the war.

I got distracted and began studying the pages of the atlas that showed European UNESCO world heritage sites, dreaming of our vacation next summer. I found a gorgeous photograph of craggy Skellig Michael and its impossible monastic settlement founded by Saint Finan in the 9th century. 

Mike, check this out. It's Finan! 

Poring over another map, Gabriel didn't hear me clearly. Neither did Beatrice. But I did. A little shock registered, then a momentary grasping of my heart. It just came out in the excitement of the moment. I called Gabriel Mike. That never happened before. 

He looked up at me, a question on his face. I felt very still. 

I just called you Mike by accident. 

I could see him bracing quietly for some unknown big emotion to escape from me as I stood there looking back at him, still leaning on my hands, flat against the photographs on the table. A big feeling from Mama could upend the pleasurable momentum, moving through stories and maps and summer plans. 

It's okay, I said, wanting to reassure us both. That was just...strange.

Finan is our favorite character on The Last Kingdom and we are gripped by fear for his life during every battle scene. Obviously Mike would feel the same way about charming Finan. And Skellig Michael's name comes from the archangel, just like Mike's. And sometimes we teasingly call Gabriel Dad when he is being very Papa-like and giving Beatrice a hard time for wasting food or reasonably suggesting consequences for wayward sisters and pets. And, you know, perimenopausal or covid- or age- related brain fogginess naturally leads one to screw up loved one's names all the time.

But still. I said it like I expected Mike to come into the kitchen and look over my shoulder. 

Because a part of me did. And in the end, after the disorientation subsided, I decided I treasure that part of me, formed over twenty years, that hasn't gotten the memo. That still lives connected to my old way of being, a part whose first thought after encountering something cool, beautiful, exciting, tied to our shared interests is: I can't wait to show Mike. 

And how very tender, how very lucky, that we hold so many of those shared interests in common with our children, fellow lovers of this mysterious, precious world, glorious descendants of Hwyel Dda. I can't wait to show them, too. 

in which the relentless passing of time, made glaringly explicit by the first day of school, left me beset by melancholy

Yesterday I came in from walking Ramona in the cooling humidity, the still air just like the air of a thousand last-day-of-summer-vacations past, and went upstairs to find Beatrice asleep and drooling on my bed, stretched across bare mattress and a tangle of stripped dirty sheets. It was around noon. Beatrice never naps, but she'd been up past 1 am the night before. 

She and her brother arrived in Philadelphia Saturday afternoon after a week at Experience Camp. After I picked them up, per Beatrice's insistence, we went in search of fast food. On our way, Gabriel told stories about camp. When I asked Beatrice for her stories, she started to cry. She told us through tears that she didn't know why she was crying and also didn't know why she couldn't tell me about camp even though she wanted to. When I pulled over so that Gabriel could pee, I climbed into the backseat with her and hugged her. Then the tears slowed. I could feel her hot limbs and face begin to relax against me. When Gabriel got back into the car and I made a move to slide back into the drivers seat, she clung to me. Just a few more minutes Mama. I eventually had to remove her little iron paws forcibly.  

Eventually we made it to an odd, desolate Wendy's where my mom met us with Frances and her friend, fresh from the King of Prussia mall, and we swapped. She took Beatrice and Gabriel home, and I took the girls to see Brandi Carlisle back in Philly. Which was, as you might have already guessed, a completely amazing show. But we got home so late and Beatrice was waiting up, confused and fretful. I told her to get into my bed and close her eyes, an order she gratefully complied with. By the time I joined her I felt too exhausted to sleep. I read for a long time, listening to her even breath.

Then Sunday was the last day of summer, and as I wandered in and out of my house and yard a part of me kept looking around and asking: shouldn't you be doing something? Shouldn't you have taken Beatrice to church for the blessing of the backpacks? Bought more lunchbox snacks? Offer some fun end of summer activity? Isn't this house a mess? Wouldn't you feel better instating some order, or buying new shoes for someone?

But after talking with my wise boyfriend I mostly let go of the anxiety that fuels my wheel-spinning and gave in to what my tired, melancholy body wanted, oppressive notions of effective, responsible mothering be damned. Beatrice and I re-watched Never Have I Ever with her siblings, read from our favorite book series, and shared some of those stories from camp that weren't ready to come out on Saturday. I read the paper in bed while she listened to an audio book. We did nearly nothing all day, and what we did do was mostly enacted in a horizontal position. 

This morning, I drove Gabriel and his girlfriend to high school for their very first day. He forgot his sneakers and we circled back for them. We asked someone holding a clipboard in a parking lot where they should go and they jumped out of the car, heading in two directions, anxious to arrive on time. Good luck! I called after them. I looked down and saw Gabriel had forgotten his water bottle in the car. Beatrice and I figured his cross country coach wouldn't let him collapse from dehydration in practice later. Right?

She and I went home to gather her things, and then walked to school. Now I'm realizing that I forgot to put a note in her lunch. Sigh. On the first day of fourth grade too! As she explained to me earlier, we're both in denial about this transition so avoided dealing with all the related preparations. 

I watched her line up with her friends in the playground before entering the school. I met and chatted with a mother whose son is in Beatrice's class. I looked around the sea of adorable children and parents and felt so heavy. When they filed into the building, I reluctantly shuffled towards my office.

The tears gathered in my throat and sat there, waiting. As I passed the front of the school, a goldfinch fluttered right into my field of vision, swooping in showy wild loops before landing on a wire over the school parking lot. I began associating Mike's spirit with bright male goldfinches after he died; this one really took my breath away. 

Mike! Gabriel is in high school, tomorrow is Frances's first day of senior year. It's all happening so fast. Please. Look out for them, make sure they're okay?

But the way that goldfinch was making himself known to me, alone on the sidewalk, meant I really didn't need to ask. It was a visitation meant to reassure. 

And like a child lost in the grocery store who begins to cry once she is finally found and safe again, that's when the tears came, and they kept coming all the way to my office. When I walked in, my boss Lauren took one look at me and asked what was wrong.

My kids went to school, I sobbed. She smiled. I cry-laughed. 

They did? They went to school? That's terrible.

I know. They're the worst. They keep growing up and they never stop. Can you believe this shit?  

yesterday's madness

Yesterday this day's madness did prepare. -Omar Khayyam

Today I am watching a continuing education training in my office, listening to the presenter explain that neuroscience has discovered that the human brain is far more plastic than originally believed. That emotional learnings can be erased and replaced with new learnings. He is describing methods of memory reconsolidation, how we can unlearn the unhelpful things the past has taught us and update that learning into something new. We can release this day's madness through therapeutic erasure.  

He's talking about unlearning stuff like agoraphobia, compulsions, panic attacks, suicidal ideation. Stuff that really gets in the way. But I find myself feeling protective of the pathologies the past teaches us.

I remember Mike telling me once, in our twenties, that it seemed I would periodically twist the knife in my heart that was my dad's death. On purpose. That I wanted to feel the pain afresh. Mike wasn't so sure that was a good thing.  

What would he say now about how reassuring I find the bouts of pain I suffer over his absence? What would this presenter say to the way I welcome the wave of knee-buckling grief when it comes for me, relief mingling with its crash and swirl? Because for me, the acute heartache of grief isn't pathology; it's a sharp tug on a chain of love. It's a reminder of my tether to the past I am afraid of losing, anchored deep in my bones and muscles and organs.  

I know that I am relearning lots of things, and it's a good thing. The time of trauma response is ebbing away, only rarely stirred up in felt ways. I sleep and eat, I send my children off on adventures, I ask for help, I offer help. No one wants to hold onto the emotional learning that makes life hard to live. But still. Our past is a precious thing, no matter the pain we lived then. 

I've been taken up by unsought, shockingly painful grief waves more often than usual over the past few weeks. It's because of a lot of things: I am in a serious, loving relationship and for the first time in well over four years I am considering what partnership might mean for me. It stirs up lots of fears, old (unwanted) learnings from past hurts, tender memories. I started watching Station Eleven (whew), a show and book I had been afraid of for quite some time. Frances has been writing exquisite poems and sharing them with me. I'm reading Homegoing. Beatrice and Gabriel are at Experience Camp, an amazing week-long camp for children who have lost parents or siblings. As we packed and prepared, we talked a lot about Papa. 

And oh yeah, all my stolen writing time this summer has been dedicated to editing a Homemade Time-based manuscript. I'm sorting through a thousand moments, trying to train an objective eye on their shifting surfaces and how I spoke them then. I've changed.  

Time keeps pulling us along; my grief yelps in protest. Art is holding and offering up time's strangeness; my heart takes it in and nods. Yep.

Monday is the first day of school; Frances is starting her senior year and focused on college applications. Gabriel will begin high school. Beatrice is growing fast and furious into a lanky fourth grader. I'm back at work, thinking about what I want for myself professionally and how to sink into this time we have before our family changes in very big ways next fall. I've been seeing us through my boyfriend's gentle eyes, treasuring who and what and how we are right now. 

It's light years away from who and what and how we were before Mike was diagnosed. That's because children grow exponentially in seven years, sure, but it's also because he died. We're different.

I'll take a little madness. Let it conduct me to other times and places. Let nothing be erased. Let it hurt, and let us shine in the hurting.