the longest day

Yesterday was my official last day off. Our offices reopen next week, and even though I chose to delay my return and squeeze in one last trip, I felt the usual clutching sadness about Friday. My last real day of summer. Last day to wake up whenever I wake up, drink tea and bustle about in the quiet kitchen, go to barre class in the morning, spend open time with my kids, deal with one of the endless house things on the list I wrote on the back of an envelope that sits on my desk by the window in the living room, spend a few minutes flipping through a magazine or cookbook on the couch. The last day to live inside the languid pace of summer.

Sure, Gabriel was leaving in the afternoon on an epic trip with my mom to Iceland and we had to gather all the last minute items he needed to pack. And sure, Beatrice and I had to pick Frances up at the airport in Philadelphia that night, back from her trip visiting a friend in the Pacific Northwest. But there would be so much time in between it all to let summer seep in.

I woke up and came downstairs where I found Gabriel clad in a tank top and shorts and his golden skin, burnished over countless summer runs, getting ready to go for a bike ride. We chatted for awhile and made a plan to head to Target later for sunglasses and an eye mask (recommended in a land where the summer sun barely sets). I didn't notice when he slipped out. Beatrice, the most teenagery ten year old, sleeps in later than any of us and so while she slumbered on, I put on my leggings and headed out the back door. 

Just as I slid into the only parking spot left on Prince Street, four minutes before class was due to begin, Gabriel called me. 

Hi honey, I said. What's up?

Mama - inhale, pause - I got hit by a car. 

My body reacted before my mind could register what he said. My breath seized and caught in my chest. He told me he was okay, some police officers and neighbors were with him, and that an ambulance was coming to take him to the hospital. 

I tried to breathe and steady myself. I told him I'd be there in two minutes. 

As I headed down Orange Street towards the corner where he'd been hit, I could see two police cars and a firetruck double parked nearby, and just as I pulled up, an ambulance arrived. There was Gabriel, standing in the middle of people in uniforms that I didn't know, the side of his face scraped and bloodied.

I could barely figure out how to open my car door. 

I ran to him awkwardly, confused by what was happening, thanking the police officers, halfway taking in what they told me. They offered to drop his bike off on our porch. I was aware that Gabriel wanted me to not freak out, and so tried my best to not freak out. Some other people seemed to be waiting to make sure my son was okay, and when we left to go to the hospital ourselves, they waved and smiled at Gabriel and wished him well. 

For awhile we were quiet in the car on the way to the Emergency Department, a path I'd driven too many times with Mike when he spiked fevers. Then Gabriel explained the accident, and how so many neighbors and people walking by had stopped to help. The only time I heard any emotion in his voice was when he said, Mama, everyone was so kind to me.

By the time we'd made it through triage Gabriel was sliding back into his usual self, cracking me up with jokes about the hospital and the police. They made sure the whack to his helmeted head hadn't done any serious damage and tentatively bandaged up his scrapes. The doctor told me that he could go to Iceland, just skip the hot springs with those oozing wounds. We came home around eleven and Gabriel suddenly said, I haven't even had breakfast yet!

Oh! A caregiving task, that would make me feel like my normal self! But as I made him toast with almond butter and apples and boiled water for tea, my hands started to shake. I put down the plate and leaned on the kitchen counter, took a breath. Gabriel got up and pulled me into a hug, wincing a little when my head grazed the bottom of his injured chin.

It's okay now, Mama, he said. It's okay.

Later he showered, Beatrice wandered downstairs to discover all the drama she had missed, and I left for Target, adding antibiotic ointment and bandages to my list. I called my mom and told her what happened. I came home and worked on his suitcase. I noticed Gabriel reading on the couch. I went to sit with him and  found he was feeling shaky himself now that the adrenaline had worn off. Exhausted, beat up and unsteady. I worried about putting him on a plane with my mom. 

But they did it. Beatrice and I performed an upbeat two person wave for them in the heat as they pulled away, and then Beatrice dropped the act and told me how stressed and strange and ignored she felt. 

So we did what any Howell Brogan would do in such circumstances: we planned to bake a peach pie with the many peaches we'd picked the day before, and went to Wegmans to collect supplies and cheer ourselves. It worked. We got sushi for dinner, picked up extra to bring to Frances at the airport. She complained about having to come along in the car. I explained everyone we know is on vacation and I wasn't going to leave her at home alone all night. She said why can't I just stay home. I said because I want your company.  

And just as we closed the door behind us, the darkening skies opened and lightning began to flash. We were soaked by the time we got into the car - even with our umbrellas. I thought of the water in the basement. I thought of the dog all alone. I thought of Frances in that sky. I clutched the steering wheel and joined all the other freaked out drivers who cruised along at 42 miles per hour on the Pennsylvania turnpike, while Beatrice and I listened to a blessedly diverting audiobook. 

The plane was late. I turned on my hazards as the rain continued to pound us and parked along a ramp near other cars waiting for their late-arriving family and friends. Unwanted thoughts of plane crashes and how I would find out flashed briefly in my mind, which led to similar thoughts of Gabriel and my mom crossing the Atlantic. Was the storm following them too? 

But Frances (and they) survived. She finally landed. They had gate checked her bag and there were problems getting the bags from the plane to the baggage claim; they weren't allowed to take it out when there was lightning. We waited. Frances ate her veggie sushi and remained faint with hunger. We waited more. Beatrice draped her arms around my shoulders and hung there, all out of complaints. Throngs of tired, vaguely annoyed people surrounded us. We went to the office and waited in a line to talk to two incredibly good-natured women who were joking to each other that today was the wrong day to come to work. We decided to have them deliver the bag rather than wait indefinitely, then lingered in the airport wondering if that was a dumb idea. In the end, we left bagless and doubtful about its eventual arrival.

We went through a McDonalds drive-through around 11:30. I accidentally slopped bits of my McFlurry into the cup holders and smeared ketchup on the steering wheel as I drove through more relentlessly stormy weather. We made it home by 1. I apologized to the confused dog, who seemed to think it was morning and our arrival marked the day's beginning. The girls slept together, and I climbed into bed with a big book, asking its words to soothe my still-shaky hands. 

There is an undeniable loneliness in being the only parent to three precious people. No one else loves them like I do and no one else can, because no one else is ultimately responsible for their exquisite beings. That job belonged to me and Mike, and now it's mine alone. Tapping the reserves of energy and calm that yesterday demanded pulled me down below the surface, down to where my solitary solo-parent vulnerability that normally putters along agreeably began to heat, to throb, and find its raw center. 

*

Thanks for listening, and easing all my tattered edges. It's a gift. And now? Off to bake a peach pie. 

the uncomfortable cusp

Here I sit on the old L-shaped couch, surrounded by a bulging duffel, piles of laundry, backpacks, travel information gathered for my unaccompanied minor when she flies home from camp later in July, the napping dog, the black sharpie for labeling. I've been packing and organizing all morning for our week vacationing in Asheville followed by camp pick up (Gabriel) and drop off (Beatrice) at the beloved UU camp of my youth. 

It is a rare thing, to be alone in my house on a weekday, with only the sounds of foot and car traffic outside the window to give some texture to this silence. Normally I long for a morning like this. Even if it's spent doing laundry and ticking off packing list items! But damn if I don't feel melancholy today. 

Also. I feel very annoyed that I feel melancholy. I mean, wtf Meagan?! This is a beautiful thing you have going here! Why you gotta mess it up with the whole heavy pit in your stomach furrowed brow thing? What a waste!

(Isn't it outrageous when we judge ourselves for feeling bad and thus feel way worse? The dreaded second arrow, it gets me every time.)

It's just that everything is changing. Frances and I have been getting all her health forms together for Princeton, and yesterday she found out her roommate assignment. Gabriel is away at camp and not here to talk with me about what to make for dinner. Beatrice is turning into a new kind of being, taller than ever, stunning me with her bright insights and new flashes of anger. 

I told my boyfriend I was worried that being on my own for five years had ruined me, that maybe I'm no good at partnership anymore. Maybe I've grown too attached to my own clannish family, my own ways of doing and avoiding things. As I grow closer to him I have to contend to what it means for me, a person who was with her husband for twenty years and then alone for five, to share the fretting and pleasures of daily life with someone else. To let that someone else help! Hoo boy, that one's big. Trusting someone else to help. How strange to recognize that having to do all this shit by myself - even though I often do it through gritted teeth - is something I'm reluctant to give up. It's my shit, darn it. Don't touch it.

I mean, do! Please! Please help, please hold my hand. I'm exhausted, really. I can feel so mixed up. 

Everything is always changing all the time, in fact everything has already changed all the time, and I'm just struggling to catch up and adjust. I know, I know, that's just life. Flux may be the norm for everyone everywhere all the time, but when you let the fullness of it touch you, it still rocks your world. 

Sending my oldest child off to college is a fullness-of-flux kind of moment. Raising my children on my own, and before that raising them while caring for my ill husband, and before that raising them with a husband who worked way too much and left the lion's share of it to me influenced my nearly 18 year long habit of being pretty cavalier about the whole 'kids grow up' business. Like, yes. They do. They should. That's the idea. Fly little birds, fly! Can't wait to see you soar while I get back to chilling in this nest on my own, enjoying my own agenda and time and space for once.

But here I am in my empty house and I feel terrible! About two months ago, after Frances returned from a Taylor Swift concert and played me all her saddest songs, it hit me with shocking force: she's leaving. They're all leaving. I knew this, I've always known this, but not like that. I cried and cried. Frances, Gabriel, and Beatrice are the center of my world, and what will I have (what do I have) to show for all these years of pouring my heart into them once this house is truly empty? Have I written any books,  become a world class therapist, done anything fancy or impressive with my time? 

They will leave and I will be old and alone and unimportant. At least, that's what the dark whispering suggests when something external triggers her release within. 

This moment is a bookend to those early Homemade Time years, when I was mostly staying at home with my little children and wondering how I would ever return fully to the world of adults. Could I pass as functional, productive? Could I conduct conversations with nary a reference to my children? Could I ever do the things I dreamt of doing when I kept on loving these children so damn much?

I am always keenly aware of the things I want to do and can't, because when you're working full time and parenting three children alone and have to remember trash night and figure out how to deal with water in the basement there isn't time for a whole lot else. Yet I sit here and think about the dining room full of lanky boys playing D&D, the sleepovers, the family dinners with friends, the porch sitting that leads to chats with neighbors, the way one of the kids reading on the couch next to the dog fills the room with quiet peaceful energy. And while I can't travel on my own, go off on writing retreats, read lots of novels, pick up a new instrument or spend as much time in movement classes as I'd like, there is so much here and now. So much that takes from me, and so much that fills me right back up. It's an abundance that is always changing. I might not have much to show for these overflowing days, but it's good to remember I am part of it all, and it is all part of me. 

Fullness of flux, fullness of life. The thumping reggaeton and the birds singing and the whoosh of tires outside my window; a rippling current that never ends. 

I've missed writing to you here. 

moving forward

We moved into a new house last Saturday. It's around the corner from our old house, and promised peaceful mornings with its second full bathroom and spacious dining room to accommodate friends waiting to ride to school. It has an open living room that, while still full of boxes, has already facilitated more time together. The neighbors on this block are tight, and have welcomed us kindly. I hear buses rumble by on the street below my bedroom window in the early morning and find it a comforting sound. On this street we are more pulled into and embraced in the flow of life. 

Yet what big change agrees to leave one's tender hurting places alone? Our first morning in this house fell on the five year anniversary of our lives without Mike. I decided to welcome that synchrony; while it is a terrible day, even more than that it's a day about honoring and remembering my children's papa. 

Since I last wrote here in mid January, I became the Head of Counseling Services and thus took on a lot of new responsibilities at work. I bought this house on January 31st (renting to the sellers until March), packed up my house (including many unexamined boxes and objects brought in from our life before cancer), celebrated Beatrice's tenth birthday, helped Frances through college and financial aid applications (still waiting on most of those decisions), prepared my old house for sale, marveled at the sheer quantity of objects we possess, and moved into this new house. All of these things were accomplished with the loving support of an army of friends, it's true. But seriously. A week into my new role at work, it hit me: now I'm the mom at work and at home. Shit. All the things eventually fall into my lap. 

I may need a bigger lap. 

(Possibly already in the works, given the copious amount of ice cream, chocolate and wine this season has led me to consume). (Though the anxiety, plus carrying countless boxes up and down stairs, may be effectively counterbalancing those influences).

I'm telling you all this just so you know. Just so someone knows that all this has been really, really hard. I've worried about so many things. My adulting capacities have been pushed to the brink. My brain is operating at a pretty sad pace, and I forget every 12th word I intend to utter. And when I can't think of the 12th word, I say fuck. Like, when I can't think of the word radiator or router I say instead the fucking thing. As in: you guys, we're going to have to learn how to bleed the...the...the fucking things.  

And my kids look at me blankly. Okay, Mama. On our way out to dinner on Sunday night in honor of Mike, after the taxing moving weekend, after picking up the cats at a friend's house and stopping by the cemetery with them and Lulu peeing all over her carrier in a total fit of feline freak out and all of us screaming in the car and frantically rolling down windows because of the astonishingly awful smell, after all of that, I called my car a fuckhead when it wouldn't shift into reverse immediately. The kids started laughing.

Mama, the common usage is fuckface.

And also, you've said the f word 800 times since yesterday morning. It's really not like you. 

Yeah, well, I'm not really like me right now. 

But I took this week off of work. And I have had days to unpack, to organize and figure things out, and even more wonderfully, to be alone in this space, and I am beginning to be me again.

As I unpack boxes, I've been touching so many objects that were once essential, and now no longer are. Yesterday I found a bulging binder given to us by the hospital, with neatly labeled dividers in Mike's handwriting, full of insurance documents and experimental treatment options. A notepad tucked into the righthand side whose first sentence at the top was How chemo works. Mike's notes from our first meeting locally, before treatment began. A clattering collection of PET scans tucked into a pocket. 

I had to touch all those pieces of paper and shiny CDs that once held the possibility of Mike's survival, read all those reports and look at all the words he dutifully wrote. Then I threw it all away, feeling weightless and strange inside.

This week I've found cards made by much smaller hands for me and for Mike, photographs, abandoned craft projects, journals. I've found lumpy ceramics, colorful paintings, and so many picture books that no one is young enough to want to read anymore (with the exception of George and Martha, which I think we will always want to read). I read those books aloud hundreds of times, snuggled next to one or two or three rapt, quiet, freshly bathed children. I love those books. They hold our history.

But we have too many, so I filled a box yesterday with beautiful, beloved picture books and put it outside our house with a 'free' sign. And the flow of life plucked them up and took them along with it, and within an hour it was empty. So I filled the free book box again.

I'm saving the most special ones. But you can't save them all, can you?

All these objects are comforting, tender reminders that it was real. We were a young family with regular young family cares and pleasures, then we were a suffering family struggling to live with cancer, then we were a grieving family struggling to live without Mike. It all really happened. Here, all around me, in half empty boxes, is the proof. Letting go of the evidence isn't easy.

One of the perks of this week off work has been picking up Beatrice after school and hanging on the playground with other parents while the kids play. The other day, Joshua and I were talking about how hard it is to be consistent when it comes to discipline, structure and routines. The authoritative aspect of parenting was never my strong suit.  

But, said Joshua, I try to remember that the most important part of all of this is joy. That's what I want to prioritize with them. 

I nearly cried. 

Me too, I said. 

I want to always make space for ... for the fucking thing. The joy. That's what moving to this house was about, and why all the angst is worth it. Keeping the doors and windows open, having plenty of places to pee, extra space for guests, places to curl up with a book or watch a movie or eat a meal. A home where we can be alone and be together. Where we can know where we've been, accept who we are now, and not be afraid of the changes and growth to come. 

radically precious you

Even though I myself have sought out all of the following influences, sometimes in life it feels as if a story is trying to reach you. Like a message is being broadcast, and your job is to listen and make sense of it. Over the past week or so, here are the forms the message has taken, the result being that I am very stirred up, cracked open:

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, read compulsively late at night all week and just finished at my kitchen table while a group of boys organize themselves for a game Gabriel invented in the next room

The prophetess Sonya Renee Taylor on We Can Do Hard Things, listened to on a drive to Philadelphia on Friday

Tracy Kidder's profile of Dr. Jim O'Connell in the NYT Sunday magazine, read in bits since last Sunday

A Man Called Otto, viewed big and tall in a movie theatre of all places yesterday

Going to church this morning with Beatrice, a Sunday service for Dr. King, a gathering of imperfect people imperfectly registering the pain of injustice and the yearning of coming closer to heroic people who have gone before us.

All of these things have left me a bit agitated, shaken. I have been thinking about our radical responsibility to one another, and the radical belonging and love that comes with taking up that responsibility. I've been thinking about how I shirk that responsibility and pretend like I don't know about it all the time, and how that shirking takes a toll. 

I remember telling Mike how, for better and worse, I had been transformed a few months into my first social work job at my old clinic. I could never not see people again. I'd heard too many stories, I'd sat with too many people that occupied corners and libraries and food pantry lines, the kind I once walked past in various cityscapes with just a shiver of discomfort that I would quickly shake off once something else occupied my attention. But now I saw those people everywhere. Did it change my behavior, no longer being able to pretend they weren't there? Not really. Though in those days, I could greet some of them by name. 

I am aware of the times I hold back friendliness and welcome, when I offer a more shuttered version of my face to a stranger or acquaintance. It's because I can sense their need, and I'm afraid of becoming responsible for them - except of course in a real sense I already am. I'm afraid of having to care for them, of having to make more space when my scanty available space already feels paper thin. 

My job offers me a way to lavish people who come into my life as strangers with attention and love, in a way that feels so very right, deep in my bones. Meeting another person's eyes and inviting their truest self to be with me like that. I welcome their vulnerability. But it's safe because there are boundaries around the relationship. My responsibility is limited. As many have reminded me over the years, a therapist is not supposed to take her clients home with her and feed them dinner and tuck them in at night.

And I'm not taking issue with that! I couldn't do my job without those boundaries, and I'm very attached to my job. Plus I have my own dear children to care for at night. But damn if all these stories and voices I've been letting in this week haven't been reminding me that everyone is someone's beloved precious child, just as precious as my own, and I love those three people so much it nearly breaks me on a regular basis. 

Do you see where I'm going? How do we live in this world that tells us it's fine to walk right past another person's pain, when we know in our guts it's really not? And how can we begin to live more aligned with our own radical preciousness, and every other person's radical preciousness, when it's genuinely hard to get everyone ready and out the door in the morning and remember the orthodontist appointment and the work emails and the friends to check in with and find time to walk to dog and there's laundry six loads deep in the basement? And also. I need a little time at night to be with myself in the dark in the tiny glowing circle of yellow cast by the clip-on book light, a novel balanced on my chest, my breath easy and slow. Otherwise I just couldn't do it all.  

I can read late, when the day's duties are done. But then I go and read a beautiful book about a hungry child. Geez. Are the day's duties ever really done? I mean, okay. Time is finite. Love is not. But how else do we express love, if not through gestures enacted within the bounds of time?

I felt like this in my teens and twenties. I think I'm supposed to have outgrown it by now. But since it appears I haven't - and I honestly do feel a little adolescent right now - I'm genuinely interested to know: how do you think about liberation, your infinite connection to others, the ever-present invitation to care? I don't really mean do you volunteer on Sunday afternoons or a write a check to Unicef. 

I mean: what is it like for you to be a precious hungry child in a world of precious hungry children?