the golden thread

Nearly every morning Beatrice and I walk to school. When we can't because of dentist appointments and other such errands requiring a car in the middle of my work day, we're sad. Once when I told Beatrice at the last minute that we had to drive because I had to pick Gabriel up from cross country right after work, she huffed and stomped in protest, angry as heck because without sufficient warning, I was taking away "the best part of my day!"

It is pretty good. Part of the joy of our walk for every morning of third grade, and fourth grade, and the few weeks of second grade when there was actual school to walk to, was that while we walked, I read aloud from books one through five in a charming series called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. Brilliant, plucky Penelope Lumley is the star, fifteen when the story begins and a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. She is sent to be the governess to three incredible children who were found naked in the woods of the wealthy Ashton estate, apparently raised by wolves. Because of their upbringing, they often interject awhoooo! and other eccentricities into their language, which, in addition to a wild collection of characters including a family of conflictual, passionate Russians, makes for an excellent read aloud experience. (You may not have heard my Russian accent, but I learned it from my theatrical sister and brother-in-law, and over the years it's improved considerably). 

We would coordinate our steps, I would read in an exaggerated silly manner, and we'd crack up the whole way to school. By the last block, when other parents and kids were more present, I'd be instructed to whisper the story to make it less embarrassing, or just tuck the book under my arm. Then we'd hug goodbye and I'd walk as fast as I could to work, arriving five minutes late, smiling. 

Things started to shift at the end of fourth grade. The sixth and final book was getting bogged down in details and authorial asides; the action wasn't moving fast enough for us. We skipped reading a few days. And then for awhile, we seemed incapable of leaving on time, getting snappish with each other and realizing we'd need to drive at the last minute, which was demoralizing. And then when fifth grade started this fall, we couldn't even find the book that we were halfway through, and tacitly agreed to forget about it.

But wow, did I miss it. And I couldn't bear to think of us abandoning the series that we only read on the walk to school a hundred pages before the end and six months before the end of elementary school, after which our walking to school and work together days will be over forever. 

Because then she will go to middle school, get a little prickly, become a teenager, learn to drive, head off to college, start a career and marry someone I may or may not like, live anywhere on the planet she chooses and call if she feels like it. I mean, really, you can see where this all goes after fifth grade. Away. 

I blame Frances going to college this year (even though it has proved thus far to be a wonderful development for all concerned, about which I have zero complaints) for my sensitivity to Beatrice's surefooted path away from childhood and towards adolescence. I'm holding a child on the cusp of adulthood at one end of my reach, and a child on the cusp of teenagehood at the other. A widowed mother cannot help but feel more confused and moved by the mysterious passing of time than ever. 

Beatrice has always invited my silly side. She pointed out while we were waiting for tickets to the F&M Dance concert last week that most mothers don't speak to their children in meows. (They don't? No? Well, most mothers don't have you as their daughter - that explains my behavior.) I can still wrestle and tickle bad moods out of her. We snuggle through her bedtime routine every night. But all this is changing gradually beneath our feet. And so when we found Book Six of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place on Thursday and I suggested we read it on the walk to school and she said, Um...why don't we just read it tonight instead?, I must have registered the disappointment on my face, deepened with mixed up hard feelings about my youngest child growing up and feeling embarrassed by such things, because she said Oh Mama, now I feel bad. I know you want to read it. We can read it tomorrow, okay?

Oof. She took pity on me. Also, my children find my disappointment and sadness unbearable; their guilt flares and they quickly apologize or in this case, submit to me reading aloud to them publicly. I try not to exploit this situation. 

That said, I'm not scary or firm or disciplined. I really have no other power to effectively wield. So this morning I tucked the book under my arm and once we were across Lemon Street, I flashed it at Beatrice with pathetic, naked hopefulness in my eyes.

Okay, sure, she said, casual noblesse oblige coloring her tiny shrug of agreement.   

So we read a few pages about Penelope Lumley's plans to escape from Saint Petersburg in order to be reunited with her beloved Incorrigibles, up until the corner where we now part ways, which is two blocks from school and a little closer to work, as I'm now the Head of Counseling Services and arriving two minutes late instead of five is slightly more seemly. 

As we hugged goodbye, I asked, how was that? Do you think we should we do it again?

I liked it, said my five foot nearly four inches tall ten-year-old, smiling her gray blue eyes at me. Yeah.

Since we started saying goodbye on this corner, I have a habit of looking over my shoulder as I hustle towards my office, watching her walk on her own the rest of the way to school in the opposite direction. Sometimes she catches me, and we laugh and wave at each other across College Avenue. I can feel the invisible golden thread spooling out between us, sometimes tugging, sometimes long and loose, floating on the breeze. She looks so marvelous and independent in her backpack bedecked with plastic buttons she has selected that flash in the sun, dark golden hair flapping in rhythm with her gait. There she goes. That's my kid.

When I first began staying home with my little ones, when Frances was three and Gabriel a little baby, I could not believe how hard it was. At the end of every day I was exhausted. My emotional resiliency was regularly stretched to the brink, and my body was rarely my own. It seemed absurd that the hardest work I had ever done was mostly invisible - the bulk of it took place in my home, with no peers around to talk things through or share the burdens and joys. Mike had thrown himself into his new job at St. John's, which required not only long days but teaching two nights a week plus Friday night lectures and lots of Saturday prep. I was often on my own. It was SO hard, and no one knew about it! There wasn't a boss to pull me aside after a skillful response to a tantrum or peacefully executed transition to nap time and say, hey Meagan, great work. I really appreciate what you're doing for the team. Let's talk about a raise at your next evaluation!

(Okay, no boss ever said anything like that to me, but still).

That said, I've never understood when other people say congratulations to me after one of my kids has done something great. They did it, not me. Right?

But here I am with three children who are growing more independent with every passing day, who each have their own world that is quite separate from me and from their siblings, in which they make decisions and take risks and decide how much of themselves to share. It's extraordinary, really, to glimpse them out and about, living their lives. It's thrilling. 

And lately, for the first time, I do feel proud of myself. There's my work, no longer invisible. It's walking to school, it's at a mock trial tournament in New Jersey, it's at a track meet an hour away. There's every time I gritted my teeth and walked away instead of yelled, every ride to an orthodontist appointment, every conflict I mediated, every bedtime routine, every harrowing pain I held and helped absorb - and there have been so very many. They are doing the hard work of growing up and becoming themselves, and I am doing the strange work of holding them close without holding too tight, doing my imperfect best to not get in the way of their growing - being here so they can be there. 

Time! You are so impossible! My heart squeezes as we leave each stage behind; my heart thrills at what the present whispers about the horizons ahead. 

 

 

confessions

I went with my friend Stacy to see Nicole Holofcener's last movie, You Hurt My Feelings, when it came out in our local arthouse theatre over the summer. It centers around a couple in their later fifties. They have a young adult son and careers in New York, and their lives are overly settled when the subtle action begins. It was lovely, so funny, nearly painfully relatable (as all her movies seem to be) and I slid through it with the ease of someone on a gentle touring-about sort of ride at Epcot Center. The movie begins and ends with an anniversary date. When the credits rolled, Stacy put her hand on my arm. 

I began to sob. The tears came so quickly and suddenly in response to that gentle contact, I was shocked. Where was that from? But also, I couldn't stop crying. So we sat together in the theatre while I cried through all the credits, and after the lights came up, and I eventually realized I was devastated because I would never have an anniversary dinner date like that. I would never build up comfortable habits of white lies with a partner I'd known and loved since we were very young. I would never inhabit a late middle age, comfortable kind of marriage. That was taken away, and I felt kicked in the heart all over again.

Because, I sobbed, even if I'm still with Thomas then, we won't have that kind of relationship! We won't have habits of relating, topics we tacitly avoid, and mannerisms we've established as a unit because we won't have had that long together. Also, we met in our forties and that's just different. Also he lives in Philadelphia and not in my house.

I was really mourning the mediocrities and complacencies that forty years together might have brought me. I will never know. The boring bits. The quotidian things we would talk about and the important things we would avoid. I cried for that.

With dismaying regularity, every 6-8 weeks I have what my family has come to call a Total Meltdown Day. Whenever it happens, I don't recognize it as such and announce that I am getting sick. I feel exhausted, headachey, incapable. Then the kids tell me I'm probably not getting sick, I'm probably just having a Total Meltdown Day. Typically I rest, and by the next day I'm fine. It seems to be a cumulative stress response. I hate it because it gets in the way of everything and it makes me feel vulnerable and limited. I blame what I imagine to be fast-approaching perimenopause.

Okay but really, more than that, I blame the madness of working a demanding full time job and parenting three young people without the partner I had every reason to expect would be here to help with this.

Here's the confession part: sometimes I feel SO mad. And small, and bitter. One never 'gets over' the loss of a partner and co-parent because this shit is never done. They're not there for graduations, performances, games. They're not there for college move in day. And they're not there for the last cross country meet of the season to say dad-type things to our son and cheer him on as he works so hard to come back from a concussion-induced running break. The future comes up to meet me every day, and more often than I like to admit, it can be an occasion to register my aloneness and strain anew. 

Because they're also not there for a Wednesday night after work. I don't want to be responsible for every broken dryer door, dog walk, dinner, trip to the orthodontist, mortgage payment, grocery run, ride to a friend's house, or late night clean-out and devilish difficult removal of license plates with rusty pliers in the dark on the street while bass pours from passing car windows (something, truth be told, I normally enjoy) from our ten-year-old minivan in preparation for it's donation to public radio this morning. I was the only one to figure out how to make the ancient screws on the license plate budge and I was the only one to figure out what to do with all the feelings that job elicited as I fished Mike's church name tag, cds with images of pet scans and cds of bands from college, a pink cup with a lid from preschool days from the Sienna's shadowy bowels beneath a street light. 

So yes, I really miss and love Mike. But there are a lot of layers to this widowhood thing, and one of them is resentment. To be doing everything alone, without the person I set all this in motion with to even see me, or know I'm doing it all, or say, oh wow, I remember that little plastic cup, it's been here all this time! I observe my peers and friends negotiating with partners about who will make dinner and what it will be, who will pick up which kid, what they'll do this Saturday. I watch one partner taking care of the yard while the other sits and chats with a friend or reads a book or explores a new fucking hobby. (Warned you about the resentment). I watch them ease into life with older kids and the more expansive time it offers, and God help me, I feel sorry for myself. Excluded. 

And feeling excluded is the worst! Right? It makes me mad-sad-bad, as we used to say when the kids were little. In those moments I feel acutely the compressed quality of my days, how tired I am, the brute fact that I can only offer 50% of what my children's friends enjoy and have to rely on favors from friends and my mom regularly to make all this hang together. I feel like a twelve year old in braces with the worst, healthiest lunch in the cafeteria, sitting alone and staring longingly at the cool kids with great hair who laugh together and pull Twinkies from their brown bags with ease, not even registering the power and treasures they thoughtlessly enjoy.

Yep, you're right, cleaning out the minivan did a number on me. It sent me straight into mad-sad-bad, into twelve year old excluded angst, which was so powerful that when I woke up this morning it was still there hanging on me, pulling on my shoulders and arms and face, and that darkness kept at it until it ballooned into a Total Meltdown Day. I felt so ill that I left work early and stretched out on the couch next to my dog and ate two bowls full of popcorn and watched tv. 

For like half an hour. Then I had to pick up Gabriel to take him to the chiropractor. But damn, it was great.

I don't have a tidy end to this post. I don't have a lesson learned, or a moment to describe during which the mood lifted and gratitude for all the wonderful things in our lives came rushing in. (Though let's be clear: I am very lucky, and we do have a lot to be grateful for, and the meltdown has already passed). Sometimes you just have to experience the pain of things, the darkest, most unpleasant parts, and let them be. All I can do is try to hold the insistent mad-sad-bad with compassion, and let that terribly awkward middle schooler know that yes this situation really sucks. I'm sorry today is so hard.

what we are here to do

Recently I finished the second four-day training module in a series of five modules (spread out over the course of the year) in the therapeutic model I like best. The more I learn and practice, the more emboldened I am to commit to this approach with my clients. And the more I commit, as with so many things, the more deeply meaningful the experience becomes. 

The first task of the AEDP therapist is to "undo aloneness." The idea is that facing danger and pain and cruelty, even facing our own dark feelings, becomes truly terrifying and often traumatic when we we are completely alone in the task. And so nowadays when I sit across from someone, I think about how to undo their aloneness; how to help them feel safe enough to permit me to draw closer and help them carry the pain inside so that it becomes bearable, feel-able. 

Using this model has been bringing out the human in me and my clients. The really real, the tender and precious, the profoundly connected. I always say the best part about my job is how it continually teaches me that everyone is lovable and no one is boring. (The worst part is sitting in a chair all day). If I can help someone feel safe enough to be their authentic self with me, they're easy to care about and be interested in. But now, with this new level of therapeutic engagement, I am learning something more: that our deepest nature is to be in communion. Connected. With ourselves and others and the infuriating glorious world around us. To participate in love.   

Big claims, I know! But seriously. I have been so moved this week by what can happen therapeutically within the felt sense of connectedness. 

Last night when I picked Beatrice up from soccer practice she was upset. Without saying too much about her experience, it boiled down to feeling excluded and alone - not only in practice, but in the lonely predicament. It was that awful sense of "I'm on the outside, and no one can help me get in, and I will always be in this terrible isolated place." We were in the car together. Darkness quickly fell outside, and as she told me about practice her pain filled the car's shadowy interior. I felt a vise tightening inside; my heart ached with her ache. I wanted more than anything to fix it! To distract with humor, to point out the positive things about soccer, to remind her of the times she'd felt good after practice.  But all this connecting I've been doing lately has strengthened my pain-tolerating muscles, so instead I listened and let her cry and told her I was sorry she felt so bad, that I've felt that way too, that it really and truly is awful.

We pulled up at home and walked through the gate to the back door. We set her soccer ball and water bottle and my book and jacket down in a pile in the kitchen and I hugged her close. Gabriel was in the kitchen and he asked if she wanted to talk about it, and she did, and he hugged her too. We ate dinner and kept making space for her darkness, and as we did it began to ebb; the tide drew it back out of Beatrice's beloved body leaving lightness and spaciousness behind. Then she was ready to do some problem-solving and talk a little about how to make things better. Then we watched a documentary in which someone with a lot of struggle in life manages to try anyway, to have new experiences and take risks. Beatrice really connected with that.

My children's pain is as hard, maybe harder, than my own to bear. Holding their grief during Mike's illness and after he died was the most difficult thing I've ever done. Sometimes I was afraid their pain would break me, perhaps in part because I had to carry it alone, without Mike. Widowhood introduced me to the most acute aloneness imaginable. 

And even though all I wanted then was to cry in someone's arms, someone who wouldn't advise or judge or try and shake me out of it but simply be there with me, I can forget that truth when my arms are the ones doing the holding. Or rather, deny that truth. Ignore it. 

Because damn, it can feel nearly impossible to be present to another human being! To offer yourself fully and completely, and stand in whatever true thing is happening together without trying to change it or push it aside. I mean, wouldn't it be easier to get some takeout? Check your phone? Yes, it definitely would! 

But the being together, the attending completely, might be the most exquisite gift anyone can give anyone else. And when you give it, you are nurtured by that generosity too. Because you are together. Because the whole experience is shared. Because we aren't meant to do any of this alone. 

Maybe you are thinking: uh, yeah, Meagan. Haven't you figured this out yet? What with all the parenting and caregiving and therapizing and being a person in a world full of people for forty-six years? Did you really need a weekend of talking secure attachment and core emotions with a bunch of emotive therapists to figure out that love is more or less what we are here to do?

And to that I say, well, yeah. Maybe I did. Because love is SO HARD and heart-stretching and scary that I need lots of reminders and inspiration all the time. I need a lot of support! I need an enormous zoom room full of therapists. And people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Richard Rohr and Glennon Doyle. And my family, clients, coworkers, boyfriend, friends, ancestors. September skies, cool mornings, sunlit leaves. Also novels and music and documentaries about people who are brave. Tearful daughters who sit in the car and tell me how much it hurts. 

I can't just show up with my whole heart and stay there without a thousand hands at my back.

Thank you world, for reminding me every time I forget, and teaching me anew. 

saying goodbye

Four years before this photos was taken, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good fortune to land a field placement with Fox Chase Hospice on the northern edge of Philadelphia. My supervisor was wonderful and the nurses were hilarious, compassionate and wise. When I walked into the office after a home visit one afternoon feeling discouraged, unable to help a family resolve their longstanding conflicts before their mother died as I'd hoped, a seasoned nurse named Debbie took one look at me and sighed. "People die the way they live, Meagan." 

That stayed with me. People die the way they live. It isn't fair or reasonable to expect them to do things differently while going through a whole-being transition, a whole-world change. Just getting through the day during times of loss requires tapping into our deepest reserves; it's nearly impossible to find the energy and wherewithal to do things with a new spirit or perspective. Of course sometimes we do, despite the odds. Maybe that's grace. 

I kept thinking of Debbie and dying the way we live, in the lead up to Frances's college move-in on Friday. Yes, everything was about to change forever, and yes, we had been anticipating it for years and named countless big feelings about the event as we moved ever closer to it. But we were still us. We were handling this little death the way we handled life - with flashes of anxiety, dark humor, conflict, dog walks, domestic chaos, and ice cream. It seemed that something really big should happen, something to reflect back the momentous cusp we all stood upon. A ceremony of some sort? Collective weeping and gnashing of teeth? A brilliant rainbow arching over our house?

But no. Nothing unusual happened. Life kept barreling us ahead, and then on Thursday evening Frances and I lugged everything from her room down the stairs and into the car, occasionally looking at each other in bewilderment and asking, "what are we doing?"

Was she going to college or something? 

Friday morning we woke up early and got on the road, and it was good. We arrived on campus and followed the mobs of parents and students and figured out where to park, where to unload, how to find the dining hall. We kept doing the things, and the things kept moving us closer to saying goodbye.

And when we did I felt it deep down in the taproot of my heart. I felt it all: hope and excitement for my daughter, gratitude to see her already finding her way in a beautiful and extraordinary place, a hint of pride in the path we have walked together, the role I was given to play in this exquisite human's life, and ragged grief over the brute reality of the moment: I would go home without her.

No matter how long we anticipate these shifts in our lives, it's shocking to become a parent, to lose someone after a long illness, to say goodbye to a child. To undergo a structural change that you can't reverse. Anticipation is its own thing, its own difficult path one can't avoid. But the event itself is something else entirely. And the word 'prepared' has no place here. How can you prepare? You've never done this before!

For instance: I didn't know how much I would miss Mike as I moved Frances into her dorm room and watched her chatting with her new roommates. I didn't know how it would ache as I walked amongst couples on their way to parent orientation. After our big goodbye hug outside her dorm, I walked to the waiting car in a lot on the far edge of campus and cried. Those tears were not so much about saying goodbye to Frances as they were about saying goodbye to her without Mike. 

Then as I crossed the enormous parking lot, he sent me a memory. When Frances was born, less than an hour old, Mike had a vision. It was a flash, a scene, one so powerful that he never forgot it. He saw her as a tiny, frail old woman (not so very different from a tiny, frail newborn) with fine white hair. She was in bed and people Mike didn't know were in the room with her - except he did know them, because he knew that small crowd of adults and children were her family. He was seeing her on her deathbed, surrounded by nieces and nephews, grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren too, and they were all loving and supporting her as she made the passage.

But that wasn't all. Mike saw the scene, and knew he would be there too. He was there too. It was as if time spread out in every direction in the moment of Frances's birth; everything was happening all at once. Everything was. Impossibly, the love he felt for a tiny person he had only known a matter of minutes was the portal to briefly entering everything-is time. Mike was aware that he couldn't possibly still be alive when Frances died, an old woman surrounded by future generations, and he knew he was going to be there with her all the same. 

I remembered all of that, and I thought: if you're going to be there when she dies, why not be here for this passage too? 

People die the way they live. They live the way they die, too. We are all dying all the time: to our old selves, to chapters past, to relationships and narratives and identities. But the small deaths we experience, like saying goodbye to Frances, can lead to bounteous, ardent new life. She is on her way. We all are.

Driving and crying through New Jersey, I talked to Mike, her proud papa, her first teacher and the biggest nurturer of her bright intellect. I don't know what dead people do all day, but after I remembered his vision from her birth, it seemed possible that I wasn't alone. It seemed possible that the only person in the whole world who loves Frances like I do - who listened with me to the music the sound of her breath and a cricket outside the window made as she slept nestled between us on her first night on earth - he was somehow there with us. With her in her beginnings, with me in my endings, maybe even with us forward and back through all the moments, and somehow helping me ensure that when Frances sleeps her last night on earth, she will also be surrounded by boundless love.