an early spring saturday

After a months-long hiatus that I feared was the natural conclusion to my nearly nineteen-year-long career as a maternal read-alouder, Beatrice surprised me last week by agreeing with some enthusiasm to the idea of reading Pride and Prejudice together. Thus began our rather agreeable turn about the room with Elizabeth Bennett, which has had no influence on my speech and writing whatsoever. 

The only problem was I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere, which seemed crazy in this house. It must be in the basement, I told Bea, where so many of Papa's program books are (boxes upon boxes, filled with all the St. John's program and philosophy books I couldn't bear to part with). I promised I would search for it over the weekend, and in the meantime, I read to her off the dread phone. 

We've been reading at night before bed, and in the morning on the walk to school and work. I arrived at my office on Thursday and Friday glowing, both with the pleasure of all that fantastic funny dialogue and the effects of the outrageously cold and windy March weather we've been having. The thing is, when we're reading I don't mind it at all. The shivering adds to the fun. After we part ways and I head to my office, I find the cold intolerable.  

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and in the afternoon Beatrice and I went to see Perfect Days with some friends. We curled up towards each other in the reclining seats, heads and knees just touching, a bucket of popcorn tucked into the triangle of space my body made, and holding hands through many of the scenes. I wasn't sure what she would make of such a quiet movie, but she (and I) loved it, and we agreed we would have happily spent another two hours with this taciturn public toilet cleaner as he went about his solitary day, smiling up at the Tokyo trees.

After we said goodbye to our friends and came home, there was laundry and kitchen clean up to do, and some trip planning over cocktails with my mother, as she and Gabriel are taking a vacation together this coming weekend to make up for their Iceland fiasco in the summer. Then Gabriel left to play poker with friends, and my mom invited Beatrice and I to come over for dinner a little later. She left to cook, and I realized I still hadn't looked for Pride and Prejudice.

So down I went into the kitty litter-strewn basement, where one by one, I slid boxes off their shelves and tipped them towards me, balanced on my thighs while I rummaged in their shadowy insides. Philosophy, philosophy, and more philosophy. Some Shakespeare. Theology. More philosophy. What time was it? I squatted down next to the very last box and slid it out. Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and ... a shoebox beneath these books labeled Mike's Keepsakes in Mike's handwriting. I've seen that box before, but surprisingly I can't remember ever opening it. 

You can guess what comes next! My feet were going numb in my weird squatting position, we were going to be late for dinner, and I cracked open the lid. Inside were birthday cards, letters, photos. A silly poem in rhyming couplets I wrote for him on Valentine's Day in 2003. I didn't go through it all, but most of what I found was from his twenties, perhaps because we communicated more often in those days on pieces of paper. 

There was a postcard dated March 6, 1998 addressed to Mike in Brooklyn, three weeks after we first got together and sent from Spain, where I was for spring break. And there was a postcard from the island of St. John, where my mother had taken my sister and me for a week-long graduation gift (we graduated from high school and college in 1998). I described some of the things we were seeing and doing, and ended it with this postscript: 

I've been thinking, we shouldn't honeymoon here. Too hot. Maybe in our flabby forties, when the kids are at camp. 

After I read that, I put everything back, closed the lid, and pushed the box back onto its dusty shelf.

I wrote those words when I was twenty years old, three months into my relationship with Mike. Where did I get that kind of ballsy assuredness? We loved fantasies about the future, about being middle aged with kids, about being retired (back to Brooklyn for long walks and cheap afternoon art movies and a tiny apartment!). In our very first romantic walk in the woods, that very first weekend, Mike - who was a year away from even applying to graduate school - told me he couldn't wait to be a professor emeritus. Now that would be living. To be a wise old man, give the occasional lecture, have lots of time for books and contemplation and yes, walks in the woods. He didn't mention the grandchildren gathered round his knees. We hadn't even kissed yet! But they were there, unspoken, part of his picture. 

I came upstairs, told Beatrice to get ready to go to Grandma's, loaded some dishes into the dishwasher. And in my quiet kitchen with the darkness falling outside the windows I was seized with the most painful anguish. The kind that makes you gasp and curl with its impact. March 12th marked six years without Mike, and March 22nd marked twenty-eight without my dad. I feel very attuned to the absence of my husband and my father at this time of year, and sometimes intolerant of the presence of everyone else's.

Beatrice came down and could tell I was off, despite my best efforts to conceal it. What's wrong Mama? she asked in her open, caring way, and because we had had such a connected afternoon together, despite my worries about burdening her with my own grief, I told her about the postcard. 

But I didn't get to have any of my flabby forties with Papa, I said. I hate feeling sorry for myself, but sometimes I do. 

And then I cried. She hugged me tightly, and cried a little too. 

I told her that I don't like being envious of my friends who have their dads to support them and their husbands to go on trips with. I wish those feelings didn't come up at all.

And Beatrice, who is entering a time of adolescent turmoil and growth, looked at me and said Mama, of course you're mad. I see my friends' dads do things with them, play with them, take them places, just be there, and I feel so angry. It makes you really mad! You have to just let it out!

We were in the bathroom together. I looked at her. 

You have to just - scream!

I still had so much twisted up sorrow in my chest and throat and face. And I held her eyes and opened my mouth and let out the strangest noise imaginable. 

We both laughed. Then she let out a big yell. We laughed some more. We tried out some pretty weird vocalizations, agreeing the low register ones felt best.

We ran in the dark, just because, to my mother's house, letting so much dark energy out our feet and our mouths, continuing to yell and make strange angry noises, cracking each other up the whole way there.

Who knows what the neighbors thought. Who cares. Mike and I didn't get our not-so-very-flabby (as it turns out) forties together, but we did get the kids. They weren't here when I wrote that postcard, and now they are! Three exquisite, loving, growing people that I cannot fathom the world without.

We found a hefty volume of the collected novels of Jane Austen on my mother's bookshelf. We read last night until we were both overwhelmingly sleepy, yet just awake enough to groan together over the absurdities of Mr. Collins. Gabriel had already gone to bed, a bit poorer after his game. I fed the cats, put the dog in her crate, locked the doors and turned off the lights. I slid my hand along the cool, smooth bannister that so many unknown people have slid their tired nighttime hands along before me on my way up the stairs, sank under the covers, skipped reading my own book and, exhausted and content, fell right to sleep. 

in the chute

 

It's a snowy day here, and the kids are off school. I'm at work where meetings were canceled, and so had a bit of time to think about Beatrice's upcoming birthday and look at her Amazon wishlist, which she has been curating whenever she gets her hands on my laptop over the past couple of weeks. 

I never use that feature of Amazon. I scrolled down through K-pop albums and bells-and-whistles water bottles until I hit something just below Star Hair Clips/Y2K Snap On Hair Barrettes that stopped me up short: a book called Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Martin Laird, who was (and apparently still is) on the faculty at Villanova when Mike was in his graduate program there. And below that? The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Family Happiness and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy. The Sources of Christian Ethics. And quite a few more titles in the characteristic theology and Russian literature veins...until I hit the very first thing that had been added to this wishlist, in June 2017. A burr grinder. That made me smile. Mike was on a perpetual mission to perfect his morning coffee. 

The Laird book, the last thing Mike put on his wishlist, was added on February 8th, 2018. One month and four days before he died, just as the cancer was beginning to come back after his transplant. Five years and 360 days before today. 

It's that time of year, observed my boyfriend as I cried exhausted tears last week, thinking about my dad in the midst of an AEDP training weekend that, as always, centers attachment in the therapeutic work. My beloved dad who gave me the gift of secure attachment, of feeling safe and loved, and who was taken from us far too soon, leaving me with an enduring envy of everyone I know who has a father that happens to be alive.

He's right. It's that time of year. I'm in the chute. I'm in the chute and I can't get out until March 13th, the day after Mike's deathaversary. It happens every year. I get more brittle, more weepy, a bit more anxious and angry in defensive gestures against the grief the stirs and lurches within. This time six years ago became more traumatic and painful with each passing day, and my body cannot forget. 

I fantasize, as I did this morning on my snowy walk to work (even the brilliant white tree limbs couldn't deter me!), about snapping at someone who complains about child care on snow days, or having to manage things on their own because their partner is away at work, or even (god forgive me, the latest person on the planet) in response to a colleague with a living spouse who arrives late to work just because. I want to say: are YOU a widowed solo parent with three children getting to work everyday, even when it SNOWS? NO?! You're NOT? Okay well just TRY DOING THIS LIFE for a couple of days and THEN talk to me. 

When Mike was sick, and even before then, he confessed to a fantasy: a stranger would walk up to him and hit him in the face. Because then he could hit back! Hard! Justifiably! It would feel amazing to hit someone for a good reason. 

So, Mike, same. It would feel amazing to FREAK OUT on some innocent person who doesn't have to live this reality and stumbles into triggering me. I would love a tiny reason to inappropriately rage.

But it's been six years, you say! That's a long time, right? Will you ever stop talking about your grief? In some ways, yes, it is very long. I'm so far from my identity as Mike's wife. So far that I often feel like a different person, like I can barely recognize the woman I used to be. (That's a grief in and of itself, even though I like the woman I've become).

We're used to it. Sort of. The kids and I are used to this new life we've made together. It's a good one. But then sometimes, like on my walk to work today with my head down against the snowflakes blowing into my eyes, watching my thighs do the work of walking along the slushy sidewalk, already deep into the chute, I think to myself: 

I'm a widow. I'm alone. 

And it feels just as absurd and unfathomable as it did on March 13, 2018. 

How did I get here? How am I alone in making every decision, caring for every sick kid, navigating every day off school and every tearful bedtime? How did this become my life? This is crazy! 

So I'm used to it. And deep down, beneath that, I'm never used to it. 

How old are the cats? asked a beloved friend while we chopped vegetables together, surrounded by our families on Sunday night. 

The cats have been alive as long as Mike has been dead, I said casually. We think they were born two or three weeks after he died; we adopted them when they were so tiny. They're almost six. 

I say these things out loud, to make bridges between my life now and my life then, between my inner life and my outer one. But sometimes it feels like I'm shouting and shaking the shoulders of the people around me. It's real! It happened! It was terrible! 

It's been six years; it's been six seconds. And six seconds is not very long at all. 

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.