not despite but because

I had a long day at work. After responding to a few last emails before I packed up my things to go home, I succumbed to a very strange impulse. I opened Facebook. I do this sometimes - check texts or social media or personal email after I finish up everything for the day at my office. It's a little time-sucking bridge between work and everything waiting for me at home. 

The first thing I saw was a post from a member of my online widows' group. She shared that it is her daughter's 20th birthday, and before this milestone, the waves of grief kept cresting and crashing because her husband wasn't here to behold their daughter's exquisite young adult self. And because she had promised him to keep the world beautiful and compassionate for their daughter, despite the crushing loss of him. It had been really hard to do that while carrying her own grief. 

I paused at my desk, feeling those words work their way into my tired body. Frances will be 20 this summer too. 

I responded to the post. I wrote that her boundless love, and her husband's, were so much bigger than loss could ever be for her daughter, who is out in the world doing incredible things. Their love buoys and supports her, offers a bright lens through which to see the world. It felt true as I wrote it.

I then abruptly closed my laptop and shoved it in my backpack, shut the door on my darkened office, and walked down the quiet hall - everyone else was already gone - out into the dusky light of evening. I went home where I was grateful to learn that my son and his friend were making dinner tonight, and so leashed up my dog for her walk with a bit of urgency in my step.

Maybe it was just the stress of the day that quickened my pace. Or the heaviness of my friend's post that I needed to move through. In any case, Ramona was initially delighted to trot along briskly with me, but when she insistently stopped to sniff the fire hydrant a block from my house I impatiently paused and waited. 

I sighed. I looked up.

And there was the sky!  

Bright pink feathery clouds in the west scudded across a purple-blue expanse. I watched them glide casually in the last gasp of light, as if it was no big thing to be a pink cloud in a glowing sky, as if there was nothing to see here, you people down on College Avenue going about your business while we do our regular old sunset thing up here all over again. 

The sight made me catch my breath, standing there while my dog sniffed and considered whether or not to pee on the hydrant and neighbors dragged their trash and recycling bins out to the curb. Here we all were, scurrying about beneath this impossible beauty, these ethereal pink forms stretching out so close to earth. It was not business as usual! I could feel my heart yearning so hard it hurt. 

I thought of my friend feeling the pain of her husband's absence, and the pain of all the years of her husband's absence. I thought of Mike, and how I saw the world when he was sick and in the early days after his death; it was so beautiful it nearly crushed me. There was nothing left to protect me from it. Ramona and I walked a little slower, said hello to the neighbors we passed with open faces. Even as the sky began to darken and the glow subsided, my neighborhood and all the people and animals and plants in it beneath the now-gray forms above remained heartbreakingly beautiful.

I was wrong. It's not that our experience of love is bigger than our experience of loss, which thus preserves the goodness of the world. It's that our love-soaked experience of loss, our broken hearts - if we're lucky - leave us cracked open to the beauty and compassion of the world. We see it, we feel it, we cannot shut it off or escape it. We perceive it with greater clarity than we did before. 

It is a treasure, all of it. The faces of strangers, the sky at dusk. It glows so bright it hurts our eyes. 

Our children learned too soon, a pain I would take away in a heartbeat if I could. Yet they are open to grace. They cannot unsee the beauty and compassion of the world, and now they are living into that truth. Vidita, your promise is kept. 

every moment is this moment

Yesterday morning I picked my way over the dark patch of ice at the bottom of my back stairs that has been growing by the day as the dryer vent in our alley melts the gathered snow there and sends it trickling towards the back door, where it promptly freezes in just the right spot for a rushing person to slide and fall. But I didn't! Then I avoided stepping in the forlorn little lumps of frozen dog poop in the backyard snow, made it to my parked car, drove the distance I really should be walking downtown, found a great parking spot, and made it to 8:30 am cardio barre class on time. Another triumph! (I am chronically three minutes late to everything.) 

And then two minutes into our warm up, feeling the pleasant effects of heat growing in my winter body to the encouraging sounds of Beyonce, my lower back totally freaked out. Pain happened. It was sudden and intense and I felt disoriented - what? huh? - and slowed my pace. It was a quintessential middle aged moment. So much was going right. I was feeling good and anticipating coming home after class, showering, packing Frances' things into the car and driving her to Princeton, where we'd go out to lunch and have a last gasp of carefree time together before her semester started. 

And then my body contemplated all this, looked around, noticed the accumulated stress of an intense week at work including many more seated therapy sessions than she is used to, noted the way I was throwing up my knees with Saturday morning abandon, and yelled: I object! 

And I was all like: well, that's fine for you lady, but I want to finish this class and have my day and you can't stop me. 

Yeah. Well, she wasn't into that. By the time I got back to my car an hour later to drive home, I could barely lower myself into the driver's seat. I gasped with pain. I hobbled into the house, where Frances had already lugged the big suitcase down to the back door and was getting ready to leave. The mere sight of her heavy object made my back throb more insistently. 

I told her about my back as I reached for the Advil. She treated my body with a lot more kindness than I had. She was patient, compassionate, and offered to drive. She loaded all her things into the car while I carried my coffee. On the ride, every time I shifted position in the seat, I made little ouchy noises, and she made little mothery noises back: oh, oh Mama, be careful, are you okay?

And we did all the things - slowly. We talked about everything in the car, as we do. We stopped at a madhouse of a Trader Joe's and got lots of snacks and loved it. We had enormous burritos for lunch, bulging packages of comfort resting on little aluminum trays lined with brown paper. We delivered one load of things to her dorm room, where she greeted her chipper roommate who was puzzling over her course schedule and whether she could possibly squeeze into a class with 15 people on the waitlist ahead of her. We walked back to the car to get the rest of it, which turned out to be a mere yoga mat and the bag of groceries. As I opened the car door to get them, my back yelped extra hard.

I think I should probably say goodbye to you here, I told her. I need to get home to a heating pad. 

Oh, she said. 

But I didn't want her to go. I didn't want our day to end. So we sat in the car together and held hands and talked some more. I told her it had been such a good break. I so enjoyed having her in home mode, slipped back into family routines and conversations, rested and restored, and even though it was good and right to do it, a part of me really hated to see her slide back into school mode. I would miss her. 

I felt so close to my eldest daughter. And it was time to say goodbye.

I was a lackluster hugger, what with my weirdo back, but she didn't complain. Then we kept on goodbye-ing as I stood empty-handed next to the car, and she walked away from me holding her heavy sack of yogurts and kombucha and dry shampoo, wearing her elegant camel-colored long wool coat and her beautiful dark hair in braids and looking very much the Princeton student. She smiled and said something about how I probably won't hear from her much because she'll be so busy this week. Her face was so open and beautiful. So her. I saw a flash of her bright curious two year old self, and a surge of uncomplicated and enormous love moved through my 47 year old body.

We are getting older. And sometimes, like in the Wawa parking lot adjacent to campus yesterday, time folds in and back, circling, and every moment is this moment. 

*    *    *    *    *

I made it home, where Gabriel and Beatrice were also kind and patient with me. Gabriel had friends over to play a game, and Beatrice and I set up pillows and a heating pad and a laptop in my big bed and watched A Real Pain and ate ice cream together. Now I want to go on a Holocaust tour to the places in Europe where my family comes from with an unhinged depressed charming cousin too. 

When I woke this morning, the sun was shining, my heart was full, and my back felt much, much better. 

feeling like a person

Hello, dear friends. Hello!

It's been a very long time since I've written. I've been out here flying free in the world, without the act of writing in this space to anchor and connect me to all of you.

And though I have missed it, the absence was intentional. 

A little over a year ago, I began learning about representation in the book business world, and tapping my connections in an effort to pitch my manuscript (based on writing from this blog) to agents. I discovered many things, including the fact that loss and grief aren't particularly marketable; despite that I used every free scrap of time I could find to further my project along. Each cold email I sent was terrifying and sometimes exhilarating for me, a person who has never easily identified as a writer nor tried to push my writing beyond the safety of the fuzzy internet and out into the bright lights and bottom lines of publishing. 

I'm glad I tried. But as a widowed solo parent in her forties with a demanding job who was unwilling to give up the treasure of sleep, it seemed there was never enough time to pitch and research and rewrite and package things as I wanted. Plus I secretly wasn't convinced I had something worthwhile to share. All the same, I took it for what it was, donned a classic fake it til you make it jumpsuit, and gave it a go. 

I attached samples and pitched; I got a few kind and thoughtful rejections in return. One agent encouraged me to try my hand at writing about my therapy clients, as readers are far more interested in the mental health of young people than in the grief of an unknown widow. 

In those days my imagination was forever reaching around, fueled by an amorphous urgency, drifting away from the stuff of life and towards the stuff of shoulds. I should write about my clients! Great idea. I'll think about that and write some notes after dinner with my kids. And I should rewrite the first chapter to make it less depressing. I should probably try to develop a social media presence and then pitch again, so agents will think someone out there will want to buy this book. Maybe I should write some op-eds. About grief. Or the pathologies of college students! Definitely. As soon as this session is over I'll start one.

Actually, I should just be a better writer. And a better self-marketer. I should be someone who is brave and talented enough to have taken some writing risks before the wizened old age of forty-seven. Let's face it: I should be a real freaking artist and yet, here I am! What am I even doing with my life, anyway?  

The shimmering should-cloth that had momentarily billowed gracefully, then settled over the complicated shape of my life with a dark weight, was becoming utterly terrible.

It was good to try something scary. It was bad to feel like a failure. And it was worse still to feel that the things I work at and pour my heart into every day and night were simply not good enough. 

It also kinda sucked that I was distracted by my scattered efforts and thoughts about being a Real Published Writer. I probably slid right by a lot of terrific moments with my kids over dinner.

So by Thanksgiving I decided to take a break from it all, and told myself that I would return to this in the summer, when I would have the entire month of July off work and thus time to dedicate myself anew to becoming the writer I imagined I should be.

When July came around, for the first time in nineteen years, I had two weeks to myself. Beatrice and Gabriel were at camp, and Frances was in New York. I drove Beatrice to our beloved UU retreat center in Western North Carolina to join Gabriel who was already there, then visited various friends in Asheville and the surrounding area and met my boyfriend for a few days at an airbnb in the woods. Beforehand I told myself: this will be your retreat! A traveling writing retreat. You and your laptop will occupy cafes and front porches in your favorite mountains and come out on the other side with something to show for it.

But guess what happened when I got there? I drove my car from place to place along winding mountain roads with the windows down, breathing in the green damp forest and listening to music. I reconnected with wonderful friends. Nearly every day I hiked in the mountains - sometimes alone, usually with someone special. I woke up one morning at a friends' home on a hilltop and watched two mother deer and two fawns grazing out my bedroom window. I wandered out to find Will on the screened in porch, settled in a rocking chair with the French press behind him and a heavy ceramic mug in hand, watching the hummingbirds swoop and flutter at the feeder. He had named them all. I sat beside him so that he could introduce me. 

When I met up with my boyfriend Thomas, we spent every day similarly in our little cabin: waking up slowly, listening and watching, making coffee, planning a day of hiking and then setting out to find the trailheads situated off serpentine roads, drinking local beer and cooking simple dinners at the end of the day. Everything tasted so good. 

Besides a few postcards, I didn't write a word. I didn't want to. 

I ended my independent sojourn back at The Mountain, where I volunteered for three days with the middle school camp before my children's sessions were over and we three drove home. But on the day I arrived, I sat on the dining hall porch in the misty weather with Gabriel and his friend Emerson to hear about all they had experienced over the past seven weeks, and to tell them about my trip too. 

I struggled to tell them why the past days had been exquisite, when I had been responsible for no one but myself. It's been so good, I told them. Every morning I wake up whenever I wake up. Then I pack a lunch and eventually take a beautiful long hike. Peanut butter and jelly has never tasted so good. And I sleep so well at night. My body feels so peaceful. I feel like...I feel like...

Hmmm. What did I feel like, exactly?

Sixteen year old lanky Emerson, who'd been listening with his elbows resting on his knees and his head bent low, suddenly lifted it and looked at me. 

Like a person?

Yes! That's it! I feel like a person. 

The boys smiled at me, and I smiled back at them. They'd had a whole summer of feeling like people. They knew.

It took a two week break from mothering, therapizing, leading my counseling service, taking care of my pets and my house and my community as well as consciously ignoring my long-standing intentions to write, for me to know in my bones that simply existing was good enough.  

I had to stop doing to realize the joyful sufficiency of being. 

Being alive! My animal self - fed and exercised and loved - shed her mind's layers of shoulds and not-enoughs in that gentle, welcoming landscape, and it restored me.

Adding "I should publish my writing" to my over-full life had turned it into a rat wheel. I spent last fall feeling bad about my limitations: my widowhood and unchosen solo parent status, my shaky ambition, my voice, my scant accomplishments. I could never arrive at the fullness of being alive because I was scrambling towards something imaginary that I did not have. 

I haven't written anything since those blessed days in North Carolina. Not until now. Because I wanted to!

I came away from that retreat (it turned out to be one of those after all) with a desire to dig into my life just exactly as it is. To bring my full self to my work, to be present to my children and all the people I love. To get the hell off my phone and spend some time staring out the window. And to walk in the mountains when I can.

 

Big hugs and gratitude to all of you,

Meagan

 

wonder-full

When I was a precocious toddler sporting a massive head of black hair in Dallas, Texas, we lived near a little girl who had renamed herself Wonder. My mom could tell you more about our old neighbor (including her given name), as I can only muster the fuzziest of memories. Blonde hair, skinny legs. Maybe she had accrued five or six years of experience to my two? I know I thought the world of her. We moved away when I was three.

Thinking of her now, given the late 70s timing, it seems likely that Wonder was an homage to Wonder Woman. But in my family, she lives on as the girl who wondered, who felt wonder before all this mind-blowing beauty - so much so that it became her name! 

I brought that spirit with me and my kids to Costa Rica in May. I found a window between AP tests and fifth grade promotion ceremonies, between the end of finals at Princeton and the start of summer internships, and I took it. We hadn't traveled internationally together since after Mike died, before the pandemic, when we went to an all-inclusive resort. That too was a major adventure for me, recently widowed and desperate enough to avoid the Christmas holiday at home without Mike that I signed on to take my 6, 11, and 14 year old children to Jamaica all by myself in December. I'd never done anything like that before, but the outrageous price tag was well worth it. It was a safe, abundant holiday spent sliding down water slides, licking ice cream cones, and basking in the sun.

But Costa Rica was something else entirely. Now I am a solo mother with an 11, 16, and almost-19 year old. I discovered my children can help me with navigation, managing stressful moments, and decision-making. They can hop out of the car to unlock the sliding gate that let us back into our Airbnb in the dark, laugh their way through class 4 rapids, speak far better Spanish than their mother, run through a Panamanian airport to make it to our connecting flight in time to board and indulge me when I insist they watch the video for Van Halen's 'Panama' on my little phone later on the drive home from BWI's long term parking lot. 

And because they are independent, capable young people, I could sit in the shade, digging my toes into the sand and watching three bobbing heads out in the clear blue Caribbean Sea, briefly imagining their conversation before turning back to my book in contentment or following the sounds of howler monkeys to take a peek at them climbing through the trees. 

I wondered at the stretches of time when I was not needed. When I was simply being, an animal in a landscape teeming with other animals who made themselves known to me whenever I sat still and waited. How did those novel states of non-vigilance - of embodied affinity with everything alive around me - come to happen exactly? It was mind-blowing. 

I wondered at my increasing sense of connection to my children. It was akin to their first days on this earth, when it was as if we inhabited one body, one nervous system, a fluid loop of call-and-response. Hunger, milk; exhaustion, sleep; touch and touch and touch. Except now our boundaries were blurring around our thoughts, emotional responses, stress levels. We picked up and put down conversations, told trip-generated jokes that somehow grew funnier the more times we told them, reacted to heat and hunger with the same brittle irritability. 

I kept on messaging my family, closest friends, and boyfriend to share what was happening during the trip because I wanted to. Those people still existed for me. But also, on an inexplicable irrational level, I began to feel that my children were all the community I ever wanted or needed. Sometimes we tease each other about the Brogan mind meld; this was something different, and just mine to experience. As we traveled home and my children began to reach out to their friends, talk about school and graduation parties, and plan their next social days at home, a part of me felt so sad. Reluctant to let go of our enclosed world of four. You guys, let's not go home! Let's stay like this, just a bit longer!

I don't think I've ever felt quite that way before. I love my children and their company, and I'm acutely aware of how important my other relationships are, in and of themselves, as well as in support my parenting. I really love the company of other adults; I really need breaks! And yet. I didn't even want it! It made me remember my dad's palpable grief every time we came home from a big vacation. My sister and I were happy to return to our friends and independent lives; he never wanted the trip to end. 

So, yes. I wondered at my big love for my children, and my utter satisfaction in their company. 

And finally, because the environment in Costa Rica is so extraordinary, I never took off my amazement goggles. Every time my eyes swept over a new landscape, I was looking for something special, and if I waited a moment, I almost always found it. Wonderful! Look, hummingbirds! Hibiscus! The clouds! A toucan! My eyes were always at the ready, and my hands ready to point out the special thing my eyes had found to my kids. 

I had a few experiences of seeing something out of the corner of my eye, getting excited, and reaching for one of their arms to get their attention...only to discover that the fin cresting the surface of the water far on the horizon was a snorkeler's flippers. Near the end of a steamy hike at the base of a volcano named Arenal, during which we had already spied incredible tropical birds, a rodent called an agouti hopping adorably in the forest, and unknown brilliantly-colored lizards, I gasped and grabbed Frances' arm as I heard crunching leaves and caught a flash of color around a bend in the trail. Quiet - there's something there!

I held my breath. My amazement eyes were ablaze in anticipation. 

Two hikers emerged through the trees. Oh, I said. Never mind. 

But actually, scrap that sheepish let down moment. Always mind. Why not be amazed? Two human beings! In this crazy jungle. Here with us. And the forty other people we've seen on the trail. Wow.

One afternoon, when I saw a little dog picking its way along the far off river bank from our raft, I was already in pointing mode. Because of the rushing water it was hard to hear each other, so I'd extend my arm and point with a flourish to indicate the amazing things I saw, like a heron flapping overhead. It didn't take long for my pointing arm to develop a life of its own. It flew out before I even registered what I was seeing. When it insistently thrust itself towards movement far ahead of us on the bank, within a second it became clear my pointer finger was not targeting a new fuzzy tropical mammal but rather a little black mutt. Someone's pet. Our guide in the back of the boat loudly objected over the roar of the river: that's just a dog!

I felt a little embarrassed. But then I smiled. I was being a baby all over again, pointing at this and that, amazed by garbage trucks and squirrels and other children, insisting on showing them to everyone else. When a baby points at a dog and looks at you with delight, amazement, and expectation of your agreement on the matter, who among us hesitates to offer it? A dog! Yes! There is a dog! Look at that doggie! Hi dog, bye dog! There goes the dog!

Babies see the world with amazement goggles. Or rather, they see the world. Later they learn to put on no-big-deal goggles. Business-as-usual, I-have-important-pressing-things-occupying-my-mind goggles. But it seems to me the beautiful constant impulse in a baby is: oh my goodness what is THAT? THAT is amazing! Let me show it to you! And then, finally, what is its name? Tell me, then we can keeping talking about it and holding it in our minds after it is gone. (Hence my futile flipping around in a Costa Rican bird book, searching for names).

So in that spirit, I dropped my embarrassment in the river and thought: I get to encounter this dog with my Costa Rican baby vision. I get to enjoy this transformation of the mundane into the incredible. That dog is amazing. It is walking around and sniffing and getting its paws wet, being super cute. 

Look everyone! A dog!