don't leave

Not too long ago, Gabriel got his drivers license. The fact that he passed his test and has a little plastic card with his picture on it tucked in a silicon slot affixed to the back of his phone has not magically put me at ease when I am in the passenger seat and he is behind the wheel. I am vigilant as ever.

So when we were making a left out of the alley behind our house into two way traffic, a maneuver that features terrible visibility due to the cars parked along the street, I said to Gabriel, 'you know, I still have to close my eyes every time you do this.' 

'Me too, Ma,' he confided in turn. 

It took me a beat. Then my eyes flew open, and I turned and punched his arm. He was already laughing, eyes wide open and fixed on the road.

'Got ya.'

He did. For half a second, I believed that when he makes that scary turn and can't quite see who is coming from the left he closes his eyes and hopes for the best because that made sense to me. Let the other drivers of the world decide if this is a bad idea. Let the winds of chance determine if I survive this left turn. 

I've been thinking about it since. My younger self often closed her eyes, relinquished her own agency. Making an identity, asserting myself socially, taking risks, blazing my own trail - all of this was so hard. I longed for authentic expression, though I had no idea what that might look like in practice. Plus I was terrified of judgment. I didn't want to give anyone the chance to confirm my worst suspicions about myself. 

Poor dear.

That might explain the series of charismatic and controlling girls I befriended growing up, girls who were the protagonists while I played nice girl sidekick. I could feel my own edges begin to dissolve before the heat of their glittering presence, and I liked it.  

At least at first. Eventually I'd feel confined and resentful, but that initial thrill of dissolution and lightness was wildly compelling. Even as I got older and chose friends more wisely, I absolutely loved the runaway quality of good chemistry, and would happily stay up too late, skip a class, lie to my parents, whatever discomfort was required to sustain the pleasure of feeling my boundaries blur, of forgetting myself. 

People who go on guided psychedelic trips often report a profound experience of oneness with everything. They could also try laughing uncontrollably in a feedback loop to exhaustion with a girlfriend as an alternate path to spiritual unity. Your ego falls away; you are all presence, all connection. It's the best.

'Your friends are your crack,' my dad once declared to me in our kitchen. I was appalled. And anguished. How to explain to him that I didn't always like the ways I accommodated my friends' whims? How I struggled to set any boundaries at all? 

Of course when I fell in love for the first time, it was friendship crack times a thousand. It felt so good to take risks and break rules for someone else. To feel my wheels running off the road, to close my eyes and turn into whatever the oncoming traffic had in store. 

I think that a more grown up version of this was at work in my marriage. There was the delight of merging and the relief of not having to be responsible for my whole person. (Did I admit that to myself? I did not.) Mike made the big decisions; I busily made the everyday decisions that filled in their spaces. 

He picked the suburban house we bought in Annapolis, and I rode his confidence that it was the best choice for us, that we wanted the neighborhood and big yard for the kids, a vegetable garden, his native plant obsessions. And we were such a we, I could not tell you even now if that was the best thing for me or not. But I was the one pushing children on the swing set and weeding the garden while the mosquitoes drained me dry. Mike managed our budget and finances, and decreed a life of simplicity and frugality, which seemed virtuous and like something I could sign on to. I mean, I love thrifting! Eating low on the food chain! I made so many excellent pots of beans over the years.

I treasure those memories. I'm genuinely happy our kids had that landscape in their early lives. And yet. Would I have chosen it all if I was in charge? Could I even fathom then what it would mean to be in charge? To assert my difference? To say no thanks, I'd rather buy new shoes and an iced latte and some more freaking child care? 

I traded some of the burden of my existential responsibility for the security and pleasure of being loved. For safety, for those delicious moments of transcendent connection. But when you make that trade, you are loved through a glass darkly. There are distortions; it's built into the deal. 

You be in charge, and I will be the version of myself I believe you want me to be. My younger self made adjustments. I was afraid to say no; I was afraid to want more. Maybe I wouldn't be as lovable.

Along with a million other viewers, I streamed Conclave last week. In one scene, a priest comes to the dean of the Vatican, played by Ralph Fiennes, sharing that he has discovered information that sheds a negative light on one of the cardinals who may soon be elected to the papacy. This has come after other disturbing disclosures, and the dean loses his temper. He tells the other priest not to tell him what he has learned. He hates to talk about other priests like this. More than that, he hates to be in the leadership position he is in. Don't tell me, I don't want to know, because then I'll be responsible for that knowledge. 

Leave it in God's hands, he tells the priest. 

I found him so frustrating in that moment that I yelled at the screen. He was putting God in the spot I had at various times put my best friends and boyfriends and husband, afraid to take up his full subjectivity, integrity, responsibility for his own existence and duty to others. This mortal coil can be a real bitch. Close your eyes, nose the car forward. Call it piety, that sounds pretty nice. I get it.

I wish Mike never knew anything at all about lymphoma. I wish he never suffered so terribly, and I wish he had not died. And the excruciating loneliness and disorientation and endless solitary decisions I had to navigate after his death led me to learn so many things. 

I met with an AEDP therapist for about a year during the pandemic, tucked away wherever I could find a modicum of privacy in my house while Beatrice slid notes under the door asking for snacks and screen time. Even so, it was transformative. In one session, I found myself, with my therapist's help, trying to listen to what my heart was telling me. It was hard. I had to be so quiet and patient. But then it came, clear as a bell. Don't leave me. My heart said, don't leave me. 

When I met Thomas, I worried at myself. What about closing my eyes, what about the dissolving boundaries? Was this love? Because I kept saying when I didn't like something, or did like something, and even, with his support, sharing things that might be hard for him to hear, that might cause conflict. 

I want to teach my 20 year old self and my 12 year old self what this is like. Being more fully myself in the wide world of other people with so much safety inside. It is a treasure of middle age.  

I knew just what my heart meant that day. Don't leave me again. You just got here. Even in the long laughs, the long kisses. Don't go. 

So I haven't. 

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