not knowing

I came down to my kitchen grumpily on Saturday morning, after a fitful night of sleep. A lone soup spoon lay face down in the drain of the little bar sink, surrounded by a spray of coffee grounds and looking not unlike a murder victim. We normally use that sink exclusively for drinking water, and so without any other dish-washing happening, the spoon had remained there untouched for at least three days. 

In an ill-fated private experiment enacted by countless mothers before me, I was waiting to see how long it would languish there before someone noticed. Predictably, no one had bothered to put it in the dishwasher. I knew if I didn't move the pathetic lonely thing, no one would, and that depressed me.

But my boyfriend came for the weekend, and even though he was suffering from post-vaccine ickiness, he must have eventually done what my children would not, because the spoon and it's surrounding mess disappeared. It's for the best that he inadvertently cut my experiment short. In this particular round, I ultimately wasn't feeling resentful of my kids. I was instead experiencing a kind of familiar, floundering fitfulness before my own shortcomings as a parent: why haven't I taught them to take responsibility for their environment?

I've been having a hard time finding the balance of things lately. I'm observing certain places where the fabric is wearing thin, but I'm not sure what to do about it. It seems I should have figured out things like housekeeping and parenting and managing work and the rest of life better by now; the problem is no matter how much experience I accrue, things are always shifting under my feet. 

How is it that I can feel so discouraged? Frances is at Princeton doing beautifully, Gabriel is home this fall working and saving up for his thru hike in the spring, and Beatrice is no longer a little girl who fights me at bedtime. She is twelve years old and knows how to bake an exquisite chocolate chip cookie.

But all the same, I often feel that I am wanting in my ability to captain this ship, and we are teetering on the edge of chaos. I doublebook orthodontist appointments and clients, haircuts and meetings. Empty seltzer cans stand watch over stacks of unread New Yorkers that slide around the surface of the coffee table, while dirty socks are huddled up beneath it. I can't seem to find time to take the stacks of paper recyclables to the place with terrible hours, or call my liability insurance with my questions. The toilet paper holder is broken and I don't know how to fix it. Even my body is chaotic: my shoulder hurts. Or sometimes my knees. My period is totally whack. My god, just think what will happen to us when menopause really gets underway...!

Even though I've parented two twelve year olds before, parenting twelve year old Beatrice is it's own thing. I can only learn to do this from and with her. And I can only parent her as the woman I have become, someone who lives in an older body, has more responsibility at work, and who is more comfortable acknowledging her own need for care, rest, and independent pursuits (like my new private practice and my Thursday night dance rehearsals). When Frances and Gabriel were twelve, I was willing to sacrifice my own well-being. I was taking care of my ill husband, and then I was newly widowed with three young children. Back then I didn't see any other way we were going to survive. 

Now we are forty-eight. I like to see my friends and exercise; also I am navigating screens, middle school dynamics, chores, and schedules with my youngest and more often than not feeling at a loss. 

I've been reading Laurie Colwin (Happy All the Time and More Home Cooking), listening to Samin Nosrat on Fresh Air, and paging through old favorite cookbooks. All of these things fill me with tender longing. I'm building a private practice while working full time (there are good reasons) and the effort and hours this requires is likely related to how freshly appealing cooking has become, ideally with the people I love perched on stools nearby. Gabriel, back from 30 days in the Rockies, has led us on two camping weekends since school began. Cooking in the woods with my family! The gurgle of the little percolator over the fire! Even better. While packing for it is anything but, life becomes marvelously simple on a camping trip. Time unfurls luxuriously.  

On Saturday morning, I was still very much recovering from the over-full week and the hit my house, parenting, and nervous system had taken in response. But last night I cooked a delicious dinner from CSA eggplants and green beans (vegetables that had been stressing me out during the week, looking at me accusingly every time I opened the fridge and threatening to go bad before I had time to cook them), watched a dumb movie snuggled up with Beatrice and Thomas, and slept deeply. Today I went to church, took a long walk in a wooded park with Thomas and Ramona where I had a cry about my various worries, and baked a pumpkin chocolate chip loaf with Beatrice. Gabriel and Beatrice and I did our grateful grace at dinner, and talked about college applications and school projects and whether or not I should buy a pair of silver shoes.

I still don't know how to do this. Widowed parenting is it's own kind of thing, full of rushing love, mind reading, and gut punches - with no breaks. They don't put the spoons away, because I do. There is so much more for me to learn, so many more moments of feeling desperately at a loss ahead. 

I won't know what to do. But we can always sit down to dinner - at the table half covered in homework and laundry, or under a canopy of trees - and bolstered by that ritual well-soaked in faith and love, be reminded that it's okay not to know. We find our way anyhow.

on two incidents of crying in public

I drove Gabriel and my mother through shocking amounts of traffic to the Atlanta airport on Wednesday afternoon, arriving with less padding time-wise than we'd anticipated. It took us nearly three hours to get there from the peaceful mountaintop in Western North Carolina where Gabriel had spent the previous six weeks. The most stimulation he encountered there came in the forms of cacophonous birdsong, campers shout-singing during Morning Circle, thunderstorms, and Sunday texting on his grayscaled iphone10.  

We walked from the short term parking lot to the ticketing area for United. I watched his wide eyes set in his alert, expressionless face scanning the vast space filled with hundreds of other faces and the accompanying sound of hundreds of wheeled suitcases bumping along the tiled floor, trying to make sense of it all. 

We checked his duffle. We'd spent the morning packing all his gear, checking off items one at a time from a five page long list. I watched his tricep muscles tighten as he leaned over the desk to fill out an identification tag and wondered. 

And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful boy.

And yet. There we were. 

My mom opted to wait for us, safe in an eddy outside the women's room while we entered the rushing current of people barreling towards the TSA line.

We did not speak. I could see his mind calculating the length of the line, the amount of time needed to get to his gate, whether he'd need to take one of those trains through the airport terminals as our feet moved one after another beneath us, propelling us towards our parting.  

And then we hugged goodbye. His body was tensed to face the challenges ahead. I told him I loved him and watched him walk briskly off, into the line, into the next 30 days.

I exhaled. I stood very still after he'd left my sight, and I cried. 

An airport worker walked by, then slowed to look back over her left shoulder at me. She wore large cat's eye glasses with translucent blue frames and perfect pink lipstick. She said, are you alright honey?

Yes, I nodded pathetically, still crying. I'm okay.

She turned on her heel and walked right back towards me. 

There's no crying in my airport! she said as she opened her arms and pulled me into a full embrace. 

I collapsed into her. He'll be fine, I sobbed. I felt I had to both explain my behavior and indicate that I was still rational, but she could've cared less. She released me with some more clucking maternal noises and went off to do her job. I felt loved by this stranger, and that made me cry more. 

Soon after my mom and I made our way back into the brutal summer Atlanta traffic, we learned his flight to Denver was delayed. And delayed again. And finally delayed so much that he wouldn't be able to catch his connecting flight to Wyoming, which was one of only two flights to Riverton, Wyoming each day, and so I began a series of phone calls to reschedule his travel and coordinate with his NOLS program and arrange a stay with our friends in Boulder that night. 

After many hours of this during our drive north, including an extended conversation with an incredibly nice woman named Marlene who runs Gator Creek Taxi in Riverton, in the end Gabriel managed to make his flight and land in Wyoming a little before 2 am EST. He didn't have his bag, but he didn't care. He made it! And somehow his canceled shuttle was miraculously waiting and brought him to Lander. And so his NOLS adventure began.

I don't know what to make of all the ways I have been feeling ever since Gabriel sat me down in the dining hall at camp one year ago to tell me his plan: graduating high school a year early and taking a gap year to hike the Appalachian Trail before he went to college. I had arrived early to volunteer at camp before driving him and Beatrice home and I had not expected him to tell me that. I mostly just listened, impressed by his resolve, disoriented by the idea of losing out on an entire year of him at home.

We got home and he set about making it happen. He changed his schedule and status from junior to senior. He deepened his connections with a cohort of senior friends. We went on college visits. He went to prom and graduation and senior week. He applied to be a CIT this summer at camp.

I was the one that suggested this NOLS course. I knew it would be stressful getting him directly from camp to Wyoming. I knew the gear list would make my head hurt. I knew we'd miss him like crazy for 30 days with no contact at all after six weeks in North Carolina. But I also suspected it would be the kind of formative experience that stays with a person forever. And I knew I'd be a lot less nervous about the months of thru hiking with his good friend that lay ahead.

Now he's been out in the field for five days. On his third day in the Rockies, I went with Beatrice and Thomas and his daughter Junah to see our longtime favorites, Ballet X, perform their summer series in Philadelphia. I especially wanted to see a piece called The Last Glass, set to music by Beirut, of which I knew little besides it was a company favorite and featured joyful, expressive movement.

The piece is organized around couples who come together in community as a whole, but also perform a series of pas de deux that each tell a story. Every dancer has a distinct character. And while there are a variety of compelling interpersonal challenges expressed in their dances, the character who struck me most deeply - the quiet persistent center of the whole piece - was the one whose challenge stems from the fact that her partner is dead. At least that was my interpretation. She wanders the stage alone sometimes, curled in on herself in pain, looking for something that we can't see. And sometimes she dances with a man dressed all in white who continually slips through her fingers just when she seems to be relaxing into his presence. His face eludes her hands; his body slides along the floor into the wings as she helplessly watches him go. A cruel trick. The other couples danced around her.

It made me cry.

Her physicality sent me back to the weeks and months after Mike died, when my body hurt all the time. It was like taking punches to the gut over and over. Curling in on oneself, barely breathing. How memories comfort until the floor suddenly opens beneath you in the brute pain of absence (there's that cruel trick). I didn't think about those excruciating days sitting in the audience and on the walk back to the car; I rather breathlessly watched the dancers while a part of me felt that deep embodied grief. 

(Beatrice, later: isn't it amazing that a dance can bring up so much emotion?)

(And there is something there too, about how I didn't want therapy and talking then so much as tending to my hurting body. I needed hands on my skin, breath in my lungs. And how now, I dance.)

After all the tears, I thought about my completely unexpected response to that dance. My mom and I had a lot of time together driving to pick up Gabriel and take him to the airport; some of our conversations centered around my kids. How they are growing up. How we made it through some terrible times together.

On one of the rare searing moments when Mike and I acknowledged that he might die of his relentless disease and leave me a widow and the children fatherless, I had a bright flash of knowing run through me. We'll be okay, I told him. I will live for them. Then we cried together.

It was true. Especially in the beginning. I lived for them. 

They kept me getting up in the morning and making breakfasts and packing lunches and going to work. All I wanted was to give them respite from the pain of illness and death; I wanted to give them normal life, to cover up all the glaring not-normalness of where we found ourselves. 

We have all healed and grown so much since then. But for a very long time they were the anchors I clung to for dear life. They have been a cover when I couldn't bear to be responsible for myself. At times I have hidden away behind their sparkling presences; it takes real intention and effort to allow my own priorities to be important, even now, when they encourage me to. 

And now they are leaving. Our unit exists intact in our hearts and minds; not so much on the earth where we are rarely all in the same place. Frances is in Buenos Aires, Gabriel is in Wyoming, Beatrice is on an overnight trip with a friend and her family. I am sitting in a Starbucks outside Philadelphia.

That dancer also tapped my grief over my boy's departure; over the way my children rooted me in the life that I built for them from our old rubble, only to grow up and leave it. 

They are becoming healthy, independent, adventuresome, brilliant, funny young adults - just the way a mother might hope they would. It's ideal; it's shocking. How could they? 

I am grateful to them for helping me survive the most crushing loss imaginable. And - yes, it's true! - also grateful to them for growing up, and without their needs to hide behind, forcing me into another no-net style chapter of growth and discovering in ever deeper ways what I feel, what I want, who I will become.

Gabriel, I can't believe you left a year early. Gabriel, my heart sings for you, and for all of us. 

marking the occasion

I was walking down the central thoroughfare in the grocery store today after work, and slowed my pace to peer down an aisle, trying to remember if we needed canned beans. There I spied a narrow back belonging to a fair-headed man in a t shirt and black jeans. He was leaning over his cart, elbows resting on the handle as he made some similar domestic calculation. I saw him fleetingly, less than a second as I walked by, but the hunch of his shoulders was so like Mike. Something about the frame, the posture. What a gut punch. A gut-and-heart punch. I pulled over in the next aisle and looked at the teas, breathing, waiting for the tears tightening my throat to relax and sink back down to their usual quiet depths. Mike. You surprised me.

Tomorrow will mark fifty years since he was born. 

And it will mark fifty years since my boyfriend Thomas was born.

It will mark forty-nine years since my glamorous twenty-five year old parents were married in Pittsburgh, and 104 years since my grandfather was born in Texas, the only child of Roy and Fay Howell, who were forty and thirty-nine years old at the time. (How long did they struggle with infertility? Were there miscarriages? How unlikely was his birth?)

I saw on Instagram yesterday that May 23rd is a favorite barre and dance teacher's birthday too. Is she also part of the mysterious cosmic conspiracy revolving around tomorrow's date, to which I may well owe the most important parts of me, the most important of all being my very existence? Probably! 

In six days I will take Frances to the Philadelphia airport to fly to Buenos Aires for a summer internship. In seven days I will file into our town's minor league baseball stadium to cheer on seven hundred McCaskey High School graduates, and my shining son Gabriel will be among them. A few days after that I will help him pack many disparate items off an extensive packing list that I cannot seem to contend with yet and cram them into our little EV, and drive him to the Smoky Mountains for 6 weeks of being a CIT followed directly by a month of adventuring in Wyoming. 

And tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Beatrice from four days on the Chesapeake Bay with her fellow sixth graders, just in time to take a rhubarb upside down cake to the cemetery where we can cry and laugh in that sacred place that brings us a hair's breath closer to Mike than we are in regular life. Then on Saturday we'll go to Philadelphia to celebrate Thomas's half century on this planet in style. He will be fifty years old, and that is very, very good. I smile typing it.  

I have zero answers in response to the open question that is tomorrow. How can Mike and Thomas have the exact same birthday?* How can a person grieve and celebrate all at once? How can I find the vast space I need inside to hold it all? 

And more than that, how I can live these impossibilities while I continue to go through the many motions required to help my two oldest children set out for distant shores and become ever more independent of the nest I have poured my heart into for the past twenty years? This nest barely resembles that one I first feathered with Mike. It's full of lanky teenage boys' laughter, skin care products, a lunatic barking dog, opinions about protein intake, episodes of The Americans, internet-fueled slang I cannot keep up with, cat hair, smelly running shoes, expensive ice cream, and interruption-peppered conversations about politics and school and relationships and history and AI and media and books and other people and feelings. These days, the only thing I'm allowed to read out loud to them is the Vows section of the Sunday Times (thanks Beatrice). 

Nonetheless this nest, such as it is, holds our shared memories of being a family of five. The exquisite heaviness of all the change hits me hard sometimes. It's my forever problem - one more impossible space to live inside of - I love to see them grow, and I love them just exactly the way they are right now. 

So, right. No answers. Only love-as-grief, love-as-tenderness, love-as-unease, love-as-bafflement. 

In other words a heart, full to the brim.

*Astrologists, I welcome your thoughts. 

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.