don't blame me

Tonight Beatrice and I finished, for the third time, Ramona's World. For those of you who haven't read it recently, it ends with Ramona's archenemy, snooty Susan, breaking down in tears at Ramona's birthday party. She initially refuses a piece of birthday cake because her mother told her about the germs that rain down on cakes when someone blows out her candles, and because of the cavities, and of course because of the sugar. But it creates such a stir amongst the other girls at the picnic table at the park that she can no longer maintain her superior manner and loses it under the sheer pressure of having to be perfect all the time. She's mad that Ramona is blatantly imperfect and people like her. She's mad that she tries so hard to be perfect and things still don't work out in her favor.

Poor Susan, said Bea. I'm glad she got better about being perfect in the end (in this case getting better = deciding it was okay to eat a piece of germy cake).

Do you ever want to be perfect?

Not about being good, like Susan. But I do want to be perfect with my work at school.

What happens when you aren't?

Bea was looking at me upside down, settling the top of her head and her feet on my bed with her butt in the air, one arm extended to pet the cat next to me, one arm gesturing wildly as if it belonged to another expressive person who was deep in an unrelated conversation.

I get so mad at myself.

Yes. That must be hard.

Because I know it's hard for me. I know how the homework anguish tests my waning evening patience, the meltdowns over mistakes that lead to sobbing at the kitchen table, the anxiety over timed math facts worksheets. It's agony for all of us, and the familiarity of it all (my own tantrums come to mind) doesn't help me parent with wisdom and grace. It just makes me more short-tempered.

Earlier tonight she and I were sitting in our minivan, waiting outside the high school for Frances. Our minivan is pretty old. Old and crusty. And sticky. And trashy, good lord. But anyway. Because it is so old there isn't a good way to play music from my phone through the speakers, so we are mostly limited to the piles of CDs tucked in compartments and under seats, relics from the CDs-in-cars era. It means certain treasures of my past get cycled through and my favorite of them all, I do believe, is Cat Power's You Are Free album from 2003.

Actually, not the album. Mostly the first song. I Don't Blame You. 

I could listen to it a thousand times. In fact I probably have listened to it a thousand times and I'm not sick of it yet. Mike found it mildly irritating and somewhat amusing when I would hit rewind to hear a song once or twice or three times in a row; he would roll his eyes. He prefered to experience the album as a whole. It was another time then.

The song is, possibly, a letter to Kurt Cobain. It's addressed to a musician who is trapped in other people's sense of ownership of him, their expectations and projections. I might be totally wrong but I think the act for which she doesn't blame him is his suicide. None of this particularly connects to me; what I respond to is the spare chords, the tenderness and ache in her voice. I don't blame you. It's a song that captures what it's like to love someone who is in pain.

It was echoing in my mind, pacing my steps through the damp gray February air as I walked to work this morning. I don't blame you. What can it mean? Blame suggests a false loading of responsibility onto one lone set of shoulders, when we all know it's never that simple. There are always already others involved, and history and hurt and endless perspectives. You can take responsibility for a mistake without taking the blame. The blame is more than your fair share. The blame can never be true.

What would it be like to sing this song to myself? To see the pain I am in and love me with a gentleness that doesn't judge? I tried to incline the tenderness of the song playing in my mind in my own direction. It wasn't easy; I'm not sure I can really do it. But the very idea, the very effort, lent a sense of possibility and exhilarating mystery to those last moments in the damp chill before I arrived at my office. My heart was lighter.

I don't blame you. I don't blame you for how much or how little you cry. For saying the wrong thing. For saying too much. For sweating when you're nervous, and for the myriad everyday things that make you nervous. For hurting a friend's feelings. For your enormous feet. For what you did and didn't do for Mike all the days he was sick. For the pain your children feel. For being irritable. For having shadows beneath your eyes. For your enormous smile. For picking at your cuticles. For seeking distraction in places you know cannot truly comfort. For being imperfect, so deeply and obviously and glaringly imperfect, every fucking day.

To sing to myself with a heart full of love, to remind myself there is nothing here to be ashamed of. It's a radical, disorienting serenade.

Every day is full of our shortcomings if we look for them, but that doesn't mean we are to blame. We make mistakes that do not diminish our preciousness; rather they put our preciousness into sharper relief. How I long for Mike's skinny calves and bouts of anxiety and tear-filled eyes and hairy toes.

I took that picture at the top of this post in the bathroom at work yesterday to try and convince my sister to buy the pants I'm wearing because she discovered the very same ones were on sale but was on the fence and wanted to see how they looked on me first. It's the kind of picture I can only send to my sister. I felt silly, but not embarrassed, because she loves me no matter what. Now I'm sending it to you, too. I'm practicing behaving as if I don't blame me. Maybe it will overflow and seep into Beatrice's growing heart when neither of us is paying attention, and she won't blame herself either.

It's just a picture. I'm just a person.

Hello.

wanting

I just did the math. It's been 680 days since I held Mike's hand and looked into his clear eyes. 

So much has happened since then.

In the months after he died I entered a kind of freefall. I was part of a finetuned, intricate system for twenty years, and on March 12, 2018 half of the machinery was suddenly and irrevocably yanked out of it - and not just on one discernible half, as you might expect - but rather a hidden gear in this corner, a series of cogs in that, a wheel in the very center of the operation, all violently removed - tiny bits and big pieces, all of them essential to keep the old me humming along as I once had without giving the miraculously complex nature of it all a second thought. Without Mike I could imitate my old gestures and impulses, but they felt empty. Absurd. Like a robot full of busted machinery masquerading as a human.

How did I do any of the things that I did then? I sold our old house, I bought our new house, I brought home the kittens, I got us through holidays and birthdays, I got us all the way to the one year mark. We all took the day off and volunteered, baking cookies at the local food bank and being so loud and obnoxious about it that after a few dozen the staff did everything short of beg us to leave to gracioulsy usher us off the premises. Much of the time it seemed I was hanging on by my fingernails. And I bite my fingernails! I worried the kids would hate me. I worried I was letting Mike down. I replayed his death in my mind many times a day. I said the word 'widow' aloud as often as possible, to try to make myself believe it. I continued to feel like a busted robot.

In the summer after the one year mark, I redid our kitchen. The new floor looks like a watermelon rind; the cabinets are so white they glow. I gardened a little. We had friends over and sometimes I didn't cry; I always laughed. I began to look around, and for the first time I felt proud of myself. That's my garage, damnit. I drove us to North Carolina and back without incident (and with adventures). That's my full time job that supports us with a decent salary and nice benefits. And I even like it!

I went to California all by myself to visit a dear friend. While basking in the desert silence I missed a flea invasion at home and I didn't feel guilty (though I definitely felt grateful to the family and friends who battled those nasty bitty beasts in my absence). I felt content with stillness on that trip. Something was starting to shift, imperceptibly at first. But I think the first clue to the shifting was that I was able to know in my bones and through my tears that I was pulling us forward, into and out of the very worst thing imaginable, and at least for now we were okay, and sometimes even more than okay. Sometimes we were kicking ass.

Somewhere around day 615, maybe 620, the shifting began to feel more like a rumble. And that's kind of where I am now - rumbling. I am leaning into and fumbling around the open spaces in my robot panel chest, and the cold air and lack of jagged metal edges is rarely about panicky disorientation these days. Instead those spaces feel like beckoning potentiality, like something I want.

Wanting! That's what I do now. I want things. I want things I could never want if Mike were alive, or at least not within the system we were together before and up until he died. What's more, I suspect I want things I could never want if Mike and I had not gone through his cancer together, and if I had not had to suffer the unthinkable loss of him. Add that to the list of goods we now enjoy with the strange, melancholy awareness that we have them because we don't have him: a full life in Lancaster, a trip to Jamaica, the naughty cats, and now all this wanting. I am able to admit to and even revel in wants I have never been able to articulate to myself or anyone else until now, 680 days into widowhood.

I want to write a book. I want to not anticipate and facilitate other people's wants. I want to assert my authority. I want to hold your gaze and not look away. I want the exhilarating responsibility of claiming my own desires.

(That's a big one. After Mike died I had no fucking clue what appeal various aspects of the world held without anticipating his responses to them. It was just me, all alone inside, and I was at sea.)

What else? I want to take up a lot of space.

The other day I slid unexpectedly on the ice and caught myself just before I fell. Sorry! I said breathlessly to the air. There was no one else there. 

So, yeah. I want to stop apologizing. And to admit my mistakes with courage.

I want to be held. I want to hold. I want to tell the truth. I want to feel my wildness and ambition without any shame at all.

I want to treasure this brokeness within me, touch and see every last shard, and then give it all away.

fan letter

Dear Kevin Wilson,

I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to. I don't want to put your other books on hold at the library, or follow you on social media, or see your name pop up in the table of contents in the next New Yorker I miraculously manage to crack open because more details would make you into a more real person, which would dim the magic of the world you made in Nothing to See Here. I want the inner fabric of the story to stay real, so I think it's best if you remain in its shadowy periphery. But I also want to say thank you to someone because it was so good - so very good - and I feel a lot of hope for myself and for my kids in the wake of finishing it under a little spotlight on this airplane gliding through the dark night sky somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe Florida. I can't see a thing down there so it's hard to say. But it feels good to point one's gratitude in a particular direction. (Which is, incidentally, a big part of why I believe in God.)

I started your book a couple of days into a trip to Jamaica with my three children, after I had finished Nora McInerny's second memoir, No Happy Endings. Somehow that seems pertinent because the two stories have been talking to each other in my mind. My husband died twenty-one months ago after nearly three years of experimental treatments for his rare lymphoma. Five days before we departed for Jamaica, the first man I've dated since Mike died broke up with me after three very disorienting and exciting weeks. My children were not at all pleased with this brief romance; not that I wanted them to know about it, but predictably the cat yowled and scratched its way out of that bag almost immediately. So it was a thing. And its ending was strange and sad for me but eventually - like two days later - I came to see that it was right and felt peaceful about it. He wasn't well enough, and I've done enough caregiving for the time being. But now I know that kind of thing can happen.

Needless to say, there were many moments while swimming and sunning and ordering three Shirley Temples and one mojito at the swim up bar at the Beaches resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, surrounded by healthy happy not even sunburned mom-dad-and-two kids families when I felt like a total weirdo. I felt marked by all we have been through, like there must be a big flashing sign over my head blinking the word GRIEVING or LONELY or BUSTED or maybe just NOT NORMAL* with a big arrow pointing at my heart. I couldn't help but notice that I seemed to be the only single parent in the whole strange alternate world of the resort. I was definitely the only person who cried the whole boat trip back from snorkeling, thinking of the calm Papa presence my terrified Beatrice didn't have with her in the water, and the wonderful guide who offered her his own impersonal version of that, which totally worked.

But I also had so many moments of gratitude, and awareness of the closeness and understanding I have with my kids. They are weirdos with me. They know. They didn't glom onto the packs of privileged children that roamed the resort, ice cream cones in hand, dripping chlorine in line at the water slide, yelling to one another. That would have been fine, and they could have done that, because they have decent social skills, plus they're pretty privileged too and took to the endless supplies of sweets and thrills just as effortlessly as any well-tended American child would. But I think we preferred each others' company. Only we knew what their Papa would say about the late night karaoke that kept us awake at night, or the curly fries we ate every day, or the way Beatrice, eyes shining, loved snorkeling in the end. Only we knew that we were there because he died - no way would Mike have set foot in that place. Also we're smart and funny and good company. And excellent huggers. And we are, actually, ready to embrace everything, to eat it all, drink it in, tolerate fear and cheesiness in equal measure despite our (to varying degrees) cautious temperaments, because of all we have lost.

So anyway. Your quiet/not quiet excellent book gave me hope for weirdo children, and weirdo adults too. For the possibility that lonely weirdo adults can take good care of lonely weirdo children, and not let them down ever - at least not in any big terrible ways. Right now my heart is so broken and so big, so vast, in this strange and unplanned and porous moment in my life. Your novel offered an unexpected version of that state of being. I recognized myself in it. Who wouldn't, really? I love that.

Thank you.

yours truly,
Meagan



*I do realize that these are feelings most all humans experience, even gorgeous moms with living husbands sipping frozen drinks on the beach in Jamaica. Nothing to see here, I know. It was just hard to remember that sometimes during our trip.

growing

A few months after Mike died I stumbled upon a community of fellow widows in the most unlikely of places. Social media! At the time the Hot Young Widows Club was a private Facebook group (they've since changed platforms) with an Instagram presence (still going strong); my wading into that particular online support community seemed to open up into deeper waters, all varieties of people and groups having to do with grief, trauma, recovery, healing. Being a hot young widow is damn isolating, and here were countless people who knew all about it.

In the beginning I couldn't stop reading their stories. I could've spent a week in bed, curled up with my phone, content to slide into so much sadness with nothing to slow my descent. But of course my life doesn't facilitate that kind of thing, and over time I've become more moderate with my online widow world consumption. I even share occasionally, and man am I grateful, because when I do my fellow wids share their hard-won wisdom and dark humor generously and it is always helpful.

The solidarity and sadness and inspiration and wisdom is a big part of why Facebook and Instagram have me hooked. That, and the weird scab-picking thing I do while scrolling through other peoples' intact happy families and active social lives. It's kind of weird, really. Wids affirming this life is fucking hard alongside non-wids sharing photos of their fucking joyful anniversary dates which makes a part of me shrivel and spit and curl up in a ball inside. A part that apparently likes to do that, because I haven't stopped scrolling.

And sometimes, sometimes, a meme wanders onto my Instagram of a gorgeous, thin-in-a-tasteful-way twenty-something woman staring meaningfully off into a sunset that features inspiring words about how grief teaches us to truly love ourselves - or something like that - and touches both ends of the social media universe for me: something that is intended to offer validation to the griever (c'est moi) but also makes the griever feel like a total freak. I am so not staring at the sunset. I am crying in the minivan.

Recently I read the story of a young woman who lost her husband and the more I read, the more irritated I felt. She exuded self-assurance. Her feelings about her partner and their relationship seemed uncomplicated. She took a very long time off work after he died, traveling and exploring herself through creative expression of various sorts. She advocated taking as much time as one needs to heal following a loss and she had a beautiful narrative to share about what had happened to both of them. It all seemed so ... tidy.

And irritating. Very. The shriveled smallness within me reads that version of loss and says: oh, how nice for you. Retreats, faraway beaches, endless travel, the occasional profound encounter with a medium on another continent. Those are great ideas, sure. I would love to "heal" too but what about my children, house, job, cats, HVAC filters, dying houseplants, weird middle-aged health issues? There are so many obligations, so many anchors fixing me to this spot. How do I invite grief to move through me when my own movement can feel so very confined?

But then I had this uncomfortable, familiar suspicion: I maybe hide behind my responsibilities. Not that I don't have a legit bunch of them...but I maybe kinda sorta have always done that. This enneagram type 2 is afraid of even articulating a desire to heal, even as I look around and see the signs of healing in my life miraculously happening despite my ambivalence and without my explicit consent: I can sleep at night, I feel less vigilance and worry, I fixate less on the traumas we shared, I have space and energy to think about what I want in my life now without feeling guilt or anxiety about leaving Mike behind. At least not as much.

Making grief about me and my needs - as many have modeled for me online - feels dangerously close to betraying those I love most. Isn't this about them? When Mike was sick I helped him and the children carry their feelings. They were so big, and so hard. I tried to clear a space in myself to be what they needed then. I was all responsiveness, reassurance. Also exhaustion. Now I spend my days at work helping my clients hold their feelings, then come home and do my best (which is not always pretty, but I'm trying) to be present to my kids in the whirlwind of their activities and ever-changing emotional needs and the race to get homework and dishes and showers in before it gets so late that I feel like a bad mom.

Letting Mike and the kids be at the center of things is a way to let myself off the hook. Avoidance. It's a temptation I think many of us understand. I have always struggled to articulate and take responsibility for my own needs. Going through such terrors with Mike gave me insight and courage I didn't know I had in that department, but it's still super scary. If I say what I want, will I still be a good mom? A good widow? Will I still be worthy of love if I give to myself sometimes rather than slip into the more comfortable and long-established habit of giving to them?

I often instinctively feel my grief should be about Mike. He's the one that suffered, he's the one who is missing every amazing thing that happens on a regular old Monday night around here. But it is also true that he and I traveled that fiery, solitary path together. And yet I am still here, holding these ashes that smudge and darken my hands and eyes. It seems a waste to watch them slowly flutter away on stray gusts of wind; in braver days, I would rather bury them, nourishing my own soil, and wait for something new and surprising to shoulder its green way up out of the ground.

Maybe growing is a better light to move towards than healing, with its whiff of resolution and meme-ready tidiness. This hurts forever. I wouldn't have it any other way. But a girl can do a hell of a lot with open wounds; maybe more than she could before she sustained them. She can risk telling you about her longing to find spaces to exist apart from her identities of mother, therapist, widow, daughter, sister, friend. Her yearning to stretch and move everything: body and soul, spirituality, creativity, sexuality, language, intellect. Her desire to feel her own power, to go somewhere new. To be quiet, to be loud. To be a stranger. To be strange.

Thank you, irritating social media widow. I feel brave today because of you.