you're camping

When Frances was just shy of two years old Mike and I flew with her to visit our friends in Colorado. At the time we knew (deep in our first-time flimsy parent bones, which had not yet been tested by toilet training, toddler rage, vomiting in the night, sibling rivalry, eye rolling, or anything remotely humbling) that she was an absolutely brilliant baby, and one of the ways this was made clear to us was the few baby verbal tics she held onto - adorable abberations that highlighted her genius and enabled it to shine that much brighter - the cutest of these being her confusion around personal pronouns. 

A delighted announcement from the black arms of the baby swing: you're swinging!! meant, of course, I'm swinging. The way she developed this habit made sense. I'd say Frances, are you hungry? And she'd reply, yes, you're hungry. Do you want some? Why yes, you do want some. Mike and I figured she probably had the cognitive abilities of a fourteen year old so we'd patiently try to explain the you-I problem to our chubby baby sitting in the little clip-on seat at the counter, gripping a plastic-coated spoon. Frances, we understand your confusion, but you see, I address you using the word you, but when you refer to yourself, you reply using the word I. Got it?

You got it!

See? Genius! It never occurred to us to instruct her. We could have just said Frances, say I’m hungry. But we wanted her to understand. We didn't want to boss her around like oppressive authoritarian parents and take away her creative linguistic autonomy. Or something like that, I guess. Anyway, we took her to Colorado. And she was the cutest. There were meltdowns, there were all kinds of challenges I'm sure, but time has faded these moments around the edges while leaving some very good ones crisp and clear. One of the most vivid is her utter delight in her own competency. Once she understood that walking on a trail is called hiking, and that that was something she could do, she really milked it. When I see the photo above, I can hear her squeaky little voice announcing to everyone we met, over and over: you're hiking! 

She was so proud. You're hiking! You've got this! You're amazing, you're climbing a mountain!

I often think about you’re hiking. On a challenging trail, or just a long walk around the neighborhood with Ramona the dog, or more often when I notice a kid doing something like flashily riding her bike one-handed or mastering the monkey bars, I smile. You’re doing it, kid. That feeling of mastery, of competence, of one’s own power growing, and smiling to all the world about it. You’re hiking!

Also, announcing to others that you are doing something you feel proud of and referring to yourself as ‘you’ is a kind of neat verbal trick. You’re talking to them, but you’re talking to yourself too. Hey you. I mean me. I mean you/me. You’re pretty great! You’re/I’m doing this hard thing and it’s actually working! It’s telling the story and being the cheerleader of the storyteller and enjoying the support of the cheerleader all at once. 

 

Yesterday afternoon we returned from a camping trip at the beach. Just an overnight, because that’s all the availability I could find during the time we could get away. You see, I’m starting back at work on Monday after my two month summer break. 

Allow me a moment to see that sentence on the screen, breathe a bit, and let it sink in.

Whew. Yes. 

So! On Thursday morning, while Frances was conducting her zoom Spanish tutoring lessons, I pulled all the gear up from the basement and threw all kinds of things into the cooler and lots of sunscreen and towels into the big tote bag and downloaded some audio books from the library and eventually we made it onto the road. I drove us three hours to Cape Henlopen State Park. I put on a mask and talked to the guy at the park about safety and park rules. It was stinking hot. I could hear Beatrice screaming at her brother in the car parked nearby and pretended like they weren’t my children. 

We pulled up to our assigned tent spot which the children found weirdly close to all the other tent spots. No comment. And it’s SO hot. Uh, yeah. And why did you think this was a good idea again Mama? But we were all excited to meet our friends from Annapolis who were already at the beach waiting to see us, and agreed to set up our tent first. The air was thick and still, I was short-tempered with the kids, and all of us were sweating like crazy. The physical exertion required to slide tent poles into those little sleeves and walk back and forth from the minivan with sleeping bags in our arms was enough to leave us dripping. The challenge of then pulling our bathing suits on over our sticky wet skin was considerable. 

But we did it, and we made it to the beach, and we found our friends, and we were so happy to see them and to jump in the waves. Lots of nice things happened; it felt great to be together. But eventually after dinner and some more evening beach time we had to return to our tent. The heat was like another person in there with us, a grouchy humorless person who enjoyed sitting on our faces. We stretched out on top of our sleeping bags, sweating. I read Harry Potter aloud to Bea for awhile, and then we turned out the lights. None of us slept. 

The rain started and it poured and poured. This helped a little with the thick hot air but not much as we had to keep the rain flap up; it was a pretty intense drenching. Every once in awhile one of the kids would whisper are you awake? Oh yes. We’re awake. Occasionally I would slip outside and try to rig the rain flap to allow for some more air flow into the tent, then go back in and watch a gust of wind slap it back into place.

It rained all morning, and all into the next day, and we left earlier than planned. 

But through it all, I would look around, take it all in, and have this feeling that made me smile a little private smile. Meagan. You’re camping. 

The conditions were miserable but we didn’t kill each other. We actually laughed a lot, and had a great time with our friends huddled under a little porch with our Starbucks haul that we went searching for in the morning. I didn’t forget anything important. I found where we were going without incident. The tent kept us relatively dry. And everyone got to put their feet in the ocean even though it’s a pandemic and even though I have to pull off all this shit alone. 

Also my kids are cool people whom I really like spending time with. It feels good to notice that.

We’re still a family. The particular shape of this life of ours is due entirely to tragedy - if Mike hadn’t gotten sick and died we would still be in Annapolis. Beatrice would have lived in one house over the course of her seven years instead of five. I would never have attempted to take the three of them camping by myself. I wouldn’t be soaking in the highs and lows of life in our pandemic pod with friends and watching my kids flourish in their Lancaster community. I didn’t want this widowed life, but I have it, and sometimes I’m really good at it, and sometimes I really like it, and sometimes that doesn’t feel like disloyalty or any other kind of problem at all. It feels like something to be grateful for, and maybe even something to crow about. 

You’re hiking, bitches.   

   

 

wayward time

Yesterday evening I ran up to my bedroom, having just arranged to share burgers outside with my mom and friends for dinner, with the intention of quickly changing and squeezing in some exercise before I had to get started in the kitchen. I peeked into the family room and found Beatrice and Frances sprawled on the couch watching Queer Eye. They looked at me with smiles frozen on their faces.

We can stop this episode here, it's fine Mama.

I looked at them, suspicious. How many episodes had they already watched?

Now I love Queer Eye as much as anyone, maybe more, but I have been on a desperate mission to separate Beatrice from screens for the duration of this pandemic and I feel I am failing even more miserably than usual lately. Since my job has been on break for the summer I have no excuse. I'm not in a session; I'm just talking to a friend on the porch or puttering in the garden or engaging with one of the other children or reading the three-day-old Sunday paper. Because I want to. And trying to ignore the nagging awareness that if I cannot see or hear Beatrice, 99% of the time it's because she's absconded to a quiet corner of the house with a screen.

She's supposed to ask me first. She rarely does. So I was totally, completely annoyed to find her hanging out with the fab five, charming though they may be, without my permission.

I told her as much. I stomped to my bedroom and bent over to step into a pair of running shorts. Beatrice, undettered by my grouchiness, burst cheerfully into the room and attempted a flying leap onto my bed to bring some levity to the situation. She wound up kicking me in the face instead.

I stood up, dazed. My eyes teared up with the impact. I was SO mad. Like, blazing, irrationally, fiercely pissed.

I don't remember what I said, but it was harsh. Her offence most definitely did not merit my response; my irritation was more about my own ineffectual parenting when it comes to screens. The kick sent me over the edge. She fled my room and ran to her own. Then another kid needed my attention, and I got distracted by some other task, and the clock was ticking and I wouldnt be able to exercise after all, and I stomped back down the hall with wisps of steam still drifting from my ears.

Until I saw Beatrice's closed door in front of me, and heard the quiet behind it. Inhale, exhale. I knew I was in the wrong. I peeked in and saw her stretched out on her bed, still and sad. I came in and got in bed next to her. She turned to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. I told her I loved her, and tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. I held her close, and tried to not make any crying noises that would tip her off. It was Father's Day, and what with my youngest child's warm back and easy forgiveness and the floor of her room strewn with slime-making supplies and LOL dolls, and the thoughtful friends who had been reaching out to me since the morning to let me know they saw and honored my loneliness, I simply couldn't not cry anymore. It was a relief.

Beatrice flipped onto her back and looked up at the underside of the bed above us for awhile and then said Mama. Mama. When you cry I feel like crying too. It makes me sad when you're sad. It's like when someone is laughing so hard, and you don't even know why but you have to laugh too.

I know. I know you don't like it.

But Mama, it's okay. I want you to cry when you're sad, because I don't want you to pretend to be happy when you feel bad. You don't have to smile if you don't feel like it.

Thanks. I don't think I do, do I?

You do! But when I feel like crying I can't stop it. I just cry. Even if I'm at school. I hate crying at school.

Ugh, Beatrice, I used to hate that too.

In the months after Mike's death I worried Beatrice would willfully push her father away from her because she had so little tolerance for negative emotions. She'd jump up and put a hand on my lips or tell a joke if she noticed me become tearful. Sometimes she'd just say no crying! like a fed-up schoolteacher barking the rules at a wayward child. I was afraid it wouldn't be worth the sadness of his absence to recall the joy of his presence.

But as we lay warm and tangled on her bed, which is really a mattress on the floor beneath her loft bed because she discovered sleeping up that high was too darn scary, Beatrice told me a different story. She used to find my sadness intolerable because of the way it made her feel. Now she is old enough to recognize that it's worth enduring that discomfort if I am being honest. She wants to know that her mama's insides and outsides match. That she can trust me.

I wish Papa would come back, she said.

Me too, I said.

Then I found something for her to do, and said fuck it and exercised anyway and let dinner be late,  and sat outside on the first summer night and watched the fireflies and talked about dogs and ate mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches with some of my favorite people.

Then today I woke up way too early because it was Frances's fifteenth birthday.

Time can be such a bitch, pulling us all along day after day, ever farther from our life as a family of five that shines in the distance beyond the fault line of Mike's death. Gabriel is now taller than I am. Frances is running her own Spanish tutoring business. Beatrice talks about her feelings like a boss and sings along to pop songs. We have a dog who has run away and come home again. Life keeps on happening! It's exhilaring; it's crushing.

Sometimes I wish this narrative arc would bend into a shape that makes a little more sense.

seeing

After I finished my graduate program and had my very first baby, Mike and I moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster. These events happened within a six week period. I was overwhelmed, underslept, and delighted to get to know my hometown in a new way, no longer from the vantage point of a child but with the transformed vision of a new parent.

I started working at what was then known as SouthEast Lancaster Health Services three months after Frances was born, which may have changed my relationship to this diminutive city even more than parenthood. I had many appointment slots every day, and my patients taught me a lot, perhaps most powerfully by offering me a window into the intimate quotidian struggles that come with being poor. They taught me about the barriers to health and mental health care in my town that, even with the aid of my new-social-worker-oblivious-white-lady-can-do energy, were often insurmontable.

That job invited me to sit down with people I had never seen before. These were people I had willfully looked past on street corners, sitting in wheelchairs, walking in pairs carrying plastic bags, hanging on stoops, talking strangely to themselves, wearing their age and chronic illness and poverty in such a way that others gave them a wide, silent berth on city sidewalks. They were part of my city too.

I remember telling Mike a few weeks into that job that I can't not see them anymore. I couldn't not know their stories. I couldn't return to the comfort of my privileged ignorance; the door had been opened and now I couldn't shut it even if I'd wanted to. I saw the poor all around me, and I understood that my looking away had been a form of complicity. It hurt.

What did I do with that new awareness? What am I doing? Getting through the day, mostly. Needless to say I didn't fix our busted health care or organize a new system of accessible mental health treatment. I'm not working tirelessly in service of the underrepresented and underserved.

I remember having a conversation then with a community leader who was visiting our clinic. She sat down across from me and said, without losing eye contact for a moment, that it was time I started serving on a board. Volunteering with more intention and purpose. My town needed people to step up, and I should respond to that need. But, I said, flustered, I have a baby! She's still nursing. And I work full-time. And I'm just figuring all of this out. How could I add anything else?

I think back to that conversation and smile at 29-year-old me. The parent kid ratio in my house then was 2:1. My back didn't hurt in weird places. My hair wasn't gray. I had so. much. energy. Now I'm still working full time, but the ratio is 1:3. My husband is dead, grief freights my every limb, I'm quicker to cry than ever before. How can I add anything else?

The past months have been an exercise in the scales falling away from all our eyes over and over. People in our communities have been hurt deeply; hurt and sometimes killed. We cannot not see it anymore. The #metoo movement ripped a scale away to reveal the brutal ubiquity of misogyny and sexual assault; now the incessant brutality of white supremacy is being revealed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And the pandemic is exposing injustice in every corner my privileged eyes chose to glide past and thereby condone.

It hurts.

In March and April, isolated and scared and struggling with work and school and a house full of difficult feelings, I found myself sliding back into the sense of alienation and disconnect I felt in the earlier days of my widowhood. I missed Mike acutely. I cried often; the loneliness weighed so much more than usual. I couldn't bear to see or talk with anyone outside my safest people. I wanted to withdraw.

Now my job is on summer break, and school is over, and the weather is perfect. I can breathe again. My loneliness has not subsided, but my resiliency is returning. I am looking around at this beautiful broken world, which somehow mirrors my beautiful broken heart, and recognizing that my own hurts do not mean I am in a worse position to be present to my community. Maybe my suffering has marked me in ways that will help me to serve it; maybe better than I ever could have at twenty-nine.

For now I'm reading, and watching, and listening, and mourning. I'm reluctant to speak in a time when so many seem compelled to speak because I'm still confronting the deep grief and pain the Black Lives Matter movement has invited me to truly see and take responsibility for. I'm feeling a lot of feelings, and waiting. I want my words and actions, whatever they may be, to come from my own pain and love and desire for healing, rather than reactivity. I'm trusting God to help me know how and when to respond to that woman's urgent invitation in my clinic office fourteen years ago, with whatever cracked and bruised gifts I have to share. She really saw me then; I'm grateful to her still.

bright morning star

Last night, in a mad competitive rush for second helpings of an unusual and prized dish around here, one enormous gooey baked mac-and-cheese comprising shocking amounts of butter, cheddar, and gruyere which I couldn't not know about after having made it, one of the four dinner plates broke. We began with six, a gift from my mother after I admired their hand-painted dogwood design in a second hand shop many years ago. Now we have three! Yet we are four. And we should be five. Only three plates! What kind of family can't set a proper table?

Also I dropped my phone Tuesday, when I stupidly took it out to return a text while walking Ramona who predictably lunged for a squirrel at exactly the wrong moment, and now the screen is completely shattered and held in place with two strips of packing tape. I've missed multiple school meetings this week as well as street cleaning/car moving, a handful of emails, and a dentist bill. I forgot Gabriel's well-planned and oft-reminded-about bunk reunion for his special grief camp from last summer. I forgot things I still haven't realized I've forgotten.

Pandemics bring out the worst in me. I know, I know, in all of us - and it's not that we're bad, it's that we're overtaxed and bereft of routines and need human contact to feel normal. So we forget where our keys are and don't show up to meetings. I know. But it feels shitty. It triggers my childhood fear of being imperfect and thus unloveable.

A deeper grief still slips out during my morning walks with Ramona the dog. (I happened to have sought out and adopted Ramona for the express purpose of ameliorating our emotional challenges. Ah well.) Those walks make me wonder if all my surface level fretting about screwing everything up is just to distract me from this particular pain: walking the streets of this town, this neighborhood, being tugged along by my sweet new pup through the hushed morning air, I always seem to wind up on bittersweet corners. I walk by our old house, where my family lived happily, raucously together, and where my dad died in a hospital bed in the living room when I was eighteen years old. I walk by the first house I lived in with Mike, when we had one tiny baby named Frances and he grew a tidy garden. I lost them in the prime of their lives - they were healthy, powerful men, the center of my world, and I had to watch them become sick and die right here.

What the fuck Meagan, you might say. (I say that too.)

Or you might, as Gabriel, observe that God really does keep on smiting you, Mama.

To which I counter, honestly, that I had the very best dad and the very best husband for me in the whole wide world. That doesn't feel like being smited. That feels like fantastic good fortune.

But on those walks the grief over having lost the very best people hits me with an inexplicable freshness. It's searing. Sometimes I cry. This morning, instead, I found myself singing.

bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
day is a-breaking 
in my soul

If you know that song, you know it is a lament, and a quiet celebration too. Oh where are our dear fathers is a bewildered, broken question that hangs and lingers, but then the song comes back again and again to the only answer that makes any sense: day is a-breaking in my soul. 

That's how I feel, walking my dog on the new-day streets of my city where my favorite people died. Cracked open to my grief, and with it the beauty of the pandemic-quiet, the spring that has stepped into full array, the chattering squirrels that Ramona runs after, the neighbors in tight pants and sneakers walking briskly in pairs. Sometimes I have wondered why I didn't take my children and run far away from this landscape that speaks so many painful stories. I think: who would stay here and keep walking these paths?

But it is all very precious to me. I don't want to leave it. On our walks I feel as I did in the early months of widowhood: alien, broken, awed. Like then, the late nights and the early mornings hurt the most. The pain of the whole world pushes on me.

I come home with Ramona and make myself coffee and feed her breakfast and we walk up the two flights of stairs together to wake Gabriel and then Beatrice as the rawness subsides and my day of carrying and anchoring others begins. I make breakfast, and then like parents everywhere I organize Beatrice's schoolwork and set up the computer for her class meetings, I review Gabriel's morning work plan, I set up my own work space. At nine I retreat to the dining room, shut the doors, set my ipad on a stack of books amidst many other papers and books on the table, plug in my ear buds, and begin my first session, hoping the sounds of kids negotiating screens and the dog barking and the dishwasher running on the other side of the door aren't too distracting. I run out between sessions and drag Beatrice away from Netflix and place her before something that makes me feel less awful, say hello to Frances, remind a kid to let the dog out, answer various questions before heading back for the next session. At lunchtime we always take a walk. Sometimes I do something awesome, like yesterday when I felt compelled to bake a lemon rhubarb bundt cake in the morning and did and it was a triumph, and later was present for a very beautiful and sad culminating goodbye session with a student I've seen for a long time. After work I exercise with the kids or alone or with friends distanced outside. This evening I joined some for Zumba which I executed badly, albeit enthusiastically, before countless park-goers, enjoying how little I cared that they saw me in all my confused, hip-shaking, which-way-are-we-supposed-to-be-facing glory. Then we got take-out pizza to celebrate the completion of Frances's first (of three) online AP exams this morning. The days roll on like this, one after another, in our very small world. I dole out hugs and tortilla chips and bandaids and songs and chores and advice and jokes and tears and funny dancing and memories and games and irritation and efforts to meet everyone's needs and help them feel heard and seen. Sometimes I have a pretty good time. Sometimes I feel like a total fuck up. But overall, it goes okay.

Until late, when the last kid is finally in bed, and I stand in the bathroom drying off after a shower or in my underwear with a toothbrush in my mouth and see my own reflection looking back at me, and she is a little confused - what exactly happened here? - and the loneliness comes rushing back. Then I am filled with a scoured out tenderness so deep and so wide that it seems my skin and muscles and bones cannot possibly contain it.

But they do. I never break. I crack and stretch and ache; I expand. It hurts, but I know I am making more space to endure the quiet beauty of the world when I wake tomorrow, click on Ramona's leash, and open the front door.