open the gates

Six months after Mike died I bought this house. The move - bringing the remains of our old house in Annapolis whose contents we had stored three years earlier, just before Mike was diagnosed, and the household we'd built over the intervening crisis-laden years in Lancaster - was an effort I found so emotionally and physically taxing that at times it felt simply impossible. My knees would buckle and I'd figure it was time to give up, leave the chaos and the artifacts of another life all around me where they lay, and pitch a tent in the backyard. Just call it quits. Too hard, never mind. Kids, start looking for the sleeping bags...they must be around here somewhere. 

About two weeks after we'd moved, I had a vivid dream. Mike was walking through the new house, looking around in dismay, at times in anger, asking me things like why did you get rid of the desk? this room is so small; didn't you realize the couch wouldn't fit? what were you thinking, buying this house? 

In my dream he hated it. In my waking life I hated that he had never lived in it, and now we did.

Last night I had another such dream; Mike was on the periphery during a weird dream-logic vacation and my only direct contact with him involved him being upset with me, noting ways I had changed, responding with some judgment. In the dream moment I remembered that I had a boyfriend. I didn't want to upset my husband so I decided not to mention it. But I couldn't hide the fact that I wasn't the same person he had been married to, because his death had changed me. He could tell, and he didn't like it. 

Terrible dream. Awful. My waking mind does not for a minute think Mike is upset with me for changing. I don't even think he cares too much about the boyfriend; I really do believe he wants me to be supported and happy. But I struggle with accepting these things. My brain twists them into painful narratives at night. 

And yet I notice changes happening inside me, without even trying to make them happen, and I notice that they are good. Beautiful, even. Life is hard as heck but I feel good about my work, my parenting, my friendships; I am kinder to my own body. And then a little part of me says but how can you be more you, more expansive, more accepting of yourself, after losing Mike?! And even scarier: did losing Mike enable you to become more fully yourself? 

And what would that mean about me, about my marriage, about Mike, about us, if it did? 

When my mom had a hysterectomy in her early 50s, she had not yet begun the process of menopause in earnest. After the trauma of that surgery - after an organ in her body that had reminded her of her own fertility for decades, had housed my and my sister's growing bodies and spirits, and had stretched and twisted under the insistent heft of fibroids was removed in a moment with cold metal instruments - menopause was kicked into high gear. She got thrown into it hard, and there was no turning back. She had to figure out how to respond to hot flashes on the fly. 

If her uterus had not been taken suddenly from her body, she would have eased into that change over a span of years. She would have wound up on the other shore eventually; the journey would have been remarkably different.

I think what is happening to me is something like that. My husband was taken from me. He was a person I knew intimately, like an organ in my own body, a part of me so essential that I did not know who I was without him. I fell in love with him when I was an uncertain twenty year old woman-child. There was a lot about myself I didn't like then. He seemed to love me anyway, but I was afraid to expose that darker shameful stuff to the light of his gaze any more than necessary. I loved being in love with him; I didn't want anything about either of us, especially me, to screw it up.

Much later in our years together, those pushed-aside bits started to emerge, to insist on being part of the conversation. Quietly, mostly in the background but also occasionally in loud and inconvenient and interpersonally painful ways, I was trying to change. To brave friction, disappointment. When Mike got sick, that process inside me, that becoming more me, was interrupted, complicated, somehow both sped up and slowed down. 

If being more fully myself would better support him in those awful times, I was into it. Up for the challenge of more honesty, more connection, more vulnerability. If it seemed like swallowing my own pain or anger or hurt would be easier, which was often the case with a beloved man who periodically lost hair and weight and the ability to speak and could barely swallow anything at all, it was hard. I mostly opted for honesty anyway, because I couldn't bear to feel any alienation between us. I'm not sure it was always the right move.

Then he was ripped from my body. Taken from me in a moment. I was thrown into the cold disorientation of grief and there was no way out but through. Actually there is no way out, not really, but there are ways to move forward. And I think after the initial months of shock, the uncomfortable process of being more myself that had hesitatingly begun before Mike's illness was thrown into high gear. Because what else could I do? Who else could I be? I could no longer take refuge within the structures of my marriage. There was nowhere else to turn. 

It was just me in here, and it freaked me the fuck out. 

I have to tell a story about it, you guys. I have to tell and retell this one. (You're thinking no duh, Meagan). I have to figure out why it's okay that I feel less shame and more openness about who and what I am now than I ever did when my husband was alive, when my life fit into easier, more comfortable compartments, when decisions weren't so wide open, when my own values and inclinations and wisdom were integrated within a two-person system. 

I started seeing a therapist, someone adept in the therapeutic approach I've been learning about and utilizing with my own clients over the past two months. In our session yesterday we somehow ended with the image of a gate, the metal kind used to corral animals maybe, like in a rural English village or Vermont farm, rather bucolic, a gate the swings wide on its hinges and opens onto a meadow, green and lush in the autumn evening light. I like the sound of it squeaking a bit as it opens outward. 

I would like to leave the gate wide open like that, always. I would like my mind to learn to make space for truer and gentler dreams. 

mindful moment

I co-led my first mindfulness class of the semester last Thursday, which is, I think it is fair to say, a total scam, as I am a miserable mindfulness devotee and will choose the maelstrom of my thoughts and attendant emotions over cultivating my inner witness 99 times out of a 100. Okay, that's not totally accurate, because I wish I would sit and meditate more, I really do. Maybe my leading Mindful U could be considered aspirational rather than fraudulent. 

I like teaching it in part because for four weeks I have to keep a daily log of mindfulness activities, just like the students, and this built-in accountability helps convince me to cut the crap and just sit down already. 

Even so, I missed Friday and Saturday's required ten minutes of practice, but I did think about it, specifically when I could create a regular, sustainable time in my day during which to meditate, and came up with a great idea: after dinner, I would leave my kids cleaning up the kitchen and slip upstairs to my bedroom, settling onto the floor in the carpeted alley between my bed and the window overlooking my back door and deck, facing the pothos sitting on the bedside table whose drawer holds Mike's watch and cologne and glasses, the plant that once hung from the ceiling in a tasteful macrame net and that I haven't been able to - or rather even tried to - rehang after the plaster fell away around the ceiling hook. While I sat with intention and awareness, the kids would learn to get it done, as I often suggest they do, just get it done please, without me there to complain to when one child is perceived to be avoiding her duties or the sink is full of pre-dinner dishes that none of them apparently have created and eschew all responsibility for. It would go so much better if I weren't there urging them on, and I would be motivated to practice if it meant a smoother post-dinner clean up. 

So after our frittata and tomatoes and cucumbers I explained that I simply had to meditate, and I would be back in ten minutes to help them finish up. I ran up the back stairs to my room and shut the door. I slid Mike's meditation bench out from beneath the table that holds the plant, and opened Insight Timer on my phone. I set the time and proceeded to slide my shins beneath the bench, straighten my spine, and exhale. Yes. Meditating. Making time for me. I love this. Right? I love this.

Within about thirty seconds my children began reciting Hamilton lyrics together at the top of their lungs. Their voices floated out of the open kitchen door below and filled the cool air around our house. The sound, along with clinking dishes and running water, traveled up to me in a way that made their voices sound particularly human, particularly like themselves. I laughed. Oh my god, I love them. They are so funny. 

Wait! Wait just a minute, I'm meditating here. Inhale, exhale.

They then blasted the actual soundtrack to sing along to. I felt vaguely jealous that I was missing out on the fun scene in the kitchen. I couldn't stop my brain from singing along silently too. 

Brah, brah I'm Hercules Mulligan/Up in it, lovin' it, yes I heard your mother say come again

Oof, no. That is, I guess, something I will label thinking.

I heard Ramona roll against my closed door and commence methodically chewing away on her squeakiest toy. 

Hello, breath. Back to the breath.

I heard Beatrice scream at her brother and sister to turn it down, they were being too loud.

I noticed my back aching. Like, all over. Oh man. Does anyone not start to feel extremely uncomfortable about 94 seconds into seated meditation?

My phone chirped many times in a row, in such a way that I knew the texts were from the man I am dating as his staccato voice-to-text style always comes through in multiple parts. 

Thinking, Meagan. 

Don't modulate the key then not debate with me/Why should a tiny island across the sea regulate the price of tea? 

I tried focusing on the feeling of my hands resting on my thighs instead of my breath. 

I then felt the air whoosh against my back as my bedroom door suddenly flung open behind me and Beatrice ran in, standing over me, her long hair tickling my shoulders.

I am sorry Mama, but there is an emergency right now and you are still just SITTING HERE meditating!! Ramona pulled the modem off the shelf by its cord and now the internet is probably broken!

I mustered all my focus and kept on noticing that I was breathing and tried not to smile and kept my eyes closed.

Mama!!! Come ON!

Beatrice, I quietly responded, I am still meditating. My timer has not gone off yet. 

But you've been up here for at least an hour!

Then I did smile. And told her I'd be there just as soon as my ten minutes were up. She ran out, exasperated.

But while we were engaged in this exchange, the door was open, and Ramona ran in and leapt onto my bed next to me, her panting face level with mine. That made me remember I still needed to put clean sheets on my naked mattress.

Thinking! Another thought!

I heard Beatrice yelling again, about something indistinguishable. She sounded like she needed help. Suddenly I couldn't stand it anymore. I opened my eyes to find Ramona's inquisitive sweet doggy face inches from mine, and looked down at my phone. Somehow I'd missed the soothing chimes indicating the end of my session and had been sitting there for six extra minutes. 

Woah. I felt like a total meditation pro. I went downstairs, turned off the music in the clean kitchen to much protesting, and felt my heart animating my chest curiously, with a flutter and an ache. 

Later on, in the course of getting-ready-for-bed conversation, Frances casually observed that I have a low bar for life, which is why I'm so happy all the time. 

You'd probably make a really good Buddhist, she said. 

That made me laugh. Oh, totally. I'd be an amazing Buddhist. Just wait til I hit that bench tomorrow.

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.