complicated heroines

At 8:42 pm last night, I remembered that Beatrice had choir homework due by 9. I had been cleaning up the kitchen to a predictable Spotify-generated playlist of early nineties hip hop, singing and dancing for my dog, enjoying our solitude and trying not to wonder what my kids were doing upstairs. When the thing I had forgotten hit me, I predictably found Beatrice huddled up with an iPad, rushed her downstairs, and set her up with my laptop. Ah, pandemic life: one screen for another! And while she listened and sang, I sat next to her with last Sunday's Book Review. An essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld immediately caught my eye: Heroines of Self-Hate. 

She was talking about the protagonists of some of my very favorite novels from the past few years, that is to say, my widowhood. Of the books I read after Mike died, those that lingered longest were cited in her essay, including both Sally Rooney novels and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I would add Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan to the list, and Fleabag, which isn't a book but is the best show I've ever seen and seems to speak to a similar experience. The women of these stories are whip smart, ambitious in varied ways, and alarmingly detached from their own feelings, unable to operate from an integrated place of core emotion. There is a sense of dangerous careening about in their interpersonal lives, though the narrative voice is often cool, deadpan. They seem completely unfazed by masculine cruelty and sometimes welcome it with unsettling detachment. Sometimes there is a flicker of the possibility of real connection in queer relationships, or more rarely, with vulnerable men. 

But most striking to me, beyond their protagonists' psychological bent, was the way these authors wrote subjective experience as fully embodied. The physical, sensory world seemed more present, more important in those books.

So it was interesting that Rosenfeld focuses on the way these fictional women hurt their own bodies without recognizing that their bodies are central to these books in a way that was more aligned with the stuff of real life - especially life in a particular kind of body that is subjected to scrutiny - than nearly any book I’d ever read before I stumbled upon this genre that is maybe capturing something new and complicated, something far more interesting than simply being about Young Women Who Hurt Themselves.

Have you ever read about what the pain of undiagnosed endometriosis is like? Frances in Conversations with Friends has shocking, inexplicable period pain; how she responds (and doesn't respond) to the pain is woven into her character. It's not the point of the story that she has an emergent chronic condition, but it's important to who she is. When does that ever happen? It's not a cough that leads to pneumonia and a death scene; rather it's a monthly experience of pain that informs how she experiences the world, and that she just lives with. That's it. Like life. Connell in Normal People similarly experiences depression in a physical and incapacitating way, on the floor. Sally Rooney describes the dull headache of fatigue, the cold stone beneath your thin pants on a damp day, the tenderness of a bruise. I was so close to my own experience of trauma and loss when I read her books, not far from the horror of entrenched insomnia and its associated headaches and upset stomach. The memory of being unable to eat, of barely feeling my own body, of moving through the world anyway, was close to me then.  

I encountered those characters as a reader, yes, but also as a woman, a widow, a mother, a therapist. The essayist, I suspect, didn't grow up in a world lit by social media, like the young people I spend my days listening to and the protagonists of these novels. They have always known surfaces take priority over actual flesh, alongside the quiet pressure to package and display oneself, market oneself in a marketplace of likes and followers that never goes dark. They inherited a world that denies the inevitability of pain and loss, the universality of fragility and finitude. Emotions are strangled and pushed and pinched, seen as interruptions and annoyances, even threats. Relentless misogyny sometimes goes underground but is no less trenchant. Young people have been taught to never stop; this is what they expect of themselves.

Is it so surprising then to encounter extraordinary young women who hurt themselves, or who seek out men to hurt them? Whether it's pharmaceutical-induced endless sleep, starvation or violence, a deep pain animates the gesture; unable to feel their own feelings that they must, at some level, desperately need to. So often the characters in these books have parents who have failed them, or worse, abused them; their communities and culture have fallen short too. It doesn't seem accidental that Connell is the one character who enjoys a secure attachment to his mother in Rooney's books; he had to know being loved to find his imperfect way to seeing and loving Marianne.

And Rosenfeld cites the mainstreaming of "therapy" (maybe those quotation marks are indicating the broader culture of wellness/self-care/therapy language) as something these young women have grown up with that marks their difference from previous generations of screwed up women. Yes, that psychiatrist in Rest and Relaxation was hilarious. Absurd! But those quotation marks definitely smelled snide to me. And geez, I don't know, maybe what I do all day serves a cog-in-the-machine purpose of helping people remain functional within an exploitive capitalist system whose very nature is dehumanizing. Whose very nature makes people sick inside. Maybe The Man fucking loves therapy. But I find it instead to be, at its best, inherently radical: the work I do with my clients hopefully leads to questioning those systems that have taught them they are no more valuable than their surfaces, skin, earning potential, brand. Unconditional embodied care and acceptance hopefully helps them know that they are always already incalculably valuable, simply because they are. 

Take that, you big dumb Man.

So anyway, yes, the human condition can be a real bitch, as Rosenfeld concedes, and these female characters enact the pressures and pains of our particular time: not being able to feel, longing for connection, inhabiting inchoate ambition and creativity. A reluctance and fear of stepping inside one's own life and filling the space, overflowing it. Living inside a body that hurts, gets hungry and tired and drunk and horny, bruises, bleeds - within a culture that denies imperfection and rejects bodies that do not adhere to an airbrushed problem-free pale form. An awareness of the crushing injustices we live inside of. A complicated relationship to power. And within all this, every time a character risks hope, vulnerability, connection, creation, valuing her own existence, love - even in small, mundane ways - it reads like a triumph. 

I loved reading these books because they were honest.

Now I'm about halfway through Deacon King Kong, by James McBride. You could say a lot of things about Sportcoat, the 70-something always-drunk deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church in the Cause projects, but he is a man that lives smack dab in the center of his own life. The other characters populating the Cause do, too. Their feelings and their bodies are their own, despite the forces aligned against them, giving shape to their experience. They know how to love one another. The contrast makes the lonely young white women of expansive Hong Kong and Dublin and New York seem all the more alien to themselves, strange silver fish in a very peculiar kind of tank, swimming along because despite it all, because of it all, it is simply good to be.

dear Michael

Mike. I woke up so early, like I have been every day over the past few weeks, as if my body has been preparing for this by recreating a whisper of the terrible fatigue of those days in the hospital three years ago with you. Between our old blue down comforter and Beatrice snuggled up asleep on my right, little lanky oven that she is, it was too hot. The weather has been changing. Last night I went to a tennis lesson at Buchanan Park in a t shirt. 

Tennis lesson? you say, with a little skeptical lift in your eyebrows. Yeah, for real. It's not pretty but it's fun, and I can tolerate how bad I am without crying (you of all people know that's no small thing), and my teacher is this Trumpy sociable older guy ...the whole thing is so improbable. I hadn't had a lesson since the fall, and I ran after work to the tennis courts, through crowds at the dog park and the playground and along all the paths, people who were joyfully emerging from their winter bodies and soaking in the sunshine together. I was one of them, grinning the whole time. You know how the sunshine and a chance to move can infect me with an irrepressible bounce. Well, it still does. Even on the eve of your day.

I had that thought out there: I am smiling, and tomorrow is your day. We call it Papa's Day. What it means to us is changing, just as our grief is changing. There is the work of time on us, of having accumulated so much life without you (that part is brutal, impossible). But then there is the fact of the children growing up. They think and feel and move and touch and listen differently now than they did then. They have grown in courage, in words, in capability, in soul. It's that sweetness of parenting that we got to experience together, the shared delight in witnessing a beloved person become more and more who they are. Their struggles, their triumphs, all of it, the acute moments of their becoming. The things they say. Always, Mike, it's the things they say. You understand. They are amazing.

I love them so much it hurts. It's a comfort that so many other people love them too, but Mike, only you love them like I love them. It's so hard to do this without you. It's hard to hold the ache of motherlove by myself. I don't have your clear eyes to search for across their heads so many times a day - or below their heads, as the case may be. You wouldn't believe how tall Gabriel is. What would that have been like, standing back to back and having to contend with the back of your boy's dark head triumphantly leaning against the top of your blonde one? 

When we went through the years of cancer-soaked crisis, and to be honest, for a long time before that, everything was about you and the children. Your illness was yours. You were the one who had to endure so much pain, unthinkable to me now. I was driving to the store after dropping Beatrice off at choir rehearsal the other night, thinking about an easy peasy semi-processed dinner option I might get, given how late it would be by the time we got home, and how happy food in packages makes our children. And that line of thinking suddenly got derailed by the memory of trying to find packaged microwavable foods that were transplant-friendly and calorie-rich, that you could both swallow and tolerate the taste of, and that we could keep in the mini fridge in your hospital room on the transplant floor. It took a lot of our collective brain power. Those awful little pasta containers with bright red plastic lids, the whole milk yogurt cups marketed to babies. I thought of that, and then I saw your pale arm resting on the chair in your hospital room, emerging from your thin white t shirt, a posture that spoke sadness. I saw just that, Mike. And I nearly broke at the wheel of the minivan at a stoplight on Lititz Pike. Sometimes the unbelievable cruel facts of what we went through hit me so hard. I wailed. I wailed for you, and for me.

That's a change. Only lately have I begun to know in my bones that it happened to me, too. I was not simply a vessel for your pain and the children's pain; I was not just a hand to hold or the caregiving I did my imperfect best to provide. People used to ask me then, how are you? and I honestly had no clue. Now sometimes I feel compelled to go back to those hard memories and touch them with my own hands, my own heart. How was I? Oh. I was hurting, so much. 

I remember telling you one morning in the sunny kitchen on Elm Street that we would be okay. You didn't have to worry about us. I could handle it. Ha! Like it was something I could add to the endless to do list: tackle a lifetime of widowhood and solo parenting. Without you. What the fuck did I know then? I could handle scheduling staging procedures in New York and Philadelphia hospitals, I could handle giving you those awful shots in your belly and operating the IV tubing after the transplant. Living through this grief, raising our children without you, this has been something else entirely, requiring every ounce of love and strength I have been lucky enough to soak up since I arrived on this earth.

My heart has stretched and broken and stretched and broken again. I didn't know anything could hurt this much. It was shocking, after you died. 

But also Mike, we are okay. It's weird. I'm becoming a really good therapist. I love my friends so much. Our dog Ramona is a source of pure delight and endless irritation. I started therapy over the summer and it's good. The kids are just amazing. They surprise me all the time.

I laugh my way through missed shots on the tennis court. I surprise myself too.

What I miss the most is your singular spirit and body. Your you-ness. What I would give to climb into bed next to you asleep on your side, to slide my cheek along the smooth space between your shoulder blades, and not say anything at all. 

Love,

Meagan

going places

My mom and I decided to take a little trip together for her birthday in April last night. A trip! Together! It was a thrilling idea to put in motion, one that will also feel unreal until we are slamming the trunk shut on our packed bags. We will both be vaccinated by then and as cautious as ever. We will take a sharp inhale and remind ourselves that it's okay, and then put our toes into an old/new way of life that we've nearly forgotten how to live. I think it will be really good. 

This past week two of my three children reclined in the orthodontist chair for an impossibly long time while braces were carefully and painstakingly applied to their teeth. Musical auditions were prepared. The cartwheel was perfected. I went to the dentist who told me I clench my teeth in my sleep. Another mock trial scrimmage was successfully completed. The dishwasher broke again, and the garbage disposal followed suit. The tv repair man came back for a second time and finally fixed it. There were in-school days, and at-home snow school days. I conducted about thirty therapy sessions from my dining room. Ramona ate one of my running shoes. On Wednesday after dropping off Gabriel at martial arts, I got out of the car and walked carefully around the mounds of dirty snow to get to the sidewalk with an ache in my chest, a tightness that takes me right back to the worst days when Mike was sick. Everything has been happening so fast.

And then last night, I dreamt I was driving a van as evening fell on mountain roads. The darkness became increasingly opaque, and there were no lights along the highway. I was driving a little too fast but couldn't seem to slow down. Suddenly I looked at the interior of the car and realized there were no lights within either, though the van continued to hurtle around curving roads that I could barely see. I couldn't tell how fast I was going, if there was a radio to turn on, or how much gas was left. All was utter darkness. I held my breath, knowing this couldn't end well. 

Suddenly everything was bright and loud, and I knew another car had collided head on into us. A huge truck, with a shining grill approaching me at eye level. In the moment of impact time slowed down and down, and I turned to the passenger seat on my left (why? was I in England??) instinctively, desperately trying to shield Mike from whatever might fly through the windshield with my arms and hold him against the seat. I could see his illumined form in profile, thin limbs, short blond hair, in a favorite faded navy short-sleeved shirt, bumped and thrown about in slow motion, lifting off the seat into the air over and over. My arms moved too slowly, as if through molasses, unable to hold him and keep him safe.

An electric buzz resonated through my own bouncing body, I heard scraping metal and felt my eyes burning with the brightness of headlights and flying sparks. All I could think was please let him be okay, please let him escape this unharmed, please. But I knew I was helpless to stop it. 

And then I woke suddenly, an hour before my alarm, heart racing, arms reaching across the empty bed. I opened my eyes, took in the darkened room, the closed blinds and basket of laundry on the floor, the sound of an eager neighbor already out shoveling the sidewalk, and reflected back the reality to myself to calm my panic: that was a dream. A nightmare. 

I rolled onto my back, looked at the ceiling, put my hands on my chest and waited. 

It came to me: you can't save him Meagan. He's already dead.

Oh. Yes, I know. I do know that - though my racing heart took a little while to catch up. 

The truth is that in real life we four keep barreling through time, up and over mountain passes and around tricky curves. We keep growing and life keeps happening. Beatrice will turn eight in less than two weeks. One of the last times she saw Mike was on her fifth birthday, and so much has changed since then. 

I can't save him, and I can't keep him with us. Every day we partake in this rich and challenging and unpredictable life is another day farther from the life we shared together, the treasure of being a family of five. The panic of my dream is the terror of losing him all over again, of losing him again and again and again, helpless to stop it, as we travel forward into the future - a future, it is worth pointing out, that beckons to us with special weekend trips, unfolding children who delight me anew at least once a day, old and new friends, a deepening of my therapy practice, novel experiences, a growing confidence in myself and my ability to drive this van full of people I love. It is good. And yet. 

It scares me too. 

we have the weather

On my drive to and from a state forest to meet a friend for a short, sweet, snowy camping trip this weekend I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie's short story Zikora. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, where Zikora, a powerful DC lawyer originally from Nigeria, is giving birth to her son. His father abruptly left the moment she told him that she was pregnant and refuses to answer her texts and calls. The only family with her is her mother, severe and quiet in the corner, nearly ready to slap her if she screams too loudly or otherwise exposes her vulnerability before the assembled nurses and doctor.

I was rapt. The reader was great. The raw descriptions of the indignities of labor, delivery, and postpartum tenderness had an immediacy that took my breath away. I might have sighed and grumbled and even yelled at Kwame, his controlled, frightened voice recognizable in the mouth of the female reader which emerged tiny and tinny from my phone's speaker, nestled in my lap as I crossed muted green-gray Central Pennsylvanian hills. Clearly Kwame is not a real person. Yet I raged at him all the same. He looked so good on the outside; inside he was useless.

But when all the feelings that a short story that touches on single motherhood, misogyny, mother-daughter resentments, abortion, racial disparities in maternal mortality, an infant who cannot latch and screams at the breast, and at least three or four other issues that naturally send a woven ribbon of anguish, anger, tension and love straight through me had settled and calmed before the quiet trees and brilliant cold stars at night, I was left with a palpable, awed closeness to my own first days with a newborn babe. 

The world became small all around me. I ceased to be interested in much that happened outside my house; there wasn't any available brain space in addition to what was required for nap schedules, breastfeeding adjustments, diaper changing and laundering, worried tracking of weight gain and ribcage-exposing sharp baby breaths. I was always sticky. My breasts became enormous, hard and engorged; my milk didn't come in until the fifth day. Our bodies' boundaries blurred. I wanted to touch my baby's skin all the time, and when I grew exhausted and couldn't stand to hold her for a moment longer and handed her to another pair of eager arms, I grew impatient to have her back. Sometimes the not-having-her felt like a physical ache, more acute than the fatigue and worry. 

Everything that mattered in those days fit inside a room. Time felt like one long day: there was daytime and nighttime, but very little distinguished them from one another. 

Babies grow, and gradually one is able to reconnect with the world outside that room. Night reacquires its blessed significance. Weekdays and weekends, summer and winter, each becomes meaningful and distinct once again, and when they do, one is more than ready.

The only other time that mirrored that degree of world-shrinking was when Mike was sick. Other people did things outside our windows - they took vacations, argued about politics, planned to have drinks with friends and went for long bike rides. Not us. After the stem cell transplant, day and night blended together, stitched together loosely with routine gestures of care: assembling the IV meds, applying cream to the strange rashes that a baby immune system could not prevent, taking his temperature, bringing his meds. We were on a tiny island where time slid by strangely. Like with our first newborn baby, we were beset with worry. 

My children will go back to school for the first time since March over the next three weeks. I am thrilled for them, especially Beatrice, to finally be with other children - yes, definitely, thrilled - but I am also sad to say goodbye to this particular island we've inhabited and decorated and refined together for nearly a year. 

Not long ago Gabriel reflected that the quality of time has changed since the pandemic started. 

It feels like it's been forever, and it feels like it's been no time at all. 

Does it ever. We talked about it, speculating that without external markers of the seasons like sports games, music performances and holiday parties, without places to go throughout the day to mark morning noon and night, time slides by undifferentiated. We don't register it passing the way we used to. 

All we really have these days, he said, is weather.   

Truth. But also, weather isn't too shabby, Gabriel! The sky is pretty nice. I can't get enough of it. 

(They all roll their eyes when I start talking about the sky.)

The other thing we have is our connections to one another, which run deep and deeper still. Do our arms ache when we aren't together? Probably not. We could all use a break for sure. But I know the attachments we share and the rhythm with which we move through our days of work and school in this snug little house (punctuated by screams when the wifi drops out, or someone's favorite spot is taken, or the dog tears a misplaced book to bits) is precious to me. It's weird to say it, but I love this island. I love the sound of my children's teacher's voices in the next room. I love movie nights and lazy pancakes on the weekend and feeling like a hike is a major outing. I love our little pod of neighbors and I love the intimacy the island has gifted all of us. 

I'm excited to walk Beatrice to school next week. But I'll miss her.