in which the relentless passing of time, made glaringly explicit by the first day of school, left me beset by melancholy

Yesterday I came in from walking Ramona in the cooling humidity, the still air just like the air of a thousand last-day-of-summer-vacations past, and went upstairs to find Beatrice asleep and drooling on my bed, stretched across bare mattress and a tangle of stripped dirty sheets. It was around noon. Beatrice never naps, but she'd been up past 1 am the night before. 

She and her brother arrived in Philadelphia Saturday afternoon after a week at Experience Camp. After I picked them up, per Beatrice's insistence, we went in search of fast food. On our way, Gabriel told stories about camp. When I asked Beatrice for her stories, she started to cry. She told us through tears that she didn't know why she was crying and also didn't know why she couldn't tell me about camp even though she wanted to. When I pulled over so that Gabriel could pee, I climbed into the backseat with her and hugged her. Then the tears slowed. I could feel her hot limbs and face begin to relax against me. When Gabriel got back into the car and I made a move to slide back into the drivers seat, she clung to me. Just a few more minutes Mama. I eventually had to remove her little iron paws forcibly.  

Eventually we made it to an odd, desolate Wendy's where my mom met us with Frances and her friend, fresh from the King of Prussia mall, and we swapped. She took Beatrice and Gabriel home, and I took the girls to see Brandi Carlisle back in Philly. Which was, as you might have already guessed, a completely amazing show. But we got home so late and Beatrice was waiting up, confused and fretful. I told her to get into my bed and close her eyes, an order she gratefully complied with. By the time I joined her I felt too exhausted to sleep. I read for a long time, listening to her even breath.

Then Sunday was the last day of summer, and as I wandered in and out of my house and yard a part of me kept looking around and asking: shouldn't you be doing something? Shouldn't you have taken Beatrice to church for the blessing of the backpacks? Bought more lunchbox snacks? Offer some fun end of summer activity? Isn't this house a mess? Wouldn't you feel better instating some order, or buying new shoes for someone?

But after talking with my wise boyfriend I mostly let go of the anxiety that fuels my wheel-spinning and gave in to what my tired, melancholy body wanted, oppressive notions of effective, responsible mothering be damned. Beatrice and I re-watched Never Have I Ever with her siblings, read from our favorite book series, and shared some of those stories from camp that weren't ready to come out on Saturday. I read the paper in bed while she listened to an audio book. We did nearly nothing all day, and what we did do was mostly enacted in a horizontal position. 

This morning, I drove Gabriel and his girlfriend to high school for their very first day. He forgot his sneakers and we circled back for them. We asked someone holding a clipboard in a parking lot where they should go and they jumped out of the car, heading in two directions, anxious to arrive on time. Good luck! I called after them. I looked down and saw Gabriel had forgotten his water bottle in the car. Beatrice and I figured his cross country coach wouldn't let him collapse from dehydration in practice later. Right?

She and I went home to gather her things, and then walked to school. Now I'm realizing that I forgot to put a note in her lunch. Sigh. On the first day of fourth grade too! As she explained to me earlier, we're both in denial about this transition so avoided dealing with all the related preparations. 

I watched her line up with her friends in the playground before entering the school. I met and chatted with a mother whose son is in Beatrice's class. I looked around the sea of adorable children and parents and felt so heavy. When they filed into the building, I reluctantly shuffled towards my office.

The tears gathered in my throat and sat there, waiting. As I passed the front of the school, a goldfinch fluttered right into my field of vision, swooping in showy wild loops before landing on a wire over the school parking lot. I began associating Mike's spirit with bright male goldfinches after he died; this one really took my breath away. 

Mike! Gabriel is in high school, tomorrow is Frances's first day of senior year. It's all happening so fast. Please. Look out for them, make sure they're okay?

But the way that goldfinch was making himself known to me, alone on the sidewalk, meant I really didn't need to ask. It was a visitation meant to reassure. 

And like a child lost in the grocery store who begins to cry once she is finally found and safe again, that's when the tears came, and they kept coming all the way to my office. When I walked in, my boss Lauren took one look at me and asked what was wrong.

My kids went to school, I sobbed. She smiled. I cry-laughed. 

They did? They went to school? That's terrible.

I know. They're the worst. They keep growing up and they never stop. Can you believe this shit?  

yesterday's madness

Yesterday this day's madness did prepare. -Omar Khayyam

Today I am watching a continuing education training in my office, listening to the presenter explain that neuroscience has discovered that the human brain is far more plastic than originally believed. That emotional learnings can be erased and replaced with new learnings. He is describing methods of memory reconsolidation, how we can unlearn the unhelpful things the past has taught us and update that learning into something new. We can release this day's madness through therapeutic erasure.  

He's talking about unlearning stuff like agoraphobia, compulsions, panic attacks, suicidal ideation. Stuff that really gets in the way. But I find myself feeling protective of the pathologies the past teaches us.

I remember Mike telling me once, in our twenties, that it seemed I would periodically twist the knife in my heart that was my dad's death. On purpose. That I wanted to feel the pain afresh. Mike wasn't so sure that was a good thing.  

What would he say now about how reassuring I find the bouts of pain I suffer over his absence? What would this presenter say to the way I welcome the wave of knee-buckling grief when it comes for me, relief mingling with its crash and swirl? Because for me, the acute heartache of grief isn't pathology; it's a sharp tug on a chain of love. It's a reminder of my tether to the past I am afraid of losing, anchored deep in my bones and muscles and organs.  

I know that I am relearning lots of things, and it's a good thing. The time of trauma response is ebbing away, only rarely stirred up in felt ways. I sleep and eat, I send my children off on adventures, I ask for help, I offer help. No one wants to hold onto the emotional learning that makes life hard to live. But still. Our past is a precious thing, no matter the pain we lived then. 

I've been taken up by unsought, shockingly painful grief waves more often than usual over the past few weeks. It's because of a lot of things: I am in a serious, loving relationship and for the first time in well over four years I am considering what partnership might mean for me. It stirs up lots of fears, old (unwanted) learnings from past hurts, tender memories. I started watching Station Eleven (whew), a show and book I had been afraid of for quite some time. Frances has been writing exquisite poems and sharing them with me. I'm reading Homegoing. Beatrice and Gabriel are at Experience Camp, an amazing week-long camp for children who have lost parents or siblings. As we packed and prepared, we talked a lot about Papa. 

And oh yeah, all my stolen writing time this summer has been dedicated to editing a Homemade Time-based manuscript. I'm sorting through a thousand moments, trying to train an objective eye on their shifting surfaces and how I spoke them then. I've changed.  

Time keeps pulling us along; my grief yelps in protest. Art is holding and offering up time's strangeness; my heart takes it in and nods. Yep.

Monday is the first day of school; Frances is starting her senior year and focused on college applications. Gabriel will begin high school. Beatrice is growing fast and furious into a lanky fourth grader. I'm back at work, thinking about what I want for myself professionally and how to sink into this time we have before our family changes in very big ways next fall. I've been seeing us through my boyfriend's gentle eyes, treasuring who and what and how we are right now. 

It's light years away from who and what and how we were before Mike was diagnosed. That's because children grow exponentially in seven years, sure, but it's also because he died. We're different.

I'll take a little madness. Let it conduct me to other times and places. Let nothing be erased. Let it hurt, and let us shine in the hurting.

a stranger's touch

Most of the time I'm a pretty competent person. I manage a house and a job and three kids and a dog and two cats on my own. I've walked with countless clients through times of crisis, I've logged more hours on the phone with insurance companies than I care to count without killing anyone, and my kitchen, right now, is more or less clean. The InstantPot is on the counter slow-cooking stock from the chicken I roasted last night while Beatrice and a friend slumber in the family room in a pile of blankets and pillows upstairs. I mean, seriously. Sometimes I'm a fucking ace.

I do drop balls. All the time. Like the birthday party for a friend of Beatrice's that I clean forgot yesterday afternoon. I'm getting more used to it but honestly, I really hate when I screw things up like that, especially for the kids - things like missing an event because I didn't rearrange my work schedule in time, or the broken retainer the dog ate a week ago that I still haven't called the orthodontist about while Beatrice's teeth slowly shift back into mess. I definitely fret about them missing out because they only have one stretched-thin parent, about having to feel different because they're the kid whose mom didn't show.

In those moments of faltering competence when the balls are bouncing around my feet and rolling into the corners, I usually keep it together. Remember to breathe. Make a self-deprecating joke. Apologize. Act, more or less, like an adult. 

But the people in my life who know me best know that I also have a not-adult-at-all part of me who sometimes takes over in moments of exposed imperfection. She's pretty crazy. She cannot be reasoned with. She behaves like an overwhelmed toddler and I cannot remember life without her unwelcome visitations, so I imagine she is very, very young. 

I once described her appearances to my therapist like this: if I were waiting on a subway platform, most of my feelings would approach like the local train. Ah, here comes some grief. I do believe joy is approaching. I can be there to receive them. But when my freaky panicker bursts into my life, it's on the express. I can feel the wind and rush of her, the unstoppable nature of her insistence. For most of my life, when this happens, I feel helpless. All I can do is cry.

The environment that triggers her crazy more than any other is the sporting event. 

I experienced no early trauma in a baseball stadium. I was never yelled at by a shaming coach. Yet growing up, my lack of athleticism and paltry experience with sports always led me to panic when invited to play in a kickball game at a picnic, or when a gym teacher directed me to stand in front of a volleyball net. Didn't those people know I simply couldn't do any of this? That I would embarrass myself, let my teammates down, get very confused about which way to run? When someone throws a ball in my direction, my instinct has always been to duck. 

Somehow I made it through my eighties childhood, when one (especially a girl in underfunded public schools) wasn't always expected to be an athlete, without too much social stigma attached to me. And the older I got, the better I could keep my pathological fear of sports a secret. But the panic I felt when asked to play a friendly game of frisbee (no joke, panic) never really abated. 

As a parent, the lurking freak out beneath the surface has most often rippled into awareness at my children's sporting events. Even though I've been going to games and meets for years now, I still feel uncertain of myself in that role. Should I be yelling something from the sidelines like the other parents? Why don't I ever remember to bring a chair in my trunk? Was there a memo about the right kind of snacks to bring?

The last time it broke the surface was nearly a year ago, at the end of last summer, when I had to bring Gabriel for a sports physical at the high school in order for him to participate in cross country. I lost track of him in the crowd. Eventually, after long minutes searching, I found him sitting outside patiently, in the most obvious place that I hadn't looked simply because I didn't want to walk out there and be exposed as incompetent before all those other sporty-looking parents whom I didn't know (and some that I did) chatting happily with each other. The moment I saw him the express train barreled through me and I bit back tears, unable to even look at Gabriel as we walked to the car. He would know too. I was no good.

Because that's what that tiny toddler part of me believes: I'm not good enough. It is blatantly discernible when I screw up. Everyone I love will leave me; I cannot trick them any longer. They know. 

It sounds dramatic. It is. She's so little, she just doesn't understand. And so the feeling is huge. But I'm trying to learn to take care of her, rather than be mad at her. 

I hadn't heard from her since the sports physicals. But last Thursday, I arranged for Beatrice to be picked up by a friend from Girls on the Run and made sure Frances didn't need the car. I blocked the last half hour of the work day and rushed out so I could finally see Gabriel run in a track meet. I had missed every other meet, or arrived after his event, because it's been so busy at work and I can't seem to leave early enough. But this time I could, and I was determined.

I arrived at a sprawling complex of schools and athletic fields that was unfamiliar to me. All the parking lots seemed to be full, so I chose one, got out, and started walking in the direction other people were headed. I passed a lacrosse game, a baseball game, and began to feel confused. Was I at the right place? Where were all the runners? I called a mom friend whose kid is on the team, and then another, asking if they were here and could direct me. They are both amazingly competent and kind people so between their directions, I realized I was as far away as could be, on the opposite end of the complex from the big multi-team track meet. 

I checked the time. I was getting mad - local train mad - imagining I would miss him run again, despite my efforts. So I myself, in my work clothes and yellow platform sandals, broke into a run. 

And you know how when you run out of fear the fear gets bigger? Like that time in fifth grade when my best friend and I got convinced there was an evil ax murderer in my house when we were home alone, and started running in the dark streets back to her house, becoming more hysterical with every step?

Yep, that was me. I passed two fit moms out on a run and one called to me that she liked my running shoes. Surely this lighthearted comment was made in kindness. Ha ha! Yet I took it as if my yellow sandals were my own personal scarlet letter, and she a nasty puritan drawing attention to them. For shame! A mother who cannot find her son's track meet!!

When I finally made it, red-faced and sweating, I could feel my scared toddler inside beginning to rouse from her long nap. There were hundreds of parents and coaches and siblings and friends milling about, and multiple schools competing, so packs of teenagers in various team colors traveled the field and areas around it. I didn't see Gabriel at his school tent, nor on the field. Had I really missed it?

A kind, freckle-faced mom at the chain link fence surrounding the track saw me standing there, scanning all around, and offered to show me the schedule. He hadn't run yet. Exhale. I confessed I had just run across the entire complex because I had no idea where I was going. She smiled. I did that too, she said. 

Oh. 

I found a spot at the fence wedged between other spectators and took some deep breaths. I told the threatening-to-freak-out toddler in me it was okay. She curled back up in my heart, still watchful, in case things started to unravel again, but quiet. 

I watched the girls' relay and saw Gabriel and his teammates get ready for their relay. I waved, he waved back. I kept breathing. And then something happened that took me from fragile to healed.

Something grazed my hip. It was a little girl who was maybe three years old, standing close beside me. As I looked down, she threw her head back to look up at me. Our eyes met long enough for her to know that I wasn't her mother, and yet with our brown eyes locked like that, she smiled. I smiled back. And then she reached up - for a moment I thought she was asking to be picked up, but no - she stretched out her arms and placed her palms on my ribcage at the highest point she could reach. Along my thin blue sweater she slid her hands, down the length of my body, smiling even bigger without losing my gaze, delighted with her own audacity as she bent in half at the waist, pushing into her father's legs as he cheered on his older daughter. 

Someone called her, she turned and ran, yet I could still feel the pressure of her touch. It was a blessing.

I was good enough again. I knew it. I think my own inner little brown-eyed girl, seen and delighted, knew it too. 

After Gabriel and I got back from the meet I made lots more mistakes. When I went to pick up Beatrice, our friends who were hosting her handed me a glass of wine and invited me to sit on the porch in the twilight, where we watched her and her friends and other kids in their neighborhood play with a parachute in the street. The kids performed odd rituals they invented, lifting the parachute high and then sitting inside the crumpling dome of it, chanting strange sounds and laughing. Sitting on the porch, I forgot to pick up Gabriel's sandwich. I forgot Frances needed the car and she came looking for me, angry. I didn't mind. It was all repairable. 

I sat on a wicker chair beside a new friend, and my heart grew and grew in the peace of the night.

farewell time

Today we woke up in Buffalo with our friends, having drunk our fill of Niagara Falls over the weekend, and tonight we will sleep in our own beds back in Lancaster, having spent a good portion of the day driving through New York State and Central Pennsylvania. Some spirit of that beautiful country seemed captured in a tall billboard we spotted today that declared Every Day is Hump Day at the Adult Outlet, featuring a personable peach nestled up against a rather tall eggplant on one side, and on the other, Find out who Jesus REALLY is! with a phone number in bold below that read something like 1-800-I REPENT.

That, coupled with the gun outlets and flags, really brought out the snobbish asshole in me on the way there. I was joking around with the kids in an increasingly unhinged way every time we passed another XXX sign. But on the way home, I felt a lot milder about the whole thing. I mean, it's not my culture, not my language, but really, is it so very contradictory for lust and spiritual longing to be pressed up against each other like that? Can't crass sexuality and Jesus occupy two sides of the same sign? You might think they are there to cancel each other out, so to speak. But maybe they just bring out something potent in each other, by seeming but not actually being opposites. 

I missed church today, but I also felt a bit off the hook by the fact that we were traveling. I never know what to do with Easter. Ever since becoming a widow, I don't feel that comfortable with anything that's supposed to be all good, all triumphant. (And growing up UU and Jewish, Easter was never a big holiday for us; I only began to figure out my relationship to it as an adult.) I will always remember Mike positively glowing on the last Easter he was alive, so close to the pain of Good Friday and the miracle of resurrection, so delighted by the fact that He is risen! which he smilingly proclaimed only 10% ironically to me that morning on the sidewalk after church. The other 90% was pure faith and joy. He was alive, the sun was shining, he was well enough for church with his family, Jesus was risen. Sound the trumpets. 

I was genuinely happy to see him happy. I treasure the photos we took that day. But I wasn't singing out He is Risen! from the rooftops to anyone who would listen, because I wasn't feeling that way myself. I mean, is He really? Is anyone? Will they be? What if they just get cancer and die and leave you all alone? What if suffering is always here, even and especially contained within the joyful moments, and you can't ever blast it out with lilies and brass?

Like last week, I began the termination process in earnest with two of my treasured clients. 

One is a junior, and as long as all goes as planned we have another year together before graduation brings our work to an end. One is a senior, and though we haven't worked together for long, it has been very meaningful, and the fact that we have but a handful of sessions left before she launches out into the world struck her as terribly sad.

Termination is the weirdest, coldest clinical word. It simply means ending. Maybe we therapists use it because we need a little distance from the emotional reality of investing in work that calls on your whole self and that, if successful, ends. 

In an ideal world it happens when the client is truly ready, in their own time. The saying goodbye is bittersweet. Happy-sad. It represents the beauty of compassion born of suffering, growth, and a readiness to part with a source of support because it is no longer needed. But if the therapeutic experience really has facilitated all that healing, the relationship was central to it. It means the client felt deeply cared for. So the goodbye can't not hurt.

And the goodbye is harder when it's not time yet. In my work with college students, sometimes we have to end because it's time to graduate, but there is so much more we could do together.

But like being alive, like everything we do and every relationship we treasure, the fact that we are ending and our awareness of it makes the present moment together extra tender and deep. Deeper than it could ever be if our work were open-ended. Because of this, and so many other reasons that you likely share, spring is full of feeling for me.

Being brave enough to talk about it, to share the sadness, to say the words I'm afraid to end with you - this blows me away when it happens spontaneously in the chair opposite. This kind of vulnerability takes so much courage, it overflows one's heart. It's especially moving because I myself am often afraid to bring it up, and put it off longer than I should, knowing it will hurt to make it explicit. 

So my junior is someone I have worked with for years now, and who has taught me a lot about being brave. She has serious trauma in her past, and carries a lot of anxiety in her body as a result. When she admitted that she was afraid she might be making up her struggles, or that maybe she isn't really unwell, or maybe she doesn't deserve to be in counseling anymore, I just waited, listened. We listened together. It didn't take long for her to discover she was afraid I would leave. She was afraid this would end. 

So we talked about what it is like that her struggles are real, that she should be here with me, now, and to face our eventual ending, together. When she walked out of my office and I shut my door behind her, I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and hugged my knees to my chest.

Right now I am dating a man that I care deeply about. It's crazy how vulnerable it feels to care like this. Sometimes I feel so frightened that the door to my heart threatens to shut of its own accord. It's scary for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that somehow or other this relationship too will end. Sometimes I can feel the ending pulsing within its beginning. The two are so intertwined, they can't be opposites. They are two threads of connection: openness to a deepening future, and grief that the openness cannot go on forever.  

I think the mystery of resurrection has something to teach me, if only I could be brave enough to receive it. Something about a tenderness that transcends the tenderness of endings and permits fear to slide from its fingers, no longer needed. That beaming joy Mike embodied five years ago wasn't premised on a forced forgetting of his own suffering; he never turned away from hard truths. He knew this would all end far too soon, yet on that spring morning, for a moment, he opened his heart wider still. 

Maybe next Easter I won't spend seven hours in the car. Maybe I'll go to church, and like my client, I'll find the courage to tell God the truth about how afraid I am, how Easter makes me want to brace myself for all the endings.

I'll be scared, and I'll try to listen.