the uncomfortable cusp

Here I sit on the old L-shaped couch, surrounded by a bulging duffel, piles of laundry, backpacks, travel information gathered for my unaccompanied minor when she flies home from camp later in July, the napping dog, the black sharpie for labeling. I've been packing and organizing all morning for our week vacationing in Asheville followed by camp pick up (Gabriel) and drop off (Beatrice) at the beloved UU camp of my youth. 

It is a rare thing, to be alone in my house on a weekday, with only the sounds of foot and car traffic outside the window to give some texture to this silence. Normally I long for a morning like this. Even if it's spent doing laundry and ticking off packing list items! But damn if I don't feel melancholy today. 

Also. I feel very annoyed that I feel melancholy. I mean, wtf Meagan?! This is a beautiful thing you have going here! Why you gotta mess it up with the whole heavy pit in your stomach furrowed brow thing? What a waste!

(Isn't it outrageous when we judge ourselves for feeling bad and thus feel way worse? The dreaded second arrow, it gets me every time.)

It's just that everything is changing. Frances and I have been getting all her health forms together for Princeton, and yesterday she found out her roommate assignment. Gabriel is away at camp and not here to talk with me about what to make for dinner. Beatrice is turning into a new kind of being, taller than ever, stunning me with her bright insights and new flashes of anger. 

I told my boyfriend I was worried that being on my own for five years had ruined me, that maybe I'm no good at partnership anymore. Maybe I've grown too attached to my own clannish family, my own ways of doing and avoiding things. As I grow closer to him I have to contend to what it means for me, a person who was with her husband for twenty years and then alone for five, to share the fretting and pleasures of daily life with someone else. To let that someone else help! Hoo boy, that one's big. Trusting someone else to help. How strange to recognize that having to do all this shit by myself - even though I often do it through gritted teeth - is something I'm reluctant to give up. It's my shit, darn it. Don't touch it.

I mean, do! Please! Please help, please hold my hand. I'm exhausted, really. I can feel so mixed up. 

Everything is always changing all the time, in fact everything has already changed all the time, and I'm just struggling to catch up and adjust. I know, I know, that's just life. Flux may be the norm for everyone everywhere all the time, but when you let the fullness of it touch you, it still rocks your world. 

Sending my oldest child off to college is a fullness-of-flux kind of moment. Raising my children on my own, and before that raising them while caring for my ill husband, and before that raising them with a husband who worked way too much and left the lion's share of it to me influenced my nearly 18 year long habit of being pretty cavalier about the whole 'kids grow up' business. Like, yes. They do. They should. That's the idea. Fly little birds, fly! Can't wait to see you soar while I get back to chilling in this nest on my own, enjoying my own agenda and time and space for once.

But here I am in my empty house and I feel terrible! About two months ago, after Frances returned from a Taylor Swift concert and played me all her saddest songs, it hit me with shocking force: she's leaving. They're all leaving. I knew this, I've always known this, but not like that. I cried and cried. Frances, Gabriel, and Beatrice are the center of my world, and what will I have (what do I have) to show for all these years of pouring my heart into them once this house is truly empty? Have I written any books,  become a world class therapist, done anything fancy or impressive with my time? 

They will leave and I will be old and alone and unimportant. At least, that's what the dark whispering suggests when something external triggers her release within. 

This moment is a bookend to those early Homemade Time years, when I was mostly staying at home with my little children and wondering how I would ever return fully to the world of adults. Could I pass as functional, productive? Could I conduct conversations with nary a reference to my children? Could I ever do the things I dreamt of doing when I kept on loving these children so damn much?

I am always keenly aware of the things I want to do and can't, because when you're working full time and parenting three children alone and have to remember trash night and figure out how to deal with water in the basement there isn't time for a whole lot else. Yet I sit here and think about the dining room full of lanky boys playing D&D, the sleepovers, the family dinners with friends, the porch sitting that leads to chats with neighbors, the way one of the kids reading on the couch next to the dog fills the room with quiet peaceful energy. And while I can't travel on my own, go off on writing retreats, read lots of novels, pick up a new instrument or spend as much time in movement classes as I'd like, there is so much here and now. So much that takes from me, and so much that fills me right back up. It's an abundance that is always changing. I might not have much to show for these overflowing days, but it's good to remember I am part of it all, and it is all part of me. 

Fullness of flux, fullness of life. The thumping reggaeton and the birds singing and the whoosh of tires outside my window; a rippling current that never ends. 

I've missed writing to you here. 

moving forward

We moved into a new house last Saturday. It's around the corner from our old house, and promised peaceful mornings with its second full bathroom and spacious dining room to accommodate friends waiting to ride to school. It has an open living room that, while still full of boxes, has already facilitated more time together. The neighbors on this block are tight, and have welcomed us kindly. I hear buses rumble by on the street below my bedroom window in the early morning and find it a comforting sound. On this street we are more pulled into and embraced in the flow of life. 

Yet what big change agrees to leave one's tender hurting places alone? Our first morning in this house fell on the five year anniversary of our lives without Mike. I decided to welcome that synchrony; while it is a terrible day, even more than that it's a day about honoring and remembering my children's papa. 

Since I last wrote here in mid January, I became the Head of Counseling Services and thus took on a lot of new responsibilities at work. I bought this house on January 31st (renting to the sellers until March), packed up my house (including many unexamined boxes and objects brought in from our life before cancer), celebrated Beatrice's tenth birthday, helped Frances through college and financial aid applications (still waiting on most of those decisions), prepared my old house for sale, marveled at the sheer quantity of objects we possess, and moved into this new house. All of these things were accomplished with the loving support of an army of friends, it's true. But seriously. A week into my new role at work, it hit me: now I'm the mom at work and at home. Shit. All the things eventually fall into my lap. 

I may need a bigger lap. 

(Possibly already in the works, given the copious amount of ice cream, chocolate and wine this season has led me to consume). (Though the anxiety, plus carrying countless boxes up and down stairs, may be effectively counterbalancing those influences).

I'm telling you all this just so you know. Just so someone knows that all this has been really, really hard. I've worried about so many things. My adulting capacities have been pushed to the brink. My brain is operating at a pretty sad pace, and I forget every 12th word I intend to utter. And when I can't think of the 12th word, I say fuck. Like, when I can't think of the word radiator or router I say instead the fucking thing. As in: you guys, we're going to have to learn how to bleed the...the...the fucking things.  

And my kids look at me blankly. Okay, Mama. On our way out to dinner on Sunday night in honor of Mike, after the taxing moving weekend, after picking up the cats at a friend's house and stopping by the cemetery with them and Lulu peeing all over her carrier in a total fit of feline freak out and all of us screaming in the car and frantically rolling down windows because of the astonishingly awful smell, after all of that, I called my car a fuckhead when it wouldn't shift into reverse immediately. The kids started laughing.

Mama, the common usage is fuckface.

And also, you've said the f word 800 times since yesterday morning. It's really not like you. 

Yeah, well, I'm not really like me right now. 

But I took this week off of work. And I have had days to unpack, to organize and figure things out, and even more wonderfully, to be alone in this space, and I am beginning to be me again.

As I unpack boxes, I've been touching so many objects that were once essential, and now no longer are. Yesterday I found a bulging binder given to us by the hospital, with neatly labeled dividers in Mike's handwriting, full of insurance documents and experimental treatment options. A notepad tucked into the righthand side whose first sentence at the top was How chemo works. Mike's notes from our first meeting locally, before treatment began. A clattering collection of PET scans tucked into a pocket. 

I had to touch all those pieces of paper and shiny CDs that once held the possibility of Mike's survival, read all those reports and look at all the words he dutifully wrote. Then I threw it all away, feeling weightless and strange inside.

This week I've found cards made by much smaller hands for me and for Mike, photographs, abandoned craft projects, journals. I've found lumpy ceramics, colorful paintings, and so many picture books that no one is young enough to want to read anymore (with the exception of George and Martha, which I think we will always want to read). I read those books aloud hundreds of times, snuggled next to one or two or three rapt, quiet, freshly bathed children. I love those books. They hold our history.

But we have too many, so I filled a box yesterday with beautiful, beloved picture books and put it outside our house with a 'free' sign. And the flow of life plucked them up and took them along with it, and within an hour it was empty. So I filled the free book box again.

I'm saving the most special ones. But you can't save them all, can you?

All these objects are comforting, tender reminders that it was real. We were a young family with regular young family cares and pleasures, then we were a suffering family struggling to live with cancer, then we were a grieving family struggling to live without Mike. It all really happened. Here, all around me, in half empty boxes, is the proof. Letting go of the evidence isn't easy.

One of the perks of this week off work has been picking up Beatrice after school and hanging on the playground with other parents while the kids play. The other day, Joshua and I were talking about how hard it is to be consistent when it comes to discipline, structure and routines. The authoritative aspect of parenting was never my strong suit.  

But, said Joshua, I try to remember that the most important part of all of this is joy. That's what I want to prioritize with them. 

I nearly cried. 

Me too, I said. 

I want to always make space for ... for the fucking thing. The joy. That's what moving to this house was about, and why all the angst is worth it. Keeping the doors and windows open, having plenty of places to pee, extra space for guests, places to curl up with a book or watch a movie or eat a meal. A home where we can be alone and be together. Where we can know where we've been, accept who we are now, and not be afraid of the changes and growth to come. 

radically precious you

Even though I myself have sought out all of the following influences, sometimes in life it feels as if a story is trying to reach you. Like a message is being broadcast, and your job is to listen and make sense of it. Over the past week or so, here are the forms the message has taken, the result being that I am very stirred up, cracked open:

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, read compulsively late at night all week and just finished at my kitchen table while a group of boys organize themselves for a game Gabriel invented in the next room

The prophetess Sonya Renee Taylor on We Can Do Hard Things, listened to on a drive to Philadelphia on Friday

Tracy Kidder's profile of Dr. Jim O'Connell in the NYT Sunday magazine, read in bits since last Sunday

A Man Called Otto, viewed big and tall in a movie theatre of all places yesterday

Going to church this morning with Beatrice, a Sunday service for Dr. King, a gathering of imperfect people imperfectly registering the pain of injustice and the yearning of coming closer to heroic people who have gone before us.

All of these things have left me a bit agitated, shaken. I have been thinking about our radical responsibility to one another, and the radical belonging and love that comes with taking up that responsibility. I've been thinking about how I shirk that responsibility and pretend like I don't know about it all the time, and how that shirking takes a toll. 

I remember telling Mike how, for better and worse, I had been transformed a few months into my first social work job at my old clinic. I could never not see people again. I'd heard too many stories, I'd sat with too many people that occupied corners and libraries and food pantry lines, the kind I once walked past in various cityscapes with just a shiver of discomfort that I would quickly shake off once something else occupied my attention. But now I saw those people everywhere. Did it change my behavior, no longer being able to pretend they weren't there? Not really. Though in those days, I could greet some of them by name. 

I am aware of the times I hold back friendliness and welcome, when I offer a more shuttered version of my face to a stranger or acquaintance. It's because I can sense their need, and I'm afraid of becoming responsible for them - except of course in a real sense I already am. I'm afraid of having to care for them, of having to make more space when my scanty available space already feels paper thin. 

My job offers me a way to lavish people who come into my life as strangers with attention and love, in a way that feels so very right, deep in my bones. Meeting another person's eyes and inviting their truest self to be with me like that. I welcome their vulnerability. But it's safe because there are boundaries around the relationship. My responsibility is limited. As many have reminded me over the years, a therapist is not supposed to take her clients home with her and feed them dinner and tuck them in at night.

And I'm not taking issue with that! I couldn't do my job without those boundaries, and I'm very attached to my job. Plus I have my own dear children to care for at night. But damn if all these stories and voices I've been letting in this week haven't been reminding me that everyone is someone's beloved precious child, just as precious as my own, and I love those three people so much it nearly breaks me on a regular basis. 

Do you see where I'm going? How do we live in this world that tells us it's fine to walk right past another person's pain, when we know in our guts it's really not? And how can we begin to live more aligned with our own radical preciousness, and every other person's radical preciousness, when it's genuinely hard to get everyone ready and out the door in the morning and remember the orthodontist appointment and the work emails and the friends to check in with and find time to walk to dog and there's laundry six loads deep in the basement? And also. I need a little time at night to be with myself in the dark in the tiny glowing circle of yellow cast by the clip-on book light, a novel balanced on my chest, my breath easy and slow. Otherwise I just couldn't do it all.  

I can read late, when the day's duties are done. But then I go and read a beautiful book about a hungry child. Geez. Are the day's duties ever really done? I mean, okay. Time is finite. Love is not. But how else do we express love, if not through gestures enacted within the bounds of time?

I felt like this in my teens and twenties. I think I'm supposed to have outgrown it by now. But since it appears I haven't - and I honestly do feel a little adolescent right now - I'm genuinely interested to know: how do you think about liberation, your infinite connection to others, the ever-present invitation to care? I don't really mean do you volunteer on Sunday afternoons or a write a check to Unicef. 

I mean: what is it like for you to be a precious hungry child in a world of precious hungry children? 

crybaby

Yesterday I joked to a friend at the playground after school that I hadn't checked Class Dojo in a week because I couldn't bear to. Not another bit of school-related app-facilitated information could make it through the sinister shine of my phone screen and into my brain. Thus, Beatrice didn't know to wear pajamas and bring a stuffy for the cozy fun last day before break and was dressed in her customary jeans and sweatshirt. 

Hahaha! She feels left out and it's because I couldn't make myself pay attention. Haha! 

Jokes are funniest when they are true. Uncomfortably so is best. I had arrived at the playground in the drippy cold weather pleased with my decision to take the day off so I could luxuriate in the after school experience. I'd make Bea happy, see friends, and get to feel like the kind of mom who can pick up. But alas, instead I was the kind of mom who doesn't keep up with school communications and whose daughter is annoyed at her because of it. 

I felt that heart-tug again submitting college applications with Frances (why haven't I done more to help?), and watching Gabriel get a ride that I could have given him a half-hour later but not at that moment. I feel it all the time, even though I know that I am doing the best I can and my Oura ring reminds me that I average between 0 and 4 minutes of 'restorative time' daily - meaning I never stop. And I don't like that! I desperately want regular down time, for reading and writing and watching TV and staring at the ceiling and cooking up plans and ideas. I am not proud of being stretched thin. In fact I hate it. 

But even more, I hate that my kids only have me. I don't want them to be made aware of their status as children of a single parent, which translates as having 100% less parental and adult support than they came into this world with and could reasonably expect to continue enjoying for the foreseeable future. They arrived as children possessed of two adults who loved them more than anything and would coordinate to accompany them through preschool tantrums, difficult homework, athletic events, class parties, college visits - two adults that would coordinate in such a way that they wouldn't have to be achingly aware of the sacrifices involved in being that kind of parent, an involved and engaged parent who shows up on time, knows where the game is, can give other kids rides and contribute to the bake sale. 

I know Mike is dead. And I know I am half of the adult force I once was. Yet I can't quite accept that reality for my three children. That stubborn refusal means I feel terrible, just terrible, whenever those brute facts break through everyday life.

Friends will reassure me that even with a co-parent they too drop balls, and can't always make it to events, and generally struggle to balance work and kids. And their husbands are useless anyway! They never remember dentist appointments! Uh huh. Yeah, totally. And I want to spit at them. And cry. Like a three year old who is told her fear is irrational. There's nothing to be afraid of honey! My mistakes and limitations feel like evidence of my children's loss-in-action; theirs do not.

This is our fifth Christmas without Mike, and I feel the pressure as much as ever. If I don't make a proper Christmas for my kids, their half-orphaned status will push against the day from the inside out and threaten to topple all the chocolate and presents and the whole damn tree festooned with ornaments from other times. As if it weren't bad enough to have Papa's stocking hanging below the stairs, empty on Christmas morning. (Though it seems worse not to hang it at all alongside the rest of our stockings). I don't want this holiday to be a shred harder than it naturally is. I want them to feel loved and cared for, to feel joy without the pinch of absence. 

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this method of self-compassion: when we find pain inside, we can hold it tenderly, imagining it to be a crying baby. There is no need to argue with a crying baby, or to scold or reason or shake a finger at her tear-streaked face. All you can do is hold her gently in her inconsolability, waiting for the distress to peter out within the safe container of your warm arms, and the quiet, fatigue-laced peace to come. 

On the fourth day of the mindfulness retreat I went on last fall, in my growing and unexpected comfort with meditation, I noticed some nasty thoughts come up there on my round cushion. You aren't really meditating, Meagan. You aren't doing any of this, you're pretending to do it, you're pretending this is meaningful. You're not even on this retreat. You are so full of shit. 

Oh man. I felt an immediate, familiar sinking, a heaviness, a recognition. It's so true. I am totally full of shit. I can't believe it. How could I have proceeded this far without remembering my own glaring fraudulence? 

But then, with nowhere else to go, I sank even lower, past the thoughts to a deeper recognition. Wait. Hang on just a minute. These fears are just more crying babies inside! And they need me. 

So I stroked their hot red cheeks, and and held them in my arms. I nursed them, an imagining that brings the same deep embodied calm from the many years I spent nursing the crying babies who live outside of my body. Eventually they settled, and fell sweetly asleep. 

That day I learned in my bones that there is no pain that can't be transformed by love. 

And now, over a year later, when I am a little bit more grounded than usual, I remember that. I do believe treating the pain - the smallness, resentment, grief, and fear I feel for my children (and by extension myself) as they grow up in a community of friends who mostly enjoy two involved, imperfect parents - as the nursery full of crying babies that it is is the only way forward. The only way that promises healing. 

To pick them up, whisper shh, shh, shh in their tiny delicate ears, tolerate their heaviness in my arms. This is so much harder than crying to my boyfriend how impossible this all feels sometimes, or attacking housework with aggressive desperation, or waking up far too early to get things done so I feel some sense of control. I imagine I'll always do those things sometimes. But this season, I want to remember to occasionally pause all the maneuvering, the pursuit of an illusory dream of greater efficiency, the strained effort to be two parents when I am only one. It is advent, after all. I am trying to pause, invite tenderness, and wait.