Melancholic baby?
26 July 2010 11:18 AM Categories: The
struggle | The kid
If you are a regular reader, you might have surmised that I am a sad sack, always focusing on events and people long gone but still present in my emotions. If you followed me around for a few days, you might be sure of it, as I break into tears here, punch at the air there, as I growl and curse. But I also dance and laugh so hard that I have to catch my breath, feel the thrill of being alive.
Life is sweet even when it feels like it isn't.
A couple of weeks ago, my son and I were doing our usual evening routine, discussing the day's events before saying goodnight. "I love you so much, I'll love you even when I'm dead," he told me. Perhaps stupidly, I responded in kind, which led to a longer discussion about death and love. It ended, of course, in tears. He wanted me to stay like I was, didn't want me to change. Maybe the pictures we've shown him of his grandparents when they were young have been sobering. They look unfamiliar with their shining hair and the tight, unlined skin of youth. He doesn't recognize them as the people they are today and he imagines what will happen to his father and me, the sagging and bulging, our faces turning into topographic maps, our bodies weakened. But I also think he's mourning the moment, who we are right now, and feels the desire to hold on. He's confronting the painful inevitability of change.
When I was eleven, I felt adulthood looming. Growing up meant a loss of self. I mourned who I was before I was gone. I had already lost so much -- would I forget the perspective of the dependent child, helpless, attached to capricious and sometimes unstable adults? Here's where I start to cry again, with surprising emotion, and I think -- what the fuck? Can't you get over it already, Jennifer? Plenty of people had it worse than you. But the emotions are still here, waiting for permission to leave.
My son has a childhood. He has his father and he has me and we will let him be a child, will protect him when he needs it and will prepare him for adulthood. These temporary moments, the joy he has in playing and being with us, the way the imaginary is real and present for him, all of this will change or disappear. This is what is supposed to happen. But we will do our best to make sure that nothing changes prematurely, that he doesn't worry about us or feel unsafe or take on larger worries. I hope that he will be able to look back at his childhood with happiness, that the preordained loss won't sting too much.
I cry, but the tears are mixed in with joy and sweetness and everything in between. This is life. I am alive.
Image: The boy at his birthday party yesterday, wielding a balloon sword.
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That yearning
21 July 2010 07:24 PM Categories: Memoir
The house was
haunted.
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
It was a small-framed beach cottage two blocks from the Sassafras River, built in the 1950s for lazy summer living. The house belonged to a friend of my mother’s, another poet, and was in a state of construction, the kitchen and living room gutted and draped in sawdust-coated plastic. The friend and her husband were on a sailing trip, a neighbor needed a sitter for her elderly cat, and would Mom like the job? It was the summer after Kevin died. My mother lived in a suburb of Washington, DC and I was in the city. We ached for Maryland’s Eastern Shore, for the cornfields and woods, for the roadside vegetable stands piled with corn and tomatoes. We missed river swimming and barefoot walks on tarry blacktop.
For more than half of their 18-year relationship, my mother and Kevin moved from place to place on the Eastern Shore, from the community on the Elk River where both my mother and I spent our childhood summers to a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay. When Kevin was diagnosed with myelofibrosis, Mom had just bought a red cottage in a neighborhood they eventually nicknamed Hatefulmoor. This was where Kevin insulted the neighbors, built curtain rods and trellises out of driftwood, and gathered beach glass to make jewelry while Mom made the money, prepared most of the meals, washed the dishes, and drove an hour each way to Wilmington and back for work. When that house slipped out of their fingers, they moved from place to place, to Stillpond and Chestertown, and points in between. In the end, it was hard to separate the place from the relationship, to disassociate the fights and cruelty with the landscape, with those long walks through fallow cornfields and along beach cliffs.
Kevin's absence hung over us that summer, the last six months of his illness hung over us, the horrible long hospitalization, the pain. We wanted the good parts back, the lingering dinners by candlelight, the conversations about philosophy and literature. We wanted the old times, the glint of Kevin's glasses across the table, the juice glasses of red wine warming in our hands. In the morning, we said, we would walk to the river, delight in the shock of water the color of late-summer moss, brown and green and cool in the delirious humidity.
The water was gorgeous. But the house was occupied. The living room and kitchen echoed with someone else's presence and every moment I was in the place I felt like I was being watched. The only habitable room was the bedroom, where my mother and I shared the bed and Kevin's son slept on a couch. We set up a fan in the window and tried to sleep, but the air moved in strange ways. I slept fitfully. One night Kevin's golden retriever, Woody, barked, a sudden sharp cry. My mother grabbed a flashlight and searched the house, but no one was there.
The physical ache of mourning -- the desire to see, hear, and touch the one who has gone away -- lingers. Our bodies mourn the loss. Was Kevin with us? Or did we just wish him there? It felt like he was present, hanging over our conversations. We were so dull and pedestrian without him. Maybe he came to mourn himself, the rush of being alive, what poet Marie Howe calls that yearning: "We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it."
My mother's friend had a large collection of poetry books in the bedroom, some purchased from Kevin during one of his purges. Mom removed them from the shelves. She scanned the pages, ran her fingers along the print. Some passages were heavily underlined and in the margin, Kevin's writing recorded his long-ago reactions.
"It's stupid to sell books when they really matter," she told me recently. "You don't know what you are giving away. It might be something you never can replace."
WHAT THE LIVING DO
by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Image: I think this is the beach at "Hatefulmoor" in the early 1990s.
Shadowy figure
16 July 2010 09:26 AM Categories:
Animal/vegetable/mineral
Dear C,
I’m having the dreams again, the ones where I can’t find you, where you leave the room moments before I walk through the door, or where I end up lurking by your apartment eavesdropping on your roommates or loitering around the lobby of your office building, hoping for a glimpse. When did I get so creepy? Last night's dream was one of full pursuit: I tried to track you down after an evening of my dissolution, a night in which we didn’t talk, we didn't even see each other, but I drank and annoyed. Not you -- no, as usual you were locus unknown, hanging out somewhere in the boxy house with pristine walls where we were staying. It was my other friend who got the worst of me. I was drunk and I ignored her and somehow missed you. But I was determined not to lose you again.
I walked to your office.
It was dark, stylish, like a set
designer's idea of police headquarters.
Shadowy. The room you worked in was large
and low-ceilinged, desks out in the open,
everyone busy. Your boss, a kindly man,
fiftyish with grey curly hair, came over
when he saw me hanging around your work
station. He didn't talk about you or what
you were doing that day, but went on about
the work environment, the collaboration
that the open room encouraged. I tried
calling you, but the phone on your desk
(black, sleek, modern) wouldn’t cooperate
with my stubby fingers.
That wasn't the only dream you haunted last night. In the other one, my former boss, L, was giving a tour of the old school building where she worked and lived. Was she still a librarian? Did it matter? The school was small and square. Brick. It was proportioned for a different time when people were skinnier and had fewer belongings. (The 1930s?) L took me through long corridors and into strange empty wings. Two times she pushed me into an abandoned classroom while she stayed in the hallway, asking me if the trash can was full. I didn't notice the trash can -- I was too worried about ghosts. Why was the trash suddenly my responsibility?
There seemed to be no end to this school, with its linoleumed corridors and cramped rooms and stairways with cold metal handrails that left a tinny smell on my hands. Finally, we ended up on the top floor, which was another open office space. This one, lit by fluorescent tubes, was light without being airy. The staff was young, a few years out of college. Some of these people looked familiar and I realized this was where you worked when we first met. But you weren't there anymore.
I’ve been expecting these dreams, with their yearning and mystery, dreams where you are a recurring character in absentia. My subconscious is working something out (although what that might be is still a mystery to me). And I'm torn between accepting you as a symbol (of me? of my squashed desire?) and giving in to the yearning.
Hope you are well,
J
Image by zen.
I’m having the dreams again, the ones where I can’t find you, where you leave the room moments before I walk through the door, or where I end up lurking by your apartment eavesdropping on your roommates or loitering around the lobby of your office building, hoping for a glimpse. When did I get so creepy? Last night's dream was one of full pursuit: I tried to track you down after an evening of my dissolution, a night in which we didn’t talk, we didn't even see each other, but I drank and annoyed. Not you -- no, as usual you were locus unknown, hanging out somewhere in the boxy house with pristine walls where we were staying. It was my other friend who got the worst of me. I was drunk and I ignored her and somehow missed you. But I was determined not to lose you again.
That wasn't the only dream you haunted last night. In the other one, my former boss, L, was giving a tour of the old school building where she worked and lived. Was she still a librarian? Did it matter? The school was small and square. Brick. It was proportioned for a different time when people were skinnier and had fewer belongings. (The 1930s?) L took me through long corridors and into strange empty wings. Two times she pushed me into an abandoned classroom while she stayed in the hallway, asking me if the trash can was full. I didn't notice the trash can -- I was too worried about ghosts. Why was the trash suddenly my responsibility?
There seemed to be no end to this school, with its linoleumed corridors and cramped rooms and stairways with cold metal handrails that left a tinny smell on my hands. Finally, we ended up on the top floor, which was another open office space. This one, lit by fluorescent tubes, was light without being airy. The staff was young, a few years out of college. Some of these people looked familiar and I realized this was where you worked when we first met. But you weren't there anymore.
I’ve been expecting these dreams, with their yearning and mystery, dreams where you are a recurring character in absentia. My subconscious is working something out (although what that might be is still a mystery to me). And I'm torn between accepting you as a symbol (of me? of my squashed desire?) and giving in to the yearning.
Hope you are well,
J
Image by zen.
Lost years
14 July 2010 11:32 AM Categories: The kid
I was sitting at a playground when this revelation hit me. The boy had a shovel in his hand and was tossing sand through the sieve, pausing occasionally to tell me what he was doing, giving me the story behind the game.
I’ve been sitting in playgrounds for almost five years now, sitting in them when he was tiny and all he could do was slump in a swing or hold on to my hands as we walked on wood chips or on springy recycled tires. There was a time (the really lost years) when we just moved to California that he hated playgrounds, when we spent dark rainy days and bright sunny days in our house or yard and I didn’t talk to anyone but him and my husband or my mother on the phone, talked in dark clipped resentful tones.
Because I’ve gone underground during the last five years – and especially the last three, after we moved to this unfamiliar place with a rainy season and foggy mornings that burn off into cloudless sky. I stopped caring what I looked like (despite my occasional forays into style). I stopped showering every day and sometimes didn't even shower every other day. I stopped using an ATM card and instead relied on my husband to give me cash infusions, like I was asking for egg money. I stopped reading much. I stopped going anywhere by myself and when I did the feeling was either exhilarating (“I’m riding on BART to San Francisco by myself!”) or scary and unfamiliar.
There have been afternoons spent at playgrounds, chasing the kid, talking to him about castles, or taking on the voice of Dress Me Monkey. We’ve trekked to libraries and Habitot and hopped on the BART to the city or to Fairyland. One long fall we regularly traveled a mile to a playground by a large playing field with the sole goal of sitting in a play structure and watching a high school football team practice. That was all the kid wanted to do there, plop himself on our little seat (growling at any other child who wanted a turn) to watch these teenagers in bulky colorful outfits run and tackle and pass.
I sometimes still walk long distances with the boy in the stroller, despite the fact that he will be five years old at the end of this month and weighs about 43 pounds. Since I don’t drive or bike, but love to walk, I’m thinking that a stroller may come in handy for a while longer even though pushing him up sloped Berkeley streets isn't always pleasant, even though I know that people think it's time for him to walk or ride a bike. (Ever walked 2+ miles roundtrip with a bike-hating five-year-old beside you? If so, let me know.) But he also walks with me, too, his warm hand in mine. We stop to pick flowers or retrieve sticks that he turns into spears or swords or arrows.
The lost years. The worst of these meant isolation and – yes – boredom for me. The kid has only recently been comfortable playing on his own with friends when we go to the park, so most of the play time has been on me. I am not one of those inventive mothers who always has a kid project going, some sort of craft or messy activity. A lot of the time I’ve felt like a stay-at-home-mom failure, a woman who isn’t actually suited to the job, but has taken it on anyway only to complain about it.
The best of these years has been the sweetness, the fun we have when I allow myself to live in the moment, the feeling of his hand in mine, the real conversations we have about his stories or our lives or even about his fears. I know that the conversations will only get better (except, maybe, during his teenage years). I know that our playground trips will be more and more about him playing with his friends until playgrounds cease to interest him. But I also know that the sweetest things will disappear. Soon he will stop holding my hand or asking for 20 kisses before he goes to school. He will stop patting and kissing my belly, will cease to bob back and forth to music he likes, no matter where he hears it. He will become self-conscious in new ways.
My son starts kindergarten on September 1st. It could be the beginning of my return to the world, the found years. In preparation, I am working out and showering daily, wearing things other than stretchy knit pants, and dusting off my ATM card. I have a short solo trip -- my first since the kid's birth -- planned for next month. But I also hope that the sweetness will last for as long as it can, that despite the changes the boy will still keep the cuddliness, will still tell me "I love you 3-a-million" before going to sleep.
It's possible, right?
Image: The kid, looking into the future.
I've written this post in the middle of a four-day business trip for my husband. So far things are going pretty well with me and the kid AND I'm still getting to shower (and exercise) daily. It's a good start to the found years.
The weight of it
11 July 2010 04:13 PM Categories: The
struggle
If you tell, everyone will know how bad you are. And stupid. And worthless. They will reject you.
Tired of the weight, you tell anyway. No one thinks you are bad. Or stupid. Or worthless. Sometimes they treat you with empathy. Others ignore what you tell them, but you come to understand that they don't know what to do with it, that it's their problem, not yours.
You start to feel better, like maybe you didn't cause your abandonment by being bad or being too smart-assed or being too you. Your abandonment was your parent's problem and not yours, even though now you are left to deal with the lifelong aftermath.
You think of her, the other girl, your biological grandmother, sixteen and pregnant in New Castle, Delaware in 1950, how she carried also carried a baby -- your mother -- probably in secret until almost the end. You think of her secret pregnancy, the secret father, the secret baby going off to live with a new family. Your birth grandmother grew up, got married and had two additional children. She held fast to the secrets.
You are angry with her for keeping these secrets, for denying information and empathy. You identify with her, remembering what it was like to be young, alone, and terrified. You want to tell her "I understand" (as much as you can). You want to punch her in the face. The legacy of suppression is a foul one and you need to blame someone for what happened to you. Someone distant and easy. But you can't. The people to blame, your mother, your father, other adults in your life at the time . . . oh, you're afraid of the mess your anger would make and you know now how hopeless they were.
You try to write about secrets, but it just feels like an emotional morass.
That's the problem with secrets.
Image: My mother, summer 1952.