A talisman against loss
Some children sleep though high fevers, resting up as their bodies fight off the germs. Not our little one. The heat disturbs his sleep. For several nights he woke up in the 2 - 3 a.m. time slot, asking "Is it wake-up time?" Well, no, but we didn't have much say in the matter. Time for a drink of water, maybe for another dose of Motrin, and then we'd settle in for cuddling and long attempts at getting back to sleep. Two hours later, once he was out, I would be able to sleep myself.
The combination of being sick and not getting enough sleep put me in a strange frame of mind. Everything seemed fraught with premature nostalgia. The Duplo block set he got for his birthday, with a castle and the toy knights? A relic of a childhood soon to be over, the toys destined to languish in an attic. The recent photographs of our growing boy? Documentation of a time we won't be be able to remember a year from now. My cuddly 3-year-old will change into a different person, perhaps several times over, and each stage will be as fuzzy in my mind as his first weeks of life. It cut, this realization of the slipperiness of time and memory.
Along with an ache for what has not yet passed, I started to see danger in almost every moment, as though I was preparing myself for an inevitable loss. The bee I saw crawling on our grass -- would it deliver a fatal sting to my son, sink its poison into his chubby bare foot? (Never mind that we have no idea if he is allergic. It is a genetic possiblity). Would this be the dog walk where I would lose my balance and fall backwards, landing on my son, strapped to my back in an Ergo carrier? (Oh, for those days when he insisted on wearing his bike helmet at all times!)
And what about me? Was I paying enough attention to the dangers that I faced? Is the morning coming when, groggy and uncaffeinated, I will accidentally dip my low-hanging robe sleeve into the burner flame, stare in shock as the sleeve is consumed? Would I finally miss that step and go tumbling into a crumpled heap of bone and flesh on the floor below?
Maybe if I tried to keep the dangers in mind, tried to remind myself that what we love can be taken away, that no moment is innocent, I would have a mental talisman against loss.
That was a few days ago. Sleep is improving and my outlook is returning to normal. Neurotic worrying is not what protects us from danger. I am lucky to live in an incredibly safe part of the world, with access to clean water, plentiful food, and good medical care. I don't have to dodge bombs or gunfire. I don't need a talisman.
But I am going to watch my step when I go down the stairs.
So. What would I write if ...
This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.
There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.
So. Maybe that's it.
(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'
There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)
"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:
Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga prym gefrunon,
Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her in.
There were stories of other dogs that had cracked
after hearing the tests at Aberdeen Proving
Ground,
dogs that pushed their way through second story
window screens, desperate to escape the sounds of
the bomb and munitions tests across the river. The
aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s general
nervousness, but now when a thunderstorm blew
through town, she was absolutely inconsolable. No
drug calmed her. By the time you got the pill
down, the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to the
local grocery store. Mom rolled the windows down a
safe distance, locked the doors, and entered the
market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green beans when
she heard a little girl’s voice. “Look, Mom, there’s
a dog shopping in the Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the beans
and continued to the toiletry aisle. The little girl
spoke again. “Look, Mom, the dog is still shopping in
the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced past the
row of shampoos to the plate glass windows – were
those thunderclaps she heard? – when she saw Louise,
panting heavily, on the run from one of our favorite
check-out guys, a kid who worked his way up from
bagger and always made friendly conversation. Louise
darted for the automatic doors, heading along the
sidewalk in the direction of the Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the door.
Outside, storm clouds were gathering force. She
watched Louise scatter a school of carpenters, men in
dirty jeans and mud-caked work boots, as the dog
passed the restaurant and made a left into the
hardware store. Mom followed, pushing past customers,
until she found Louise in the back of the store,
trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the storm
passed, then walked her back to the car and drove
home, sans groceries. Apparently, the dog panicked
when she heard the approaching thunder, pushed
through an open car window and went looking for Mom.
We were grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I came home
from grad school for a visit. Things were grim.
Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, had been
diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease. My mother
was close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was
getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to thunderstorms;
now the dulled explosions from Aberdeen were having a
similar effect. She was terrified. If no one was
home, she would attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid
she would force her way through a closed window,
pictured a return home to bloodied shards of glass
and no dog. If someone was home, she would scratch
and pace, pant and whine. Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We sat with
Louise, stroked her as the vet depressed the needle.
It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.
Freed by chains
I tried to tackle it again a couple of nights ago, started a post about the drawn-out death of Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend. There was his actual end, a very long day in the hospice, waiting as his lungs and heart slowly gave out, waiting for that last long sigh, and the prelude to the end, six months of hospitalization, the horror of it all.
And what about the back story? Or the story before the back story? I couldn’t determine what was important, when to stop my tortured, embarrassed typing. It was overwhelming. The process became a story on its own, a tale of tale-telling gone mad. I canned my original account and the post, though it is still worth writing, provided I create a sound framework.
Good short stories require limits, a set period of time, a riff on one theme or maybe two. Limits create the freedom to explore something in depth, to stop glossing over and really, finally, maybe start get to the bottom of things, to make a stab at the truth.
And so it goes with the stillbirth story, the thing I’ve been working on for a year now. In the process of writing and rewriting it, I’ve been working through the feelings, airing out my tamped-down grief and omnipresent guilt. So I dragged the last 23 years through the mud. When I tried to tie it to the present, give it a neat resolution in my sweet adult life, the story fell apart. It wasn't a story, but a timeline with representative examples.
I needed to do this. Writing it out, the long version and short version, the angry words, and the passages full of self-recrimination, was necessary. The words weren't wasted, but the piece did not transcend.
Then -- a thought: limit the story's timeframe to two weeks, to the just before and the right after. And no initial perfectionism: keep on typing, let my subconscious do its thing. I would clean it up later.
There it was, a story. No pat endings, no struggles to reach peace in 2400 words. The limits freed me.
Is it over?
But I really didn't expect my son to stop napping before his third birthday (about a week away). Last Wednesday, he made a decision: no more naps. Even in the monotony of a long drive, even when his lids were at quarter-mast, when he was a little zombie boy in the carseat, he stayed the course. My attempts to coax midday sleep out of him have been unsuccessful.
It's all well and good when there are two of us around to entertain him, but what happens next week when it's just me and him? He isn't a big fan of playgrounds, he doesn't like hanging out with other kids. One can only take so many dog walks and trips to the library. Maybe this is our big opportunity to explore San Francisco, take the BART into the city and get culture. Or take a bus into the Berkeley hills, or to campus, have a little public transportation adventure (!!).
My boy is funny and often self-entertaining. He loves books and trains and motorcycles. Spending my days with him is a joy, but I am a person who thrives off of quiet time. Uninterrupted time. I'm scared. I need that time. After a full day of child chasing, my brain is mush. How am I supposed to write?
Thank goodness for his two school mornings. And for early bedtimes. Sometimes as early as 6:30.
Heathen can wait
There was no other conclusion. I couldn't believe in God. This wasn’t a question of whether or not he existed, but was a question of my own belief. No proof was sufficient and I had no faith, no religious background, no desire to hide behind the wimpy safety of Pascal's wager.
Shortly after I reached this conclusion, a product of a paper I wrote on God’s existence in a Philosophy 101 class, I dropped out of college. It was the middle of the second semester, sophomore year and for a while I kept it quiet, kept on accepting my father and step-mother’s checks, which were enough to cover my half of the rent. My roommate, in shaky recovery from an eating disorder, was working as a waitress. As the money dried up, she got me a job waiting tables.
It fell apart. We drank and drank, put ourselves in dangerous situations. I was moving to DC, she didn’t want to come. She slept with my longtime boyfriend, I abandoned her for an Eastern Shore boy who lived with his brother in a place called the Sugar Shack. That fall, my mother drove me and the cat to a small rowhouse in NE DC where I was renting a room. I was starting a new life as a sophomore at Catholic University.
This was the atheist’s choice? Catholic University? I was thinking of majoring in education and Catholic had a good program. The school was located in Washington, a city I wanted to live in. My decision was sealed during the interview, when my interlocuter -- Miss DC 1988! -- told me I was in. But on that first day of school, I jettisoned education for philosophy. It was the most interesting thing going.
Amy, my housemate, was 30 years old to my 20, a Peace Corps survivor. Amy counted her potatoes and onions, and even recorded the shape her peanut butter was in -- the knife slashes, the peaks and valleys and indentations -- before she put the lid on the jar. I found her tallies of produce, her vivid peanut butter descriptions, recorded in tiny script on a piece of paper hidden in the pantry. When I moved in, she had envisioned late night bull sessions with her new gal pal. What she got was an unhappy, underage semi-alcoholic, quiet and removed. She coped by counting her vegetables, a safeguard against (non-existent) theft.
I found salvation on the second day of classes, while taking notes for the History of Ancient Philosophy. N., a Basselin scholar, started up a conversation with me and his fellow Basselins joined in. They were men my age, in the seminary and on the road to priesthood, in addition to being philosophy majors on steroids. If it weren’t for N., who pulled me in, supported me, got me a job when I was desperate, and on occasion gave me food "donated" from the seminary kitchen, I’m not sure I would have survived. He was -- and is -- a good friend.
N. is happily married now, to a kind-hearted, amazing woman. They have five kids. He and his wife have accepting of me, of my quiet atheism. They approach me without judgement.
But am I still an atheist?
I don’t have faith, but I am not as slavishly devoted to proofs. For those who believe, God is real. As for me, I’ll have to be content with not knowing.
On the way to L.A.
Greetings from scenic
Cambria!
We're on a road trip down to the L.A. area, to visit
my father-in-law. This morning we drove out past San
Simeon out to see if we could find
elephant
seals.
We did!
More later. I have friends' blogs to catch up with,
too.
In the beginning ...
When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.
I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.
Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.
Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.
I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.
Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008
As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.
I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.
Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.
H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.
What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.
But I can't worry about that now, can I?
A Dream of the Snow
By the time he died, after eight years of illness, we had reached a peace. I loved him like a father.
Today would have been Kevin's 62nd birthday. (My mother just called to tell me she had a pain in the neck, just like she has every year on his birthday. Ah, the tension continues even after death . . .)
In honor of Kevin, I am posting one of his poems, "A Dream of the Snow." For many months after his death six years ago, my mother had this as her voice mail greeting. She got a lot of hang-ups.
A Dream of the Snow
From Knife
Gift by
Kevin Sheehan
For a long time I hid
while my body grew,
watched while it learned
a hard way to speak
till the clothes that it wore
no longer fit me
and I could not understand
a word of its speech.
For a long time I slept
while my body dreamed,
cried when it married, moved
away. Now I dream alone
in the room where we played.
Not of the fields, but the falling,
not of the cold, but the coming down,
my body is a dream of the snow.
Shameless plug
You're in luck! Now you can find selections of my work at PublicLiterature.Org, a site that includes the full-text of several classic books as well as contributions from published and aspiring writers. I've recently posted "Running Back" (aka "Going Faster Miles an Hour") here and will be adding more in the future.
(Note: "Running Back" is misfiled as fiction. Ahh, if only . . .)
The Victorian Village slasher
We met him on a dog walk, a meandering stroll through our Columbus neighborhood, past a brick-solid hodgepodge of Victorians and gingerbread, Italianate rowhouses and cobblestone alleyways. This world was new to me, a stable life as an adult, with a fiancé, a dog, a professional job, living hundreds of miles from my mother. I was going to hold on to that stability with a death grip, make sure I would never fall back into the abyss.
But back on the East Coast, Mom was cracking up. I wasn't allowed to call her at home, so we’d talk at work. The conversations usually ended with screams (hers) and tears (mine). My cubicle was in the middle of the library, exposed. I would hold my voice tense and steady, then rush to the ladies’ room, smash the tears back with toilet paper, splash the redness away with cold water.
My mother was a frequent subject on our dog walks. I obsessed over our new rift, the rage unfairly projected, while my husband-to-be made sympathetic noises. I was to blame by choosing my fiancé, a snobbish WASP, loyal and overprotective. It was a slap in the face to my bohemian mother.
If my abandonment, my choice to betray, wasn't bad enough, she was also struggling with her long-term boyfriend, a difficult character in the best of times. Kevin was in the early stages of a rare illness that would eventually kill him. She had to support them both on a small salary and was stretched to the point of financial ruin.
On that cool September evening in 1995 Jared and I were having the usual discussion. Would Mom and Kevin follow through on their threat to boycott the wedding? Why was she being so cruel?
I didn’t notice the runner pass us. Then we heard it.
“Hey, jogga!”
The small voice was coming from a bush to our right. Whoever it was, they couldn’t quite pronounce their r’s.
“Hey, jogga! I am the O.J. Simpson! I am the O.J. Simpson!”
Suddenly, a little boy, no more than five, leapt out from behind the bush, making stabbing motions with his empty hand in the direction of the runner, who was long gone. He looked at us and just started talking. Yes, he could hang out in his yard after dark. His mom and dad were divorced and he was living with his dad, who liked to drink ice beer. Had we ever tried it? He had, and he didn’t like it. He talked on, aggressively friendly, clearly lonely.
Another runner flew by and the boy repeated the performance, enjoyed the effect. It was disturbing and amusing, this five-year-old's violent pantomime.
Beyond the open screen door of his house, I could hear canned laughter, the hiss of a bottle being opened. His father, up until this point a lumpy shadow behind a curtain, turned his head to the side and yelled, "Get in here!" The boy said goodbye, walked into the house, and shut the door behind him.
Over the next few months, we walked by that house several times. We never saw him again.
Crushed
For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.
In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?
That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.
Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.
Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.
I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.