Up against your will
Less than five hours of fitful sleep, one too many Widmer Hefeweizens at the Echo and the Bunnymen show last night, the usual predawn wake-up after a week of bad nights and early mornings: I am tired.
Two years ago my husband and I went to another Echo concert, the Ocean Rain tour, and I spent the first three songs of it sobbing in my seat, bathed in the sounds that accompanied my abandoned adolescence. Ocean Rain came out in 1984. It was the soundtrack for the long lonely time when I lived almost on my own, the years of isolation and pregnancy and death and the relentless sameness of life afterwards. The music tugged the emotions out of me. Not so much at last night's show. Until the encore. "The Killing Moon" killed me and there I was sobbing and sobbing on my husband’s shoulder, crying like I’ve been crying a lot anyway these days.
Before the Killing Moon tears, I cried in the lobby. Before the tears in the lobby, I went up to get yet another beer and then stood alone, back against the wall, until my husband came to find me. We’re stirring up a lot of stuff right now, both together and on our own, and it’s good, it’s all good, but I am one with these feelings that I used to keep at bay by focusing on the stories, their origins. It’s not the why that is so important now, it’s the is-ness of the feelings and sometimes I can’t believe the depth of them. These are just feelings. They won’t drag me down or threaten my very being or toss me off the edge, but for a while last night I had the image of my body flipping over and over again after a leap off a cliff.
There was no bottom to hit, it was just the fall and the flip. My old-fashioned dress swirled around me. I looked like I was twelve years old. My body turned like a pinwheel in the wind and I fell. I fell. The image wasn’t soothing and it wasn’t disturbing. It was representative.
We’re in the middle of it now, me and him, we won’t give up until our psyches are shining, clean, clear, the emotions floating out of us like words, meaningful, changeable, whole, complete. It’s a long journey, the end is murky. I’m grateful for my tendency to worry at relationships like a dog gnawing at a bone. I’m grateful for my husband's presence, too, for the fact that he is there with me, listening, trying, supportive.
So I float, I flip, my tears stream. I stand alone with my back against the wall. I feel the threat of love’s promise to always be there when such a thing is impossible.
From the prompt "I won't give it up."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I edited this -- a tired brain is a slow one and adds unnecessary words. Took the extra words out, made the language clearer, and there you go.
Image by James Dawson.
Living proof at my fingertips
My husband and I were standing against the wall at the Fox Theater in Oakland, this over-the-top restored venue from the late 1920s, drinking our beers and waiting for the group Echo and the Bunnymen to come onstage. We'd already had a lot of laughs that would be almost impossible to explain here (for example, the image of us wearing cucumber and cabbage outfits, just to find our moment of glory in the truly ridiculous [but very cool-sounding] Echo song Thorn of Crowns). Without warning my dead son winnowed his way into the conversation, which lead to talks of alternate lives and then my father showed up, too, unrepentant, demanding the old song and dance of anger.
My father and stepmother visited us last month, which was a truly wonderful visit, one for which I am grateful. As a result of nerve damage in his back, he is in constant pain and traveling is very difficult on him, but they made the trip and we all had a good time. There was just one ripple in the visit, one that I tried to ignore, in a discussion that would have been impossible without the blog. He found writing to survive over a year ago and read through it in its entirety. Eventually he apologized via email for any pain he had caused me, which was the extent of our interaction on the topic. During this most recent visit he asked "Are we ok?" meaning, I suppose, "Is everything all right between us?". Yes, I said, we were ok -- when he read the blog I felt like he was listening to me. Did he feel like we were ok?
Well, sure, but he wanted me to know that, despite my accusations to the contrary, he had tried. I had no idea what he was talking about, but his response was probably to this post, where I write about my anger at my parents for doing nothing when I desperately needed help: "My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth." It's a heavy accusation and I stand by it. The truth hurts. We didn't dig any deeper into that particular pit, but our discussion bothered me, still does, and that was what I was talking about in the lobby of the Fox Theater, that and imagining my never-to-be-24-year-old son, dressed in skinny tapered pants and an ironic t-shirt, angry at me for my own form of neglect, of the fetal variety.
The band started. We hustled to our seats, suddenly surrounded by the music that was a part of the soundtrack of my mid-teens and I started to cry. I sobbed through the first three songs while my husband patted me reassuringly, probably feeling bad about the tickets, which were a birthday present. The music transported to a bleak time in my life, when things started really getting bad and I was indescribably alone. I felt the direness of my situation at fifteen and sixteen, combined with the beauty of my current life. I am forty years old, married to a good, supportive man. We have a healthy, creative, wonderful child. My life is in enveloped in love and warmth. How did I get so undeservedly lucky?
Our conversation in the lobby -- the clinical look at my father, the ghostly appearance of my son, my guilt over that time of terrible fear and anger -- began to make sense. No matter how much work I've done here on revealing secrets, writing out my pain and anger, trying to forgive my parents, I can't take the experience of what happened in the Little House away. Even thinking about the music we were about to hear brought me to the edge of that past, to the isolation and neglect. And my father's main reaction upon reading this entire blog, apart from a generic, though I'm sure heartfelt apology, was to tell me that he tried. He has never acknowledged any direct responsibility for (or curiosity about) that time. I wish his acknowledgement didn't matter. Maybe someday it won't.
I've put so much effort into trying to forgive the unaware that I've forgotten to pay attention to my own grief. I still carry around sadness for things lost, for not mattering enough, for acknowledgment that will never be. So I cried and cried until Ian McCulloch started singing about vegetables. My husband turned to me and raised his eyebrows. We started to laugh.
I really am lucky.
Echo and the Bunnymen play "Silver" in Oakland, courtesy of some fellow fan: