Pent-up heart
Last night before going to sleep, I wrote a bit in my journal (so much to say, so little ability to say it clearly right now) and then listed the things I wasn’t going to let myself be woken up by, but maybe I would let enter my sleeping mind because my waking mind is all pent up. OK, self, I wrote, you can have the dreams about loss and guilt and invisibility and other long-term themes. One of us has to confront this stuff, and if it has to be you, my sleeping mind, my subconscious, so be it. If the dreams are important, you may wake us up, but not if you don’t have to. (Write interrupted at minute eight by the boy coming downstairs to tell me he threw up [a common occurrence during his illnesses – apparently he drank some water too quickly; as I type this I hear one of the cats throwing up … another common occurrence], getting him situated on his sick couch, talking with the groggy husband. Now to begin again.)
3:30 a.m. I was up. I was trying to go back to sleep. On with the meditation track, the slow climb of relaxation up my body from toes to scalp (thank you for the CD recommendation, Betsy). Not quite asleep, not quite asleep, and then in came the boy, not as feverish, still a little whispery with whatever imaginary scenario was playing in his head. Somehow we both fell asleep and then my dreams were of driving. He was driving, I was coaching, until I realized that the maneuverings of the car were too complicated for him. So I took over, tried to get out of the parking lot, but was blocked at both exits, so I drove back and forth between them, until the semi moved or the pick-up drove off, and I was going up the ramp too fast and then I woke up again.
The boy had fallen asleep with one of his arms around my back. The soon-to-be toothless cat Nick was howling his angst to the ceiling, and I had dream hangovers, this bereft image of sitting alone in my high school cafeteria, followed by the slight rush of the dream me at the wheel, parenting, taking over. I want to choose the last dream as the one to stay with me, but it’s the other dreams that are more representative of my internal state. I am invisible to myself at the moment.
My heart is compressed. My eyes are dry.
But sometimes my heart opens up. Yesterday early afternoon, I felt it, the blossoming, the sudden access, a reaching out that I can’t explain. I felt the connection, I was in the moment, I enjoyed it while it lasted, this portal to another. The day covered it over, but I know my heart is in there, waiting for me to let down the gates again. I just need a good cry first.
From the prompt "What a loser."
Image by naosuke ii.
Traveling to Xanadu
On the days when you need something more (during the crisis, during the rise to a fall, the aftermath of the inevitable ill-advised move: thank you, ladies), you can hire one of them out to talk to you, to hold your hand over coffee or – even better – over a night of alcohol and tears. This is how it used to be, back when you knew more women, back when you were all free to talk and sleep in and worry yourselves about men and the future.
The women remember, too, though some of them are less prepared than others. The unprepared don’t know your back story, they come straight from another person’s narrative. They’re here for the break, for the thrill, for a night off with the teetering headcase from an off-kilter world. They want to blur the lines with you, to break out of the narrative arc. Others, the weathered women, the ones who started this thing with you back in the seventies and eighties, when you all had plump cheeks and bellbottoms and (later) shoulder pads (before the days of knits: this was the time of paisley and snaps and high-waisted pants, of hair that hung over foreheads in threatening swoops), they get it, they understand your story and sometimes you get to hear theirs, because they have authors, too, a whole separate life lived in a fictional landscape.
From the prompt "Where I want to go," dedicated to the psychiatrist who prescribes my antidepressants who advised me recently that I need more female friends. Umm, yeah? They are out there, but I don't talk to or see them often enough. I guess I should be grateful for Nora, the girl dog in my life.
More no-sleep, more kid-sickness. The poor boy had his traditional sickness puke in the middle of the night. I hate when he is sick and miserable, both for the way he feels (I can do so little about it and I always worry that it is something major, some terrible illness) and for the way life gets compressed.
Finally, from wikipedia on Xanadu, relevant to the time of high-waisted pants and shoulder pads, on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song "Welcome to the Pleasuredome": In their debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome which rocketed to rank one in the UK charts in its very first week in 1984, Frankie Goes to Hollywood referred to the poem in the title track. While they changed the poem's starting line In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A stately pleasure-dome decree to In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, A pleasure-dome erect, they delivered an atmospheric video that interwove contemporary mid-80ies youth culture with elements of a fictious Xanadu themepark. This is appropos of nothing but the associations of my tired mind, plus (as a survivor of mid-80s youth culture) I like the video description.
Image by Athena.
Ringing true
Nora led me on the slow walk along Dwight. She concentrated on sidewalk scents, the deep contemplative sniff, totally ignoring the grumble and gunning of car engines and their acrid exhaust. She’s getting older and I cut her some slack, let her enjoy the spicy roots of roses and street trees, the metallic bitterness of security gates. Outside the store, I tied her to the stoplight post, knowing from experience she hated to be left out. She jumped and barked and pulled at her leash as I entered the double doors.
Bamboozled is for last chances, last-minute alcohol, milk for when you run out, bananas for a burst of health after the fried fish sandwich. Most people come here for six-packs and lottery tickets, for the cigarettes behind the register.
The girl at the counter, glossy black hair, cinnamon skin, was speaking into a mobile phone in a language I didn’t know. Somewhere behind her my pack waited, anticipating the tap-tap of nervous hands, the ceremonial unwrapping of cellophane, my trembling choice: which one would burn first? Even through the closed door I could hear Nora's yelps. The girl made eye contact. I put an empty hand to mouth and inhaled deeply, pantomimed the satisfaction of holding and releasing smoke. Phone crooked between ear and shoulder, she turned to the cigarettes, letting her hand pass from brand to brand. I nodded when she got to Camel Lights.
This was the start of my escape and I noted the details: the dog's distress, the store's faint odor of disinfectant, the rows of 12-packs in the sunlight, the layer of dust on the cans of Coco Lopez. I dug into my back pocket for a ten and one of my fingernails bent against the denim. The girl and I slid our offerings across the counter, my cash for her cigarettes. A pale scar divided the back of her hand in two. Someone stuck his head in the door to ask if anyone knew whose dog that was, the distressed one tied to the post? She's mine, I told him and ran out to Nora, leaving my change behind (oh, her dance of recognition, of joy in not being abandoned she gave as I freed her from the post). We continued our walk to University, past Indian restaurants, cafes, and small grocery stores, turned left, and went to the water.
Cesar Chavez Park, a former landfill, juts into the bay. The grass is uneven, the ground underneath lumpy and booby-trapped with gopher holes. As Nora obsessed over gophers and ground squirrels, I looked across the water. San Francisco glittered in the distance, a taunt for what I could never have, another thing to bemoan, and my chest ached.
But suddenly the feeling changed. This is the mystery, the real topic of fiction: that moment of change -- is it a moment? A process? What brings it on? What is the key to the transformation? Did the kites flying above push me toward acceptance? Was it the family picnicking near us, two silent and exhausted parents watching their chubby toddler rip up handfuls of grass? Had I been working on it unconsciously all along? This was when my heart shifted toward truth and yet I can't get at the truth of the moment, at least not here.
As we left the park, I sent the pack of cigarettes sailing into a trash can, a sacrifice to note my sacrifice, an acceptance of the delicate balance in my life between ambiguity and love, novelty and stability, lightness and darkness. Cleansed by bay breezes, baptized by the city's exhaust and the hum of the highway, Nora and I returned to the humid familiarity of home.
That night I woke to chains dragging and ghosts howling, the sound detritus of a rowdy party up the street. But I was having a dream, too, of coming to the edge of the impossible, flirting with it while knowing it was impossible. I kept changing my clothes, rejecting my outfits, my disguises. Nothing fit or it was dirty or ripped, long out of style or season. The impossible and his progeny waited for me. In the end I told them to go on ahead. I would make it to our destination on my own in whatever identity fit.
Yesterday morning I did tell my husband I was going out for a pack of cigarettes (har har har). It was day four of the boy's illness and my husband was also laid up (and continues to be) after hernia surgery. I felt trapped by other peoples' needs. A dog walk, some studying, some time almost-alone, and a little more sleep helped shake the feeling. There is nothing to escape. This is my life and I am committed to it and to whoever we will become, me, the man, and the boy.
Besides, I already have a pack of cigarettes in my desk, a remnant from the truly horrible spring of 2011. The pack is almost full. I’ve never finished a cigarette. But I like the fact that it is waiting for me in a drawer, that I can take on the role of rebel or angry girl or self destructive harpy without taking it on at all. Because I am not any of these things.
It doesn’t mean that I can’t return in my mind to the time when home meant my erasure, that I can't wear the dark coat and scuffed boots even on a sunny October day. The cigarettes and stories act as a pressure valve for my dark side. I dance with the impossible in my dreams and I return to reality when I awake. In my first version of the cigarette story, the fictional me got to the edge of the bay and kept on going. The water submerged her. The dog barked as it swallowed her up. But there was no point to this ending, no transformation, just the further disappearance of self.
It didn't ring true.
I got very absorbed in this one -- probably best to think of it as a work in progress.
Image by meddygarnet.
She visits in the night
Restless, I woke at 3:37 this morning to a thump at my room door. At some point in the night, the dog had gone from my side to the blanket on the floor, but she was still asleep. I knew that the woman was eyeing me, just like I knew she was beside me last night before I dropped my book and turned off the light.
I’ve been reading about beauty and brutality, about the forces that make us who we are, about what it means to be human. It’s a mix of fact (the psychology of personality, though I think calling it “fact” may go too far) and fiction (The Bone People by New Zealand author Keri Hulme, a book so sad and violent and blurry with drink, child abuse, and self-pity that I’m not sure I can finish it, no matter how luscious the writing). Maybe the book influenced my night, reading that last scene of whiskies and beers and bottles of port all consumed before tea time, the prelude to broken glass and a blow to the head. I have lived in the drunken haze of a spring afternoon in a bar where day was night, but I have never beaten a child. I have never taken my displacement, my lack of connection, out on those weaker than I, at least not tangibly, my fist against their flesh.
Still, my poor sleep last night might have been for other reasons. The house could be haunted. Someone is watching me. My checkbook disappears and then shows up again days later in its rightful spot. I lose stuff, strange things, like bottles of shampoo and favorite pens. During the rains last week, the sheets of water rattling the skylights, I woke up to a door slam downstairs (it was the wind, the wind). When I slunk to the bathroom, I refused to look in the mirror for fear something else would look back, something I could only see in reflection, the spirit behind me, my shadow's opposite. The boy woke up in a panic, too, and we spent half the night in a cuddle, both of us scared for only slightly different reasons.
Shapes flow at the edge of my peripheral vision. I am not alone. I talk to the air and explain myself: Don’t watch me, I tell it, him, her: this isn’t me. I am somewhere else, inside my head, dancing on an empty stage, performing for no one but myself.
I didn’t go back to sleep this morning. The boy is home sick for the second day in a row (he is watching The Hobbit for the 20th time as I type across from him. I like to watch the emotions roll across his face like waves, his unfiltered reactions). Tomorrow my husband goes in for hernia surgery and I’m afraid that I will be home again with the boy, unable to support my husband at the surgical center and unable to be fully present at home.
When I don’t sleep, my outlook is bleak. I remind myself that it’s the insomnia talking, giving me guilt and worry, telling me that my luck is about to run out, that I don’t deserve a damn thing anyway, that the fates will figure it out soon enough. They will take away.
The woman sits in the room with us. Her knitting is loose and disorganized, her eyes glassy with lost memories. At night she sheds years. She wears black wool. Her long, dark hair gleams again. The woman visits each of us in our respective chambers, runs her hand along our frowsy sleeping heads. She stares at us until we stir, hoping to meet the eyes of the living one more time.
Image (from a Victorian ambrotype) by colodio.
Feed me
Actually, today there will be an escape. Back when I thought I had my career counselor meeting today, I scheduled a babysitter to watch the boy in the morning. He's not so sick that he needs me by his side constantly (though I will call the doctor about this fever thing). Even though my meeting was yesterday -- a meeting I ended up having on the phone -- I am still getting out of the house today. I am going to wander the sidewalks. I am going to get a pedicure. I am eating lunch in the open air and sunshine.
Here's what I've been up to: going through boxes of maternity clothes and things from early baby life. Reminiscing about long thin interrupted nights, the struggles to feed, remembering the worries about milk leakage during my rare forays into the world, all the other women in my moms' group checking for tell-tale spots on each other's nursing tops. I'm finally selling the cloth diapers from those sleep-deprived early months, the hallucinatory nights followed by zombie mornings. I talk to pregnant women on the phone, women who are as confused as I was about the complicated world of cloth. I've listed baby carriers on craigslist and I've cleaned up the miracle blanket for sale, that swaddling cloth that the boy absolutely hated.
I wake up way too early or in the middle of the night, Nick the cat howling for the streets, the boy's burning feet resting on my calves. I've been trying, and probably not succeeding, to eat enough. The antidepressants suppress my appetite (in addition to causing insomnia, though my current bout is more complicated than that -- think it might be time to actively encourage the boy to stay in his own bed all night) and I'm pretty sure I've lost a few pounds, not that I had it to lose. I am trim and model thin and, despite the four a.m. catcalls that pull me out of bed, I continue to function, though my mind is slowly slip, slip, slipping away.
I want to escape all of this through writing something transcendent, amazing, lyrical, but I don't have it in me right now. I attempt to escape through fantasy, through my imagination, but the scenarios I come up with taunt me, they leer with knowledge of what I can't have and what I should be focusing on instead. I know this is a blip in my life, that all will be well soon, but that doesn't stop me from feeling weary and whiny.
So I complain to you. I anticipate our four day weekend off the grid, my computer resting at home, my cell phone hibernating in the glove compartment. We'll sleep under the stars, under mosquito netting. We'll splash in the water and hike the trail. Maybe without cats or computers or digital clocks, without many obligations to drag me away, with the boy safely tucked in his own cot, I will sleep. I will gather ideas, snippets of conversation and snatches of sunlight.
The balance will tip. I will be satiated, full up on life.
Hipstamatic image of my hair and the front window by me.
I'm not back yet
But I will be next month.
My mother's visit, followed by the kid's illness, my trip away at the end of this week, and the beginning of the school year are conspiring to keep me from blogging.
Thank you for all your kind words on Zoe and writing, and see you in September!
Images: Top, the Golden Gate bridge from the Marin Headlands. Bottom, trying out some doors at Battery Mendell in the Headlands, where they apparently paint to match the ocean.
Welcome to New Jersey, where the Santas stare all night
The kid at Belvedere Castle in Central Park on a chilly (but not rainy) Wednesday.
Santas in the pantry at my father and stepmother's house, watching me as I hopped onto a neighbor's wireless connection at 3:00 in the morning (Eastern time) on Friday.
Me and the kid at the long-term parking at SFO, 10:00 a.m. (Pacific time) on Friday. The kid stayed awake through the entire flight, even after being up since essentially the middle of the night, even though he was also sick. As we reached our stop on the parking shuttle, his eyelids finally started to flutter and I staggered off with him flopped in my arms.
More words on Monday.
Twenty-four hour party person
With the change, I also implemented a new commenting system, Disqus, in the hopes that some of the issues readers were having with the other system would go away. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the comments I imported into the system were not linking to my posts. I was also not thrilled with the location of the completed comments, which appeared down at the bottom of the page. So I've switched back to JS-Kit Echo, except that as of Monday night all of my old comments were floating around in cyberspace, unattached to the posts that prompted them. I apologize if one of your comments is out there, either from the brief reign of Disqus or the somewhat spotty ongoing commentship of JS-Kit Echo.
Everything else has changed, too though the language has stayed the same for the most part. Take a look around and leave a comment or email me to let me know if something works or doesn't work for you. You might also learn something new about me, discover another reason why I'm here.
So here you go. I hope you like it. I'm sure I'll be tweaking things over the coming weeks.
Image: Big Skully as angel, December 2009.
Edited 22 March to reflect change in commenting interface and to add all sorts of other stuff, too.
I promise that, after two days of sunshine, I will smile
What is it about my son’s illnesses that plunge my life into despair, knock me into a pit for the duration? Four days at home with a sick four-year-old, four nights of not-enough sleep, his body sandwiched between my husband and me in the middle of the night, exuding heat, the constant bark of his cough punctuating my waking dreams.
“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it out,” we told him Wednesday night as he hovered over the sink. His coughs have been from the center of his body, deep and hoarse. He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed again, and threw up into the basin. It was very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned. "Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up, is it?"
“I used to cough until I threw up when I was a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back. “It happened to me all the time.” It did. I had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I lived in a series of mildew pits, that I slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew and cats and probably the cigarette smoke that twisted through my grandparent’s place. Used tissues would pile around me like snow drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic” coughing fits.
The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember turning it over in my mind, that these terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom, for being a bit of a hysteric herself.
The unfortunate thing about running on fumes, about being stuck to the side of a sick boy for four days – I have no perspective. I wish I could tell you of the helpful doctor who helped me manage my asthma, who held out her hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor, though I did at least get an inhaler.
The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped, except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if you don’t want to be helped people generally don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way, but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a funk it only drags you down further.
But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a week of health for the boy and the rest of us and I will leave the funk behind. I promise you that everything will be different, that I will smile back at strangers, will embrace friends and acquaintances. After the long gray winter, spring will come again and I will be filled with warmth and perhaps something resembling happiness. Or contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the absence of grayness.
Image: Kid in between colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a time someone helped you
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block, the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I will rub my hand against it before I enter the room, think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside, lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the way you would expect. It had nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.
Image by Vinje.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't write about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.
Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.
Catch up and a writing prompt
So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.
But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.
White
Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.
Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.
White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.
“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.
I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.
They are totally unrealistic.
The wonderful, the not so good, and the unknown
Then, the unknown: my father found this blog. This is not a shocking development, since there is at least one link out there with my full name that points to writing to survive. What does it mean? I don’t know. I hope it means an open line of communication. And that’s all I’ll be saying about it here. Some things are meant to be – yes – private.
Finally, happily, the wonderful: two fine bloggers gave awards to writing to survive in the past week.
John of Storied Mind passed along the Brilliant Blog Award, which is quite an honor from someone who I think has a brilliant blog! The premise behind Storied Mind is that writing and creating stories about one’s experience with depression can help break through its deadening effects. Storied Mind also aims to create a community, a place where people can gather and discuss their experiences with depression. All of this is beautifully done, with thought-provoking posts that dive deep into the experience of mood-related disorders and what may work to reach clarity. Thank you, John. I am truly honored.
Kimmy of The Eagle The Lion and The Dove passed another award my way, the I Love Your Blog award. Kimmy’s blog is all about focusing on the light in darkness, seeking the beauty in the world and ourselves, knowing that none of us is perfect. It’s a great dose of daily inspiration. Thank you, Kimmy – I’m so happy we found each other via Entrecard!
As a way to share the love and highlight some outstanding blogs that are part of my daily reading, I am planning to have monthly reviews, with a feature on my sidebar linking to the Blog of the Month. Stay tuned for the October selection.
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.
Buzzer beater
(Begin boring complaint)
First, C got sick. Then H developed the same cold. When C gets sick, he sleeps like the baby he once was: poorly. Also violently, with lots of tosses and turns and kicks. When H gets sick, he snores more. My cold symptoms started on Tuesday, the same day C developed pink eye, guaranteeing that daycare was a no-go for Wednesday. Babysitter doesn't want pink eye either. Finally, after the first night of good sleep in five nights, yesterday C decided to skip a nap. I have pink eye for the first time since third grade. And I've spent most of his nap time today cleaning up in preparation for the babysitter (at least his pink eye went away).
(End of boring complaint)
Now he is awake. 'Later.
Throw it away
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
experiment
the kid is asleep on my lap. the husband is asleep by my side. the visiting brother-in-law is coughing downstairs.
and I can't reach my cup of coffee.