Waiting room

The scene, a large living room in a medium-sized city in the San Francisco Bay Area. One child, newly 15, occupies a long sofa. To his right, a sleeping greyhound. On the midcentury modern coffee table, a sleek and simple bit of teak, he works out problems in preparation for a math placement test. Across from him, sitting in a chair bought at a Manhattan flea market twenty years ago, a man in his mid-50s scrolls down his iPhone, a pile of math printouts for review on his lap. To his right, a greyhound melts from his dog bed onto the floor. Then there's me, female, still 50, occupying another piece of teak modernity, the armrests polished and round, pale kitty curled to my right.

The boy went fishing with a friend this morning (masks on!). My husband and I went for a walk that turned into a 4.5 mile hike. We are toned and lightly tanned. Four plus months in to this pandemic, I am in the best physical shape I’ve been for years, thanks to lots of walks, hikes, and Bodyfit by Amy workouts. There will be no in-person school for who knows how long. My husband will be working from home for a similar amount of time. And I have started to see select clients in person with lots of precautions, though I am pretty much giving away my services to 80% of my clients online or in person. There is so much need and many of the folks in need do not have sufficient (or any) income to pay psychotherapy fees out of pocket (and insurance coverage is another thing altogether). Once I hear their stories, I can’t justify charging full fee. This feels good on one level and suboptimal on another.

We are a privileged group. Our income is stable and covers our expenses. We have access to many things, including technology, healthy food, physical space, health insurance and lots of time. Still, I worry about the effects of this isolation on the boy. I am sad and scared for the world and for people that don’t have our privileges. I worry about the earth. I do what I can in my small form of redistribution. But who knows what life will be like four, six, twelve months from now?

Did anything happen while I was gone?

It’s been a long time since I’ve used this space as an outlet, as a place to communicate. I almost let my squarespace wts account lapse, a kind of passive abandonment of the my long-dormant therapeutic writing space. But I’m not quite ready to let this space wither into an unoccupied domain name.

Finding time to write, to think in solitude, is harder now than when I first started the blog. Turns out being home with a teenager, another adult, and a host of other mammals while the adults have to work and teen hangs around (in a charming manner — we’re lucky duckies right now, really, which is a strange thing to say given the larger horrors of the pandemic and the state of things in the U.S.) — well, it takes up more time and space than parenting a toddler. And I’m not the tortured soul I once was. My internal writhing is at a minimum.

Still—I need to write. Sometimes about my work, which is tricky. I’m going to try an experiment. Once or twice a week, I’ll check in here. I know there aren’t many people reading at this point, so perhaps it will be like the early days of writing to survive. These won’t be polished, anguished posts. Just things I can fit into the spaces of a day. Likely short. Perhaps dull. Or not. We’ll see.

Lying in wait (a screed)

I’m feeling petulant in this week of disappointments, way too old to pout and sophisticated enough to know passive aggression when I display it, the urge to subtly pollute the waters, to leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouths.

Late cancellations in a full schedule. Those who take the easy out. The not-listeners and eager beavers. The ones whose motives are unclear even to themselves.

But here I am, sharpening the old pencil (readying the shiv?), a reliable carpenter in an unreliable world. Sure, I’ve slipped out the door. I’ve not returned the call. I have let the better part of me say yes and the worst part of me decide not to go at the last minute. And I have a job that prides itself on reliability and airing things out. 

Last night, I dreamed one of our greyhounds got away from me. We were walking along a California coastline cliff, some dream version of Point Reyes. The path was barely big enough for one person. Lorca was on lead, Hugo was not. His first disappearance was down to the water in a pack of other dogs. He frolicked. I called. He eventually returned.

The second time was my fault. The weather went from sunshine to snow. I sought higher ground, a wider path up the hill. Hugo did not come. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! I could not see him. The hillside steepened. Children created slick paths with their sleds, icy slopes to the lower path. Hugo! Hugo! Hugo! Lorca and I took a step along the hillside and the snow beneath us began to slip. I woke up to that sensation of falling, Hugo’s name still in my throat.

Sometimes, the responsibility of it destroys me.

From the prompt Lying in the wait

Surfacing

I keep a bowl full of crystals in my office. This is not for new age reasons. I do not focus on the healing, energetic properties of rocks. I find them beautiful and fascinating, something of heft and cut to hold in the hand, to trace with a finger, for a client to press into Crazy Aaron’s thinking putty and distract themselves with patterns. Some of the crystals have their outer skins, the dull rock they emerged from, still intact. The average person would never know the color and edge that rough dullness contains.

This is what I think of when I remember the Elk, a brown-green, mucky-bottomed river on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, weekend and summer cottage spot for the lower middle class of Delaware and Pennsylvania (at least in the 1950s-80s, when my mother and I were growing up). Appearances are deceiving. What this river contains is childhood, freedom, skinny-dipping, sex, the undertow of passing ships moving from the C&D canal to the Chesapeake Bay.

When my mother’s well went dry, she filled five gallon buckets with water from the Elk to tide her over. The first night I met D, it was in the parking lot next to the beach, a memory attached to memories that fill me with yearning, regret, and sadness. From the phone booth next to the clubhouse that my grandfather totaled when driving drunk to the homemade raft created from barrels and planks to the crab pots attached to the pier – crack open the memories, go beneath the surface, and what exists is something dead and gone and alive in my mind, in the stories I tell

From the prompt: Child swimming

Resolved

There was a time when I was self-propelled. My two feet transported this gamboling shamble on the road. I had a need for speed, was compelled to escape the wanderings of my mind and so went walkabout. That’s what I want to do today, to rush out in the rain, to flush out the bad and sad thoughts, to feel connected by running away.

Still. Upstairs the boy practices viola. The man naps in the back room. A dog and cat sleep beside me and another dog curls on the couch. The rain tosses itself against the window, repeating its name before it disappears into the earth. My placid, stationary feet rest on the hearth, gathering heat from a fire that I built and maintain.

This is not all joy. I struggle with connection and am, in many ways, more cut off from the wider world than I was a decade ago. I wonder whether I will ever allow myself to be truly vulnerable. Parts of me feel sealed away and I’m not sure whether I can make this life work for me without permanently pruning what feels untidy and untoward.

And there is joy. Laughter. The basic satisfaction of compatibility, of everything fitting together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle, simple shapes painted primary colors. With this sort of bland comfort, this predictable placement, who wants to show their jagged edges? I am torn between acceptance of this way of being, of continually sanding away the burrs—the anger, the hunger, the feelings—and figuring out how to make space for my ragged, full self. 

Surely I can be all of this, can let the rough patches touch smooth curves. I can wander and come back again, feel and express myself as I am. I am capable. My life has room. Freedom is possible. I choose two words for 2020:  honesty and connection. There is plenty of space to read between the lines, to make choices and create stories, to be alone and in community.