Lost

At night I mold myself around the sleeping forms of cats, Liam at my feet, Pippin at my knees. I wake to the howls of Asher, our third, half-deaf feline, hear the panicked barks from the galgo downstairs when our CSA box arrives post-9 p.m.. Too early some mornings, I pull myself out of bed. I make the oats. I put away the dishes. Hugo, greyzoi, all legs and snout, curls next to me on the coach and offers his soft, bony chest.

 The animals and I bide our time in the dark. This is a year of in-betweens, a boy finishing up childhood, a brother-in-law closing out a life. Twelve months from now, nine months from now, six months from now we will be transformed. You can’t live as if every moment is temporary, but I feel it so keenly. This, too, shall pass. Nothing will ever be the same. I am not the same as I once was, the bottles of IPA, the long dinners out, the feeling like the future was unknown and exciting.

Who was I? Who am I? Who knows. Reinvention, rediscovery, reification, the necessary illusion of solidity, of a self that persists—I miss that fantastical, emotional, me, loose, sometimes chaotic, connected inside and out.

I hope I find her.

Preparation

It’s another Sunday of triangulation, the three of us in the living room, one working because his work overflows, one studying and completing homework because his school schedule is intense, and one who should be writing but can’t really focus on much of anything but filling out mock-ups of the Common App and scraping the Reddit barrel for gleanings of college application process wisdom.

I knew this fall, the boy’s last in school, would be tough, that not only would his workload be huge (with a total of five Advanced Placement classes this semester—his choice, not ours), but that the extra work of applying to college would toss us all into a tizzy. It’s delicate writing about it here, given that I am a parental participant, a quasi-bystander. The process is the boy’s, with us as prodders and cheerleaders. Complications emerge. Stress levels rise. Sleep suffers.

I’m not sure I would believe the intensity if I weren’t living it, and I may be at a loss for how to explain how stressful it all is. Take one child, seventeen years of love, connection, and investment. Our family is like a gilded tapestry, tightly knitted, the boy our the golden thread, the flash of light, against the dusky tones of his parents. Add in our histories, a (long-ago) year of mysterious illness, pets come and gone, and mix in a mixed-bag pandemic—we are as one.

Next year at this time, he will not be in this house. OK. This I can mainly accept, knowing it will take time to adjust. I can even accept that we will not know until spring (at the earliest) where the boy will be going to school. It’s just these months of focus, grades, test scores, essays, showcasing the best of him, the most authentic of him, with a kid who hates the process. This against the anxious knowledge that change is ahead. When he is tugged loose from the family fabric, what will happen? What awaits him? How will we adapt?

But these are higher level questions. Now is nag, love, support, accept. In four months, the application process will be done. And all will be fine. He will be fine. We will be fine.

Carrying

This is my arm yesterday, Saturday, July 16, early afternoon, with Marin County in the background. The car was too hot and the air through the open window was not enough. I couldn’t take my eyes off the way the glass’s shadow marked my skin, hence this photo. It pleases me with its echoed shapes and layers, some of which were invisible to me when I snapped the shot.

Lately I’ve been angry, constantly irritated. No one listens. I am never alone or too alone. I am sure someday I will be totally alone. My work is difficult and often unappreciated. I feel burned out half of the time, deeply engaged for the rest. My friendships are dying through neglect, contempt, and hurt feelings. I question friendship, I question love, and don’t know if I have it in me to be a good anything to anyone anymore.

But the extra thing that pleases me about this photograph – or perhaps surprises me is the better way to put it – is that my arm looks just like my father’s. I had no idea I was carrying around these pieces of him. What else do I carry? Who, and what, I am connected to through fate and blood? I am a person of fragments gathered into a fractured, viable whole.

In my mind I'm going to Cecil Count

I recently learned that my first love has fallen on hard times, his wife of many years leaving him high and dry. Pushing sixty, all his financial eggs in one basket, he is emotionally and financially devastated. This is a man I tend to romanticize. The youngest of four with a boisterous extended family, he occupies my land of what-ifs, the fantasy place of perennial loneliness. For a brief, hollowed-out moment after hearing his news, nostalgia clogged my mind. I fell back into images of large family dinners, the conversation flowing, his family supporting us like a marriage bed, like a hug after a death, lulling me into a sense of ease. It was the kind of feeling I would get in elementary school when my grandmother picked me up for the weekend. It was a memory of safety and care, no need to worry. Someone else had their eyes on the wolves in the woods.

But the family I once knew is no longer. Nieces and nephews that did not exist when I knew this man are fully grown and married. His father is long dead, his mother in her 80s. We are the old guard now. As for the rest of it, the foundation of that relationship, I also remember the ways in which he was comfortable with stasis. Whether this is a relic of his childhood, personality, or years gone up in smoke is unclear. I do not have the full story, so I fill in the blanks.

And what of this nostalgia? Is it about being fourteen to his twenty, the nights of waiting and other sordid, obscure events? I had my own youthful fecklessness and cruelties, my emotional struggles projected on to him. Perhaps we had nothing in common except for timing and a certain shared sensibility, us against the world. Perhaps it all comes down to missing being young, being able to believe in the illusion of endless possibilities in a world that felt less bleak.

I have a child that will be in college soon, a young person who lives at a time in which climate change cannot be denied and certain rights are no longer guaranteed, in which the rabid minority hopes to control the ineffectual majority. My project of the last eighteen years is almost complete. I am not the same person I was when his father and I became parents. We must now create meaning in a world that feels objectively meaningless and cruel. Reinvention is necessary for emotional survival. My hankerings for seventeen, for my naïve adolescent stupidity, are understandable. In my mind I’m going to Cecil County, sinking empty beer bottles in the Bohemia, listening to Ted Nugent at full blast with no thought or worry about his politics, imagining a future in which me and my man would live on the same street forever and ever.

It’s not enough. The stone skips across the surface before dropping into murk. I know too much and living in a fantasy is counterproductive. But, as usual, writing it out helps me make meaning of it. It creates a story. It gives me control of the narrative. I write a foundation for the future, my gaze steely and my intentions set.

Note: I edited this post today (September 5) for two reasons. One is because I just realized I used the photo in a previous post. The other is to lightly edit what I wrote about this ex of mine. Though my regular readership has dropped down to almost nothing, this person could easily recognize himself. Perhaps he has already seen it (hello there.). I often forget that I am not writing in the dark, that writing anonymously does not protect others, and, well, words can cause pain. But removing the post feels cowardly. So, dear readers, both random and regular, mea culpa, mea culpa.

Fever dream

The fevers were a hallmark of our son’s sixth year. Each attack announced itself with a headache, sore throat, and vomiting. His temperature shot up, often hovering around 101℉ for three to four days, with three weeks in between the bouts if you counted from the first day of symptoms. We had no idea why these fevers were happening. They came on like clockwork, were not related to a virus, and were not contagious. Ibuprofen, when he could keep it down, helped bank his internal fires, but it didn’t change the frequency or length of his mysterious life-interrupting slow burns.

Between October 2011 and June 2012, the boy was “sick” in this way for over 40 days. I had no job outside of the house, and grad school was barely a twinkle in my weary eye. My time was the boy’s time, and time was our prison. We had a drill. Come headache, come stomach pains, come the conflagration, and the boy and I would retreat to our guest bedroom (aka the back room). I would set him up with ice water, a just-in-case bowl, movies, and endless runs of Curious George. We sat next to each other in bed, the boy’s cheeks flushed scarlet, patchy with heat. He watched TV, sometimes read. I scoured the internet looking for answers.

I became a medical sleuth. My father provided me with a (sobering) family medical history, heavy on depression and autoimmune diseases. Based on bloodwork (the result of a terrible trip for a blood draw, the boy mid-attack, that ended in him vomiting in the car), the boy’s fevers did appear to be inflammatory in nature, his immune system gone awry. Was a paternal great-aunt’s hospitalization as a child in the ‘30s, two years of adolescence lost to “Saint Vitus Dance” one clue to the boy’s struggles? Or did my grandmother’s years of mysterious, debilitating illness, eventually attributed to Addison’s disease and lupus, contribute? The family history of diabetes (grandfather, father, aunt) or thyroid issues (father, me) may also have been precursors to the boy’s fever attacks.

My mother’s family health history remained remained a mystery. Adopted as an infant, later denied contact by her birth mother, her biological father a mystery man, her background was a blank slate. Finding out more about her history, our history, became the second part of my focus that year. I had her mother’s likely name and hometown, ancestry.com DNA leads, and practically unlimited time. As Jack Sparrow sparred his way out of sticky situations for the umpteenth time and Mr. Fox outsmarted Boggis, Bunce, and Bean yet again, I mined the vast information stores of the internet to identify our genetic antecedents.

It doesn’t take much to track someone down. There are sites out there that do the dirty work for you for a low price. If, like me, you have an obsessive, curious, and determined mind, as well as the time to indulge it, these sites are superfluous. When caught up in a search, I leave no link unclicked. In previous, non-family focused deep dives I uncovered an arrest record for a former middle school crush, gawped at an awkward high school yearbook photo of myself at barely fourteen, and cringed at the fundamentalist ravings of a former classmate. In this case, I was helped by census records from the 1940s, which taught me more about my grandmother’s family and, along with DNA-informed hunches, helped narrow down the potential name of my grandfather. News stories and other records revealed that my grandmother, who was seventeen when she had my mother, married less than two years later and had another daughter a couple of years after that. I also located a marriage announcement for that daughter, my half-aunt, and discovered she had become a psychotherapist.

On a typical feverish March Tuesday, the back room pulsating with the usual feelings of boredom, anxiety, and frustration, I was paging through hundreds of hits on my grandmother’s family name and hometown, another search in the dark. This time I uncovered something surprising. It was news story from (oddly) a Canadian paper. The article described a late July afternoon in Delaware, a girl’s older brother, fifteen at the time, hearing her screams from a cornfield. The brother runs into the house, grabs a shotgun, runs back out again, and unloads the gun in the direction of his sister’s fleeing assailant. I imagined that green expanse of corn rippling in the humid breeze, the moment of realization on his part, the endurance and fight on hers. The girl’s attacker, an Army private, was later discovered with a shoulder wound at the local base. The girl, who was named in the article (as was her brother), required treatment at a local hospital. She was eleven.

My pulse quickened. The room, stuffy with the remains of picked-over nachos, heavy on the jalapeño and congealed cheese, suddenly seemed even more oppressive. Curious George snickered from the television. Glancing over to see if I was paying attention (I was not), the boy emanated heat. The kids’ names checked out. They were the right ages. This was my grandmother and great-uncle.

My initial response was one of disbelief, that I had found the article, that she had experienced such a traumatic event. The second was a complex, strange brew of feelings, two parts guilt to one part thrill. Trauma isolates. It separates you from others. You feel unseen and unwitnessed because you were unseen and unwitnessed. The places where I expected overlap between me, my mother, and her mother became more complicated. Trauma in its various permutations was a new connection. I felt less alone. I felt horribly sad. I also had more questions. Did her family help her make sense of the traumatic event, did they rally around her, or was she buried in shame? Did the attack make her vulnerable to other traumas, perhaps leading to the sex (consensual? nonconsensual?) that resulted in my mother’s conception?

My grandmother’s sexual assault (as I eventually learned it was) likely had nothing to do with the boy’s fevers. It would be a stretch to connect it to his overactive immune system. It wasn’t a fact that was necessary to find to find her. But it was a stark detail, a bit of traumatic personal history that I later learned she had kept secret (from her husband, from her daughter), much like she suppressed the fact of my mother’s existence. It deepened my curiosity about the ways trauma gets passed along, not only through experience and exposure, but through our DNA. What potential epigenetic traces does trauma leave across generations? The answer for the moment is unclear. In addition, research around the ways trauma is expressed genetically currently focuses mainly on complex traumas or those experienced by large swaths of the population. But the question continues to intrigue me.

The time of fevers ended the summer between first and second grade. It is unclear why they stopped. It may have been the “bad medicine” (aka cimetidine, which the boy originally took in its bitter liquid form) he was prescribed on a hunch that he had periodic fever, aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis, adenitis syndrome or PFAPA . He may have simply grown out of it. Over a decade later, I can look back on those lost weeks with a certain nostalgia—all that time with the small and cuddly version of the boy, the lack of responsibility for almost anything else, the world outside the back room flattened and unreal, a memory of a hallucination, a fever dream. In the process, I uncovered a personal history and piqued my curiosity about the unspoken connections between my grandmother, mother, and me. We were young once, and vulnerable. We were unprotected, unseen, stumbling along into the future, ignoring the pain within. But maybe we weren’t as alone as we felt. Maybe a witness after the fact is better than no witness at all.