Liminal musings

I have spent the last several months sitting on the couch, occupying the chair, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve completed the entire output of Denise Mina, consulted a credible psychic medium who did not follow up (was it me? was it her?), and written journal entries with asides to my imagined survivors. I, along with my partner, have cajoled, encouraged, and supported the boy, life changes around the corner for all of us, some presumably more permanent than others.

 The other shoe has started its leisurely, tragic fall. My body is signaling its age (the pain that radiates at odd moments from my left shoulder—an errant shrug, an arm tossed out to avoid a potential stumble, the resulting sharp heat that takes a minute to ease). I experience troubling symptoms that are statistically unlikely to indicate cancer, but still could indicate cancer, and await the outcome of an upcoming appointment, perhaps appointments, with a specialist.

 It's not all drawn-out endings and liminal musings. Somehow, surrounded by reminders of mortality and change, I feel ok. But perhaps that will all shift next week, when I am armed with new knowledge, the possibility that I am closer to ashes and grit than I really want to be. I have people to attend to, a child on the cusp of adulthood, a family member weeks away from the grave, and a husband who needs me on this side of the veil. But I’ll deal with that knowledge when and if it arrives.

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.