Poem of the week, month, year

Song

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

–Adrienne Rich

Where we are now

I’m sitting on my porch again, and it’s beautiful. It should be. I had the floor stripped and repainted, the screens redone, and spruced the joint up mightily. It’s time to list the house again. This time I’m serious. The slanting floors are being replaced and structurally re-configured at great expense, and things I’ve been meaning to paint for years are finally getting painted. I have been madly pruning in the yard. I have thrown away bag after bag of detritus, donated carloads of clothes/books/furniture/appliances, watched as passers-by removed item after item from the curb. (I should hold a garage sale, but there is something deeply gratifying about putting things out front with a “FREE” sign taped to them, and seeing who stops to pick them up. And god knows I have scavenged plenty off of the street–everything from armchairs to easels to oriental rugs–in the past.)

With help from my boyfriend and consoling-windows friend and my kids, I’ve filled a dumpster with–let’s be blunt, shall we?–crap from a decade’s worth and more of family life. A giant house, a garage, and a basement make it all too easy just to put the broken television set, the outgrown bicycle, the slightly-flat basketball, the ancient Macintosh computer, the crib and its mattress, et cetera et cetera somewhere other than the municipal dump, or Goodwill. We have cleaned and re-caulked, disassembled and reassembled various items of furniture (the bunkbeds are no more; the old smelly sofa is gone forever) culled the shelves of books (a phrase I never thought I’d type), rearranged, stored, stowed, dusted, wiped, vacuumed, and mopped. I’ve pruned and planted, weeded, raked, clipped, repotted. And nothing is quite finished, of course, but the end is finally in sight.

Will it all have been in vain–more work by far than I did the first two times I listed the house, more extensive repairs, more cosmetic touchups, more money by a factor of about twenty (my ex-husband, though he does not help, is bound by the terms of our divorce agreement to help pay) spent to try to sell the house? This time, as I said, I am serious, this time I have had enough. I wanted to sell as long as three years ago, of course, but back then the habit of living here was still very strong. When I think that I could have moved out in the first place and left my ex-husband here, and that I did not, I could weep. 

But there is no point second-guessing decisions made by whoever I was back in the throes of separation and divorce–I did the best I could. I honestly thought that the kids needed to stay here, and that I needed to stay with them, though I now think I was wrong–I think I could have taken even a tiny apartment somewhere close by, and they would have been fine. But no matter. All I can do now is finish what needs to be done, and try not to think about how little control I have over any of this.

The contractor claims he’ll be finished with the floor/ceiling repairs in a week. I’m dubious, but this is certainly good news. There are plenty of annoyances ahead–showing the house, coping with inspections and financing and so on and so forth, finding a new place to live, then moving–even in a best-case scenario. I am trying not to think about what happens in a worst-case scenario, trying (with varying degrees of success) not to fret and worry pointlessly.  Sometimes it all seems rosy and wonderful, and other times I think that I have stupidly thrown a great deal of bad money after good, and we will be stuck here–poorer, but with level floors–forever.

“Fortunately, it doesn’t matter one way or the other what you think,” my boyfriend wisely said last weekend, as we painted the fiberglass garage doors in ninety-degree heat. And he’s right. Whether I feel optimistic or hopeless has no relevance and affects nothing. Whether I find this particular powerlessness Zen or wildly frustrating also has no bearing on what will or won’t happen. I woke at three this morning having dreamed that the car I was driving had careened off a cliff–I watched my sons’ bodies float down to certain death, and knew I was falling too, until I woke up–and lay there trying to sleep for what felt like hours, pointlessly treading the same old ground in my head. Which is, as we all know, a patent waste of time and energy.

Right now the yard is sunny, the birds are singing, the windowboxes are blooming (though I accidentally killed a bunch of petunias by overfertilizing them) and it’s lovely on the porch. The kids and I saw the first lightning bugs of the year last night as we sat out here playing hearts. The cat, amusingly, went nuts trying to catch them in midair in the yard. The swim club is open, and we can ride our bikes down there. The house, once everything is finished, will never have looked more beautiful. Any intelligent person would try to enjoy her uncertain tenure here for as long as she possibly could.

Oedipus in Suburbia

So it’s summertime and everyone is out of school, which is great.  Secretly you welcome the built-in excuse to get very little accomplished, though you suspect that this summer might be easier than others…after all, the children are getting so big!  You live in a town where it is possible for kids to be very independent–they can ride their bikes everywhere, they can go to the pool and stay for hours unsupervised, they can get themselves over to their father’s house and to friends’ houses without any help from you.  They get up in the morning and go off to half-day camp–the younger is a camper, the older a counselor–all by themselves.  You’ll have them with you every afternoon and every day for lunch–you’ll have to make sure you have milk and sandwiches around, that sort of thing–but honestly, how hard is that?  It’s not like having babies or toddlers, for crying out loud.  In a way, you feel kind of guilty, like you’re not really doing enough to hold up your end of things.  Just because they’re independent doesn’t mean you should necessarily ignore them, tempting though it may be.

You decide that this will be the summer you make a real effort, instead of taking the path of least resistance (reading magazines at the pool day after day after day while the kids do god knows what, for example).  This summer, you’ll plan educational and enriching activities–picnics, museums, concerts.  You’ll take the kids hiking, even camping.  After all, your fifteen-year-old is overdue to turn all remote and teenagery, so your days of sappy, happy togetherness are numbered.  Remember the summer you were fifteen?  You spent it sneaking out of your parents’ house, smoking pot, and kissing boys.  So far your son seems innocent and pure, but perhaps your parents thought the same thing about you.  Maybe your son is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, up to no good behind your back. Maybe he’s just on the verge of turning wolfish.  Either way, if you keep him busy with lots of high-maintenance wholesome activities, he won’t have time to look for trouble.

The week after school lets out, your teenager certainly seems to be around a lot. When you wake up in the morning, the minute your feet hit the floor, he wanders into your room. (He’s used to getting up early for school, you suppose.  But why is the eight-year-old still asleep?)  He shadows you as you stumble around the house doing what you do every morning–measuring coffee grounds and turning on the machine, groggily unlocking the doors to the porch, shuffling out to get the paper.  The few seconds it takes to walk to the end of the driveway and back are more peaceful than the rest of your routine, and it takes you some time, in your sleep-addled state, to figure out why. Your son, who is disinclined to follow you outside, waits at the front door till you get back, at which point he picks right up wherever his morning monologue left off. He is full of news and observations. He would like your opinion about things. He would like to recount the plots of various television shows, the high points of South Park and Tosh, never mind that the two of you watched these television shows together the very night before, and that you are therefore up to date. Those seconds walking down the driveway, you realize, when his voice is coming from inside the house, are the quietest moments you get until he hops on his bike and pedals reluctantly down to the corner, calling an extra, wistful goodbye over his shoulder, and rides off to his job at camp.

You are not, nor have you ever been, much of a morning person.  Your ex-husband didn’t talk much at any time of day, and you’ve gotten rather used to easing into the day with a few minutes, even hours, of quiet.  During the school year, your older son gets himself up and off to school before you’re even awake, and your younger son prefers to get up at the absolute last second–he’s got it down to a science–that allows him to dress, bolt a bowl of cereal, grab his backpack, plant a kiss on your cheek, and tear down the street to the bus stop as the bus rumbles around the corner.  Not much time for chit-chat, which is just fine by you.

But now your mornings are uncharacteristically noisy. Your older son has beautiful blue doe eyes; they follow you adoringly as you pour out cereal and attempt to read the paper. You are like some cartoon from the 1950s, with you as the grouchy husband and your teenaged son as the talkative wife; in a vain effort to cut off conversation by cutting off eye-contact, you hold the paper directly in front of your face as you read. Your son is not deterred. He reads whatever headlines he can see out loud, and muses over their significance. What do you think, he would like to know? Your younger son, munching his cereal in silence, looks at you expectantly. You grip the paper tighter, mumble some reply, fight the urge to slam your hand on the table and hiss, through clenched teeth, that BREAKFAST is not an appropriate time for TALKING.

Finally, they leave. God, it’s peaceful. You repair to the porch, where you squander your precious child-free two and a half hours reading in an ecstasy of silence.

At eleven forty five exactly, your spine begins to tingle, and your shoulders hunch with dread. It is some sort of atavistic response–you remember the feeling vividly from your younger son’s babyhood, when it came on like a case of hives right before his never-more-than-forty-minute nap came to an end.  Forty minutes is not a lot of time.  You used to go and stare at your older son while he slept for hours and hours every afternoon, willing him to wake up already so you’d have an excuse to quit pretending to work on your dissertation. But the minute your younger son’s eyelids fluttered shut you’d fling yourself into naptime with panicked frenzy.  You’d inhale lunch while reading the paper, one eye on the clock, your nerves on fire.  When he woke, as he always did, by summoning you cheerfully, your heart sank.

This is exactly how you feel now, as you hear your kids biking happily up the hill to you. They call out from the corner, bursting with news. Well, the older one calls out. The younger one is busy fussing with the gears on his new bike, the first bike he’s ever had that isn’t a hand-me-down, and you get the impression he would wheel it into the kitchen and sit next to it at the table if he could. Your older son couldn’t care less about his bike, which is actually your old bike, come to think of it. He’s a good kid, to ride his mom’s bike without complaint. A very good kid–and a very fast kid, too, because he’s somehow managed to make it from the driveway to your side, all sweaty and shiny and talking a blue streak, while his younger brother is still pedaling dreamily down the sidewalk.

Lunch is a social event, during which you hear all about the kids your older son supervises at camp, while your younger son eats his sandwich according to his particular ritual, taking it apart and putting it back together before biting into it, humming to himself. Your older son narrates his morning in real time. It’s not enough simply to listen, though frankly you have a hard enough time just doing that. You are also expected to respond. You are meant to react. To laugh, to enquire, to take part. It’s what you’ve always tried to tell your kids to do–they have a social obligation to feign interest when a boring adult or teacher or even another kid engages them in conversation. It’s part of being a human being, you’ve told them, being polite and considerate even if you’re not terribly interested in what someone else is telling you. You are not terribly interested in what your son is telling you.

Well, you say to yourself, it’s only June. This is some weird transitional phase–it’s got to be. Remember how the transition from half-day kindergarten to first grade meant you got a wiped out, grouchy, weepy, starving child delivered every afternoon? Remember third grade? Remember the first summer after the divorce? There are bumps and stumbles, hills and valleys, and this one, though annoying, is certainly not the worst thing that could happen.

On the Fourth of July, you find yourself on a blanket with consoling-windows friend and her husband and son, along with your boyfriend and his daughters.  It is hot. Too many children want to sit next to you. Your boyfriend’s daughters want to braid your hair; your younger son wants to lie across your lap. Your older son, peeved, settles for a spot leaning against your knees, and the very close, sticky presence of so many children makes your skin crawl.

Consoling-windows friend snickers from her lovely, child-free side of the blanket while your older son presents every single firework as an object for discussion. Mom, did you see that one? Mom? Hey, that one was green. Whoa, that was a big one! Mom? Mom? Consoling-windows friend’s giggle is devastatingly infectious; when your son turns around to make sure you are right there with him as far as the latest explosion went, he catches you wiping away tears of suppressed mirth. His face falls into his shoes. “Am I bothering you?” he asks plaintively. “I just wanted to make sure you saw that.” No, no, you say, I’m just–it’s something else I’m laughing at, honey. It’s not you. Consoling-windows friend snorts. She has three sons, older than yours; you distinctly remember times when she could not so much as walk to the kitchen without being shadowed by some gangly, chatty, shaggy-headed creature in oversized clothes, who would stand behind her as she answered the phone, or wait patiently, mid-sentence, while she finished writing something down, or bend over to put his enormous unkempt head on her shoulder while she stood with her teeth clenched, trying not to flinch.

“They need girlfriends, or something, but they don’t have them yet, so it’s like we’re their girlfriends,” your brilliant wise editor friend tells you on the phone. Her middle son is also fifteen.  ”It’s worse than just the talking, though the talking is pretty bad. They also want to TOUCH you all the time.”  You shudder. This has recently become true. Your older son stands too close to you, always, and at the pool he has taken to occupying the lower half of the very chaise longue you are trying to stretch out on. Every day you attempt to foil his nearness by commandeering several lawnchairs, arranging them around you, and piling them high with pool-related detritus, to no avail. Your brilliant wise editor friend is nonplussed. A back injury forces her to work lying down in bed, and every night after supper, while the rest of the family disperses with their laptops or goes off to watch TV, her middle son follows her upstairs and mopes around until he makes his move. “He won’t go so far as to actually lie down on his father’s side,” she says.  ”Instead he scootches into the eight-inch space between me and the edge, and then throws his arm across my waist.” You chuckle indulgently–so far, thank god, your son draws the line at getting in bed with you.

He has, however, no qualms about summoning you to his bed–where he calls every night for you to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight, as if he were a toddler. He wants you to sit with him a while, chatting about this and that, rehashing the events of the day. Because you are seldom apart, these bedtime confidentials tend not to break a lot of new ground. But they’re not, truth be told, unpleasant. You lie across the foot of your son’s bed in the dark, half listening to him describe his second at-bat in today’s baseball game, or articulate some half-baked theory about why communism actually makes sense. Sometimes he talks about school, and sometimes about soccer, and sometimes–rarely–he asks you to weigh in on an issue he’s anxious about, and then listens carefully to your response. You remember your mom telling you that bedtime was when all the skeletons came out of the closet, that it made sense to sit with your kids for a few minutes every night, even if you were exhausted, even if you were desperate to get away. Kids will open up at bedtime, she said, in a way they won’t during the day. Getting your son to open up does not seem to be a problem, at any time of the day or night, but it’s actually quite relaxing there in the dark, and your son’s monologues are oddly soothing. And amusing, come to think of it. Perhaps you’re finally cracking under the pressure, identifying with your oppressor. He is the Symbionese Liberation Army, and you are Patty Hearst.

But if this is so, there’s freedom in your oppression. Driving to New Hampshire for a week in a cabin with your boyfriend and all four kids in the car is a veritable sitcom of delight. The teenagers are like some sort of vaudeville act–the younger kids goggle with admiration, while you and your boyfriend laugh and laugh. The whole week is like this. No one argues or sulks. The weather is beautiful. There are no petty squabbles, no quarrels, no conflicts. Your son is the funniest person you have ever met in your life.

This was last summer. Since then, he has turned sixteen, grown about five inches (he is now taller than you are, and you are reasonably tall), and started (unnecessarily) to shave. His voice is deep. He texts you from school, calls you from the bus, saves his best stories for you. When you laugh, his face lights up. He teases you for being his biggest fan; you tease him by saying he’s definitely the coolest person in the family, a popular crowd all to himself, and you’re a wanna-be, a mere hanger-on. “You’re so good for my self esteem, Mom,” he says, laughing at you laughing at him. “If a joke doesn’t go over at school I always say to myself, ‘Screw you guys, my MOM thought that was hilarious.’”

You remember the terrible twos, the even-terribler threes, the fucked-up fours. All in all, you vastly prefer the sweet sixteens. Turns out you and your ex-husband have managed to raise a nice kid, after all. You worried so much, and everyone warned you it would be awful. “Just wait till he’s in high school,” they all said. “It only gets worse.” And look what happened instead. It gets better and better, and although you suppose the tide could turn at any moment, you’ve given up fretting. Why sell your kid short? For now you’ll take him at his word when he tells you, as he does at night when you go in to kiss him, that he’s happy, that school’s excellent, that everything is actually (here he yawns, and turns over on his side) really great, Mom, it’s all good.

Love and Death

My sister-in-law, who was forty years old, died last week. A little over a year ago, she was diagnosed with a rare, inevitably fatal cancer; her death was therefore not a surprise. Still, the shock and horror–she died swiftly, her children are young, her parents are bereft, my stepbrother is devastated–of her death are undiminished by expectation, and there does not seem to be any way to make any of it all right.

I took my younger son to the funeral with me. We drove up the night before and slept over at my boyfriend’s apartment; the next morning, we took the subway to a commuter train, which whisked us north through a series of  beautiful, affluent suburbs in full bloom. My son held himself carefully on the train, mindful of his outfit–a hand-me-down jacket that was slightly too big for him, a new pair of pants I’d bought for his piano recital the week before, and his very first tie, which my boyfriend had knotted for him that morning. Coming with me had been his idea. “Maybe it will be nice for the cousins if I’m there,” he said, and I said I supposed he might be right. My stepbrother’s older daughter is nine, the same age as my younger son, and his younger daughter just turned five.

Despite the coincidence of the two nine year olds, and despite the relatively short distance between our houses, my stepbrothers’ daughters and my sons have never been close. They’ve spent time together at family gatherings, of course.  We’ve dutifully exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday presents and thank-you-notes, and we’ve kept track of each other via the family grapevine, but the kids don’t know each other well, haven’t grown up in each others’ orbits. And though my stepbrother and I were quite close when we were little–I wrote about our relationship, glancingly, here–we have not seen much of each other as adults. Sibling relationships wax and wane, especially when you grow up and out of the house, even more once you marry and have kids of your own. Once you start to spend holidays on your own or with your spouse’s family, you even lose the default see-you-at-Thanksgiving annual reunion. Of course, whenever I did see my stepbrother, the years fell away. But we crossed paths less and less the older we got, and I didn’t know his wife well at all.

Like my own ex-husband, she was not terribly interested in forging relationships with members of the family she married into. She was never obnoxious or rude about it; she simply kept her distance. This puzzled my parents, and my sisters, and me; was it something personal? Did she dislike us, were we coming on too strong, were we (an unlikely possibility) perhaps not coming on strong enough?  When she and my stepbrother visited our parents’ house, my sister-in-law would excuse herself early (my stepbrother would follow) while the rest of us stayed up playing Boggle. During the day, she’d inevitably absent herself in some harmless way–reading in her room, for example–for hours on end. “Shit, I didn’t even know you could DO that,” my sisters and I exclaimed, marveling at her nerve. Imagine–instead of straining to interact with the in-laws, you simply don’t show up!

It is odd to write this. It feels like speaking ill of the dead. I do not mean to imply that I disliked my sister-in-law–the fact is, I did not know her well enough even to have an opinion. She was inscrutable, and her relationship with my stepbrother was a mystery. What we knew was that they seemed to adore each other, and not to need or want much to do with any of us. After her cancer diagnosis, they became even more private. They did not want to discuss her prospects or the diagnosis with anyone; they did not want anything but to be left alone to cope.

It is surprisingly difficult not to intrude when people you care about are going through a bad time. I had googled my sister-in-law’s particular cancer; the five-year-survival rate was, everywhere I looked, given as zero. “Most patients die within a year,” the Mayo Clinic bluntly said. “Do not ask us what treatment we are pursuing, or what we expect will happen, or what we think the prognosis is,” my stepbrother wrote in an email he sent out to family and friends. And so we did not ask. We talked among ourselves, of course. We worried. We were sad beyond measure, thinking of their children, thinking of my sister-in-law, facing death at what should be the prime of her life, thinking of my stepbrother, about to lose the wife he adored. But we were put off, individually and together, by their absolute insistence that we leave them be. (I should add that my stepbrother has, through hard work in a lucrative field, made a truly colossal amount of money. This made it easier to swallow the idea that he and his wife had everything under control. They had access to, and the means to afford, any medical treatment they chose. They had the resources to cushion the horror they were facing with anything money could buy. They had full time hired help–they did not need anyone to bake casseroles or babysit or walk the dog or take turns driving carpool.)

There was nothing we could do for them, in other words. And nothing was exactly what they seemed to want.

The morning of the funeral, my father and one of my sisters picked us up at the train station. My son, tricked out in his tie and jacket, shook hands solemnly with my father. My sister looked beautiful, and it made me very happy to see her. (Is there always a family-reunion aspect of funerals that runs like a strange countercurrent to the main event? Until last week, I had, believe it or not, never been to a proper funeral before.) When we got to the temple, and my sister’s wife handed me their seven-month-old baby girl, saying “I know you’ll want to hold THIS,” and my beloved aunt and my stepmother and my youngest sister and her intended surrounded us, there in the lovely spring sunshine, I was happy, and slightly shocked at myself for being happy. The baby waved her arms and kicked her feet with joy. My nieces–the little girls whose mother had just died–marched right up to my son and started chatting. My stepbrother looked hollowed out by grief; still, he smiled when saw us, and hugged me hard and kissed me, and nuzzled my sister’s baby’s soft little head. There were pictures of his wife on the walls of the temple, pictures of their wedding, of their family on vacation, pictures in which she looked absolutely gorgeous, pictures in which she was clearly very sick. We were gently herded by the rabbi into an annex, where we stood with my sister-in-law’s family for a few minutes before the ceremony began.  I tried to remember the last time we had all been in a room together, and couldn’t.

The ceremony was devastating. I do not cry easily or often, but by the time my stepbrother gave the final eulogy I, like everyone else present, was in tears. My son buried his face in my lap, holding me around the waist so tightly it hurt. “I never thought she would die,” my stepbrother said at one point during his speech, and my two sisters, sitting on either side of me, stiffened in disbelief. How on earth, I wondered, as my eyes brimmed and my throat threatened to close, could he not have known she would die? ”Even her mom and dad said they didn’t realize how sick she was,” my father told me later, when we were back at my stepbrother’s house, surrounded by flowers and friends and food. “They kept everything so private, you see.”

I didn’t see, not at all. Two months before she died, my sister-in-law was rushed to the ER and put on life support.  While she was there, my stepbrother sent a series of mass emails detailing her progress–something he had never done. They were businesslike, no-nonsense dispatches charting her condition–which tests were negative, which results came back inconclusive–up until their very last sentences. When my sister-in-law was extubated, my stepbrother closed by saying, “I love hearing her voice.” A few days later, he wrote, “My wife kissed me today.” From my stoic stepbrother, these moments of tenderness made public were extraordinarily moving. And then my sister-in-law was released, and the emails stopped coming.

In his eulogy, my stepbrother described their final hours at home, before he drove his rapidly worsening wife to the hospital where she would lose consciousness and die within a day. “We were getting ready, and I broke down and cried, uncontrollably,” he said. “And she asked me what was wrong.” He cleared his throat, swallowed. “I didn’t tell her,” he said, staring out over our heads with the look of a man who knows he’ll go to his own grave haunted by regret. But it’s not that he wishes he’d confessed, I thought. He wishes he’d been braver; he regrets weeping in front of her. My god, it’s not just us. They never acknowledged even between the two of them the fact that she was going to die.

“I don’t want to say goodbye,” my stepbrother concluded, addressing my sister-in-law’s casket. “And so I won’t.”

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

We sat shiva at my stepbrother’s house for the rest of the day, if you can call it shiva when half the sitters are as anglo-saxon as it gets. It was a beautiful afternoon. My stepbrother’s older daughter found my son and me out in the garden eating lox and bagels (“There you are,” she exclaimed, hands on hips) and led him off to play. I stayed alone for a while, peaceful in the sunshine, forgotten by everyone. I was reluctant to look for my stepbrother, oddly skittish about seeing him after his speech.

In truth, his very expression, his thinly veiled desperation, his absolute refusal to accept what was inevitable, the fact that he had lived in fierce denial right up to and through the bitter end, spooked me a bit. The look on his face when he refused to say goodbye reminded me of the look my ex-husband wore for the dreadful months during which I insisted, and he refused to accept, that we simply could not stay married. My ex-husband, like my stepbrother, had thrived in what what a friend once called the “terrarium of modern-day marriage”. Whatever was left of his life after work, he poured completely into the little glass bubble that contained his wife and children, needing nobody else, wanting nobody else, refusing even casual relationships with anyone else. My stepbrother, an amiable guy, was not the type to build walls to keep other people at bay; but I had a feeling he’d been quite happy to let his wife build them for him, making it much easier  for him to retreat into their private world. “Some people pick spouses who can put up those barriers, because they can’t manage to do it themselves,” a friend told me at lunch a few days after the funeral. And some people, I thought to myself, pick spouses who allow them to opt completely out of the social and familial whirl, because their spouses whirl along happily on their behalf.

Not all marriages are like this, of course. But they can be. Such insular devotion is often praised, even envied, and I daresay it’s all well and good until somebody dies or gets divorced. The difference is that my stepbrother’s refusal to accept the loss of his wife seemed moving, passionate, even noble, I thought. While my ex-husband’s behavior came across as deluded and horrifyingly sad.

This was a pointless, even cruel line of thought, and I quickly abandoned it. Since when was divorce anything at all like early death? Just then my son came back, alone, and sat down beside me with an odd look on his face. I asked whether he’d seen his cousins’ playroom, which I’d heard was rather epic. Yes, he said, it was full of those things–what are they called? Princess hotels? “Castles,” I said, smiling. “So I’m guessing not a lot of nerf guns or Legos.”

He shook his head. He’d been given a tour of the whole house, ending with both girls’ bedrooms, which my older niece had led him proudly through. One of the bedrooms was very pink, he reported; the other was not quite finished. “She told me that her mom was really good at decorations, but that she didn’t know who’d finish everything now,” my son told me. “And then she stopped and said, ‘I’m kind of freaked out that I don’t have a mom any more.”

Christ, I thought. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘I’m really sorry. It’s so sad for you and your sister.’” He hugged me again, but he did not cry. When I felt I could speak, I went to find my stepbrother. It was getting late. It was time to say goodbye.

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The evening my sister-in-law died, my stepbrother sent a mass email telling friends and family that she had been admitted to the hospital the night before. “I love my wife more than she will ever know,” he wrote at the end.  My god, I thought, this is it, and I typed a frantic response.

“Oh honey,” I wrote. “She knows. Believe me, she knows.” And then I hit send, and nothing happened, because the internet and phone and cable all over town were suddenly down. I hit send again and again, and then I picked up the phone, which had no dial tone. The message is still there in my drafts folder, because by the time the internet came back up, my father had called my cell to tell me that my sister-in-law was dead. Presumptuous of me, really, to think I’d have a final, helpful word, to think I’d be able to give solace at the end of a long sadness I’d never been part of or understood. Still, I wish I’d been able to send that message. I wish he’d read it, no matter what it might or might not have meant to him, before she died.

Truth

The last few days have been hard–the house is going back on the market, but not without a series of expensive, necessary repairs, and we’ve been living in dust and squalor while demolition gets underway. The thought of the money I’ll have to spend has triggered a kind of generalized panic, and while I know it’s silly, I have recently been miserable in a way I thought I’d moved on from.  I have been filled with dread, dogged by nameless and superstitious anxieties, worried about the metaphorical ground under my feet, haunted by the deeply unnerving suspicion that all my choices in life have been, somehow, wrong. Logic can’t get a foothold on this kind of un-magical thinking; no matter what I tell myself, no matter how I berate myself for being stupid and self-indulgent, I have woken in the grip of bad dreams every night for a week, and spent my days feeling I was right on the razor edge of despair.

I have had the extreme good fortune never to have suffered from depression. My dips into melancholy are just that–the merest of dips, and I always find my way out of them. I’m not angling for sympathy or a pep talk, I’m just giving a bit of background. I went to the computer this morning, thinking I’d finish up my taxes; instead, of course, I found myself clicking around looking for something to distract me, to amuse me, to inspire me.

What I found had me staring into space for a good five minutes. Once in a great while, something you read feels as if it was dragged right out of your murky, voiceless, secret self. This morning, I read the final installment of the Guardian’s column “Diary of a Separation”. This, in part, is what it said:

Whatever transformation I thought separation would wreak has not ensued: things I thought were wrong with our relationship have turned out, chasteningly, to be wrong with me. I haven’t emerged from the cramped cocoon of my relationship to become a beautiful butterfly: rather, I am sitting in the remnants of the dusty cocoon, worrying that wings don’t suit me.

The whole column, and its archives, can be found here.

Blog means never having to say you’re sorry

All across the internet, writers are apologizing. They meant to update. They know it’s been a while. There have been things, but not bad things, just, you know, LIFE things. They’ll be back. This is just a placeholder. They’ve been composing posts, really they have, but then they got distracted and the baby threw up and well, here we are three weeks later….

Back when I started writing this website, I decided in advance that I wasn’t going to snivel if I failed to update in time. An apology, I figured, was really just a way of deflecting blame; besides, the person composing these essays isn’t a real person, and this is not a blog about the quotidian. There would be writing when I had something to say, and the time to say it properly. Otherwise, what was the point?

I wrote two posts ago about my ongoing attempts to protect three hours a day–three measly hours–to write without interruption. Those attempts were born of desperation–I had a deadline, and a project I cared about, and I was determined not to fail. (I finished. Quite the load off my mind. And I have discovered that getting to the library, where I do not log on to the internet, is an absolute miracle. I have not worked so efficiently, nor so well, since the advent of wifi.)

But the problem with deciding that the internet is the enemy of one’s productivity is that one’s website tends to suffer. So that’s one explanation wrapped inside a rather flimsy excuse. Another is simpler: like most blogs, this one has lost a bit of steam. One begins in a rush of excitement, and one has a lot to say. Then years go by, and one tires of the sound of one’s voice. This is endemic; many of my favorite websites have petered out a bit over the years. I wish they hadn’t, and I confess that I get annoyed with their authors for leaving me stranded. Now I myself have become annoying, and so it’s time to break down the fourth wall and apologize, sincerely, for updating so sporadically. Unfortunately, I can’t in good faith promise to reform my sporadic and annoying ways.

I have considered shuttering the blog, of course. Do I still have anything meaningful to say? Fact is, I do have things I want to post–Important, Relevant, Helpful things, essays I’ve mulled over while sitting in traffic, brilliant original thoughts I’ve jotted down groggily in the backs of books in the middle of the night, then forgotten about. But I am lazy and distracted and undisciplined and time, as it invariably does when one is not abject and lonely, keeps speeding up. I’ve gone back and forth about this a million times…if I can’t hold up my end of things, shouldn’t I just be honest with myself, honest with you? I can always write in my journal, after all. If I’m not going to fish, I should have the sense to know it’s time to cut bait.

But I don’t want to just write in my journal. I want to write to and for you.

There’s no question that keeping up with this website is much harder to manage now than it was back when I was still stumbling around beating my miserable divorced head into the wall. I’m happier now, busier now, more inclined to get outside and weed the flowerbeds than stay in to write something obnoxious about my ex-husband. Truly, I don’t think I can ever match the frequency with which I wrote during those first couple of years. Here, have some more excuses. I’m typing this perched on the piano bench–the only available seat–in my dining room, which is filled with the living room furniture. The living room itself is empty, because its ceiling had to be taken down, because I’m having the sloped floors upstairs repaired. Then the house will go on the market. I have overnight guests coming tonight, and a dumpster in the yard, and it’s baseball season again for both children, each of whom is rostered on about sixteen different teams.Every day I run around like a lunatic and then collapse into bed at night with a novel, feeling guilty at all the things I have not done.

I have never been known for my tremendous powers of concentration, nor for anything that might be termed an urge toward overachievement. Wherever possible, I let things slide; that this website has slithered down the slippery slope of uncompleted tasks is a constant source of mild and persistent shame. But there’s nothing to do but be honest about the state of things.  I don’t want you to be vexed when I don’t update. But I don’t want you to give up on me. So I encourage you to subscribe to the blog, if only to spare yourself the annoyance of checking the homepage and coming up with the same stale post for weeks on end. (I don’t know how to make an RSS feed button, but I’d be happy to do that too.)

I’m still here, is what I’m trying to say. I will always post as often as I can.

March Madness

In this, the season of college basketball tournaments, I found myself having lunch with a friend of mine yesterday (male, an artist by trade) who hadn’t the foggiest notion what I was talking about when I chirped happily about filling out my bracket. My boyfriend, who is a nonchalant fan of certain sports, indifferent to others, and rather passionate about a weird, esoteric few, agreed to participate in the bracket-filling out ritual this year for the first time, but his heart isn’t really in it. Yet.

The problem with sports is that you have to keep up. I was a baseball aficionado for many years; going to high school and college in New England, plus having parents who loved the Red Sox, made me loyal to that particular cursed team…until they actually won the World Series, not once but TWICE, and I lost interest. I used to watch college basketball all the time, too. Football has never done it for me (American football, that is; I like soccer, when I happen to run across it every four years at World Cup time) and I can’t get too excited about professional basketball. But college basketball is–there’s no other way to put this–fun, fun, fun. So I babbled on cheerfully to my bewildered artist friend, who couldn’t have cared less, and as a thank you gift for being so patient I decided to bestow upon him my brother-in-law’s all-purpose line for Those Who Aren’t Sure About Sports. It’s a magic charm to protect your dignity whenever someone says something about a player or a team or even a whole sport that you have no clue about, and you just want to satisfy whatever urge they have to share while not looking stupid and ensuring they stop talking sports as quickly as possible. It works for EVERYTHING. Here it is:  ”I know! can you believe that shit?”

Example: “How about those Red Sox?”

(You have no idea what he means. Did they win? Did they lose? Was the franchise sold? No need to look like a moron, just say:  ”I know! Can you believe that shit?”)

It works on specifics.  ”Man, did you see Kobe Bryant last night?”

(See him do what? Score a touchdown? Hit a three-run double? Trip over his shoelaces? It matters not. “I know! Can you believe that shit?”)

“Damn, that Derek Jeter is such a motherfucking MONSTER.”
“I know! Can you believe that shit?”

You’re welcome.