mother’s day

I’ve spent much of today feeling otherworldly, having arrived home after midnight this morning after working an eight hour shift at the restaurant, where I was hit on by (mostly) toothless older guys who did not even blink at my wedding ring.  I walked in the door, bleary-eyed and exhausted, and there was a basket of goodies on the table and my husband was cleaning, as he almost always is when I get home at night.

“Happy Mother’s Day,” he said, and I smiled at the gesture.  We talked about our nights and then went to bed.  About four hours later, he brought Simon to me to nurse.  There was a little more sleep, the fumbling effort to get all four of us ready for church, and then the drive there, when I called my mom and we spoke but I couldn’t say all the things I wanted to say.  Instead I said, “Happy Mother’s Day!” and “I wish I was there so I could make you breakfast or something.”

There’s always more to say, right?  Such as:

I’m almost three years into this gig and it seems I’ve learned more about life in that time than in all my years before becoming a mother.  The sleepless nights, the exhaustion, the irrational anger and frustration at the sink full of dirty dishes and the food on the floor.  The mounting piles of laundry, the diapers to be changed and washed, the tantrums, the stubborn refusal to get dressed, to eat, to walk on the sidewalk.  The constant buzzing of worry and anxiety and, yes, even depression that comes with the isolation and back-breaking work of mothering.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – but motherhood brings me to the very edge of myself and back again every single day.  Every day there is a reckoning, I take a hard look at myself in the mirror, I take deep breaths, I cook and clean and change diapers, I love, I love, I love.  It’s love that propels me through all the shit, both literal and metaphorical, to a place where I see both my sons’ sweet faces and their tears of frustration and I know beyond any doubt that this, this love, is the greatest meaning of life.

It is this love that brings me to grace, to forgiveness, to healing, to possibility.

That is what I meant to say to my mother.  And I wanted to say that we are both imperfect and that we’ve both made mistakes.  I wanted to say that we’ve both always done our best but in weak moments we’ve disappointed and hurt each other.  I wanted to say that because she loves me, I can love my own children without reservation or fear.

It’s like the series finale of Six Feet Under, when Claire, who is the youngest child, is leaving for New York to embrace her future, and her family is seeing her off.  Claire tells her mother Ruth, “Thank you for giving me life.”  And Ruth shakes her head and says, “You gave ME life.”

I could philosophize all day about my mother who gave me life and my children who also gave me life.  The love we share is a reminder of the invisible umbilical cord that binds us for eternity.  Together we will live forever.

 

forever, you

We met when we were 25, two fresh-faced young adults who loved books and movies and sleeping in.

We’d both known love and heartbreak.

Our first date was mere weeks before his 26th birthday, and that was when the tumble into love began.  I had learned to be cautious with my heart.  I felt that I was too flawed to love and to be loved.  But there was something about him that touched something in me and I wasn’t afraid to show him myself.

So I did, and our love story began.  And the day after he turned 26, we laid together in his bed as the sky darkened and I thought to myself, “I love him.  This is it.”  And he turned to me and said, “I love you.”

Those words have passed between us hundreds of times since.  They’re what I return to when I feel lost.  He is my lighthouse.  Forever, him.

With each passing year, I’ve watched him grow and change from my adoring boyfriend who stayed up late with me every night so we could watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to my long-suffering fiance who listened to me obsess over wedding details, to my supportive husband who held me while I cried over how much I hated my job.  And then I watched as he evolved into a daddy, the father of my children, and my heart breaks constantly with joy watching him love them, watching them love him.

He’s 33 years old today.  I am so proud of him.  And I’m just so amazed at the person he’s become – but at the same time, I’m not surprised at all.  He’s always been himself.

Happy birthday, Roy.  (Forever, you.)

diving into the wreck

Adrienne Rich has passed away.

*

Space mildews at our touch.

The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—

aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?

A million insects die every twilight,

no one even finds their corpses.

Death slowly moving among the bleached clouds,

knows us better than we know ourselves.

 

I am gliding backward away from those who knew me

as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.

I can be replaced a thousand times,

a box containing death.

When you put out your hand to touch me

you are already reaching toward an empty space.

—Adrienne Rich, “Moth Hour”

*

I was 20 years old and had been casually and carefully exploring the poetic form for a couple of years, and I decided to enroll in a poetry class at the local university.  We read Hart Crane, Louise Bogan, and Sharon Olds, among others.  Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” captivated me.  I had never read anything as mysterious.  I puzzled over it for hours.  We took it apart in class and after that I was never the same.

Over the next year I drank all of her poetry collections like water, and I spilled everything back onto the page.  She paved the way for me to write bravely, honestly, and fearlessly.  Like myself, the person I was, the person I wished to be, the person I would become.  It is with definite sadness and resignation that I accept her death, knowing that she’s left behind a legacy of power.

Good night, Adrienne.

my head sounds like this

Here’s what my computer desktop looks like.  I think I took that picture a week or so ago, though, so there’s even more stuff on it now.  I seem to have lost the skills to help me be organized.

So.  It’s March.  Specifically, the end of March.  March has swept right on by in a haze of sickness, sleep deprivation, and stress.  I’ve been sick three times and am at the tail end of a nasty flu, which came complete (and raging) with congestion, coughing, a sore throat, fever, chills, body aches, a cold sore, an eye infection, and laryngitis.  It’s been a largely miserable five days, but there is nothing quite like coming back to the world after illness.  Everything is shinier and a little more bearable with one’s health restored.

***

There’s a thing inside me, a darkness, a brokenness, anxiety, depression, thinktoomuchitis.  I always end up with the same conclusion.  I must be a horrible person.  That must be why life is so hard, why I am never satisfied, why I continue to want despite all my having.

I always thought I was alone.  Then we went to this place.  Church.  I shudder when I hear the word church, much like I cringe when I hear the words Jesus, blessed, and worship.  I’m a recovering Catholic.  Up until a few weeks ago, it’d been 16 years since I’d set foot in a church for something other than a wedding or funeral.  Church was not for me.  It never felt right.  It never … resonated.

But life had gotten hard.  Too hard.  Hard to the point where I felt like giving up.  It’s hard to feel so broken in a society that just wants to gloss over all the ugly stuff.  It’s hard without community.  We looked online.  We found a Unitarian Universalist church.  We showed up a few Sundays ago.  A nice little old lady gave me a name tag and I told her I hadn’t been to church in 16 years and that I was raised Catholic.  She looked at me kindly and I knew she understood and she said, “Welcome back.”

I listened to the reverend deliver a sermon about how our lives are stories of returning to love.  How we are born wonderful, curious, creative people, and little by little, life wears us down and we become fearful.  He said things that I knew to be true and I fought back tears and I felt the collective brokenness and strength of everyone in the room.  It’s true.  The service was an invitation to skip over all that glossing of the truth that we are so fond of doing and to dive right in to the center of our own broken hearts.

Even better: no talk of Jesus or Mary.  No shoulds.  No thou shall nots.  No sitstandkneel, no meaningless or empty rituals, no guilt.  No Bible verses.

Instead we talked about love.

It was wonderful.

And it resonated.  We’ve been three weekends in a row and it continues to resonate.  It’s a place where I feel safe.  I have never felt safe in church before.  There is some great mystery I am finally beginning to understand, why people make small pilgrimages to their churches once a week.  I get it.  Even though I don’t know who or what God is or even if God is.

I am attending the church of the human experience, where we set free our joys and our sorrows.  My own life is a story of returning to love and I welcome the journey.

***

I am gainfully employed again.  I’d like to say that I have achieved my childhood-turned-adulthood dream and am writing for a living, but I’m actually just waiting tables again.  It’s hard work, and I’d actually forgotten how physically demanding it is as well.  I don’t guess I ever would have foreseen myself taking on a food serving job when I left the industry over five years ago, but that’s because I was sold on a whole bunch of bullshit that turned out to be … bullshit.  And yet I struggle constantly with being back here, giving up my weekends and my nights, putting up with shit from customers (and managers and co-workers), all for the almighty dollar and how to use that dollar to make things happen for my family.  It’s humbling.  Knowing it’s not all about me anymore pushes me to work harder and to do more, though, because at home I’ve got two ragtag little boys who need us to get our shit together.

I don’t know what to do about writing.  Or exercise.  Or getting enough sleep.  Or eating right.  Or someday living in a house of our own.  Or paying off our credit cards or student loans.  Or getting a second car.  I don’t know how to achieve balance in my life.  Our apartment looks like a chaos demon threw up in it.  We still haven’t managed to completely unpack, even though we moved in almost five months ago.  Our kids have very interesting sleep needs and that means that I spend more time sleeping with my older son than I do with my husband.  Sometimes lunch is noodles and strawberries.  Sometimes it’s just strawberries.  Or just noodles.  Sometimes they don’t eat all day because they are clearly not interested.  Sometimes they scream in the library, take off their shoes and throw them in the street, climb on the table and pour all the salt out of the shaker, take off their diapers and pee everywhere.

They are so cute, though.

It’s what I hold onto.  The cuteness.  The laughs.  The stupid songs I make up to make them smile.  The many times I catch Roy snuggling one or both of them.  I spend so much time in my head and in that dark space, and these are the things that drag me out into my life.

They deliver me to love.

the dark night of the soul

This is me holding up a list of 12 goals I wanted to accomplish this year.  12 in ’12.  Very cute.

This is my public announcement that I will now stop trying to be such an annoying overachiever.

This is my recognition of the fact that in order to live, you must first survive.

This is me at 32 years old.  I’ve gone and lost the person I used to be.

There’s not much to do but rebuild.

I like to read.

(from top to bottom: Snuff, Sunset Park, The Adderall Diaries, Blankets, Fight Club, Scenes from an Impending Marriage, Birthday Letters, Ariel)

These are the books I read in January.  (Three of them were rereads.)  I enjoyed them all immensely, but if I had to pick a favorite, it’d be Sunset Park.  I am rapidly becoming obsessed with Paul Auster.

It’d been awhile since I’d read that many books in a month.  A lifetime ago I could blow through ten or more books in one month with ease.  A lifetime ago I was impressed by quantity.  Now I am not.  I take my time reading because I am more or less forced to, motherhood being what it is.  I have enjoyed the process of slowing down, though, because that’s what life’s about.  Slowing down, savoring.  There’s no rush.  We’ve all got the same thing waiting for us.

We got rid of most of our books, traded them in at a local bookstore for store credit.  The time had come to rid ourselves of a lot of clutter, and our books were part of it.  I’d always imagined us with a huge library but we currently lack the space.  I actually enjoy having less books.  It means we get to take the boys to the library every weekend, just like my mom did with me.  It means we won’t have to pack them up and move them the next time we find ourselves relocating.  It means we have more open space in our apartment, and thus it feels more quiet.

Books are wonderful, but I don’t need to own every book I love.  Sometimes all the fun is in finding a copy of a beloved book again.

this week

I want to blog more.  I do.  I used to enjoy blogging quite a bit and then it became cumbersome and I wasn’t sure how it fit into my life.  Or how I fit into it.  I still am not sure.  I’m not a very good blogger.  I don’t respond to comments, even though I treasure them.  I read each comment several times.  Then I sit and think about how to respond to it.  Then I go wash a few dishes.  Peel Simon off my legs.  Change a diaper.  Wash my hands. Fill up a sippy cup with milk.  Check Facebook.  Make mac and cheese.  Put the kids down for a nap.  Collapse.  Recover.  Write in my journal about how I have nothing original to say, I’m washed up at 32.  This is why I don’t blog anymore.  I convince myself before I even sit down to write that I am just another blahblahblah in a sea of voices.  And that I’m washed up at 32.

Earlier this week I almost got crushed by this dark thing.  I just couldn’t stand this living anymore. I couldn’t see what the fuck the point was.  Medical bills, dishes piled up in the sink, loneliness, disease, absence of voice.  My boys sitting around the dinner table as I looked on and tried to imagine their lives without me.  Sometimes I still go all dramatic and think they would be better off without me.

No one should ever have to go without.  But we do.  I think this is the dark thing, this going without, that makes me weary.

I don’t mean going without an iPhone.  I mean going without clarity, understanding, compassion, empathy.  Light.

But I pressed on.  It’s what we do, right?  Even when we’re going without.

This week I put on lip gloss and my red peacoat and walked through downtown collecting job applications.  Some guy hit on me at a bar I ducked into and I had no idea it was a come-on until I was back outside, application in hand.  It made me smile to realize how dense I have become.  And to realize that I might still be attractive despite this saggy motherflesh.

This week I read The New York Trilogy.  Three books that contain different stories that are somehow part of one big narrative.  Meditations on the self and what it means to watch someone else.  Are we separate from the people we follow?  Where does one end and the other begin?  I blew through it with ease and in awe.  I still have so many questions.

This week we began night weaning Simon.  We’re almost at fifteen months of nursing.  What an accomplishment.  But you know how I mentioned going without?  It turns out that going without sleep is a big fucking deal.  And I’ve been going without since my third trimester of pregnancy.  That’s a long 18 months.  Once the darkness threatened to swallow me, I knew it was time.  No more boob after 8PM.  This will be the fourth night.  We’re going to do this.

And because of that whole night weaning thing, I slept through the night last night.  When I woke up and got out of bed this morning, it was because I wanted to.  Not because someone needed milk or I needed to drive Roy to work.  It was still dark in our apartment.  I tiptoed into the kitchen to check the time.  6:20.  It felt so delicious to know that I spent at least 7 hours last night completely oblivious to anything else in the world.

This week I read about half of this woman’s cancer blog.  I don’t know why I’m drawn to those things; maybe I’m looking for secrets, insights, I don’t know.  It made me just want to forget all the bullshit and try to be satisfied.  I listened to The Cure’s Wish album, this in particular.

This week I read this poem:

What the Living Do
by Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

All signs are pointing to continuing to live, to telling my story, to wearing my red peacoat.  I can do that.  What are you going to do?