22 months

Dear Bean, As though your heartbeat were the metronome of my time passing, your growing marks my aging. You’re so big now, tousle headed and bright eyed. You stand mid-thigh to me. Two months shy of two years old, you carry rocks and cookies and other small treasures in your pockets. You are passionate about tractors and backhoes and mud and books. You take long walks with us along the muddy dirt road, stomping in puddles and pointing at birds. Recently you began speaking in sentences, stringing syllables together, like so many bright beads on the sea glass necklace of language, and it’s a wonder to hear what you have to say.

In the past two months, the trees have turned into skeletons of bark and twigs and on cold mornings you put your own boots on. You have learned to climb up onto the stools in the kitchen, and we spend many family meals there, the three of us in a circle of yellow light around the butcher block island, passing forks and trying to carry on conversations. With words, you now have the ability to express that you want specific things, right this second. Mama, more milk please. Mama, mama, mama, milk!

The past two months have been difficult though. Not because of you exactly—your beautiful smiles fill up our hearts with heady glee and wonderment—but because your presence makes our lives full to saturation. Since you, there have been few moments for downtime, and fewer moments when your Daddy and I have a chance to gather each other up in our arms and really look at each other.

Parenthood took us like a storm at sea. Together our small red boat of tenderness , we threw ourselves into the process of staying afloat, and have somehow lost track of who we are for each other. The compass of our life trued towards you; your needs so primal and huge pulled our hearts with fierce gravitational tug. But gradually over the past two months, as you’ve become less needy and more independent, we find ourselves trying to redirect the vessel of our love. Often, we find ourselves flailing about, clutching at the driftwood of who we were. So much has changed. The raw fibers of our selves have been stretched and pummeled utterly.

So the past few months have been drenched with moments where we face each other on the shore of our love and find ourselves unbalanced and hesitant at the edge of the rubble-strewn tide line that stretches out between us. Invariably, you are right there, asking for more noodles, or “Mama, read book, now” and we only manage jagged interjected sentences. Or it’s late at night, and you’re finally asleep, and we’re so exhausted that everything we say comes out slanted and biting.

It’s hard to be in this place. Here, where we can see how the routines that have grown up out of necessity, have made deep grooves across the surface of our lives and love. More than either of us would like to admit, things have become for granted. We spend days hip deep in the mud of surviving; arguing again and again about the things of daily life that accumulate with great banality and abundance day after day. The dishes, the bills, dinner, laundry.

I’m writing about this because someday you’ll be tall and you’ll be shaving, and also, because someday you’ll be in love and you’ll be trying to figure all this out for yourself. I’m also writing about this because I want you to understand how loving travels the full arc between passion and deep despair, and how a lot of the time you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle of it, flailing like a fish, one moment in the sweetest water, and the next on the harshest sand.

Just now, as I was writing you and Daddy burst into my studio, full of morning excitement, ready to do things with the day. It’s 10:30 am, the weekend before Christmas, and there are cookies to be made, and shopping to be done, and decorations to be hung. Daddy wraps his arms around me, and right away you climb onto my lap, grabbing first at the pencils on my desk, then going for my keyboard. In the three minutes you are in my studio, you scribble in my notebook, collapse my easel, and climb onto the futon, wanting to be read Good Night Moon. You are like a sudden rip tide; when you’re present, you fill the room up and make it impossible for me to do anything but swim with the current, keeping track of the horizon in the distance.

But I’m grateful for this. For the struggle of it. I realize how easy it would be for me to succumb to simply letting life change me gradually and unintentionally, were it not for the latent urgency you bring to my life. When you woke up two mornings ago, I carried you into our room and tucked you into bed between Daddy and I. There in the dark, while both of us were trying for a few more minutes of sleep you began to sing, ever so softly. Suddenly I realized you were singing all the words to the lullaby I sing you every night. Go to sleep, you sang and stroked my face, and goodnight, and tomorrow will come soon. You sang so sweetly and off key, but you had every word right, and I could feel my heart start thudding with sudden awe. You learned to sing over night, and here I am barely able to get around the width of my ego to say I’m sorry when I’ve hurt your daddy unintentionally, or when I’m so tired that I have nothing to say beyond the superficial.

I opened my eyes and realized you were watching me as you sang. This is what I mean about urgency. You’re watching me. Being your mama I am reminded daily, again and again, of our need and our capacity to grow, to learn, and to become.

I love you, Mama

In the midst of it

Flecked across the page, the doorway of my heart, wide bands of color from a horsetail brush, a blade, an inkpen. It’s so easy to be hurt. So easy to withhold even the smallest scrap of willingness to travel on, past the point where words were slung about with careless grandeur. Past where the hurt started, reasonably or not.

I can see my shadow here: my ego eclipsing my own generous spirit. But this is what marriage is, isn’t it? To be shown again and again what we fear to look at the most in ourselves. So easy to call it out, to place the placard of blame on the other standing there, shoulders hunched forward, defensive and yelling. So hard to breathe out, and accept how very small our goodness is, when we’re backed against a wall. To say something, anything, that reaches out like a white flag or a bowl full of alms.

Afterwards

An entire week of goodness. Time with long-time friends. Pedicures and walking bare-toed down cold cobblestone to share coffee. Browsing jewelry stores. Trying on dresses, the three of us to a dressing room, and then twirling in front of the mirror. Toasting with champagne and eating pomegranates. Laughing. A lot. And soaking up time with the in-laws also here, as the best babysitters ever. So much fun, chatter, intellectualizing, giggling, cooking, strolling, enjoying. Now that everyone is gone, the house seems hollow and big, and Bean fell apart at every gusset, over-stimulated, teething, and off schedule. We’re all ready to find our rhythms again. To get back to the things of daily life: showering before bed so my hair doesn’t turn to icicles in the early morning frost; planning out lessons; replying to an overcrowded email inbox that has sat untended for days on end. It’s a shock to the system though, to go from such heady days to this, yet I find myself craving downtime.

Good vibes

My sister is here, from across the country, and she's brought a good vibe with her. Aside from being a saint---making exquisite food, plying me with yummy wine, and bathing my kid, she's also given me some space to unfurl a little. To talk, to feel safe, to unscramble. She's perceptive and determined and encouraging, and it's been just what I've needed: to soak up her affection, knowing that she gets me in a different way than anyone else does. And maybe because I've allowed myself to let go just a little, and let my guard down just a twinge, all sorts of good omens have come my way regarding grad school.

Whenever I'm contemplating big ideas or changes for my life, I sort of send out a universal query, before I wholly commit. Then I wait to see what the universe says. In this case, I got a big YES from four different sources yesterday, and that made me feel good. So good. So I'm trusting that I'll get all the pieces figured out and get the applications sent in on time. Trusting that my life will take me where it needs to go.

It's been the first time in a long while that I've felt like things were going to be okay. And therein lies the lesson: let go just a little and trust. See what happens.

Self portrait: standing at the back door

I stand at the back door watching the rain. The air smells of water and sweet dying grass. The oak leaves still cling to the trees like bits of rust, and the wind stirs them wildly.

I’ve spent the past three days doing nothing. I keep bringing my mind back to now again and again, asking of myself only to heal. My body is weak from the fever I’ve had, and as I left or right, my eyes ache from the sudden sharp movement. My body feels fragile like a porcelain doll’s.

I can tell that I’ve been pouring too much energy out lately, and have been doing nothing to fill up my inner well. I look in the mirror, and see once again, I’ve aged. I step on the scale, and though the pounds haven’t changed, the percentages have—I’ve lost muscle recently. Lost muscle, and courage too.

So I spent these past three days lying mostly still, watching the light change, folding laundry, making simple food. I don’t feel ready to go back to work yet, but at some point, today or tomorrow, I know I will. It isn’t a choice. So I try instead to imagine a different outcome. I try to envision strength and boldness and verve. I call a therapist and make an appointment. I feel heat rising up in my body as I talk to her on the phone. It is so hard to admit to needing help.

I’ve been so damn independent my whole life, and always, I was that girl who everyone else came to when they had problems. It’s hard to be in the passenger seat now, fumbling for words, for tools, for anything to give context to this new vantage point.

I stand at the backdoor watching the rain fall in dark splotches on the smooth slate threshold. The sky is the color of crushed violets and ashes. I put on my boots and go for a walk.

Sunday List

* As I feared, by bedtime I was running a fever, and spent the night alternately hot and shivering. * Spent Sunday in bed, mostly, watching the light travel across the room, and dreaming bizzare dreams.

* Ate the best soup ever for lunch--made my DH. Just the kind of soup you long for when your sick, light, brothy, with just enough salt.

* Felt my heart expand with amazement as Bean kept coming over to me, wanting to kiss me, or just be close.

* Wrote some last minute lesson plans, and called in sick. Crap. I hate doing that. I feel so responsible for the little rascals I teach.

* You may officially declare this a useless post. Thank NaBloPoMo.

The helter skelter arc of my heart

I took the day off from work, feeling crumpled and exhausted and near-to-tears. Work, post-traumatic stress, and life in general, has me feeling more anxious and more depressed than I have possibly ever felt in my life. Mostly, it’s the whole post-trauma stuff, which seems to permeate everything else. Because I am an optimist, a glass-half-full dreamer, it is unnerving to be here on the brink of sorrow. Doubt, like an unbalanced weight, threatens to pull me over the edge. And perhaps the worst part of this is I’ve always been a mind-over-matter type of person and suddenly I’ve come slamming up against the fact that I can’t just mind-over-matter this all away. My body has internalized the stress of it all, and I’ve been sick in this low-grade kind of way that has me always feeling thin skinned and raw.

So I took the day off and reveled in a morning all to myself—no toddler, no kids all asking for help in unison, no colleagues asking for favors—just me and some writing and a tall frothy latte.

Then I took a nap. It was that weird kind of sleep where semi-consciousness hovers close. Every few minutes I felt like I was almost awake, and, for a moment upon waking after an hour of sleep, I felt sure I had not slept at all. But I had, and the day outside had gone from grey to a perfect autumnal blue.

I took Bean in the backpack for an hour hike through woods, stopping every so often to listen to the sounds of the woods and smell the crisp autumn air. We’d stop, both of us nearly holding our breath, and listen to the sound of water, to the occasional crow calling overhead, and then, suddenly and more than once, to the report of a gun. Damn hunters. I sang softly walking along the spungy trail, not wanting to be mistaken.

Home again, DH and I immediately launched into an argument, that in retrospect had everything to do with the fact that I wanted to be taken care of and hardly anything to do with whatever puppet topic we pulled onto the stage. But later, after I’d left for town he called, and we talked until we came to some sort of understanding, and he met me there for dinner. It was cold out, and I was glad for my down jacket. We at kebabs and crepes from street vendors, and sipped creamy hot chocolate from the local chocolatier, and had a lovely time.

So I guess I’m stubbornly scrabbling out of the hole I’m in. It seems a lot like one step forward, two steps back, but there’s movement, and many exquisite moments. I am grateful for this—that I have not lost my capacity for joy.

(Here are a few pictures, still with the crappy camera.)

In contrast

Trying to remember what it felt like to lie still against the rock, to turn my face towards the sun, to be wholly in the moment, like I was in this picture with Bean scampering up and down the rock beside me. The air was cool and sweet with the smell of autumn: wood smoke, drying grass, the spicy scent of maple leaves and concord grapes, and the musky smell of manure being spread on the fields.

In contrast, I spent today indoors, watching the sun move across the square diorama of my window, sending long rectangles of bright and shade onto the carpet and tables and the tousled heads of kids. It was a PMSy, moody day with near-tears moments and and no-reason exhaustion by the end. Sometimes the sheer volume of 20 little kids is enough to drive me up a wall. My head reverberates and I feel utterly fragmented. Then I realize I haven’t eaten in hours. On days like today I catch myself longing to be teaching college students—longing to be that me I’ll be in five or six years from now.

Learning about showing up

A week of waking up, stumbling to the shower, making my way to the coffee pot and out the door just as the pale fog is lifting. I drive along the dirt road, the gravel slick with mud from the evening rain, and watch each how the leaves are turning. Now, at the end of the road all the maples are golden. I want to hold my breath. I want to slow things down enough to be able to drink up the beauty of the early morning light falling on the backs of grazing horses, and the mountain rising up tall and humble from the patchwork of trees like an old monk seeking alms. I want it to go slow enough to remember the breath of my sleeping son, eyelashes long and delicate in the first light of dawn.

I turn at the end of the road, onto the highway full of cars and make my way towards the brick school building where I work. I love it there, as much as I can. Some days my heart feels tightly wound like the pieces of an old pocket watch, and I tremble thinking of my little boy at home. Thinking of how my life now is like a grapefruit, torn up into sections of bittersweetness. But I’m growing used to the rhythm of this—getting up, leaving, doing what I am good at, and returning in late afternoon. Often I come home to my two guys sitting in the back yard in our two lounge chairs, side by side, sun splashed and handsome. I try to shift gears, feeling an internal lurch: longing for down-time, for solace, and then throwing myself full-throttle into the daily act of devotion that is raising a child and loving a husband. Some days DH and I reach out and touch, hold each other, drink each other up hungrily, and laugh. Other days, we have nothing to give, and in our emptiness we starve eachother. We bicker and get snappish. We hold on to little things, and forget how much we love.

But I am learning to be patient with time. Learning that things will come to fruition and fall into place if I give them space to do so. Like the morning poems I’ve been writing. I start with a handful of scraps, a few random lines still drenched in the half-consciousness of dreams. If I’m patient and I return to these lines later in the day, I find small gems I rarely expect. Things I’d never think of if I wrote later in the day, when impatience and busyness saturate my pores. So I’ll keep showing up next week. Showing up at the page. Showing up at the now of my life.

Riding the waves

It’s so funny hanging out with six year olds all day. We read a book about spiders and learn that the babies fly away on silken threads soon after they are hatched.

“Cool,” one little boy says. “It would be SO FUN to fly away and not have any parents. We could do ANYTHING.”

“Like what?” I want to know. Watching a grin spread wide across his freckled face.

“Like STAY UP ALL NIGHT!” he says emphatically, waving his arms about at the possibility.

The magic of that idealized independence hovers in the air.

“Yeah, and we could eat candy for every single meal,” another boy chimes in.

I remember that time, before grown up. That time when days sometimes felt like years. When yesterday was so far off it hardly mattered. Now grown-upness saturates the air around me like a heady perfume: replacing the oxygyn of whimsy with the dioxide of worry.

Maybe I’ve been feeling this now more than ever because death has pressed close up against the periphery of my life, or maybe it is simply because I’m in my late twenties—and this is the time when most young people invariably start feeling old.

Talking with my sister on the phone the other night, we agreed, when we were eighteen we knew it all. At least that’s how it felt for me. I was at the top of my game at eighteen: ballsy, headstrong, self confidant, and completely invincible. I wrote reams of poetry, jotted pensive philosophical notes in the margins of my books, read Shakespeare and Whitman, and regularly skinny dipped in the ocean. I knew everything then. I’d take up conversation with anyone. No argument was too complex, no social challenge too awkward. I attempted almost anything: rock climbing 1000 feet above the Mediterranean, sleeping with men I barely knew, volunteering in an HIV positive community in Harlem, jumping from fifty feet into an abandoned marble quarry filled with still green water. I had nothing to loose.

Now, ten years later, I am humbled. My heart each day feels the breathless immense weight of Love. Now there is everything to loose.

It seems like instead of seeking challenge like I did then, challenge finds me. The sum of my experiences, like a few small crusts of bread in my pockets, do nothing to feed the hunger of the beasts I now face. Over and over I find my words come up short; my hands empty. Then it was all about pushing the envelope: how wild could I be?

Now it is about other, fiercer, more tender things.

Navigating the terrain of love, seven years in (this month, our anniversary); making new meaning in the context of near death; finding words to express even a small sliver of the immense protective love that comes with motherhood.

I wouldn’t go back. I love the challenge of now: the tender grace of meeting someone’s needs unconditionally, the fierce affection that comes with having woken up day after day after day next to the same man, or the ease that comes with starting out again, for the fifth year, with a class of children. But some days, especially the long ones, when my heart feels worn and scattered like a handful of sea glass, I get nostalgic for that time before DH, before Bean, before a career. It would be nice now and again to feel that rock-solid certainty that comes with inexperience.

TGIF

My Image upload plugin still doesn't work. I have so many pictures and art to share, but it will all have to wait until later in the weekend when I can devote time to such things. I stumbled through the past two days quite well. I was asleep last night by 9:30, utterly exhausted. Tonight, not much better, but my students had a solid first two days and Bean and I had a wonderful early evening hiking the perimeter of our land: watching monarchs, picking crabapples, eating the last wild black berries, checking out frogs, and pointing at crickets. So good to spend some quality one-on-one time with the little guy, who by the way, is growing SO FAST. I have so many funny Bean stories to tell, but, like the art/photos, they are pushed to the back burner until I've had oh, twelve hours of sleep and a stack of pancakes. :)

Incoherent

Feeling wiped out tonight after a ten hour day, and an open house. Freshly sharpened pencils. Smiling until my cheeks ache. Wishing I’d stopped at Starbucks for an iced latte. Trying to make every parent feel like I will be teaching for their child alone. The past few days have been rocky, not because of the work-related stuff, but because some days are just like that. Everything comes out edgewise and sharp, without meaning to. My foot has spent its time permanently lodged in my mouth. My skin is breaking out, and shopping over the weekend I was devastated to discover that the eighties are entirely BAAACK and I want to gag. I thought the trends were dumb in the eighties: legwarmers, frumpy ankle boots, and, dear god, skinny jeans, which look terrible on everyone except maybe Kate Moss. Really, why did that decade have to come up in the fashion rolodex THIS YEAR? I have enough to worry about right now. Buying jeans should not be a distressing pastime. All I can do is pray the whole pegged jeans look is not about to be revived.

So yeah, a rocky couple of days. Bad fashion. My image upload plugin isn’t working properly, I apparently have lost all tact when it comes to saying things to DH, and it’s his birthday this Thursday and I’m a little bit bummed about that because it’s the first day of school and I hate not being able to devote more time and energy to him. If it’s not raining we do have a fun evening planned though: a hike up to the lean-to at the top of a hill to build a fire, drink hot coffee from a thermos, and check out stars through his telescope. If it does rain, I’m screwed. I am bad about having a working Plan B. I wing things. Probably to much for my own good.

I guess I’m just way outside my comfort zone right now: in limbo, waiting for the routine of work to kick in. Making this huge transition on top of the post-traumatic stress of the incident at work has resulted in me gaining probably five pounds too, and that really doesn’t help perk me up. The only thing to redeem all this is that my best friend is coming for the weekend, and she always hits me like an extra-bright sunbeam. Love her. There will also be pedicures involved. So there is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel (though as she puts it, sometimes that light is an oncoming train—ha!)

What type of person are you? Do you plan things out or wing them? Are you more spontaneous or predictable? What makes you feel like your outside your comfort zone?

time management

Some days no chart exists to diagram all the ways each minute must be doubly spent in order to accomplish all that must be done. Today was like this: like the whir left hanging in the air a nanosecond after the hummingbird flown away; like the thrumming silence between the beats of a drum; like the tumble of mud upon rock in a landslide.

It was also Bean’s 1.5 birthday today, and he was so precious and independent and sweet, watching him nearly took my breath away at least a hundred times. He came to my classroom with me, and spent hours playing without direction or fussing: climbing chairs, investigating keyboards and reading books. Tomorrow a Bean letter for sure. Tonight, let it suffice to say that I love him exponentially each day, and that those moments with him curled against my chest, just after he’s gone to sleep, are like bright garnets in a handful of gravel.

The rest of my day was a pmsy, moody, blur of productivity. Hence the run on sentences. I’ve been meaning to post all night, but haven’t been able to dig myself out from under everything else I’ve been trying to do (I missed a call to my sister, planned my class schedule, developed literacy curriculum for the beginning of the year, and mourned the loss of Allison on Project Runway, fast-forwarded on Tivo, among other things.) I suck at time management.

Seriously, I want to know your strategies. How do you manage your time? What tools do you use? How do you plan for rest and play and productivity? How do you avoid over scheduling/exhaustion?

The unbearable sweetness of being alive

Two nights ago DH’s blood sugar (he’s type 1 diabetic) plummeted suddenly, without warning. It didn’t come back up, despite him taking several hundred carbs over the period of a half hour---and hovered nstead in the low-low double digits, just at the fringes of consciousness. It was one of those surreal times, when I could see myself from some other vantage point: my hair pulled up in a messy pony tail, going through the motions of wrapping dryer-warmed towels his shaking shoulders, pouring more juice, trying to remain calm and easy.

Every small shred of my being was at once saturated with the sweet intensity of my love for him, and the bitter taste of fear at the back of my tongue. Like the taste of snow or nickels, I think fear tastes like metal.

After a half hour we called the paramedics, because we’d reach that point where we weren’t sure how to proceed—not knowing if things were going to improve or worsen. As we waited, the moments stretched out in long arcs across the darkness between our little house and the ambulance somewhere moving towards us, its lights like an aurora borealis of red and white. When they came through the door nearly a half hour later, his sugar had just finally escalated to within the normal range. Still, his pulse was bounding and his blood pressure surged and waned as he shifted positions. But he was okay.

They couldn’t say why what had happened, had. They couldn’t know if it were some irregularity in the chemistry of his body or in the insulin he took. But he was okay, and we went to bed, exhausted, just shy of 1 a.m. In the dark of our room, with the moon spilling onto the floor like milk, I curled my body around his. His skin smelled sweet and warm in the dark, and his breathing soon regular and even with the onset of sleep.

You can’t ever be prepared for these moments that come out of the dark to meet you. You can’t ever know when they will come or what they will bring. Therein lies the lesson: remember the sacred sweetness of each moment. Bow down to it again and again with humility—reaching over and over towards the better part of yourself that can overlook of the fact that your loved one forgot to unload the dishes, or left a circle of soap scum in the sink after shaving again, and can see instead the wonder of who they really are: eyes filling with the fullness of a smile; heart spreading out the periphery of their hands.

Self Portrait: Psychology of a confined space

Like a flock of birds, I sometimes feel myself alighting into the slumbering weight of my body, just as the morning light first falls across the windowsill. Abruptly, I am there again, in our bed with my arm pressed up against his back, sleep heavy, and tingling. Trailing the gossamer of dreams, it takes a moment or two for my mind to slip back into this place of soft flesh and muscle, this body. Then I stumble towards the shower.

Every morning there are a few moments of disconnect: where my mind and body stagger towards each other like drunken lovers, in blurry recognition. The bifurcated pieces of me come back together under the shower’s steady spray. I linger there, in that tile enclosed space; often it is the only time I have unaccompanied, uninterrupted, with just my sore shins, bare skin, and slick hair. These first moments are almost a prayer, a meditation, an act of worship, bowing a the temple where body and mind intersect. It’s here, of course, that I have my best ideas. The most perfect, raw lines of poetry arise in my mind unexpected. Dreams come back to me in shreds, each piece jaggedly sewn to the next like the fabric of an old quilt. And then eventually the day creeps in. I hear noises from the kitchen below: the clatter of dishes being unloaded from the dishwasher, Bean announcing he wants more milk, DH making espresso, and almost immediately lists start to crowd in.

But for those first moments of waking, it feels like I’m teetering on the brink between two worlds, my face soaking up water and my mind wringing out dreams.

* More confined space self portraits.

Sunday brain clutter

I went into my classroom for the first official time since I got the job. A big geometric room, with yellow paint and fairly new rugs. It’s still waiting for summer cleaning though, so other than sitting in the middle of it to draw a quick floor plan on the back of a used piece of printer paper, I didn’t stay. I’ll be there enough once it’s waxed and scrubbed, arranging chairs and labeling things. Instead, I went shopping.

There is a whole slew of outlet stores right down the road from my school, and I’ve been dying to go, but have never had both hands free. That is probably one of the greatest things I miss about my pre-baby life: both hands. Now it’s a rare occasion when I’m not schlepping Bean and/or his stroller/diaper bag, or some other baby related accoutrement. But today it was just me and my blue bag.

I discovered something depressing while shopping. Something I’ve kindof been made aware of, but have been ignoring: my boobs have shrunk. Yeah, I’m stepping this low. A boob post. But I’m a WOMAN, after all, and women are aloud to whimper and whine about such things—especially after my negligee drawer has only seen D cups for the past year. I’m now in what might be called the “nearly B” category. Did you even know there was such a category? Google it. You’ll see. There is, and I’m in it. I drowned my sorrows by spending a small fortune on glorious midnight blue on-sale bath towels, and savoring more of this wine (it’s cheap, and luscious: a bouquet of blackberries, and a sweet finish.)

Self portrait as: trying to get the balance right

The morning after our fight feels exactly the way it does when you walk outside after a rainstorm: everything is washed clean, and light refracts from a thousand small droplets of water.

He looks different to me: maybe more like the person he really is. And as I watch him making coffee, I see that this is what marriage is: a process of holding the mirror up again and again for each other, so that we may see ourselves anew—and also, so that we may be seen anew. It takes both: to see, and to be seen, to become truly aware of ourselves—and despite the hurt of it, this is what we offer each other in the moments when we hurl words about in the narrow place of our anger.

I catch myself sucking in air, realizing that no matter how long we’ve known each other, I’ll only know a small sliver of who he is. This is why I’m grateful for our moments of tension---because they force something deeper to open, and for a brief moment I catch a glimpse of the him that’s bigger than the picture I already have.

It is so easy to grow accustomed to seeing only the part of him that is us. The person that picks up where I leave off, emptying the dishwasher, sautéing zucchini, running Bean’s bath, or the other myriad things we do together every day. Easier still to see him for the things he doesn’t do—the small, banal things that don’t really matter at all, that my mind alights on like a hungry vulture after a day spent giving, without time to myself.

Today I lie in the tall grass on the hill behind our house, all alone. The green is so vibrant here it almost sings: the foliage is such a riot of emerald hues, dense with insects and ruffled in the wind. I close my eyes and let go, feeling the earth spin.

I feel my cells drinking this solitude, replenishing the part of me that has grown sparse in the past few months, when every moment was jam-packed with responsibility for things that had very much to do with us, but never to do with simply me. I know he feels this too, this fierce need for time spent all alone doing things according to pure selfish whimsy. We both thirst for it, just as we thirst for each other, and this is the push-pull I think we’ll always feel. A struggle to find the balance between our separate selves, and the self that is sum of our love.

Without directions

We sit in the walk-in closet amid the silent heat of boxes and winter garments, and our words fly around us like an angry swarm of bees. Here, everything requires translation but the lexicons are burning.

What do we do here? In this place where both of us feel like we’ve reached the outer boundaries of love---when really the only boundary we’ve reached is the perimeter of our own large egos. The tool box is locked, and the delicate wrenches of kindness are inside.

In our culture it’s easy to interpret “successful relationship” to mean “effortless.” Friction doesn’t fit the definition we’re so often fed: the quick Hollywood snapshots of couples walking hand in hand, laughter always on the lips. Hurt—-that parabola formed at the intersection of anger and loneliness and loss---does not belong to the stereotypical shape of affection. And yet we find it here, close to us, filling the space between us, even though we are in love.

We feel terror seeping in, the moment we go beyond what’s comfortable. What if we can’t recover? What if the words we’re saying are really the basis of regret or unraveling? What if we can’t rebuild, continue, grow? Now in the heat and silence, there are large gaps between us as we look away, staring at the slope of the gabled eaves, the shelves organized with shoes and belts.

Why are we here? Away from everyone, this unventilated room is the only place where we can fight tonight with no one hearing. But really, why are we here, in the middle of this place, exchanging oxygen for anger? Because we are unskilled and unpracticed in this kind of action. Few share this part of the journey; when the rubble strewn mess of for-granted and regret collide.

We ache in this small space, trapped by our egos, and our inability to really reach beyond ourselves and meet the other. Shame drenches us, and makes us stubborn. In the balance of things we keep believing a loss of face is somehow greater than a loss of love.

So suddenly we’re there, at the breaking point. You’re walking away from me, too tightly wound, and I’ve given you nothing for everything you’ve tried to say. You’re starving but somehow I can’t offer you any bread of apology. I’ve taken yours and thrown it to the sparrows.

You stand to walk away, and as you do I finally break open, no longer caring about being heard or being right or being sad. The brittle shell around my heart breaks all apart and with the greatest effort I say it. Like Atlas lifting an entire world, I strain under the burden of my own weakness.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “For not giving you an inch.” Your body turns slightly, and you smile, just a little. Then we try again.

We do not know how to fight this way: one to one, face to face, navigating the battle map of our hearts, and this is our cultural loss. Personal conflict is always locked behind closed doors, a thing of shame. We’re taught never to talk about our family’s heartbreak, about the endless ways we hurt each other, and recover.

Yet all around us conflict is glorified in external ways. The media is saturated with constant acts of aggression. And we hardly stop to think about this lesson we teach our children, generation after generation. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a link between our failure to share the unmarked maps of our personal conflicts with our children, and our failure as a culture to live together peacefully in the world. Each generation grows up just as unskilled as the last, in matters of the heart. Each generation encountering it’s own inadequacy in understanding how the mystery of loosing and winning, of giving and receiving, of selfishness and selflessness is contained within the greater mystery of love. Could we do better than this for our children?

Everything is at stake in the moment I reach beyond the brittleness of myself. And when you turn back, that smile quivering at the very edges of your lips, we’ve made it to the other side.

But it takes both of us to move ahead. Waving a white flag of apology does nothing by itself. Too often you say those words trying to end the strife before it’s started, before we feel ourselves raw and exposed, on the operating table of each other’s mercy. Too often, you say “I’m sorry” before either of us know what we’re really talking about, before we reach what matters buried beneath what matters less. It takes great effort and great risk to keep talking beyond apology, beyond blame, beyond embitterment, without walking away.

We stay. And now at the breaking point, we hover like surgeons, over the open wound of our growing love, attempting at once to remove the malignancy and repair the damage. We are untrained and clumsy, yet our effort counts for something, and after hours of this mess, we are sitting together on the bed. Your arms are around my shoulders, my hand traveling the contour of your knee. We are through the worst of it: through the time of where transfusions were needed, where openness needs to replace bitterness, and the chances of survival depended not on how much we were willing to loose, but on how much we were willing to give.

Now I write, because writing does something alchemical to experience; transforming it from a blur of things merely felt, to something better understood. I write so that I can remember—so that we can remember; my words bearing witness to the things we hardly ever say (that hardly anyone ever says), that are, in the end, the words that matter most.

Things I crave right now:

1) Having paint on my fingers and making things again. 2) Splattering paint on the page & blotting a wet brush on the corner of my terry robe. 3) Sitting in a bright oval of lamplight in my new studio, stuff still in boxes everywhere, and not minding when a little paint gets on the floor. 4) Eating dinner outside, with shadows growing long across the slatted table. 5) Licking my fingers after eating something sweet. 6) Walking with my guys after dinner along new trails; finding a pond with a topsy-turvy bird house on a pole, and an old stone wall from long ago. 7) This song. It has the perfect beat. Hearing it once is not enough. 8) The way DH has been glancing at me lately, across the room. In that kind of way. 9) Fresh sheets and fresh flowers in my bedroom 10) A clothesline mood wall like Mav’s to hang whatever strikes my whimsy.

What are you craving?

(Go on, you know you want to write a list!)

Running in the rain

I went running for the first time today since our move six weeks ago. It felt a bit like remembering how to bike again after a long hiatus: the synchronized action of my limbs following the kinesthetic blueprint of forward motion. I never wrote about not running the marathon, but I didn’t, and it made me sad for weeks. Part of the reason I didn’t run was because we moved THE VERY NEXT DAY, and that was entirely poor and ridiculous timing (what WAS I thinking when I scheduled it?) But most of the reason was because I developed a stress fracture during the latter half of my training program and despite dutiful trips to the physical therapist and cool green orthotics for my shoes, my shin would hurt excruciatingly for days after a run and eventually I was forced to weigh my options. Run the marathon and be injured for the summer or, skip it, move to our new with a wholly functioning body, and enjoy the rest of the summer sports that I so dearly love.

So I didn’t run, and then suddenly I was immersed in the massive project of unpacking in an unfinished house, and somehow six weeks have whipped by in a blur. But I’ve missed running. A little like a craving, a listlessness in my tendons at night. So today when I leapt off the front stoop and took off down our winding gravel drive, I was grinning.

It felt so good. And it felt so bad.

Do you know how much muscle tone you loose if you just up and take six weeks off of any regular exercise? A lot. Throw in weaning a baby, and the ensuing hormone restructuring, and it’s a sure-fire recipe for feeling the way I imagine sea turtles must, loafing their way up some sandy escarpment to make a nest.

A four mile run took me a lot longer than a four mile run did a month and a half ago, and afterwards I sat in the corner of the couch and begged for someone to make me a PBJ and a glass of milk because I couldn’t move. But surprisingly, during the run I was so distracted by the beauty of this place where I live that I barely noticed how unmistakably plod-like my gate was.

The wet air was fragrant. Everything is in bloom or fruit now: raspberries are ripe along the hedgerows, and elder berry blossoms, burdock, cornflowers, and Black Eyed Susans spread out across the fields like a thousand speckled suns. And somehow, the time mostly went by without my noticing.

It is inevitable I’ll feel it tomorrow. I’ve started to notice how my body no longer forgets the cumulative effects of the things I do to it each day. But there’s something of value in having one’s attention be focused on one’s body in this way: noticing it for the things it can do, for the way it feels, rather than simply for the way it looks. I’m ready for this again---especially after spending a week on the beach being all too aware of how I appear to the rest of the world.

(You know how the flight attendant always cautions that “your baggage may have shifted during the flight,” ? Let’s just say this is a good way to describe my physical accoutrements as well, since Bean. )