We stand in the mist outside the restaurant stretching out our goodbye. One of the servers lingers by the back door smoking a cigarette and peering into his cellphone. Streetlights yellow the asphalt. The rain let up hours ago but it feels like it could start to fall again now.
“I don’t know if I’m saying too much,” she says. I want to tell her that a 12 year friendship allows for speaking versions of the truth that are hard to choke down. And anyway, tonight’s version will not stay. This right here is not anything like the last time we stood in the same spot on a June night two summers ago. I had just celebrated my 5th anniversary by realizing my marriage was over. This friend listened to me gasp through the dawning awareness that life would never again look anything like it almost had.
Now, it is a birthday dinner with gossip and giggles.
“Oh, just say it,” I tell her.
“It’s just. . . well, don’t let your fears about money consume you.” She nods to herself and looks at me with something like apology. Over our brown rice and sweet veggies, I had told her all about the condo. About how life is about to become even tighter. About how I still wheedle Giovanni about earning power and crack beans-and-rice gallows humor no one finds funny anymore. She goes on. “I see what that narrow focus on money can do to a person. With my mother, it’s a real wake-up call. She has always had enough. She still does. But a day doesn’t go by that she isn’t obsessed with how she will make ends meet.” She pauses. Then,in a quiet voice, “It’s a miserable way to live.”
I take this in. “It’s a funny thing about abundance, isn’t it?” I say. “How if you start believing that you have enough, then you start to find these reserves of energy and creativity that make it possible to have enough.”
She laughs. “If I took half the time I spent worrying about things and used it on projects, just imagine how much I could accomplish!”
We hug and say our good nights. As I head home, I chew on the truth of her advice. She is right, of course. When I am rested and right in my head, it is as if I wake up in a parallel universe. “Look at all this,” I marvel. “Look how much is right here!” On these rare days, maybe one in a year if I am lucky, the whole earth falls open and offers herself up to me.
Love in abundance. Security in abundance. Resources, ideas, opportunities in abundance. Creativity is a river. Truth spills from unlikely mouths. The bond between my son and me caulks the fissures in the universe. The clock’s tempo shifts and the day spreads a blanket under the sun and reclines there, leaving room for everyone.
At an edge of the clearing,a breeze parts the trees and reveals the hidden trail.
There will be plenty to eat on the journey. There will be plenty of time to rest. There will be plenty to learn and plenty of companionship.
There will be plenty.
Right here is plenty.
Category: Happy Days
Happy 100 Days: 32
Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah
—
Hannah Trigwell sings Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llyADThAg5o
Happy 100 Days: 36
Today is a good day to die
they say
Crazy Horse hollered to the sky
before charging into battle
he may have lost, winning
the chance to hear Mozart
call back across string and reed
under a November mist
on the eve of a birthday
he never reached.
Happy 100 Days: 37
Happy News of the Day: The Powers that Be approved the promotion! This was my official first day as Director of PhD Student Services. The real fun begins tomorrow when I cruise the main campus schmoozing with folks in the know about future projects. Onward and upward!
So-So News of the Day: For all his sweet talk, the sexy condo is out of my league. The seller’s broker came back today with word that a $6000 special assessment for new staircases has to be included in the purchase price. The gal who owns it was supposed to have been making monthly payments but has not paid a single penny. The bank will not approve the short sale without the buyer taking on the assessment. That would be me, except that it won’t be me. Also? The condo fees were listed incorrectly. They are actually $117 higher per month than advertised. A chunk of change that size can choke you in a year or three, never mind a few decades.
I would have to live on credit cards and ramen for the next 10 years to afford it. So, today, I bid this dream a sad farewell. Goodbye, bamboo floors! Au revoir, living room dance space! So long, staggering mortgage and second job!
It’s not quite a heartbreak. A little heart-squeeze, perhaps? The regret is mixed with a dollop of sweet relief. It’s nice to be able to imagine a Christmas with gifts again.
I met my agent at another cute little place this afternoon. The price is right and it’s a decent location but the traffic NOISE NOISE NOISE is unbearable. Tomorrow, we head out west again to another property which would require a commute. It is not quite as burdensome as many of the places in my price range, though, and the neighborhood is close to several of Bug’s and my favorite parks, shopping, and rec centers. Also, it is 1140 square feet with fireplace and a fenced back patio. We’re still talking condo-ville in a car-clogged area, so I’ll have to see if the property itself is enough of an oasis to make up for the shark-infested surroundings.
Rain and snow are churning just beyond tonight’s clouds. Once the slop starts to fall tomorrow afternoon, I will have the perfect opportunity to see just how much road-time those two hundred square feet are worth.
Happy 100 Days: 38
When I picked Tee and Bug up from the airport on Friday night, the kiddo was on the brink of tears. In the car, I finally pried it out of him. “I don’t want to go to school tomorrow,” he sobbed.
“Oh, buddy,” I smiled. “It’s Friday today. Do you know what that means?”
“No.” He was rubbing his eyes. The flight was five hours from Seattle.
“It means the whole weekend is still ahead of us. You were just away for a week of Thanksgiving vacation, and we have two more days before school.”
“Two WHOLE DAYS?”
And so it was that this morning, Bug crawled into my bed at 5:54 and told me he had been awake “for hours.” I told him my bed was only available to sleepy people. Funny how quickly he gave in.
These little dawn cuddles usually don’t last more than 20 minutes. This morning’s lasted for nearly three hours. We snored there together, right on past sunrise, right on past the honking geese and the snoofling dog. We had the yummiest, snooziest lie-in we have had in all of the six years Bug has been on this planet. When we finally roused ourselves, we stayed put, smooshing and talking about dreams and such for the other half of the morning.
It was a day of firsts, apparently. The sleep-in kicked off one of the most therapeutic home-bound Sundays on record. I didn’t even have weekends like this before Bug was born. We did watercolors and coloring books, made soft pretzels from scratch, built a railroad station out of legos complete with a border guard and a city park. We both enjoyed completely unplanned sleep-where-you-fall naps sometime around mid-day. We stayed in our pajamas until nearly 3:00pm, and we only dressed then so we would be warm enough to romp around the playground in the afternoon sun.
We never got in the car. We didn’t spend a penny. We only argued once, and it was finished in minutes with a hug and dinner.
Somewhere in there, I finally got around to creating a homework nook where Bug can plop down when we arrive home from school. This has been one of those lingering tasks I have deftly avoided for two months. I knew it would be helpful for his focus but I could not summon the energy to take it on. It is not easy to find a place on the first floor that isn’t crowded with stuff. Today, high on rest and vacation ease, tackling this project was a breeze. Bug now has a corner of the dining room complete with a bin of school supplies, two chairs, and a clear spot at our underused table. As soon as it was unveiled, Bug sat right down and went to work, covering four loose-leaf pages in pencil drawings.
Just before bath time, we took out a big piece of construction paper and some markers. We wrote “Bug’s Homework Station.” Bug decided it should be decorated with “all bright colors,” so we covered it with polka dots and lollipops. He took great care in taping the sign to the side of the plastic drawers on the table where his crayons and glue sticks now live.
While Bug was simmering in bubbles up to his chin, I sat on a stool at the side of the tub and watched. A little playmobile girl was fighting through the “gloop,” trapped and choking under the surface. His right hand was a giant sea-creature that would rise up through the froth and swoop down on her, “Chomp! Oh, bonk, argh my head!” Trying and trying again to catch her, the hand-monster was foiled every time.
It has been years since a day this good. It has also been years since I have seen my son so clearly. For this extended moment, I was quiet enough in my own head that I could look at Bug and imagine the world as it is to him. What a tilt of the glass! It is like stopping on the busy sidewalk where you walk every day, lying down, and looking up through the buildings and trees. The purpose of every angle, even the ticking of the clock and the throbbing of the human traffic, all shift into new alignment. Sometimes it takes an intentional pause to see things as they really are. In fact, such a pause may be the only thing that clears the gaze.
As he soaked, I felt myself peel open and marvel at the singular experience of the boy inside Bug’s skin and mind.
He looked up from his bath battle and stared back at me a beat longer than usual.
“What?” he asked. “Why do you look like that?”
I smiled. “Because I lo-o-o-ve you.”
He shrugged. “So?”
“And you’re my beautiful boy.”
“Arhh!” Another splash. The hand monster was about to break the surface again. The playmobile girl tried to swim away. “The gloop is around my throat and I can’t breathe!”
Neither could I.
For one fleeting moment, I understood the magnitude of my luck. It feels like waking up.
Happy 100 Days: 39
Being cross for a week does not make a lady enjoyable company. Every time my son goes away, my fretful nature hijacks the controls and takes me for a joy-ride (or a doomride, as it were). Solitude leaves me with too much time on my hands. The long-awaited freedom to “get some work done” takes me on a detour where thoughts spin out at 95mph and the engine burns into the red zone before sputtering out.
It is these sorts of weeks that have me deciding it is time to pursue a PhD or get a second job, start dating or never date again, expand my social circle or remove my broken self from the friendships I am surely already screwing up. Without the ritual of waking to his sleepy voice, without the practical choices the day sets before us (Waffles or pancakes, Buddy? Should we ride the metro to DC or go cut a Christmas tree?) I notice long-ignored pings in the engine and go wrestling the whole beast up onto the hydraulic lift.
What good does it serve, plunging my hands up in there? Still, who can resist? I poke into every dark corner seeking the missing piece and come out choking on grease.
Then he returns.
Every time my son comes home, I tuck my arms around him to sing him down to sleep. Everything slides back to ground level. The engine chugs to life.
It is a wonder how quickly I forget that Bug’s absence is the trigger for all my wrongness. It is a blessing how easily his presence restores me.
Happy 100 Days: 40
Less than 48 hours after making the offer on the condo, fear’s icy hands come to drag me down under the churning surface. A closer look at my budget squeezes the air from my lungs. The Wow of this has become the Ugh. What do you call buyer’s remorse before the purchase? Bidder’s remorse, maybe? If this offer is accepted, I have no earthly idea how I am supposed to make ends meet.
This is supposed to be the happy blog. I know. I will try to write my way there now, because nothing else is working. Thinking is getting me nowhere but further down in the cold dark.
Two and a half years ago when Tee’s job went away, all of our possessions went with it. Four-bedroom house, the shed Tee built for our tools and outdoor gear, furniture, appliances. All the little things a family collects over time had to go away, too: bicycles, books, dishes, linens, lamps, sleds, on and on. You can imagine. We sold tons of stuff on Craigslist. A massive yard sale that brought in $1000.
It was a conflagration. It was as complete as embers and ash.
We moved back to where we had started six years earlier. We rented a storage unit after moving in with my folks but soon realized the rent on the space would far outstrip the cost of the items inside. We emptied it, took several trips to Goodwill, and each tucked away what little bundle of marital debris we could manage in our respective borrowed bedrooms.
I had been out of the workforce raising Bug and being a camp wife in the mountains for five years. This set me back on the job hunt but it did not cripple me. In the wretched economy of 2010, I landed a decent job at an entry-level salary and am thankful for it every day. Even so, my paycheck does not stretch far enough to move Bug and me out of dependence on my parents. In those first panicked months of separation from Tee, I realized that no one was going to fix this for me. If I was going to climb out of my financial hole, I had to do it myself (with ample and very blessed help from the folks, of course. No way around that). Three options seemed to be available to me:
- Marry a rich guy
- Write a best-selling book
- Increase my income at my job
Options 1 and 2 were a bit too risky for my taste. I was fresh out of a marriage to someone whose perception of the world had never been based in a reality I recognized. I needed to place my bets on something that depended less on the whims of others. Sure, I would date (eventually) and sure, I would write (erratically), but I was not yet ready to morph into a Kardashian or JK Rowling.
I am a hard worker, though. I can kick ass when I put my mind to something.
Which is what I have done at my job. It helps that I love it and that working in higher ed is a great way to make a contribution while still drawing in decent benefits. I am pleased to note that 2 1/2 years into my job, I have received two small raises, a promotion, and am being encouraged to take on a greater leadership role at the university. My income has not doubled and it may never, but I have seen my effort and courage rewarded well. This gives me every reason to believe that if I keep on finding ways to grow and improve, new opportunities will present themselves.
It is just a little hard to remember all this when I picture being entirely responsible for mortgage and everything else my son will need to grow up safe and well.
A short sale can take somewhere between 90-120 days to close. This gives me a few months to tighten my belt. I think now about re-accumulating these possessions to make a home, and I see how the expense can sink a person. Tee and I took eight years to build up that foundation. It will take far more than that yard-sale $1000 to begin to re-furnish a life. If I move in the next few months, I will have to come up with stores of money I simply do not have to cover payments my parents’ largesse has helped me avoid. You know, those little things like food in the fridge, heat, and electricity.
I keep running and re-running the numbers in my personal budget. Where else can I shave? The internal chatter has been incessant:
If I bike to the metro every day, I don’t have to pay parking or gas. Can we get by on $200 a month in groceries? What about $150? The gym membership can go, of course. We will have to reel in Christmas and birthdays. No more eating out. I don’t need much in the way of new clothes for the next few years, and I know where to find decent used kid stuff. Shoes for Bug could be a problem. The kid needs a new pair every 6 months!
All of this, to make sure Bug and I have a home. It seems insane to do it. It also seems insane not to. With an interest rate of around 3.5% for 30 years in a high-growth area of the DC metro region, this place can be both a good home and a decent investment for our future. If I can swing it for a couple of spaghetti-years, I may be able to come up with other creative ways to bring in money.
This is where the happiness warms loose the cold grip of fear.The truth is that I have every tool available to me to make this work.
- I am already frugal to a fault.
- My years working in a family homeless shelter taught me about resourcefulness.
- Camp taught me to be creative with spaces and furnishings.
- The past two years have shown me the extent of my work ethic, creativity, and willingness to try unconventional approaches.
- I have such a great circle of supportive friends and family, I know we will never be entirely on our own.
- Bug and I could share a room for a year and find a roommate. I know graduate students and the condo is near a university.
- With my free weekends and my own home, I could make progress on writing projects that could bring in extra money.
- As long as I keep my eyes and heart open, something new will present itself to help me along. It always has, and it always does.
- A home is not the same as having a baby. It is reversible. If I get a few years into this and can’t make ends meet, I can sell. People sell houses all the time. Someone is selling this one to me.
Just because I am tired and scared today and can’t think of how to make this work does not mean it can’t work. I was tired and scared in 2010. I was blind to a way forward. Somehow, we made it here. Here is a really good place to be.
The future is growing up and around me. Some of it is within my control. A great deal of it is coming here to meet me. I keep learning the lay of the land and how to move over it. Just keep walking, as they say, and the way will appear.
Happy 100 Days: 44
Rest comes easily now. Finally, after all these years, the dreams are sweet.
This weekend, I met a new someone deep down in the valley sleep. He was a young man with red-blonde hair and a curious, distracted gaze. He clutched a hardcover book. Maybe he is Bug in 20 years, maybe the whisper of a companion I will someday greet. Maybe he is just that friend of mine I am learning to be.
We sat near each other on a deck built over a creek and the water burbled just beneath our feet. He opened the and the corner of it touched my knee but he was too absorbed to remember to turn it towards me. We spoke our breathless dance about a text neither of us quite understood. I let my fingertips fall on the back of his hand where it grazed the page. He did not reach back for me. I was happy regardless. He turned the page. We talked on.
Proximity can sate hunger. So, it seems, can distance.
I woke up smiling even though he was gone.
Happy 100 Days: 58
This must be what the snake feels
when her skin starts to peel
back from what has been
tucked away
asleep.
Which of those coiled
selves will push
aside the rest, confine
them to another dormancy
while it becomes
the whole of what the living
thing knows
of stone and meat and predator
and mate
(and, of course, all of what they know
of her)?
Only one
will feel the next rake
of earth
against fresh belly.
Such a crap shoot.
She has so little say.
The manner, perhaps,
and place,
but not the timing
and certainly
not the fact
are hers to choose.
No wonder she goes
so still
when the husk
makes its intention known.
Who in her will suffer
the singular pleasure
of being
born?
Happy 100 Days: 83
After the small scuffle at the Chicken School about leaving (he hates leaving), the tiff in the car about the lipstick (he threatens to smear it on the ceiling), the cuddle on the couch and the talk about talking about feelings (“Mom, I don’t know how to explain how I feel!”), the dinner I make from scratch in 15 minutes because I had an odd moment of foresight and marinated the chicken and prepped all the sides last night (“This rice is so good!”), the conversation sputters and Bug zones out. I catch him staring in the general direction of the dark kitchen window. We loll at the kitchen table, too tired even to drag ourselves upstairs to bed. I know there is homework in his backpack, but I just can’t bring myself to force it on him tonight. Not at 8:00pm on a Wednesday, and not in kindergarten, for Pete’s sake.
I open the Style section to get my fix of Carolyn Hax, but Bug is not having any of it. He reaches for the paper and scoots closer to me.
“I want to read with you, Mommy.”
“Okay.” I turn to the Kid’s Post at the back, and we read this article about the fact that pets can have preferred paws, just as humans have dominant hands. As we work through the percentages, I pause. “Do you know what it means that 10% of people are left handed and 90% are right handed?” He does not. “Which hand are you?”
He thinks about it then holds up his right.
“You and me, we are in that 90%. Here, let’s see if we can figure this out.” I find an envelope and a scrounge up a couple of pencils. I make ten hash marks and then draw a circle, dividing it into ten sections. “Ninety percent means nine out of every ten.” We count the marks together, cutting off the single leftie at the end. I keep checking Bug’s body language for signs of resistance, but he has picked up the pencil and is counting along with me.
We talk through coloring one slice of pie for left handed people. We write together “10%” and “90%.” I don’t know if any of this is making sense to him, but his eyes are bright and he is copying every single thing I do, including my little key for which section of the graph represents which hand. We do the same exercise for dogs, which, as the article indicates, are usually about 50% left-pawed and 50% right. I ask him to compare the two circles, and see how much of each one is colored in. “See? Many more dogs use their left than people do. Half of dogs are lefties, but only that little bit, that 10%, for people.”
His eyes light up, and he breathes a big “Wow!”
“So, the article says something funny about cats. It says that 50% of them are right-pawed, 40% are left-pawed, but 10% have no preference.”
We find a fresh envelope and start on the cats. Bug is buzzing with excitement despite the fact that it’s nearing 9:00 and he almost fell asleep in his barbecue sauce. He is bent over the page now, making his hash marks and circles. I explain that he can remove all the zeroes from his percentages and make them into numbers easy to count. He decides that right paws should be dark, left paws should be dots, and no preference should be stripes. He draws a key, makes his ten-slice pie, and begins to color in the sections.
“Bug, look what you did! You made pictures to compare dominant sides for a whole population of dogs, cats, or people. This is really cool stuff, and it makes the numbers easier to understand.”
Beaming, he writes “cats” on the top of his last drawing and tells me again what it all means. I am dumbfounded. This, from the boy who claims he is too tired even to set forks on the table at dinnertime?
On nights like these, I am more resolved than ever to keep a TV from setting foot in our someday-home. It is nearly an hour past bedtime at the end of an exhausting day, and my boy would like nothing more than to stay up half the night creating a graphic model of an animal population. Who would be more tickled by this, Edward Tufte or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? Perhaps Bug’s own granddaddy, who is at this very moment down in the basement puzzling out one of his mutivariate equations, those Faberge eggs of math, adorned as they are with their many-shaped numerals and their strange Greek baubles.
When Bug is finished, he makes a giant check mark on the bottom of the page and draws a big smiley face just like the teacher does. He is delighted enough to grade his own work and give it high marks. I quiet the urge to tell my boy how happy this makes me. That’s the sweet little secret of intrinsic motivation, isn’t it? The itch is his to notice and to scratch. And it doesn’t matter one smidge who is proud of Bug, other than his very own self.
Shannon E. Williams 