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community, Friends, Home, Mindfulness

It’s Marvelous to Be Alive in This Time and Place

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It’s worth fighting through the inertia.

True as that may be, my self-pity disagrees. In its defense of digging a deeper rabbit hole, it would rather filibuster than concede. Its zealotry twists the mere suggestion of celebration into an offense against reason.

Birthday? Bah. What would you be celebrating anyway? Your troubled finances? The end of your relationship? The last dozen fights with Bug, an anemic field of job prospects, your dearest friends in crisis?

The silk-throated devil reminds me that I’m stretched too thin as it is. “Tired” is no longer an adequate descriptor for the perpetual state in which I exist. Wouldn’t you rather just rest, read, heal? Wouldn’t your time be better spent re-tooling your resume?

And:

Once you’ve had 40-something of them, birthdays just become days. Throwing yourself a party at this stage is both tacky and desperate.

No parties. No people. No no no.

But also yes. Because every reason to skip out on pleasure is a dolled-up version of submission. In fact, the more convincing the justification for staying low, the more I should suspect — and upend — its dominance. A toxic mood relishes its alpha dog position, growing in power unless I subvert it.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has a simple and ingenious approach to this. Just choose the opposite.

To break this feedback loop, we need to engage in a behavior inconsistent to the emotion we’re trying to manage. This is a technique called opposite-to-emotion behavior. To do this, identify the emotion (sadness), identify the mood-dependent behavior (inaction/isolation), then do the opposite of that.

Opposite to Emotion Behavior from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

A snap, right? Take the stairs. Don the cape. Put a friggin foot on the gas and go. Even when it seems like the most useless act in the world. Especially then.

So, snarling and irate and certain the endeavor will fail, I hurl a few names at Evite.

Fixing a time and place leads to tidying, menus, asking for help. I cobble together activities. I send personal invitations to a new neighbor and to old family friends going through a tough time. My mother gets on board — bless that lady — and then I am dashing around, slapping on lipstick and jamming in earrings as the first guests knock on the door.

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As with so many actions, motion generates momentum. It’s almost irrelevant the direction of travel. Any push will do.

The friends arrive. More follow. They hug and meet and hoot and gossip. They bring wine, sweets, kids, dogs. A few play along with my contrived icebreaker activity, milling around five zones of the house where markers and paper on the wall invite joyful thinking about our community and our time together here.

As with so many choices, intention determines outcome. It’s almost irrelevant the details of the text. Any welcome will do.

Earlier in the day, Tee whisked Bug off to a college basketball game. Halfway through the party, he’s dropping the kiddo off. When half-ass planning this whole shindig, I’d been wearing armor of thorns and stink. My invite list failed to catch half the people I love. I’d also been too tight-hearted to ask Tee if he’d like to come. If I have to throw this stupid party, I don’t want my ex husband here. My birthday. My party.

Mine mine mine.

Then my son walks through the door and the room erupts in a cheer. Bug’s face lights up and he skips into the Studio 54 buzz and music and sparkle. Tee is already backing out, saying good night. “Come in,” I say. “Eat. Have a beer.”

“I’ve got a lot of school work still to do. . .”

I gesture wide. “There’s hot cider, Moroccan veggie stew.”

“Okay, just for a minute.” He steps inside and stays for an hour.

Tee is still there when my loved ones gather in a circle around the room. Everyone speaks out loud their wishes for the year ahead as well as their thanks for the right-here-and-now. My mom. The junior-high pals. The Zumba instructors who’ve become sisters. The new neighbor, the writing group fellow, all these the people who just happen to be my people. Even Tee shares how happy he is that we are parenting together as friends and that our son is thriving. Words upon words brushed with almost-tears and lots of chuckles weave their light web around the room.

Bug and the neighbor’s son, chasing down dogs who are chasing down crumbs, dart through the throng decked out in sunglasses and bandit masks, mercifully demolishing our grownup drift towards solemnity.

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It’s an extraordinary and dizzying experience to stand inside the metaphor of a circle of love manifesting in real life.

That incessant need to be on, to get things right and be just so, has slunk off into some forgotten corner. In my home with these dear ones, I feel at ease. It is as if I really am — for the moment — okay as me. Clumsy, gushing, nerdy, cutting, tempestuous, so-very-lucky me. . . just a gal entering her 43rd year in the happy company of her tribe.

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(And, as I remind several perplexed friends and my son: Yes, a 42nd birthday is the beginning of a 43rd year, because math, people).

As the music starts up again, the circle dissolves and takes on new shapes. Small pockets of conversation dot the room. People who just met giggle like old friends, a baby is passed to a new set of arms, men talk coaching and gals talk travel. Folks who haven’t seen each other in years cover lost ground. The first roots take hold under nascent relationships.

Orientation determines truth. I tilt my head and the whole thing resolves into sharp-edged clarity. Throwing oneself a party is also giving a party. A birthday is just another day, yes. It is also a gift, a perfect excuse to open a door and invite a fledgling community to weave itself into being. This circle is so much more than mine. It holds my son, parents, neighbors, and all the friends who show up with attention, voice, and story.

My girlfriend says that each year is “a free vacation around the sun.” Even so, it can also feel like an extended solo trip. It can take a few revolutions (or a few dozen) before it becomes clear that we have always been in this together.

This time I can see how many are at the helm, how strong the crew, how wide open the skies.

 
 

Family, Friends, Home

For This

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Kulturgeschichte / Essen / Belle Epoque

For more than one of the eleven around the table, the year left bruises. For more than one, tears choke the blessing. Words that begin as thanks are threaded with veins of dense and nameless matter.

Loss is a removal that adds weight.

Chuckles accompany each small confession. We are older now. Pleasure hits the tongue in the bitter spots too. Years distill gratitude to its sharpest potency.

We round the corner and my turn is seventh. I say that I most often describe myself as a single mother. I say this is inaccurate because a tribe holds my son and me. We are not doing this on our own, we never have been alone. I say that family is like a story. It ends up looking entirely different than what we expect and somehow ends up looking exactly as it should.

—
Image credit: Otto Günther, Am Tagelöhnertisch (1875)

 

community, Friends, Home

This Happening

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Open Now

The vet’s best guess is that our rescue dog was born sometime in the fall of 2013. Over scrambled eggs and waffles this morning Bug says, “Let’s make her birthday October 12 .”

October 12, as it happens, is a school holiday in the states. Indigenous People’s Day is what the more enlightened of my fellow American’s have begun calling it. I’ve taken off work so Bug and I can hang together, but the neighborhood kids have been asking for him all weekend. I know I’ll be sharing him and that’s just fine — it will provide some needed post-window-replacement cleanup time. Every piece of furniture in every room of the condo is still sitting three feet from where it belongs.

Now it looks like my tidying plans will have to make room for Noodle. “What do we do for a dog birthday party?” I ask. Continue reading “This Happening” →

Family, Home, Love, Relationships, Things I Can

96. Things I Can Witness: Sickness, Health

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My mother was in a severe car crash yesterday. I say “crash” because of course it was an accident. Also, two drivers slammed their vehicles into each other. Damage and injury ensued. Crash it is.

I learned about this crash from a text. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to walk Noodle today. I’m at the ER waiting for a cat scan.” This is my mom. The request for help is ever-so-gently implied and braces itself for disappointment. Also, she cares always that others are okay. Concern for everyone else gets top billing even when she’s just wobbled out of an ambulance.

I called and texted to dead air. I was already en route (though it was anyone’s guess which hospital), having left a garbled message for my supervisor about missing our afternoon meeting. Then my mother called back.

“I’m mostly okay.

“Is Dad there with you?”

“He’s at a lunch meeting. He said he’ll come when they release me. I just got out of X-ray and now I’m waiting for the scan.”

“So you’re there alone?” I’m already turning off campus and heading north. I have to press because I know she’ll cover for him. It’s a ridiculous charade. Hell, Bug and I were their housemates for three years. She knows and I know that my father puts work first, so I ask again and she half apologizes for him even while pinching her lips at his absence.

“Oh, it’s fine. I was worried my teeth were broken, but it turns out I only had a mouthful of glass.”

We hang up and a few minutes later she pings me back to let me know my dad is out of the meeting and on his way. Sure enough, he arrives before I do, so I turn back and land at my office in time for my boss.

After a diagnosis of bruised ribs, a goose-egg, and random surface havoc, they send her home. When we talk later, Vicodin drags her speech out and she assures me she’s fine. “The shower stung a little.”

“What do you need?”

“Your dad’s here. I had a can of soup. Really. I’m fine.”

I’m sure she is, though I’m less than certain of his capacity to keep her so. She takes very good care of my father. Even around the edges of her own career, she always stocked the fridge and made the vacation plans and supported my sister and me well into our respective adulthoods. She tends to her chaotic extended family, schedules the carpet cleaning and window replacement, and feeds the cat. She keeps everything humming along.

My dad has his own ways of contributing, and I see this a little more clearly now that the fog of my adolescent daddy issues has (mostly) lifted. When my mother’s frustration with her husband’s obliviousness makes her want to explode — she was in Scotland for 2-1/2 weeks and returned to a fridge full of rotten food — she repeats her mantra: “He is a good provider.” Indeed, he is better than anyone I’ve ever known in this regard. He would have made his own daddy proud.

True to the gendered roles of his generation, my father takes care of all the outside chores and most of the structural/mechanical/HVAC aspects of the house. True to the equality rebellion of that generation, my parents work towards their financial and retirement goals together.

It is as surprising as it is obvious that my father would leave off work halfway through the day to care for my mom. In his way, he is her warm (if itchy) blanket. As she convalesces, she’ll have to give him a grocery list and remind him to take out the garbage, and he may forget to follow through on both. Even so, behind her voice on the phone, I hear his. He’s there next to her on the sofa, cracking jokes and laughing with her at Bill Maher.

For most of my life I have run in the opposite direction of my parents’ relationship. I’ve sought out intimacies that were so dissimilar, they may have been a different species altogether. Certainly my marriage was an odd imitation. It outgrew its costume in less than a decade.

The friction my parents generated in the first half of their marriage led to a separation and almost-divorce when I was in my teens. The concessions they both made to repair that rift seemed far too pricey. I have been determined to be more communicative, less gendered, more adaptable, less childish. Along the way, I’ve build expansive and byzantine and ornate and enchanted romances with people who were wildly unsuited to me.

But I have yet to build a home.

And this, I hear through the phone, is where my parents live.

My father is there for her. Sure, this comes after a pause to complete the work which occupies at least 75% of his attention. Nevertheless, he comes. And she asks now for only a smidge more than she ever hopes to receive. Sure, the longing for a more complete union is forever pressing from beneath, stretching taut the skin of her diplomacy. Nevertheless, she accepts what he has to give.

He stayed and worked from the house today. They took a break and he ferried her to the lot where the tow truck stashed her totaled Honda. After emptying the glove box and trunk, they headed back, stopping at the supermarket together to stock up. He will be with her when she starts test-driving new cars. She will be with him when they review their bank accounts to decide what they can afford. He’ll go back to work. She’ll return to her book clubs and volunteer ESL classes and (fingers crossed) walks with Noodle.

For as long as this chapter of their lives together lasts — and we all see with more sharpness today how instantly the book can close — they will be the ones who take care of each other.

Here I sit, quiet and a little stunned in the solitary place that contains the whole of me. It is night here. My son is at his father’s. The dog dozes by screen door. A retreating rain and the thrum of the interstate are the only voices that pass by. They dance at the windows then slip away.

It’s a marvel. Somehow, for all their mistakes and failings, my parents have fashioned a partnership, a love, a home. I pick up some of the discarded garments and turn them over in my hands. Split seams, yes. Stiff stays and rough hems and oversized buttons. Still, they could fit. If I arrange them to my form, if I piece them together with my own tattered wardrobe, I might find they suit me after all.

 

 

Home, Mindfulness, Things I Can

94. Things I Can Whisper: Become, Surrender

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I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am.

– From The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

 
 

Family, Home, Mindfulness, Things I Can

84. Things I Can Snap: The Family Photo

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. . . and they found a certain contentment, living more or less happily ever after, which is what “now” is while one’s in it.

– From Robert Coover’s “The Frog Prince”

I lay flat on the stained carpet, felled by a muscle spasm with diamond-tipped talons. My boy, stung pink with sun, is sprawled across a twist of sheets and pillows. He has been complaining about a stomach ache. “I just don’t feel good,” he keeps repeating while he looks at me with a mix of longing and irritation.

Beside us, Noodle mopes in her crate. All the pacing and fussing and nosing  to spur one of us to action had the opposite effect, and now she sighs heavily and frequently while staring right at us.

A pillow props up my knees up and I grit my teeth against waves of pain as I read. We’ve just begun The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which we’ve inexplicably overlooked during the previous eight years of literary peregrination. Bug sips from a cup of seltzer water and kicks the blanket further down the bed.

Right in the middle of Edmund’s box of Turkish Delight, Bug turns and reaches across me. Scootching his hand under my shoulder, he inches me closer to his mattress. Then he leans in and plants a slow, soft kiss on my cheek. I see a smile ease loose across his face as he lets me go and flops back onto his bed.

“It’s all three of us right here,” he says. “Wouldn’t this be a perfect family portrait?”

I put my finger in the page, close the book against my chest, and look around.

My boy, the dog, a home, this night.

One story, one kiss.

Our perfect family.

 

Home, Poetry, Things I Can

61. Things I Can Add: Music Room

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piano keys

The piano may join us
in this corner we call the dining nook
where our family that is two
keeps a bucket
filled with markers and pens
next to the salt
shaker. When we move again
the table and sofa
remaking our one room
into the many we covet
this becomes the sitting
place and the piano
will be doing that already.
It can stay. A song now
glitches on a hand-me-down
laptop. These machines age
in dog years. The choice
is between upgrading or losing
one lyric after another
to the exponential rise
of force X point O.

Option C is none here,
the above too poor an excuse
for music. It is hardly a maker, 1s and Os
whipping in packs along circuitry
delivering a canned calliope, midway
carousel operating
by remote.

I also want to be new
as if mounting the horse with fresh
paint might offer a ride somewhere
other than where I started
as if I am the lucky one. You are young
enough to believe capacitive touch
means building with light. Still at the table,
you are angry that screens are not invited here
and I lift my wrists in an extended rest, too few
fingers for the chord
my angers weave.

The piano may make us
play the old music
as if for the first time. One note
yours. One note, mine.

All together now.

Soon we will trade these keys for those,
string the hammered
steel tight across wooden belly and let heavy
dampered echoes reach
between us, press down,
tumbling our separate weights
into a sound only four hands
can make. Like us, the instrument
will have to share
this room of a dozen uses. It will join us
at our sharp corners.

You empty your glass. The wall here
is the color of leaves, or maybe one leaf
of blank sheet music. We each draw
a marker from the bucket. The first lines
decide everything.

 

community, Home, Things I Can

53. Things I Can Submit: My Comments

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Dear VDOT,

I write to you as both a commuter and a resident who will be affected by the proposed changes to I-66.

I live in a complex of garden-style condominiums just behind a sound wall near exit 60. It is a lovely place for a home. Like so many of my neighbors, I chose Northern Virginia for my work and family because of the rich quality of life here. Proximity to the cultural and professional opportunities of a thriving metropolitan area is only part of the allure. The parkland, woods, protected watersheds, and trails are the real gems of the region.

Northern Virginia has done a superb job of maintaining green corridors throughout its various counties and districts, even as the population has ballooned. This makes owning a business and raising a family here an especially welcome prospect, and it is what differentiates us from the development monstrosities that litter the landscape of many of our suburban and urban counterparts.

It is admirable that our regional transportation agencies are working so diligently to respond to the needs of our expanding region. I-66 is the favored bugbear of locals, and it is understandable that this is where attention is currently focused. However, when it comes to projects like this, it’s been shown time and again that individual vehicle use increases as roads grow. For this reason, I am surprised that widening I-66 for more vehicle traffic is even being discussed. There is ample evidence that drivers will only shift to bike or public transportation options when driving becomes more arduous than the alternative. More lanes = more cars, longer commutes, and a miserable ride for everyone.

Alleviating the congestion here requires creative and integrated solutions. It is good to see bus routes included in this conversation. Expanded bus/train/metro service is a necessary but insufficient condition for sustainability. Truthfully, the most appropriate options for Northern Virginia are walkable, mixed-use office and residential developments with a variety of interconnected transport options.

That said, I understand that expanding I-66 is a likely outcome. The medium-term time horizon of many of our region’s residents and commuters all but guarantees this. Sadly, too many of my neighbors think only of easing their own commutes or protecting their own property values rather than ensuring a livable home for our grandchildren. I have spent enough time in cities like Dallas and Los Angeles to see the disastrous, ugly, and unlivable results of such shortsighted transportation “management.”

I would like my son’s children to inherit a place more inviting than a gordion knot of mega-roads choked with cars. As a homeowner who wants to sustain this livable community many generations into the future, I ask you to consider the following concerns as you proceed:

  1. Please do everything in your power to maintain the wetlands, mature trees, and other uncultivated greenery that abuts I-66 outside the sound walls. If any of this must be cut back for construction access, I urge you protect the land from development or structural change, and work to restore the greenery when the project is complete.

    2.  

  2. Please refrain from bumping the walls further into our neighborhoods and parkland. The current border of the freeway already pushes up against countless homes and green spaces. Moving those sound walls further out would be devastating. Construction noise notwithstanding, the long-term impact of that lost acreage would destroy the livability of this neighborhood as well as many others. Here alone, an entire community comprised of hundreds residents would face a stripped concrete surface for decades to come, perhaps longer. The blight this would invite is a chilling prospect. Maintaining the narrow but delicate band of greenery that buffers our neighborhoods from the freeway is critical. Please do everything possible to secure the walls in their current locations.
     

  3. If the bike path being discussed comes to fruition, please treat it as the transportation route it is rather than as a “trail.” Again, the limited greenery on the outside of the sound wall is already threatened. A bike path is essentially another road of barren concrete. The nearby streets and the inside of I-66 are already designed for wheels. They can be adapted for bike lanes with much less damage to the mature trees, wetlands, brush, and wildlife habitats that flourish in the current I-66 buffers. Please keep road elements together in the plans, and keep our green spaces lush.

Thank you for considering these comments and concerns. You have my great appreciation for all you do for our region.

Most Sincerely,
A Cautiously Optimistic Neighbor

Home, Parenting, Things I Can

41. Things I Can Believe: Those Wise Words

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We need a way to forgive others, ourselves, and the fact that things don’t turn out the way we expected. Writing our experiences, our fears and our aspirations can clear away the overload of resentment and the stale taste of remorse.

– B.L. Pike in “Write Now: Why You Really Can’t Wait Any Longer”

I ask my son to help with dinner. He snaps and stomps, tells me he’s not going to cook for both of us, he’s only going to make his own snack, and it’s not fair. For once, I conquer the urge to roar back. Instead, my voice is even as it reminds him of his options. He can either make dinner for us both by himself, or he can help me make dinner for us both together.

“Why do I have to do everything around here?” He storms into my room, hauls Biggie the stuffed polar bear off the bed, and thrashes him against the mattress. Noodle comes streaking out, head bowed, ears down.

I empty the dishwasher then check the mail.

Continue reading “41. Things I Can Believe: Those Wise Words” →

Home, Things I Can

35. Things I Can Put Away: The Weekend’s Haul

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The absence of television is my secret indulgence. The house, silent, throbs with stored energy. Even the ambient nothing is saturated with sound and light.

The night is mine to claim or spurn. I have relinquished the service of intermediaries.

Tonight, my boy wanted pupusas for dinner. I’ve never eaten one, let alone prepared one. No matter. On my lunch break today, I popped over to the supermarket for masa harina.

We weren’t 30 seconds in the door before Bug raced off on his scooter with the neighbor kids. I cranked the music and heated the skillet. Wet cormeal, caked hands, cheese, oil. Mash and spatter, the warm scent rising.

Bug came back flushed and hungry. He downed four and told me, “Pupusas are a hit.”

Now, he is in bed running the twilight battle soundtrack, fighting off sleep with jet engines and exploding artillery. I move through the house as laundry churns and dishes dry in the rack. The dog awaits her nighttime walk. The lunches are packed, the plants sated.

Next to my bed is the red bag left from Sunday. After the 5K, my Mister and I wandered through town. In the garden behind an elementary school, we parked ourselves with our compostable takeout containers of eggs and greens. Full and sunned, we strolled down the main strip. A ruckus at the library checked our progress. Crowds, umbrellas, noise. Curious for a Sunday.

The lady at the door told us the bag was $5, and it was our ticket in. We handed her a bill and she offered up a shopping tote. We could fill it. These were the weekend book sale’s all-you-can-haul final hours. We elbowed our way through hordes of neighbors and pawed through the leavings. Children’s fiction by Ursula LaGuin, The Black Stallion, one for me by the author of The Lovely Bones. An investigation of Shakespeare’s missing folios. The Golden Compass (two copies, it turns out — I must have been eager). A treatment on writing memoirs. A stack of rough-skinned novels by women, a few fat beach reads with “murder” in the title.

The spines bit at the seams and at My Mister’s back, yet everything and everyone made it home intact.

For the past five days, the sack has been sitting unsorted on the floor of my room. Tonight, as Bug winds down and a May breeze sidles through the screens, I sit on the carpet and dump my treasures. I pull from my shelves the pieces I have no need to keep. A few dimestore mysteries, a couple of salacious works of pop journalism. Those go into my backpack for campus the book drive. The new ones, I slide into the gaps left behind, righting the spines and checking that all neighbors are compatible enough to coexist at least for the short term.

The hardback volume on the voiceless boy, I set aside. It goes onto my bedside table to keep Cervantes company. It might be what carries me off to sleep tonight.

The red bag is folded now and stashed with the other grocery totes in my kitchen. The washing machine has finished clanging and spinning. The dog has settled in her crate.

In my son’s bedroom, I hear pages flutter then thump to the floor.

The house is silent.

The night is mine.

This is nothing like alone.