He wraps his arms around my shrunken shoulders
and says I can stay.
His cupboards overflow with borrowed delicacies.
The eggs of endangered sea creatures.
The dried stigmas of saffron flowers.
He places his finger on my chin and pries my mouth willing.
I am thirsty.
He feeds me salted arame
and calls it rare.
He counts for me the reasons
for my gratitude.
Category: Uncategorized
A and Not A
Pulling into our driveway last week, Bug said to me, “When you and Daddy aren’t divorced anymore, he can live in this house with us.”
This is where the breathing comes in handy. “Sorry, babe. Daddy and I aren’t ever going to live together again.”
“Well, but when you do live together again, he can live here with us.”
Inhale, exhale. Just the facts, ma’am. “You will always have two homes. Daddy and Mommy aren’t going to have one home ever again.”
“Yes you will. You will live together again.” He unbuckled himself and was out the door, banging into the house.
These declarations from my kid rattle me. If I were truly certain that this was the right thing, or if Tee were gone from our lives for other reasons, maybe I could make these statements without feeling so blown apart. Maybe. How would I know? Friends who have been widowed or abandoned have their own struggles with explanations. My shakiness is my own, and it comes from lacking an unshakable faith in my own judgment.
What if I am wrong here?
The lawyer emailed me yesterday. She filed the paperwork with the court, and it landed on the clerk’s desk on December 8th. She wrote, “I know you would like to be divorced by the end of the year. I think we can do it. I will keep checking back with the courthouse.”
End of the year? This year?
What started as an idea became a word. It then grew to a living thing the size of a meteor, moving at its own momentum along a trajectory we can barely track let alone control. Divorce is an eclipse, blocking the sun. It seems to go on for years.
But it does not. It is finite. This one might even meet its end this year.
What if, what if, what if. Is this the wrong choice? What if Tee and I could muddle along, be decent enough companions and good enough parents to our son? In the absence of the awful things, infidelity and abuse and the unspeakables, identifying a right course of action is hopeless. Even attempting to narrow the field of “right” choices down to something manageable becomes a Sisyphean task. Push it up, watch it fall. Repeat. This is especially true for a person with such a remarkable history of poor judgment where men are concerned.
Stay, but how? Go, but how? Maybe a little of both?
Without a clear right way, I choose to trust my instincts. (Yes, those very selfsame instincts that so often lead me astray.) I am unwilling to put Bug through the ups and downs of my loss of faith in his father. Muddling through in a marriage is all good and well, but even that is unfeasible where respect has dried up and disdain has pushed through the cracks. Tee does not need that form of partnership, and Bug certainly does not need to see his folks living that way.
So I tell myself.
Over the weekend, Bug had a neighborhood buddy over for a play date. While they were leaping off the couch cushions in the living room, I overheard this conversation:
Bug: “Did you know I have two houses?”
Friend: “You do?”
Bug: “Uh-huh. My daddy lives down the road and my mommy lives here.”
Friend: “That’s weird.”
Bug: “My parents got divorced, so I get to live in two houses.”
Friend: “Okay. Are you the good pirate or the bad pirate?”
Bug: “We’ll both be bad pirates.”
Grownups are not so different from children. We swing between acceptance and resistance. We sip on sweet lies as we work our way up to taking a big gulp of truth. And we all come around to what we need to face in our own meandering way.
Perhaps, though, acceptance and resistance are a false dichotomy. I don’t know about you, but I want so badly to want what is in front of me. I command myself to want it. I try to force blinders on my imagination and open my arms and will myself to choose this because it should be my desire. This here is what I have so it must be what I wanted. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Unearthing the reasons these things landed before me may require a more exacting instrument than the logical fallacy. Acceptance is complicated by the desire to see with clear eyes and adjust my course for the next leg of the journey.
Meanwhile, I ache for the impossible. Just like my son, I fixate on things that were or that seemed to be or that might have been, if, if.
A different version of the fantasy appeals depending on the day. This is why the resistance is not so far removed from acceptance. Sometimes the wanting is for the iconic man of the house out in the front yard hefting the axe to chop the wood to warm us in winter. Sometimes it is for cruising down an open road that preceded even the notion of family. Sometimes it is for tucking into a warm hug and hearing a story from a mystical world in which good and evil are cast in gold and shadow, and justice follows its prescribed path, and the triumph of the proper virtue is never more than a page or two away.
From time to time, I wonder if friends and loved ones on the outside of this can see more clearly than I can. Are these hurling shards of planet and moon on a predictable collision course? Do these witnesses stand back biting their nails and holding their breath and hoping for minimal damage, all the while thinking, Thank heaven that’s not me? Or is something else happening, something no one quite knows or understands, like a supernova where a star once burned? Like an earthquake along a forgotten fault line?
I have to admit, I haven’t the foggiest idea how to proceed. The divorce is happening, but it is only one hurdle, not a finish line. Crossing it opens the field to far more questions than it answers. I do not need to list them here. If you have been through it, you know. If you have not, then for goodness sake, don’t waste your brain power imagining.
Bug and I sat down this weekend and drafted a letter to the North Pole. He wrote the “Dear Santa” part and then dictated the rest to me. It was a lengthy correspondence. He only asked for a single Pirates of the Caribbean Lego set. From there, he went on to describe in great detail how he lives in two houses, so Santa should visit both, and in what order on which mornings. He then explained he would be in Massachusetts at Christmas, so Santa must also remember the two cousins. And, yes, Santa please dress warmly and wear a hat.
I cannot give my kid certainty about his future. I cannot even give him a mom free from stupidity and impulsiveness when it comes to men. Unfortunately, Bug is going to suffer a bit of the fallout from the more volatile parts of my unfinished self.
I can, however, give him my best shot at an honest answer. A story from a magical place, a few songs, and a hug when he needs one.
I can also give him two houses.
Maybe he will learn to want what he’s got. Maybe he will always have a taste for something different.
If he is anything like me, maybe a little of both.
Office Party 2.0
We were able to dispense with the requisite “Secret Snowflake” office gift exchange this year. While I am reluctant to snub tradition, who needs another $10 tchotchke? We agreed to try something a little different.
The assignment: identify a favorite charitable organization, and come prepared to talk about it.
Our student services gathering was early this year due to the early departure of one among us to a lengthy holiday in Brussels. On Monday, we brought holiday treats along with our own brown bag lunches. It was low key, in a conference room over lunch. Nothing fancy, which was exactly right for us. Folks came bearing festive, chocolate-y, sparkly yummies to share.
Anyone who wanted to participate anted up a few bucks. While we ate and chatted, each participant in the “Charity Stocking” dropped his or her organization’s name in a stocking. We listened as each in turn shared that group’s purpose and describe why it mattered. This gave all of us the opportunity to hear one another’s brief, sweet and revealing personal stories.
We not only learned about a range of organizations and how they serve a greater good, we also became more familiar with how our co-workers think about service. I had not known before that one of our coordinators used to volunteer as a counselor at one of Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Camps, and that another has a relative who has recently returned from Afghanistan and has become involved in the Wounded Warrior Project.
We chose the team-member who is the most recent hire to draw from the stocking. He pulled our winner: Canine Companions for Independence. The organization raises service dogs to help folks with disabilities. I had a vague idea about such work from a documentary I watched a hundred years ago, but I did not know it can cost $40,000 to raise and train one of these pooches! Our small group of ten collected over $125. This will not transform the world, but it sure is nice to know our pocket change is going somewhere that matters.
Then we consumed vast quantities of sugar.
Since our Monday gathering, I find I am paying a little more attention to the food donation boxes and Toys for Tots collections scattered around my campus. I am also trying to tone down Bug’s fixation on what he is going to get from Santa. It is not easy, but even just having him help wrap the gifts or write the notes seems to get us on the right track.
I recently asked for Bug’s help choosing and bagging canned goods for the food drive. He was full of questions about who and how and why. I explained that the food was for people who do not have enough to eat.
“Why don’t they go to the store and buy some more?”
Well, of course, that would be the logical approach. So began a straightforward but carefully worded conversation about money and hunger and “enough.” It was all very strange and without context, but my boy took in as much as he could before he was ready to get going to the delivery site. “Come on, Mommy!”
In the frenzy of buying, traveling, feasting and festing, it is a fine thing to remember about giving.
Below are the other organizations that made it into this year’s Charity Stocking but did not win the cash:
We keep their good work in our thoughts during the holidays, and on our lists when we have a few dollars to spare.
Self Afflicted
For Aron Ralston
At first it was the rock
pinning him down.
To rage and chip
at the obstinate thing
was the best he could do.
It took time to work up to the idea
that his own fixed self
would kill him in the end.
Then, just gritted teeth
and a dull blade
to saw through his own
tendon and bone.
Up and out,
leaving behind in its mausoleum
a scrap
once as much him
as the man who climbed to the surface
and lived.
We are each one of us
trapped where we landed
by way of foolish missteps
and a distracted gaze.
It is not the weight of boulders
we swear we can feel
holding us in place.
It is the delineation of a cave
we believe the dwelling place
of our whole.
When we finally concede
that freedom is sweeter
than the precious fragment,
we toughen up
and amputate.
Distillation
The iron leaves a streak of gray silt on my blouse. Before I can react, it is cooked in. I have no time for this, but it is my own fault for taking a shortcut. I could have purchased the distilled water, but I chose to fill the iron from the tap. It seems an unnecessary hardship, the task of adding an item so rarely purchased to the list. To actually remember to buy water? With everything else life demands? But now, this. A stain, and I will have to find a way to repair it, to rub the iron over salted paper, to make things right.
It seems such an extreme process. Is it really necessary to cook invisible hitchhikers out of the substance? To force it through those narrow passageways and collect it, so much reduced? This rarified version cannot really be so different from its original stuff. How is it possible that all those microscopic bits, things the naked eye cannot even discern, are such a burden?
It is odd to have this spare moment for ironing. It is odder still to have a spare ounce of gray matter for musing about it. Now that we have entered December, I can tackle some of the lingering items from last month’s neglected list. November was a bear. On November 2nd, a co-worker informed me we had just begun National Novel Writing Month. Sounds nice, but doesn’t everything has a stretch of the calendar these days? Oatmeal Appreciation Week. Lute Celebration Day.
No, no, my friend explained. You write a whole novel in the month of November. 50,000 words between the 1st and the 30th. He had started it already. I was dumbstruck. One day in, and I was already almost two days behind! I couldn’t wait. The opportunity to write towards such an ambitious goal was too delicious to pass up, no matter how strong the other demands on my time. That evening, I went home lacking an idea, an outline, or even a character. I did, however, have everything I needed to begin: a wide-open canvas and the thrill of the hunt.
It turns out it is not so very hard to write 2000 words a day. As long as I ignored my tired and crossing eyes, the 13 items on my to-do list, and all the tempting pulls away from the pen, I had no problem producing copious, overflowing quantities of words. It’s simply a matter of sitting one’s backside down at the page and commanding the hand to go. I did not have time to doubt the process. The choice to achieve the goal is itself the act of faith. Whatever source I drew upon was abundant, it was far bigger than I am, and it was unconcerned with anything going on up on the skin of my days. It flowed on its own, right on past me if I didn’t dip into it. As soon as I did, up it welled.
The juice that spilled out to the surface may be crude. It stuck to everything, including itself. It took no identifiable shape. But it was the raw material, and it was rich, tasty stuff.
I crammed writing into every nook and cranny of my waking hours. Previously undiscovered pockets of time revealed themselves. After Bug goes to bed, I found energy I never knew I possessed because I usually tell myself I am too foggy. My lunch hour was long enough for both a 30-minute walk and 1000 words. Waiting in Tee’s parking lot for 10 minutes, grabbing the first open seat on the metro, tapping my toes in the doctor’s office waiting room. As long as I shed the habits of distraction and the illusory need for ritual, as long as I simply opened the book and started writing, no matter what my state of mind, I could – I can – write 2000 words in 45 minutes flat.
Two choices I made starting out on November 2nd: First, I was going to finish it. Second, I was not going to sacrifice any other essential element of my life to finish it. These two things require a quick and dirty assessment of what, in fact, qualifies as “essential.”
These things are my necessaries:
- Giving my 8-hour work day my all.
- Being an attentive mother and playmate to my kid.
- Running, dancing, sleeping, and eating well.
- A bit of time with friends.
- Caring for the dog.
- Flossing.
- And, because the success of the whole endeavor turns on the axis of a secure home, being at least a tolerable housemate to my forbearing parents.
The two choices – finishing it and not giving up the important stuff to do so – required sanding down and fitting together the edges of all the tasks in a day. I had to learn quickly how to move between them without chatter and nonsense. Moments became intentional. Yes, a well-balanced gal needs her version of loafing. For quiet, I lit a candle and stretched my body across the living room floor. When done, I took a breath and returned to the page.
Such an endeavor comes with a cost. Among other things, writing fiction means not reading up for the LSATs or the GREs. It means not reading at all. No news, no poems, no advice columns, no blogs by friends. The list of things I do not do when I write is infinite. Worrying about the not-doing was yet another thing I did not allow myself to do.
The main cost is not anything like a loss. It is a purification. In a few short weeks, I discovered this: As I increase the heat and push writing through the narrow spaces between the necessaries, what is left behind is inessential. The things I do not do – things like watching TV, unfocused shopping excursions, Facebook, and pawing through my closet trying on five outfits before deciding what to wear to work – are junk. Dregs and residue. They weigh down my vision, clog up my brain, and leave a sticky residue choking the pores of my days.
Ignore the task of distillation, and the stains become inseparable from the fabric. The work to repair the tarnished journey is far more of a burden than the simple discipline of practice.
My birthday gift to myself on November 28th was to cross the finish line. After work and cake and gifts and Bug’s bedtime ritual, I dragged myself to my room and wrote the 50,000th word. The next evening, I grafted an ending onto one limb of the story and dumped the whole thing on the NaNoWriMo website. It’s mostly garbage, but it is the raw beginnings of another novel. And I completed all 52,800 words of it in 28 days.
Distillation is not a gentle process. Heat and aggressive focus: these are the things that burn apart the elemental makeup and offer up a concentrated supply of the pure and right.
Write on.
Propagation
It creeps down the side
of the credenza, spilling onto the shelves below
before climbing again, gaining purchase
in minute crevices where paint
appearing flat
is not.
The vine spawns more
vines, fat leaves
unfurling from a ration of soil
I dumped in the pot
a year ago.
I have trimmed it back
twice, down to the nubs,
sure if I allowed it to grow unfettered
it would burst its seams
and shrivel
in this dim office
cut by a narrow fraction of glass
facing north.
Yet it keeps coming back.
Curling around corners, heedless
of borders, it feeds off that old handful of dirt,
flaunting its green like the Amazon
canopy, thirsting for nothing
but sips from the tap.
Barring my scissors,
it would carpet the floors
drape the walls
drip from the ceiling
and steal down the back of my chair
until it could slip
inside my collar, whispering
against my throat
its secret
for licking at nothing
and still swelling
with a bellyful
of yes.
After Midnight
Just think:
a cute little flat
in a college town, a job in a non-profit
animal welfare organization
and evenings free to rock
the open mic.
All of this, in a blink.
Poor girl.
Your godmother must have earned her wings
from an online university.
All that magic,
and the best she can do
is a dress,
a dance,
a man?
When you leave
his ring on the nightstand
and cross the moat
for the last time, be ready to take
matters into your own hands.
If she shows up again,
grab the wand
and run.
Mother, Night
We talk of Christmas
gifts to make for ones we love
whose number may include each other.
Ties and books and the difficulty of music,
and what to do for the sister
with particular tastes
and an absence of time.
I say my year will be complete
if all I receive is a box of sleep.
Just think: to unwrap
one week, a mere seven nights,
each a polished pomegranate
swollen with its eight hours
and perhaps a nap or two, jewels
tucked in around the edges.
The story of this gift is far from new.
Three men arrive at the crèche
bearing gold and perfume.
What of their fourth?
In the forgotten chapter, lost
back in the desert,
he dared to crack the wooden arc
open, to sample the offering.
He could not resist the scent
(who could?)
and dipped his finger in.
Just a taste
and he was adrift
in the oblivion
he was supposed to have shared
not with the babe
but with poor Mary
who still, two millennia hence,
awaits the arrival
of a decent night’s rest.
The Seventh Life
She begins to cry sometime after midnight.
Each howl a round, dry bottle
she casts over the water
only to watch it sink.
No buoyancy at all,
just the cool ink where it fell
silent, still.
In this house of warm flesh
every door is shut. Even her nemesis
is out of reach
closing in on a doe,
a black comma
on a pallet under a coat of winter wool.
She didn’t do this before. Never in her many years
has she wandered the house, pleading,
the inflection cresting at the end of the cry
a sustained note,
a hooked interrogative
dredging my drowned body
from the depths.
I would invite her in (I claim)
but never have, not once.
She kneads the soft places
with her claws.
It doesn’t so much hurt
as scrape the edge of desperation
and beg for a way back in.
There is no vacancy
in this fallow womb.
Even though she presses her longing
against the spars,
the sea of my heart does not surge
and my breast is parched.
She will have to let the light from distant stars
in through the portholes
of her eyes
and seek refuge
in its inadequate warmth
as we all do.
Indulge
I allow myself ten minutes of self pity per day. It isn’t wise to take gulp it down all at once. Sipping is a better course. It whets the appetite but keeps some on reserve for when the mouth goes dry. After each taste, set it aside. Lift the eyes, take notice, breathe. Dig for a pen. Step into the music, call a friend. Give someone else a hand.
Over the course of a year or fifteen, perhaps the practice of coming up and out becomes the default. This is the hope, anyway.
So, please excuse me while I overindulge today.
Bug and I immersed ourselves in Halloween this weekend. Haunted mini golf, a raucous costume bash, and a pumpkin baking frenzy. I knew Tee would have Bug tonight as he does every Monday. Weeks ago, he asked if he could bring young Potter to my place for trick-or-treating, as my suburban neighborhood is a bit more pedestrian friendly than his town house complex. Last night when I called to confirm the plan – my Hermione costume ready, the house strung with pumpkin lights, a small mountain of candy by the door – Tee informed me he had changed his mind, “Didn’t we talk about this?” Miscommunication or oversight, not malice for certain. But still, my kid is not going to be here on Halloween.
We have had more than our fill of the holiday in each other’s company. Hell, he and I were singing karaoke and dancing until midnight on Saturday in our matched Gryffindor scarves. This is not a big deal. I even told the lawyer Halloween was not one of the holidays we needed to parse out in the Parenting Agreement, because it simply is not that important to Tee or me. Bug will be with the parent whose day falls on Halloween each year.
But, boy, did the news take a big scoop out of me. There was already a hole where my family used to be. The news is ice water on a cavity.
I do not want to go home tonight. Who can bear the chitter-chatter at the door, the pleas, the insufferable cuteness of their wings, their wigs, their gore?
This is a laughably small grievance. So many suffer much worse. The specters of lost children stab with acute, cardiac precision on the holidays. Friends I know have children across oceans, or who only come in the summers, or who are gone forever. Mine is not such a terrible fate. Bug will be with me on Wednesday, and on Thanksgiving, and again on alternating weekends into the only future I dare imagine
That still leaves tonight, and this insatiable thirst for self pity. The requisite moderately sexy Halloween outfit hangs on the back of my office door. I packed for work with a vague notion of something other than my house tonight. The streets here are lined with bars offering pub crawls and pumpkin beer to the childless and festive. Yet, I cannot work up the enthusiasm. Oblivion no longer satisfies.
I cast about for a texture for tonight’s indulgence. I open my tongue and taste the air. What is the craving? For ink? Steam? Curry? Stupid giggles with a friend? Silence? I circle back around to the same old place, the lessons not yet learned. When hurting, do something kind. Slow-dance the mind. Comfort the heart. Seek a source. Open the lips; take a long, slow sip.
Shannon E. Williams 