Tag: divorce

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Reframe

smirkpretty

Giovanni and I keep our cameras handy. We want to capture the cool Allegany waters and the dripping tamarack boughs. He turns the lens on me. I cringe. In those frozen moments, I can see how tired my eyes looked. How stained my shirt, how disheveled the campsite, how absent my son. Giovanni laughs and just shakes his head. “You’re beautiful, baby.” He glances at the photo in the camera then grins up me. “That is a good looking woman.”
 
In the archive of forever ago live photographs of the first weeks Bug was home, nursing at my breast. Wedding photos. Christmas pictures with Tee and Bug and me in the Colorado forest, cutting our own scraggly pine. Tired eyes there, too, and bright and distant and everything in between.
 
I ask Giovanni to keep taking photos. I know better than to let vanity scrub history of its texture. Still, it is hard to look at the images of this north country camping trip without feeling a bit of remorse. Where is the open face of a girl with no bitter seed tucked inside her cheek?
 

Every time you raise a camera to your eye you’re composing a picture – the very act of deciding where to point it is based on a conscious or sub-conscious decision about what you want to include in the picture. – Lee Frost

 
Begin again. Turn the head. Unhitch, release the remains of the gift freely given but poorly maintained. Gone, the days playing in the mountain creek with the tiny minnows flitting past my little boy’s ankles. Gone, too, the tulips curled deep in their bulbs beneath December frost along the hand-made fence. Gone is everything before.
 
Giovanni and I walk on.
 
The residue of a recent conversation with Tee still dusts my skin. We were chatting about their father-son adventures: fishing trips, air show excursions, visiting the tall ships in the Baltimore harbor. Tee is a fun daddy. “I can’t give him the childhood I had,” Tee explained. “So I have to make the best of what is here.” Resignation. A touch of martyrdom. I could almost hear the quiet, cresting cheers at Tee’s strength. The truth is, I listen for them myself when I speak of settling for less in order to provide stability for my son. This is the attitude of survivors.
 
Is that what we are doing? Surviving? If we start with the premise that we are handicapped, then our fortitude is certainly a strength. I hear the father of my son hint at disadvantage, and I think (quietly, because I am learning to hold my tongue), This pulsing place? The nation’s capital? The diversity of experience and background in every neighborhood? The colleges and museums and historic battlefields? The curry and pho? The political stage? The assembled masses? All of this is a shortage?
 
Bug’s childhood is not deficient. He is missing nothing at all. Nevertheless, it won’t be long before Bug believes he lacks the golden ticket if we believe he does. The kid is sharp, but it does not take a sixth sense to sniff out the secret Tee and I both carry: we have fallen short. We have not provided our boy with what he should rightfully have. The odor of failure clings to us both. We do not believe we have done enough, that we give him enough. Something is “supposed” to be better, or more, or different.
 
In another context, Giovanni once suggested that a shift away from wanting and towards appreciating might help us see each other a little better. When we pause to notice the composition of the object before zeroing in on its flaws, something good has room to grow.
 
Where I aim my gaze determines more than a single point of view. Bug will learn to orient his attention by watching the grownups in his life. Do I want to apprentice my son to a taxonomist of shortcomings? It seems a wiser course to teach him to identify the call of a whip-poor-will from its perch on a cedar’s low shoulder.
 

. . . by using different lenses, choosing your viewpoint carefully and thinking about which part of the scene you want to capture on film, it’s possible to create successful compositions every time. – Lee Frost

 
In the snapshot of Bug’s life today, here is what I choose to see:

  • Two homes.
  • A mom and a dad.
  • A lop-eared dog.
  • Woods near his house with pricker bushes and a creek and all kinds of ways to get lost.
  • Public parks, public libraries, and some of the best public schools in the country.
  • Books splitting the frames of shelves in his rooms.
  • Parents who read to him every night.
  • Road trips and campfires.
  • Healthy food in abundance.
  • Quiet time.
  • Neighbor kids who ride bikes up and down the cul-de-sac.
  • Three sets of grandparents who make room for him.
  • A cozy bed.
  • Songs in his repertoire.
  • Questions galore.
  • A floor onto which he can pour his tired body when he wants the world to stop.
  • Dreams about pirate ships.
  • Climber’s legs.
  • Dancer’s feet.
  • Paper and markers, glitter and glue.
  • Wonder.
  • Grit.
  • Anger and sadness and sweet, tender kisses.
  • One bad joke about a duck.

 
Tee says he cannot give Bug the childhood he had. He is more right than he knows. A childhood is not ours to give. In fact, Bug does not have a “childhood” at all. He has a life. His own. This very one.
 
As long as I am living with wishes that things could be more X and less Y, and as long as I carry the burden of loss, then I model for my child the fine art of holding off on joy until real happiness comes along.
 
Begin again. Turn the head.
 
All we need is right here.
 
Circumstances will change, of course. We will seek new doors down corridors we have not yet explored due to blindness, fear, or simple chance. But a belief in adaptation and expansion does not require us to disparage the now. We can love possibility while also wrapping our arms around this very whole moment, draw it close to our hearts, and shiver in awe at the perfect fit. So complete, this day, this configuration of things, this this.
 

The fact is you’ll rarely get the best picture from the first viewpoint you find, but unless you make the effort to explore your subject from different angles you’ll never know the alternatives. Sometimes all it takes is a slight change of viewpoint to completely transform the composition. – Lee Frost

 
As Giovanni and I walk the trail through the northern woods, I make a promise out loud. When I see a photo, I will find something in it to like. It is a simple act. The practice, I have learned, has a way of revealing the path. In every snapshot, seek something that opens the eyes. Appreciate the image as evidence of riches. Find the pulse. Land the gaze there and call forth the living yes.
 
—
 
Lee Frost Photography. http://www.leefrost.co.uk/default.asp

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Catch and Release

smirkpretty

Everything? Did you really do everything?
 
Finally, the question works its way through the labyrinth of my choices and avoidance, and returns to its true home.
 
Did I really do everything?
 
Giovanni is a good man. He brings home a small table to put in the corner of his room for me to write in quiet solitude. He concocts his own rub for the chicken and then works it into the perfect cubes. When I arrive, he is setting red bell peppers and summer squash in neat rows on a platter. “I’m about to light the coals. Go write.” I do. When I emerge, I fill the water glasses and pour the wine. We eat and laugh and argue and make our plans.
 
He is a good man for me.
 
Still. The timing is wrong, I am not ready, we are ill-suited for each other in a hundred ways, and we fight like we have money riding on the outcome. I tell him the marriage left too much smog and debris. I cannot see him through it. I only see reflections of Tee and of all the confused choices I made.
 
My fear of repeating the same mistakes drives me to insomnia. I leave. I come back. Again. Again.
 
Giovanni listens, and consoles. I round on him for making choices too much like Tee’s. He stands up to me. He challenges my assumptions and asks me not to have conversations in my head with ghosts. His good heart may be bottomless but his patience is not. Neither is mine.
 
I cannot face choosing, so I make the non-choice. I leave. I come back, and for the first time, he blocks my advance. “Not so fast.”
 
Not choosing, it turns out, is a choice after all. Now, the possibility that I have closed the door on what may be a sweet love wakes me up. It is the one sharp breeze that clears the air. I see Giovanni exactly as he is: strong and flawed and stunningly beautiful. And loving me and welcoming Bug. And hurt. And maybe done with me.
 
Did I really do everything?
 
A few weeks back, with his firm but loving touch, said, “You’ve got to let go.”
 
“Let go of what?” I asked.
 

“You know what,” he said. “And I can’t be the one to tell you.”
 
I cast about for what. Which fear? Which pattern? I know he is right. It is the edge I grip, the one I believe keeps me safe. If I hold on here, keep my arms and feet inside the bars, I will know exactly what needs to be done. Nothing can hurt.
 
The marriage clouds my vision. Tee blows in and blocks the light. Not Tee himself, exactly, not the real man with whom I am trying to work out kindergarten arrangements and holiday arrangements for 2013. Not my co-parent. The Tee I drag back into the frame is a phantom man with whom I am still grappling. The fights we had in the early weeks and months of dating haunt me, as I see now how the other choice was there, the other door, and I did not walk through it then. I had deep doubts, but I kept crossing the divide and choosing to believe. It only worked until it didn’t. The questions about what I missed, or where I missed a chance to choose differently, plague me.
 
Tee and I chose each other, and we did our best, and it did not work between us. It was not because of any one quality or one chain of events. Nothing about our unraveling is so easy to identify. Exploring those reasons is another story, though. It is for another day (or, rather, for all the days, quietly). The fact is that Tee and I are not well suited. We have moved without rancor into a new kind of relationship. We raise a son together, but we are not companions and partners.
 
I need to let go. Let go of Tee the history, Tee the boyfriend on the other end of those doubts, Tee the husband. Let go of the marriage. Release it to the story of before.
 
I have not done everything. I have not created a way to visualize or live that letting go. It is time to do so. It is time to do this, not to welcome Giovanni, but to welcome myself. Somehow, I have to take an action that will allow me to walk out into the fresh air and see the terrain around as it really is.
 
Today is the day. On this beautiful day in June, with a single cardinal on a branch outside my window, singing without restraint to the blue suburban sky, I begin.
 
I find the little toy Tee gave me on one of our early dates. It is a plastic figure of Grover in a cape and crash helmet. Somehow, this token became a symbol of our affection, and we passed it between us, letting Super Grover carry silly messages back and forth. It ended up with me all these years later, even though it had been a childhood toy of Tee’s. I wrap it in a letter thanking Tee for all he has done for me. Then I pack the words and the figure in a hand-carved box that Tee gave me. It was one of the many beautiful boxes he brought me from his travels. I love being surrounded by these small pieces of our shared story, but having them cluttered around me keeps Tee too close. Bug’s father is near enough, just by virtue of being Bug’s father. It is time to hand back these pieces. To release my grip, and let him do what he will with them.
 
And then to let the quiet, clear nothing fill my hands.
 
Perhaps Giovanni will fit into that space, perhaps he will not. Whatever happens next is uncertain. My hands are open. My eyes are beginning to be so.
 

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Homeward Bound

smirkpretty

My parents were the age I am now when they bought their first real house. We had lived in several apartments and a townhouse during my earliest years, but it was not until we moved onto that corner lot that I found my Tara, epic and tortured and almost breathing with coming-of-age angst. It had three bedrooms and big trees for climbing in the yard. The neighborhood boasted all the accessibility and leafy quietness of one of those rarified zip codes everyone knows is the perfect place to raise a child.
 
The house is still there, squatting on prime real estate wedged between the Beltway and the red line in Bethesda. I drive by it sometimes and feel my stomach clench in a fit of nostalgia and hunger. Inhabiting one of those doomed swaths of DMV land where swollen mini castles erupt from the still-warm remains of modest post-war bungalows, the house may be seeing its final days.
 
Drive-bys are just one symptom of my unchecked covetousness. The dear people closest to me gently suggest that I am a bit obsessed with money. Fear about Bug’s and my financial situation clings to me like some kind of unpleasant aroma. The jokes I crack at lunches with co-workers about our salaries are usually too loud and too close to the bone. I find it hard to control myself. The paychecks come in twice a month. They are adequate for here and now. Here and now, however, is not adequate for up and out.
 
The exasperation of the dear ones has long since eclipsed indulgence. No one wants to hear (again!) how tight things are, how frightened I am, how tough it is occupying this point on the financial spectrum. Someone out there is happy with less than what you have, they remind me. Someone out there is unhappy with more.
 
What if you already have enough?
 
I have a sweet tooth for drama. This is not news to anyone. Low-dose panic is my drug of choice. In a rare show of equanimity, I am taking their words under consideration. Is fear feeding the anxiety? Have I lost perspective? Perhaps the dear ones are right. It might be the case that I am so caught in this loop of defeat that I am unable to see how far my finances can stretch. Is all this quivering anxiety just me being a little hooked on the flavor of my own misery?
 
If my paycheck is sufficient to support Bug and me in our own place, I might actually have to get off my frightened ass and make the leap. I claim I ache for a home. A Place of Our Own is my official Red Ryder carbon action 200 shot range model air rifle. But maybe I don’t entirely trust myself to manage alone. If I wake up to find that possibility under the tree, will I shoot my eye out? Having enough would, after all, mean the end of this recuperative chapter in the suffocating security of my parents’ nest. Might it be that the truth of my terror is not in being stuck but in becoming unstuck?
 
Clearly, it is time to take an honest accounting.
 
I am a stranger to neither fiscal prudence nor a precise ledger. In all the years Tee and I were living together, I kept us on a noose of a budget. A single YMCA camp income supported our family of three, covering everything from staggering health insurance premiums to dog chow. One of my many jobs as the captain of the domestic ship was to scrimp, save, and track every penny. I made the baby food, hung the cloth diapers on the line, and hand-crafted the holiday decor. We traveled only to visit family. We ate in. Every single month for five years, I reconciled the budget. By some kind of financial sleight-of-hand (and more than our share of help from the ‘rents), we lived just a hair above the poverty line without ever feeling the pinch. We were actually comfortable. Never in all that time did I carry anything like the sickening panic weighing on me now, even though my current income more than the Y ever paid Tee.
 
This week, I bit the bullet and sat down with my Excel spreadsheet and a pile of bills. I mapped out the year ahead with Bug’s transition to kindergarten and the corresponding reduction in childcare costs. The budget contains 27 items spread out over 12 months. I tried to keep it austere but realistic, including meager numbers for dining out and clothing along with slim grocery expenses. The thin trickles into retirement and Bug’s college fund were saved from the axe. Cable and wifi were slashed along with any travel pricier than a day trip.
 
In the end, I tallied up the numbers. If I move out of my parents’ house in the next year, I will have enough money for a two-bedroom apartment. In Peoria. As for a location in Fairfax, Arlington, Loudon county? I cannot even afford a studio, let alone a condo or a townhouse in which my son can have a room of his own. Understand this: I hold an administrative faculty post at George Mason University. The position requires a master’s degree and carries an assistant director title. After bare-bones living expenses, the salary leaves me a mere $900 a month for rent, taxes, and utilities in an area where a bottom-end two-bedroom apartment is $1800 a month, before utilities.
 
They say public service is noble. Where can I trade in all this nobility for a little dignity?
 
This is not a woman who is eating her own tail in a solipsistic frenzy over money. My perception is not skewed, and objects are not appearing bigger because I am viewing them through the side mirrors. The situation is, in fact, just as dire as I had thought. The number gazes right at me with its italicized crimson smirk. It will not diminish unless I cut out things like trips to the dentist. Or Christmas.
 
The number is real. Also, it is not. For now, Bug and I are secure in this way-station, parked in a house which does not eat my earnings for an appetizer and then come slathering after my savings for the main course. The number is just this: a sign of how much further I have to go and how different life is going to look for my son growing up than it did for me.
 
The dear ones guide me away from my talk of financial trouble not because the trouble is false, but because they are helpless to ease the burden. We would all like to believe poverty is a state of mind and that overcoming it just takes hard work and a positive attitude. I am guilty of this half turn from uncomfortable truths. During the three years I spent working in a shelter for homeless families, I was a dogged cheerleader. I advocated for the guests to keep plugging away, and never ceased maintaining that the right combination of social programs and part-time jobs and bus vouchers could move a family into permanent housing. The fact of the recidivism rate – a number I cannot recall, but whose smirk had fangs much redder than my little spreadsheet figure – was hard to look in the eye.
 
Nonetheless, one has to believe against the evidence. What the dear ones are really saying is that the only alternative to faith is despair, and that is a sure exit ramp to ruin.
 
I can’t own a house any time in the foreseeable future, but I can own this: $900 a month free and clear is not chump change. Draw at random any one from among the 7 billion, and odds are she lives for a year on less than my monthly surplus. The generosity of my parents combined with that minor excess keep us from sinking down under the poverty line. I know better than to wallow. We are rich. We have trees in the yard, and Bug does have a room of his own.
 
A $900 rope is in my grip. I cannot see how far it stretches over the cliff face, but I know the only direction of travel is up. How I use my muscle to put that cash to use will determine how high we can climb. I clip one strand of it into a savings account to tether us to an embryonic down payment. A fraction hooks into Bug’s 529 plan so he is not choked by college debt in 15 years. Another thread harnesses us to a retirement account. With these small outlays tied on and my kid strapped firmly to my back, I climb.
 
I picture what is waiting just up over the lip of the rock. It is just out of sight, but it is there, the door open, a tall glass of something over ice waiting on the porch rail. I picture my son at the age I am now standing on the front step, watching for his retired and nimble mama to pop up for a visit. I picture home, and up we go.

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Structural Integrity

smirkpretty

In the park, a dad holds hands with one son while his other boy darts off into an empty batting cage. “Garrett, come on,” the dad calls. “We’re leaving.” Dad and little brother are strolling at a toddler’s pace. They have plenty of ground to cover before they reach the parking lot. Clearly, they are not leaving yet. “Bye bye, Garrett. We’re leaving you here.” Garrett, God bless him, ignores his dad. He is in a cage. A deserted one. How dangerous can it be?
 
I have only one kid. I’ll concede that I can’t fully appreciate the challenge of managing more. How does a parent keep an eye on the one who has run off when the other is foraging in the dirt for cigarette butts? Like every other parent out there, Garrett’s dad is doing his best with the tools at hand to keep his sons safe. Still, I can’t help but think “bye bye” is a flawed strategy for roping the calves.
 
Garrett has undoubtedly heard his dad’s ploy before and knows it for the idle threat it is. I watch as he moves up and down the cage, lacing his fingers through the fencing. He is busy exploring and marveling, and his dad’s farewells ping off his deaf ears. “Garrett, now.” Ah, yes. Escalation. The wheedling has not worked, so Dad kicks it up to demands. Garrett stands at the gate for a moment before turning and re-entering the cage. Dad’s voice edges upward. “Come here, now. Five, four, three. . .”
 
I do not stick around for the next installment. The father will figure something out. So will Garrett. That’s the thing about kids and parents. We are always figuring things out. More often than not, what we end up learning is not what anyone intends.
 
It seems like eons have passed since I last counted down towards a punishment. It has been almost as long since I have seen Bug’s temper go volcanic. Parenting tactics in which I was engaging almost daily are now abstract memories. “If you don’t get over here by the count of three, the cinnamon toast goes in the garbage. One. . . Two . . .”  Threats are disappearing from my vocabulary. Time-outs have also been enjoying their retirement.  Occasionally, warnings about endangered privileges still slip out. My voice became accustomed to the feel of “If you don’t ____, then you lose ___.” These tics still skitter past my lips before my brain can intercept them. Like Garrett, Bug ignores these ploys. I usually do, too. We return to mending whatever is frayed between us.
 
From time to time, I still walk away. Before I respond, I need to quiet down my own howling, growling head. I am not always so good at telling Bug I need to step away to catch my breath, but I hope I am getting better. When I explain I will be back and we will figure it out together, he usually manages to wait for me without going off the rails.
 
They say twenty-eight repetitions form the habit. New approaches I established in my interactions with Bug are actually working. We get into the car for school most mornings now just by moving together through the preparations. It stuns me to watch my boy perform the straightforward exercise of walking out the door, sitting down in his car seat, and picking up his book. For months as long as lifetimes, that stretch between bed and car was a minefield. Now, I explain the expectations, give him choices, and speak in an upbeat tone about what is unfolding right in front of us. The former slog has become a simple morning routine.
 
While Tee and I were leaving kindergarten orientation last week, Bug threw not one, not two, but thee rocks at me. They all missed, but not by much. My vision constricted and my jaw set. I walked away from the first throw (which is why he hurled two more). Trying to stay calm, I called over my shoulder, “I cannot be near a little boy who throws rocks at me, even though I love him very much.” He had been asking to stay with me that night. It was, however, his night with his daddy. Repeated requests and increasing volume had not worked, so he scaled up to aggression. He was also tired, having forgone a nap at preschool, and was a little disoriented by his tour of the new elementary classroom.
 
All of these facts about his experience in that moment were right there for me to notice. Shifting my gaze away from my own rising temperature and back onto my son had the effect of cooling and centering my mind. In a previous post about Bug’s defiance, I wrote about focusing my attention on just one measure when deciding how to approach my son: Does this choice strengthen or weaken my relationship with Bug?
 
Halfway up the hill, I paused. Looking back, I saw my little boy standing all alone. He had been left behind. Even Tee was walking away, explaining calmly that Bug was going to lose his movie that night for throwing rocks. With yet another punishment added to the burden, Bug was cracking under the weight of it all. Somehow, he was supposed to swallow the disappointment and describe rather than act out his feelings in an unfamiliar location while being incredibly tired. He had almost no resource to handle the task before him. Clearly, he was far too small for all the decisions required of him in that moment.
 
A number of options are available to a parent to get a situation like this under control. Roaring, wheedling, doling out consequences, and putting the kid in a time-out all are on the table. The simplest approach might be to just ignore the behavior and continue walking. Wouldn’t this deprive the kid of a the satisfaction of a reaction while also making him practice moving through his stormy emotions? Any of these options might make Bug drop the rocks and get his butt in gear. They also might further fracture an already strained relationship.
 
The mantra about strengthening the bond reminded me to set aside every extraneous objective and slip back into alignment with my child.
 
Down the hill, Bug’s face was set somewhere between tornado and downpour. My response could determine which climactic event would occur. I took a breath. Then I walked straight out of the tight corset of my own anger and returned to my child. I knelt and opened my arms. He collapsed against my chest. I spoke in a very quiet voice. “You threw three rocks. You must have been feeling something big.” He quivered and sobbed. “I feel disappointed when something doesn’t go the way I want. I feel like throwing and breaking stuff, too.”
 
He quieted against me. “Yeah?”
 
“Yep. But throwing and breaking usually hurts people and makes things worse. So maybe I say how sad and disappointed I feel, or I cry, or I go find a hug. You did that. You cried and now you’re getting a hug.”
 
I kept holding him and letting him hide his face in my neck. He was as small as he needed to be. He was small enough to disappear. This was just fine, because I had become a big sanctuary carved into the side of a mountain.
 
For the first year or more of the separation and divorce, I lacked integrity. I understand this now. The foundation was cracked, the floor bowed, and the walls were caving in. My flawed judgment and instability led to poor choices. I was not able to face the truth of my limitations and situation, so I found escape in dishonesty. With upended priorities, I forgot how to be Bug’s refuge. He did not know who inhabited the tilting room that was supposed to hold his Mommy. Would he be entering Opelia’s haunted quarters or Medusa’s lair?  Would his pre-dawn knock awaken Miss Havisham or one of the Scylla’s sleeping heads? Sometimes, he did not find anyone at all. His grandmother had to fill in the sinkhole left in my absence.
 
“There is nothing easy about divorce,” writes Abigail Trafford in Crazy Time. “It is a savage emotional journey. You don’t know where it ends for a long time. You ricochet between the failure of the past and the uncertainty of the future. You struggle to understand what went wrong with your marriage, to apportion the blame and inventory your emotional resources. There is one thing you are sure of almost immediately: you know that life will never be the same again.”
 
During those falling-down months, I was not Bug’s safe place. Now, I can be now. The new floor is laid on bedrock. The beams are carved from oak.
 
“Tell you what,” I murmured into his scalp. “When I pick you up day after tomorrow, the doggy and kitty and grandma and granddaddy will all be at our house. We will have a special dinner. Anything you want. What is your all-time favorite meal?”
 
“You know,” he said, pushing his head up under my lips. He could not get close enough.
 
“Pizza,” I say.”
 
“Nope.”
 
“Hamburgers?”
 
“Nope.”
 
“No?  Hmm. Lasagna? Ham and eggies? Chicken on the grill?”
 
“No. You know.” He was smiling in his shoulders now. Stone pillars no longer pressed them down. He grinned up at me. “Thai food!”
 
“Really? You want Thai on Wednesday?”
 
“Yes!”
 
I lifted all fifty pounds of him into my arms and carried him like a baby up the hill to Tee’s car.  “I will get a whole order of spring rolls just for you.”
 
“Five whole orders!”
 
I want to tell Garrett’s dad that his kid never needs to hear that he will be left behind. Not even a struggling, just-good-enough father would abandon his son in the park. Even if the little boy cannot keep up, even if he tests how far the radius of his parents’ attention extends and moves an inch or three beyond that, he will never have to find his way back by himself. This is the contract that we sign with creation when we become parents. We commit ourselves to being the safe place.
 
Building a refuge requires measuring with precision. We speak truth first to ourselves and then let it guide our voices. Because we know we would never hurt or leave our children, we should not say aloud the lie that we might. A threat, even a toothless one, is that first termite eating its way into the frame of our relationship. Either our children believe the lie and our rule is one of terror, or they do not believe us, and the emperor wears no clothes. Trust is brace, footing, and bolt. Trust is the stuff of integrity. If I have faith in my mind and the good universe to guide me along the parenting journey, then my son can have faith in me. He can even dart out of my reach from time to time, and I will always be there to carry him back home.
 
—
 
Trafford, Abigail. Crazy Time.. New York: Harper Collins, 1992. Print.
 

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Nowhere Near Kansas

smirkpretty

Defiance is always a relationship problem. If your child does not accept your direction (‘I don’t care what you say, you can’t make me!’), it’s always an indication that the relationship is not strong enough to support the teaching. This happens to all of us from time to time. At that point, stop and think about how to strengthen the relationship, not how to make the child ‘mind.’  – Laura Markham, Aha Parenting

When the brain is no longer in survival mode, it has the opportunity to come up out of the storm cellar and assess the damage. A weekend of nourishing activities and a few days of rest have calmed the skies. Climbing up into daylight, I can see the havoc this two-year typhoon has wrought on Bug’s and my relationship. It is hard to believe the thing is still structurally sound. It is even harder to face my own role in wrecking the place during my mad dash to get us to safety. Survival-mode parenting may keep the roof from blowing off, but it does not do much to help a kid learn to learn how to build anything solid.
 
This is not just guilt talking. A raw empathy for Bug also surges through me when I survey the scene. I want to be able to go back to the beginning and throw myself around him. He is too little to face so many of the events unfolding around him, and I wish I could protect him not only from the storm but from my own botched reaction to it. Alas, no one has yet perfected a time machine. Bug and I will have to pull what we can from the wreckage and start rebuilding right here.
 
As an earlier post described, my kid is struggling hard to manage life in two homes. Transition times yield the most resistance, but explosions occur at bedtime, in the morning, and during any activity involving additional people. Strong feelings seem to flood Bug all in a rush, and he acts before he has a chance to find his footing.  It is normal to look for a causal relationship between a child’s behavior problems and a single, identifiable event. The conventional approach is to wonder if his new teacher, the long commutes, a split home or a food allergy might be to blame. In my gut, I know better. I know that displacing my child’s distress onto circumstances beyond us has been a way for me to manage my own sense of being overwhelmed.
 
I also know better because I was a child once. The difficult situations around me were never the real challenge. The challenge was in not knowing how to make sense of my feelings about difficult situations. We all have painful childhood memories; for me, the ones with deepest imprint have nothing to do with the precipitating event and everything to do with fearing the fallout from my responses. Somehow, I was supposed to get my act together, yet I had no idea how to go about doing this. A sense of indistinct danger hung over my tangled feelings. The memory of distress is so vivid that even as I write about it from the safe distance of three decades, my heart begins to gallop.
 
A kid’s emotional vocabulary is rudimentary at best. I am guessing my childhood home was not the only one unacquainted with the “I statement.”  I remember how very difficult it was to know how to behave when I was feeling sad, scared, angry, or disappointed. This is not an indictment on my parents or any family culture. The language of loving guidance is a foreign tongue to most of us. Feelings are strange and slippery things, and they can seem even more perilous when we attempt to face them. Even as an adult, it is tough to gain composure, think clearly, speak rationally, and act well when the pressure is on. Who wouldn’t duck back down into the cellar and pull the hatch closed?
 
When I am feeling anxious or upset, I want someone to remind me that I am safe. That I am loved. That the world does not hinge on this one decision, that it is okay to take my time to sort it out, and that I have help if I need it. When I do not have these things, I become more prone to burst. Why would things be any different for Bug? In Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline, Becky Bailey suggests,

When your children are having a hard time obeying you, they need to believe that you have faith in them. They need to sense that you have confidence in them before they can develop confidence in themselves.

 
Yet, when my son is acting with aggression, what do I do? Increase the pressure by threatening “consequences.” If he does not put his toys away and put on his jammies now,he will lose books at bedtime. If he does not stop saying “shut up,” he will go straight into time out. I take away his ability to gain confidence in his own decision-making, and he loses trust both in himself and in me.
 
I understand the argument that children need some form of punishment in order to learn to behave appropriately. I understand it, and I do not agree with it. I have been attempting that approach for months because my own stressed brain has not been able to come up with anything better. However, the more I attempt to will Bug into compliance, the wider the rift between us grows. Sure, he may hop to it if I threaten to pour the hot cocoa down the drain, but he only grows more tightly coiled as the day rolls on. Against this survival parenting, my heart and mind have been gently, insistently reminding me that my own intense and stressful responses to my son are exacerbating his defiant behavior. My child has been begging for help in learning how to face a tough situation. Because I have been so very tired, I have largely left him to twist in the wind.
 
What is the alternative? As I squint into the new daylight, this is about as much as I can discern: I need to mend what is torn between Bug and me. Laura Markham suggests that “the most effective discipline strategy is having a close bond with your child.” This is what my heart tells me to do. It is also what practice has been reinforcing. No matter how aggressive Bug’s behavior, I remind him that I love him and that I am on his team. “It seems like you are having some big feelings, buddy.  Let’s see if we can figure out what to do.” I try not to snap. I know what it’s like to have someone get angry at me when I do something I know is wrong. It only makes me feel more hopeless. Suggesting my kid has to “get it together” before he is allowed to be in my company or in the company of others sends the message that only his proper, polished-up self is invited to the party.  I want to reverse course, and provide affection and support to the messy, work-in-progress my son truly is, as all of us truly are.
 
I am practicing staying with him. I am learning to let him cry or blow up a little or say what he needs to say. Afterwards, we can talk it out. Maybe we will have a do-over or experiment with something altogether new. I try to remember to use just one scale to measure an approach before I take it: does this choice strengthen or weaken my relationship with Bug? I do not always get it right, but as I breathe through my own confusion, I remember that the thing my son needs more than anything right now is me, loving him.
 
Now that I have clocked a few good nights’ sleep and opened up the cellar door, I can see the debris strewn around. The gift of this perspective is that the sun shines under the broken places and reveals treasures I never knew existed. Where structures once stood, rich soil, long fallow, offers itself up to us. Here and now, my son and me. We begin.
 
 
Bailey, Becky. Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

Change

Unfurl

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The quiet white stillness outside the chrysalis bears no resemblance to the cacophony within. The rending of flesh from bone, and bone from marrow, the screeching tear as seed splits hull and a wing cracks into being. . .  the noise of that inexorable process is as deafening as a war zone.
 
There is no help for it, though. Becoming is the only choice. It is not Change or Remain the Same. It is simply Change or Change. Even death, with its pretense of permanence, is an illusion. Renewal is the only constant. All the time, within all things. Listen closely: inside, you can hear shift and jostle of the next embodiment.
 
Even down on the parched forest floor under the long-fingered shadow of winter, no endings can be found. All is becoming.

Spring, but only the first of the bushes have begun to shoulder open their purpling buds. Weary, crooked sticks lean against the sky. What I know, we all know: the feathering leaves unfurl, the flowers begin. Life returns as it always does. Also, it never ended. It was happening there in the blank silence, too. Death is no less alive than life itself. Everything is becoming, even in dormancy. Even in the in-between.

I dig up the calendar from 2010. An insurance change requires me to stretch back into forgotten history for an accounting of doctor’s appointments and hospital stays. The first of that year is life in Technicolor, even against the heavy Adirondack days. I see in my own hand the careless flourishes across January, February, March. A sledding play-date on camp’s tipping hillside. Staff game night. A preschool field trip. Visits from grandparents scrawled in bold letters across entire weeks.

Then, one square in April, blank. Another. And another. Days into pages, three, four, weeks into months. Not even a dog-ear, not even an erasure. Paper as empty as the branches here, the dull, bare maples sighing in their dry earth.

The nothing was not nothing. It was everything. It was the ground falling open and a marriage collapsing into the ragged sinkhole. The small frames of the calendar seem oddly cramped in their attempt to mark the tectonic event, and about as reliable as Dali’s clocks. Is this not what survivors of disasters say? The seconds slowed to minutes, hours, lifetimes. In a blink, one entire universe trades places with another. The rearrangement is anything but momentary. It is a whole new age in the history of the world.

Failure and ruin. Even when they reduce us to fragments, they are the whole of that terrible verge. They are the bellowing commandment for a new beginning.

May.

June.

Finally, July.

The strident nothing of everything turns into something else. A few job interviews are penciled in. August 23rd is squared off as the first day of the position I hold now. Just as suddenly as they froze bare, the pages crack open, blossoming with trainings and brown bag talks and the names of students who have since walked across the stage.

It was just three months. One season. In the span of a single exhalation, one stunned breath, the shedding of skin and form, the white-bellied exposure of the most translucent husk. Then bones knit. The strange flesh is grafted on, and the beginnings something altogether new crawls, dazed and damp, into the searing luster of the world.

It is hubris to believe this one thing can be chosen and so it will remain. We are forever stepping into baptismal waters just as the silken threads of the next incarnation thread themselves through our limbs. These wisps spin around us before we have even begun to dry. We feel just the faintest breath of this new weaving, and it is easy to mistake it for something we can brush away. It pulls us in as surely as we step to the shore, believing ourselves renewed once and for all, believing ourselves reborn.

We are shapeshifters, blind to our own relentless becoming until we notice too late we have lost our legs for fins, then our gills for beaks, then our arms for the finest cilia, then our bones for smoke and honey, and soil and light.

Uncategorized

Animate Object

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I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

 
I need a new metaphor for strength. Since my late teen years, thanks to powerful role models and fantastic friends, I have seen myself as a strong woman. It helped to come of age protesting the first Gulf War. I can still remember Vietnam era activists visiting my high school to provide training on sit-ins and passive resistance. They were eager to share their wisdom with a new generation of outraged citizens. I was hungry for it. By the time I was nineteen, I was standing in the town square, raising my own fist and quoting Oscar Romero and Audre Lorde in a tireless call to rally the masses (however trifling they may have been) to right the latest wrong.
 
I was strong. Everyone told me so, but I did not need to hear it from them. I knew it inside. I knew that when I walked, I embodied the determination of a warrior. I painted the image with my fingers onto the walls of my mind, urging it to life:
 
A revolutionary leads the call-and-response of the swelling army. Eyes blazing, posture unshakable, voice speaking truth to power in rhythm with a thousand comrades.
 
Never mind that at night, fear and uncertainty would grip my heart and squeeze out the tears. Never mind my confusion pounding itself into the pages of my journal or into the recoiling chest of some lover. Come morning, I was strong. Raise the flag, compañeros! March into battle.
 
Nineteen also welcomed the genesis of my running life, and my body grew lithe and powerful alongside the public persona. I began to dance soon after. In the studio, I tapped into a creative capacity I had never known existed down there under the surface of things. Being able to speak for a more expansive way of being through movement only increased my vocabulary and enhanced my sense of potency. The form of dance I first explored – contact improvisation – allows dancers to move together around points of contact, using weight and gravity to form beautiful, fleeting pieces. Pure expression. Such power lives inside the ability both to lift and be lifted by muscle, bone, and intention. Sweat poured. Legs hardened. I felt lengthened and electrified by movement. In long strokes, another symbol:
 
A whitetail deer bounds up and over the hillside, never caught by bramble or tar pit. Reaching. Free.
 
Simultaneously, the mind demanded its perpetual improvement. College gave way to facilitation and teaching. Writing became central. Graduate school was next, followed by more teaching. Along with the decision to develop expertise in an area (any area!) came the simultaneous commitment to eschew short-lived comforts in the interest of the long-term investment. As both student and teacher, I would sleep while others socialized, wake up at dawn, study for hours while my peers slumbered, and plunge all my attention into the heart of the question at hand. In the interest of inquiry and craft, I maintained the ascetic self-image.  I did not drink or watch television, I did not bother with fashion concerns beyond basic grooming. In this fastidious attention to my work, I felt invincible. I painted the life into it:
 
Leonardo da Vinci, hands grasping a brush, a bone, a chart. Heaps of books litter the space. Sketches and diagrams and spilled ink on pages of formulas. Behind his stillness, his eyes are a frenzy of motion.
 
Then, years turned into a decade or more, and I acquired a marriage and a child.
 
Whatever I believed to be true about myself not only thinned under the relentless rub of these primal and primary relationships, it bled. Bug’s intensity from the moment of his arrival until today, 5 ½ years later, has demanded a kind of responsiveness from me that is not my natural strength. Patient attention to another human being for days, weeks, years? Staying steady in the face of flash and fury? Living with constant yet unpredictable interruption and need? So much for da Vinci and Archbishop Romero. Neither of them had kids. Family and its strange, claustrophobic isolation sapped my strength and rendered my metaphors impotent.
 

My fingers drip with paint but the wall flexes its blank expanse. How quaint those old symbols seem now that they are emptied of their magic! In the absence of a functional concept of power, I find myself regressing to the ways of my elders. The patterns raked into this soil early in my life, far before I chose my own way, become the trenches that both trip me and trap me. I do what comes unconsciously when faced with these new, completely unexpected challenges.
 
Bug is aggressive and erratic, and I find myself tensing into a tight ball and barreling down on him like a bull in the ring. Is this strength? It feels strong, but the fit is wrong, and the chilling fallout indicates this approach weakens us both.
 
When I have to get through a hectic morning, I power up like a pneumatic drill. Snapping back help and narrowing my gaze, I grind with gritted teeth through each task. Constriction. Tension. Stress. Is this strength? It feels strong as well, but the power is deafening. Stiffening. A good way to snap.
 
My work situation is still less than adequate to support us financially, and I am Atlas, taking on everything and then some. I bear it all and look for other opportunities, and seek seek seek a way up and out. Is this strength? It, too, feels strong, but it leaves me sapped and hopeless. An absence of faith is the opposite of strength. It is defeat.
 
All the oldest ways of being strong – not ways I have chosen, but ways I have learned regardless – are the ones I am relying on now. Guard and push and limit and clutch.  Come up with plans of action based on the idea that something is lacking and must be added, improved, removed, or fixed.
 
My notions of power are in need of renovation.  As a working single parent struggling to make ends meet, living with her parents, and trying to learn from the failure of a marriage while dating and co-parenting – in short, as a person whose situation is wholly different from any she has faced in her past – what symbols do I animate? How can I draw true strength into this unfolding story? A metaphor is a gift Daedalus fashions to lift the narrative up and out of the turmoil of conflict and into the breathing space of redemption. Where do I let the wings carry me?
 
These days, I am sketching the rough outline of a few to see how they fit. One is bamboo, bending in the highest wind but not breaking. Another is riding the surf, staying loose, knowing another wave will hit, and feeling the way. I even try to hold onto a picture of oysters at the bay’s edge, adapting as the sea leaks into their beds. Instead of withering, I imagine adjusting the needs and ways of my flesh to the shifting climate.
 
So, tonight, I spread my palette with gneiss and stir in snippets of long-threaded moss. I let my fingers make the first strokes as the shadow of a new strength unfurls on the cave wall.  As my hand does its uncertain work, I notice the ghosts of the ones that came before. Thank heavens I quieted my impulsiveness and did not wipe them clean. In a far corner, the others – warrior, deer, and scholar among them – begin to stir.
 

And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
But call any thing back again when I desire it.

 
Because life is what it is, I suspect the toughest days are ahead. Fortunately, magic is never gone from anything that once possessed it. The old symbols, and even this old girl, may have a bit of juice left. It does not need to be much. Just enough to give awakening breath to the life unfolding before my eyes and right here, at the tips of my fingers.
 
 

Change

Squatter’s Rights

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I’ve been running into this old friend all over the place. Bug and I opened up a worn copy of Rise Up Singing to find the words to “Big Rock Candy Mountain”, and there she was. She snuck up on me as I leafed through the battered vegetarian cookbook with all the mouth-watering photographs of phyllo pastry and parsnips. One of her handmade collages fell out of the back of the splashy covers of Graeme Base’s 11th Hour. A slim volume of her poetry slid from between the sturdier bindings of the published authors.
 
Her name, the long arc of the letters in an exuberant hand, greets me. Hello! Hello! I was here, and now I’m back!
 
The girl was prolific. Artistic. A little intense. I had forgotten how eclectic her literary tastes were. Never dull company, that one.
 
She left her mark, and now she leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. Mail addressed to her shows up at my house. She is registered to vote in my very own precinct. She even has an account with the university library. On the card alongside a grinning photograph, her name appears yet again.  She has been taking full advantage of the access my small-potatoes position provides. Titles covering everything from neuroscience to storytelling arrive by the week. She has been away for some time and certainly anything can happen to a person, but my guess is she has not changed so much. You would recognize her anywhere.
 
I am thinking of inviting her to stay. I didn’t realize how much I missed her spunk. Anyway, it’s just a formality. She has already staked her claim, hasn’t she? When that girl gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go. Hell, her nameplate is hanging on my office door. She has probably already designed her new business cards. Before you know it, she’ll be running the place.
 
Good thing. We need someone with strong arms and a little sass to throw open the windows and holler to whatever is out there, What are you waiting for? Come on, get your butt in here!

Uncategorized

Walking Away

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The absence of complaints has their husbands believing that things have improved; they’re out of the dog house.
– Michele Weiner-Davis, “The Walk-away Wife Syndrome”

 

It has taken two years of thrift store shopping and beans and rice, but Hal and Wendy finally save enough nickels for ten days at all-inclusive resort in Cozumel. As soon as they arrive, they order margaritas and dance holes in their shoes. They stumble back to the room and sink into the soft belly of the bed. They are drifting off, blissed out and hoping to wake up early enough to catch the snorkeling cruise.
 
Drip Drip Drip.
 
Wendy: “What’s that?”

Hal: “What?”

Wendy: “That drip? I can’t sleep with that.”
 
Grumbling, Hal rises and fumbles with the shower. He comes back to bed.
 
Hal: “I tightened it.”
 
Wendy: “Thank you.”
 
Drip Drip Drip
 
Wendy: “I really can’t sleep with that.” She gets up and shuts the bathroom door.
 
Hal conks out. The dripping goes on, fracturing Wendy’s night. On the snorkeling boat the next morning, she is grumpy and dark-eyed. Back on land, the pair finds a pharmacy. Earplugs. Just in case. Wendy elbows Hal into talking to the front desk. A maintenance guy shows up, speaking in rapid Spanish and noodling with the fixtures above and the pipes below.
 
That night: Drip Drip Drip.
 
Hal sleeps. Wendy tenses. The earplugs are useless. She gets up. She stuffs a towel on the shower floor to muffle the noise. It works until she is ju-u-ust about under, then:
 
Drip Drip Drip
 
The next morning, knowing she has not slept, Hal slips down and gathers fresh mango and Wendy’s favorite omelet, carrying them up on a tray. She picks at the food then hints hard that maybe another room would be better. He sighs and heads off to go talk to the front desk. He comes back and shrugs.

Hal: “No rooms. Booked all the way through next month. Sorry, babe.”
 
Hal gets dressed to head out on the jungle excursion. He finds Wendy stretched by the pool with a paperback. “Aren’t you coming? You love things like this.”
 
Wendy: “Too tired. I’m just going to chill.”
 
She drags herself to the front desk while Hal is gone. The hotel will not reimburse them if they want to re-book at another establishment. The part for the shower is somewhere else. The receptionists are sweet and entirely evasive. They offer free drink tickets for four cocktails as compensation. That night, Wendy is not interested in the marimba show. They go to bed early. Hal falls asleep.
 
Drip Drip Drip.
 
The fourth day, Wendy is by the pool with her paperback again.
 
Hal: “How’s the book?”

Wendy: “Good.”

Hal: “You’re really into it.”

Wendy: “Yep. It’s good.”

Hal: “I paid for a 90-minute massage at the spa for you. They have openings at 11 and 3 today.”

Wendy: “Cool. Thanks. But I’m really fine just reading.”

Hal: “You’re not going to go? All you need to do is make the appointment.”

Wendy: “I might. I don’t know. Thanks. Have fun on the water.”
 
Hal rarely sees his whirling dervish of a wife relax. That’s good enough for him. He heads off for a swim.
 
Sometime in the wee hours of that night, Hal wakes up when he hears shuffling and banging in the room. Wendy, in the dim light, fully dressed, and with a face like a fist. Not aimed at him, but still.
 
Hal: “What’s going on?”

Wendy: “I’m leaving.”

Hal: “What? Where are you going?”

Wendy: “The cab is waiting. I’m going back to the airport and I’m going home.”

Hal: “What the hell? You’re leaving? Over what?”

Wendy: “You know exactly what. I can’t stay here one more minute. This trip was the biggest mistake we ever made.”

She grabs her bag and is gone.

 
 

A post on DivorcedAndAngry last week led me back around to the Weiner-Davis article. The theory goes like this: When Husband and Wife* are giving attention and feeling supported with some degree of balance, the relationship thrives. Eventually, though, faucets leak and trouble comes knocking. If the partners put their heads together to resolve the issues, the relationship still thrives. When communication fails to bring about resolution, the result is division and decay.
 
Husband pads the rough edges with gifts or compliments. He thinks he has done his best. Wife needles and nags, barely acknowledging his misguided offerings. Because trying to coddle a shrew neither appeals nor satisfies, he withdraws. She battens down the hatches and begins planning her escape. Whether her retreat is emotional (“Screw him. I can take care of myself”) or practical (squirreling money, meeting with a lawyer), the upshot is the same: she has already turned her back on the marriage at a time when the marriage most needs her attention. Meanwhile, Husband has not heard Wife moaning about the leaky faucet for a while, so he figures the problem has gone away. All is well in his world. Until the night she drops the bomb.

Wendy: “I’m leaving.”

Hal: “What? Where are you going?”

Wendy: “I’ve signed a lease on a place across town.”

Hal: “What the hell? You’re leaving? Over what?”

Wendy: “You know exactly what. We’ve talked about it a thousand times, and nothing has changed. I can’t stay with you another minute. This marriage was the biggest mistake of my life.”

 
 

It is chilling to see Tee’s and my story reflected with such perfect clarity in some social worker’s theory. I assumed for years Tee knew what I needed but was simply unwilling to make the changes. The tired saw about old dogs haunted me. “You can’t make a man change, and trying is a losing game.” My choice, it seemed, was to endure the leaks or jump ship. Tee tells me now, in slack-jawed wonder, that he had no idea there was a problem. He thought everything was fine.
 
If someone had suggested to me that I was Wendy, I wonder if I would I have worked harder to attend to the marriage. It’s impossible to know. So many years of walking away emotionally wore a deep chasm into the terrain of our marriage. I may not have had the courage or energy to try to bridge it, even if someone had forced a mirror in front of me.
 
I do know this, however. I hear the drip drip drip in my relationship with the fine and attentive Don Giovanni.  I can even pinpoint the precise weakness in the seal that joins us. I am not interested in repeating design errors. Setting my jaw and building my resentments have never worked, and they will not work now. Talking with honest frankness about the fractures terrifies me, but what choice do I have? Like Tee, Giovanni may do nothing. Or, he may do all the lovely things that come naturally to him to make me smile, while still not attending to the leak. As some of his predecessors have done, he may even decide I am a judgmental bitch and a bottomless pit of need, and do the walking himself.
 
I have heard it all before, endured it all before. I tell you this: none of it compares to the agony of living with the drip drip drip.
 
It is worth considering that a successful adjustment and even creative resolution might result from caring conversation. I am damned sure that nothing good will come of eggshells and avoidance.
 
So, perhaps this: Whatever man chooses to place his bets on me is going to hear about that leak. He does not need to be a plumber because I am pretty handy with tools myself, but he had better believe there won’t be any sleeping on the job. We’ll be up and at it together, or we won’t be a We at all.
 

* Please forgive my assumptions about gender and orientation. While the pattern is most understood in the context of heterosexual marriage, other configurations do not confer immunity. Indeed, any partner in any partnership can play these roles all too well.