Tag: marriage

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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.
 

Uncategorized

In the Presence of these Witnesses

smirkpretty

The stalks are high the year
I kiss him under a cornflower sky.
He is slender. Friends marry.
We perch on hay bales, thighs touching
spider thread and dust.
Now, their children grow
pole beans they help to sell at market
on Saturdays. The sun has not aged
since that afternoon. It still is as high
as I have to rise, up on my toes
so his face
blocks the gaze of the wise one
beckoning from across the field.
Love, her lips say. The breeze carries her words
away,
the direction I learn
too late
is mine.
She nods to the fecund stretch of earth.
Love, come here.
On the hem of my dress
alights a grasshopper, dry
as my mouth on his.

Divorce, Poetry

Low Notes

smirkpretty

Once, I believed you sang for me
Even though the girl’s brown eyes were not the blue of these.
It was a relief to become an imagined thing,
A lyric, the leaf atop a walnut shell, bobbing along
On the calm and lilting sea,
The lullaby of you giving the faintest luff
To the edges of our rough but sturdy dreams.
When we turned away from that gust
We found so much calm, we could not progress.
Lazy circles. Days into weeks.
You stopped trying to draw a smile upon my cheeks.
Do you remember I had a dimple?
Do I recall the feel of your teeth?
Your tune, so long
Had pulled me back from any distance
Until I slipped to the crack at the bottom
And tried to plug the leak with my own whispers,
Hoarse and off-key.
My sodden wings
Sucked me through and down
I went
Willingly.
Logged with brine, I was not expecting rescue.
Good thing.
Instead, the tentacle grasp, the inky black
Deafness. Down from up, who can tell? That slick and sucking embrace
Cracked scapulae and pressed the feathered limbs back in
And oh, the sting, my torn and voiceless throat,
The sweet surrender of broken things.
How far did I go? Fathoms
Immeasurable, impossible for a human girl
To descend to those low octaves and still draw breath
So I choose to believe
Only this:
I never left the boat
And you were still there on the surface of things
With your song suspended
Over me, awaiting my reach, my choked “Please.”
If I had spoken this aloud, perhaps.
Perhaps.
Assuming our power is greater than that of the ocean,
And that words can turn the winds
And that we are more than just dampened flesh
Salted with such thirst.

Divorce

Closing Remarks

smirkpretty

Thank you for saving me from those awful American teenagers in St. Lucia.

Thank you throwing yourself between the two cars on that icy road in California just to keep the new Subaru from getting smashed. For calling in favors to build us a deck in California. For constructing the shed in the front yard with your dad, the play structure in the back yard with my dad, and the coffee table with me.

Thank you for letting me sleep in. For giving Bug and me a home in the woods. For biting your tongue. For mastering Carcassonne.

Thank you for being such a playful daddy, and staying close with your family, and storing the skis and sleds and tents and skates and wagons and hoses and buckets and boxes, all out of the way but within reach.

Thank you for building the clothesline and the sandboxes. For setting up the stump-jungle-gym in the yard, for hanging the hammock, for doing all the driving, and for digging the car out in winter.

Thank you for playing guitar without singing sometimes so I could write. For taking Bug on the back of your bike, taking him camping at Rock Island, taking him for walks around the lake.

Thank you for throwing the ball hundreds of times just exactly straight so he could feel the crack of the bat. Thank you for doing the same for me, for correcting my pitch, for never losing your patience no matter how wildly I swung the racket or club or bat.

Thank you for agreeing to have our computer and TV in the basement or back room, and sometimes for having no TV at all.

Thank you for dealing with the mice and spiders.

Thank you for appreciating every meal I cobbled together even if you didn’t like it.

Thank you for hanging the art and the curtains and the shelves.

Thank you for airing the tires. For raking the leaves. For speaking calmly. For reading Bug stories. For wrestling with him on the living room floor.

Thank you for your calm that night when our son was just a year old and I couldn’t take another minute with him, and I met you at the door with my overnight bag and tears streaming down my face and I thrust Bug into your arms and announced I was going to be gone for the night. Thank you for taking it all in stride and trusting that I would return and letting me go catch my breath in a Denver hotel room by my blessed self.

Thank you for drawing the maps and the blueprints. For bringing home the dining hall schedules. For keeping me abreast of the activities in camp even when I was too consumed with home and Bug to care.

Thank you for inviting me to common meals. For nudging me to host the game nights in our house. For coming home at lunch from time to time to be at the table with your family.

Thank you for learning to drive stick and use the tractor and run the plow. For splitting the logs and building the fires. For mastering the chainsaw, the table saw, the nail gun. For building the fence so the dog and our son could have a place outside to run.

When I called you to schedule the next meeting for the divorce, thank you for reminding me to ask the lawyer about tax benefits and timing. For cracking a joke. For your light touch.

Thank you for staying kind to your son and me when you were compelled to blow or burn or use your teeth. Thank you for sticking around. Thank you for being the best man you knew how to be.