Catching Up

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I don’t need to remind anyone what a shit year this has been for most of us. The pandemic has been the obvious and collective villain of the season, but as the Anna Karenina principle contends, our individual miseries are as varied as the people available to suffer them.

Some of the most painful things that people must face at some point in life have all happened in this one year to some of us, one after the other, like an unrelenting, interminable cascade of misfortune. And the pandemic was merely the hell-scape backdrop to the whole nightmare. I know of people who lost both parents in the space of a few months, some to COVID, some not. These same people received scary chronic diagnoses themselves, fretted over and nursed sick kids, got divorced, lost their jobs, lost their pregnancies, witnessed the murders of family members at the hands of law-enforcement…I mean, it feels more like we’re living through an ancient Greek tragedy rather than twenty-first century reality with this avalanche of adversity.

The catastrophes that some have had to endure in just this year amount to the sum of events that would occur over decades or even a full lifetime. There’s been no reprieve, no room to catch our breath or dress our wounds whether individually or collectively. We have clung to the few bright spots in the year as if our lives depended on them, because sometimes they really did. We have shared and bragged about the fleeting celebratory moments seeking to prolong their life-giving energy as long as possible. But, for me anyway, these oases of positivity have done little to staunch the driving tide of anxiety and depression, and we will grieve the losses of this year for a long time, probably the rest of our lives.

Then there’s the hate-filled political and social disturbances this year, not just within this country, but in how the unrest here set the tone globally for heightened mistrust of anything or anyone relegated as Other. The world is tense, the air is thick with fear and uncertainty. Many of us are angry and hurt, feeling betrayed by our government and sometimes even our families and most often our fellow Americans. So now what? What possible recovery do we have? What balm best soothes betrayal?

I don’t know where we go from here, but I do know that it feels like we’re at a crossroads. These are the times when true colors are revealed, foundational characteristics prevail. These are the moments when we decide who we will become. The pressure of adversity either rots or refines. So it’s a scary time because group think is strong in this country.

I guess only time will tell.

Peter Brant West – March 6, 2001.

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Tonight I’m lying alone in my bed, much as I was 16 years ago, with a minor ache or soreness around the right side of my rib cage. Then, it was his feet or his back, maybe. I don’t actually know. Some part of his tiny self always lodged under the right side of my ribs.

I constantly had to stretch and arch back while using my hands to massage and nudge him down and over to a different spot. He would flip-flop and roll around and I would see belly waves of protest as he repositioned discovering yet another pokey tiny baby part to jam under my right ribs. I’ll never know why that was his spot. 

Sixteen years ago tonight was pure raw pain and panic. Memories morph between foggy shapes and colors, voices coming and going. There are deafening mechanical beeps and whirs from all the machines attached to me. Nurses in the hallway shout and cackle to one another, oblivious, yet somehow still unable to drown out the loudest, most unnerving of the sounds. The absence of a sound. The vacancy where I should have heard the swift swoosh, swoosh, swoosh, swoosh of a thriving neonatal heartbeat. 

I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but in my memory the morphine drip has a distinct odor. It smells like chemical death as I lay there pressing the button again and again and again praying for the IV cocktail to release me from the horror of my present reality. 

It didn’t.

But even through my drug and grief induced stupor, sometimes the vividness of a moment rises through the haze. I can close my eyes and I’m back in that cavernous hospital room. The blood pressure cuff is rhythmically crushing my right arm to the point that my fingers purple and bulge. Somewhere nearby there’s a new-for-the-occasion, terry cloth, powder blue robe that still hangs lifeless on the back of my bedroom door all these years later. Artificially induced labor contracts my body all night long preventing sleep–despite the gallons of morphine I must have absorbed. It’s not enough to soothe the screaming chasm of a broken heart. 

No drug would ever be enough for that. 

Tonight’s minor ache is a deliberate pain invoked as an outward, visible commemoration of that indelible internal scar. Tonight’s pain is nothing by comparison, yet it’s a poignant and bittersweet reminder. It’s a necessary connection. 

Pain is interesting. Usually we want to dull the pain. Or hide it. Or forget it. Tonight I’m grateful for pain. I’m grateful for pain that connects and reminds and softens. The discomfort of his tiny body ramming into the same spot of my ribs all day every day for nine months is now one of my most cherished, and painful, memories. 

Thus, I have honored him with an outward symbol of the major memory that unites us. 


We are encircled by snowdrop flowers that bloom every year around his birthday. 

Fifteen

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My daughter turned 15 yesterday. She’s had a boyfriend for several weeks; went to the Snowball dance with him at school last weekend; has Valentine’s Day plans with him.

Her dad gave her tickets to see Hamilton in Chicago as her Christmas and birthday gifts combined. So she was in Chicago with him yesterday. She promised to take lots of pictures and send them to me. She sent one, and then I didn’t hear from her all weekend until I had to text her dad to make sure everything was ok. She finally wrote and said she just kept getting distracted. She was only home for an hour and a half before it was time for her and her brothers to leave and stay at their dad’s house for the next three weeks. She would not hug me to say hello or goodbye. She was pissed at me because I wouldn’t stop the cycle of laundry I was in the middle of so that she could run her own load through. I explained to her that I’d been doing laundry all day and had washed and folded all of her and her brothers’ stuff so that they’d have plenty to take to their dad’s for the next three weeks. Didn’t matter. She was still pissed that she couldn’t immediately wash the clothes she’d taken with her for the weekend. She humphed out the door tonight without a goodbye or a backward glance.

These next three weeks are the longest my kids and I have ever been apart. I’m sure it matters less to them than to me. But in fifteen years as a mother, the longest I’ve been away from my kids is two weeks when I visited Italy, and despite having a great time there, I broke down several times from missing them and not having a strong enough sense of myself to properly exist day-to-day without having them around to take care of. I’m not going to have the distraction of a beautiful foreign country to engage me over the next three weeks. Just work and canceling my student status at Pitt–again.

Yesterday was hard. Fifteen years as someone’s mother seems like it should mean something. I did fifteen years worth of work on her, but the celebration was with her dad. He takes her to musicals that she and I love. He takes her to salons to get her hair done. He takes her for manicures and clothes shopping. I only have one daughter. And somehow, he gets to do all these fun firsts with her.  I just don’t understand what all the work and effort is for. Other people get the payoff. Other people get the credit and the one person I had hoped all my effort would matter to doesn’t give a shit whether I’m present or not.

It’s not her fault that it all feels hard for me. It’s not her fault that the death of the child before her placed so much importance and longing and redemption on her whole existence. It’s not her fault that she always felt more special, more necessary, more anticipated as a result of the pain and the lack that preceded her. It’s not her fault and it’s not fair to her that I needed her. That I needed her tiny new life to fill in the enormous throbbing void left in my soul.

None of it is fair.

A Month

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A month into the new job. It’s good. People are all nice and helpful and pleasant to work with. 

It can be tedious and repetitive, but it’s a paycheck and fullfilling my current needs, so I’ll take it.

Forty hours a week, plus parenting two teenagers and a pre-teen (one of which is having serious medical/neurological needs at the moment and missing tons of school), plus 16 hours a week at the part-time job, plus trying to complete all the course work from last semester, plus, plus, plus…it’s exhausting. 

I have little expectation of actually completely the course work from last semester under the present conditions, so that’s $9k I just added to my student loans with nothing to show for it. I think it’s time to put that dream of an English/Writing degree and becoming an editor to bed for good. I’ve been wasting too much energy on what could be or what might be or what I’m hoping for instead of directing my energy and focus on what is. 

It’s time to be present in right now and put away all the distracting and wasteful wishes. 

Words of Affirmation

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This past fall I read The 5 Love Languages: The Military Edition. I typically don’t buy into relationship books like that because I’m a bit of a cynic and sometimes a snob. I work in a bookstore and often stock the shelves with the various editions of The 5 Love Languages franchise, and I’m always equally as intrigued by their claims to restore and save marriages as I am skeptical of those claims considering how broadly and generally those claims sweep. “Reading this one book will change your whole life,” and “Contained within these pages is the secret to relationship longevity.” These are the kind of statements that make me smirk, roll my eyes, and stuff the book back on the shelf.

I take issue with the idea that one book, one person’s words, contains all the truth I need to get through life and relationships successfully. I think it’s an arrogant assertion to suggest that in all the time of human history, this one man holds the secret to relationship success and happiness.

The fact that these are shelved in the Christian Living section didn’t make it any easier for me to spend the cash on it. (Not because I have a general distaste for Christian books; but rather because of my very specific history with Christianity.) Of course, I’m someone who believes in accepting truth wherever I might find it, even if it did manage to blunder its way through a religious patriarch.

But I’d been intrigued by this particular edition, the military edition, for so long–every time I’d shelve in that section, I’d pick it up and flip through and read a few lines–that I started reading it on my break one day. Without even realizing what I was doing, I started underlining parts that resonated with me and writing notes in the margins. Couldn’t very well put it back on the shelf after that, so it came home with me.

I have plenty of criticisms of the book–The 5 Love Languages in general, not just the military edition. There’s too much god-ness for me. It’s stiflingly heteronormative and traditional in approach to gender roles, and doesn’t use or seem to know language that encompasses a variety of long-term, committed relationships, not just Christian marriages between a man and a woman. That being said, if you’re willing to mentally edit the overly-religious parts and to interchange pronouns to suit your circumstances, it’s truly an insightful and useful little book.

There’s plenty of truth and sound advice and experiential wisdom in there. I learned that my love language is not what I thought it was; or maybe it’s more accurate to say, I learned that my love language is more than I thought it was. I’ve always known, even before the phrase “love language” existed, that I feel loved and secure and confident in a relationship–no matter what kind it is–through acts, demonstrations, cooperation in tasks/chores, teamwork. Doing. Being on the receiving end of Doing is what has always felt like love to me. The 5 Love Languages calls it Acts of Service.

As it turns out, while that’s still true, what’s more true is that even when someone is doing and is a person of action in the relationship, I can still feel a lack. A distance, an insecurity in whether or not they truly love me. I realized through reading this book that a possible reason I could feel that lack or insecurity is because my love needs were in fact not being fully met. Yes, acts of service are absolutely vital for me to be a partner in sustaining a healthy, loving relationship; but also, I need words. Words of Affirmation according to The 5 Love Languages. My Words of Affirmation score was even higher than my Acts of Service score. I found this fascinating because I’m a firm, lifelong believer in walking the walk. Anybody can say the right words, but those words need to be backed up by action. That’s always been my philosophy, and still is. But it’s also my philosophy that solid actions need to be supported and enhanced by the right words.

Self-Portrait

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A few weeks ago, I felt smugly confident I’d get through this winter without the usual self-loathing and morbid dreariness that tends to accompany February. Several factors were in my favor:

I began Weight Watchers just after New Years and have lost seven pounds without much effort, which, as anyone trying to lose weight knows, if you can feel immediate success, the encouragement of that far outweighs the constraints you place on yourself to continue losing.

We had a lovely house guest—Karen—for a week crossing January and February which has to be my favorite part of the winter.

I recently bought several adorable succulent house plants to bring in more naturey greeness which I expected to be a further balm or preventative to my winter blues.

I’ve been taking Vitamin D for general health and wellness and because I know it can help with seasonal depression because you’re not getting that Vitamin D from sunshine. (For the most part, I have noticed a significant improvement in my overall moods since beginning to take it daily.) And I thought the snow was on my side.

I was mostly ok with the relentless snow because it was at least pretty and disguised the muted ochers, grays, and dingy greens of Pittsburgh’s winter landscape. The snow brought a clean, bright contrast to the skeleton trees, and really, for me the view outside my front window and all the photos I saw of the buried city and surrounding towns, filled me with wonder and awe at the spectacle and ferocity of nature. It was breath-taking and wonderful and vicious all at once.

I thought to myself and said to several people that, even though the clean-up of the snow was annoying and a week stuck indoors with my kids drove us all a little batty, I wanted to think of it as positively as possible. My spin on it was that at least February looked pretty and the snow wasn’t likely to melt until March and by that time, Spring would have all but sprung and I’d be well out of danger for my yearly bludgeoning by seasonal disaffectedness…whateverthefuck it is that makes me despise drawing breath while I wait for the sunshine to crack the clouds and find me again.

But I was too smug or too confident or too a few weeks ago because today and for the past several days all I can do is sigh and mope and drag my hang-dog self around the house prodding me to switch the laundry so we can all have underwear tomorrow.

Today I have eaten 12 or 13 Tagalongs, 5 Trefoils, and at least 9 or so Thin Mints (cookies, not boxes—if that were the case I believe I’d be going to have my stomach pumped.) But seriously, who eats that many cookies in a day? Good grief. I felt like if I could just reach that one more cookie, I’d have a reason to let my heart go on beating. Pathetic. It’s unbearably pathetic. And this is the eat-me-up cycle: Inexplicable moroseness, disinterest in all things (excepting perhaps chocolate and Girl Scout cookies), bounded well with a mortar of intolerable self-loathing.

I know this sounds like whining, but it’s not in my head. I mean, the tone of voice isn’t whining. These are simply matters of fact.

I’m dreading going to sleep because I haven’t actually slept well in three weeks thanks to strange and disturbing dreams and perpetual pain in my neck/back/leg—depression with an insomnia chaser; I’m dreading waking up tomorrow feeling the same as I do today; I’m dreading an exam, a paper, and another exam all due next week; I’m sure there’s plenty more I could dread. I know there is. I’m overcome by dread.

Thing is, I know it’s unreasonable. I know there’s no real cause. I know in a few weeks I’ll start to feel my way out of the fog and gloom and will mostly continue on through life…but right now, I feel terminal even though the ickyness feels interminable. Whether or not that makes sense, I know what I mean.

I just want winter to get a move on.

I Draw

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Here’s some stuff I’ve drawn. Most were for a class last year, but I’ve never shared them, so I figured why not now, especially since I asked people to trust their faces to me. This should show (I think) that your face is safe in my hands. 😉

Also, Casey bought me an easel and I shall share pictures of that too. (But also use it for creating more pictures, not just admire it.)

You can click on each picture to see it bigger. Hope you like ’em.