When she died, something changed, but maybe it was for the better. Maybe I would have been a mama's girl otherwise. Even though sometimes the thought of her absence wells up in me like a wooden door swollen with humidity, and I feel like my heart won't fit in my body, most of the time it's okay.
Today I'm thinking about when we rescued my dad in Puerto Vallarta. He had been drinking heavily just a few months after major surgery, and he came unstitched. That sounds like a metaphor, but it's not. We had all been down there as a family, had a somewhat anxious treacherous vacation, but also with beautiful moments of grace, waking up before breakfast with a snack bar to swim in the big empty shaded pool, going for a run along the malecón. We went home on March 6. Four days later we got the call that he was in the ICU in a Mexican hospital, that he intestine had perforated. He had two emergency surgeries and we flew back down to see what was what. He was there for 5 weeks.
My mom dying changed me, it forced me to grow up. It made me bitter in some ways and (more) judgmental about the way other people acted. It ached when I got engaged, when I got married, bought my own condo, bought my own house, took care of my dad. But it didn't take something essential and buoyant away from me the way that trip did. The not sleeping for days on end, the not knowing what was going on, having one remaining parent in a hospital in a foreign country. It wore away at me and my brother, not knowing what we would do, how we would get him home. My brother wet the bed. I held myself together filling out insurance forms and sending them from my romantic vacation in the Bahamas. We couldn't get doctors to speak with us, there was a language barrier. Eventually we found out, miracle of miracles, that he'd gotten travel insurance and that it would cover an air ambulance, but not until we've researched a bunch of air ambulances, since he never bothered to tell us.
My mom was the center of my life, the thing that made the earth turn. Yet she was nothing compared to this.
Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Losing you
the first bird that sings
it meant everything
we lived our lives before that moment
i couldn’t bear to bring
to bear on anything
the force that would set things in motion
but the sky is the color of night
and the day holds the world in your shadow
and i could never find
a reason
to change
i thought that losing you
would be easy to do
i never thought that we would feel it
if only we were free
then everything would be
as if the pain never existed
but the sky is the color of night
and the day holds the world in your shadow
and you could never find
a reason
to change
And it doesn’t matter
No none of it matters
There is no forgiveness
But there’s no anger either
Just the sorrow that you lived
This way
So lay down beside her
Claim your piece of eternity
leave us this reminder
Now and ever after
You’ll be capable of loving someone freely
and the sky is the color you left her
and the day gave you back all your laughter
and you could never find
a reason
to stay
Friday, September 7, 2018
14th anniversary letter
Your death preceded everything. The lives we thought we’d fashioned before were a nothing; a tile jangling as it separates from the floor, a hairline crack in a glass, water spooling slowly out on the table. We were meaningless, we were predeceased. That last Christmas, I brought you gifts bought with my first grown-up paycheck. I broke out in hives wondering if I'd make the flight. Joyful naïveté and shy pride as I presented you with Striped Cashmere Sweater, Leather Purse.
Items worn once then given away when you died. I was too hasty. I was bleary thought unwanting a future. I was deloved. I was devolved; motherless becoming child. Removed from homeplace. Not broken, but taken apart and welded back together ill-fittedly. A hall of doors with haunts behind them. Solid oak and hollow core. If I had the choice, I would have gone back and saved from the stack all the remainders of you that meant so little because you were so fresh. Your memory hung about like humidity in a sprawl of slack-jawed summer. Summer child, summerland, dull green leaves, summer friend. Thrum of cicadas, lush. Summersand, jumping out of our skin with excitement, we'd normally be. Summer love, that heady rush. That summer by the window with the guitar, watching tendrils of the weeping beech drifting above the driveway. You on the bed, eyes roaming. Summer hush.
Take me back there. If I'd known, I would have saved your crumpled up tissues, I would have worn the sweaters. Cherished the one-armed reading glasses instead of trashing them. I would have decorated myself with trinkets of you, a vagabond of grief. Put your clothes on top of my prone form and made a carapace, a nest. I always want to make a nest. I was the first bird, you know. Now I know what it means. Carapace, by the way, that’s a word I read in a book about ghosts, of which you are the most. The ghostess with the mostest. You would have found that funny, I think. I never know anymore.
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye. I'm so tired. I wish you were mine. I wish that I'd had any inkling of what was to come. There's a February day that shines like a beacon in my mind. Where we plowed the snow with our legs and downhill on Diversey to the lake, we found the sweetest little restaurant. House wine and a corner booth. It's since been bought three times. Sometimes I wonder if it ever existed in the first place, or if we stumbled upon it in a dream, like the wardrobe, the fur coats, the snow falling through the pines. If I were to go back there, I would never leave. I would, like an enchantress, stop the time from entering. Like the song, our personal belongings would intertwine (did you know, Leonard Cohen died?). The windows would frost gently over, the snows blow by and creep up to cover us. We'd be perfectly preserved to this day, eating and laughing, the little old man who served us, too. I tried to find out, you know, who he was, if he was still alive. Maybe he's with you.
Your pages are worn from many readings, yet in many ways, I’ve never gone back to the beginning. It seems now so present. Months and years of you ebb but now you’re reversing, hurtling back into that space which you always occupy but which without you lies quiet.
In the space, a voice is growing that wonders who I was (for isn't mother, in essence, always for you, not for her, but for other, for child, for upward chirping and lostness and kiss this please, no, not dada, you). You were the beginning, you were the everything, you were the end. A circle, your arms. We're here again, I'm afraid. I'm afraid we'll miss him. I'm afraid we won't. I'm mostly just lingering and longing and doubt. And sewn seeds of little ones, your thigh height, hand to hair (I imagine). A gesture of protection. I imagine you in the bathroom dusting your cheek with Maybelline blush. In a blue bathrobe and pink towel turban. In the garden, my embarrassment at your short running shorts. In the garden, laying bricks. Resurrecting a lost statue from the vines, your lotus flower floating on the surface of the water. In the garden, in the garden, in the garden. Wheelbarrow and rust. All the things we'll never remember that we've lost.
Mother, why did you leave us? How did you do this? Raise a child? Remain a self? I’m going through a sea change. Husband says I should pick the Pacific. I’ve always been reluctant to make waves. Apologetic, yet sneering at those who sorried overmuch. My regret was inside and afraid, and dirtier as such. Not wanting to bother others, not wanting to take up space or attract unwanted attention. Always saying the wrong thing, asking for not enough. Shame at breathing to expand, shame at being.
I'm breaking open. I guess it started to happen the moment he was born. The tide is coming in. I wish I were iridescent. I wish I were free enough to be anyone. To live in the world unleashed. There is a bitter regret at not having been able to be there with him. I wish I could go back to the beginning, re-live him without the fear. Mother is so simple to a child. On the other side, it is a fractured underland. I'm clawing my way back: new moon, new tears, new sky, new land. New words, new hands. New ways to understand the path we took to get where we are. Coming up for air. And feeling for the first time in a long time that maybe there is a path in front of us as well. That the world won't stop just because you did. That I won't stop just because you did. That we're different people. That I have the choices you had also, but didn't make. Looking at life head on sometimes drags me under, but at least I'm looking instead of hiding. At least I'm doing something about it. I'm not going to sit back in a lawn chair and wait for death to find me. I'll be standing at the ready, armed with my own scythe.
Items worn once then given away when you died. I was too hasty. I was bleary thought unwanting a future. I was deloved. I was devolved; motherless becoming child. Removed from homeplace. Not broken, but taken apart and welded back together ill-fittedly. A hall of doors with haunts behind them. Solid oak and hollow core. If I had the choice, I would have gone back and saved from the stack all the remainders of you that meant so little because you were so fresh. Your memory hung about like humidity in a sprawl of slack-jawed summer. Summer child, summerland, dull green leaves, summer friend. Thrum of cicadas, lush. Summersand, jumping out of our skin with excitement, we'd normally be. Summer love, that heady rush. That summer by the window with the guitar, watching tendrils of the weeping beech drifting above the driveway. You on the bed, eyes roaming. Summer hush.
Take me back there. If I'd known, I would have saved your crumpled up tissues, I would have worn the sweaters. Cherished the one-armed reading glasses instead of trashing them. I would have decorated myself with trinkets of you, a vagabond of grief. Put your clothes on top of my prone form and made a carapace, a nest. I always want to make a nest. I was the first bird, you know. Now I know what it means. Carapace, by the way, that’s a word I read in a book about ghosts, of which you are the most. The ghostess with the mostest. You would have found that funny, I think. I never know anymore.
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye. I'm so tired. I wish you were mine. I wish that I'd had any inkling of what was to come. There's a February day that shines like a beacon in my mind. Where we plowed the snow with our legs and downhill on Diversey to the lake, we found the sweetest little restaurant. House wine and a corner booth. It's since been bought three times. Sometimes I wonder if it ever existed in the first place, or if we stumbled upon it in a dream, like the wardrobe, the fur coats, the snow falling through the pines. If I were to go back there, I would never leave. I would, like an enchantress, stop the time from entering. Like the song, our personal belongings would intertwine (did you know, Leonard Cohen died?). The windows would frost gently over, the snows blow by and creep up to cover us. We'd be perfectly preserved to this day, eating and laughing, the little old man who served us, too. I tried to find out, you know, who he was, if he was still alive. Maybe he's with you.
Your pages are worn from many readings, yet in many ways, I’ve never gone back to the beginning. It seems now so present. Months and years of you ebb but now you’re reversing, hurtling back into that space which you always occupy but which without you lies quiet.
In the space, a voice is growing that wonders who I was (for isn't mother, in essence, always for you, not for her, but for other, for child, for upward chirping and lostness and kiss this please, no, not dada, you). You were the beginning, you were the everything, you were the end. A circle, your arms. We're here again, I'm afraid. I'm afraid we'll miss him. I'm afraid we won't. I'm mostly just lingering and longing and doubt. And sewn seeds of little ones, your thigh height, hand to hair (I imagine). A gesture of protection. I imagine you in the bathroom dusting your cheek with Maybelline blush. In a blue bathrobe and pink towel turban. In the garden, my embarrassment at your short running shorts. In the garden, laying bricks. Resurrecting a lost statue from the vines, your lotus flower floating on the surface of the water. In the garden, in the garden, in the garden. Wheelbarrow and rust. All the things we'll never remember that we've lost.
Mother, why did you leave us? How did you do this? Raise a child? Remain a self? I’m going through a sea change. Husband says I should pick the Pacific. I’ve always been reluctant to make waves. Apologetic, yet sneering at those who sorried overmuch. My regret was inside and afraid, and dirtier as such. Not wanting to bother others, not wanting to take up space or attract unwanted attention. Always saying the wrong thing, asking for not enough. Shame at breathing to expand, shame at being.
I'm breaking open. I guess it started to happen the moment he was born. The tide is coming in. I wish I were iridescent. I wish I were free enough to be anyone. To live in the world unleashed. There is a bitter regret at not having been able to be there with him. I wish I could go back to the beginning, re-live him without the fear. Mother is so simple to a child. On the other side, it is a fractured underland. I'm clawing my way back: new moon, new tears, new sky, new land. New words, new hands. New ways to understand the path we took to get where we are. Coming up for air. And feeling for the first time in a long time that maybe there is a path in front of us as well. That the world won't stop just because you did. That I won't stop just because you did. That we're different people. That I have the choices you had also, but didn't make. Looking at life head on sometimes drags me under, but at least I'm looking instead of hiding. At least I'm doing something about it. I'm not going to sit back in a lawn chair and wait for death to find me. I'll be standing at the ready, armed with my own scythe.
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Spillable Items
Spillable items
Wet shoes wet car two umbrellas curly hair
human, in stop motion
Slow lotion
Under the pavement
Are buried tracks
Is wonder is the hope of frozen generations
Germinating in captivity
In between, we jangle, are predeceased
We spatter
Blossom rain, main sail, nascent birdings
Bone unfurling
These are cherished
offerings
(but not all. you asked for all but we must preserve. ) we must reintegrate. we must remember.
before the rains came
before you stopped
before the rivulets
before the dams
before the damned
Barrel brave and candle flicker
sick moon, waning swagger
sick moon, fallen gather
sick moon, tiny monsoon
And shatter
Degraded, incrementally
Terrified and tender
Coming slowly to understand something
Never to know her
Stop
(Hands to ears)
We're here!
We’re here!
Burlap and baby hair
My god, all these years
Oh perfect preservation
(and all things holy)
What I wouldn’t give for
simple mercy
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Time is blue now
Time is blue now
and all that I bring
is quieter than
the movement toward the edge of all things
Where am I now?
I'm in the between.
My heart is an arrow
it shoots straight into the core of everything
*********************************************************************************
When Infant was born, my first thought was are you Italian? His eyes were huge and dark (and all gross and alien and newborny), but as soon as the creepy eyes calmed down, I realized they were yours; your big brown eyes looking out at me from my tiny little boy. It was the oddest sensation. I don't know why, but I always thought he'd have his father's eyes, maybe because I kept forgetting the ME part of the equation, that I was carrying not just my husband's child, but also my own. It was too much to take in. I was so afraid and overwhelmed. Husband could be a Nazi extra in a WWII film because he's the original Aryan, so I wouldn't have been surprised to meet a tiny little Austrian cherub on that day, blond hair and blue eyes, but there he was, my little 1/16 Chilean. I told everyone who met him: they're not my eyes--they're darker, see? Not even the same brown. Put us together in front of a mirror and his have a beautiful grey-blue cast, like a perfect stormy sky. My mother's eyes. No one seemed to be significantly impacted by this observation or grasp the difference. I could see them thinking, uh huh, he has brown eyes. But inside my head, I'm shouting, HE HAS MY DEAD MOTHER'S EYES ISN'T THAT AMAZING!!! He could have been born with my eyes, but he wasn't--he was born with her eyes. When everything was dark, and I couldn't decide on a day to day basis whether I was losing it or not, I would sometimes think, what if she's looking out from behind those eyes, what if she's inside him? What if she took his soul? It sounds 100% ridiculous now, but at the time, it didn't seem that farfetched.
I was worried that the whole dead mom thing would lead to postpartum depression. I was the poster child for knowledge about it; I could list the symptoms, I ranted about how mental illness shouldn't be stigmatized and how postpartum depression was under recognized because it's primarily a woman's issue. Everyone checks in on you: the midwives, the social workers, the hospital. But still, I lost my way. There was so much I didn't know. For instance, I didn't know that if you didn't actually want to drown your baby in the bathtub but you kept worrying all the time that it would happen, and you literally couldn't stop worrying, that those intrusive thoughts were part of the disease. I didn't know PPD could also be postpartum anxiety or OCD-related. I thought that if I loved my baby, then I must be okay, because everyone kept emphasizing detachment as the primary symptom. No one talked about the guilt. That's what stopped me from getting the help I needed sooner, and it crept up so stealthily that I didn't even know what hit me.
The illness came cloaked in exhaustion and mourning. It took me over and made me blind; a cataract of creeping grief. One eye to split between grey sisters: mother, wife and me. Oh, what I would have given to just be free. PPD is like one of those viruses that infects your computer and tells you there's a virus on it, click here to fix it, and then you let the monster in. A Trojan, I think they call it. Postpartum depression is a Trojan horse. There's another me living inside of me. She flattened herself like a bedbug, waiting for stillness to come to me so she could crawl across my face in the night and into my mind. She pried me open to get to all the nooks and crannies. The me I couldn't keep at arms' length was the me that said you don't get to feel this bad, you are too lucky, your privilege too great. The shame of who I was burned through the tender foundation of goodness that I believed I possessed. I could see how little I meant in everyone's face, in my baby's heart, on the inside of my eyelids. I knew I was worthless, that I didn't deserve to live the life I'd been given. I mean, yeah, I have a dead mom (okay, maybe that's a slightly big deal), but I also have a husband who stayed home for three months with me on maternity leave, cobbling together FMLA, baby bonding time, and sick time so we could stick it out together. One who stayed up nights to feed the baby so I could sleep, one who cooked for me and cleaned too when I just couldn't manage it (which, duh, he should have, I had stitches and could barely lie in bed, but I still felt guilty). Place that on top of the already ever present guilt at being born who and where I was and not having to eat dirt pancakes to survive, and the burden became crippling.
Husband was so kind and listened when I kept crying every day, multiple times a day. He told me to just let it out. He was there for me, there for the baby. I carried the baby for nine and a half months, gained an ungodly sum of weight. Lost an ungodly amount of sleep. Couldn't eat properly, experienced isolation and depression when I couldn't tell anyone for three months, felt ill and couldn't drink or go scuba diving during our romantic vacation to Turks and Caicos, worried all the time about Zika or where I might find a public bathroom. Not to mention rings and shoes (and vagina) no longer fitting right. But all I could think after the fact was you don't deserve to have PPD, you're not special enough, you've already reaped too much attention for yourself, attention that wasn't rightfully yours. Your husband deserves the spotlight for once.
This is the conversation I had with myself, over and over: I feel guilty. But you shouldn't. But I do.
The guilt consumed me. I couldn't talk myself out of it. I felt guilty for wanting to step away even to do household chores, to fold laundry. I felt guilty because I would have enjoyed that more than taking care of the baby. I felt obligated to be with him every second of the day and felt guilty when I wasn't. I felt guilty for crying in front of my husband, for the burden I was placing on his already exhausted shoulders. I felt guilty for crying in front of the baby. I worried he could see into my heart and would know how I felt and carry that with him always. I felt guilty for feeling guilty. It was like the claw of a crayfish, unshakeable.
The thoughts crept in like chinks of light through a door or a gap in the blinds, except it wasn't the light getting in, it was all the grimy fragmented leave behinds of my worst self, and they weren't soft, meandering thoughts, but bold, sharp ones that surprised me with their clarity and intensity. They stained my consciousness with feelings of foreboding and washed my dreams in darkness so that I woke up from awful twisted nightmares of eating my mother as tender dark meat and twigs of bones, or wanting to have sex with the baby, or being lost in a murky sea of shipwrecks or unending corridors or wolves.
I dreamed over and over of murky water and of wolves. In one dream a dog became a wolf became a human with a wolf mask and I woke up abruptly, terrified. I was unable to leave them behind. And when I did wake up, there was a whole separate set of whispered worries. Be careful on the stairs, what if you fall. Be careful as you pass the stairs, what if you hit the baby's head on the banister. Be careful in the bath, what if he drowns. What if the window washers fall on you. What if he suffocates in the bedsheets. What if you fall off the pier with the baby carrier on and he drowns underneath you. What if his listlessness is not tireless but heat exhaustion and he dies. What if you molest him. What if he looks like your brother because you slept with your brother, don't you remember? That's not real. Of course it's not. But...what if it is? What if you sleep through him crying and he dies of a broken heart? Or you don't love him enough, or don't show him enough, and he feels unwanted? What if he hates you because you're not enough, and you'll never be enough, because look at yourself. He knows you're a bad mother. He knows you're not worth it. Your husband knows. The man at the retail shop who sees you without make up on a bleary twilit winter day three weeks postpartum knows. In fact he probably thinks you're in here to steal something because why would someone like you be good enough to shop in a nice store like this. The girl whispering to her friend outside the door knows. Everyone who looks at you sees through to the center of you, they see the rot growing there like the blackness beneath the drain, you can't hide it. And you're trapped and you can't break free and you hate yourself for wanting to be free. But he'd be better off, wouldn't he? What if you went for a walk in the snow, in that crisp, deep blue twilight, and just never came home, but disappeared instead, threw a passport in your purse and walked down a jetway into another life? What if you called the neighbor and said can you watch him and then came home and made things simpler for everyone?
Now that I think about it, I was having weird thoughts during the pregnancy too; I only had a week or two here and there where I felt honest-to-god depressed, but every now and then I would think, what if I had a miscarriage? Would that be the worst thing in the world? Then I'd be free, I could change my name, board a train, forget this whole marriage thing.
Now, I thank god (with a lower case g) for the medication, for therapy, for living in the day in age when we have the option. For the gym nearby. For the kindness of strangers and friends and people who are becoming new friends. For music. For holding this sloe-eyed little monster in my arms speaking baby talk, asking him if I ate his foot, would I poop a foot. Nothing is an easy fix. I still feel guilty often. It's a balancing act. But he moves me and allows me to live with tenderness and compassion. I went to the dark side when you died, but that ache was so different, it was I want I want I want; a deep longing instead of the perpetual chant of I can't bear this anymore. The more layers of myself that I peel off, the more everything hurts. But it hurts like the spring; it hurts like hope. Getting sick made me realize that I have to remember to live now, that I have to remember to live as me and remember to love, and remember to be kind. I understand you less now than I did before Infant was born, because I love him, but I know that I have to put on my own oxygen mask first, I know that protecting myself will make his life better.
You didn't care for yourself. You lived in denial, and you forced us to live it with you. Time keeps passing and I don't feel as thought I'm closer to forgiving you. I still don't understand your mindset. You yourself weren't an addict, so how could your level of denial resemble so closely that of my father, who still think an alcoholic is someone who "passes out in the street" and "can't hold down a job"? Understanding that you were in denial, not just about your husband's alcoholism and personality disorder and the effect on your children, but about your own diseases (Type I Diabetes first and then cancer), this has been a great gift to me. It helps me in my struggle to combat the guilt and feelings of selfishness in order to take care of myself.
There is so much I don't understand about you still and so much I despise. I despise that you were too weak to make the break that would have saved us all. You will never be back on the pedestal again. But there is so much I share with you also, like the morning, the coming downstairs alone and making coffee and holding the mug in your hand while watching the sky change, one moment a washed grey with dimples of scattered clouds, the next, a wide arc of blue. The walking around the garden to examine everything I've given life to, the pondering, the doodling, the philosophizing. I understand now the solitude you craved and required to go on functioning.
I crave it too. I realize now that it's not a selfish desire, it's not a silly indulgence. It's as necessary to me as blood. That is, if I want to keep being me. Between taking the time to make myself whole versus not and becoming bitter and resentful because of it, I'm guessing Husband and Infant might prefer that I take the time. So here's me, taking the time. Say hi to Swayze, crazy lady.
and all that I bring
is quieter than
the movement toward the edge of all things
Where am I now?
I'm in the between.
My heart is an arrow
it shoots straight into the core of everything
*********************************************************************************
When Infant was born, my first thought was are you Italian? His eyes were huge and dark (and all gross and alien and newborny), but as soon as the creepy eyes calmed down, I realized they were yours; your big brown eyes looking out at me from my tiny little boy. It was the oddest sensation. I don't know why, but I always thought he'd have his father's eyes, maybe because I kept forgetting the ME part of the equation, that I was carrying not just my husband's child, but also my own. It was too much to take in. I was so afraid and overwhelmed. Husband could be a Nazi extra in a WWII film because he's the original Aryan, so I wouldn't have been surprised to meet a tiny little Austrian cherub on that day, blond hair and blue eyes, but there he was, my little 1/16 Chilean. I told everyone who met him: they're not my eyes--they're darker, see? Not even the same brown. Put us together in front of a mirror and his have a beautiful grey-blue cast, like a perfect stormy sky. My mother's eyes. No one seemed to be significantly impacted by this observation or grasp the difference. I could see them thinking, uh huh, he has brown eyes. But inside my head, I'm shouting, HE HAS MY DEAD MOTHER'S EYES ISN'T THAT AMAZING!!! He could have been born with my eyes, but he wasn't--he was born with her eyes. When everything was dark, and I couldn't decide on a day to day basis whether I was losing it or not, I would sometimes think, what if she's looking out from behind those eyes, what if she's inside him? What if she took his soul? It sounds 100% ridiculous now, but at the time, it didn't seem that farfetched.
I was worried that the whole dead mom thing would lead to postpartum depression. I was the poster child for knowledge about it; I could list the symptoms, I ranted about how mental illness shouldn't be stigmatized and how postpartum depression was under recognized because it's primarily a woman's issue. Everyone checks in on you: the midwives, the social workers, the hospital. But still, I lost my way. There was so much I didn't know. For instance, I didn't know that if you didn't actually want to drown your baby in the bathtub but you kept worrying all the time that it would happen, and you literally couldn't stop worrying, that those intrusive thoughts were part of the disease. I didn't know PPD could also be postpartum anxiety or OCD-related. I thought that if I loved my baby, then I must be okay, because everyone kept emphasizing detachment as the primary symptom. No one talked about the guilt. That's what stopped me from getting the help I needed sooner, and it crept up so stealthily that I didn't even know what hit me.
The illness came cloaked in exhaustion and mourning. It took me over and made me blind; a cataract of creeping grief. One eye to split between grey sisters: mother, wife and me. Oh, what I would have given to just be free. PPD is like one of those viruses that infects your computer and tells you there's a virus on it, click here to fix it, and then you let the monster in. A Trojan, I think they call it. Postpartum depression is a Trojan horse. There's another me living inside of me. She flattened herself like a bedbug, waiting for stillness to come to me so she could crawl across my face in the night and into my mind. She pried me open to get to all the nooks and crannies. The me I couldn't keep at arms' length was the me that said you don't get to feel this bad, you are too lucky, your privilege too great. The shame of who I was burned through the tender foundation of goodness that I believed I possessed. I could see how little I meant in everyone's face, in my baby's heart, on the inside of my eyelids. I knew I was worthless, that I didn't deserve to live the life I'd been given. I mean, yeah, I have a dead mom (okay, maybe that's a slightly big deal), but I also have a husband who stayed home for three months with me on maternity leave, cobbling together FMLA, baby bonding time, and sick time so we could stick it out together. One who stayed up nights to feed the baby so I could sleep, one who cooked for me and cleaned too when I just couldn't manage it (which, duh, he should have, I had stitches and could barely lie in bed, but I still felt guilty). Place that on top of the already ever present guilt at being born who and where I was and not having to eat dirt pancakes to survive, and the burden became crippling.
Husband was so kind and listened when I kept crying every day, multiple times a day. He told me to just let it out. He was there for me, there for the baby. I carried the baby for nine and a half months, gained an ungodly sum of weight. Lost an ungodly amount of sleep. Couldn't eat properly, experienced isolation and depression when I couldn't tell anyone for three months, felt ill and couldn't drink or go scuba diving during our romantic vacation to Turks and Caicos, worried all the time about Zika or where I might find a public bathroom. Not to mention rings and shoes (and vagina) no longer fitting right. But all I could think after the fact was you don't deserve to have PPD, you're not special enough, you've already reaped too much attention for yourself, attention that wasn't rightfully yours. Your husband deserves the spotlight for once.
This is the conversation I had with myself, over and over: I feel guilty. But you shouldn't. But I do.
The guilt consumed me. I couldn't talk myself out of it. I felt guilty for wanting to step away even to do household chores, to fold laundry. I felt guilty because I would have enjoyed that more than taking care of the baby. I felt obligated to be with him every second of the day and felt guilty when I wasn't. I felt guilty for crying in front of my husband, for the burden I was placing on his already exhausted shoulders. I felt guilty for crying in front of the baby. I worried he could see into my heart and would know how I felt and carry that with him always. I felt guilty for feeling guilty. It was like the claw of a crayfish, unshakeable.
The thoughts crept in like chinks of light through a door or a gap in the blinds, except it wasn't the light getting in, it was all the grimy fragmented leave behinds of my worst self, and they weren't soft, meandering thoughts, but bold, sharp ones that surprised me with their clarity and intensity. They stained my consciousness with feelings of foreboding and washed my dreams in darkness so that I woke up from awful twisted nightmares of eating my mother as tender dark meat and twigs of bones, or wanting to have sex with the baby, or being lost in a murky sea of shipwrecks or unending corridors or wolves.
I dreamed over and over of murky water and of wolves. In one dream a dog became a wolf became a human with a wolf mask and I woke up abruptly, terrified. I was unable to leave them behind. And when I did wake up, there was a whole separate set of whispered worries. Be careful on the stairs, what if you fall. Be careful as you pass the stairs, what if you hit the baby's head on the banister. Be careful in the bath, what if he drowns. What if the window washers fall on you. What if he suffocates in the bedsheets. What if you fall off the pier with the baby carrier on and he drowns underneath you. What if his listlessness is not tireless but heat exhaustion and he dies. What if you molest him. What if he looks like your brother because you slept with your brother, don't you remember? That's not real. Of course it's not. But...what if it is? What if you sleep through him crying and he dies of a broken heart? Or you don't love him enough, or don't show him enough, and he feels unwanted? What if he hates you because you're not enough, and you'll never be enough, because look at yourself. He knows you're a bad mother. He knows you're not worth it. Your husband knows. The man at the retail shop who sees you without make up on a bleary twilit winter day three weeks postpartum knows. In fact he probably thinks you're in here to steal something because why would someone like you be good enough to shop in a nice store like this. The girl whispering to her friend outside the door knows. Everyone who looks at you sees through to the center of you, they see the rot growing there like the blackness beneath the drain, you can't hide it. And you're trapped and you can't break free and you hate yourself for wanting to be free. But he'd be better off, wouldn't he? What if you went for a walk in the snow, in that crisp, deep blue twilight, and just never came home, but disappeared instead, threw a passport in your purse and walked down a jetway into another life? What if you called the neighbor and said can you watch him and then came home and made things simpler for everyone?
Now that I think about it, I was having weird thoughts during the pregnancy too; I only had a week or two here and there where I felt honest-to-god depressed, but every now and then I would think, what if I had a miscarriage? Would that be the worst thing in the world? Then I'd be free, I could change my name, board a train, forget this whole marriage thing.
Now, I thank god (with a lower case g) for the medication, for therapy, for living in the day in age when we have the option. For the gym nearby. For the kindness of strangers and friends and people who are becoming new friends. For music. For holding this sloe-eyed little monster in my arms speaking baby talk, asking him if I ate his foot, would I poop a foot. Nothing is an easy fix. I still feel guilty often. It's a balancing act. But he moves me and allows me to live with tenderness and compassion. I went to the dark side when you died, but that ache was so different, it was I want I want I want; a deep longing instead of the perpetual chant of I can't bear this anymore. The more layers of myself that I peel off, the more everything hurts. But it hurts like the spring; it hurts like hope. Getting sick made me realize that I have to remember to live now, that I have to remember to live as me and remember to love, and remember to be kind. I understand you less now than I did before Infant was born, because I love him, but I know that I have to put on my own oxygen mask first, I know that protecting myself will make his life better.
You didn't care for yourself. You lived in denial, and you forced us to live it with you. Time keeps passing and I don't feel as thought I'm closer to forgiving you. I still don't understand your mindset. You yourself weren't an addict, so how could your level of denial resemble so closely that of my father, who still think an alcoholic is someone who "passes out in the street" and "can't hold down a job"? Understanding that you were in denial, not just about your husband's alcoholism and personality disorder and the effect on your children, but about your own diseases (Type I Diabetes first and then cancer), this has been a great gift to me. It helps me in my struggle to combat the guilt and feelings of selfishness in order to take care of myself.
There is so much I don't understand about you still and so much I despise. I despise that you were too weak to make the break that would have saved us all. You will never be back on the pedestal again. But there is so much I share with you also, like the morning, the coming downstairs alone and making coffee and holding the mug in your hand while watching the sky change, one moment a washed grey with dimples of scattered clouds, the next, a wide arc of blue. The walking around the garden to examine everything I've given life to, the pondering, the doodling, the philosophizing. I understand now the solitude you craved and required to go on functioning.
I crave it too. I realize now that it's not a selfish desire, it's not a silly indulgence. It's as necessary to me as blood. That is, if I want to keep being me. Between taking the time to make myself whole versus not and becoming bitter and resentful because of it, I'm guessing Husband and Infant might prefer that I take the time. So here's me, taking the time. Say hi to Swayze, crazy lady.
Saturday, July 15, 2017
13 year letter
Beneath the wet pavement
Beneath the warming
the newborn bumblebees
not yet risen
Beneath the dog shit and the mud slush
the brown leaves splayed with stars of fungus
the unfurled things
unnameable things
still and white and huddled
reaching to be carried up
Crawl down beneath the rot
Bring me home
the time is hot
To all travelers once seen and loved:
Hold on to me as you would the ground beneath your feet
Be at peace
and leave me no legacy but this:
Be at peace
and leave me no legacy but this:
My body in the earth
The earth in my body
******************************************************************************
I can't believe that it's 2017 and you died in 2004. I'm surprised we don't have flying cars by now! Someone should talk to Michael J. Fox about that. Though we do have hover boards, so I guess he's done his part. What else? Hillary ran for president twice, and no one thought it was that big a deal the second time. Though she did lose and we elected a mad hatter and misogynist, so I'm not sure that's progress. Flat screen TVs got really light and pretty cheap. iPhones became ubiquitous and had their ten year anniversary. Businesses might be realizing that people actually enjoy talking to people, so that annoying trend of stores never having staff on hand to actually assist might be ending.
I was reading one of my earlier posts today, thinking about the way I was back then, happy and carefree and falling in love. I was worried about you of course, writing dark poetry and music about death, living with your illness as a constant shadow in the periphery of my life, yet somehow I was still a regular 24 year old; out exploring my territory like the baby I was. Cancer was at home with you, out of sight. I was a big city girl. I didn't have the time or the inclination to worry. Maybe I wasn't HAPPY happy, but I was certainly less jaded. Now I'm a thousand slapdash coats of peeling paint layered over a driftwood center, struggling to let go of all the burdens I carry and all the ones I invent for myself. I think I was able to be innocently hopeful at 24 because I didn't actually think that you would die. That was the lie you told us, and maybe yourself, despite the three-year sentence they had handed down. I knew it was a possibility, but the chemo was working, and I naively believed that your window of good health meant that you were getting better.
That spring, you were thin, but vital. You visited us when snow was still on the ground, and then again in April. That was the last time I saw you before I thought of you as dying. You were still so well, running about as always like a foal come newly to its legs. Ordering the house wine, wading through the foot-deep snow with aplomb, puffing tiny clouds of steam with pink cheeks and stocking your pockets with legions of tissues and practically bouncing with joy and optimism. In the photos, you're smiling wide and hugging me tight around the shoulders. Red suede bomber jacket. After you died, I couldn't bear to part with it. I used it to collect firewood at dusk rather than have it sit in a closet, unworn. It's amazing how fast you turned the corner. Cancer lunged at your throat and took you down, and even though we knew it was coming, it felt like a bolt from the blue.
In a garden, grass will never remain within its neat boundaries. It prefers to travel, tunneling under, propagating itself in unconnected areas, metastasizing through your perennials. Cancer is the obvious metaphor, yet your death is like that too. No area of my life is free from the tangled connection to who you were, who you might have been, what you wanted, why you did what you did and why you didn't do what you should have done, which is march into the doctor's office and say: I need a colonoscopy ASAP, my mother was just diagnosed with colon cancer. Already you were past the age when you should have had a routine screening. Why? WHY? Why did you choose death? Or more accurately, why didn't you choose life? Inertia has a tidal pull. I understand this. Life slips out from under us all in slow motion. But in addition to making coffee and emptying the dishwasher, commuting, wife-ing, and mothering, and a thousand other tasks that comprise a day's work, it seems to me that it wouldn't have been that difficult to set aside the time to make the phone call that could have saved your life.
Burdens. I'm so tired of having all these emotions for and about you. It's been so many years that I don't have anything left to feel. Like, literally, all my emotions ran out. Bleak, backbreaking sadness, anger, and now, the dregs of a savage disappointment. There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. I went through a stage where I was really mad at you for what you wrote in your journal. You said that I was angry as a teenager, that I would hurl that anger, particularly at my father. Which is of course true, but how cowardly to foist the blame for your own bad decisions onto your teenage daughter, and how unreasonable to expect that someone growing up in a damaged home would be emotionally balanced. It was your choice to stay married to a narcissistic alcoholic. Given the circumstances, I don't even think I expressed my anger adequately enough. I regard you now with a level of contempt and pity that contrasts starkly with the hero status you attained by way of dying. I wish you were alive so I could sit you down and have a proper heart to heart. It's so frustrating to not be able to tell you what an imbecile you are. If I could, then maybe I would be able to forgive you. I just don't understand how someone who seemed so wise and was so supportive and knowledgeable could live her life swamped in denial (I just don't understand how a world that makes such wonderful things...could be bad). How could it be that I looked up to you and admired you so much when I strive so hard for self awareness in my own life and you yourself were so unaware? How could I have missed the mark so badly? How could you be so human?
All of this was a meandering cloud dream for so many years, but when I found out I was pregnant, the grief sharpened and took shape again. When Infant was born, it sharpened again. When I started to heal in my heart and get enough sleep to understand the magnitude of your absence alongside his presence, it sharpened yet again. Again now that he's starting to become a person, again when he stands in his crib and looks like the photos of me doing the same at that age. Your absence is like a piece of carrot caught in my throat. I hate your stupid lingering ghost. I am sick of your stupid lingering ghost. Sometimes it makes me better, allows me to strip off layers and become. Sometimes it takes me home. But other times it feels like there's nothing redeeming about it. A toothache. An empty air freshener. The rubbish they put around electronics so they are physically impossible to open without a pair of garden shears, but you try anyway and end up cutting yourself. I AM BORED OF YOU, GO AWAY. I wish I could take out the trash of your ghost and move on. But I can't. You're my cell mate, mate. I'm stuck with you, whoever you were.
The earth in my body
******************************************************************************
I can't believe that it's 2017 and you died in 2004. I'm surprised we don't have flying cars by now! Someone should talk to Michael J. Fox about that. Though we do have hover boards, so I guess he's done his part. What else? Hillary ran for president twice, and no one thought it was that big a deal the second time. Though she did lose and we elected a mad hatter and misogynist, so I'm not sure that's progress. Flat screen TVs got really light and pretty cheap. iPhones became ubiquitous and had their ten year anniversary. Businesses might be realizing that people actually enjoy talking to people, so that annoying trend of stores never having staff on hand to actually assist might be ending.
I was reading one of my earlier posts today, thinking about the way I was back then, happy and carefree and falling in love. I was worried about you of course, writing dark poetry and music about death, living with your illness as a constant shadow in the periphery of my life, yet somehow I was still a regular 24 year old; out exploring my territory like the baby I was. Cancer was at home with you, out of sight. I was a big city girl. I didn't have the time or the inclination to worry. Maybe I wasn't HAPPY happy, but I was certainly less jaded. Now I'm a thousand slapdash coats of peeling paint layered over a driftwood center, struggling to let go of all the burdens I carry and all the ones I invent for myself. I think I was able to be innocently hopeful at 24 because I didn't actually think that you would die. That was the lie you told us, and maybe yourself, despite the three-year sentence they had handed down. I knew it was a possibility, but the chemo was working, and I naively believed that your window of good health meant that you were getting better.
That spring, you were thin, but vital. You visited us when snow was still on the ground, and then again in April. That was the last time I saw you before I thought of you as dying. You were still so well, running about as always like a foal come newly to its legs. Ordering the house wine, wading through the foot-deep snow with aplomb, puffing tiny clouds of steam with pink cheeks and stocking your pockets with legions of tissues and practically bouncing with joy and optimism. In the photos, you're smiling wide and hugging me tight around the shoulders. Red suede bomber jacket. After you died, I couldn't bear to part with it. I used it to collect firewood at dusk rather than have it sit in a closet, unworn. It's amazing how fast you turned the corner. Cancer lunged at your throat and took you down, and even though we knew it was coming, it felt like a bolt from the blue.
In a garden, grass will never remain within its neat boundaries. It prefers to travel, tunneling under, propagating itself in unconnected areas, metastasizing through your perennials. Cancer is the obvious metaphor, yet your death is like that too. No area of my life is free from the tangled connection to who you were, who you might have been, what you wanted, why you did what you did and why you didn't do what you should have done, which is march into the doctor's office and say: I need a colonoscopy ASAP, my mother was just diagnosed with colon cancer. Already you were past the age when you should have had a routine screening. Why? WHY? Why did you choose death? Or more accurately, why didn't you choose life? Inertia has a tidal pull. I understand this. Life slips out from under us all in slow motion. But in addition to making coffee and emptying the dishwasher, commuting, wife-ing, and mothering, and a thousand other tasks that comprise a day's work, it seems to me that it wouldn't have been that difficult to set aside the time to make the phone call that could have saved your life.
Burdens. I'm so tired of having all these emotions for and about you. It's been so many years that I don't have anything left to feel. Like, literally, all my emotions ran out. Bleak, backbreaking sadness, anger, and now, the dregs of a savage disappointment. There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. I went through a stage where I was really mad at you for what you wrote in your journal. You said that I was angry as a teenager, that I would hurl that anger, particularly at my father. Which is of course true, but how cowardly to foist the blame for your own bad decisions onto your teenage daughter, and how unreasonable to expect that someone growing up in a damaged home would be emotionally balanced. It was your choice to stay married to a narcissistic alcoholic. Given the circumstances, I don't even think I expressed my anger adequately enough. I regard you now with a level of contempt and pity that contrasts starkly with the hero status you attained by way of dying. I wish you were alive so I could sit you down and have a proper heart to heart. It's so frustrating to not be able to tell you what an imbecile you are. If I could, then maybe I would be able to forgive you. I just don't understand how someone who seemed so wise and was so supportive and knowledgeable could live her life swamped in denial (I just don't understand how a world that makes such wonderful things...could be bad). How could it be that I looked up to you and admired you so much when I strive so hard for self awareness in my own life and you yourself were so unaware? How could I have missed the mark so badly? How could you be so human?
All of this was a meandering cloud dream for so many years, but when I found out I was pregnant, the grief sharpened and took shape again. When Infant was born, it sharpened again. When I started to heal in my heart and get enough sleep to understand the magnitude of your absence alongside his presence, it sharpened yet again. Again now that he's starting to become a person, again when he stands in his crib and looks like the photos of me doing the same at that age. Your absence is like a piece of carrot caught in my throat. I hate your stupid lingering ghost. I am sick of your stupid lingering ghost. Sometimes it makes me better, allows me to strip off layers and become. Sometimes it takes me home. But other times it feels like there's nothing redeeming about it. A toothache. An empty air freshener. The rubbish they put around electronics so they are physically impossible to open without a pair of garden shears, but you try anyway and end up cutting yourself. I AM BORED OF YOU, GO AWAY. I wish I could take out the trash of your ghost and move on. But I can't. You're my cell mate, mate. I'm stuck with you, whoever you were.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
The earth has forgiven you (song)
the earth has forgiven you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O-67ZOw424&feature=em-share_video_user
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O-67ZOw424&feature=em-share_video_user
i wish i could say there was
a gap where you used to be
walking softly, catching moths to
release them into the night
laughing upside down to hide your teeth, you were always
but through the earth you still march
but through the earth you still march
unheard you wake me in the night
like the creak of a familiar landing
dreaming that I saw your face
on a stranger the other day
you are the cracks that take
the water to its home
through the earth you still
march, like rain
desert
shade-maker
stream
a severed arm of me
you are in the earth
and through the earth, oh
and through the earth, oh
the earth has
forgiven you
but I’ve not
forgiven you
the earth has
forgiven you
but I’m
still alone
All those years we could have had you
lie like a knife on the
bottom of a drawer
a wretched truth of used to be
No ghosts or flickers of the light, not here
Just the dust of three lives stopped dead
in their tracks
Imagining
that we’d just been left behind
that you were on
the earth
not in the earth oh
the earth had been given you
but we had not given you
the earth has been given you
but we’re
still alone
where are you now
do you see the things that make us real G
do you see the pain do you
feel it too
I’ve buried you so long, I can’t
recall just what it felt like to
recall just what it felt like to
say your name
Where are you now
Do you have the strength to make it home
If I meet you halfway
Will you come
I don’t always miss you,
but I miss you in the moments
When I come undone
I’m just trying to define a life I’ll never understand
I keep waiting for the tide to bring you back
Your life on the tip of my tongue so say this:
take your severed heart and just be;
I am in the earth, and through the earth,
the earth has forgiven me,
but you’ve not forgiven me
The earth has been given me, so let me go home.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)