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Beyond the headlights, retrospect and prospect, and letting go of my need for an order

I have a friend who spent her 20s dabbling. For various unforseen personal reasons she wound up on a somewhat circuitous professional route. She went to journalism school, she travelled around the world, she wrote, she taught yoga. Things happened, bad things, and heartbreak. At 30 she decided to change her life and go back to law school. She had always been intrigued by the idea of law school, though had not anticipated going at this point in her life.

She forged ahead. We spent many hours, drinking wine, crying, talking about the twists in life’s road that we did not anticipate. She was full of angst about her concern that her various choices and jobs did not really add up to anything. She felt tormented at what felt like wasted years. Several months ago, a year into her post-law school job, she emailed me about a new job opportunity that had come her way. I read her email with tears in my eyes. “This is it,” I wrote back, my fingers not able to write as fast as I wanted them to, so eager was I to convey my enthusiasm. “Really?” she responded, admitting that I’d always been the cautious voice of reason and she had not thought I’d react this way. “Yes,” I wrote, “This is the thing that makes it all make sense.”

And I’ve thought about that exchange so much. I don’t know when my friend will make the move into the opportunity that I was so excited about, but I feel certain she will eventually. And suddenly there is a glowing sense of peace about her, at least when I look, a design that has descended onto what previously looked like randomness. In retrospect, now, with this piece of reality in place, we see the order.

What strikes me is that my life is kind of the opposite. All of my decisions made sense prospectively; it’s only now that they appear not to have been adding up to anything. I always made the “right” call, in the moment, at least if you define right by what the world will approve of, as the most conventional option. And now, at 35, I find myself reflecting on 20 years of careful choices that have brought me … here. Home to … myself. To this frantic restlessness.

Maybe what we really need is to let go of the need for an order. Maybe what I need to do is to let go of my desperate desire for there to be a plan, an ordering logic. Perhaps making a decision in the moment, with all of the information we have at that time, is the best we can do. That, and accepting the surprises that come our way, shifting our course infinitessimally but irrevocably. Maybe my friend and I aren’t that different, after all. Maybe we both have the same single and fundamental task: to make peace with the roads we have travelled, as straight or winding as they have been, and to trust that we are up to the task of what lies ahead, whatever it may be.

E.L. Doctorow’s quote comes to mind: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Maybe now my job is to stop squinting past the headlights. It’s only causing me panic that I can’t see, hurting my eyes, and taking my attention away from what is right in front of me.

Moment of truth by the tub

On our last day in Sanibel, Grace and Whit were horsing around in the pool. She dunked him aggressively and he was very upset.   My mother immediately reprimanded her, asking her to get out of the pool for a few minutes. Grace, in classic form, dissolved into tears. She sat on a chair by the pool, wrapped in a towel, hot pink goggles pushed up onto her forehead, forlorn and in full-blown pout mode.

Finally I asked her to come back to the condo with me and we walked, hand-in-hand but in silence, through the parking lot. She was sniffling and, I could tell, making a real effort to calm herself down. Often she asks for “deep breaths,” where she sits on my lap or we hug and take deep breaths together – this has been effective but I am now thinking she needs to figure out how to calm herself down without me. Anyway, she was trying hard and I could tell.

We got to the condo and I turned on the tub for her, because she was freezing and her purple lips were chattering. As she stood in the bathroom, naked and shivering, I looked at her suddenly all-grown-up body. She is so tall now she comes up to almost my chest. She seems startlingly unfamiliar, lean and lanky, with endless limbs, though I can still see that faint birthmark, more texture than color, on her left hip. I remember noticing that birthmark for the first time when she was mere days old.

She turned to me and I could see she was still crying. Overcome with identification and empathy, I crouched down in front of Grace, realizing that she is at that awkward height where standing I’m too tall but crouching I’m too small. I looked up at her tremulous face. “Gracie?” she looked at me, a tear spilling over her right eyelid onto her cheek. “It’s hard to be the older one, I know. Isn’t it?” she nodded at me. “I was that, Grace. I know. Everybody expects you to be grown up all the time. It’s hard, isn’t it?”

Her face just crumpled. She leaned into me, hugging me awkwardly as she was now taller than I was. “It’s so hard, Mummy. Sometimes I just get carried away and I lose control,” she choked on her words, crying hard now. I pushed her away only so that I could look her in the eye. “I know, Gracie. I know,” I said, firmly, “sometimes what you feel is really strong, isn’t it?” She nodded mutely, tears flooding down her face. “I know, love, I know.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I folded her body, all angles and long, skinny bones into my arms. We stayed like that for a long moment until she broke the embrace, wiping her eyes. She looked at me and I could tell she felt embarassed. “Grace.” I looked at her, almost sternly. “I know. And I know what a good, good girl you are, and how hard you try. I know. I promise. And I can tell you that your feelings, for the rest of your life, will be really strong. I still feel like I lose control sometimes. And it’s scary.”

She stared at me, a combination of fear and thanks in her eyes, and I could see how much she wanted to believe that I was being sincere. I think we both felt we’d revealed a lot, so she stepped into the tub and we moved on to other matters, but something essential happened in that bathroom. I saw a young version of myself and she saw that the strength of her emotions was going to be a lifelong battle. Yes, Gracie, I know what it is to feel out of control. I know what it is to feel pressure to be the “good one” and to do as others want you to do. I know all of those things. I wish I could teach you how to stop those feelings, but i can’t. I honestly have no idea. I wish I did.

Pain engraves a deeper memory

I can’t put Devotion down. Run, don’t walk, to buy it. To say I’m obsessed is an understatement. I feel as though Dani Shapiro is speaking straight from my heart, albeit far more elegantly and eloquently than I ever could.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through and I have underlined at least a big chunk of most of the pages.  I love Dani’s voice, she writes about the same things that are utterly preoccupying me right now, and I just don’t even have words yet for the way this story is touching me.  I am sure this will be the first of many posts about this book.

But one passage in particular is on my mind today.  I’ve been thinking for weeks that I needed to write about how this is my blog.  Not my life.  Not my spirit.  I get a fair number of inquiries, from people in person and through email, people I know personally and people I don’t, asking if I am okay.  These people mean well, I’m sure of it.  And I am often taken aback by the question because I am more than okay.  I am well.  I realize that people are responding to what they read here, and I know this is a public forum and that of course I choose what I write and publish.

This is what I read in Devotion that brought this recent issue to mind:

“The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects: Pain engraves a deeper memory was her response.”

I love Anne Sexton, wrote my thesis in college on her, and any mention of her makes me feel instantly connected.  I’m surprised, actually, that I had never heard this sentence.  “I look for uncomplicated hymns, but love has none,” is one of my favorite quotations of both hers and all time.  This one goes on that list.  I think there is power and truth in those five words.

Yes.  I have long responded to those who, from their experience on this blog, express concern that I seem gloomy and sad that that isn’t true – it’s just that I find in the more complicated thoughts more fertile ground for exploration.  The grayer parts of my heart and head are where the interesting stuff to write about is, at least to my mind.  I am not particularly interested in reading anyone writing about how fantastic and perfect their life is, least of all me.  And, while my life is absolutely, inarguably rich and full and tremendously blessed, it’s not true that I experience every day as unmitigated sunshine.  I don’t.

I’ve written before about how I “incline towards melancholy.”  There’s no question about that.  But I also firmly believe that this tendency to feel things deeply also allows me to experience a surpassing joy that might not be available to me without the darkness.  I still don’t know if this connection is about capacity or contrast; I’m not sure it matters.  I think I lean towards capacity, though: because of the deep scars that pain has engraved into my spirit, there is a deep repository for joy, when it comes, to fill.

The introspection on this blog is definitely part of my personality, and there is nothing inauthentic here.  But the blog is also not a comprehensive representation of my life; far from it.  I understand the confusion that occurs there and know that it comes from a place of support and love.  I guess I just felt compelled to say, in the echoing voices of two of my literary idols, that my choice of topics is just because pain engraves a deeper memory.

Safe

Danielle talks about our core desired feelings, and asserts that all of our behavior, conscious or not, is in search of feeling these feelings. It’s embarassing, maybe, that it’s taken me 35.5 years to figure this out, but I am certain that one of my core desired feelings, probably the primary one, is safety.

This is one of those places where the rational and logical people in my life roll their eyes. I know. I’m one of the safest people in the world. How can I possibly not know – not feel – it!? I don’t know. But I do know this realm, this space of most devoutly desired feelings and deepest, most primal anxieties, is not a place where reason and logic rule. I have struggled my whole life with feeling unsafe. There. I said it.

There are many layers of this unsafety (and it’s actually not the same as my deep and toxic insecurity, either, a topic for another post). I have terrifying fears about financial safety that, while not tethered to reality, have their claws deep into my psyche. I worry that there will not be enough. I worry constantly about not being able to pay basic bills, not having a roof over my head, losing everything. This turns into enormous pressure on myself to earn money. It has also created a completely irrational panic about all things money-related, which, combined with my deep resistance to ever talking about the topic at all, makes money into a powderkeg of a subject, one that I both fear and avoid.

I also worry about the safety of my physical self. I’ve always worried about it: perhaps this is hypochondria, perhaps it is a psychosomatic way of handling my anxieties about my spirit in the world. I wait, day in and day out, for the other medical shoe to drop. My daughter’s mononeucleosis diagnosis this week felt like a manifestation of this deep sense of being at risk: I spent two terrifying hours imagining very bleak news (with reason, given what the doctors said and did) and wondering if I had, with my incessant worrying and fearing, somehow brought this onto her. The actual news that she had mono felt like a radiant relief after what I had imagined and blamed myself for creating.

Perhaps most vitally, though, I want to be safe from myself. I want to be clearly seen for who and what I am – something that I have truly felt so rarely in my life – but also loved in spite of it. I know I misbehave, I know I am far too emotional, reactive, insecure. I want to be kept safe from those monsters running in my head: I want someone to wrap their arms around me and tell me that I am safe from my own rampaging emotions.

Someone told me recently that there is no meaning without safety. I’ve been mulling over the comment, turning it over, and finding myself nodding. Yes. Given my preoccupation with the search for meaning in my small little life, this is a vital truth, not a mere nuance or turn of phrase. And it must explain why for me there is such frantic fear around not being safe. In those rare moments where I have felt safe enough to relax my white-knuckle grasp one very single little thing, I’ve been able to see and experience meaning. To relax into my life, to live it rather than hold it in my panicky, breathless, fearful grasp.

I want to feel safe. What will it take? How do I build a life around those people, places, and experiences that provide that? How do I not transmit this irrational but deeply destabilizing fear to my children? How do I learn to control my own reactivity so that more people might be willing to be here, so that I can trust that they will keep me safe? I don’t know the answers. I’m only barely seeing the questions shimmering up through the morass of roiling thoughts in my head. I turn back to Rilke, and commit yet again, as another day turns towards morning, to living the questions.

Good night, Whit

Last night, as I tucked Whit in, the room was heavy with nostalgia. It was dim, his favorite lullabye was playing, and I curled into his bottom bunk, breathing him in as he lay with his back to me. One week from today he turns five, and this awareness is stitched through every moment of every day lately. I can barely bear it. I kept my eyes closed as I felt him turn his head to look at me, and I heard his low giggle, presumably at the unusual delight of seeing me “sleeping” in his bed. The nearness of him, the just-bathed little boy smell, the familiar lullabye music, the nearness of his birthday all swelled into a huge wave of nostalgia and sadness and, predictably, I found myself blinking back tears.

I thought about how recently I wrote about how his “babyhood clings to him” and how that is just not true anymore. I thought about the moment he was born, a moment as clear and crystalline as any I have ever experienced, I thought of the million times he has driven me to yell at him and the million and one times he has made me cry with sweetness. I turned to sit up and felt his hand reach back and grab for me. “Don’t go, Mummy,” he murmured, so I stayed put for another song. Peculiarly, I remembered those last days of pregnancy, when the baby feels so tight in your drum-hard belly that you feel it every movement with an exquisite, painful awareness. My emotion felt that big inside me, almost as though I could not contain it with my physical body.

Finally I forced myself to open my eyes and sit up, and I leaned over Whit, studying his face. My gaze moved slowly down his face, his features unfurling again to me as if brand new: his eyes, so blue even in the darkness, his long eyelashes, his pale skin, and his defined cleft chin, one of the very few tangible things he has inherited from me. He reached up a hand and clasped me behind the neck, smiling, with what struck me as a curious, surprising awareness of the moment. I smiled back at him, “I love you, my little man.” Tears ran down my face and I saw puzzlement wash into his eyes. I smiled again, trying to reassure him that nothing is wrong, and felt relieved when his face softened. “I love you too, Mummy.” He pulled my face down so it was right next to his. I felt his soft cheek against my wet one, and turned to give him a kiss. He clasped his hands behind my neck, holding me to him. “I love you as much as the sky,” I heard him whisper.

Oh, my baby boy. Five years old. There is so much tenderness I am not sure I can stand it.