Friend Omega took a cue from the Soccer Scheduling Spreadsheet and started his own. But for something even more not-typically-spreadhseet friendly: dating.
I think our generation might have serious issues, people. Serious and hardly surmountable.
*tm
Monday morning, Thing One threw up at school so the secretary called me. Despite Ike's protests that vomiting wasn't that serious, I picked up the eldest monkey, took her home and spent the day with her. What became readily apparent was that she didn't have the flu--no fever or cough--and while her stomach was upset, she kept down soda and popsicles, and eventually a bagel. I could tell something was upsetting her by the way she stayed close all day, wanted to lay with me on the couch and watch me knit. Thing One is 8 the way other people are 21: she owns being that age and rules it with a kind of elementary-school confidence. So the mother need was unusual, though I thought it was likely just something more about the Girl Wars at school.
Then Tuesday night at dinner she broke. "Papa said he was going to marry Sara," she cried. "And that if Sara wants to, they'll adopt a baby."
There are a handful of times when I've been rendered speechless. This was one of them.
Thing One put her head down on her plate--empty because she had refused to eat much for the past two days--and sobbed. "Why does he need another baby?" she asked. "He has us. He has us."
There have been times when Things Two or Three get upset and cry about their dad, the divorce, any of it. And I've told myself that those times are hard because they lack the verbal acuity to voice their feelings. I realize now that isn't true. Watching Thing One grieve--she's the kid who, at 7, cried and said, "I want you to live together again, but I know you can't. And it makes me sad."--is a special kind of pain. I can't tell her everything will be alright because she knows better.
At the dinner table, I scooted my chair next to hers, put my arms around her. I rested my forehead on the back of her neck. At the nape her hair is still baby soft, thin and light and fragile. "I'm sorry," I said. It seemed like the only thing I could say that was true.
"I don't understand," she said. "He moved away from us."
"I know."
"If they adopt a baby, then it will get to see him more than I do. And he'll like it better than us. He won't be able to help it." Thing One's chest heaved when she talked and her body shook.
Right then I wanted to hurt John. I wanted to shake him hard. Look at this, I wanted to tell him. Look. This is what responsibility fucking looks like.
John didn't admit to saying anything at first, though now he says it was all a side comment, nothing important.
Last night, I asked him to switch weekends with me, since I have something going on in late April. He agreed, but noted that I would need to take them two weekends in a row. "Well," I said, "you'll be here Easter, so I'll get a break anyway."
He was quiet.
"Because you and Sara are taking them out, right?" Last year, when we were going through mediation and creating a parenting plan, he had argued to alternate Easters. This was because last year, when I asked if he wanted to come over for Easter, he snapped at me. "I'm an atheist," he said. "Why do I care about Easter?"
It was dig against Jon, who was in seminary. When I made plans for Easter that didn't include him, though, he was angry and then sad. So he wanted to alternate the holiday, argued for it in mediation. And now it's as though he can't remember why.
"I'll be there for a few hours," he said.
"I know. I'm just trying to calculate how I'm going to do this without a break for two weeks."
"Well, I'm not taking them three weekends in a row. That wouldn't be fair."
Fair. The word stuck. Fair. I had just asked him if he could manage to pick them up early that Friday in April, at 5:00 pm. He had sighed, said he'd have to check with his boss to see if he could get off early, but he wasn't sure, and wouldn't know until maybe that week. Fair. The word doesn't carry any meaning with me anymore. Does he want to talk about fair?
Nevermind that he does not pay for their prescriptions or doctors' visits, though he promised to, and Thing One's asthma medication runs $95 a month easy.
Nevermind that he does not help cover their soccer registration fees or uniform costs.
Nevermind that he does not pay child support on time.
Nevermind that he can drop emotional bombs like "I might marry Sara and adopt a baby" and then leave without having to deal with the repercussions.
Nevermind that he never shows up on time for his weekends.
It was then that I realized that 5:00 pm is the time he's supposed to pick them up. That's the agreement. That's in the stupid parenting plan we made. And he's broken it for months now because he gets off work later than that, sometimes as late as 8pm. What's worse is that it has become so regular that I've allowed him to redefine the terms so that 5:00 pm is early. I spend every other Friday driving up to Portland to drop them off, or I hire a sitter so I can go to a reading, and then I drive them up Saturday morning. He drops them off early on Sundays too sometimes. I get 48 hours of child-free time every two weeks, and even that he tries to cut in on. "I appreciate you being so flexible," he says frequently. And I fucking let him get away with all of it.
This is what I do. I wouldn't let my friends get away with this, even my male friends. If Friend R were to ever pull something as crappy as this, I'd box his cute little ears and then I'd be done with him. I never have to worry about this, though. My friends are loyal and good and kind. They take care of me and they take care of me well. But while I wouldn't tolerate such behavior from my friends, the men I'm either romantically involved with, or were, somehow get carte fucking blanche. And part of the reason is that they're sort of emotionally crippled or something. They always seem unaware of what they're doing or what they've done.
Fair.
The Nefarious Poet and I have been trying to repair our friendship, despite what happened at AWP. He said he wanted something "safe and manageable," and I missed him, missed just talking to him, missed that connection, the way he got me, understood me. So we started emailing. But his words stick the way John's do.
Safe? Safe? No one gets safe, NP. Who would want safe? No relationship, not even a simple friendship, is safe, let alone this one. And I don't want safe. It's not worth my goddamn time. And it isn't worth yours either.
Last weekend Tim-Tim told me, over dinner at an Italian place, that pouring anything more, even friendship, into the Nefarious Poet was useless. "He's like a piggy bank with the plug pulled out. Whatever you put in there isn't going to stick."
After NP sent me a photo of an ex-girlfriend making eyes at the camera for him, I began to see Tim-Tim was probably right. Like John, he doesn't know any better. It's fair and safe. Everything fair and safe. Fair and safe. Meanwhile, the balance goes on my account, it's my job to deal with the fallout, to deal with the repercussions, to hold up the illusion of fair and safe for these men. I can't do it anymore. And I don't want to.
*tm
(listening to a playlist which includes the not-oft combined "Irreplaceable," by Beyonce, "Chan Chan," from the Buena Vista Social Club Soundtrack, "Jackson," by Lucinda Williams, "Someone to Pull the Trigger," by Matthew Sweet, and "Black Sheep" by Martin Sexton, among others).
Last night I helped Thing One finish her math homework. She's learning division, but they're still at the stage of using remainders. I had forgotten about remainders until I saw her mark one with a capital R. I miss them. They make more sense now. When did we start to think we could figure everything out, carry something down to the last digit, the 1000th place or the 1000000th place?
It never works. There are always remainders.
"What's zero, really?" she asked, halfway through.
"It's not really a number," I said. "It's an idea."
"What does that mean?"
"It shows absence. It symbolizes what isn't there."
Thing One thought about this for a minute. "Yeah," she said. "Like it's a circle around nothing. Like, 'look, here's nothing!'" She laughed.
I nodded. I thought about the Chudnovsky brothers who built their own computer to calculate pi. When I last read about them, they had calculated out 2 billion places, with still no pattern found, no final number. There has always been something strangely comforting to me about that, about them. The faith it takes to keep going. The fact no end is in sight.
"I like the remainders," I said.
But Thing One had already gone on to the next idea. "Zero is like tomorrow. Like the word tomorrow."
"What?" I said.
"Tomorrow is an idea, too," she said. "So it's like zero. There isn't a real tomorrow. You never get there."
Remember how I was all "Thing One isn't as smart as I was, wah-wah-wah"?
Now? Now I have to DESTROY her!
*tm
I have a poet shaped hole in my heart.
Poets are weirdly shaped though. I may not recover.
Christ, someone tell me a joke or something.
*tm
AWP is the kind of thing people* go to for different reasons. There are panels on a variety of (mostly) boring and pedantic topics. There are readings, some of which have slayed me, some of which have left me yawning. There is the Book Fair, an immense gathering of all the best literary publications in the country, and you can buy books and subscriptions at discount rates, as well as hip ass t-shirts** and they hand out tons of free crap like coffee mugs with quotes and temporary tattoos of various magazine logos. And there's the networking and the drinking nights, and all the camaraderie and the watching of poets dancing to Vanilla Ice***. But this year, one of the reasons I came was to meet the Nefarious But Adorable Poet.
My closest friends knew about this, knew that he and I have been carrying on something approaching a relationship, via the Internet, for eight months now. It's been intense and sometimes tough, sometimes a little frightening. It's also been wonderful, and I consider NBAP a close friend, someone who has bailed me out of a few tough jams, someone I can trust with lots of things, even with reading my work in progress. And I think I've been the same for him.
At the same time, there was something amiss, some small little glitch, that I felt for months. Part of it was, I'm sure, the classic case of the Push/Pull, the thing boys do that makes us girls crazy. Pull us close, push us away, pull us close, push us away. I've dated boys who've given me whiplash with their version, and NBAP was never that bad. No, it was something else, something I could sense but could never quite figure out. It was there in the high level of emotional intimacy we had coupled with his inability to classify the relationship as romantic in almost any sense****. That was a clue to me, something I should have perhaps paid closer attention to.
Twenty minutes ago, Housekeeping came into my hotel room, and the Cuban woman asked in her Cubaned English if she could clean. I agreed, put on my ear buds*****, and within five minutes of beginning this piece, I started crying. Like a moron, people. A moron with a runny nose and a tear-streaked face. So the lovely Cuban woman kept approaching me with her questions. "Clean towels?" she asked, with the gentlest eyes. Then, "Will it be acceptable to vacuum?" She's vacuuming now.
I'm telling you, fan base, it's like I'm living my entire life in a romantic comedy of not my own choosing. Because, as Fort Awesome would say, these things? Things like getting dumped in the presence of balloon-wielding midgets? Being asked about clean towels while feeling heart sore? These things only happen to me, and I'm starting to believe her.
When I was a kid, my parents took off a few times. It was never longer than a week, but I never knew where they were, and I'd spin stories for my little brothers, then spend every night of my parents' absence wandering the house, looking for clues, anything to tell me what was happening, what I could expect. My brothers and I were hungry, no food really in the house, and this has shaped me as well, that gnawing in the middle of the night, hollow-bellied and sick with hunger, the faux-Victorian street lamps of our pretty little suburb throwing light against my closet, doors off because none of us kids were big enough, strong enough, to put them back on. There were other failures: power cut off, ripped clothes, holed-shoes. But this is what I return to, those few abandonments, the belief that any moment, the rug will be pulled out from under me by someone who I should trust.
When I'm honest with myself, I know that the other reason I looked through the house was because I thought I could learn how to predict when my parents would abandon us. I wanted that level of power and control. It was an easier thing to believe than to think I had no control, no foreknowledge, at all.
It's what I'm doing here, even now in this entry, and what I've always done with this boy to some small extent, though I tried not to. I've looked for the clues, worrying I knew what was coming, thinking how much easier it would all be if I could predict what would happen with a relative level of certainty.
He was doing his own version of this too. He has convinced himself that it would be better, though he's attracted to me and thinks I'm funny and smart and all the right things, that starting anything with me will only end in pain. A familiar story, isn't it? One I realized, as soon as it came out of his mouth, that it was the story, the failure, I most worried about.
Friend One says that we're most attracted to a certain kind of man, and he's attracted to us, and that maybe we play out these little scenarios again and again and again, only changing the players. And there is some truth to that, though I think, I have to believe, that you learn, you figure out how to work with the type you're attracted to, how to open up, learn to love and accept love. The hard, cold truth is that I would have done all of this even knowing what I know now. Because I have a little more hope in people, in myself, even in this poet, that we can best our fears, that sometimes we can let other people make us better than ourselves for small moments. It's what I think everything boils down to. And I know he's probably been looking all the while for clues, trying to figure out how this will end, and I know, despite feeling angry and hurt, that he's doing his best, just as I am.
Though I think we both sometimes just see what we're most afraid of.
Right now I'm sad and embarrassed, a terrible state to be in, though another poet (gah, always with the poets) has expressed a high level of interest in me. He's the kind of hot women go crazy over and it's flattering and lovely to be appreciated and treated warmly. But I already miss the Nefarious But Adorable Poet, don't know what to do about any of it but keep writing this, keep smiling, apply my lip gloss and flip my pretty hair, and flirt with the help, as Friend One would say. I don't even know if we're still friends, don't know if it's possible to move backwards in that way. And I'm, like the girl who sat in her parents' room, rummaging through drawers of old clothing, I'm trying to figure it all out, right now, despite the fact I know better, and I know it won't help.
This is the oldest story in my book, the one I could tell in my sleep, the narrative all my fictions, true and untrue, come from.
*tm
*If I were being kind, I'd say "writers" instead of "people," but I'm feeling catty, so no. I won't deem them all writers. Not today, my friends.
**Well, they're really only hip if you're a writer. Which is, to say, not hip at all.
***Yes. This was last night, Friday night. No, I am not kidding. I want to bring a video camera next year and videotape them, then upload the offending material onto YouTube. Title? "Poets Dancing Badly."
****I know, I know. Stoic Writer says that doing the DTR (Define The Relationship) talk gives him hives, and I know most guys hate it. But at some point it has to come, or you're building on an unstable foundation people! I'm serious here!
*****While writing this, I decided to make a special playlist. Content?
The Postal Service's "Against All Odds"
Neko Case's Outro With Bees," "I Wish I Was The Moon," and "Set Out Running"
Beck's "Lost Cause"
Patty Griffin's "Rain"
and Gillian Welch's "Black Star."
Yes, this is evidence of masochism, I'm certain.
On the phone yesterday afternoon, Jon gave me the final diagnosis. It's the fourth version of final--the first being high grade, aggressive sarcoma, then possibly a very rare infection, and then low grade sarcoma. The final, most definitive, and hopefully last diagnosis is a cancer of the deltoid muscle, called a desmoid tumor, the same kind of cancer Dave Dravecky was diagnosed with in the 80s. Jon won't need chemotherapy or radiation, but he'll lose his arm about 5 inches below the shoulder. His surgery is scheduled for Wednesday morning.
It was no more than a minute before we were joking about it. He was talking about getting the arm off and he said, apropos of nothing, "but you know, amputation. It's no big thing. It's like a Tuesday night in front of the tv for me." Then he added, "but no chemo or radiation! Damn it! I wanted to lose this last bit of belly." I joked back, and it wasn't long before we were laughing together.
"Are you taking time off of school?" I asked.
"Well, I have to miss one day. But I'm going back the next week."
"That's like a guaranteed 'A'," I said. "'Hey, I had my arm amputated and I only missed one day of class!' How could you not do well this term?"
One of the best things about us was the shared sense of humor we had, how we'd both make things okay by joking about them. I didn't mention it on the blog, but when Jon and I were dating, he dumped me often and repeatedly. Lots of times said dumping would last no more than forty minutes, but it was exhausting, kept me on my toes, made it impossible for me to evaluate the relationship because I was always in recover mode. It was a bad way to go, and it tells me now that there was something seriously wrong with us, some foundational aspect that would have never been fixed.
The first time he broke up with me was maybe a month in*. He wanted to meet up at a restuarant for dinner and "a talk." I drove 30 miles north to do this, missed a class (because he insisted it was that important), and met him at a Red Robin in the middle of nowhere--his choice. I had never been to Red Robin, and was a little taken aback by how bright everything was, how forcefully cheery the staff was (our waiter sat next to me, in the booth!, while he told us the specials).
So when Jon started in with the "I don't think we should see each other anymore," right after the waiter had brought me my iced tea, replete with doll-sized paper umbrellas (plural), I was thinking "there is no way I am doing this in a giant, well-lit burger place in the presence of paper umbrellas," told him so, and promptly left. This was also because I was going to reach across the table and strangle him (I missed class, drove for 30 minutes, for this?) if I didn't walk out right. that. second.
Red Robin has door people--and around these parts these people hand out balloons--and as I was leaving, all bent out of shape, angry and sad and thinking of all the verbal attacks I could launch on Jon later, someone opened the door and offered me a balloon, saying "thanks for coming!" I took the balloon, it was a jaunty purple, and then realized that the person handing it to me was a little person. Also, he was wearing a jester hat**.
It was like I was stuck in a romantic comedy of not-my-own-choosing.
But the best thing about this story is the way that I spun it, much later, to his family, and how we acted out parts, took on roles. "This is how I got dumped," I said at a big family dinner, once. "Jon had me meet him, meet him, as in 'drive 30 minutes,' at a Red Robin. Red Robin. Otherwise known as the brightest place on the Earth, to do it."
"I'm sorry!" he would say, not at all sorry, laughing.
"It's brighter than the sun in there! All those pieces of flash! And the happy waiters!"
"I'm sorry!"
At this point, everyone would be laughing, leaning in, elbows on the table.
"So he dumps me, right, and I get all angry and leave," I'd continue, "and as I'm leaving, this guy hands me a balloon. And I'm about 3 seconds from crying, I mean, I've just walked away from a table full of shiny objects and paper umbrellas where I've gotten dumped, so I take the stupid balloon and then I realize that this guy is a little person. And he's wearing a jester hat."
On cue, Jon would say, "I'm really sorry!" while everyone roared.
"It's practically a violation of the Geneva Conventions!" I'd add. Then I'd take his face in my hands, and say, with only a little faux frustration, most of it being authentic but funnelled into the long joke, "if you get only one thing from this relationship, it better be this: you are never allowed to break up with someone at Red Robin. Never!"
His parents loved this story, laughed heartily at it. They wanted to like me more, I know, but couldn't bear the idea of one more painful thing happening to Jon, so they held me at arm's length, as though they knew I'd be the harbinger of some terrible loss. So they loved me best when I was telling a funny story, especially when it was something painful I had spun into something humorous. It was the only time they trusted me. Maybe the times I made everyone laugh, they thought I'd be the person who could finally help Jon best his pain. Maybe they saw in me then a form of caretaking no one else could give him: better than a wife would be an alchemist capable of turning loss into episodic tales, humorous and manageable.
Sometimes I think if I could just have told funny story after funny story, they would have accepted me.
Mostly now when Jon and I talk, I hear what he's asking for, what he needs. So I tell him he'll be fine. I tell jokes, stories about my job and the Things. He is, I am certain, going to be ultimately fine. The cancer has a very low rate of reoccurence once amputation is done, and he has a good, strong family. It's just that they can't give him this one thing. And maybe that's my role in all this. That I let him call me, or I call him, make jokes as if it's my duty to do so.
*tm
*At some point in the relationship, I started deeming the constant breakups "putting the relationship through feats of strength." So then, when Jon would break up with me, I'd say, "Oh God. Not another feat of strength!" Is every relationship this insular? I think it is.
**Beyond Red Robin merely being a bad place to be dumped, any restaurant that would hire a little person to stand at the goddamned door and hand out balloons--in a jester hat--should be boycotted. Seriously. I don't care how many stupid paper umbrellas they put in their unsweetened ice tea.*
*I really do have a thing for the paper umbrellas. Also, this is a footnote of a footnote. Is that allowed?
Thursday evening, Jon was diagnosed with a high-grade, very aggressive sarcoma of the muscle tissue. On my way to pick up the kids, I stopped in Salem and had coffee with Jon and his mom. It was good to see them both and we talked for awhile about my new job, new house and then moved on to talking about his tumor. There was a comfortableness there that we had during our best times together. Jon has an appointment tomorrow in Seattle where he will find out what his options are. His mom and I joked and teased him, asked him questions, demanded things from him. He and I settled into the comfort of old conversations, recycled phrases and tidbits from well-worn arguments that now carry the weight of a spider.
It was good to see him. Good to remind myself what my role is and isn't.
Please keep him in your thoughts.
*tm
A few days ago my ex-boyfriend Jon, who some will recall as The Sweet Boy, was diagnosed with an aggressive tumor. It's in his right forearm, and is roughly the size of a softball, perhaps larger. That arm is the one that was most affected by his motorcycle accident, and is held together with titanium rods and enough plates and screws to put together an IKEA table. His doctors have said for years that he will someday lose the arm--the circulation is so poor, and if they were to amputate it, he could get a prosethetic--but he's stubbornly refused discussion of it. I understand that, understand now why he says that he doesn't think they'll take the arm. Understand his stubborn insistence that all will be well, that maybe even taking out the tumor will improve things, make his arm work better, "free up" the dead nerves.
We've talked about the possibility of me being there with him, though I don't think that's physically feasible, as the surgery will take place in Seattle and I have kids, a job, a life that must keep going here. Beyond that, I cannot be that person for him anymore. I am not that person now. I am not the girlfriend, not the wife. But when he told me over the phone, told me of the diagnosis, I wanted nothing more than to be there, for a few moments.
Then, after we hung up, I set down the phone and cried. I remembered, weirdly, my dad and the sickness that enveloped our house for years, quietly, crept in through medical forms and subtle changes: the handfuls of vitamins, pamphlets collecting dust with magazines on the coffee table. My dad had Hepatitus C, had it for two decades before anyone even knew it existed, was a lost cause from the moment of diagnosis in 1991.
It's been nearly ten years since my dad died and I always think, rather stupidly, that I'm over it. I don't cry at the normal milestones or miss him at holidays. But the triggers are there, buried, in places I hardly suspect. When I was taking my MFA exams, I thought of him one night as I was typing. I remembered, out of the blue, when he was studying for his bar exams in Sacramento, head over a book on Torts, muttering to himself and taking notes. I remembered him telling me then, "someday you'll have to study this hard. And you'll miss it when it's over."
I was typing my exam at Jon's house when I remembered this, sitting in his dining room, books spread over his table, lap top in front of me, the cup of tea he had made me cooling. I closed my computer, laid my head across it and cried.
So when Jon told me about the tumor, I thought suddenly of my father in the ICU in Bakersfield. His liver was failing and he wasn't quite conscious, was angry, I recall, because we couldn't give him any water and he was so thirsty. But there was something about the medicine they were giving him, trying to reverse some damage, some reason he couldn't have the water, and I can't even remember now, thinking of the doctors and their faces and voices, they are all putty and static, all I can recall is swabbing his lips, apologizing that I couldn't give him anything more. His skin was yellow, everything was yellow, when he opened his eyes, the whites were milky-yellow, and my mind played a game I couldn't stop: yellow like sunflowers, like dried leaves, like agua fresca in the mercados.
The past few weeks have been rough. I am behind on bills, terribly behind, afraid of how behind I am. I am worried about the kids. Thing Three's ear infection is back, I called off on work again yesterday, and am worried and guilty about that. And I was struck with how much I miss seeing them, the kids, when Thing Three and I curled up on the couch and watched a movie together. I chatted with friends--Friend One, Huckleberry--yesterday while she took a long, much needed nap, and I bickered with both of them. I want guarantees against loss, and neither of them, in their own ways, can give me that. No one can. I am three kinds of sad and two kinds of crazy, and I hate feeling needed and not being able, emotionally, physically, to answer. The night before my dad died, I remember sitting in his hospital room. He wasn't fully conscious but was trying to talk. All he could manage was my name, my brothers' names. I knew he was still thirsty, his lips cracked yellow. I walked from one end of the room to the other. I called the nurses, asked for more swabs, a new heating pad, anything to ease his pain. I couldn't fix anything. I couldn't do anything, and it was awful, a terrible feeling, as though all the love I had for him meant nothing if I couldn't pour it into a cup and help him drink.
*tm
Friday, my friend Tim-Tim* came over to watch Thing Three. He had been sitting her all week since her preschool is closed for much cleaning and staff training, much to the chagrin of all the single parents in the program. Tim-Tim agreed to watch Thing Three for a combination of reasons. One, he's a good person and a great friend. And two, I am paying him. But agreeing to spend 50 hours in one week with the youngest? Even doing it for money is an act of generosity, and he has, in every sense of the word, bailed me out.
What's more is that he did a fine job of it. He took her to the playground nearby, sometimes twice a day. He cooked her pancakes for breakfast, taught her to play checkers. They went on walks around the neighborhood. Friday, for the finale of Tim-Tim sitting, he took her to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, which is about 3 blocks from home, then to watch the university's marching band, and then to the neighborhood ice cream parlor. He swept my floors, washed all the dishes. He was also gentle and kind with her, but firm when necessary. So, Friday morning, when he came over, sat on my bed while I put on my shoes and makeup, Thing Three in the background eating raisins with her mouth open, him talking and joking about our various love lives, I had this sudden pang.
I missed being with someone.
It wasn't about Tim-Tim, unless you can envision him as a placeholder, a talisman of sorts. Tim-Tim and I are great friends but, like most of the men in my life, only a friend. Friend R is much the same, as is Friend Two, which is good, preferrable even. But I've had these moments with all three of them, times when we are doing something with the kids, or the kids are there, and I feel an acute sense of loss.
Last year, Friend Two and I took the Things trick-or-treating. It was pouring rain, and we went to a friend's house, someone in the program, to show her the kids' costumes. We stayed there for 20 or 30 minutes, her boyfriend charming the kids with his guitars, she herding them through the big house. Friend Two watched the Things as well as I did, but that wasn't it, really.
That Halloween night, as we were getting ready to leave, Thing Three piped up that she couldn't find her sock. "A sock?" Friend Two said. Thing Three nodded. He took her hand. Then he called out, "Sock? Sock? Where are you, Sock?" I watched the two of them walk through the house, watched Friend Two act in mock surprise when they found the missing article.
I know what you're thinking. I know you're thinking it's about Having a Man or some such thing. It isn't that; I felt this pang often with Friend One. She used to come over and sit on my couch while we'd fold little t-shirts and shorts, and we'd talk about our days. Or she would herd the kids into the car, or help me cook dinner. Once, we took them to the movies, and when Thing Three wouldn't walk, transfixed as she was by the image on the screen, we exchanged amused glances, and I felt it again. It's having someone here, someone that is part of this life, another adult.
Friday, I came home from a long, terrible day. I had found out I tied for the job I applied for and interviewed for, the job I already have, the temp job I've been working for two and a half months. Tied. I have to reinterview on Monday. I was stressed about that, and annoyed too. I mean, I tied? But then, a mere 20 minutes later, I found out what John will pay in child support every month. $415. For three kids, total. My childcare bill averages $1175 a month (with summer childcare taken into account, which is costly). It doesn't even pay for half of that.
Then, a little while after that, my boss yelled at me about labels. Labels. As in ones that go on the outside of envelopes.
So when I came home Friday evening, I must have looked terrible, because Tim-Tim said, "Jesus, what's a matter?"
"I had a rough day," I said.
Tim-Tim herded the kids inside, asked me if I wanted tea. He started the water and brewed the tea while I fielded a call from John. I put "Matilda" on for the kids, and Tim-Tim and I sat at the kitchen table. I told him about my day, quietly. Then I rested my cheek on my hands on the table. All I could think of was the $415, the fact I must move in a month, that the kids need school clothes, the stupid job. "What the hell is happening to me?" I said. "I went through undergrad and grad school, and I can't even get a secretarial job outright." I closed my eyes, tried to think about something else, something to keep me from tearing up. I thought about, suddenly, the world's tallest thermometer, which you can see rising, like a mirage, from the rippled heat and the starched hills between Bakersfield and Las Vegas. Then I remembered my dad, coming home in the early dry morning of Sundays from the prison where he guarded men. And I remembered how he woke me up, only me, then would take me out to the Latino markets downtown, before the sun rose, for menudo. There is no one to be here, I thought, except for me. And then, even though I fought it, I cried.
Tim-Tim put his arm around me, rubbed my shoulder, soothed me. And that's when I realized what I missed most--having someone to bear witness to this life, to bear witness to, who bears witness back. And what I miss is so far gone, that what hurts now is realizing exactly how far gone it is, how long I've been doing this on my own in one way or another. John did it well, to some degree, years and years ago, but after Thing Two was diagnosed, he stopped that, then stopped talking, then shored up entirely, until he wouldn't say anything of importance. Until I couldn't move him at all.
"At least I didn't say 'I'm just so tired,'" I said to Tim-Tim, an old joke from the program. Every term, we'd take 16 units, a requirement, and we'd also teach. And every term, I'd get to week 10, the last week before finals, and I'd find myself somewhere, usually with Friend Two, and I'd be so painfully exhausted, so wrung out, that I would look up and say, "I'm just so tired." And at that moment it was so true, and relief would still be a week or so away, that I'd cry. Just cry from sheer exhaustion. I made it through the program on caffeine and weeks where I only slept 30 hours total, and it always caught up to me, came out in tears usually. The line became a joke eventually in the program, various people saying it to me, and me to them, always with affection.
This time, Tim-Tim smiled, but said, "I kept thinking about this all week. I kept thinking 'times this by three. And then times it by 52.' And then my head exploded."
I laughed. "I don't know how I did it, that last year," I said.
"Me either. But you did."
Friend Two likes to tell me that, "No one thing sustains us, TM," likes to quote the Gillian Welch lyric that asks, "what will sustain us through winter?" answering that nothing will. He's right. I did make it through the program, and I'll make it through this, but it was never one thing, and it was never on my own. I hate how up-and-down everything has been the last four months, how dramatic and scary and difficult. Part of me hates, too, how much I've come to realize that I need other people. The old TM would have never cried in front of Tim-Tim, let alone cried every term, and would have bristled at the thought of a regular joke being made about what she would have considered her weakness. As an undergraduate student, I took the hardest classes I could, wrote papers about ideas that astonished my professors, and walked around, kind but with a cold steely "fuck you" underneath it all, as though daring anyone to prove I didn't belong. That person is gone, burned away for lots of reasons, one of which is the realization that while John was shut off, I was coldly humorous. That I'm at least half responsible for the ruin of my marriage because I never wanted to need him or anyone.
Then I realized, perhaps, what I needed, have always needed, is something I've never outright wanted until pushed to this brink. What is a witness, but someone who sees? And what is it to bear witness, but to say what we experience, to put language to it, to tell someone what we see in them? And what is it to let someone do that, but to let them in, to be vulnerable, to be weak?
So, that evening, as the kids watched their movie, I let Tim-Tim comfort me, and then I asked him about his love life, the funny particulars of it, the drama he has by living in a co-op. We talked for awhile, were moments joking and serious. And I hoped that I was as half a good a friend to the people around me as they've been to me. And that I bear witness when they need me to.
*tm
*Tim Tim is the name the Things gave him. They are, like their mother, fond of making nicknames for people. For example, Thing Three has a teacher named Leslie, which she pronounces "Les-ah-lie." So, when she met my friend Leslie from my program, she annoited her "Les-ah-lie-Not-Teacher-Les-ah-lie." Now all of the Things call her that.
Yesterday morning, Things Two and Three and I woke up early (Thing One was at a slumber party) and headed off to the Vegetarian Preschool. The Vegetarian Preschool is thus named because, you guessed it, they only serve vegetarian food. Also, it is a Co-op, run through the University here. It has a good program and some great teachers, and co-oping isn't mandatory, so I like it quite a bit. But every once in awhile I get creeped-out by the vegetarian thing. This is Hippyville, Oregon, though. I should be used to all this by now.
So, the Vegetarian Preschool is the place where Thing Three spends most of her waking weekday hours, and during one of those hours this week, the call went out for parent volunteers to lay sod on Sunday. I don't know exactly what I was thinking. It probably had something to do with the giant bill I receive at the end of the month, coupled with the knowledge that I can work some of that bill off via co-oping. Therefore, it makes some sense that I decided to sell my body to the vegetarians for a day.
And, truth be told, it was more than just the potential for (small) financial gain that made me volunteer. I like working outside, even though it sometimes hurts when I do it, and I like people, I enjoy gathering, doing something difficult in a group.
Sunday I woke up early, fixed Things Two and Three the typical Sunday breakfast (pancakes, apple-smoked bacon), and drove us all over to the preschool at 8:00. I left the two in the capable hands of the Adorable Boy Preschool Teacher, and went to work.
Another mother, Mina, and I started in on the shape garden--small slabs of concrete shapes laid in the ground. We were laying sod on this area, so the concrete pieces had to be dug up, and there were about thirty of them. Rooted weeds had grown over most of them, so we scraped with our shovels, dug around the edges, then pried them up. They were heavy, dense things, so we rolled them to the side each time we unearthed one. And we talked. Mina is an incoming master's student in the journalism program here, originally from Tanzania, and we talked for the entire hour as we dug, unburied worms and beetles.
When we finished, we joined the rest of the group--there were about ten of us--and begun the difficult job of digging out the old grass and making room for the new sod. We leveled and graded and dug, filling twenty wheelbarrows full of dirt and sand and rock and grass. We worked like this for four hours in the sun, sweating and laughing and flinging dirt at each other's feet.
Two years ago, I wouldn't have done this, or would have but with no real joy, because John* (previously known as "The Man") would have been there.
I used to think we didn't enjoy such things because he wasn't good at social play, the kind of interaction I've a gift for. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it really wasn't that at all. He was social enough at moments, funny and biting, but his humor carried no real joy. None. When we were younger, he could make anything humorous, had the ability to joke about anything, was bitterly wry and caustic in a way that attracted the 20-year old me.
This also meant that he had little to no ability to believe in anything for very long, if at all, including other people. Including me. The ability to claim something, to claim it, which is akin to loving it, if loving means understanding it and accepting all of its faults and weaknesses, was something he had no use for. We may have volunteered to lay sod, we did things like that occasionally, but it would have been me feeling his judgemental eye as I made friends, listened without a sly, ironic grin plastered on my face. It would have been me waiting for the edgy joke, the one that no one else would understand the context for. We spoke in a long-winded joke, always, a knitting of old stories comprised of this kind of caustic humor, so that even when sometimes he talked about the Things, it was there.
The nice thing about Jon** (formally "The Sweet Boy"), and one of the reasons I think we did well together for a few months, was that he was almost unable to wield irony. He believed things, believed them as much as he could, claimed them and declared them. He lavished me with attention, sent tulips to my class on Valentine's Day, bought me a book I love, held my hand everywhere. He was, I am certain, ultimately wrong for me; he had a wandering eye and commented on other women--my friends, for god's sakes--frequently, and his belief system was constructed absent complexity, or room for true critical thought.
And thinking of him as a partner, thinking of him working in a preschool yard one Sunday, brings up no better feelings of security or happiness than working with John would have. Certainly, Jon*** would have been social, social to a fault. But he would have likely told some woman "you look hot in that outfit," or would have made me cringe when he offered up his black and white world view.
So I find myself at this interesting place now, a place I'm happy with, despite my wedding dress woes. I'm single, and it isn't terrible.
*tm
*I've decided to just name him now. It seems better than giving him some pretend name, which seems a little too precious a device at this point.
**And, using the same reasoning, I've decided to name him as well. Perhaps it's a good way to remember that these are people now in my past. Not in my present, nor my future.
***To counteract confusion, the Things called the second Jon "Eight-Finger Jon," a nickname he loved.
