Terrible Mother

Fear...?

Fear what? Fear loses?  Fear calls it quits?  Fear gets a day job?

The Sweet Boy and I are back together.  The fear factor is more complex and complicated than I originally thought--on both sides--but we are working on it together.  Last night, we had a completely normal, and wonderful, night where we shopped at Lowes for a ceiling fan, then ate dinner at Olive Garden, then came home and watched Frasier, and then went to bed. 

I am content and happy.

Fingers crossed, people, on all fronts.

*tm 

Poem of the Week

Advice to a Young Poet (from a young poet)

they will say that youth is what ails you
that epiphany comes with liver spots
that you could never know the depth of what Doty meant:
planchette, peony, pneumonia, positive, but
only that his lover's blood was tainted, he was sick

any child knows that well enough
any child wants nothing more than knowledge
will grip a steely fork like a spear
and make his way to an electrical socket
to tap that power for himself, to see if he will glow like a bulb--
to be curious, to be bitten, and to return with a bigger fork
that is poetry, age is nothing

-by Lucas Howell

*tm

Just Say No

(A conversation with Thing Three's anesthesiologist, on the occasion of her tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy):

Terrible Mother:  Thing Three, lie down.  No lay down.  Lie down?

Doctor No Pain:  You need to give her a minute to do it.

Terrible Mother: No no.  I just can't remember which version of the verb is correct.

Doctor No Pain:  Oh I hate that one.  I never get it correct

Terrible Mother:  Me either.  I think that's why they're considering turning my MFA program into a three-year deal.

Doctor No Pain:  Oh.  You're a graduate student?

Terrible Mother:  Yep. 

Doctor No Pain:  That's great. (to Thing Three):  Here's a little Happy Air to help you out.

Terrible Mother:  "Happy Air"?

Doctor No Pain:  (laughing) Laughing gas.

Terrible Mother: Oh. (looks down at Thing Three).  How are you doing, sweet pea?

Thing Three:  I floating.

Doctor No Pain:  You're floating sweetheart?  Are you ready?  Are you ready to blast off?

Terrible Mother: "Blast off"?

Doctor No Pain (nodding):  Now she's gonna get the general.  (to Thing Three)  Here it comes sweetheart.  Smell that rocket fuel? 

Terrible Mother: (gives Doctor a vague look like "what the holy hell are you talking about?")  Is this okay?

Doctor No Pain (ignoring Terrible Mother):  Okay, now breathe it in!  Breathe in the rocket fuel! 

Thing Three breathes it in deeply.

Terrible Mother:  I'm pretty sure there are pamphlets on this sort of thing.

Doctor No Pain:  Come on, honey.  Big deep breaths!  Suck in the rocket fuel!

Thing Three begins to drift off.

Doctor No Pain:  That's it, sweetheart.  That's good rocket fuel, isn't it?

Terrible Mother:  You are so paying for her 12-step program when she's 19. 

*tm

Thing Three had a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy yesterday and did AMAZING.  She didn't cry once, before or after, and was even in such a decent mood post-op, and so curious about her surroundings that the nurse let her help remove her own IV!  Last night she begged for, and ate, an entire taco, and is at this moment playing outside with the neighbor's cat.  Insanity.  It's probably from the drugs.

(The Return of the) Poem of the Week

Grammar

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,

smiles like a big cat and says

that she's a conjugated verb.

She's been doing the direct object

with a second person pronoun named Phil,

and when she walks into the room,

everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.

Even the geraniums look curious,

and the bees, if they were here, would buzz

suspiciously around her hair, looking

for the door in her corona.

We're all attracted to the perfume

of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,

and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.

In the meantime, she is the one today among us

most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,

and when we see it, what we do is natural:

we take our burned hands

out of our pockets,

and clap.

-Tony Hoagland

from Donkey Gospel

Fear Wins

I can't be with you.

Why?  Why do you keep saying that?

Because I know I'm the rebound. 

You're not.

That's what you said it was.

You're not the rebound anymore.

I can't do this!

Look.  Look at me.  I love you.  Why are you crying?

Because I know you don't love me.

Stop.  Please stop.

Or you love me now.  But you'll stop. 

How could I stop loving you?

When you have to take care of me, you will. 

No, please.  Please just listen to me.  Why are you saying this?

You want this?  You want this body?...Sweetheart.  You don't want this. 

Please stop.  Please.

You don't want to take care of me all the time.  You don't want to clean me.  You don't want another kid.

I'm not afraid.

Well I am.  Let me go.

He held me close to him and said this.  Kissed me and said this.  Abandoned me on my front porch, left in his car crying.  Dumped me because he loved me.  My inclination is to make a joke here, something vaguely Seinfeld-ian, but nothing about this is remotely funny.  Nothing at all.    

*tm

Fear Factor

This morning got off to a rough start.  Thing Two had climbed into bed with me last night, and Thing Three had come in, an hour later, and camped out on the floor.  This is a rough time for the Things, and Things Two and Three have the hardest time expressing themselves, so they often end up (especially Thing Three) sleeping with me, or near me.  But when both of them pull up camp and head into the Mother Bedroom, it's rough.  I get little straight sleep, and I feel cranky in the morning.  That would be this morning. 

Normally, this would be manageable on all accounts.  I'd get up, put on my slippers and make coffee, then get the kids breakfast while alternating between telling them to eat and telling them to get dressed (this confuses them, which always reminds me of several late 80s video games where the Hero would confuse lesser Bad Guys as a means of defeating them.  I think someone needs to remind me that parenthood is not sponsored by Nintendo).  But this morning, Thing Two cried in bed, saying that he missed me.  "I know buddy," I said.  "I miss you too."  This is true, and the weekends that The Man has them are the hardest on me.  This is because I have such a deep need to be away from them after single parenthood for two weeks, I so deeply need me time, time when someone isn't asking me for something or demanding something from me or wondering aloud about space and asking complicated questions about God and Jupiter that would make Carl Sagan scratch his head, or isn't walking into the bathroom while I'm showering or peeing.  At the same time, I miss them.  It's weird, this whole thing--the business of being a single parent with another parent involved.  I have bigger chunks of free time, but the con is that I miss them all weekend, and the missing them is quiet, subtle, not something to cry over, but more like missing something that is part of you, so that you go around and call out their names, or call your boyfriend's dog Thing One or Thing Two or Thing Three, and you realize it's because you need to do it, call them, talk to them, because they are your children.

So I understand missing, what it means to miss someone, and I hugged Thing Two, and told him I'd pick him up from after school care as early as possible today, but that I had a lot of work (25 papers to grade, gah) so I wasn't sure how early I could do it.

Then Thing Two got a bloody nose. 

And by bloody nose, I mean Bloody Nose.  I mean a gusher.  I mean blood down his face and chest, blood on the floor and the rug, blood in bright splashes across the bathroom sink.  Thing Two screamed.  He sobbed.  He was terrified--I mean, a bloody nose, it looks to a six-year old like he's bleeding to death.  I held him for a long while, put a wet washcloth to his nose and held it there, and then stroked his head.  I cuddled him.  He whimpered a little, and settled against my body the way only a child can to his mother, remembering the curves, the way the arm cradled his head.  We sat like that for a long while.

And then his nose started bleeding again. 

By the third time it started bleeding, after a long 5 minutes of not bleeding, he was wound up so tight I could have spun him into next week.  And yet.  And yet.  The kids have school.  They have to go.  I need them to go so that I could work.  So, I did what any mother would do.  I got the nose to stop bleeding, dressed him, and put him into the car.

By this point, we were 15 minutes late for school, but I figured we had a good reason--a good reason always being copious amounts of blood flowing freely from any part of one's body.  Thing Two was more or less calm, was clean, and had all his school stuff ready.  Thing One could barely contain her annoyance at the whole situation--being Almost 8 means that she thinks she's above delays due to the petty lives of her younger siblings. 

Then we pulled up to the school, and Thing Two let loose a cry that I have seldom heard outside of a horror movie or a dentist's office.  He was terrified.  Terrified of me leaving him there, terrified--after the weekend with his dad, then Sunday with me, then the bad sleep and then the bloody nose and the late starting morning--so that he could not conceive of losing sight of me for two minutes, let alone an entire kindergarten day. 

Thing One went inside, and I took Things Two and Three.  We got a tardy slip.  Then we sat in the hall while Thing Two sobbed.  His teacher came out--she's wonderful with him--and we tried to separate him from me, but it was a no go.  He screamed like we were killing him.  "I miss my papa," he screamed.  "I miss my mama and papa."  And suddenly, I felt like the worst parent in the world.  I should have waited to divorce, I thought. I should have waited until he was in first grade.

My own fear.  My fear of being a bad mother.  Of not being good enough.  Of making irrevocable choices that are terrible, wrenching, that tear us apart.  Of not making the terrible choices that need to be made.  Of course the idea that if I had waited a year it would have been easier is ridiculous.  But that is fear.  We can't think our way out of it.  If we could, it would be easy.  It's irrational and real at the same stupid time.

The teacher and I decided to get the Behavioral Specialist--a sweet guy who looks to be about 25--for Thing Two.  He came, and almost instantly, Thing Two calmed down.  He's hung out with this guy before when he's gotten wound up in class.  And it was as though Thing Two needed several adults to help calm those fears, to remind him that the world is stable, safe, that Mama is coming back for you, that The Evil Witch won't eat you.  The way we call friends, multiple friends, to tell them when we are sad, scared, too paralyzed to act.

Thing Three and I left, and as I buckled her into her car seat, she started whimpering.  "What's the matter?"

"I'm afraid of monsters."

I know what she meant, why she made that leap.  You're around someone who is afraid long enough, you absorb some of it yourself.  But you cast it out into the world in your own way.  Fear of never seeing Mama again turns into a fear of monsters.  Like the fear of being abandoned turns into a fear of never being loveable. 

This is the crux of the fish or cut bait with The Sweet Boy and I.  My fear?  The fear of abandonment.  And when I say abandonment, I don't mean that he's going to leave me at some truck stop in Yreka.  I mean that he's going to dump me out of nowhere, or suddenly become stoic and sullen.  And The Sweet Boy?  For all of his loveliness, for all of his delight and joy in the world--you should see his face, his wide, happy grin, really--he believes, in his heart of hearts that he's unlovable.  Who could love a broken guy like me, he says.  And when he says it, it isn't a question.

This is why we're here, where we are now.  I can't be abandoned, and he thinks I can't love him, that no one can.  The other night, during one of our long talks, he hinted at the fact that his disability will someday be worse.  I know, I said.  Your body can't take this prosthetic and what you demand from it forever.  Someday you'll be in a wheelchair. 

Do you know what that would mean for you, if we stay together?

I think so. 

It means you'll pack me up, get me a room at the VA, he said.  And that will be that. 

Does it matter that I told him I'd never do that?  That I couldn't?  That when I think of the future, I think of it as a foreign country, a place I will love for its strangeness, and will often be confused by, but that I will love all the same?  It may matter to the narrative here that I said it, that I held his face in my hands, told him I'd never abandon him (because I couldn't, not me.  He doesn't understand that our own fears dictate what we will and won't do to people.  Which is perhaps why we often work so well together.  I feel absolutely loved by him, probably because he wants to live in a world where he knows he's absolutely loved), but I'm not sure he heard what I said.   

We, all of us, want to believe that we're bigger than our fears, or that we can think our way out of them, or that at least we stop being afraid of bogeymen by the time we grow up.  And then I see Thing Three, crying about monsters in the early morning sun, when the threat of monsters is so far away, and I realize how I'm the same, how the Sweet Boy is the same.  We've just substituted abstractions for bogeymen, replaced the tentacled-beast under the bed with Intimacy, Abandonment, The Ability to Be Loved.  I want to write that Love is Enough, or some other platitude, but it doesn't address this question of fear.  How do we stop being afraid long enough to get what we need?  I don't know.  I don't know.  But this is where I am with The Sweet Boy now, perched between these two terrible fears. 

*tm

What The Hell is Love, Anyway?

We're at that stage--The Sweet Boy and I--the "this is getting serious" stage that occurs between months 4 and 7, and looks roughly like a train wreck in slow motion, if that train wreck were comprised of long drives and sitting in the car in the middle of nowhere and drinking bottles of red wine from blue plastic cups.  You know this time--when the stakes get high suddenly, very suddenly, and the buy-in suddenly looms.  The fish-or-cut-bait time.

To be fair, The Sweet Boy and I have been at this point off and on for a long time, in some ways since the beginning.  This is because the immediate stakes have been so high for both of us.  Me, I'm a soon to be divorced mother-of-three, someone who missed feeling loved, important, wanted.  The stakes for me were initially all about that feeling wanted business--that's what I ended up finding The Sweet Boy for initially.  But then he grew on me, if that growing on me was him hitting me on the head with a two-by-four.  Our first date started with dinner and ended with a five hour conversation at the beach.  It was amazing. 

At the time, though, I denied all amazingness.  This was just one date, I told myself.  And it wasn't even really amazing, you know.   

I know.  People have been put to death for smaller treasons, but there it is.  Utter denial.  Pure and simple.

To be fair, he was in utter denial as well.  He told me, on our drive over to the beach that night, I can't be a father to three kids right now.  You know that, right?

To which I replied, I don't want you to be.  Yes, the denial was thick on both sides. 

We were--are--were--are--so wrong for each other on paper.  He's conservative.  I am not.  He's going to seminary to be a chaplain.  I struggle with religion like a four-legged fish trying to evolve.  I'm getting divorced.  He has one leg.

Yes, fan base.  That was not a typo.  The Sweet Boy has one leg.  One.  I know all of you are right at this moment scratching your heads and thinking "what the holy fuck, TM?  You've held out on this info for how long?"  (Among these reactions are two slightly different ones--Grim is likely thinking "how could you not have milked this dramatic potential on the blog for months now?" while Freak is likely thinking "how could you not have told us about amputee sex* on the blog for months now?"). 

This is the story:  The Sweet Boy was in the Navy, one of the elite in a certain group, and was a boy-boy.  You know the type:  devilishly good looking, big wide smile, flirty and gentlemanly at the same time.  He had a fast--exceedingly fast--motorcycle and rode it everywhere.  And then he did what many boys on  motorcycles do:  he wrecked.

The Sweet Boy, though, is a person of some extremes.  For example, he was a top wrestler in the state, a top sailor in his program.  So his accident could be no simple accident.  In the early morning, in the spring of 2000, he hit a guardrail going 60 mph.  His right leg was shorn off at the knee, and his right arm was, for all intents and purposes, taken off as well (a few tendons were left attached). 

He was, luckily, found moments later and an ambulance was called.  But at the scene, he was declared dead.  My understanding is that they put him in the ambulance and continued working on him, but considered that he was a lost cause.

Somewhere between the accident site and the hospital, they found a pulse.

He had lost a lot of blood, and so at the hospital, one of the first things they did was pump him full of 30 units.  A side effect of losing this much blood, though, is the body's inability to take the new blood in.  His body swelled, his organs crushed from the presure inside.  The doctors cut slits in his arms, and the pressure was so great, that it split the tissue deep, damaging muscle and nerve.  This, though, was the least of their worries.  He had a closed head injury, was barely responsive. 

They reattached his leg and arm--he lost two fingers on his right hand, but those the doctors didn't worry about.  His leg, though, was too damaged, and a few days later, they had to amputate it at the knee.  Several days after that, the tissue between the knee and the hip was dying, and they  made the decision to amputate at the hip.  The arm was saved--with titanium rods and many surgeries.

The Sweet Boy was in a coma for 4 months, and was in some kind of hospital setting for something like a year.  He has severe nerve damage to his right arm (can't feel anything below his elbow, more or less), and nerve damage to his left hand (can't feel much of anything).  He is smart and funny, but has memory loss at times--which results in a fogginess that is apparent here and there.  And he wears a prosthetic leg. 

This is the guy who picked me up on a date, sight unseen, put me in a car, and had me comfortable, relaxed and laughing within 10 minutes (that is no small feat).  The guy who told me the difference between "affect" and "effect" within 15 minutes (I was complaining about my students at the time).  This is the guy who, walked painfully around the car to open the door for me, held his arm out to escort me into the restaurant.  This is the guy who, when the diners looked at him from their plates of pasta and salad, google-eyed as we walked in, 30 minutes into our first date, I felt a rush of angry protectiveness.  Fuck them, I thought.  Fuck them all.  ,

This, fan base, is the man I fell in love with.

And now here we are.  Six months in.  The make or break stage.  He's met the kids and is alternatively smitten with, and terrified of, them.  On alternating weekends, we cook together (or I cook complicated meals, like pork chops stuffed with apples and gorgonzola, while he offers help, pours wine, kisses my nose).  My exam weekend, he took care of me, brought me cups of coffee and tea, cooked me pasta with cheese sauce, listened to me while I cried and carried on.  And depsite all reasonableness, I love him.  Despite all protocol, all logic, all wisdom, I love him.  Despite the fact that his body is breakable--broken even--that he sometimes falls and needs help writing checks and remembering days--I love him.  It's suddenly so much more than just his leg or his body or his anything. 

I don't know what I'm doing, I think often.  I don't know what I'm doing.  But I'm doing it anyway.   

*tm

*apparently, you get out of the whole "no sex before marriage" thing if you're one-legged.  At least in the Christian church.  No, don't ask.