Terrible Mother

The Laying on of Sod

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.

Some Things I Know*

Everyone has a hard time with transitions and, frankly, most of them just plain suck. The past six weeks have been so full of them, though, that my life has felt perpetually up in the air and I’m just now starting to acclimate. It’s come faster than I expected, really. I feel like one of those crazy desert pupfish in the deserts of Arizona who learned to live in tiny puddles, evolving practically overnight.

The first transition was graduation. Of course. Of course graduation was a transition, and I expected it to be. But it was much more difficult than I thought. We had a set of readings before the graduation, and that first night, Friends One and Two and I read. Tradition has it that the MFA candidates introduce each other, and so it was that Friend Two was set to introduce me.

Prior to reading, we were all a bunch of nerves. We each kept looking at our work and--a sign we are truly writers--kept revising it. But then it was Friend Two's turn to introduce me. He walked up to the podium, adjusted the microphone, and began by saying my full name, then launching into the introduction. If I’m honest with myself, that’s the moment that it all became real to me. It was the formality of my full name, coupled with Friend Two saying it at a podium where I was about to read. He went on to talk about my work in terms of theme and content, quoted what professors had said about my writing, and ended by telling the audience how often he had fielded a late night call from me worrying about not being good enough. “Now that you can’t protest,” he said, “I’m going to tell you that you are a rare and extraordinary talent.” His voice quavered a little, and I started to cry. It’s all ending, I thought. Right when I realize that I might actually be good enough.

I read, garnered an applause heavy and long, then proceeded to introduce Friend One. I told stories about her, summed up her work, and ended with a quote from one of Flannery O’Connor’s letters to her close friend, Maryat Lee. Lee had sent O'Connor a photo of herself as a girl, and O'Connor responded in a letter by saying: “I wish I would have known you then. You look so happy. We would have blown things up. I would have found the matches, and let you light the fuse.” It said everything about the relationship Friend One and I have.

None of us made it through the readings or introductions without crying. The three of us realized what we had accomplished that night, and how soon our lives were about to change. The ceremony the following day capped the experience by ritualizing the transition, but the readings were the moment where I felt the impending loss most acutely. And since then, everything has been in flux.

Five days after graduation, the Things were with The Man for a long weekend, and I was having dinner and drinks with all the graduating fiction writers and Professor Rainbolt. The plan was that I was to spend the weekend with The Sweet Boy. I didn’t want to drive the hour to his place, though, after drinking, so he was to pick me up at my house. I got home, post-dinner and drinkage, a little late, so I felt somewhat guilty when I saw The Sweet Boy sitting in his car waiting. As I parked he got out of his car, walked over to me. Something seemed slightly off, but he hugged and kissed me, smiled so sincerely, that I dismissed that moment of worry. We went inside and I was still flush with Mexican food and margaritas, so I talked while I finished packing, letting my voice carry through the empty house. The Sweet Boy followed me as I tucked t-shirts and underwear into my backpack, found a book I wanted to finish. He didn't say much of anything.

In the kitchen, I started pulling down the ingredients for Dominican Chicken and Rice. I had made it for the Sweet Boy’s family once when his younger sister and her husband were visiting from Boston, and his mom wanted me to teach her how to cook the sofrito, simmer the chicken just right. I was excited about this. It meant that she liked me, that I could potentially be part of this family. We were going to cook together Friday night for The Sweet Boy and his Dad. That evening in my house, I found a paper grocery sack and began filling it with guandules verdes and coconut milk and green olives. “So, am I still cooking dinner for your family tomorrow?” I asked, more as punctuation to my packing than a real question.

The Sweet Boy looked pained. “I don’t know,” he said.

I stopped packing, turned to him. He looked sick to his stomach. “You’re breaking up with me, aren’t you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

Whenever we’ve done this—which has been frequently to some extent—I am almost always the one who has to bring it up. I’m the one who notices something is wrong, and immediately knows what it is. And I’m the one who says it first, who has to ask the question “Are you breaking up with me?” It’s as though he’s always too afraid to do it himself, so he makes me do it.

That is wrong on so many levels.

That night, in my kitchen, the moment after he said yes, I looked at him—really looked at him closely. He was terrified. He was also completely closed off to me.

The Sweet Boy and I talked for two hours and it was eerily like the break up the month before. He held me, kissed me, told me he loved me more than anyone, but that he couldn’t do it anymore. There were all kinds of reasons, but none of them seemed to connect to the others, or to reality. It was that he “couldn’t,” then that he “wouldn’t,” then that he didn’t “want to,” then that he would if it was without any risk. At some point, it became exhausting for both of us. I kept trying to make it all understandable, reduce it to a single failure, something I could point to and say “ah-ha, this is the problem.” And then I could fix it, or at least avoid it in the future. I never found it, partly because I wanted language to work, wanted to flex my linguistic muscles. I wanted to use logic and reason and my acute ability to articulate the abstract and make them work for me, make the fact I was getting my heart broken reasonable. This is one of the few times that language, and my ability with language, has failed me, and it's because I expected too much from it.

In the end, I finally asked “why” for the hundredth time, and he stood up, got a hard look on his face and said, “Because I don’t want you and I don’t want your kids.”

Maybe this is true and maybe it isn’t, but in that moment, he broke whatever we had. He broke everything. He left then, and I stood at the screen door and watched him go. It was late—close to 11—and the street lamp freckled amber through the tree in the front yard, lighting only one side of his face. I thought about the night we first met, how we drove to the beach in his car, talking all the way there and all the way back. As he drove that night, I memorized his profile. "This is how I came to know your face," I said once, when we were driving, months after we first met. There was something familar and heartbreakingly different the night on my porch.

There’s this way that The Sweet Boy must walk down some kinds of stairs, specifically stairs with only one banister, like my front steps. He has to go down backward, slowly, each step even and exactly placed so that he doesn’t fall. After our fight, there wasn't the slam of the door, a quick retreat. Instead, he walked slowly to the edge of the steps, then turned around. I watched him take each step, and he looked at me the entire time, his face purposely emptied. Watching him--that slow, measured, painful step--reminded me of everything about him. The way he has approached life, always backward, carefully edging in, like a child dangling a foot into a deep pool of water. And of the way he was leaving me, was always leaving, had always been leaving, but was still looking back, unable to fully turn away. The Greeks described Life as a man, not walking forward through time, but walking backward, always looking back, obsessed with the past, never having the sight to understand or even see what was ahead.

I still wonder what he saw when he looked backward that night on the porch, through me, through my house where we had nestled on the couch, hung streamers for Thing Three's birthday, washed dishes together in my kitchen. Did he look back and see his girlfriends, miss them through the haze of regret? Did he look back and hear his parents, his sisters tell him over and over all the small memories he had forgotten--the operation on his nose, his sister's allergy to eggs, the plane ride the night of his prom? How almost all of his memories are nothing more than stories told by other people? Did he look back until he reached that night, remembered the second before he hit the guardrail? Did he look back, far back, when his first love laid her innocent head in his lap as he drove them through orange groves? He was just 20 then, a kid, and when he talked about it, it was as though that time had become his own Eden, and that he had somehow earned his fall. He had made a normal life into a paradise that he will never feel worthy of reentering. I don't think he will ever manage to look forward much. I'm not sure it's fair to ask him to.

Since that night, The Sweet Boy and I haven’t seen each other.

A few days later, the Things and I set off to Whidbey Island, where we enjoyed the sea and the sun. I cried, felt angry and hurt. But mostly, I felt adrift. What now, I thought. I could not conceive of a what now. I had put all my eggs into two baskets**—school and The Sweet Boy, and suddenly both of those things were ripped from me. I felt completely untethered.

When we got back from Whidbey Island, I attempted to settle into some kind of routine, but it felt impossible. I applied for a few jobs. I interviewed at, and was rejected by, the Graduate School here for a summer office position. There was nothing to hold on to. I walked around the house during the day, while the kids were at day care, and wondered what the fuck I had done with my life. I had come here, two years previously, with a husband and three small children, and no real belief in myself as a writer or a thinker. And now the casualties of my decisions were everywhere: the remnants of a failed marriage (which would have died anyway, was nearly dead, but graduate school was the euthanasia), an ex-boyfriend who I loved dearly but who still failed me, three children who now missed two men as opposed to just one, a mountain of debt. No job. No prospects. Nothing to hold me anywhere in particular. The feeling made me nauseous. I worried about finding a job, a house, a life.

Friend One called me daily, and we talked about our lives, this feeling of being adrift. Neither of us could write, could even think about writing. We met for breakfast, made our lives manageable over cups of coffee and plates of eggs. But we both felt a gnawing sense of failure in some way. We were done with school. How did we move from here?

Friend Two and I talked as well. At least he was writing, but he also felt untethered. Sometimes he came over, and we sat on my porch, drinking beer and talking in the falling summer light. “You just need one thing right now,” he kept saying. “We all just need the one thing.” He would take a pull from his beer, lean over and rest his elbows on his legs, put his head down. “Hold out a couple more weeks.” When he said it, I knew it was just as much for him as me.

I tried to convince them both that I should go back to The Sweet Boy. “You don’t understand,” I would cry to Friend Two. “I just need something right now.” Friend One and Friend Two were indispensable. They talked me through it. We talked each other through it, that first month after graduating. None of us knew it would be as hard as it was.

Because I felt adrift, and because I needed something that wasn’t The Sweet Boy, I planned, that week, to move to Portland. I would find a job there, uproot the kids (they would be closer to The Man), and settle in. I loved this plan;it was something to cling to. As Friend One says, it’s “the future, always the future," as though looking forward brings some sort of clarity and comfort that looking at can’t.

I knew I needed money, so I found a temporary job through an employment agency—quick cash, I told myself—and started working part-time, four hours a day for a county office. The routine was comforting. I woke up in the mornings and had somewhere to be. I dressed the kids, took them to daycare, and drove to work. And the work itself was relaxing in its dullness. Type minutes, pull reports, answer phones, make labels. I’ll just stay here until I land a job in Portland, I told myself.

Then, things happened. Thing Three got into a pre-school in Portland, and I was thrilled that it was in the area I wanted to live in. It was a good pre-school, too, one of the few I actually liked. I was ecstatic. Ever try to get a kid into pre-school this late in the year in Puddletown? It’s nearly impossible.

And then I calculated the tuition. Initially, I thought the pre-school day was 6 hours, so I’d only have to pay for 3 more hours of before and after care. But since the pre-school day was significantly shorter, total tuition, for one child, was $1100/month. With after school care for Things One and Two included, my childcare costs would be $1400/month. If I had more time, I could have found a good pre-school for much less money for Thing Three, but this late in the year, it was impossible. It was the Outrageous Pre-School or it was nothing.

Then my boss started wondering aloud if I’d be interested in applying for the job once it opened as a full-time, permanent position in the next six weeks. She described the benefits—a pay increase of 40% from what I’m making now, and full benefits for me and the kids at no cost. None. In other words, an excellent job. When she found out I was a single mother, she said “this job offers a lot of time off—sick leave and vacation time all in one bank. It would be great for a single parent.”

A week later (and two days post Dickhead Landlord), a prospective landlord emailed me. I had posted a “housing wanted” ad on a website. I said that I was a single mother with good credit, good rental history, and that I needed a house within a certain price range in a certain area. He emailed me, and I drove by the house. It’s older, but renovated, has a large front porch, three bedrooms and a beautiful fenced yard in a lovely neighborhood of families. It’s perfect for us. I had spent so much energy planning for a life in Portland, planning out of a need to make things stable, that I didn't realize until I saw the house that a life here could be what I really need right now.

As soon as things fell in place, it was though this life had already existed, waiting for me to discover it. Right now I’m working, saving money, starting to pack for the inevitable move. And I’m starting to write again. I have this small little piece of stability to hold on to, and I’m hoping, hoping for a little more.

*tm

* “You never talk about me on your blog,” complains Friend Two, frequently and with feeling. “I do so,” I say. “Yeah,” he replies, “but only when I fail the exam.” So, here’s my mea culpa. This title is the title of a short story, part of a larger work that Friend Two is working on. It is also brilliant and heartbreaking. If he lets me, I will post it.

**the kids don’t count as a basket of eggs—they are an absolute; they are always part of the equation.

Holding On

The break-up has been worse than I thought it would be. 

By that I mean I'm just sorta holding it together.  It started when we got to Whidbey Island Monday evening.  I walked through the beach house--it was perfect, not fancy, but laid back, relaxing and big, with huge windows all along the side facing the water.  The sky was perfectly blue, the water lapped gently at the beach below us, where there driftwood was piled against the rocks.  And The Sweet Boy wasn't there.  While the kids played and wrestled on the hammock, I sat on the back porch--huge, beautiful, perfect--and sobbed.  He was supposed to be here, I kept thinking.  If he were here right now, we'd be laughing about the kids fighting over the hammock, and the weird 70s carpet, and we'd be making plans for the week.  Instead, I was alone. 

The Things have all cried over him, cried that we broke up, which has been the worst.  And every hour or so on our vacation, they brought him up.  "Do you think that motorcycle was like his?" "Do you think that he'd like The Mad Crab?"  "If we bought him a gift, do you think he'd come back?"  "Did he not like us?"  "I thought he said that he loved us."  I try to answer their questions, but it's awful, gut-wrenching having to pretend like it's all okay.

I hate The Sweet Boy for this. 

Right now, I've hit an all-time low.  My friends are all sort of busy with their own lives, I'm alone with the kids going on a week, the house is a mess, I have to find a job, and there is no grown up to tell these things to. 

*tm

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 

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.

Cooking for a Man

Terrible Mother:  So, I need your advice on what to cook for The Sweet Boy for dinner. 

Friend One:  What are you considering?

Terrible Mother:  Scallops.

Friend One: Scallops? 

Terrible Mother:  Yes, scallops.  You know.  They are small and tasty shell fish that you can buy in mass quantities at the local fish store.  Or fishmonger.  Jamie Oliver calls it "fishmonger."

Friend One:  Did Jamie Oliver tell you to cook your boyfriend scallops?

Terrible Mother:  Well, he implied it would work.

Friend One:  Because Jamie Oliver is a chef, Terrible Mother. 

Terrible Mother:  Wait, are you saying I shouldn't cook The Sweet Boy scallops?

Friend One:  Well, how committed are you to the scallops?

Terrible Mother:  Not very.

Friend One:  I think it's a bad choice.

Terrible Mother:  Bad choice as in "white wine with pesto" or bad choice as in "goat cheese and Saltines"? 

Friend One:  No no.  Bad choice as in "drinking three Jack and Cokes and having sex without a condom."  Not that I know.

Terrible Mother:  What?  How can scallops be that bad of a choice?

Friend One:  Listen TM.  Scallops are finicky.  The finickiest of the shellfish.  They absorb anything you put in the pan with them, and even things in the same room.  They are raw at 1 minute and tough as hell at 2 minutes.

Terrible Mother:  But I'm a good cook!  I can roast root vegetables!  I make a mean mac and cheese!  I know how to be a good bougie girl!

Friend One:  Yes, but scallops?  For a boy, TM?  Look, you do what you want, but this is potentially what could happen:  You cook the scallops.  They are tough and chewy.  He looks across the table at you, the table you've set with the china and the candlesticks and he will think "this girl can't cook at all!  What am I doing here?" 

Terrible Mother:  That is so sexist!  He won't think that!

Friend One:  Well, if you undercook them he won't.  Then he'll be puking up his guts and cursing the day he met you. 

Terrible Mother:  I can cook really well!

Friend One:  Of course you can.  I'm just asking you to think clearly here.  Think about where this relationship is right now.  Is it ready for scallops, TM? Because, frankly, I don't think it is.

Terrible Mother:  Maybe you're right.

Friend One:  Of course I'm right.  I'm never cooking scallops for any man until we've done the 'til death do us part. 

Terrible Mother:  Then what will I cook?

Friend One (pause):  How about an easy pork tenderloin?

*terriblemother

Sippin' on Jinx and Juice

In the world of blogging, my seperation from my husband and impending divorce has received what we might call "the montage treatment."  Meaning, it's been given very short screen time, which has allowed me (conveniently) to skip over it as though it were so much necessary backstory, but just more or less a plot point that had to be covered but not examined.  This is mostly because I don't know how to talk or write about it without sounding, well, fucking depressed.  And also because my feelings change on it more frequently than Sean Penn makes a political statement, so it seems weird to chronicle and re-chronicle my feelings, emotions, angry outbursts.  But IRL (in real life), I've been seperated for going on four months, and I'm just, these past few weeks, feeling stronger, better, more even.  I'm even happier this way--sans my husband--though I miss things.  Specifically, I miss the way things used to be four or five years ago.  I have fond memories of pieces of our marriage and relationship.

But in the past handful of weeks, something interesting happened.  And that thing is that I met a boy.  A sweet boy (in fact, I'll call him that here:  Sweet Boy).  We've been "dating" (ie, hanging out and having long, complicated conversations) for three weeks now.  He is nothing like The Man; nothing like me.  He's a (moderate) Republican and I'm a Democrat; he is a Christian and is going to seminary (!) to get a Master's in Divinity (!!), while I'm a godless heathen.  He is also funny and smart and outgoing and kind and generous.  I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm suddenly, without explanation, happy.  Really actually happy.  I don't know if this is going anywhere, but I'm intrigued by how complicated he is, how complicated I am, and how complicated our new relationship is. 

Now people, just don't jinx it.

*terriblemother