Descent from the summit

‘I think you are the sweetest, kindest, dearest, loveliest, most thoughtful, best looking and most loveable girl in the whole world. I love you with all the strength that is in me.’
-Dean P. Stiles to Marion E. Davison, April 1945

‘What I want to convey in this note is that my thoughts have been filled with you constantly since Sunday night and that the days have seemed dreadfully long, I’ve missed you so. Already tonight I miss you voice. Somehow the day doesn’t seem complete. I wonder where you are and what you are doing. Are you thinking of me? I love to spend my waking hours each day running over and over again the things we have done together, the things you have said to me and to recall every wonderful moment you have been in my arms. I do believe I remember every little detail. Yes, I even remember that the big toe on each of your feet is relatively shorter than the one next to it.’
-Dean P. Stiles to Marion E. Davison July 1944

‘Can you keep a secret? You can? Well, I love you, sweetheart, so much in fact that these words form with my every breath. May my love for you keep you warm and close to me. I’ll be with you soon.’
-Dean P. Stiles to Marion Davison July 1944

All these love letters and twenty something years worth of birthday, anniversary, Easter and Mothers Day cards, stored away in boxes all over the house. Love. It can be so ephemeral! It can build you up and break you down in a day. I found a card sent from my Grandfather Dean to my Nana after twenty something years of marriage that read on the front- “Can we get together on this?”. When you open it up there is a picture of a bed and it’s signed, your loving and hopeful hubby. He sent it from the post office in their town to the house they shared. Weird. And sad. And damn if history doesn’t repeat itself!! My husband hasn’t had a regular sex life in years. Poor guy… Anyway, the infamous story is that when my Grandfather left my Nana, he threw a book at her that he had bought full of new sexual positions he hoped they could try. My Nana was crippled with arthritis and probably depression and my Grandfather was sexually frustrated and unhappy with the way his life had turned out. Love in all its new beginnings is so Utopian but loves’ decline is anything but idyllic.

My husband told me last night that he’s been spending time with a woman he met. Not official dates, just getting together and talking. I didn’t feel a shock or jolt of pain. I felt calm and actually happy for him. Huh. I mean that says a lot right? But I also have some excitement going on here so maybe that’s why I’m so OK with it?
This guy that I fell head over heels in love with during a summer spent in Oregon eleven years ago, recently opened a FB account just to find me. I mean this guy……… I haven’t ever really gotten over the sense that I missed out on something big with him. Total unrequited love. He, (I’ll call him J), had a girlfriend when I met him but the draw we felt towards one another was so strong that he told his girlfriend he needed to spend time with me to figure out what was going on. She gave him her blessing and I’ll always admire her for that very strong and difficult decision. We only spent time alone on two occasions and kissed with sweet longing and immense restraint. We jumped into a freezing lake and collapsed laughing and shivering on our towels. We lay on our bellies, shoulders touching and talked for hours. On the drive home that day he reached silently across the car and ran his fingers down the entire length of my arm to my fingertips. I can still remember how my arm tingled and practically burned from his touch. Then she recanted and made him choose. He chose her and rightfully so. I was devastated and spent the last three weeks crying myself to sleep and slept with some dude who was just that- some dude. At the end of my last day of work at the resort lodge, I called the bellhop service for a ride to the golf course where the car I shared with friends was parked. Who should show up to get me but J. I walked to the back of the shuttle van, the only passenger in there and sat with arms crossed in the very back. He drove me in silence for most of the way and suddenly pulled off to the side of the road practically skidding to a halt. I can’t remember if he turned to face me or if he spoke to my reflection in the rear-view mirror but he told me that he needed for me to know, with out a doubt, before I left, that the decision had been very difficult for him and that he cared for me very much. That he thought about me every day even though he couldn’t call. He delivered me to the golf course, I hugged him goodbye, flew back to Boston the next day and that was eleven years ago.

He ended up marrying her. She asked for a divorce a few years ago. Now he writes me out of the blue and our emails have that same veiled excitement that our conversations did all those years ago. The excitement that comes from wanting and finding yourself able to discuss anything and everything with a matched wit, imagination and intelligence. Then he tells me in his last email that he has a girlfriend out there that he got together with shortly after his divorce, who followed him from New Orleans to northern California. He intimates his unease at not feeling sure that she is the one he wants to marry and have children with. She wants this with him and he wonders if he is being unrealistic and selfish in holding out for that ‘mind bending’ love as he calls it. Oh man… My heart fell about three stories when I read this. He has a girlfriend. Pffffft. But then this is the shit I’ve been thinking about and writing about every day for years now, so you can only imagine the lengthy email I sent out in response.

I don’t want to be let down again. Nor do I want to be used like a sandbag on his scale so he can determine how much he loves this woman. But I also don’t want to let him slip away again if this is life yelling in my face. Maybe as we communicate more I’ll realize he’s a total dork, or he’s way into God, or he’s too straight laced for me. Or maybe I’ll just tell him to get some balls, take the reigns and come for a visit to New England.
But just as ephemeral as love can be, it can also suddenly sprout the most tenacious roots that declare permanence. It remains to be seen what will happen between J and his lover or what he wants from me. Just one more thing for me to add to the list of uncertainties that make up my present and future. This afternoon I will continue to immerse myself in the lives of my grandparents, whose future has already become their past, the last chapters already written. THERE is something I can hang my hat on-a future that I know awaits me with absolute certainty: a final chapter. Here’s to a damn good read until then!

Guess I'm Doin' Fine

The kids and I have been on self imposed exile after being exposed to a nasty virus that sent my uncles wife to the hospital with dehydration. Today is day five and even though the sun is shining I'm feeling burnt out and low on patience. My husband has come around and now wants us back to the house for the month and a half before he deploys and even though this was what I originally wanted, now I feel like it's throwing me off kilter. As painful as these past weeks have been for he and I, the pain was essential to create boundaries and new relationship definitions. I am weary and wary in the knowledge that this stay together is going to throw us right back to point A. I'm anxious to put down roots and get a rhythm going with the kids, to organize play dates and reunite with my friends around here. Instead I am picking up yet again and leaving. Ultimately it is not about me though, it is about the kids being able to see their father before he deploys and one doesn't have to expound on the importance of that, one just puts their own feelings aside and makes it happen. It also give me needed time to pack up the house, get rid of shit and clean for the showings. If we are able to find good tenants then there is a chance we might get our deposit back which considering our financial situation right now, would greatly help us. I can't remember the last time I was so broke. It hasn't been without it's benefits though. Strangely, it has been freeing. No longer a slave to guilt inducing impulsive buys and the hollowness that followed those purchases, I am finding little pleasures in the money I am saving by not shopping at Hanafords or the co-op. I am trying to make crock pot meals stretch for the week and baking goodies instead of buying them. The flip side is that I can't afford a babysitter (now that I actually have one in the area) and I can't afford the gas money to drive to see the friends I have been missing so much. But I wake every morning in a lovely house that is a safe haven from the cold and I have the luxury of a laptop and pirated internet signal. I have French Roast and free range eggs in the morning and a park up the street where the kids and I can sled or ice skate. I have friends calling to offer their tireless support and love and little windfalls keep coming my way. Returning to the house one snowy night there was a package by the door with my name on it. A new friend had seen my face book post bemoaning the onset of a cold and had sent me a whole slew of get-well goodies from drugstore.com. I was totally blown away by this act of generosity. The items inside the box are only part of the gift, her reaching out and offering her support fortified me immensely. Yesterday while going through yet another box of stuff in my nana's home, I found a letter from a friend dated in 2007 that I had never received. Inside was a message of such love and support and affirmation that it seems like it was meant for today. I am thankful for these unexpected gifts. I am also thankful for marajuana and white wine. I am thankful for hot showers and snow down the back of my pants. I am thankful for the little peals of laughter from the living room. I am thankful for the picture I have propped up next to my computer, my nana's beautiful smile encouraging me to write every sentence. I am thankful for mysteries and for not feeling the need to solve every single one. I am thankful for walks on warm nights and the feel of silk on my naked skin. I am thankful for my mother's music and the freedom of dance. I am enraged by big business customer service, devoid of humanity. I am overwhelmed by Haiti and all the desperation, need and loss around the world. I am scared of never being successful. I am jealous of those I perceive as having it 'easy'. I am confused about love. I am disappointed in the size of my breasts and probably always will be. I'm annoyed by religious people knocking on my door (when I am greasy and disheveled), bringing a message out of the goodness of their hearts, of impending doom and damnation. Can't they see I'm having a hard enough time preparing myself for TODAY? Like the seasons and cycles I was born into, I am balanced by positive and negative, gain and loss, potential and collapse, generosity and materialism, optimism and despair. I am perfectly imperfect.

'Well, my road might be rocky,
The stones might cut my face.
My road it might be rocky,
The stones might cut my face.
But as some folks ain't got no road at all,
They gotta stand in the same old place.
Hey, hey, so I guess I'm doin' fine.'
-
Bob Dylan from 'Guess I'm Doin' Fine'

I too have a dream

On NPR this morning a Reverend Kyle noted that so often pioneers don’t live to walk the trails they blaze. Kyle was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the day he was shot. My mind skipped back to something Elizabeth Gilbert said on ‘The Exchange’ the other morning, about marriage and how in essence, we are all pioneers of modern marriage right now. She said that we really only have two generations of women to model ourselves after, who have married with equal rights and choices. And because of this marriage is still evolving and we are in the thick of it. I nodded my head in agreement over the sink of dishes I was tackling. This is partly what I touched on in one of my earlier blog posts: that the multitude of choices women have now can negatively affect our success in long term relationships. I just hadn’t thought about it the way she presented it, that we have so little in the way of role models, that we are the pioneers. It would make sense then that women can feel so lonely and isolated in their desires for an alternative kind of marriage or for freedom from their marriage simply to pursue some of these choices we now have. Choices that guide us closer to ourselves. In our great grandmothers day, it was bona fide scandal if a woman left her husband-especially if it was for another man. Depending on where she lived and who she was, she could lose her children, reputation and social standing for choosing selfhood or passion over wedlock. Wedlock. What a terrible word. Implying that there is a lock holding two together, also implies that there must be a key. Who is the holder of the key? I wonder if I will ever get to pioneer by example before I die. Will I ever test or achieve the relationship I envision? Will I see in my lifetime the necessary major shift of consciousness surrounding marriage? I wholeheartedly support wanting and having a till death do us part relationship. I think cohesive, successful ones greatly benefit society. Our society’s inability to adapt it’s thinking and teaching of marriage will only allow for its continued decline. History has taught us so many times it’s hardly necessary to point it out again, that failure to adapt results in extinction. So why don’t we start with early education. Teach children that a ‘normal’ marriage might consist of two people keeping separate bedrooms. Not for a lack of intimacy between them, but in the interest of achieving intimacy with themselves, to satisfy a need for personal space, to provide a retreat, a place for expression through the chosen color of paint, textiles, artwork etc. A ‘normal’ marriage may work best when the couple sees each other one or two weeks out of a month. A ‘normal’ marriage may facilitate sabbaticals so to speak. I would like children to learn that monogamy and marriage are not about owning another person literally or figuratively, that it is about supporting and helping your loved one live a fulfilling life that is guided by an internal compass and expecting the same in return. I would like to steer love and ego in separate directions- like state and church they shouldn’t be mixed.
I have the basic outline for what I consider to be the New Marriage but I still need to meditate on the fillers. For example, teaching myself how to be productive and self reliant when my lover is off on sabbatical or, back it up, when I am newly dating and waiting around for that phone call, that assurance I am so used to seeking. I realize this is all big talk from some one petrified of even dating! One of these days it will be time to step down from my soapbox and conduct some trial runs and I imagine I will fail more than once. The early American settlers lost many lives to the winters of this strange new land and we all know what atrocities the survivors went on to commit. I pray my own errors will not wipe out any chance my children have of achieving healthy love. If I do not ever get to walk the trail I am helping to blaze, I hope that my children can, that at the very least the path if not paved, will be well trodden.

Marie Curie ain't got nothin' on me

There are times when I wouldn’t want to hire myself to babysit my own children. I can get almost a perverse, teenage pleasure from mimicking their high whiney voices until they break down in tears. A couple times I’ve pushed to get an emotional response from my son when he didn’t cry about something truly sad or upsetting. I think I was honestly worried that he might be unable to have a sad emotional release. Mothers are underpaid under-recognized and let’s face it- sometimes unqualified, anthropologists. We are scientists shoved into the field armed only with our limited life experiences and what we consider right and wrong as a result of those experiences. We are alchemists pulling elements off the shelves adding a dash of discipline, a cup of love, with a blueprint hanging on the wall reminding us of the anticipated, magnificent end result. The culmination of our blood, sweat, tears, love, heartache, mistakes and well meaning. How often we have to remind ourselves that the original essence we’ve been amalgamating, in many ways identical to our own, is also many parts it’s own unique substance entirely alien to us. One wrong ingredient could fuck the whole thing up! Sounds like a dream job doesn’t it. To be quite honest there are days when I don’t want the damn job. Get. Me. Out. Of. Here. Just let me fly free for a few days, a week, a month. Just lighten my load so I can think for a while. What I wouldn’t give sometimes to be my old girl self, before the preoccupation with boys turned me into a sullen, depressed, pimply pain in the ass. To be the confident, curious, energetic girl who spent all day in the woods amusing herself. To sit by the side of a secret stream, on a moss covered rock, hugging my knees, inhaling the scent of their sun-warmed skin.
I sat with that too long and now I’m crying… Grief is a funny thing. It runs on it’s own schedule. You thought the last train came five years ago and suddenly you have to dive off the tracks to avoid that roaring, steel, harbinger of memory and you’re left to nurse the resulting cuts and scrapes. I’ve always been overly nostalgic and I do grieve for that childhood never to return. I grieve that I only travel farther and farther from ‘her’ and closer and closer to frailty and infirmity. I could really use some more celebration in my life. I could use some belly laughs, some wicked mirth, some gentle words, a long hug, some sister love. Right now I’m broke as a joke and the phone brings me my friends. Once I have a little gas money though I am going to buckle the kids in and aim my wheels towards the nearest warm kitchen. Keep a light on ladies.
It sounds like the kids movie has ended, time to drag myself back to the lab. Maybe I should focus more on my own concoction today. Let’s see: a cup of patience, a gallon of optimism to balance the brooding, a dash of contentment to cure the malaise and enough wisdom and perseverance to keep the whole thing from fermenting. Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up in my face.

I know why the caged bird is thirsty

Some days I sit and wonder how I’m going to get anything done. How will I ever get the kids to the park when I can’t get myself dressed? The task of getting them dressed, finding socks, putting on snow pants, jackets, boots, mittens and hats seems too monumental and I can’t get off the edge of my bed or out of my bathrobe. The weight of lost dreams, an unknown future and unclear present, settles around me like cement and if I don’t drag my arms and legs through the motions it will harden and I will sit forever. The kids will have to go to the neighbors for help. Maybe my son will remember how to dial 911. When the ambulance comes I will sit, unable to move my mouth, my eyes pleading for them to recognize my cemented condition. Once the fantasy gets this far I’m distracted enough by the absurdity to grab for my pants and the battle’s already half won.
Outside and bundled, we troupe to the park and I am shocked anew by the stinging cold that greets my cheeks and lungs. I let them slide across the ice of the duck pond as long as I can stand it and when my toes start to go numb we head for what we now call home. I spend hours re-arranging two of the bedrooms, trying to transform them into comforting, uncluttered, welcoming spaces. This is what I can offer them right now. I drag a slightly mildewed mattress up from the basement for myself and set up a little desk in a corner with plants to my left and a window to my right. This is where I have taken to having my coffee in the morning, listening to NPR, and it doesn’t eradicate the sadness or loneliness, but it helps. It’s where I’m writing from now, yelling at the kids when they squawk too loudly in their play. Then they sneak in on tip-toes to whisper in my ear that they love me and offer me their small, wet lips that only a parent can enjoy kissing without worrying if that’s spit or boogers. I can tell today it is going to be nearly impossible to be present and thankful. Today I’m going to wait for the phone to ring and my heart will flutter around in my chest, an impatient, anxious tenant and my patience will wear thin before noon. Today my heart will weigh heavy as the cement that threatens to pinion me to the bed. But it’s all really controlled by perspective and I can’t help but think of those old adages of glass half full or half empty and making lemonade from lemons. As I clear off the window seat to neatly place some books, toys and a pillow for the kids, as I tape bright, colorful cards of various winter birds on the wall to cheerfully greet them when they awake so far from their familiar room, and papa and beloved kitties; I am squeezing those lemons and mixing in what sugar I can procure to distract them from the sourness of life. I fill their glasses first and sometimes there is enough to fill mine and sometimes, like today, it’s half empty.

Bon Voyage

The dance has ended. The last awkward and unbalanced steps were painfully performed for both of our families during the holidays and then he went home to work while the kids and I stayed on in New Hampshire with the intention of returning a week or two later. Now he asks that we not return, that he be allowed to prepare for his deployment without the misery that my presence causes him. He is angry and launches a verbal attack on my character, on my failings, on everything I have given this family during the six years of our marriage. He rejects the notion that I love him and predicts that I will take him for all he’s worth in court. I sit on the other end of the phone hearing the pain and anger in his voice, my insides churning, my heart in anguish for him, for me, for the children. I am able somehow, in the midst of this unloving barrage, to feel a calm understanding of what he is doing and why he needs to do it. He needs to free himself of me in order to heal. He needs to be angry so that he will not be made vulnerable by his love for me. He needs to believe that I have used him to keep a roof over my head, that I plan to rake him over the coals in divorce court, that I have single handedly ruined the family that he is supposed to have. He is hardening himself against me.
There is only one small blessing that will come from his six month deployment to Afghanistan: that I will not be able to torture him by succumbing to my sadness and loneliness, that I will not be able to call him with the selfish need to tell him I love him, I miss him, his smell, his hug, his companionship. There is one great fear that haunts me: that he will die in Afghanistan.
A friend just gave birth to her second child in the thresh hold between her living room and kitchen. Not exactly where she had planned, but it was time RIGHT THEN and everyone adapted to what was inevitable. Holding her four day old son in my arms and listening to her birthing story, I was transported back to my own labors and those sensations normally kept under lock and key by biological necessity, come back in small increments. I realize that where we have been in our marriage is akin to the crowning during birth. The head needs to come past the pubic bone, the pelvis needs to expand the last little bit, the skin of the perineum needs to stretch a little more and it feels like none of these things is possible. The pain, aptly called the ring of fire, is unbelievable and the fear that you might split in two is very real. I remember being terrified of pushing, of increasing that pain, but I knew I had to do it for there to be progress. Those pushes that moved my babies heads down and into the world required the most strength and trust I have ever had to summon.
I told the kids this morning that we will not be going back to North Carolina, that their papa is leaving on another long work trip, that he loves them very much, that we both love them very much. I told them papa and I are having a hard time being married. My daughter who’s emotions are readily available at the drop of a hat, cried. My son said the same thing he did when I told him his great nana had passed: “ That’s not sad for me!”
I left the room to stir the oatmeal and when I came back he was standing alone with his finger in his belly button. I drew him to me and he began to cry. We all cried a little together and then went on with our morning. This is what it will be like for us, I thought. Later we called their father and they expressed their sadness. Then my daughter said, “I don’t remember what your face looks like.” My insides crumpled for him. It’s only been five days since she’s seen him, of course she remembers him, but I know this statement has played on one of his worst fears and I imagine him being in our big house alone contemplating all that he has lost and there isn’t a damn thing I can do. I haven’t been able to make him feel better in years so really this isn’t a new handicap yet it continues to cause me heartache and seems alien to the essence of my being as a woman. I suppose that in time this particular pain will ease for both of us, that eventually some other woman will open her arms to him, nurture and love him as he deserves. I am less sure that I will be able to love and give like that again. I feel broken down and undesirable. I could find ten guys, in one night out, who would want to take me home. Who might fancy themselves fortunate to call me a girlfriend, but when they find out who I really am, how my mind works, what my requirements are, how fiercely I value my autonomy, how my energy will mainly flow to my children, how I am hurting for an obsolete marriage, then they will count themselves lucky to slip out in the morning without leaving so much as a phone number.
Ah, but that feeling is thankfully not constant and I can catch glimpses of this confident, beautiful, powerful, bright woman with bold ideas and a wonderfully open mind and heart who has just set out on a terrifically exciting journey.
Pack your bags folks. Here we go.