February is the new April
The path riddled with puddles
My hair frizzing with the humidity
I wear a hat, Gore Tex coat
But there is no snow
I need a freeze to shock my system
So that in the spring I can bloom
No rest, no hibernation
Christmas holidays straight to beach season
I need woolen socks
Steaming cups of hot cocoa
Deep sleep in a downy bed
Not this year
Eyes wide awake, spirit tired,
But still, I put on my boots,
Zip up
Prepare for what’s next
My dad and my stepmom are on their way over. They’re in town from Florida. It’s their first visit to my rented townhouse, to my post-4,000 sq. ft. cul-de-sac life.
I am cleaning like a banshee. It won’t be good enough. They’ll see the spots that I’ve missed. Nit pick. Criticize.
I now recognize that this frenzied feeling in my chest, this churning in my gut, has a name: anxiety. I am anxious for my Daddy to see the place where his baby girl lives. The place that he, when I first moved in, asked, “Is it infested?” Last month he asked, “Do you have good heat?” His questions reflecting his anxiety that I am at risk; unsafe.
I am 53. I am fine.
I love my new home, familiar tzchotkes and photographs on the table tops collected from a lifetime of travels and gifts from beloved friends, my guitars hanging on the wall, folk music wafting in from the kitchen Bose speaker a client gave me for Christmas.
I am barking at my daughter, “Make your bed. Clean up your room.” I am teaching her to be anxious. This is *not* the family tradition I want to pass onto her.
I want to breath. Relax my shoulders. Feel confident in my choices: to leave my too-big lonely home, my too-small lonely marriage.
I am making my own way. My own living.
My father is coming. He’s old now. Every visit, potentially the last. He’ll see the dirt on the floor. The dishes drying next to the sink. Hopefully he’ll also see me. I do.
Summer evenings of 1984, as I was gearing up to leave for college in Ohio 7 hours away, my best friend and I cruised rural Howard County roads in his mom’s smooth-riding Peugeot, listening to music and laughing like crazy. One night, JP popped in a cassette tape from a band I’d never heard before. The lyrics rang loud and clear to my melancholy heart: “IIIII will be with you again…IIIIII will be with Yoooouuu aaaaagain…” I didn’t know then how true they’d be.
Sometimes you yearn for SO HARD for something that you can almost believe it has actually happened. A thing that seems so real, a story told so many times, that you no longer can tell reality from fiction. This is not one of those times.
It was after “The Joshua Tree” album was released, that the dreams began: Bono (U2’s lead singer) and me, sitting together, on a back, wooden staircase in an off campus-house somewhere, engaging in the most thought-provoking, discussions, the most wonderful philosophical debates. Stealing time, as though we had snuck away, from a frat party, perhaps, to meet and discuss, and maybe even solve, the myriad problems of the world.
I couldn’t wait to get to sleep at night. The dreams were so real. I felt like I really knew Bono and that someday, when the time was right, we would meet. It was simply a matter of time. The dreams lasted every night, for about three weeks. And then, as inexplicably as they’d started, just like that, they stopped. I missed them. Missed my friend and our conversations.
Soon enough though, real life took over–graduation, a marketing job, then marriage, a house, a couple of kids. I’d nearly forgotten about the dreams. But then, I had one more: I was backstage, at some sort of a special event after-party. Bono was there, too. From across the space, our eyes met, and he strolled toward me, his arms opening wide as he approached. He said my name, so familiar. And he embraced me.
He hugged me, in his most honest and present Bono way, and I, ridiculously, I began to laugh. Taken aback, he straightened his arms, pushed back my shoulders, and looked right into my eyes. “Why are you laughing?“ he asked. And in my unbearably lifelike dream, I said, “Because.” “I’ve always known that this moment would happen.” Goosebumps. And then I woke up. [sigh]
I try to see U2 whenever they come to town. A decade ago, for the 360 tour, I splurged and went to two cities–DC and Charlottesville. The shows were only 2 days apart. A Tuesday and a Thursday. Back home on Friday, I noticed on the tour schedule (God love the internet, even 10 years ago). I saw that on that Saturday, Bono and the Edge would be playing a special event in New York City, at Carnegie Hall. It was Gavin Friday’s (Bono’s best friend’s) 50th birthday. A whole bunch of stars were coming together to celebrate and raise money for Project Red, (Bono’s fundraising organization for HIV/Aids relief in Africa).
I thought, “What the heck?” We’ll make it a Trifecta! And I bought a ticket to the show, and a ticket on the bus, early the next morning. Sometimes life begs you to leap. (It helped that my sister in law, who lives in Manhattan, was visiting us.) I borrowed her apartment keys and Vamoosed myself to Manhattan. I confess to myself that the quest to fulfill my “Bono dream” was helping to propel that bus.
The show was an incredible mish-mash of songs by massive, inebriated, stars, Courtney Love, Shane McGowan, Fred Armisen (as Prince), Scarlett Johansen, Joel Gray, Lady Gaga! Laurie Andersen! Lou Reed! It was a discombobulated, wonderful mess. Ryan Reynolds was seated directly in front of me, Dennis Hopper was a few rows away; and, Ali Hewson, Bono’s beautiful wife and his two daughters, Eve and Jordan, were four seats away. It was surreal. If ever my dream were to come true, surely tonight was the night.
But after the show, rather than contrive to get myself backstage, and live out my fantasy, my premonition, I opted to leave, out the backdoor, with all the other nobodies. We waited like lemmings for “Bono and the Boys,” Deities! to exit the theatre. Wouldn’t you know, I wasn’t *even* facing the right direction when he walked past, climbing into the backseat of an idling black Cadillac SUV, and skirted away, nullifying any chance of my dream ever coming true.
He was “right there” that night. So present. Bono the man, the dad, singing more to and for his wife and daughters than anyone else in all of Carnegie Hall. The experience was one of the greatest of my life. I reconciled all of it. I still loved U2, but no longer had conversations with the lead singer in my sleep. Sometimes dreams are just dreams…
A year later I found myself back in New York–to celebrate my sister in law’s 40th. She wanted to take a double decker tour bus, inquire where famous people live. We passed Jerry Seinfield’s apartment, Alec Baldwin’s upper East Side condo, John Lennon’s Dakota on West 72nd, and on West 74th, the San Remo…home of…
That’s how, when the next day, October 25, 2010, when after a long day of sight-seeing, my friends and I found ourselves at the western end of Central Park, emerging from Strawberry Fields, that’s when I knew we were only a block away from…
What could it hurt? To walk by? So we did. And when we got there, I saw. An idling black Cadillac SUV. Just like the one I’d seen him get into the previous fall…after the Carnegie Hall show…so we loitered, maybe, just a little bit…
We wondered where to go for dinner. My sister in law chatted with the doorman, asked for his recommendation.
A man and his wife exited the building. Again, my back turned in the wrong direction. My sister in law hollered my name. I looked up. The black leather jacket, the slicked back hair, the gait, I knew that man!
Simultaneously intent and terrified that he’d think I was a stalker (I was a block away from the Dakota!) I ran towards him and hollered out, “Bono!”
There he was! His face was right in front of mine. His eyes, his clear, blue eyes, were right in front of mine. What to do? What to say? I did the only thing I possibly could have done in that moment, “Can I have a hug,” I asked?
And, just like in my dream, he opened his arms wide and wrapped them around me. He embraced me. Bono embraced me! This was not a dream! I could feel the actual softness of his cheek against mine, breath in the spicy, citrus-y scent of his cologne. This was it. This was THE moment. I began to laugh, and I looked him in the eye and I told him: That I’d dreamt this exact moment—more than a decade before. That we’d met backstage, and that he’d hugged me, and that I’d laughed.
Because now, as it was then, it was true: “IIIII will be with youuuu againnnn…” I’d always known this moment would happen.
The End
We were visiting my ex-husband’s grandmother, Ruth, in Florida. Long before he was my ex. Infact, this particular visit was even before our wedding took place.
Everything Ruth did was loud. She laughed, she swore, she dressed louder than anyone else I’d ever met. She wanted to be noticed. She filled her home with art from around the world and filled her lives with characters as colorful as she.
She took me once to a friend’s, a sculptor’s, place. This woman’s apartment was filled to the brim with granite and marble works of varying sizes and shapes. Some geometrical, shiny, black; some white, curvaceous. Ruth put me on the spot and said, “Which do you like best?”
I didn’t know. None really was to my taste, but the artist herself was standing right there, beaming with curiosity. So I pointed at one, nearly a figure eight, made out of a taupe marble. It stood about thirty inches high and must have weighed about forty pounds. The plaque on the bottom read, “Sisyphus.” Despite my four-year, private liberal arts education, I had no idea what that meant. I should have looked it up.
A month or so later, Ruth’s grandson and I were married. (Ruth herself nearly boycotted the wedding, but that’s another story). Soon, her wedding gift to us arrived via UPS: the statue. I sat the piece just inside the front door. No pillar to raise it up for notice, just sat it there. For the next 26 years it remained.
Through the years of our marriage, all the years of arguing: which way the toilet paper should roll off the holder, what financial categories the $212.59 spent at Target was broken down into, whether the dishes should be washed before they were put into the dishwasher, that statue stood just inside the doorway to our home. Me, completely ignorant to its significance, its symbolism.
Sisyphus was a king of Corinth, a son of Aeolus. His name actually meant “crafty” in Greek: he was noted for his deception and he’s the equivalent in Greek folklore of the master trickster who turns up in many folk beliefs, such as Coyote in American Indian mythology. He even managed to cheat Death the first time around, surviving the experience to live to a ripe old age.
In Greek legend Sisyphus was punished in Hades for his misdeeds in life by being condemned eternally to roll a heavy stone up a hill. As he neared the top, the stone rolled down again, so that his labour was everlasting and futile.
In my ex’s eyes, I could never be ready on time, cook eggs properly, put away laundry fast enough, be a consistent disciplinarian to our children, our dog. Our marriage was a perpetual playing out of that ancient Greek mythology, me, rolling the same God-damned rock up a hill only to have it come rolling right back down again. Again, and again, and again.
Now divorced, I no longer push that stone. I am free of that insanity-producing Sisyphean life. Perhaps, like old Sys, I have cheated Death and am, instead, living, free of futility.
NOTE: Found this file on my computer just now. Wrote it 8 years ago. Still musing, I guess…
“Have you been a good girl?”
When I was little, someone gave me AA Milne’s collection, “Now We Are Six”. It contained poems that were rhyming, silly, nonsense but were oh, so much fun to recite!
One of my favorites, though, I don’t think I really understood until I was much older:
It’s funny how often they say to me, “Jane”
“Have you been a good girl?”
“Have you been a good girl?”
And when they have said it, they say it again,
“Have you been a good girl?”
“Have you been a good girl?”
I go to a party, I go out for tea,
I go to an aunt for a week at the sea
I come back from school or from playing a game;
Wherever I come from, it’s always the same:
“Well?
Have you been a good girl, Jane?”
It’s always the end of the loveliest day;
“Have you been a good girl?”
“Have you been a good girl?”
I went to the Zoo, and they waited to say:
“Have you been a good girl?”
“Have you been a good girl?”
Well, what did they think that I went there to do?
And why should I want to be bad at the Zoo?
And should I be likely to say if I had?
So that’s why it’s funny of Mummy and Dad,
This asking and asking, in case I was bad,
“Well?
Have you been a good girl, Jane?”
“The Good Little Girl”
A. A. Milne
from Now We Are Six
That question circulates daily: Have I been a good girl?
When I was a little girl, we had two signs hanging in our kitchen: One, in a fancy, Olde English font, succinctly stated, “Fuck Housework.” The other, held to the side of the fridge with a magnet, was a list, “Children Learn What They Live,” the top portion being the ancillary negative lessons to the more positive ones listed beneath.
I was consumed with the top of the list, the bottom ones so unfamiliar to my little psyche. Tolerance, acceptance, security, praise? These were things you got your friends’ houses. But, criticism, hostility, ridicule, shame? These, I knew at home. I yearned to just be loved, to have my tiny heart held. I knew that there must be someway to get what I needed.
And then it happened.
A 45-record appeared in our collection. I placed it on the yellow turntable and the lyrics sang out–the answer key to my emotional survival for the next 49 or so years:
“Tell me a story, tell me a story, tell me a story before I go to bed,” the child singer called out, “You’ve got to give in cause I’ve been good. Tell me a story before I go to bed.”
Even at my tender young age, 4? 5? The unmasked manipulation of it irritated me; scratched my skin. But at the same time, I just knew that simple cause and effect would be the only way. Being the youngest, the cutest, hadn’t worked, being honest and and actually stating my feelings outright hadn’t worked, saying “I feel sad,” having been usually met with, “No you don’t.” So, I’d give this new way a try: Score keeping, finger pointing, aggressiveness. “You have to give in cause I’ve been good.”
Thinking about it now makes me feel dirty inside. I knew then that manipulation wasn’t my authentic nature. But what other choice did I have? I was just a kid.
Now, at 53, I am rediscovering the inner voice that was quashed as a child. I am learning to honor my right to have needs and feelings at all, and to ask for (and give myself permission) to have them actually met. But, every so often, I catch myself being coy, cutsie, overly planful, trying to machinate the attention I seek. It’s a tough skill to unlearn. But I am.
And I remember, children do indeed learn what they live.
*Blog title used without permission from The Nields song of the same, by Nerissa and Katryna Nields. I hope they don’t mind.
Philadelphia Blues Rocker, Ben Arnold wrote this song a few years back. Now I’m living what he meant. Two years ago, I steeled away from my marital home a few prized things. Of course the most precious to me–my kids, and my soapstone countertops, would stay. (Though I’d get shared custody of the kids. The counter tops, I’d have to learn to live without.)
I moved from the comfort and loneliness of the home I shared with my husband for 17 years in exchange for a light-filled, high-ceilinged 2 bedroom apartment in a town that has lots of green space and walking paths. The space was already out-fitted with comfy furniture and all the other accessories to make it homey.
Tomorrow I am leaving this nest that has served my soul, my muse, so well. At my youngest’s bequest, I have rented a townhome nearer to her father, her school, her friends. While some folks pack with excitement about the new life ahead, I have been filled with dread. I am moving back to my old life.
Not exactly, but that’s my fear. Since leaving my marriage, I’ve discovered and rediscovered this creative, introverted side to myself. I’ve written stories, made music, made love. I am terrified that moving back[wards] geographically speaking, will unwind me, this new spool of myself.
Practically speaking, there are things I can do to keep myself in check–I can buy a stereo and listen to all the old cds I’ll be lugging to the new place, I can decorate the house to include a spot for my writing, I can keep my guitar nearby. Just because I’m moving to a house, doesn’t mean that I have to become a housewife.
In the past two years I’ve learned so many things. Not the least of which is surrender. My daughter needs me close. I am moving spaces, not time. I am strong enough to be me, even if those around me only knew who I used to be. God, grant me the courage to accept the things I cannot change, the strength to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. And, the next time I’m moving, I’m moving to heaven next time.
(Well, maybe not *quite* yet. It’s only a three-year lease, afterall).
[Title used without permission by Ben Arnold. Ben, I hope that’s ok.]
When she was 3, my eldest daughter “caught” me vacuuming, not something she often saw me do
Her comment confirmed my infrequent cleaning as she said, “Mama, you look like the cleaning lady.” I confess, I was embarrassed. But, it was true. We had a once-every-three-weeks lady who came to the house and cleaned.
One of the last times I saw her, I was quickly remaking my massage table in my upstairs studio, hiding the fact that I’d slept there. She asked.if I was ok. I said I was, yes, but that my marriage might be over.
Today, as I do every Wednesday morning, I dropped off my daughter’s overnight bag to her father’s house. I rang the doorbell and the cleaning lady opened the door. She was surprised to see me, as I haven’t lived there for two years. The expression on her face said, “Please don’t come in.” I was not welcome in my home. But the cleaning lady was.
Here’s a tip: if you’re a stay at home mom, clean your own house, so your toddler doesn’t mistake you for the cleaning lady. And, if you’re married to a man who doesn’t “get” you, with whom you feel broken, insufficient, not worthy, don’t end your marriage by getting attention from another…Don’t try this at home.
“I am older now. I know the rise and gradual fall of a daily victory.”
–Poignant, Yet Pointless, Crisis of a Co-ed, Dar Williams
Beneath my high school senior yearbook portrait read my future plans, “College, Psychology, Fall in love and get married.” And so I did. What I incidentally left out of that fortune-telling was “be incredibly lonely in marriage, fight for years to get attention, give up and throw it all away in one incredibly desperate attempt to save self.”
Two years ago, after 26 years of, competing with one another for who could be more right (and therefore less happy,) who could outlast the other (refraining from affection the longest,) who could simply ignore the other (without revealing any pain it caused) my husband and I called it quits. Well, called a “time-out,” actually. A “90-Therapeutic Separation.” We had a structure set up by our therapists, how much money I’d receive to maintain my standard of living, (albeit now in a two-bedroom apartment); how often I could see the kids (I’d previously stayed home to raise); which of my high school and college friends/lovers I could keep in touch with (and who I’d be disallowed to call or text.)
It was all a naive attempt to save what was, since its inception, a doomed relationship. Because you can’t build a relationship on contract. You can’t promise to stay together and never talk, never hug, never once in over 20 years shower together…Enmeshment, sure. Entanglement, absolutely. Even the two most wonderful children ever created, absolutely. But a relationship? No. Not even close.
So that’s what landed me here. In a “temporary” separation.
Only, it’s been two years since I left. Ten months ago the divorce was finalized. And now, this nest of an apartment, with it’s high white walls and open floor plan has cradled me through my infancy of living alone, adolescence of rebounding sexual mama, to now–this fully fledged adult woman, single. And so it’s time to move on.
And that, it turns out, is why I’ve been so sad about moving into the cute, backing to trees, little townhouse, only one mile from my kids’ school. I should have been jumping for joy. But I have not been.
I realized tonight, washing dishes I never purchased, that it’s truly the end of the 90-day Therapeutic Separation. It’s really over. And, no Dorothy, I’m not going back to Kansas.
Instead I’m taking on a property, a house, leased in my name from the get-go. Filled with my belongings. My domain. The woman of the house is me. Like that time so many years ago, pregnant for the first time, when it suddenly occurred to me, “Oh, shit. I’M the MAMA.” This house, this next step is MINE. And my marriage, that other life, it really and truly is done. I am not sure what to feel. Relief? Excitement? Sadness? Terror? Yes. All of the above and more. My knees are shaky now, but they’ll learn how to steady themselves in this new terrain. I will plant basil. Hang fairy lights. I will call it home.
These two years, this apartment, has been a flash of light in a very, very dark time. I am grateful. But it’s time, not just to leave this nest and fly, but to land.
It’s the 10th of June. It should be hot and sunny, but instead, a cover of clouds is lightly spitting. I’ve just had coffee with my old friend who also happens to be my ex-sister in law. Our connection feels neglected, like so many other once-dear things I’ve left behind on the cul-de-sac.
mindful musings 