Longing and the counter-factual

Today, I am thankful to be back where I live (which I didn’t think I would be), and back to my blog (which is now misnamed, at least in the URL, because it’s not 2010 and there is much, much rebuilding still to be done).

I come from a very cool place that has gotten significantly cooler in the almost-20 years since I’ve lived there.  When I tell people where I’m from they look at me quizzically and say, “Why don’t you still live there?”   The answer used to be simple: I don’t still live there because I’m from there!   Had I not gone to college there, against my wishes and my vast ambitions, I might have found my way back and built my grown-up life there.  But when I set out to build, I wanted to build far away.  I wanted to build in the not-cool town in which I live now.  And I did, and this built-or-rebuilt life is deeply rooted here.  Where I’m from is a very different USDA growing zone, and I can’t imagine a successful transplant.

Except, of course, when I go back.  When I go back, I long to move us there.  I used to disdain grown-up life in my home town because I thought I knew exactly how it would go.  I knew where I would live, where I would shop, where I would pray.  It seemed claustrophobic.  Now it seems magical.  I wish I lived closer to my parents (whatever their flaws as my parents when I was a child — and they were flaws from ignorance and a too-small worldview, not from effort or temperament — they are superb parents to me as an adult, and brilliant grandparents to Milo).  I wish I could replicate for Milo some of the things I knew as a child.

And most of all, when I am in my hometown, I wish I could be who I think I was there, who I (mis)remember being there.   When I was there, well, I was 20.  I was bullet-proof and rocket-fueled.  Or so it seems now.  Now I think I could recover something lost.  I could be a writer there — I wanted to be a writer when I lived there.  I started writing there.  I was known there, I wasn’t Daniel’s shadow.  I was the superstar, the promising one.

So of course I longed to be back.  And of course I longed for more time in which I don’t have real responsibilities, like my job and dinner and bills.   And longing and imagining doesn’t, and probably will never ever again, happen singly for me.  When I long, I long for whatever sparks it, and the child I won’t have.  That’s my new permanent setting — longing in stereo.    My mother’s family came over for Christmas (my parents are Christian,  it all works out remarkably well), and there are a lot of them, and I was sad about my own smaller-than-I-wished family (leave aside that my grandparents, who produced this big family by having four kids were deeply miserable in their marriage.  I have no memory of them being happy together, and my grandfather died when I was 20, so I had a lot of time to see them both.  My grandmother has flourished as a widow, which is both happy and sad).

There were so many great moments on this trip, but there was that double shadow of yearning over most of them.  After Christmas, Daniel and I went away for a few days to an even cooler town whose main industry is creativity in a range of cool, artsy, foodie forms.  It was amazing.   There were a fair number of tourists there, and I looked at each family, hungrily, wanting to see just one child, not two, not three.   I saw indescribable art, but it never left my head that the artist had two children.  And I imagined a life in which I could be in this cool art town creating things and writing.  Why aren’t I?  (Short answer: not enough remotely traditional Jews.)

Yesterday I spent most of the day enjoying Milo, playing with him in my parents’ front yard, going to one of my favorite secluded places just down the road.  The three of us, my own little family, stood where I used to play in the shade and sand and water.  Milo and I stirred up dirt and tried to catch sticks.  The sun was shining, the light was soft, Daniel was as happy as he could imagine being.  And I was happy but even so I couldn’t stop missing the child who wasn’t there.  I tried to tell myself that if she’d been there, the moment would have been less perfect, because I would have had to stop her from falling in the water, because she would distract us from Milo’s discoveries, because something.  But it hurt, and I hated that it hurt.  I wanted to have this perfect moment and not be in the shadow.  But the shadow was between me and the moment.  I resent this so deeply.

In the cab on the way home from the airport tonight, I turned my head and cried a bit.  I wasn’t happy to be coming home — to my real home, the one I live in now.  My hometown is obsessed with pleasure and lifestyle and beer and food and its own coolness.  It’s not overtly anti-intellectual, but it kind of wonders why you’d want to work so damn hard.  Nobody works past 7, nobody works weekends.  My real home, my now-home, is all drive and power and status and ambition.  People work weekends whether or not they really have to.  Creativity exists here, but it doesn’t exactly flourish — that’s not what we do here.  Or rather, we are creative but not generally in soul-nourishing ways.  (Good lawyers are very creative, for example, as are real estate developers and deal-makers.)

But then I got home, inside my real home, with my stuff and my life.  My tools.  My decisions.  My responsibilities.  And thanks be to God, I liked it.

When I go away, I get wrapped up in counter-factuals.  If I had stayed or returned to where I grew up…. If I had married someone I was supposed to marry (a type, not a specific individual)…. And every counter-factual includes that child I didn’t get to have — because why not?  If I’m imagining a life I don’t have, why not throw in the object of my most ardent unfulfilled desire?  Counter-factuals are dangerous for me.  Unfortunately, that’s how I tend to experience the world.  My favorite thing to do in a new city is ride the subway, because that’s what people who live there do.   My new favorite thing to do is to find a yoga class, which I did in the super cool art town.  I am always imagining my other life in another place.  I can’t just be a visitor.  I need to sense the texture of the life there.  And in for a penny, in for the pain.

Lawyers talk about good facts and bad facts.  Secondary infertility is a bad fact.  But the other facts, the life I really live, is full of good facts.  I can feel them when I am surrounded by them.  I am okay with them.  They are good.  They are blessings.

When I was in the super-cool art town, I did a little yoga one morning in my hotel room, and I surprised myself by sobbing as I lay in shivasana.  I was yearning to be consoled.  If God couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t heed my prayers for another baby, I begged for consolation.  Some huge, transcendent, deep and abiding feeling of consolation, something that a human couldn’t provide (Daniel is not in the consolation business.  He wants my pain to disappear, to non-exist.  Consoling me means recognizing how much I still hurt.  He can’t afford that.)  And I cried because none was forthcoming.

But it occurs to me a little bit now that my consolation is here, where I live, where I am writing, where I am building, where I cook dinner and get tired and do stuff that is and isn’t rewarding.  It doesn’t feel like I thought — it’s not a great soft pillow, it’s not a balm, and it’s not comprehensive.  But it’s adamantine, like my own hard-won strength.  It’s not a blanket — it’s a tangle of very, very strong and true threads.