Dear Ex-Boyfriend

( the post isn’t that interesting, but it’s a great title, isn’t it?)

Dear Ex-Boyfriend

The ways you were bad to me outweighed the ways you were good to me.  I should have broken up with you long before I did (via trans-Atlantic phone call, a week before I came home after being abroad for three months).  Although you were very kind to me after our break up, our years together taught me to expect very little from significant others and to be grateful for what is in fact the bare minimum of decent treatment.  I deserved better.

And yet, I’m writing this blog post to thank you because at Christmas in 1990  you gave me this belt:

I wear this black-worn-to-silver (it looked this way when I got it — those aren’t signs of wear) Gap belt all the time.  It has been the single piece that turns a couple of otherwise random pieces into a great outfit more times than I can count.

So, 21 years later, something good from our relationship is still with me.

Not yours, not now,

D.

p.s. You also introduced me to the pleasures of live music in smoky, grotty, beer-soaked venues and some singer-songwriters that still mean a lot to me and now mean a lot to Daniel.  Years after our breakup, you also took Sister out for a beer on at least one occasion, and she says she had a very nice time.  So thanks for that, too.  But otherwise, you were a pain in the ass.

Posting will be light this week.  I’m up to my earlobes in work responsibilities, and heading to my state-of-origin with Milo on Thursday night to see my parents and grandmothers.  One of my grandmothers is 90, the other is 88.  The number of times I will see them again in my life is very small, countable on my fingers and if I’m lucky my toes.  I realized that earlier this year, and am trying to get back to my state-of-origin at least twice a year, rather than only once.   I’m using the inelegant phrase state-of-origin rather than home state for a reason.  I haven’t lived where I’m from for 17 years — 19 if you count graduate school when I was a legal resident of home state but lived somewhere else most of the time.  About 15 years ago, I decided to stop referring to the place I grew up as “home.”  Where I live now, as my own grown up, is my home.  It’s my home because I’ve made it my home, not because of accident of birth or the choices of anyone else.

Closet Archive 5 — first clear failure

Today I am thankful that this is my 200th post!  I am also thankful that I appear to be taking the afternoon off.  I took Milo in for a checkup today, and I intended to work at home afterwards, but I keep not doing that.  I mowed the lawn, I’m writing this post, I’m not working.  I am under a lot of pressure at my job because of a major project, and it has the counterproductive effect of limiting, sharply, the amount of time I’m able to focus on work.  I need to fix this problem, but it appears that today is not the day for that.

A week or so ago, I had my first closet archive failure.

The challenging item is the skirt (so far, 3 of 5 closet archives have featured challenging skirts).  The shirt was crisply ironed when I actually wore this outfit. I’ve washed it since.

Why I don’t wear it:  I’m not entirely sure.  I think it’s just too detailed.  I also think that it’s too young for me.  It’s made by Nanette Lepore, and most of her clothes have a lot going on.  I used to think I loved Nanette Lepore, but I think it’s just too much for me now.  I’m trying to develop a sleeker, more powerful, less girly look (Helmut Lang and Alexander Wang, for example, both of which are beyond my means.  And my new clothing crush Adam, of course, which is also beyond my means but has good sales.)   Here’s a picture of the back (yes, that’s my foot in the bottom left corner, with grass on my toes from mowing the yard.)

Why I still have it: This skirt is part of a suit that I wore to my nephew’s bar mitzvah many years ago.  I was so excited to get this suit, because it was perfect for the occasion and I felt so pretty in it.  Of course, I spent most of the bar mitzvah chasing Milo, who was then a very active toddler, and then keeping him quiet in the “bridal lounge” in the vast and alienating synagogue that my sister in law’s family used to belong to.  I could have worn a paper sack for all I was seen.   I’ve tried to incorporate the skirt into my summer wardrobe, and wore it a few times a few summers ago with a navy tshirt, but couldn’t ever find the right shoes.  (Now I have the right shoes.)  I’ve also tried to wear the lovely jacket more as well, because it’s so pretty and flattering but it’s too small and too…much.   When I wear either piece, I think people see the clothes more than they see me.  I’ve kept the suit because it is perfect for spring and summer occasions like a bar mitzvah — but I’ve only worn it as a suit one other time (another bar mitzvah) and that was years ago.

What might save it: Nothing!  The skirt is very flattering to my curvacious and bodacious backside, but not at all to my prominent tummy.  I prefer professional clothes to show a little less of both my excellent rump and my “oh, yeah, I am 40, and I do like my beer” tummy.  I just didn’t feel happy wearing it.   A belt would have helped, but that would have been another element competing with the dots and the “hello, here’s my a**,” and the corset lacing on the back.   So now, both skirt and jacket are hanging with the other to-be-consigned items in my closet.  When I see the suit there, I think, “yes, it belongs there.”

My taste and my shape are quite different than they were even a couple of years ago, even one year ago.  That tummy is non-negotiable.  Skirts that used to be loose are now quite snug –everything between my belly button and mid-thigh is bigger.  So that’s likely to lead to more items that just can’t be saved for me.   And my taste is moving rapidly away from cute, adorable, lovely to something more forceful, less girly, more grown up.  My closet isn’t quite where my mindset is.

Poem for Wednesday

Today I am thankful that I will soon be asleep.  I am tired out, too tired to be a nice wife, too tired to resist snapping when Daniel vexes me, too tired to shrug at something that is worth only a shrug, not a 15 minute half-quarrel.    But mostly, I am thankful that after a fair amount of searching, I discovered this poem:

In Praise of My Bed

By Meredith Holmes

At last I can be with you!

The grinding hours

since I left your side!

The labor of being fully human,

working my opposable thumb,

talking, and walking upright.

Now I have unclasped

unzipped, stepped out of.

Husked, soft, a be-er only,

I do nothing, but point

my bare feet into your

clean smoothness

feel your quiet strength

the whole length of my body.

I close my eyes, hear myself

moan, so grateful to be held this way.

Meredith Holmes, “In Praise of My Bed” from Shubad’s Crown. Copyright © 2003 by Meredith Holmes.

If Hegel were a blogger…

…he wouldn’t be blogging about secondary infertility and smart blazers and Jewish holidays.  Nevertheless, I invoke his name because I think I have achieved synthesis of the disparate moods of sadness and defiance in previous posts.

There is no such thing as “as happy as if…”  Period.  “As if” is a clammy shadow over happiness.  I am not going to be as happy with one as if I’d had two — “as if I’d had two” is a null set.  It doesn’t exist, it is the opposite of infinity.  There is nothing with which to compare.

Even “happy in spite of…” is tricky because it keeps the unhappy stimulus right at the center of happiness — it’s the thing that happiness is always tethered to for comparison.  Comparisons are the enemy of happiness.  Even if one comes out on top of a particular comparison, it’s an invidious habit and eventually wears one down.  And one never knows, really.  I’m pretty sure that truly happy people don’t bother with comparisons.

So: I didn’t have another baby.  I was sad.  I will be sad.  I am happy.  I will be happy.  (It would sound smarter in German, I’m sure.) 197 posts to get to those 19 words.

p.s. — A manifesto

I thought of this just a few minutes after I hit “publish” on that last post, and I think it deserves its own place on the blog.

What I am trying to say is, I am claiming a place in which I reject feeling  eternally inadequate, incomplete, pitiable, less-than, and somehow to blame for it all.   From my first post, I have struggled with the fact that there is no do-over, no way to make up for this or remedy this wrong.   This is permanent, never in remission.  But I can see something like a remedy.  I can see a way to be post-infertile — if not for always then for some minutes.  It’s not my fault.  It’s not a fault at all.  It’s something that happened.  I am not less of anything because it happened.  I don’t have to be an object lesson in not getting everything you want.  I don’t have to bear up bravely for the rest of my life.  I can honor the sadness and walk away from it.   And then walk back towards it when that is what is called for, and then walk away again.

Not all losses are like this, subject to this yes/no, on/off, post-modern, “any way I say it is” treatment.  But I’m deciding now that this one might be.

The happy base, with thanks to Nicole

Today I am thankful that I’m still okay.  And that this arrived (in off-white) and it fits perfectly!  If I am wearing the costume of the chic and competent professional, then surely I am one, right?

I am so often inspired by my commenters, and today Nicole wrote something that means a lot to me.  She introduced the idea of a happy base.  She wrote:

the core of what [she and her partner] have is very happy – a good home together, a wonderful dog, comfortable life style, travel, etc. Those things are always there – the happy base so to speak. We just can’t control the things that come and go making us more or less happy.

I want to protect my happy base as much as possible from the erosions of a discontented mind.  The challenging thing about that is that it requires a huge concentration — like keeping your eye on the ball every minute — especially when I am asserting that I can be as happy with one as I would have been with two, or at least I can aspire to be, or allow for the possibility, even insist on it if I’m feeling stroppy about it.  That goes against what most people with children believe, because they do decide to have more children and they do it because they think it will make them more happy (otherwise why would they do it?).    I am not denying my sadness when I make this assertion, or trying to convince myself or anyone else that I won’t be sad about this again (even at inopportune times).  I am saying that I am trying to limit the reach of the sadness.  I am trying not to let it be the name for the pain.

Nicole’s comment inspired me to track down this George Orwell quote: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”  I knew that line, I just wanted to make sure I had it right.  What I didn’t know was the line immediately after it: “One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.”  In this space, my recovery from infertility is an important event — how could it be otherwise?  It does help to keep this diary, to see what is in front of me, to remind myself that an unblemished life is not possible for any person and that happiness is found in minutes, not structures, systems or promises.

Closing in on a year

Today I am thankful that I decided to do yoga outside, while wearing a skirt, looking goofy as hell, while I waited for Milo to begin his horseback riding lesson.  It occurred to me that these would be the only minutes I would have all day to do yoga, and I was tense and cranky (that’s redundant), so I got into downward dog and went on from there.  I made myself and my needs more important than the curious gaze of strangers.  I never do that.  I’m usually quite proper and contained in public.  But today I needed to be different.

In traditional interpretations of Jewish law, mourners spend 11 months saying the Kaddish prayer in memory of a recently dead parent, child, spouse, or sibling.  Mourning officially lasts for one year, but there is a generous assumption that the dead person was a good and righteous person, and thus only 11 months worth of prayers are needed to both demonstrate his or her merit and to ease his or her soul.

I’m a little bit past 11 months of mourning for the child I’ll never have.  Three weeks from today will mark one year since I got the call, while standing in line for a burrito, saying that my last fertility treatment had failed.  (I thought about titling this post “49 weeks,” but that title reminds me that, if that last desperate, doomed treatment had worked, I would have a 9-week-old baby right now.   I can bear that thought just enough to contain it in parentheses, but not enough to have it leap out as a post title.)

I think I knew without knowing that this anniversary was coming up.  Early last week, I started thinking, “Wow, I’m doing really well, I’m just fine, I’m okay,” which of course was a prelude to being somewhat not okay.  On Tuesday, we saw one of Matthew’s former teachers and the mother of one of his classmates.  She’s single and pregnant by a sperm donor.  Of course I want to ask how many treatments she did.  Of course I admire her for saying, despite what appear to be very limited financial resources, “Hell yeah, I’m going to have another child because I just want to.”  Of course I think, “Oh, we really should have done one more IUI.  The first one didn’t really count, the doctor said the timing was off, we didn’t really get three good chances.”   Since Wednesday, my shoulders have been unbearable tense, and there’s an unwelcome knot in my left trapezius.  I am carrying the weight of this unfulfilled dream, the weight of the sadness of it.

This is the sad I will always have.  And in some ways, I find it comforting and honorable.  This is the sad I have that honors the child I didn’t have.  She was important to me (I imagine her as a she, I always did.  Her name would have been Rebecca, or Rivka Chaya in Hebrew.   When I went in for treatments I would say, silently, “Please Rivka Chaya, please come now.  Mommy needs you.”  She didn’t listen.)  This sadness honors my effort, and my God it was a hard one, to do what I needed to do even though it was probably going to fail, even though Daniel was terrified, angry, and recalcitrant.  This sadness honors the fact that I stopped when it was necessary to stop, even though, looking back, I would have liked to have gone a little further.  But at the time, I didn’t have any resources — financial, marital, emotional — to push on.  This sadness honors my strength and my determination to get better.

I’m finding little comforts and ignoring discomforts.  I was in an airport on Wednesday and bought a copy of Yoga Journal without noticing what was in it.  There’s a section on shoulder opening, and those stretches felt gorgeous yesterday.  I appreciated the felicity of having a solution (temporary, sadly) when I needed it.  I also bought a copy of Elle and the July horoscope promised something about a new baby or a breakthrough with understanding a child.  I thought, “That’s irrelevant” and left the magazine on the plane.  (Although I confess to having adoption fantasies for the past several days.  Those are also irrelevant.)

Daniel and I went out two nights last week.  We’ve entirely let go of “date night” — we haven’t had a babysitter two nights over the last two months before this.   It was wonderful to be so much in the grown-up world.  It was wonderful not to fuss over homework or pay a huge amount of attention to Milo.  I have more opportunities, or fewer impediments, to be in the grown-up world than I would if my efforts had been successful.   That isn’t supposed to be a comfort.  The grown-up world can wait, right?  But I can’t borrow against future pleasures.

This really deserves its own post, but I want to start writing it now, to see exactly what I think about it.  When I was in high school and college, I always wondered where the better party was — where were people being cooler, smarter, having more fun?  How much did this party fall short?  I had a bad case of swivel-head, looking around to see what better options were out there.  I regret that now.  My beloved friend and ace commenter, Sister, never had that problem.  The party, the class, the lunch table, the restaurant, the conversation she was in was the best one there possibly was.  She dove in, fully present and electric.   I am like that with my imaginary second child.  That’s the better party, the one that the imaginary me, Daniel, Milo and Rivka Chaya are at.  As happy as I ever am, part of me insists I would be happier there.  But in college, there wasn’t a better party, really.  I should have been happier at the parties I was at (I wasn’t at so many, actually, the metaphor is imperfect).  There’s no better family for me than the one I have now.  We are it.

I am going to decide that minutes of happiness are like minutes of life.  I have as many as I have.  If I did have Rivka Chaya, I wouldn’t have more happiness minutes.  The minutes I had with her would mean minutes I didn’t have with Milo, or Daniel, or at a restaurant, or with a friend.  I wouldn’t be less happy; I would be happy in ways that are unattainable for me and will be forever; but I wouldn’t be more happy.  Very little in the wide world supports this view.  I am not a natural rebel or contrarian.  But here I am.  I may be wrong about my happiness minutes hypothesis, but I am going to believe it anyway and it’s not falsifiable for me.  I will never have the second child to disprove my theory.  And no one who has more than one can prove that they would have been less happy if they had stopped (or been stopped) at one.

A very effective way to be unhappy is to fret that one is insufficiently happy.

 

 

 

An appropriate celestial intervention

Today I am thankful that things got better after that last post.  They got painfully and intensely worse, and then they got better, which is what this post is about.

Friday night was a full-on disaster.  I tried to talk to Daniel about his exceedingly dark mood, but somehow the conversation wound back around to me telling him how he needed to change and do more for me in the marriage.  Which is true, but surely the wrong thing to say when one’s partner is deep in a bleak bleak place.  Of course, Daniel’s dives into depression (or what looks to me like depression, small “d” probably not clinical grade, but oh so frequently within sight — less so now than in the past, but I can’t forget those months and years) always make me scared and defensive.  I am not generous enough, not replete enough, to give to him when he is sad and ferocious (like a scared and scary thing with claws in the back of a cave).  Instead, I panic.  I think only about the attention I’ve lost.  And like a child, I try to get negative attention just to get any attention at all.  I can’t bear to be eclipsed by the foul cloud of his mood.

Daniel called me on it and said “You always do this.  You always make it about you, and we never talk about why I am so blue and I can’t get up off the floor.”  I said, “Let’s talk about it right now.  I will talk about this until there are no more words.”  And of course he didn’t, because it was time to put Milo to bed.  And then after Milo was asleep, he refused, rather spitefully.  I did note that he always refused to talk about it, but he stayed silent.

I implored God to do something.  I sat in the bathroom and implored as intently as I could for several minutes.  I was furious at Daniel for shutting me out, furious at myself for doing everything wrong and making Daniel’s depression about me, agonizing about the state of our marriage, wondering if he would agree to re-start marriage counselling, a complete mess.

And the next day, there were interventions between me and my anxiety.  Daniel slept late and Milo and I went to synagogue without him.  I was ready to pour my heart out to a friend there, but I couldn’t because a woman I don’t know very well started chatting with us, and we couldn’t talk freely.   I was ready to call my mother, who has a counseling background (and experience with my father’s bleak moods), but I knew I couldn’t reach her when she was out of my dad’s earshot.  The world was arranged so that I couldn’t draw more people into this story.   That had the comforting effect of minimizing what had happened.  Maybe I had done everything wrong, but it didn’t matter so much if there was no one else to tell about it.  (The opposite of blogging, where things matter less when I can share them — I like extremes, I guess).

And when Milo and I got home, I somehow knew what to do.  I didn’t putter around in the kitchen or make a cup of tea or read the paper.  I went up to see Daniel.  And I stayed there for 20 minutes talking, and he apologized for his behavior and said he loved me.  I was able to be present to him and close to him without having to remember to do it or overcome other distractions.  This, my friends, is a close to a miracle as I can possibly expect in my life.  This is a prayer that was answered. Things that had not been accessible to me or possible for me were possible, even natural and easy.

We are okay now.  I still don’t have a grand birthday gift, but I’m sending him a profusion of his favorite flowers, and we’ll have dinner.  I have a father’s day gift for him that will make him smile, and Milo has his own scheme.

I held out as long as I could against Daniel’s depressive episode (I do feel a little wary of that term.  I don’t mean to minimize the impact of genuine clinical depression by comparing it to something less awful.  But Daniel has something more than run-of-the-mill bad moods — they are more frequent, deeper, more consuming, and this has been going on for years).   I have developed ways of dealing with his episodes, and they aren’t particularly healthy but they are deeply ingrained.  The next time — there will be a next time — I will hold out longer if I can, and I will try to resist being scrambled and feeling so thoroughly abandoned and making it all about me and the needs of mine that aren’t being met.

But for now, we are okay.

This is probably the only post for this week.  Some lovely social obligations and a brutal one-day business trip will absorb all my energies.  On Wednesday, find a poem, and if you love it, post a link in the comments.  Crowd-sourced poem for Wednesday!

Surely this is funny

Today, Daniel and I had the 1000th installment of our fight-that-is-not-a-fight.  I will only sketch the details because I’m in a hurry, but basically, it starts with me probing what’s wrong — because there’s CLEARLY something wrong with him.  He says nothing.  I keep saying, “It must be something.”  And after a few minutes it comes down to this: I have not been paying enough attention to him.  I have been distracted.

Then I defend myself.  I point out that he has been asleep/feeling poorly/stressed about an assignment/traveling/distracted for the last day/week/month.  I remind him of all the small things I’ve done for him. I ask for examples of distraction.  I say, “Wow, that’s really strange to hear because I feel like I’ve been trying to pay MORE attention to you over the last day/week/month.”

He says things like, “I can’t say anything to you, you just come right back at me.”  I say, “Please don’t say that.”  He says, “It’s not that bad, I’m sure it’s fine.”  I say, “No, no, I want you to tell me when you are upset.”  He says, “Why are you crying?  Please stop crying.”

And what’s funny is… I HAVE in fact been trying to pay more attention to him over the past two weeks, haven’t I?  Haven’t I been documenting that very thing?  (And my new blazer, of course).  Why, yes I have.  Which is EXACTLY why I was crying (need to chill out on the all caps).

And it occurred to me in the aftermath of this particular bullshit marry-go-round ( I typed the “a” rather than the “e” accidentally but surely that’s on purpose) that I would like not to have this conversation again.  So here are some options for approaching this differently:

1) Do nothing next time — wait for him to get the f*ck over it, variation A.  Here’s the deal: I am not sure I believe that Daniel really was upset because of what I’ve done or not done.  I think “you don’t pay enough attention to me” is his ready-at-hand excuse, his own name for the pain.  I think he’d rather say that than say, “I am bored out of my skull at work and have been for 10 years” or “I am staring mortality in the face every day and hate it” or “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired and yet at the same time I don’t want to do anything about it.” So of course my attentions don’t mean anything to him because they aren’t the solution to the real problem.

2) Do nothing next time –wait for him to get the f*ck over it, variation B.  Assume I truly haven’t paid enough attention to Daniel.  Let him deal with it.  We never ever have this conversation with the roles reversed.  Why?  Because when I believe Daniel isn’t paying enough attention, I ask for more attention.  I don’t always get it, but I know to ask.  Daniel knows I am intensely busy at work.  He knows I will not be 100% available to him when he calls just to chat at 10am.  He knows, if he thinks about it for a second, that I have been Milo’s primary (often sole) caretaker for both days of the holiday, preparing the holiday meals, and dealing with a sudden crisis with our air conditioner.  So maybe he could just take a deep breath and deal with it.

3) Skip the draining, depressing, distressing conversation and just change my own behavior.  Oh it was no fun at all to hear that my concerted efforts have made no dent in Daniel’s consciousness.  But maybe I’m not tending to Daniel like he wants to be tended to.  Maybe my thoughts are more prominent than my actions.  Maybe it’s all in my head, when it needs to be in Daniel’s face (or something like that — my metaphors are weak tonight).  He complained that my attentions felt like items crossed off my to-do list.  He complained that the came at the end of the day after everything else was done.  Fair points, all.  But holy heaven, I can skip the conversation and just retrench and try another approach.

Hmm… When I was mulling this over with a cold beer in one hand and a novel in the other, baking in the heat of our back porch while Milo and Daniel watched a movie, I thought I had scores of ideas for doing things differently.  I thought this would be a wry, funny post and I’d have more to say.  But only these three options are coming to mind right now, and none of them sound particularly comforting.

In truth, dear readers, I am very sad.  I am trying hard not to mope around the house, not to feel completely crushed by this conversation.  I truly don’t want Daniel to feel that expressing unhappiness with me has a high and gloomy (dark and stormy?) price.  I want to be data-driven and experimental and do what works, not what doesn’t.   I want to say, “Okay, glad I can stop pounding my head against that wall.”  Because I have been.  Because I haven’t felt that my efforts in the last two weeks have made a difference.  Because they did seem to aggravate Daniel instead of elevating him, or me, or us.   Because Daniel isn’t a mind reader and couldn’t see what I was thinking — he only saw that he didn’t like what I was doing.  I saw it, too, and yet, I didn’t stop.  I was making it about me not him.

Daniel’s birthday is next week — early next week.  I’ve made reservations at our favorite restaurant.  I am continuing our long tradition of making him a good mix CD (for non-iTunes people, that still has some value, it’s still some work).  Yet have no idea what to get him for a real present, or for father’s day for that matter.  Surely there’s some terrible metaphor in that.  Maybe that is in fact the crux of the problem — I am not paying enough attention to him to get him a damn birthday present.  It only just today occurred to me that I”ll need to bring home cupcakes or something so that Milo and I can sing happy birthday and make an event out of it.  Daniel prides himself on providing dazzling birthdays, on brilliant gifts.

I do not believe, in all the years we’ve been married, I have said to myself, “Wow, I’m getting this wife thing.  I am a good wife.”  I say that about my work — sometimes I’ll say “Wow, I’m good at my job.”  I am confident about my parenting 90% of the time.  But as a wife, I get it wrong all the time.  All the time.  And that makes it very hard to screw my courage to the sticking place and try again, or smile when I walk into the bedroom.

 

Poem for Wednesday — sneak preview

Dorky title.  I won’t be blogging tomorrow, so I had to work around the poem for Weds framework.

I had a thought this morning on the way to work (the honeysuckles are wilting in the heat and will probably be dried up when I walk to work again on Friday): Daniel delights in Milo more than he appears to delight in me because interactions with Milo — like interactions with many children, with good dogs, with beloved friends — are on a short, intense feedback loop.  I liked that thought.   It made the shortcomings of my marriage (which are less severe and more common than I may portray them) seem structural and institutional, not personal.

This seems appropriate:

Love Like Salt

By Lisel Mueller

It lies in our hands in crystals

too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet

without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine

we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies

in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table

talking of holidays and the sea.

Reprinted from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1996) by permission of the author. Poem copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.