Dear young man

who was hurrying behind me on the subway escalator this morning, who stayed uncomfortably close behind, no matter how much I sped up, until I moved over to the right, where the slow people go (or stay), after which you deftly sped down the rest of the way, light as a young Fred Astaire, hurried but unworried:

I was burdened by things I was carrying, in my hands, on my shoulders, in my head.  Perhaps I was invisible in my obscuring winter gear, which was necessary at 7am, but foolishly out of date by 8:30 when you were on my heels.  And I am afraid of falling down the steep, dim, mechanical stairs with mean teeth.  I’ve always been a little afraid of falling down, haunted by a recurring dream of being stranded and terrified on fast, wide elevators that won’t let me go.  I fell on sidewalk ice a few days ago, a rude, brutal shove from mortality, and I can’t forget it.

One day, it might be you.  Unfashionable, invisible, burdened, and scared of falling, bruised already from old falls.  So please consider breaking your elegant pattering stride, and waiting while we gather ourselves and move to where the tepid and inconvenient people go (or stay).  And when one day it is you, we’ll be gracious and invite you to stay.

14 reasons I’m happy to be married to Daniel

This is not a Valentine’s Day post.  This is a challenge exercise.  I was searching my archives for this post, and I realized that all the posts categorized “the marriage” are about my frustrations with Daniel and the challenges we have.  I rarely write about the good things in our marriage, or in him.  Now, things are still uneven between us, and he was a pill yesterday.  But I think I can come up with 14 reasons I”m happy I married him, even though it’s making me really nervous to think about this right now.  It seemed safer to write “14 reasons I love Daniel,” but I wanted the maximum challenge to remind myself that there are reasons to be happy in my marriage.

1. Daniel buys me excellent wine, even though he no longer drinks himself.  I haven’t had a bad bottle of wine in my home since 1994.  I don’t know why that’s important to me, but it is.  It’s a luxury that I wouldn’t provide myself, and that I wouldn’t even have discovered if not for him.

2. Daniel is truly funny, and when we laugh together, the world is wonderful.

3. Daniel is smarter than I am, and being around him has made me smarter.

4. Whatever our marriage is or is not right now or ever, it is rarely boring.  One of the quotes on my pinterest board this morning was “It is both a blessing and curse to feel everything so very deeply.”  Indeed.  We are awash in deep feeling.

5. Although my family drives him crazy, Daniel is always welcoming to them and happy to go see them.  He’s more gracious about my family than I am about his.  I’d argue that my family is easier to deal with, but perhaps only to me.

6. Daniel is an exceptional and engaged father to Milo.  This is one of the ironies and one of the greatest sources of pain about our infertility story (no link here — start at the beginning of the archive and quit when you reach today).  Daniel was and is so happy to be a father to Milo that he never ever wanted to be a father to anyone else.

7. We have great sex.

8. Daniel insists on subscribing to the paper versions of The New York Times and our local paper, even though he usually reads them online (and Milo and I read the paper versions over breakfast).

9. He’s not frugal and not very practical and while that causes me enormous anxieties sometimes, it also teaches me that frugality and practicality are not  ends in themselves.

10. (related) He has opened my eyes to a world of experiential riches, and an exquisitely high standard for daily life that would never a million years have gotten to or dreamed of on my own.

11. He likes all my friends, except one or two, and about them he can be very funny.

12. He really, really likes to sit and talk to me (whether I like it or not, which is an interesting challenge).

13.  He cries at movies, and not even at the saddest parts. Watching Kramer vs. Kramer with him was a trip.  He has never forgiven Meryl Streep.

14. I’m Jewish because of him.

Okay!  Did that!  As I was writing, I felt drawn to qualify or hem or redirect, and give you the dark underbelly of the good.  It occurs to me that most of what drives me mad about Daniel and what you can read about in the rest of “the marriage” posts is rooted in exactly these things.  We are ourselves and our shadows both at once.

Don’t do something (in honor of Aunt Jeannie)

I had a wonderful great aunt, Aunt Jeannie.  She was pure gentle sweetness.  For the first four years of her life, Jeannie didn’t have a name (so goes family lore).  Jeannie’s father (my great-grandfather) wanted to name her after her mother (his wife, my great-grandmother).  My great-grandmother’s name was Myrtle, and she said, “I’ll be damned if you give my sweet little baby that awful name.” There ensued a four-year standoff, during which time Jeannie was called Baby Sister.  Then my other great-aunt was born and the name issue had to be resolved, so Baby Sister became Myrtle Jean, but always called Jeannie (or, endearingly, “our Jeannie” to distinguish her from a sister-in-law with the same nickname.)

For the rest of her life, Jeannie acted like a baby sister.  I remember being in an earlier job discombobulation, having left one field and wondering where I’d find a job next.  She said to me, as I stood in the doorway of my grandmother’s kitchen, “You know, everybody [she pronounced it ever-body] says ‘Don’t just stand there, do something!’ But I sometimes think, ‘Don’t do something, just stand there.'”

Today, I was absolutely paralyzed by despair.  Really.  I can’t do my job, find another job, take care of my own dear self (which I am happy to say is taking a lot more of my time than it used to), and heal what needs to be healed between me and Daniel, and all the other odds and ends of life.  Nothing was working, there was no relief, no help from any corner.  I appealed to my therapist, who is amazing, and she said, “Well, maybe you could come more often and we could switch to psychoanalysis.”  Me=drowning person.  Her=”Why don’t you study oceanography?”

I left her office all broken up, and I felt like I was walking in a pitch-dark wood and I did not know where to go or how to get out.  And I said to myself, or maybe Jeannie said it to me, “I am going to sit down right here in the dark and wait for it to get light.  And sing till it gets light.”  And that sounds incredibly hokey and squirrelly — like something you see on the many, many life-coaching/magical-thinking blogs and websites and newsletters– but it got me through that moment and it felt like the right thing to do.

This evening my boss called.  He described some work for me that isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t solve everything.  But it enables me to move out of this feeling of intense crisis and despair, and actually do work, rather than frantic and futile busy-ness. It enables me to put energy into solving some of the home front problems (or waiting them out, or loving Daniel through it), and to look at the professional landscape and opportunities in an open, relaxed, and abundant way.  I just stood there, and it just got a little bit lighter, and I’m still singing.

To bolster myself later….

Okay, it’s a bad time all round.  Or maybe not so bad.  We are healthy.  We can pay every bill on the horizon.  Milo is flourishing.  But I’m not happy at work, and I’m not happy at home.  And Daniel isn’t happy at at home.  And that’s deeply exhausting and hard to overcome.

But a good thing happened.  I had breakfast with a dear, dear friend on Thursday.  I told her that I was applying for a new job on Friday, and that I was just going to hit send on the application however imperfect.  I did apply to the new job — a job I don’t want, and an application I didn’t spend a lot of time on– and there was a glorious rush once I did.  I felt like I was finally doing something different, meaningful, and that would create something better eventually.   But by Shabbat morning I was doubting myself again, questioning my skills, feeling low and enervated.  But at services, my beloved friend told me that I had inspired her, and she made two phone calls she’d been putting off for months to get a potential project started for herself.  And if nothing more comes of my job application, that’s okay — because helping my beloved friend is enough.

There is so much out there about work and advancement that borders on, or charges headlong into, magical thinking.  It is very like infertility talk —  put that good energy out there,  set that intention,  make that vision board, believe, believe, believe.  But maybe it’s just different enough that I can believe that having 100 breakfasts, and letting all my friends know about my struggles and aspirations, and putting myself out there, and connecting and “give before you get”-ing will get a good result.  (I was much happier before I drew that parallel with infertility.  But I survived that.  I’ll survive this.  Oddly enough, the stakes seem higher now, but that’s only because I know that I survived that — or have survived so far.)

Usually I write my way out of pain.  At the moment, I’m writing my way into pain, as it all looks so daunting and unfair and impossible.  Really, wasn’t infertility enough?  Why this, too?  But, see paragraph 2 above.  Helping my beloved friend is enough.  Making her feel happy and smart and engaged is enough.  And I can write my way into something else, eventually.  Eventually.