Pesach 5780

I started this blog post by looking back, but I get to revise it.  I get to tell the story from the start, from now, not then.

Today was the start of my Pesach kitchen transformation.  I wished today that my mother were Jewish — which I have never wished before — so that I could call her and say, “I just did my refrigerator, where are you?  What are you doing about the seder plate this year?  What are you making?  Can we stream the seder?”  But she’s not.  We don’t share the holiday back end, and I am sad, especially as I am coming to fully inhabit this holiday.

I am proud of my Pesach kitchen.  I do more a thorough changeover than I did when I lived with Daniel, lived in that narrow place, trying to find a space between his disapproval and generalized rage at Pesach, his disdain for my Jewish practice, when I was balancing the whole burden of Orthodox practice on my head.  But now, it is for me — and for Milo, for a few days, and I’m not sure he’ll notice or not.  Even alone, I am connected to Jewish women (I wish Pesach cleaning weren’t so gendered… maybe it isn’t in other households.  In my current set up, all the domestic labor is gendered.  Milo vacuumed for the first time in his life when he was here two weekends ago.  He was delighted by the novelty, but took umbrage when I asked him to do it again.  He agreed to clean his desk, which was also his dining room for his two week of post-travel quarantine with me.  He took Women’s History last semester, so he has all the rhetoric, but gender privilege — modeled to a T by his father —  is in his marrow and he has to fight to overcome it).  I am connected to all of the people who spent hours today, wiping out the fridge, switching the contents of the cupboards, scheduling the controlled landslide (right metaphor?) of Pesach through the rest of the kitchen: sink, dishwasher, microwave, stovetop, oven countertops (why do we say “won in a landslide”? That doesn’t make sense.  We don’t say, won in a tidal wave.).

I control nothing at all outside my door.  The virus will affect one in seven residents of my city, according to the latest projections.  There are 15 apartments on 11 floors in my apartment building.  One trash room per floor.   One laundry room — 10 washers, 10 dryers — for all of us.  One package room for the endless deliveries that we believe keep us safe.  The odds are not in my favor.  So how glorious (my Will’s favorite expression of delight, “glorious,” in his really sexy light Queens accent. Why yes, Will does read my blog.  Why do you ask?)… how glorious it is to declare that my kitchen is as I want it, as it should be.  My kitchen, for Pesach, is communal, connected to all the other kitchens like it until the night of April 16, when Jack in the Box of the holiday springs open and we scatter.

This constrained Pesach feels full of possibility.   I will take time off, which is counter cultural and counter-intuitive.  My boss’s confusion radiates through her email.  Why would you take time off when you can’t do anything?  Exactly.  No doing.  Reading, walking, ceasing to push the heavy boulder up the steep incline of my job, which has ceased to engage or fulfill or reward or pay my bills.  This Pesach, with so much forbidden, I will be free.

(The last time I wrote about Pesach it was like this.  And now, with everything confused and so much fear about work and money and when will I be able to free myself from Daniel legally and financially,  I have all that I need, things that were literally unimaginable when I last wrote about Pesach, two years and four days ago.  I did this.  I made this.  It’s indelible.  Whatever else happens, whatever I might lose later, I did this.  I love you, my Will.)

 

The new story; the now story

3:29

I did not write an intentions blog post last year.  I remember exactly why.  I wrote down my intentions elsewhere, in my Ink & Volt exercises (and yes, last January I invoked Brad Feld and said, “I wish I could do what the cool VC guys do.”  I repeat myself.  It’s fine.  If I say it twice, I must mean it.)

I met my goals and lived up to my intentions beautifully last year, ahead of schedule. I looked back at my posts from January 2018 and they made me very sad.  I was crushing myself.  I was not at all a friend to myself.  I did some extraordinary and brave things and told myself I was stupid and heartless to do them.  No. I was right the first time.  Once I got some momentum going, living in truth was unstoppable, and I have lived in truth as best I could for 2018.  I look back at least year’s Ink & Volt lists, and the blog posts, and recall the conversations with friends and see how small and scared I was then.  I wonder if I will look back a year from now and see the same thing, next year when I am that safe giant.

Or maybe this will be a year for consolidation, for cementing all of that behavior change when it will get really challenging.  Maybe this will be the year that I say that it’s okay for me to have all the good stuff.  Because even as I’m typing and thinking about the move and how great it’s going to be and the rugs I want to buy, I have that old fear, that something bad is going to happen.  That it’s not going to be really great after all.  That it can’t really be great for me.

Here is the antidote: I note, record, and revel in how this has been truly the best year of my life.  This year, when I walked into many of nightmares and continued walking.  (Did I write that already? I think I did.  I must really mean it.)  This year I learned that I could do that, walk into the nightmare.  I learned that even a nightmare truth is better than pretty lies.  The solidity of knowing the worst is better than the wobble-board of fearing the worst.  And there were so many people holding my hand as I walked into and through the nightmare.  I never thought that would be the case, but they showed up.  This might have been the hardest year of my life, but I don’t think so– I’ll have better perspective later.  When I put aside the fear, I had more room for happiness and joy.  When I detached from a grading system that would always fail me, I felt more successful.  I made things possible that seemed impossible just weeks before.

So… Even if my new apartment is less congenial and commodious than I hope; even if my neighbors are loud; and the water pressure in the shower remains unworthy of the name; and the cable cord is strung along the ceiling rather than the floor and it vexes me every single day and I have to stay home and pay money to get it changed; even if I run through my savings and have to borrow more from my parents; even if I buy all the wrong rugs and lamps; even if my stuff won’t fit in my new apartment and I have to rent a storage space for my Pesach dishes and college memorabilia and suitcases.  Even if lose my job.  Even if friends break my heart by leaving me because I have left Daniel.  Even if I never find the love I hope for.  Even if all those things at once, the last year is indelible.  It happened.  I am the me that did that.  I am also the me that undermined herself for decades, see, consolidation, above.  But a strong counterstory is emerging.  “Is emerging” as if it were a gas or natural phenomenon.  No. I AM CREATING a strong counterstory.  I am living a strong counterstory.

My main intention in 2019 is Abundance.  I have elsewhere told myself it’s abundance, not excess, but I’m going to excise the negative from my intention. I know the difference between abundance and excess.  One makes me happy and the other makes me anxious, so I don’t have to wag my finger at myself and warn myself away from too much (I’ve overspent this past week, and I’m struggling a lot with that.)

4:04, with breaks

 

Joy

4:38

I’m breaking one of my cardinal rules, and blogging during the workday.  I will leave my desk in 22 minutes anyway to go to yoga, and there’s nothing work related that I can accomplish in 22 minutes. Well there almost certainly is, but nothing is coming to mind and I’m not looking hard.

So some things that are bringing me joy right now, regardless of all other things, and in no particular order

1. Frugality. When I am thoughtful about spending money, buying new things only to replace old things,and using up all the old things and clearing out and letting go, I magically have money for the things that matter (therapy!). I’m loosening my grip a little, but so far, it’s not been too hard and the psychic rewards are much greater than the rewards of careless spending.

2. My new CSA subscription. To be fair, I won’t see the produce for a couple more weeks, but I am very happy about the idea of the fresh produce and adventures in cooking. This subscription touts itself as being extremely easy to manage. A few weeks ago, I would have said I couldn’t afford it (groceries come from Daniel’s portion of the budget), but I think it will make me happy to spend this money in this way.

3. Bringing my lunch to work. Before our financial pinch, I never brought my lunch, and thought it would be impossible to do so. Who wanted to cook on Sundays for the week? Me, it turns out. Some three months in, it’s not oppressive. I have a very high tolerance for eating the same foods over and over (I’m on week 2 of lentils every day). I go into the common areas of our offices, and have my nice lunch away from my desk. I think eating away from my desk is essential to this enterprise, and the food is incidental.

4. My new offices. I thought I would hate this location, but the space is delightful. It feels fresh and new. I also like working in a slightly different neighborhood. I enjoy being an urban explorer.

5. Bicycling. The new offices are most easily reached by bike, and I delight in unlocking a bike every day and flying along the streets. My bike commute is very short, downhill (I usually take the bus or walk home) and energizing. I feel like a college student, or little kid, and I enjoy that.

6. Writing. At work, I write for 10 minutes a day on whatever project is at hand — mostly playing around, brainstorming, sometimes revising. It is magic. I have ideas I wouldn’t have come up with otherwise. I move projects along that would have seemed too daunting to take on. Even when I don’t feel like it, it’s just 10 minutes. I didn’t read about this practice on a blog or in a productivity book.  I just made it up, and I love the results.

7. Milo. He’s spectacular. He shows me what mutual love looks like, and there is so much freedom and happiness in it. (Shadow to this: my relationship with Milo, and the goodness in it, revealed to me so many of the limitations of my relationship with Daniel, and the wrongness of what Daniel said about me and how he treated me. It’s an awkward truth: Milo’s love showed me that I have to leave his dad. Hmm. Milo will need a good therapist of his own.)

8. My friends. I thought for years I was a bad friend, needy, self-centered, only showing up when I needed something. My friends show me something different. If these amazing women want to spend time with me, then there is something really right with me, and it gets more right the more time I spend with them. I didn’t have models of female friendship growing up. These women are saving me, every day.

9. The gym in the office building. Finally, finally, I’m running. Just the treadmill, just for 15 minute HIIT workouts, but I’m running and it’s hard and I like it. I’m also doing some weights and resistance work. I looked forward to it all day yesterday. It feels better (and is so much cheaper) than spinning.

4:59. Not my best prose, repetitive and pedestrian. I care enough to note it, but not enough to change it.

The door after another door

I love how WordPress has a simple icon and the word “Write” next to it at the top right of the screen.  Write — is it a suggestion, and invitation, a command?  I like it as a command right now.  If English had a distinctive imperative tense, we’d have the answer.

Without going into details, I am back to where I began this blog, in the following sense: there has been a terrifying, saddening rupture in my expectations of what the future will look like.  So, Write.  I wrote myself through the last rupture without knowing how important writing was.

Okay, a few details.  Daniel and I are NOT getting divorced, at least not now.  In fact, the thing that has happened might be the salvation of our marriage.  That is my hope.  For the foreseeable future, the family’s economic health depends on me and on our savings.  This is an unprecedented situation for me.  I might need to change jobs, trading love for security.  That’s what the spring will likely be about.

I am not feeling anything right now.  I can see the feelings, but am not feeling them.  I am opening up this space for when the feelings come.  Well, I am feeling dizzy, literally.  When I got out of bed at 5 to go to the bathroom, the room spun, and I fell hard against the side of the bed.  The spinning continued when I returned to bed, and it was intermittent throughout the morning.  The internet is of two (at least) minds whether vertigo can be stress induced.  During yoga class, it occurred to me to start writing again, and I recall having something urgent to say, a marker I wanted to lay down for myself, but I don’t remember it now.

There are some early intimations of fear.  I am terrified of having to do more, to work longer hours, to put more energy out into the world, to have more work of all kinds to do.  I can’t even talk to my beloved friends right now, although I am avidly emailing and texting, because I can’t release energy for conversation, for describing how I am doing, or how Daniel and Milo are doing.  Introverts in crisis: we need tea, a soft blanket, and Netflix.

That said, I have poured so much energy into a marriage that was not working, and that’s like pouring gasoline into a rusted-through tank.

I sound frenetic.  I don’t feel particularly frenetic, but I can see the frenzy.  I had hoped to be quieter and wise, almost vatic.  I will meet myself there.

And Better Still…

I’m nervous, a bit, to write this.  I worry that when things get bad again, this post will make me sad.  I also worry about being wrong, or falsified.  What if that work, that realization on which I thought my happiness depended, did not in fact bring happiness. What if I talked myself into an illusion, and I end up wrong and sad on the other side because of it?  That last question has kept me from so much happiness.  That last question was part of the architecture of what I built and just recently started to burn down (it’s a long, controlled burn).

I’m out of town on business for a long stretch.  This afternoon Daniel called me to narrate the last three innings of our home team’s baseball game (we are crazy fans of our local team).  I told him that’s why I would never divorce him.  We stayed on the phone for almost an hour, he told me which commercials were on, he used funny sports lingo.  It was one of the loveliest times we’ve had– just a small, simple thing.

We are happy.  We are close.  Almost every day, I think, “Yes, this is what I wanted. This is why I married him in the first place.”  It’s been years and years since I felt that way for days and weeks, rather than moments or hours.  There are still shadows and frustrations, and last night I almost went off the rails.  I am not free of fear.  I wonder, as I did this morning during a yoga class, if it’s okay to be this happy.  The answer is yes; I think I will always always ask the question.  And that’s okay.  That’s what it means to be me.

Last week we went to see Milo at sleep-away camp.  We spent three hours in the car before getting to the airport (we flew out of a different city, and we dropped off the dog with friends on the other side of that city), enduring a hot, humid day with no air conditioning.  Daniel hadn’t gotten it fixed.  I was fuming, mostly silently.  I foresaw the 3 hour drive, I knew the air conditioner needed to be fixed, and I was suffering because of Daniel’s inaction.  “This,” I thought, “is the metaphor for our life, our future.  I can see the problem ahead, I know what the fix is, but Daniel’s in charge of the fix, and he can’t or won’t see the problem, and won’t fix it.” (I think this about his health and our finances, more the former than the latter, because I have more control over our finances.)

Then we got to the airport, sticky, cranky, and found our flight had been cancelled and there was no obvious way to get to Milo’s camp before Shabbat started.  And Daniel rallied, and I rallied, and the hot car was no longer important because there was something larger to focus on.  And with significant exertion, we got to where we needed to be before sunset.  Daniel supplied the emotional energy and optimism for the last leg of the journey when I was spent.  And I thought, maybe this, this second part of the journey is our future.  Maybe we’ll rally, and Daniel will carry me through when I need it.

Both, I think, will be true.  The air conditioner didn’t fix itself in the airport parking lot, and the ride home was no fun.  But it was just an air conditioner, and I got it fixed the next day (yes, me, not Daniel).  And it’s okay.  It’s all profoundly okay.  Later it may not be.  So perhaps I should enjoy the now all the more.

 

Dessert

It is typical of me to leave the story at the hard work and the struggle, the square-shouldered resolution, and leave out the hope and fun.

All that stuff I just wrote has a payoff. Even now, I’m putting more distance, faster, between myself and feeling like I’m a bad wife.  I am confident now that I put Daniel’s happiness above my own, and it doesn’t feel like choking.  Let me revise that.  Putting your beloved’s happiness above your own is the “out in the world” definition of true love and a good marriage.  I didn’t feel like I met it, so… failure.  I’m not sure I would choose that definition of true love ab initio.  It sound like the message sent to women for, oh, millennia.  On the receiving end, I’d be unnerved by someone putting my happiness above his own all the time.  Anyway, I am confident that I am closer to loving Daniel entirely as he is than I have ever been, because I’ve seen more of him.  I know what’s there, and I am okay with it.  Merely okay with some of it, but that’s better than denying, correcting, and raging at.  That makes me feel good.  I was so disappointed in what I thought was my flawed love for Daniel, I thought I was bad at love, and rejected that because it was too painful.  I am not flawed at love.  I was really, really wounded and scared. But I stayed with it — and that is a beautiful tribute to what I’m capable of.  I stayed with it and I got to this place as fast and as best as I could.

And the biggest payoff, and perhaps the hardest to explain but it makes perfect sense in marital alchemy is… I feel like I can be more entirely myself.  I don’t have to be good, I don’t have to supply the perfection that my marriage is missing.  I can, dear readers, finally be a bitch.  That’s not a goal, but it is a reprieve.  I have desperately wanted to feel and only rarely, rarely felt loved just as me. (It’s not my parents’ fault. They did the best they could.  They just didn’t know what was going on in my head, which was more complicated than they imagined.)  My beloved friends have provided it, but I wasn’t tuned in to it as a possibility, so, again, always felt like I was somehow disappointing them.

Now, I’ve created that possibility.  I don’t even need Daniel to go first, and demonstrate deep love in my moments of bitchiness (Does this make any sense at all?).  I can just lay claim to it.  I have so often felt powerless in my marriage, because Daniel won’t do things that are important to me.  But I’ve seen that I do have power, in a more subtle way, to show Daniel how to treat me, and to live with it if he doesn’t deliver immediately.  And that’s not about imperfection and failing.  It’s humanity.

Milestone

Over the last week, I’ve come to a major realization about my marriage.  That is the first meaning of milestone.  But I’ve also got an older meaning in mind, a milestone quite literally as a mile marker.  I’ve been blogging, and talking, and thinking long enough to know that the path of enlightenment, or happiness, or just living is not a direct line.  It’s a lot of loops and re-crossings. I’ll lose this realization, and have to come back, and I’ll see things I don’t see now.  I am marking it because it seems important.

My 30-year-old self, the self I was on my wedding day, would never have agreed to be in the marriage that I am in now, at 45.  If she/I could have known what would happen and what it would feel like, she/I would never have put on that white dress and picked up that bouquet of orchids and walked up to Daniel feeling –for the first time in (our?) life — like she was her maximum self and that was perfectly right.

The realization on which my marital happiness depends is that that’s okay.  It’s okay that almost 16 years in, I’m in a marriage I would have strenuously rejected when I embarked on it.

That’s what I’ve been trying to get to, probably for the history of this blog. How do I begin to unpack this?  There are two parts: Perfection and Witness.  And I bet if I go back through the archives, I can categorize most posts about the marriage as exploring one or the other.

I grew up believing that perfection was not merely a possibility, but an achievable standard, if I could put in the work.  And boy was I inclined to put in the work.  So, I never had to question whether I was doing something because I wanted to do it intrinsically, or whether I wanted to do it instrumentally, or whatever else was a possibility.  “Want to”, “should”, and “can” were perfectly aligned a lot of the time, and that was powerfully reinforcing.  I didn’t ask why, too much, I didn’t understand luck and chance.  I believed there were right answers that came from outside of me, and I lived by them.  Not robotically, but persistently and ardently.

So… marriage.  I don’t want to write the full details about the imperfections in my marriage. I am deeply shamed by them, even though they are truly not my fault. This may seem contradictory to the spirit of this post, but I believe that my imperfections are pretty garden variety.  (Maybe everyone believes that about themselves.) Nothing about my Daniel is garden variety.  I don’t see women’s magazine articles that describe my situation and validate my response. I see, instead, a lot of cultural and other messages that say that our situation is flawed and must be fixed.  And I felt (feel?) responsible for all the fixes, even though I am not the breaker.  (More on that later.)

I couldn’t accept the situation.  I couldn’t, as the meditation coaches say, get curious about what was happening and what I felt about it and why.  I just said, “This is not to standard.  This is not what a gold star marriage looks like.”  And then everything looked flawed, like a failure on my part and his.  Everything.  Daniel’s utter inability to pick up after himself , and the way his stubbornness increases in direct (or double) proportion to my anxiety about the mess, was not about Daniel’s history as a Jewish Princeling brought up in the 1950s and 1960s when no one thought to ask boys to set the table or make a bed.  It was about how flawed I was, because he didn’t love me enough to do what I wanted.  There was no boundary between disappointment and delegitimization of the whole project.  And that became the story of the marriage.  We weren’t getting it right.

That’s an absolutely crushing way to live.  I blamed myself, and that was so painful and there was so much blame that it overflowed on to Daniel. There were happy moments, but the sense of personal and shared failure got bigger and bigger.  The one place we clearly were not failing was in raising Milo, but, in the twisted logic of perfection, that only made everything else look worse.  We were clearly capable of great things — look at our son.  So what the fuck was happening between us?  Failure. I grabbed too hard at the moments of happiness, I put too much on them, so when they evaporated, as they do, that also added to the failure story.

Words are failing (!) me.  I don’t think I can convey this dynamic adequately.  Just believe me that, especially in the last few years, my marriage and myself have felt like a failure because it’s not what it was supposed to be.  It was not the gauzy standard set by TV commercials and Ladies Home Journal.  So how could it be good?  I was torn, knowing there was goodness but not having a way to reconcile that with all the fractured shoulds.  My 30 year old self was saying all the time “This is not how it’s supposed to be.  This is not right,” and how could I let her down?

Witness.

Yeah, my 30 year old self.  She suffered, and not only from what was in her own dear head about perfection.  She suffered because Daniel… Daniel did some bad stuff.  And Daniel can’t deal with it, so it never got put away.  This blog saved me after infertility because I could come here and say, “Here’s this pain.” I could recognize it for myself, and readers said, “Yes, we see that pain, it’s legitimate, and we are very very sorry you are feeling it.”  I never got that for the other stuff.  It never got acknowledged and accurately described, so it never got to be over.

So that feeling of failure, in a twisted way, became the monument to that suffering.  Does that make any sense to anyone but me?  I’ve written about it, kind of.  Somebody had to be there for her, for the woman I was, whose husband was looking for the exit when I was more vulnerable than I would ever be again in my life.  Daniel married me in good faith, but he couldn’t bear what it meant.  He both embraced and fled from fatherhood, and husband-hood.  A couple of years ago he said, thinking he was joking,”I’ve finally forgiven you for giving me a family.” I will remember that as long as I remember anything. He was in the living room, I was on the staircase.  I said, “Thank you. What’s interesting is that you think you are joking.  I know that you aren’t.”

When I wrote about the first realization that I was hanging on to the pain as a memorial, I thought it would be enough to walk away, to stop tending the pain and to let it fade of its own accord. Now the image I have is of something like burning man. Something intentionally constructed and intentionally destroyed.  I’ll keep the ashes in a pretty container in a drawer.

Resolution

I can’t keep feeling like a failure.  I can’t keep feeling like my marriage is a failure and Daniel is a failure.  God, how many times have I written that or the equivalent?  See “milestone” definition 2.  My 30 year old self didn’t know what she was agreeing to.  I bet most people don’t when they get married.  Do people really believe on that day in sickness, poorer, and worse?  I know some do.  I don’t blame myself for not being one of them, then.  Nobody is wrong here. 30 year old me is not wrong.  45 year old me is not wrong.  You have no idea how far I have to come to write those sentences.  Isn’t someone always wrong because that’s implicit in someone always being right?  And someone is always right, right?  (Usually me.)  30 year old me has suffered enough. That is my imperfection — choosing suffering because I couldn’t get to another option.  45 year old me is ready to stop it.  To let go of being right, and embrace being curious, and free, and unvalidated by anything other than my own sense that I continue to choose this, and it’s between me and Daniel.

I had thought this would be a better post.  I’ve been writing it in my head for so many days.  I smile at the thought that, given what I know about myself and the non-linearity of discovery, I’ll surely get a chance to write it again.

 

 

Goodbye, Miss Havisham, or a return to Poem for Wednesday

In the years we have been married, Daniel has caused me tremendous pain.  He hasn’t always meant it directly, other than that he meant to do things, and those things inevitably cause the other person pain, but it wasn’t always personal.  Sometimes it’s been personal.  And inevitably people who live together will cause each other pain because it’s an imperfect, fallen world.

I believe that Daniel cannot bear the thought that he has caused pain to others, but at the same time, he will not refuse to do things that he very much wants to do in order to spare others pain.  Many (most?) people are like that, but Daniel is more so, I think, on both counts.  So Daniel decides that he hasn’t really hurt anyone.  That the other doesn’t really know what he did or didn’t do, or that it wasn’t really a big deal, or that whatever the other feels isn’t really pain.  And if the other person says, “Hey, that thing you did really caused me pain,” he thunders like Zeus from Olympus that the other person is wrong or selfish or misguided or doesn’t understand or is doing something out of bounds or egregious.  He knows the truth, but he can’t acknowledge it, so he raises the costs for the other person beyond the point of bearability.  There are exceptions — times when he has apologized sincerely — but this is his general approach.  He’ll change his behavior and be sweet and attentive in the wake of bad action or rage, and encourage the other to see that as the apology.  But he’s not skilled at just owning it.  It’s easier for him to do the elaborate magic show to cover it up.

So for years, I have worked out the following marital equilibrium: Since Daniel has caused me pain, but won’t acknowledge my pain, and certainly won’t apologize or soothe it, I hold the pain.  I hold the pain so that he won’t have to face it, and feel his own kind of pain.  Holding the pain becomes a kind of love I give to him — I keep the pain from him this way.  I hold the pain also because it seems big and important, and something has to be done about it.  Someone has to know about and honor this pain (this blog was a vessel for pain, and I am so grateful to readers who did know about and honor it).  And I hold it because I am waiting for Daniel to change and become a person who can acknowledge, forthrightly, the pain he caused me, and apologize from the deepest recesses of his being.

The pain, then, has become really important. I’ve cultivated it, and fed it, and tended it.   It has become inextricable from my love for Daniel.  It is almost how I define my love for Daniel: I know I love him because I have withstood this pain — and I have cataloged it so carefully that I can tell you exactly how much pain it is.  I know I love him because I have kept this pain from him and borne it for him so he doesn’t have to know it.

And now it is so clear that this doesn’t serve me at all.  I alluded to this in my last post, probably in so many posts before that.  I can’t see Daniel anymore.  I can’t see his sadness, I can’t see his needs as anything but threatening or demanding.  I have constructed our marriage as two people and one oxygen mask.  I am so tired from guarding and tending and feeding and loving that pain, rather than feeling it and moving on, that I don’t have good energy to give to Daniel when he needs it.  Or to myself when I need it.  I can’t feel loved or sexy or enlivened or interesting or interested because that might distract me from the maintenance of the pain.  I can’t pay attention.

So the experiment on which my marriage now depends (that may be an exaggeration — exhaustion and strong rye whiskey talking) is letting go of the pain.  Taking it out of its museum and letting air and sun and damp and elements rot it till its gone.  Understanding that keeping it alive till Daniel acknowledges it means keeping it alive forever — and that there is no benefit to me in that course.  This seems entirely not possible.  I have no idea how to do this.  But having the idea of doing it seems like a good place to start.

The pain happened.  It will never un-happen.  It will never be acknowledged or reckoned or balanced.  And it is time to let that unfinished, unreconciled, un-ledgered pain fall away.

I remembered this beloved poem as I typed this.  It’s not in the spirit of renunciation, but so beautiful on how hard it is to leave unfinished business, even when we must:

A Presence
—Dostoievsky’s older brother
sometimes made him stand in a
corner, telling him, “And don’t
think about a white bear!”

You are the white bear I try
not to think about, the file
untitled in my computer’s cache,
you are the one piece of a puzzle
already burned, the rhyme no
sentence of mine ever leads to.

You are the erasure leaving
an impression, blank, on each page
of my pad, phone number with no
name, connection that can’t find
its voice, the carryover never
cancelled, not to be restored.

You are the amputee’s ghost
pain, the debt redoubled on
full payment, the dissolving
membrane whose unfriendly floaters
blur my lens, the emperor’s new
son and heir, the lost white bear.

W.D. Snodgrass

Soulstice

That is an awful title.  AW-FUL title.  But I’m going with it.

Daniel is at a Hanukkah party, and I am here with an unwisely large glass of red wine, a dozen pistachio nuts and a square of dark chocolate — and I’d rather be here than at that party.  I am sick to pieces of small talk.   I’m feeling un-pretty, un-sexy, un-literary.  I want to stay home and far away from people.  So I am.

Over the last many weeks, I’ve lost my sense of play.  I didn’t know I still had a sense of play until I lost it.  There are many reasons I got to this place.  But I didn’t see the signs — I saw the circumstances (too specific and identity-revealing to describe here), but not the signs.  So, it turns out that not spending time on Pinterest did not mean that I had become deeper, more thoughtful, more literary, and less materialistic.  No, it meant that I was not doing something that I really enjoy doing.  I wasn’t satisfying some visual/creative/design side of myself.  I wasn’t playing the 40-something version of paper dolls.

I bought running shoes today, my first pair in at least 5 years.  My last post was about how long intentions take to manifest themselves, and I’ve been intending to get back to running for years and years, but haven’t yet.  The call to run again has been getting louder and louder.  I need that kind of flight.  I need to run away.  Over winter break, I’m going to run the streets and hills I ran when I was a teenager.  And if my knees tell me that’s all the running I should ever do, okay. But I need to try again.  As I’ve written before, I need to connect to the person I was when I ran.  She was awesome, even if she didn’t know it.  She was light. She was fun, she could play.

And I can play.  Even as recently as last Monday and Tuesday, when I was at a conference, I thought, “My new job is going to be so much fun.  I can’t believe I’m going to be allowed to have so much fun.  Somebody’s going to tell me that they aren’t paying me to have fun.”  But maybe not.  Maybe I am at the time in my life where I can work and play at the same time.  Maybe the more I play the better I’ll work — wouldn’t that be nice?  That is what I want to be possible.  Over the last year, I have made much possible that wasn’t ever possible before.

Over the last two weeks I have been tested and I’ve faltered.  I’ve lost my serenity, fallen off the path, however you want to say it.  But perhaps the difference is, I recognized that that was old behavior, and not my default mode.  I saw it, and tried to fix it, and kind of did fix it and kind of didn’t fix it and didn’t take it to be the end of the world.  I got angry (really, really angry.  I was leaving a screaming & profane voicemail to Sister — instead of calling Daniel — and passersby looked at me and shook their heads), but I didn’t get self-blaming or devastated about it.  I don’t love anger — it makes it hard to sleep, it seems inconsistent with meditating and yoga, and it’s a bad kind of energy.  But it might be better for me than my typical forms of quieter self-destruction.

I started this post thinking it would be about failure and recrimination.  And now it’s kind of about possibility.  I don’t believe in transformations, unless in retrospect.  But I do wonder if I have a different set of default settings now.  If I’ve suffered and written and thought and cried and read and laughed and meditated and down-dogged and grown myself into new and better default settings so that things will, on balance, be brighter on the days ahead.

Now is the time (again)

I’ve felt the need, or the urge, or the itch to write for a few weeks now, but have pushed it aside.  It’s easy to do that during the run-up to the Jewish holidays, or the four week endurance test of the Jewish holidays (maximum observance version).  But three weeks in, I’m going to write now.  Writing here is associated with so many things: comfort, discomfort, risk, clarity, observation.  And I’m in the middle of all of those states.

What first made me feel like writing was the dawning understanding that intentions can take a very long time — years and years — to manifest themselves, but eventually many of them do.  How many years did I say I intended to meditate in the coming year?  And after not doing it, and not doing it, and not doing it, I started last year, and now I sit and meditate (poorly) for 30 minutes each morning and arrange my schedule around it.  Similarly, for months if not years, I’ve intended to get control over my spending, and after a particularly binge-y summer, this month I’ve managed to observe the impulses that drive my spending and think harder about what I’m trying to buy (efficacy, ease, confidence, pleasure, excitement, comfort) rather than actually buying things that are just things rather than achievements or states of being.  I find this time lag so comforting.  We’ll get where we need to go, where we intend to go, but in a wending, winding, sort of way, when the world inside and the world outside are congenial and supportive.  We are not failures, we are just not successes yet.  I never before appreciated how things can unfold in time.  I thought I had to bring about changes or states of being instantly (which is why shopping was so seductive, especially online; I wasn’t seeking instant gratification, but rather instant efficacy.  I wanted to make something happen, and I did — I clicked and a whole machinery came to life just to satisfy me).  But many things happen when we aren’t trying, when we aren’t looking.  I used to find this invisibility, this occurrence without extraordinary effort discomforting because I believed I could control what happened to me, that I was able to control things through extraordinary effort, and that I could control all the people who were part of the happening.  Well, no.  I held on to that illusion with all my might (a lot!) for a very, very long time, and this blog is, among other things, a record of why and how I began to let go.  I expect there is much more letting go that will happen in the future.

Yes, time.  Before Rosh Hashanah this year, I was thinking about self forgiveness. I was thinking that I was probably ready to forgive myself for never having had that second child.  It felt like time.  Among the other things this blog is, it’s a record of a giant tangle of sadness and blame — and the connection between thinking I could control everything that happened, and should control everything that happened, and the subsequent step into blame, first of Daniel but more fundamentally and durably of myself, for what didn’t happen.  So this year, I went back and read what happened on Rosh Hashanah four years ago.  I felt drawn to that accounting because, I guess, I needed to measure the distance between now and then.  Four years is a long time, but not really so long.  It’s how long it’s taken.  And I was so grateful to have the record of the starting point, even though it’s very painful to read even now.  And so grateful to have people like Nicole, Tracey, Sister, Mali, and everyone else who were there for me in a way that no one who was physically near me was or ever could have been.  How ever many words I ever write in my life, here or elsewhere, I’ll never be able to capture what that meant in that time, and how precious and necessary it was.

And, still, time.  I’m about to accept a new job.  An imperfect job, but the perfect job for me at this time.  I think being on the verge of this new job, a job in which I will really create something, called me back to the blog because it, even more than my book, was a powerful, sustained, creative effort.  I was creating… words are failing me here… I was creating a self that could withstand being disappointed by God, myself, my husband, medicine, the universe.  I was creating a story that enabled me to make sense of the place I was in.  I was creating a loving and supportive community.  I was creating myself as a particular kind of writer.  I did that, with help, word after word, one post at a time.  So now I can do this new thing, and then the thing after that, and then the thing after that.  It is time, again, to create.  This time publicly, with my own livelihood at stake.  I think it will work out.

Daniel is a brilliant writer, but he hates to write.  He makes himself miserable over most of his speeches and his larger articles.  I think it’s because he worries they will never be good enough.  They will never accomplish his true aims.  This morning I told him, “You don’t have to try to be Daniel D_____.  You already are.  You woke up that way.”  And a few hours later, during a deep twist in a yoga class, I realized, me, too. I don’t have to be anybody more spectacular than I am to do this next thing.  I woke up with enough, at least with enough to get started.

At every holiday, we say a prayer called the Shehecheyanu, in which we thank God for having enabled us to reach this occasion, with the sense that we are grateful to be back at this occasion, this place in time, once again.  I am feeling that intensely now.  I am back at this occasion, the occasion of building a path forward for myself.  It has taken a long time and a lot of intending, a lot of trying and lot of wandering and not trying, to get back here, which is also somewhere very far forward from where I started.