Reality

8:01

Reality is that, after I returned from a business trip Thursday, I saw a pricetag from Urban Outfitters for an item I never bought on the counter — my counter — in the bathroom.  Reality is, Daniel really did not want me to engage with this pricetag once I picked it up and said “This says black, extra small… I have nothing like that at all from Urban Outfitters.”  He got angry when he saw me put it in my pocket — he knew I was going to investigate.  I put it in the garbage and then I took it out and investigated.

It’s a top.  Not one I own.  I’ve twice previously found very small sized clothes in my house. I’ve found other things that Daniel can’t explain in a way that convinces me.

I had decided not to engage this latest installment of reality, and did a great job of it all weekend, forestalling the symptoms and awful feelings.  Then I decided to engage it in therapy, through a side door.  My therapist confessed that she was feeling really anxious about it or around it.  So now I am: all the old feelings, the dry mouth, the shivering, the shaking.  And Daniel will notice.  Everything around him feels like a lie.  And if I tell him, the truce will be destroyed and it will be yelling and hatred and I am enjoying the mendacious truce, the truce of untruth.  I need this calmness, because I am two months away from possibly losing my job — along with my gorgeous health insurance that pays more than half of my therapy bills, and the schedule that allows for lots of yoga and therapy, and good, hard creative work, and the dear colleagues, and the status just as it’s rising and rising.

And if I tell him, I won’t believe anything that comes out of his mouth unless he tells me that he did, in fact, buy it.  That would be refreshing.  I could work with that.  Should I give him that chance?  Or should I say, “Damn, if he’s on notice that I am thinking about divorce and he STILL fucks around like this, AND doesn’t clean up after himself when he does it, we are done as done can be, and all that’s left is my own timetable?”  By fucking around I don’t mean actual fucking. I meant the gifts and emotional engagements with other women.

It was so much better when I did not engage, when I half thought that maybe I picked up the tag on my business trip, in a shabby hotel room that might not have been cleaned well enough.  But I don’t remember clearly whether I set my things down on my counter before I saw the tag — I think I didn’t.  Or when I didn’t think at all.  Now I feel sick and tired.  I want not this.  But this is probably the future of staying.  Over and over and over again.

Do I owe it to him to give him even the chance to tell the truth?  No. Not now.  The costs are too high. I’ll fake it for a while. I get important job news on Friday, I think.

I hate living like this, but I hate the consequences of alternative actions so much more.  I also hated giving up the dream of my own apartment.  I was ready, am ready (?) for it to end, but not like this. Or maybe exactly like this.  I was looking for another incident to spring me, but it’s never this one, it’s always the next one, the one that hasn’t happened yet, and then the next and the next.  Daniel is just following protocol.

But what if he is innocent?  Why do I have to be such a mindreader, and wonder why he cared about the tag in my pocket and told me to take it out.

Daniel wants to be seen and to hide at the same time.  I am done.  And oddly sad and freaked out, but that’s commensurate with the seriousness of the project.

Milo melted down today in school because Daniel was treated so unfairly, which is true.  But I’m not treating him unfairly by leaving. I am treating him entirely fairly, and justly, if not entirely mercifully.  I need the mercy and the justice.

This is no good, no fun. I should have a whole category of blog posts called “lies.”

8:14

Juicer

8:43

When Daniel loved me, before I was his wife (which ruined everything for him), he gave me practical — bizarrely practical– valentine’s day gifts. The first was a juicer — and this was in the mid-90s, before juicing was such a thing. I was completely flabbergasted, and he laughed. We were so romantic all the time, that valentine’s day was almost meaningless, so he gave it meaning by subverting it. I loved that about him.

After he bought the house we live in, he gave me half of it, in the form of a deed saying we were joint tenants in common, for valentine’s day. Without that deed, leaving him would be financially impossible. Under the law, I wouldn’t be entitled to half the house, because he owned it before we married. (I think this is true. I haven’t investigated the counter-factual.)

But then he stopped loving me, and I got red roses, trite as hell, when I got anything at all. And I pretended to be very happy about them, even as I wished for a sly can opener, or pot holder, or anything at all that indicated he was thinking about me, and us, and our history and our love. To be fair, I didn’t get him anything at all, usually. Just because I’m more sinned against than sinning doesn’t mean I haven’t sinned.

Yesterday morning, I saw a stunning flower arrangement on my dressing table when I woke up — truly the most beautiful arrangement Daniel had ever given me. I was touched, but confused. I didn’t want this display from Daniel. Kindness and love are not part of the story right now. I also wondered how he managed to procure flowers between 9:30 pm on Tuesday, when he went to a friend’s house for a late dinner, and 6am on Wednesday, when I found the flowers. So I asked. He told me that the flowers had been sent to our friend and his wife as a thank you gift. The friend was leaving town Wednesday morning, so Daniel took the arrangement home for me on Tuesday night. “But if I hadn’t gotten the flowers from [friend], I would have gotten you red roses.”  A double loss. I am both reassured and disappointed.  Recycled flowers? Really?

My mood is all over the place. Yesterday evening at yoga I thought, “I have never been happier.” I don’t know what I meant by that, but it came into my head. There is an enormous relief in knowing the truth, in having a life that makes sense, in not trying to do the impossible, in releasing responsibility for what I could never be responsible for. I went to a bookstore today and bought three novels — not mysteries, which I read when I’m stressed, and which have been the overwhelming majority of my reading for at least three years. Daniel should worry about this opening of mental capacity. It means I’m no longer thinking about him and how to please him. I want him to be happy, and not angry or lonely or sad, so I do things that might have that effect. But that’s different from wanting to please him. I’ve released myself from that obligation, which I never could fulfill. It was structural, not personal.

Then, on the way home, after a cocktail reception at work where I had on my brightest professional armature, I was low again, and I was low when I ate my solo dinner while Daniel was upstairs paying bills. I left Daniel alone to eat dinner a lot. I wish I hadn’t. It’s not very nice. And this post is making me cry. Remembering when he gave me that juicer, in my first solo apartment, where I probably slept 6 nights in three years, because I was always with him. Remembering what it was like to be loved by him, when I was loved by him — it was exquisite. It was gorgeous, it was the best thing that had ever happened to me, and the memory of it obscured the reality of these last (17? 10? 5? 2?) years.

Given that I desperately need someone to fund me and someone to fuck me, and the lack of both is making me absolutely mad, I’m doing extremely well. I am unbelievably steady in the face of all that I have to lose and the more brutal face of all that I lost without knowing it, because I have so much fullness in myself. You might say I am full of myself. But sometimes–now– I want to fall down on the floor and cry and mourn.

9:03

Here

7:17

The last day (30 hours or so) has been surreal.  I wrote on Sunday that Daniel hated me, but writing is different than feeling. On Monday (yes, after my therapy session) I started to feel it. She said it to me, and I said it to her, and then it concretized around us. I said I wasn’t scared of it.  She knew better.

It doesn’t make sense for Daniel to hate me, except of course it does to him.  Daniel’s hatred of me is doing some extremely important work for him, which is why he clings to it so tenaciously.  I have lots of hypotheses about what that work is.  Well, one big hypothesis, which I started to type and then deleted. I don’t want to use this space to get inside Daniel’s head. Protecting this space is part of the dethroning project.

It doesn’t make sense to me for Daniel to hate me, but knowing that he hates me makes sense of many other things.  Why he has been reluctant to go out to dinner with me, much less go away with me, for years. Why I refused to see what he needed, because that would mean seeing the whole picture, and I couldn’t do that.  Why certain places made me so very sad (because they were full of couples without hate).  Why, for so many years, things felt just not right. Why he’s always mad at me. So, that’s comforting in a way. I know one level of why.

Except — holy cow, Daniel hates me! After… everything, he hates me. I wonder if he knows it. That’s where things get surreal. The man I live with, and have loved and have built a life on, around — but never with, because he refused — hates me. Or rather, he hates his wife. I think he likes Dorothea. That may be why he’s been so supportive about my work situation. He likes me. But he really, really, really hates his wife. Which is me.

I know that things will be so much better on the other side of this hate, but I don’t know when I’ll get there. It looks fearsome, to divide a household, to say nothing of the emotional damage to Milo. People do it. It’s mostly a logistical and financial matter, and I’m good at those things. Daniel will make it significantly more terrible and therefore more expensive than it has to be. I wish I could start today.  But, Milo. I don’t want to give up seeing Milo every single day.

Then there is the huge question of how I can ever ever trust my own judgment again. It’s kind of funny, actually. I have huge trust issues, which predate Daniel. I am very upfront that I don’t trust people not to hurt me. And those trust issues absolutely did not protect me. (Pause for that earthquake to settle in.) Maybe I should be trusting as fuck, and see what happens then. As it happens, a lot of people are being very very lovely to me. I couldn’t always see the love that surrounded me, because that might have required to see the laser beam of hate. Maybe I should believe that I am a very trusting person. Believing that I was mis-trustful caused me to discount (maybe) what was happening: I only think it’s that way b/c of my trust issues, not because of the real thing. But it was the real thing!

This is what I mean about things being surreal. I am moving through the days as if things are entirely normal. As if I don’t know what I know. As if this knowledge doesn’t make me wish to the point of tears that my parents lived in the same city as I do, so that I could just go back to their house, and start all over again. They have furniture. I’m going to need furniture — and I’ve already decided it will be used furniture, because I’m going to have to get more new furniture when I move from my emergency landing pad apartment to my “this is my real life now” apartment. And I will just throw money at someone – throw all the money I’m saving with that responsible, environmentally sound used furniture – to find it and buy it and arrange it until I can make real decisions.

We will go to my cousin’s wedding in a month. We will make plans about Milo. We will celebrate holidays. We will act as if all this is normal — and, to be honest, for us this is normal. Daniel hating me and me acting as if I’m not hated, is totally normal and status quo.  I will consider waiting to leave until Daniel has stabilized after his crisis (his hating me long predates this crisis.  This crisis might have saved me 10 years of continued blindness). I will stay nicely put until Milo is older. As if all this is normal.

Oh hell, I will have to go on Facebook, won’t I, once I’m divorced, so that hopeful exes can find me and at least I’ll have someone to sleep with for a while. Oh hell, I really don’t want to go on Facebook. I will go on a hundred shitty dates. I’ll write wry, witty blog posts about them. I will be invited to a hundred Shabbat dinner tables with visiting single men. Oh hell. When will it end?

I am now suffering alongside Daniel. Daniel wants his crisis to end, but he seems to do little to hasten the end.  Me too! I am in crisis. The difference is, he wants what he once had to be restored. I know that I never had what I thought I had (maybe I had it, in the beautiful 1990s). I am in crisis, I want it to end, and for some period of time I will do nothing to bring that end about. I will live surreally. Where is the joy in that?

7:51

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.

 

 

Intentions check in 2012

In the opening days of this year, I wrote two posts about my intentions for 2012.  I did a check in post in February, and then forgot about the intentions until about 24 hours ago, when I realized, in the calm of my parents’ house, away from all my daily obligations and ceaseless motion, that intention setting seemed to work very well for me.  Of course, I have no idea right now what my intentions are for 2013, and I’m a little intimidated by the prospect of setting intentions now that I’ve seen how well 2012’s worked out — I worry about setting the wrong ones and missing opportunities.  But that is a worry for next week, a project for the flight home.

For now, I’m going to do what I rarely do, which is take stock of some good stuff and think about how it might have happened so that perhaps it can happen again. So here is my original list of intentions, and the follow up of how they manifested themselves throughout this year.

1. Don’t fight lucky strangers.  In other words, don’t get unmoored when someone else turns up pregnant.  This is still, forever, a long term project. Even a few weeks ago, I was very reluctant to have dinner with the woman who I wrote about in these posts.   This will always be a work in progress for me. I think I’m better able to weather these storms than last year — at least until another storm unmoors me.

2. Continue to be brave. I am being brave. I am writing a book (more on that below) and am being brave that way.  I am being brave in my relationship with Daniel, and blessedly it doesn’t feel so much like being brave, it feels more like doing what I want to do.  It’s nice to think that perhaps bravery is becoming a way of life.  The more I think about it, the more places I choose to see it, especially if I expand the definition to include things like being more self-directed about my time and money, and therefore taking an extra hour out of my work day to go to yoga, and taking control of long-delayed house expenditures and saving up the money to pay for them. That may not be what others call brave, but I’m (bravely?) defining it that way because it all seems to be of a piece.  (See also “take up space” below.)

3. Corollary to #2: Be present in what I have, and balance that with staying open and welcoming miracles. Well, this year has been more about the first part of that, being present in what I have.  I am skeptical and sore about miracles, and I’m okay with that.  I have enjoyed more paintings in the sky, more flowers, more deep breaths, more beautiful faces, more excellent food, more spontaneous pleasures than I have before. Lisa at Privilege wrote something about this yesterday (or so) that resonated: “But most any time I get melancholy I can startle myself into a tiny rapture by paying attention. I find my way forward most often via a conscious waiting for the sadness to pass through, and a parallel close observation of exactly what’s right there.”

4. Write a book. Yes! Yes I am writing a book.  I wrote 25,000 publishable words this year.  I wrote many many more unpublishable words, or words unpublishable in their current order.  But holy crumbs — that’s three really solid, well-footnoted, lucidly laid out chapters, plus most of the interviews done for the fourth.  My co-author has been much busier with other things and therefore less diligent, but I think we’ll have a book by May.  A book I said, a book!  I did not think I could do this.  I did not think this would happen. But it has, and it has because I made it happen.  I took control of my time, and I wrote paragraph after paragraph knowing that these weren’t the right paragraphs but I could only get to the right paragraphs by going through the wrong paragraphs.  I have learned an enormous amount. I have taught others an enormous amount.  I taught myself how to write a book.  I finally feel like I know how to work — after 18 years in the workforce.  I finally understand how to take the next steps, I finally can draw on all this stored up knowledge I’ve been gathering.  I could go on and on about this.  Writing this book this year has been a huge milestone for me, a tremendous step forward.  Hooray for me.

Someone read one of my chapters and asked “Is fiction in your future?”  I have ideas for 3 novels.  This writing stuff is pretty addictive. 

5. Meditate for 10-15 minutes a day at work.  Um no.  This didn’t work out.  I have a deep respect for meditation, and it does great things for me, but I am not open now to making it a regular practice in this way.  I don’t know why, but I recognize that I am not putting any energy into making it happen.

That said, I do a quick review/intention-setting/check-in every morning.  I read about it in a Yoga Journal article which isn’t available online, but the book from which the practice is taken is here.  This practice has had a profound effect on me.  I chose to focus on four intentions in it: forgiveness, compassion, fearlessness and prudence.  My marriage has improved beyond what I could have hoped, and I am certain it is because I am keeping forgiveness and compassion in my brain.  I don’t always practice it perfectly, and Daniel and I had some horrific fights this year, but I am getting beyond some old, bad stuff.  Daniel seems different to me, and maybe he’s got his own practice of some kind of thing going on, but I think the difference is me and my eyes to see him.

Sometime this year, Sister was telling me that her marriage just got itself to a better place, and I thought, “That is simply impossible, I can’t do that, we can’t do that.”  But we have, for now, and I believe it started when I started to do this very simple morning intention practice, which doesn’t even require me to sit up before I get out of bed.

6. Be harder on my body.  This has worked.  I am taking 3-4 yoga classes a week most weeks.  I tried other practices, even running again, but the answer to the limits of yoga was… more yoga!  Practicing alone isn’t the same as being in class with a great teacher.  And practicing several times a week is much more effective at keeping me open than practicing once a week.  I didn’t understand how much I was closing up between classes until I no longer had time to close up.  This is all yoga-speak here, but I had been practicing for almost 15 years without having a good understanding of my midline and how to pull in around it and use it for balance.  I couldn’t access my core very well, or open up my back, and now I can.  I can’t do all the dazzling poses, and that’s okay.  I can get so much more out of basic poses now.

7. Take up space.  This is happening as well, not necessarily because of conscious effort, but because of greater comfort with exercising force in the world in terms of my use of my time and my money — which are the force-making tools that are most readily accessible to me right now.

8. Move to France. In other words, buy more nice underwear.  Yes to that, although it’s been erratic.  I’ve also spent much more on accessories, and less on clothes (maybe — I haven’t done the math and am a bit scared to) this year than in the past and am loving how well it’s worked out.  This post is already overlong, so I won’t go into much detail, but I do feel like I’ve finally nailed down what I want to look like and am sticking to it.  (Short version: Like this — a revelation!, and like this.  Slightly longer version: Tomboy – 1/2 (JCrew/Preppy) + 2x French.)  To say nothing of a huge surge in skincare spending and experimentation.  (As the book writing has become more intense and stressful, I am almost compulsively buying new oils, unguents, and balms.)  It all feels very French to me!

9. Date again. (Daniel — go on dates with Daniel) Um, no.  Not yet.  We had a good run of parties and events throughout December, but I can’t pretend that this has been a success.

10. Let Daniel have his own feelings, even if they make me uncomfortable.  See 5, above.   I am probably not doing better at this, but it seems less pressing.  I am putting less stress and less anxiety on/into our marriage, so perhaps it’s easier to step back and let Daniel feel as he feels.  He just seems so much easier to live with of late, and I’m pretty sure he’s the same as ever, it’s just that I’m not making it harder.  I do find myself trying — often too late — to do things differently when we are having a version of our standard fights.

11.  Give money to Yoga Activist. Yes — as of about 10 days ago.  I got a solicitation email and realized that they had set up an automatic donation system, so I am giving them the bare minimum each month to be a “member.”  This was purely fortuitous, because I was steadfastly ignoring my calendar reminder.

12.  Learn to poach an egg.  I did this very early on, then realized that I prefer fried.

I wish all my dear readers (if I have any left) every merriment, happiness, and celebration.

 

When the universe is in on the joke

(Only frenzied people do three posts in 7 hours.  I get that.)

Daniel and I went to a big lively cocktail party this evening.  The first person we said hello to was a friend we haven’t seen in years.  The first words out of his mouth: “Hey, how many kids do y’all have now?”

Even I, in my utterly crazed state, realize that this is funny.

I drank rather more than was wise at this cocktail party.

Un-everything

I want to un-publish, un-send, un-write, and un-feel all of that last post.  Other people’s happiness makes me sad?  I am ashamed.  I am also ashamed of where I am in my career, and ashamed that I am ashamed.  I want to write my way into a place where I can be sure you think well of me, and not poorly because of what I just wrote.

In short, I am in a giant spiral of freak-out.  Can you imagine what I’d be like if I hadn’t been doing yoga 3 days a week for the last month?  Daniel says he can tell I am in frenzy because of the way I walk from room to room (which makes it very hard to walk normally in his presence.  Monty Python’s ministry of silly walks comes to mind, but I’m too frenzied to pause to find the link.)

I will get through this.  The things that are really stressing me out are good things.  Nothing bad is happening to me or to anyone I love — in fact, there’s a surfeit of good things.  I’m just finding it challenging to manage the details of those good things.  I am starting to feel tugs of shame for not being able to manage the details of the good things, but that’s just gratuitous spinning into the freak-out, and I will resist.  I will find my center again.  I am grateful for this space and for your patience while I do that.

Trying to stand tall in a stiff wind

Warning: This is one of those yucky inside-my-mind posts in which I reveal my worst and smallest self.  I’m not erasing it because of my feelings about blogging honestly, but I’m not feeling good about it.  I ought not be blogging at work, but I can either think about this blog post and not work, or write this blog post and not work, and maybe if I do the latter, I can salvage more of the afternoon.

So… on Friday P, the woman I wrote about in this post,  delivered a lovely, perfect baby.  I started my career as a writer, wish I wrote more, and am struggling terribly to write a book that I believe will be widely ignored.  P’s first book won a major award.  I work on policy issues that I hope may make a difference.  She works on policy issues and her work has quite demonstrably saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives.  When Daniel and I struggled to become pregnant, he resisted strongly because of his age — “I don’t want to be driving carpool when I’m 70!” he would say.  Her husband is roughly Daniel’s age, and although he’s not the sort to drive carpool, could be doing so at age 70 because he just couldn’t tell his wife no when she wanted a second child. 

I know that comparisons are rotten, but boy oh boy, the divergence here is challenging, very challenging indeed.  Every point at which I feel vulnerable, she looks very very strong — every single one.  I’m struggling.  I wish I weren’t, but I am.  I thought I was doing okay.  I had a good reckoning with myself this afternoon on the way to one of my sanity-saving lunchtime yoga classes.  I said to myself, “Okay, P’s life is not going to change to suit your emotional needs.  The only thing you can do is make your own life better.  You are in charge of that.  If you are bummed about writing, well, act.  If you want to write a great book, then make that happen.  That’s your field of action, so act.”

That’s great advice, right? And I gave myself other great advice too, this weekend and today, when I was sliding toward despair.  I thought, pitifully, “I don’t know where to start.”  And I answered myself: “Start from where you are.”  So Zen!  So meditative! So correct!

Then, just a few minutes ago, one of my closest friends just told me via email that his wife will have their 3rd child late this year.  (One of my other closest friends will have her second in the fall.  Thus, of the four friends I hold dearest in the universe, half are expecting.  All have or will have more than one child.) I expected this news, because I’d seen my friend and his wife a few months ago and thought something was up.  But my friend was lamenting how hard it is to get any work done, and how he’s trying to get a burst of writing completed before the new baby comes. 

And that is a hell of a stiff wind in which to keep my steady footing, dear readers.  Why?  Because I have neither the family I had dreamed of (although my family is a dream… Milo especially lately, and Daniel and I are getting there — terrible quarrels but some valuable reconciliations) nor the career I had hoped.  P looks to me to have both, which is to say, to have everything.  My dear friend has very clearly made a tradeoff, choking off some professional ambitions in order to have a robust family life in which he is very, very engaged, so he has one but not the other.  I feel like I’ve lost on both counts.  I can’t look at my career and say, “I’m am doing so well here, and it takes so much energy.  I couldn’t be such an ass-kicker, I couldn’t be flourishing so much here if I had the family I thought I would have, so it’s balanced out.”

That’s what’s got me wrapped around the axle here — the feeling that I’ve fallen short on both home and work fronts.  One I can’t do anything about at all.  The other I ostensibly should be able to correct, but just at the moment I’m feeling powerless to do so.  Work feels like a dead-end, a bog, a hole I can’t lift myself out of. 

It seemed better, when I started this post, to let the feelings of sadness and inadequacy out, to give them this semi-public airing.  I am ashamed to feel this way.  I have so much to be grateful for.  I had promised God I wouldn’t do this anymore.  (Long story — last week Milo was playing in such a way that he could easily, easily have been hit and killed by a car.  I wasn’t paying close enough attention.  I could have lost Milo, and it would have been my fault.  I thanked God vigorously that this didn’t happen, and told God that it was very clear to me that He had not forgotten or abandoned me, but was in fact taking excellent care of me.)

So this is just me being sad and small and ashamed, and wishing I could be big and generous — not just to others but even to my sad and small self.   My astrological sign (which I’m not supposed to care about) is Libra, and I am forever trying to balance the scales in situations in which it’s not at all appropriate or kind to myself or others.  Daniel is ferocious in trying to extirpate this bad habit of mine, which makes me even more ashamed and which makes it harder to work it out and eventually let go of it.  So I turn to my patient and trusted readers.  I am sorry, I am sad, I am ashamed.

Never out of reach of a sucker punch

Oh my goodness.  I had just been observing how beautifully and mercifully time was doing its work of easing my pain about the baby I never had.  I still have odd fantasies about becoming pregnant, but I also have moments of thinking, “I’m glad there’s just one.”  And then they are followed by dreams (like last night’s) in which I am praying again for some intervention that brings me a baby.  But these are like the gentle rocking of waves, the hum of the refrigerator in the background.  Not disruptive or saddening, just static in the background.

And then, five minutes ago, Daniel came home and told me that our friend P is pregnant, again.  P is three days older than I am — we’re both 41;  her husband, R, is two years younger than Daniel, both much older than their excellent wives.  (I’m too wrecked to give them proper blog-o-nyms.)  P and R conceived their first child just after Daniel and I started our sad, expensive, wrenching, immiserating and futile quest to have a second.  P got pregnant before we knew it would be so hard, but I had glimmers that it might be.  I cried then, too, when I heard of her first pregnancy; and I remember visiting their first baby a day or two after yet another negative pregnancy test, and steeling myself to be very good and very happy.

I have, I confess, borne a slight, ugly, and unjustifiable grudge against P and R for having their first baby.  P is wildly, extravagantly successful in her field, as is R.  She and R have very serious, important, mind-engaging jobs, at which they work extremely hard and extremely long hours.  I cloaked my hateful jealousy at how easily and happily they had conceived their first baby by thinking, “Well, but they don’t seem to spend much time with that dear baby.”

So I’m already disposed to be bitter and vile.  And now… now they are having another.  And I feel like an unhappy outlier, like one disfavored by fortune, for having only one.  (I know I’m not. I’m really not. I’m healthy, solvent, strong, sane, safe.  I know where my next meal, next house payment, next paycheck is coming from.  My child has a full belly and a warm coat and is happy.  My husband is healthy and lives with us, not on an army base far away, or in another city to earn a living and send remittances.  And he was uncharacteristically kind and generous about my jolt this evening.  I am one of the luckiest people who ever lived.  I know that.  I just don’t taste it right at the moment.)  Even crazy-busy hyper-successful people who spend lots of time away from their first baby have another one.  Very few people choose to have only one.  It makes what happened to me seem even more like an aberration.  It seems unfair, even though fairness is no more relevant to this situation than the color purple or the sound of a French horn.  But this is my irrational thought: in a rational allocation of babies, that baby should have been mine.

I keep a close mental accounting of people who have only one.  I surround myself with them, mentally — not actually.  P was one of those people.  And now she’s not.  And it hurts.  I thought I was well beyond this kind of hurt, the feeling like there’s a profound electrical imbalance, a literal shock, in my cells.  Beyond these tears, beyond this confusion and ugliness and fruitless calibration and calculation of who is a better parent and who deserves more children and who doesn’t.  And who is lucky and who isn’t.  I did I did I did think I was well out of it.

Milo, blessedly, was an angel tonight.  He didn’t know I was upset.  He called me upstairs and said, “Mommy I am glad I have you.”  I am glad I have him.  He is my reality.  P and R have their reality, and bless them and bless their first baby and their second and any other babies that come their way (right?  Why not?  F*ck it, let them have 3, 4).   And now perhaps my prayer, other than the prayer for their beautiful second child’s health and happiness, is that the intervals between sucker punches get ever longer.

Twelve intentions, goals, dreams for this year, part 1

On Thursday, I took my father to buy a gun.

If only the facts lived up to that dramatic opening!  My father is a long-time hunter and gun owner.  The most venerable gun store in my old hometown (I went to elementary school with the owner’s daughters) called my father a few weeks ago to tell him that a rare pistol had come in, and offered to hold it for him.  My father had knee replacement surgery in mid-December and can’t drive yet, so I took him to the gun store and stayed in his truck, noodling around on my iPhone, while he waited for the background check.

And I read this, which is also in the print version of today’s New York Times.  It’s another hero fertility narrative, in which her “own steely resolve” and science give, or more accurately, earn, the author a much-longed for, fought for, second child, and then well-timed and sincere prayers at a fertility temple in the pristine and mysterious East, earn the author an unexpected, 1000-to-1 third child.

I hate this narrative.  I hate this narrative so much that I have to go back into it armed with my father’s gun.  My resolve was less than steely, my determination less than complete, my prayers to the stern and exacting Hebrew God mistimed or mangled.  I hate this narrative because, as nice as this author is, she’s saying “I did the right things, and I stuck it out, and I won, and I got a miracle, and I deserved it.”  And that brings up all the doubts about my own non-win.

So, out of this, and the fight in my head with this author for the next day or so, came my first resolution or determination or intention, which I scribbled down on the plane as we flew home the next day:

1. Don’t fight lucky strangers.  Don’t put the energy into marshaling counter-arguments, or identifying tropes, or pointing out that successful fertility stories are the Horatio Alger narratives of our day/class/gender.  She doesn’t know what I know about failure, and I don’t know what she knows about her own failures and stories and needs and compromises.  Let it go.  Don’t let stories like this move me into my exhausting and sad practice of mental accounting: I have only one child, but I have a more interesting husband. I have only one child, but I have wonderful parents who I appreciate more each day…  As they say in Daniel’s family, “It doesn’t pay.”

But then, as happens so often, writing takes me places I didn’t know I needed to go.  So, a bit later, I wrote:

2. Continue to be brave.  I don’t think of myself as brave, and as I wrote those very words, I started to tear up.  Bravery doesn’t go with failure.  I wasn’t brave enough to do everything and go into frightening debt and continue to strain our marriage in the belief that the new baby would make it all okay.  Now that Daniel and I are well again, I think we could have withstood it, the risk, the money, but at the time, it was clear to me that we couldn’t.  I don’t know whether I was right then, or am right now — one never does know.  But anyway, as I was writing the notes for this post on the plane, I realized that I failed and I was brave, and this blog is a testament to that. This blog, like so many other wonderful and beautiful blogs (Nicole’s, my new friend in France’s, my fairy blog-mother Belette’s, Neighbor’s) is the story of me deciding to move ahead and face scary things after loss and write my way deeper in, and then through, and then out, and then in again (dammit).

And I was brave in trying to have another baby.  I was very brave.  And I failed anyway, and then I had to be brave all over again.

In 2012, I will need to be brave in different ways, about work and life and voraciousness (to be described in part 2 of my list), and I may fail.  I failed before.  But that’s okay.  Safety is getting less satisfying.

So I sketched out that thought on the plane, and wrote a few more goals and then the tears really started when I wrote:

3. Corollary to #2: Be present in what I have, and balance that with staying open and welcoming miracles.  And this is what really makes me cry, and why I can’t let go of that hero narrative as much as I want to.  I want to shut the door to miracles, but not quite as much as I want to leave the door open for them.  I cannot imagine any circumstances by which I have another child by biology or adoption.  At this moment, such a thing would entail me not being married to Daniel, and I have already chosen Daniel over another child.  But there are miracles and things unforeseen.  I will always have room in my heart for another child, so if one comes to me, in a way that I can’t see now, through some impossibility, I will receive that child.  That’s my intention.  I intend to stay open for a miracle.

But another impulse that’s not quite contradictory is equally strong: I will let the intention do all the work.  I will wish and forget.  I will leave the light on, and go about my business.  I will be completely present for what I have.

At the time that I wrote that corollary, it seemed very powerful.  I didn’t remember, in my cramped middle airplane seat, of my prior openness to miracles and prayer.  I was so caught up in the yearning, in the intoxication of hope, in the belief, which pieces like the one in the New York Times feed, which is the engine that powers Oprah magazine, that an earnest and sincere and deeply deeply felt wish for a good thing will have its own power and make things happen.  Now I am feeling a little hard, a little sore, a little skeptical.  I’m leaving the light on with a shrug and a twisted mouth.   But that’s okay.  It makes my commitment to what I have stronger.

 And now, off to yoga.