Timestamp in the 'Rona of 2020

Greens, champagne, the smell of the turkey cooking, chopping things, assembling things, texts flying back and forth, a long drink on the front porch with a love, listening to Patty in concert while I cook, the discomfort of the elastic behind my ear from the mask I have to wear as I cook because of the Covid exposure last weekend, the idea of last times playing in my mind constantly, the scritch of present worries that natter incessantly, the reality that this is not the Thanksgiving that I wanted, the reality that holidays are heavy boots of loss, the wish for joy, the joy of my kids, the brush up against D leaving for school next year, the idea of things (time, feelings) being stretched like a Stretch Armstrong forward and back the tug and pull and tug and pull. What is it to live in joy? The gratitude of nine years of health, the gratitude of friends who text to say hello, the weird guilt when I forget. The reality that sometimes digging around in your psyche renders things that take awhile to hurdle. And then there are those times when you think you've scaled a pretty significant mountain only to slide back down. It's in the practice, in the work, the application. You never know if it's going to work until you make it operational and have to stay in, stay in. I miss my people, I miss having people in that way. There is a heaviness when someone you love deeply (your child) is angry with you. Listening to Patty sing Forgiveness and I think there is no more true or perfect song. Stream of consciousness writing, sometimes it's the only way it's coming these days. I miss writing. The compass foot set.  John Donne back from the days. Oy. 47 minutes to go on the turkey, I miss those strange sounds of football announcers calling that feel startling and calming at the same time.  Too warm for a fire tonight, the rain has been all day. My heart is heavy with the missing but also with the love. And that's a thanksgiving all it's own. Gratitude not written on a # or cup. Traversing, coming back, ending where I've begun. 

Timestamp.

I comment to her that the coffee from the new coffee maker doesn't taste as good and she says something about it maybe being because it's not, "what is it called?" "Seasoned?" I reply and we both crack up at the idea that our grody old coffee maker had seasoning. I love these moments with her where she's so teenager and so becoming.

He sits on my bed and tells me about the difference in the tests,  tucking his long man feet under the sheets. He smiles and we talk about how things will be fine even in this strange time and then he leaves to go to bed and I am overcome with the thought that in a year he will be gone. This is not a new feeling and  I know how to breathe through it but it engulfs me and I wear it on my skin for the next three days even though I push the thought aside and aside and aside.

We lump into my bed less frequently now but he comes in to talk and rest his head and she sidles in and soon enough we are in a tickle fight like so many before. She always gets the better end of the attention stick in these moments, a fierce tickler and relentless. He lets her have those moments, laughing and cheering her/me/her/me on. They are bonded beyond, all of these miles and the twisty flips and they've walked it together. That familiarity of shared experience and the plentitude of love from all sides. Consonant, good. We finally stop and just spend a moment all breathing and smiling before I ask one too many times for them to go to bed. We all linger, here and now. It won't be forever.

River

(For Noadiah, whose wisdom is gold)

Been traveling these wide roads for so long
My heart's been far from you
Ten-thousand miles gone

Oh, I wanna come near and give ya
Every part of me
But there's blood on my hands
And my lips aren't clean

In my darkness I remember
Momma's words reoccur to me
"Surrender to the good Lord
And he'll wipe your slate clean"

Take me to your river
I wanna go
Oh, go on
Take me to your river
I wanna know  --River, Leon Bridges.

Lines across the page, pen and paint dipping back and forth to ferry color in bits, I sat letting my mind wander through so many things while listening to Leon Bridges' song River on repeat. It's been a grey day full of that thrust that wants to keep things moving forward, reaching, but the tug of the grey is strong and the deep soul of this song will not let my mind rest. I've been thinking about the river all day, about friends who will observe Yom Kippur tomorrow, about the cleansing and healing power of gathering up shame and guilt and attendant sadness and casting it upon the water so it can fan out and away. Tonight over dinner, friends and I were talking about the ritual of bread taking in the quality of those emotions and, in turn, nourishing the aquatic life beneath, the movement of that energy from harmful to nutritive. There is a surrender to the water, be it nightly as I shower or sitting beside the ocean listening to her crash and call. My nightly showering ritual started in a ramshackle college dorm in Rome, Italy where I was living for the summer, two short months after Hunter died. My grief was unmanageable and unmooring, stuffed down by copious wine and a distancing from myself that had gone into overdrive with my dad's death four years before. Nightly showering was a way to strip off the day before I crawled into the twin bed in my lonely room and let tears stream into my ears while I stared at the ceiling. So many years later and in the weeks before I got married, I stood on the shore of Whidby Island and held hands with my girlfriends as they all wished their peace for me before I threw myself into the water of the Sound. I wanted that water to wash me anew, a clearing between what was and what would be. Tonight in the shower I was thinking how beautiful it would feel to be baptized now, at this age, not so much into the realm of the church, but into the light of joy. To receive the intention, to be held and plunged back, to come up for air in the shattered sunlight, cleansed. There is something I crave about that feeling. Perhaps it's surrender. My chest draws toward it. My heart has a need.

Listening to Leon Bridges reminds me that we are most resistant to coming to peace when we feel our most unworthy, when we have blood on our hands and our lips aren't clean. We want to put the pain down, to let the sins and feelings flow away but we feel too broken to ask. And this is precisely why these rituals exist, to allow us to release the shame and the shit and the static that keeps us from one another and from moving forward in our lives. My friend Noadiah told me that his beloved minister once said "Prayers aren't being answered? Well, who are you still mad at?" When he said this, a face lept to my mind as clear as day, boom. There are others, but this is the mad that is sticking the Universe in a loop for me. And it's my own atonement to do, not because I have wronged this person, but because I have wronged myself in holding on to so much anger. 

It's humbling and messy and I'm making my list of things I want to think through as I walk to sit by the water and be present to this idea of giving some of this a rest.

Join me.

At 16, We Exhale

Sixteen came and went. None of the usual fanfare, no car with a large bow parked in the drive, no huge surprise party BBQ designed to usher my sweet boy across the threshold of not-driving to driving. He can't technically drive yet, so maybe that's why this celebration felt muted and less elated than others. Maybe that celebration is one still to come.

But fifteen had been a year of holding breath. It started a few months before his birthday, his long lean frame and easy smile at times a startling reminder of Hunter, basketball held loosely under his arm at his side, his easy wave in the summer sunlight sending me right back to the day I last saw my brother in the rearview mirror on my way out of town. Fifteen was a year of a tension that sat at the back of my skull, low where the head meets the neck, an alertness of danger. Danger might come in the form of worry about how D was doing at school, whether he was happy or connected to friends and family, how he was feeling in this world of what feels like constant tension and would extend to a broader worry about the world and his place in it. This was all my tension, not his. "What if something happens to him?" my mind would ask as inopportune times of watching he and his friends play ball or when he'd walk away from the car in the morning. I'd find myself in frequent tears. I knew that my flood of emotions was unusual. It seemed at one point completely irrational and at another completely normal. There were a few times it bordered on a panic attack. Gratefully, I have good friends whose wisdom led me through those scared moments.

My therapist and I have talked a lot about the long ripple of trauma in life. When she first mentioned that losing my brother constituted trauma, I pushed back hard, "People have had horrible things happen to them, Darleen. This is life, this just happens." But she kept with it, explaining how trauma works, how my defining other people's trauma as "Big T" and mine as "Little t" was fine, but it was still trauma that required me to work through, process and come to a place of understanding the loss. I was reminded of Viktor Frankl's idea that pain has the property of gas let into a vessel, that no matter the amount of gas, it will fill the entire vessel. Trauma has these properties, it seems, and can linger longer than anyone ever realizes. You can work through it, you can observe it when it comes up and see it for what it is and, depending on where you are in your work, you can work on not allowing it to bring fear and anxiety into your every day that limits your living. In my case it was subtle and then it wasn't. My love and deepest respect to people who fight this every day.

This morning I was listening to an NPR piece on survivors of gun violence and the things that pop up in their lives. One woman interviewed noted that when her daughter contracted a disease she had to work through deep feelings of fear of losing her. That provoked this little blog post. One person's story sometimes reaches out to another to make them feel less alone.

There are a million complexities to losing a sibling, the shift of parent and child relationships, the ongoing loss felt in sibling relationships, the episodic and startlingly real feelings of recurrence and remembrance that startle the living and drive intense emotions. All during that 15th year, I would talk to David about those feelings, not so much to let him know that I was terrified something would happen to him (which I did, honestly, because I was) but because he has a gift for seeing the patterns and behaviors that exist around him. I wanted him to understand what was happening. And, in truth, he will know and love many people in his life who live with lingering trauma. We all do. We all need to know.

On the morning of his 16th birthday, I asked David what it felt like to be finally 16. "Pretty much the same," he said. And, after we'd been driving for a bit, he turned and asked me what it felt like for me. "It feels like exhaling, buddy. It feels like everything is going to be ok."

And it will be.
It will be.
Come what may.

(Happiest 16th to my beautiful son. 7/8)
/The book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkolk has been a real gift./

Rechercher - and the pink

This piece was originally written in 2014, only to be found while poking around in my drafts folder for something else. The week I’m painting my lawn furniture pink. TY, Universe, for the reminder.
*********

I sit at the border of the practical and the whimsical, cross-legged on the ground of practical and peering ever so gingerly over to the other side. This comes from a lifetime of thinking about practical things, having been raised by a mother who made practicality a hobby. This seeps into everything; choices from clothing to cars, where to vacation, where to live, what I purchase. I'm whimsical with things I do for others, but never with myself and often not with my children.

It's dry and parched sometimes on this side of the line, constraining and desolate.

I haven't always been this way. I was the kid who was obsessed with rainbows and horses and designing things, the kid who had ideas about things that were outrageous and certainly not practical. When I let her, that kid sits at the computer with her daughter and sides with the eight year old wants the tie dye beanbags instead of the more practical neutral cotton ones. That kid pokes the adult me in the ribs when I shy away from pink. That kid whispers in my ear "she's only eight once, let her heart be free" as she moves the cursor and clicks "complete order" on two wildly colored monstrosities that will take up half of her room. I can see here there, listening to music, hanging out with friends, basking in a space that has her personal mark on it. It's saying "yes" more than saying "no". It's actually saying "why the fuck not?" instead of "I shouldn't".

"Yes" over "no". Processing the "no" and why the "no" is always the first response. Meditating on joy over practicality. Realizing that this hemmed in way of thinking and being has kept me at about 20% of my creative capacity.

In early June, I bought three scrubby little aloe plants on a whim while shopping at IKEA. Mostly because I liked the pots next to them. Mostly because I thought I needed a little color for my window sill. Maybe because aloe plants reminded me of breaking off the spiky, green arms to rub over cuts and scrapes as a child, the plant's healing power working magic in the hot Oklahoma summertime. Weeks later, I broke the black plastic pots away from the plants' soil-encrusted roots to find what seemed like miles and miles of roots wrapped around the base. The scrubbiness of the plants completely due to the constraint of what was going on beneath in the constricted and root bound weave below. I moved my fingers back and forth, loosening the roots, breaking them so they could regenerate and grow, packing around them nutritious soil with room to breathe. Feed the root, the plant will flourish. Sometimes things have to be broken in order to be rebuilt again anew.

To break, to bend.

It starts with a text to a dear friend, that nattering anxiety and worry you’ve been wrapped in all week, this week, the week of holidays and loneliness and estrangement tipping off a rush of worry about people you love. It’s a simple, frustrated text that he quickly intuits where you are. “I’m going to leave the door open and put a bottle of wine on the coffee table. Curl up on the couch and I’ll be down to talk in 20.” And moments like these are the test, you who are embarrassed by your neediness, not wanting to be a burden, not really wanting to admit that you need some love and a good talk and just a moment. But you go, because that act in and of itself is a bravery, and on the way out the door you grab the wishbone that has been sitting on your windowsill. “A wish in wait” you call them, ready for times like these.

Fast forward to a crisp, chilly afternoon with an azure sky and a smoking fire pit. You are sitting outside with another dear friend, glass of champagne in hand, escaping what can only be described as the smelliest fish dish in the world. You have been invited to her family’s small gathering, her welcoming heart opening another spot for you. It’s a timid acceptance of the invitation that leaves you wondering why you keep doing this, the resisting, when there are people to love and friendship and sisterhood with people who know your spirit.

Smelly fish and blue skies turn into singing “Proud Mary” and “Easy” and drinking cheap wine at karaoke with new, lovely, gorgeous friends and their friends whom you’ve never met, the invitation that was the hardest to say yes to (sober-ish karaoke at 7:30p? Um, ok...), but the greatest yes because this friend knows the struggle of finding a place in a city of odd circles and she’s very intentionally trying to make that change for you. And this is an act of caring that you haven’t felt in a really long time, not because it’s not ever been done, but because you’ve been so reluctant to accept it.

In truth, we are at our best and worst sometimes in these moments of acceptance, the urge to mask our own needs by wanting to be helper but not the one in need. The feelings that sit under that discomfort—embarrassment, shame, humiliation, abandonment, rejection, loneliness, loss, hurt, worth— are real and deep, their roots are so firmly planted that unearthing them feels like the ground underneath would give way. Some of us, most of us, are pack animals. We need our people, a place to feel protected and be productive, a group in which to make and sustain a life. And in creating that belonging for others, you have to accept it for yourself.

You sit on the couch looking into your friend’s eyes, having explained the simple rule of the wishbone (as you play it): each person makes a wish for the other and pulls on behalf of that wish coming true. “One-two-three...” and the snap comes away with your friend holding the winning piece. “Oh, good!” he smiles, “that’s going to be a good one.”

And you know you can’t ask because it won’t come true.

And you know that every good thing that happens to you in the future will be sweetened by wondering if this is the grace he gave you in that wish.

And you are so grateful.

This is the Sea

Crouched on the dusty floor of my new studio, light streaming through the huge casement windows, I took a deep breath and lifted the first plastic lid off the first randomly selected box. I'd brought all of the archives into this new space, the boxes and bins of my college and high school history kept for years at my childhood home, my compulsion to keep scraps of notes and cards and pictures and random fragments of my life come to roost in a city so very far away from the ones where I was from. I'd decided that it was finally time to sort and parse, to try to make sense and to try to remember and to be in what was my history at that time as I had recorded it through pieces.

The first piece of paper held my best friend's signature scrawl, the words of a song that sang in our souls at the time, nailing me between the eyes.

Damnit. 

I walked over and dialed up the Waterboys This is the Sea on my iphone and let the music wash over me.

These things you keep
You'd better throw them away
You wanna turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
Once you were tethered
Well now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea!

One verse in and the irony of standing in the middle of this excavation hit me.

Now if you're feelin' weary
If you've been alone too long
Maybe you've been suffering from
A few too many
Plans that have gone wrong
And you're trying to remember
How fine your life used to be
Running around banging your drum
Like it's 1973
Well that was the river
This is the sea!
Wooo!

Verse two and I couldn't read the page for my tears.

Now you say you've got trouble
You say you've got pain
You say've got nothing left to believe in
Nothing to hold on to
Nothing to trust
Nothing but chains
You're scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
Scouring your conscience
Raking through your memories
But that was the river
This is the sea yeah!

Three and my heart broke open.

Because that's really what this excavating was about, the finding, the sensemaking, the retracing steps and remembering who, what and why. Recounting, recontexualizing, renaming what has been lost and forgotten and erased and left behind over the countless miles. The who I had been back then made me the woman I am today.  

Two inches down and I found an envelope containing melted coins from my brother Hunter's car wreck.

Another layer and I found a cache of old love notes.

Another brought a rough letter from my mom.

Another offered hilarious cards from friends sent in the days before texting and email and iphones.

Hot, tired from the sorting and feeling, I was about to close everything up when I looked over to see that unmistakable handwriting once again, this time written across the entire swath of the envelope headed with PLEASE READ THIS.

oof.

My heart went zooming back to 1990, standing in my summer sublet, staring at this envelope from my clever-as-hell best friend. Months earlier, we had a bitter break, one so deep and severe that it felt it would be impossible to overcome. I refused her calls and wrote Return to Sender on every card even as they continued to show up. I was hurt and that hurt felt so huge that I had to throw gasoline on it, light it up and take it all down, even if it meant losing the most important person in my life. 

But she kept at it until one day this letter showed up with her message on the outside, her knowing damn well that I would be powerless not to read it, the message explaining that she refused to give up, that she was standing for me and for our friendship. That she wasn't going anywhere, for life. 

It also taught me a lot about myself: that friendship and loyalty are not light things for me, that maybe I expect too much or don't communicate clearly enough, that sometimes my favorite flamethrower is on deck with trigger finger poised. But also that I am there to extend the olive branch to work it out, show up, be there willing just as she was for me. 

I have never forgotten that act of love, just as I have never forgotten her patience and willingness to put herself out there again and again to rescue something that, decades later, is deeply precious to us both. That day, and the miles with her before and after, taught me about trust, what is earned, what friendship means, about not giving up. That people stay. 

These things you keep. Eternally grateful. Love you, sister.