Recently I was found.
An old dear friend reached out to me from across the wide expanse of years. We were young and dumb together, he and I. We had had many adventures–real, crazy adventures and wild emotional ones too. But that was long ago and we haven’t talked in years. We had grown up, found love, formed homes, started families. Life got busy and we drifted apart.
During the years when we were close, our relationship had been an anchor. We passed long letters back and forth over sea and land. He was in the Navy, I was teaching in Texas. Those letters kept me afloat during two very difficult years when I was far away from home, far away from love, far away from even myself. He kept me grounded, kept me reading, kept me thinking, kept me breathing. We talked about everything. We often disagreed. But no matter how spirited the debate, he saw me, really saw me for who I was, and adored me for all my imperfections. He was the first person who loved me who didn’t minimize my flaws. That is powerful love.
One New Years Eve, over 15 years ago, in a city hundreds of miles from where either of us lived he found me, sought me out to slip his arms through mine. As I lay my head on his shoulder and told him secretes, I knew that I would love him forever, that he would always be dear to me. Always.
At one point in the height of being young and dumb we had a bitter falling out. I can’t remember now any of the details or the circumstances. But I do remember the sadness, the loneliness of realizing that something profound had shifted in my life, of feeling a veil had been lifted and that I was left with life, stripped bare. Without him. I ached intensely. I was angry for I was sure that I would love him always but this did not feel like love. We stopped talking for what felt like a lifetime. The silence was so loud.
After a while though, no matter how intensely I felt the loss of him, I found that I could sit with the memories of our friendship, sit with them without anger at his betrayal. I remembered all the ways he saw me, all the ways he knew me, cherished me, even if he couldn’t understand me, even if he no longer could appreciate me. And it became clear to me that no matter how big or intense the hurt, the love I had for him was big enough–big enough to hold it. Big enough to overshadow it. Big enough to balance it. Big enough to bless it. Big enough to let it be. Because I had been seen. He saw me.
By the time his letter of apology came in the mail, by the time he found me again there was nothing but love left in my heart.
Our relationship changed after that. It would change many times. Not for the worse or even for the better. It just was, as we were, growing up. There were hurts. There was laughter. One day I sat on a park bench with him in New Orleans. I was teasing him about some girl he was dating, some girl he would later marry but the edge in my voice betrayed me. I looked down at my shoes, maybe a little embarrassed. “I just want you to be happy” I said to him. “Do you?” he challenged me in the way that only he could. “Do you really? Or do you just want me to be yours?” I was, like I often was around him,dumb struck. I just kept looking at my shoes.
But later that night I sat in a rocking chair on my friends porch in the Garden District rocking myself and looking up at the big old moon. “Happy” I whispered to the warm Louisiana wind. “Happy”. I sent my wish out for him. And for the first time I took into my heart the reality that love does not mean attachment and love often means walking away, setting boundaries, saying goodbye.
Of course it wasn’t really goodbye. Because love kept bringing us back in different ways. There were a few Sunday mornings when as I lay in bed with Juan, watching the political talks shows the phone would ring. He was watching too. Or he had news. About a clerkship. About a girl. About a death. He came to my wedding, driving through the rain from Manhattan. As he stood there with the woman who would be his wife he looked at me, and I looked at him and we both smiled–for he saw me, he saw me exactly for what I was. Happy. Messy, imperfect but happy. And it brought him joy.
But life is a busy thing. Careers, children, houses that are too big, budgets that are too small. We no longer had time for penning long letters. Sunday mornings were full of chores, and work. There is a Christmas card, maybe two and then silence. But this time the silence came so gradually I didn’t even hear it. Its been at least 5 years since our last communication–It was around the birth of his son. I sent a congratulations. He sent a thank you note. And then it was quiet.
But he found me.
Truth is he always does.
And he found me at the perfect time.
At a time when I needed to remember that love, true fearless love, is big enough to hold any hurt, any betrayal. That in the end love is always bigger. That forgiveness is but an affirmation that love is more important, mightier, stronger. He walked back into my life exactly at a time when I needed to remember that fearless love changes, morphs and may appear to retreat but never really dies. That love is not equal to attachment but that love always finds you when you need it most.
He is coming this way, my dear old friend. Passing through town this month. And he says he wants to see me. He always did see me. And when he does I will slip my arms round his waist and lay my head on his shoulder for a moment and see him too.
Last night I sat with a powerful woman drinking coffee in an anonymous strip mall. It could have been anywhere in America but it was halfway between where she and I were. A place to meet. And I we sat and talked she told me stories and I remembered some of mine.
I remembered being pregnant with Max. I remembered how tired I was, how much work it was just to be. How the simple act of walking from one place to the other would require me to rest, put my feet up, retreat. I remembered how on one hand I was doing nothing to actually grow this child and yet how I was doing everything to grow him. How this very creative act left me with no energy for anything else and yet…how it felt so strangely not me.
I remembered the not knowing, the fear, the waiting. I remembered the feeling that the end would never come or that rather I had no idea what the end would actually be like. How would I be as a mother? What would this child be like? What would it be like to cradle, nurse, nurture this child? How would it impact me as a woman? How would it impact my marriage? The answers to these questions were imminent but nevertheless hidden, unknowable, unfathomable.
I was changing before my very eyes, but at the same time I couldn’t see how. It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once.
I was changing before everyone else’s eyes and friends and strangers couldn’t help but comment on the changes. The shape of my belly, the look in my eyes, the thickness of my hair. They all saw the changes but we all acknowledged these changes to be temporary. I had no idea what would come next. How life would be forever changed by this journey I was on.
I remembered the day that I sat in the airport and thought my water had broken. I called the midwife from my cell phone trying to keep calm. I was only 5 and 1/2 months along. She was calm and cool even as she told me the news. It could have been my water…But it could also equally have been a simple, small, harmless infection. I asked her what I should do–Should I get to the emergency room? Rush somewhere to save my baby? She said, “No”. There was no use in rushing. If my water had broken there would have been no saving. There was nothing to do but get on the plane and go home and sleep, hope that labor would not come. In the morning they would check me. A good outcome was all in the hands of faith–out of my control.
Pregnancy–this metaphor has sat heavy on my mind as I think here I am, pregnant again. Not with a child, but with a new life. I am in the words of my dear friend drinking her latte, “pregnant with myself”, pregnant with this next phase of my journey. I am pregnant with a life I cannot see, I cannot touch though I feel it stir inside me now and again. I wonder about it but now its out of my hands, mostly. I try to picture what it will look like, what it will feel like to hold this life in my hands and I know that there is no way I can imagine it, no matter how hard I try. I might as well just rest with my feet up for the process of getting to here has exhausted me so. I am doing nothing and yet I am tired. I am so tired. I have no energy left for anything else. Not for writing or playing my guitar or even gardening today. I am just so tired from the act of creating myself anew.
I think tonight about how so many generations of women spent their whole lives in the cycle of pregnancy, birth and the celebration of new life. I realize that now I am not that different, that none of us are. And while birth control or choices about family size have changed the physical realities of pregnancy, if we are honest we are in a constant cycle if only metaphorically–pregnant with possibilities and dreams, birthing of one’s self, creativity, and celebrating a new life, new growth, new beginning. Of becoming new again.
Ten years ago I made my first trip to Oaxaca, a married gringa heading south to meet the family for the very first time. Juan was heading home for the first time in over 10 years, bringing a bride. From the minute I walked through the door of his mothers tiny house in the foothills, I felt I had come home–a home I never knew I had, a home that was waiting for me for almost 30 years.
I was raised Irish Catholic–practically 100%. I was born Margaret Ann Casey. I went to a Jesuit college. I have cops in the family. I can actually do the jig. I am a stereotype. Classic Irish American girl.
When Juan and I met and fell in love he was worried about being swallowed up by us Caseys. We are here. We are loud. We have crazy traditions which we will shove down your throat. We are Irish Americans dammit. Proud.
I loved him and I wanted our life together to be equal. I made an effort to bring the Mexican into my life. I pledged him we would be an Irish-Mexican-American home. I made it my mission not to let his culture be sidelined.
But from the minute I crossed the threshold and embraced his mama, my suegracita, it was no effort. It was natural. It was breathing. I was a gringita by blood but Mexicana by love. Even my suspcious father in law had to admit it. I adopted the culture as easily as I breathed in the clean country air.
A feminist, I had always struggled with the patriarchal church of my youth. But in Oaxaca, I found a community of mostly women, devoted to la virgincita, the mother of all of Mexico, of all of us. I came home to my faith in this culture surrounded by tiny older women kneeling and lighting candles and asking another woman for help, believing in magic and miracles. As a feminist and a Catholic it suddenly all made sense. Home.
I came home to real cooking as I learned to use a molcojete to mash up tomatoes, grind chiles and make salsa (blenders are for chumps people). My love for spice and chocolate found voice in true Oaxacan mole cooked over an open fire all night long, stirred by women taking turns at the community fire, telling the stories of their lives–comadreando under the stars. This was the way my heart told me to cook. This felt like home to me.
From my first Dia de los Muertos where I helped my sister in law decorated her beloved daughters grave, while mariachis sang and a street vendor wandered through the cemetery selling fried dough and families set out picnics by the graves, I embraced the traditions of remembrance that seemed to come from my ancestors too. It made so much sense to me. It was a tradition that I knew must be mine. Had always been mine. Would always be mine. Communal grief poured out. Acknowledgment that we never get over the loss of someone we love–we just change and move on. This was the way I feel I always knew it must be done. To never forget. To love and laugh.
My name was Meg Casey-Bolaños. I chose that name–not just because I married a Mexicano but because it said who I was-someone who had embraced, had absorbed something from the magical Oaxacan sunshine. A woman forever changed by the magic in the air, the water and the countryside. Who loved los santos, who ate mangos by the bucketful and who milked a cow named Marguerita. I wore it proudly–It was a symbol of who I had become: a mujer who was changed forever by milagros and mole and muertos in the Oaxacan foothills.
When Juan left I went back to Meg Casey. It made sense in many ways. It was a demarcation. A milestone. It told people my life had forever changed. It told them I was going it alone. It told them that I was me.
But it also very subtly said I was no longer a member of a familia Mexicana. That maybe I divorced not just Juan but a part of myself too.
A few weeks ago I got an email from Anne asking me if I missed the culture of my adopted family. If I missed baking pan dulce and drinking hot sweet pot coffee on Sundays. Or if I still did it? She wondered because she knew how I had come home that first trip. That every trip I made south over the last ten years was a reunion. She wondered if I was homesick.
I still have my little altar to la Virgen where I light my candles, but many of my milagros have been put away now. From time to time I put away the coffee maker and make my coffee in a pot, the way my suegra taught me. I sometimes pull out my cookbook, the one where she wrote all her recipes down–the one with measurements like “a pinch”, “a handful” and “not too much” and will bake some bread that smells like anise and cinnamon. But really, its true, I packed so much of that away when Juan packed his bags. And I am feeling a bit — well–not quite whole, come to think of it.
Yet, when I decorate for Muertos or consider a party for Tres Reyes, I feel like such a poser, a gringita adopting traditions that are no longer hers. I struggle with whether I can appropriate these secrets that were told to me when I was familia. I feel like an outsider looking in and I can’t figure out whether I should fight my way back into the circle or turn my back on it forever. What do I do with this piece of who I was who was tied so closely with someone who isn’t mine any more?
This week I read this lovely piece about identity–Claiming it, holding it, attaching to it, and letting it morph, be, go, change. It reminded me of this little puzzle, not so neatly wrapped up after my divorce.
Is my cultura a wedding gift I now need to return?
It was an unusually warm April day. We were standing in the park. It was a Saturday but we were working–the way people in Washington, DC do. But because it was Saturday we could give ourselves a break from the relentless pace and walk around the block. We stopped in the park and stood about three inches away from each other and talked, the way we had been talking for months, about life and family and justice and my married lover and movies. Suddenly the skies opened up and it started to pour. I barely heard him over the thunder. “You know I love you, right?” he said. “Yes” I said, slipping my hand into his. The next moment before we kiss stretches infinitely out before us. Spacious. Open. At that moment everything in my life changes.
********
He slipped the key into the lock and it turned. We couldn’t believe it was ours, this house. It felt like a palace. After the studio apartment where he spent almost every night and then the one bedroom basement in Mount Pleasant that we shared, the openess seemed like a metaphor. Our whole lives lay out before us–full of possibility and hope. He rolled around the floor and I took pictures. We dragged in paint cans and ladders along with a suitcase full of dreams and made love on the drop cloths.
********
I was rolled up in a ball–scared, terrified. I was eight months pregnant and I realized that when I had this baby he might just love it more than me. I had never been loved so deeply before in my life and for the first time ever I had felt rooted and at home. I was scared, so scared that it would all start to shift away from me once there was this little person around–this child I so desperately wanted. I would become second in his eyes. I would fail as a mother and he would love me less. The tears started to drip off my chin. He wrapped his arms around me and promised me it would never come true. He would always love me. Always. And I knew he was right.
********
The day they placed Max in my arms. I knew I had it all wrong. He would never stop loving me.
********
There are endless stretches of no sleep. There are short words. There is postpartum depression. There are chores that don’t get done. There is frustration. There is unhappiness that creeps into every corner of the house. There is a child that consumes both of us and leaves so very little left. We have nothing to give each other.
But we try. We rally and laugh and delight in this child we created together. We hold hands and share our stories of him. We find our way back to each others bodies at night. We tell ourselves that love will get us through, that we are a team. We make plans and we dream. We convince ourselves it is going to be OK.
********
But work is hard. Life is hard. There is so much falling apart around us we don’t know how to start holding it all up. When we go out for dinner we are so tired we can do nothing more than stare at each other.
We love each other madly even though it is beginning to feel that love may not be enough.
********
The day he tells me he is leaving me, everything inside my body goes cold. I can’t breathe. Everything stops working and then starts working in reverse. And then stops again. The walls that just five years before had seemed so widely spaced are closing in on me. Our two year old was sound asleep in his room. How did it come to this?
We could figure this out. We always could figure it out. I beg him. Lets figure it out.
********
Nine months later, the air is so heavy in our house I cannot breathe. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to stay. I can’t do the hard work. I can’t figure it out,” he says. “I can’t believe this is us, falling apart this way.”
We are sitting three inches apart from one another. “You know I love you, right?” he says to me as he pulls his hand from mine and gets ready to walk out the door. “Yes,” I say but I am not sure he hears me. He kisses me too quickly and in an instant my life has changed again.
******
I have everything I wanted out of this divorce settlement. There was no fight. It is sketched out on a napkin at a Lebanese restaurant. We promise we would be our best for each other, for him–the only one each of us truly knew how to love at this moment. After years of disappointing each other so deeply I wonder if this was yet another empty promise. I try to so hard to forgive–to forgive him, to forgive myself, to forgive love for not being enough.
********
I need to bring my marriage certificate to court on Friday. I finally bring myself to dig it out of my files. Sometime last year I had moved it from M for marriage to D for divorce. I pull out the file. There is only one certified copy left. I need a certified copy for the court. I make a mental note to write the County and request another for my file. And then it dawns on me that this is the last time I will never need a certified copy of this document ever again. I don’t need to write the County. I put my head in my hands and the reality of the last 4 years hits me like a truck.
********
I move in and out of my day. I am so blessed. My life is a good one. I have beautiful friends, I have not been without love for one day in this whole journey–not one. I laugh every day now–genuine hearty spontaneous belly laughs. I wrap my arms around my dearest girlfriends–soul sisters who understand my heart and giggle with me until 3am. My life is messy but I am bowled over by the stark beauty of it. I am better for this journey I have taken. I am wiser and slower and kinder and gentler. I know that I would not have this–this community, this love of life, this appreciation for slowness, this knowledge of the depths of my heart had he stayed and pretended, but I can’t help but say to anyone who will listen, “I don’t recommend divorce. I say stay. Stay. Stay.”
********
I sit and play my guitar but my fingers don’t want to work on this right now. They want to twine themselves in the hands of someone I once thought I would never live without. I stop and don’t even notice that I have. ”You’ve stopped” my friend says. “Sorry” I say and I mumble something about how I was frustrated with myself. ”I want to start again”. The metaphor hits me like a ton of bricks. I want to start again. Yes–I want to go back to the moment in April when the air hung hot and the thunder clap almost drowned him out. Before I knew how it would all turn out. I want to rewind the movie and play the beginning over and over again.
Despite the thousands of ways he has found to disappoint me, I still love him.
********
I can’t live with him anymore. I don’t want to.
I remember this fact and look at my friend. I look at the guitar in my lap. I think about the richness of my life, about the gorgeous details in this tapestry that is my life. It all turned out exactly as it should have. I have everything I need.
So I pick the guitar back up. I apologize for my bad mood and rotten attitude. For the somewhat wasted lesson.
My friend launches into a spiel about how its the middle of the second period and there is another period and a half to go and you might be getting your ass kicked but you still have to put your head down and tough it out and play and hope you learn something for the next game. I want to kick him out so I can have a good cry but I know that he, with his icehockey metaphors, is right. Wait for the final buzzer I tell myself. I put my head down and I play so soft thunder would drown it out.
******
He plays Tom Waits. And then he plays another song–a song I believe I have known since before I was born. He knows I love it and he wants to cheer me up and he does– a little. I hug him–it is time for him to go. I tell him as he packs up that Friday is the day. “I know” he says. “Its hard”. There is nothing more to say than that–and I silently thank him for not trying to say more.
********
I sit in the dark and wrap my arms around myself. I breathe in and out the truth–the honest truth. I love my life, with its ups and its downs. I love the strength I have discovered in myself. I love my friends, my urban family and the rhythm of this community we have created with shared meals and Eric’s homemade key lime pie and Jackie on my cell phone and Stephen in my office making fun of me. I love Barbara with her laughter and Jen with her schemes and Jeff with his music and Cathy with her cup of coffee and the kids begging me to stay for dinner or take them to icecream. I love my housemate with her fancy salads. I love my job, even when I have to fight with my colleagues. I love raising Max more than I have loved anything else in the world. The truth is I am giving birth to a life that I love more than anything I have ever loved and I couldn’t do it without losing my marriage.
********
And I know, honestly, that I would walk this path over and over just again to sit here in this moment right now. The moon is full and I am incredibly happy even as I am sad.
********
“You know I love you, right?” I whisper to noone in particular–to the moon, to my sleeping son–to myself. I feel the words vibrate around the room before they finally settles on the couch next to me and slip between my fingers. The moment both stands still and passes quickly. And I tumble on, head over heels in love with whatever will come next.
Its late on a school night. Max should be getting ready for bed, or at least close to brushing his teeth. Instead we are entering an ice rink in a town 30 minutes away. We are here to see a teenage friend play ice hockey.
Max has recently expressed a fascination with things on ice. Its unclear to me how much of it is a pure interest in the game, and how much of it is a love of our friend Jeff, a hockey dad and all around fan. It is Jeff we meet at the rink, Jeff who takes Max’s hand and whispers to him the secrets of the game. Whatever it is, the attention from Jeff, the fast moving game, the being in the middle of a very male world, it makes his heart sing. And so I make an exception about bedtime and I drive 30 minutes on a school night out to the rink.
We arrive at the rink and within minutes I am alone. Max has scurried off to the booth from where Jeff runs the scoreboard. He sits on Jeff’s lap. He stands on the bench in the penalty box waiting to open the gate. He wrestles with another dad, a nice man, whose name I will not catch, but who picks Max up by his elbows while Jeff looks on and laughs–three boys together playing a game that can not include me. Max is happy and so I can sit, alone for a change, and be with my thoughts.
The sound of the skates cutting across the ice is meditative. The nice people sitting around me cheering for their kids disappear. I am alone with the memories that wash over me as I follow the puck across the ice. I am carried away, back to a more innocent age, to a rink just like this one.
I was just 13–or maybe 14 when we met. He was a dreamy blond Canadian boy who played hockey. He sat next to me in 8th grade history class. He was popular and talented and wonderful and he took my breath away. And then he took me completely by surprise. One February night, at an ice rink, he took my hand and asked me out. He was my first real love.
For the next two years, we were an item. I don’t remember anything else about those two years but him. He was my Romeo. I worshipped him. At his brother’s hockey games, we would sneak away, hand in hand, out of the sight of everyone to “warm up.” I practically lived at his house. We would lay for hours on end, wrapped up together on his water bed, listening to music. We trusted each other. In that bedroom, we grew up.
He played on an elite travel team. Many a Sunday night, after an afternoon of hanging out in his room, we would eat whole wheat spaghetti in his kitchen. Then he would disappear to the garage and pick up his big hockey bag and stick. I would throw on my coat and watch him throw his bag into the back of his dad’s station wagon. We would climb in the back seat and his dad would drive us all to some far flung rink, while his mother sat up front chatting away.
He would disappear into a locker room and emerge on the ice. I would sit in the stands between his mom and his dad. I would watch every play, every move he made with the attention one gives only to a true love. His father would sit to my right and whisper into my ear what was happening as each play unfolded. His mom would sit to my left knitting, occasionally chiming in. I learned not only about love on those winters nights. By accident, I learned about hockey.
After the game, he and I would snuggle in the back seat of that stationwagon, oblivious to his (clearly very cool and hip) parents up front. I would sit on his lap and bury my head into his chest and breathe in the sweet musky scent of a guy who had just skated his butt off for an hour and a half. A guy who made my heart do flips. A guy who hung the moon. A guy I was sure I would love forever.
I sit now in the stands now and I half expect to see his face when the defenseman turns my way. I can almost hear his dad’s voice now, call out the plays, explain the penalties. I hear him call out as the boys crash into the boards. “There you go…That’s it…Skate…skate…skate. Oh…too bad.” I hear his voice in my head, clear and bell like as I surprise myself with what I remember. I turn slightly to the right almost instinctively and say, “That was a nice clean pass, wasn’t it?”. I say it to no one in particular but I feel the smile, the warm arm around my shoulder that would have answered me back then. I heard he died years ago. I wish that I had said a prayer then–that I had reached out to the family. That I had found my old love and told him how much I adored his dad. I say a prayer for him now as the skates cut across the ice. As the buzzer sounds marking the end of the period.
The buzzer knocks me forward 24 years, back to my grown-up life. I wonder why I am thinking so much about this chapter of my life. I had not thought of this dreamy Canadian boy, his gentle mother, his laid back and kind father for some 20 years, but now I think of them all so often this winter. I think about how his dad taught me to pump gas and let me sign for it. I think of how his mom would ask me to help her chop vegetables. I think about how I crossed some Rubicon in the company of that warm family. In the arms of that sweet boy.
I want to go back and touch the heart that I would break when we were older. I want to go back and say what I should have said when his mother finally gave in to cancer years after we broke up. I want to go back and thank him for being so gentle and kind with me as we walked the path from innocence to knowing. I want to take his hand in mine and tell him that he changed my life when he asked me out that February night. I never did any of those things but I am yearning to do it now. And I can’t help but wonder why…
Perhaps it is about being at the cusp of a beginning again. Perhaps it is standing in a new place of innocence. After years of being out of commission I am now standing again, ready to plunge into love or something that feels like it. Perhaps the hopeful, heady feeling reminds me of being so young again. Perhaps it is that I know that I am once again in a moment, a moment not that much different from when I was wrapping my hands around a cup of hot chocolate, wondering what would happen next, that moment between the second and third period right before that dreamy boy took me by surprise when he asked me to take a walk around the rink, when he swept me off my feet, and sent me tumbling headfirst into the adventure I call my grown-up life.
