Back when I was in my teens or very early 20s I had a vision of my future and it looked like this: I would finally make it, be wildly famous if only in a small circle, have lots of friends, and life would be largely effortless.
The things that would be difficult, I imagined would be amazing challenges–like hiking up high Asian mountains, or writing THE speech, or winning some national prize. I imagined that things like getting the laundry done, remembering birthdays, matching my clothes and looking passably fashionable would be so old hat. Certainly things like caring for children and getting a healthy dinner on the table and the grocery shopping done–that stuff would be done breezily in no time flat, leaving me lots of time to struggle nobly with poetry, and science and other meaningful critical important stuff.
I read this post today by Jena–Her blog is often a mirror for me–I go there and see so much of my own internal world reflected. In her post I recognized so clearly the way I sometimes hold the ordinary regular old stuff in my life. I wonder why it is 20 years later and I am still struggling to figure out how to get the cat fed and the recycling to the curb and the kitchen floor mopped, why small things can leave me feeling a bit flustered and why I do not have a perfectly ordered and neatly wrapped up life like “everyone else”. Or I stomp around grumpily through the mundane wondering when I can get through it, when there is going to be time to be brilliant and glamorous the way I imagined it would always be. Fortunately, I recognized too my own eventual settling into the notion that really at the end of the day I am enough. Happily enough.
I am so thrilled to be regular and unglamorous. To not always have it together. To screw up and make mistakes and learn.
Yesterday Jen Lemen talked about many of the things that leave her feeling foolish. Oh I have my list too. Many of them are mentioned above. Jen and I spend hours giggling over all the ways we play the fool and yet in this laughter I see beauty reflected back at me. I look in this mirror and know that I am exactly perfectly who I need to be right now. That its quite OK to be able to the kind of person who doesn’t always hold it all together so neatly but instead who runs around with life spilling over her arms, dropping pieces of lovingly constructed color along the way. Flawed but authentic. Jumping in with both feet. Getting messy. Living now.
And just now, I stood at this mirror. How crisply I saw my reflection in Bella’s story even though the contours are so very different. I am on the otherside of my divorce and am truly healed and yet the echoes of who I once was are still there. And I wonder what that means. Like Bella, after a long struggle to overcome difficult things I am used to being in healing mode. I laugh with glee when I realize that I am actually on the other side –not in the thick of it anymore and have to giggle when I say, “What is my excuse now? What is holding me back”
And speaking of now, I also today found this little gem at another of my favorite places to go for comfort–Cheerio Road. I thought Karen Maezen Miller just hit it perfectly–this notion of what it means to live in the moment. To be present NOW. Its so cliche, so chic these days to talk about THE NOW as though you need some special sort of wisdom, you need to have obtained some special enlightenment to live in the present. I am printing this post out and taping it to my mirror to remind myself that there is no future when I will be glamorous–there is no time when it will all fall together. There is no time when I won’t play the fool. There is no time when I will forget what happened in the past. No–there is only now. With me in it, enough–more than enough.
I am tonight standing at my mirrors, gazingly lovingly at soulsisters who hold themselves up so that I may see myself clearly. And am thankful.
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?
This is my friend Jen Ballantyne. Most of you know her and her amazing blog The Comfy Place. It is a journal about living–living as a single mom, living as a creative soul, living with stage 4 cancer. She writes with raw and juicy beauty.
Back in the day, when I started blogging, there were about 4 people who I knew read my blog. One magical day, a few months into the whole blogging experiment, I got a comment from Jen B. I remember the day as though it were just yesterday. It was a Thursday. My guitar had just arrived and Jeff (who had helped me buy her on ebay) was on his way over to drop it off.
It was a magical evening. Jen was one of the first “strangers” who seemed to have found my writing. Something about her comment, her name, beckoned me to learn more. I googled her and found her blog and spent the whole night reading her posts with my new guitar on my lap, saying “She is JUST LIKE ME”.
We started emailing and became faithful commenters on each others blogs. The emails started off slow and were mainly about bloggy things. Jen was (and still is) a tremendous encouragement to me, a faithful cheerleader of my growth as a writer. Jen is the whole reason I moved off that clunky ol’ vox site and onto a page of my own. She gently pushed me, encouraged me and kept me honest in my writing. She was the first person to ever sk*rt one of my posts. She taught me to believe in my writing.
One night early in our friendship, while chatting about something bloggy I confessed to her that I was about to go on my first date since separating from Juan. She immediately answered back and a whole new door of our friendship sprung wide open. We whisper our hopes and hurts, our fears and dreams, and tell stories of first loves, our youth and our now. Our emails come daily but during one particularly rough patch for me I heard from Jenni several times a day. She is my soul sister and I love her. She is a miracle.
One day before she arrived on my blog I was struggling with some aspect of single parenting that my married friends just didn’t get. Alone at night, feeling scared I shouted out in frustration: “Just Send Me Someone Who Understands!” And then, days maybe weeks later, there was Jen. In my email box. A voice who understood. Who helped me see things clearly. She is my tangible proof that I am held by Someone Greater. She is an answer to my prayers
The day in January that I came home to her email, the one with “Its Back” in the Subject line my heart stopped for a minute or a year–I don’t know. With the recent news of her latest diagnosis I find myself vacillating between hyper-hope mode and hyper-reality mode. Somedays I think of her and my heart just breaks–not only for her and Jack and the sadness and difficulty that they face but also, I hate to admit it, selfishly for myself. I can’t imagine my days without Jen in them.
Back before we knew that her cancer would come roaring back so strongly I wrote her these words
Just think, one day 20 years from now we will sit together on a beach. I will put my head on your shoulder and say, “Remember back then when you had cancer and I was recovering from the loss of Juan and we just held each other across the internet? Look at us now. How beautifully it all turned out! What a miracle! What an adventure!” And then we will laugh and toast ourselves and our beauty and faith.
While I know that things rarely play out the way we dream (and that often it is for the best), I can’t seem to wrap my head or my heart around the truths that tell me that this one is not likely going to play out exactly this way. And it can make my heart ache with echos of future grief.
The one thing I have found that helps is to give. To give to her because I can. To give to her because she is with me. To give to her to tell her what she means to me. To give to her because she is here in all her beauty and I want to celebrate her and help her and comfort her. So I research like crazy. And I make lists of acupuncture practioners in her area. And I knit for her. And I send emails. And I pray. Helping is a balm on my heart, the place that bleeds when I think about Jen’s hurts. Caring for her now is the balm on my heart, the place that bleeds when I think about the day she will not be here. Doing all these things helps take some of the sting out of the fact that she won’t be with me always and forever. They help bring me back from the thousand scenarios of the future that I can play out into my head to the now where Jen is in my email box and at the other end of the phone line. As I DO these things I am rooted in our now. A now where she still laughs at my jokes. A now where I can say to her “Look at us now! What a miracle! What an adventure”
But some days these things just don’t seem like enough. I feel like I can’t do enough by myself.
At this point many of you know about the auction for Jenni that is being organized by Bella, Jen Lemen and I. It has been an experience which has moved me beyond measure. An experience which has taught me so much about how much love there is in the world. So far so many of you have responded in such amazing ways. We already have pledges of things like jewelry, prints of original photography, handpainted beautiful items and more. We are gearing up for a magical auction the week April 25th. Every morning when I check the weloveyoujen (at) gmail (dot) com mail box I am blown away by the tremendous offerings of love and care for one of our sisters. I feel lifted up and cheered and find myself soaring on gusts of tremendous hope. You all are another answer to another of my prayers–You are tangible proof that we are all one, woven together into some beautiful tapestry. Proof that we can make the “now” magical. Proof that we are all held by Love and are all a manifestation of Love.
If you want to donate and haven’t emailed us yet there is still time. Send us a note at weloveyoujen (at) gmail (dot) com. If you want to give cash there is a button over there on my sidebar that says donate. If you click it, it takes you directly to a paypal account that we set up for cash for Jen. If you blog, please help us spread the world about the auction once its live. And if you pray, please pray. Whatever you have to give is enough.
But mostly what I wanted to do here now, what I sat down to do was say thanks. Not what you are doing for Jenni–We give out of love and the gift is its own reward. The gift of her in this world is our thanks.
No I want to say thanks for what you have done for me. How you have proved to me once again that I am, that we all are, held by Someone Greater. That we are all One. And that we are all Love. And that is the miracle of Jenni in my life.
Last month I wrote about my friend Jen Ballantyne. I say she is my friend but she is my hero, really. She is a single mom, just like me. She is beautiful and artistic and creative and an amazing and generous friend. She is also a brave warrior against cancer.
For those who don’t know Jen’s story, you must get thee to her blog. There she gives you the real deal–beautiful stories about what it is like to have stage 4 colon cancer. What it is like to parent a six year old. What it is like to be a brilliant, creative, shining light who is facing possible death so early. Jenni is fighting for her life while she struggles to be a single mom and provide quality care to her sons. She is in the fight day in and day out, bravely, smartly, gracefully slogging it out–all the while finding time in her day and love in her heart for the likes of little old me and many more lucky women who call her friend.
Jenni’s words daily inspire thousands of women across the globe. And a few of us have been struggling as we read, desperate to find a way to make a difference in her life thousands of miles away from us.
I’d like to let you in on a little magic elfwork I am cooking up with the beautiful Jen Lemen and the stunning Bella at Beyond the Map. And in doing so hope you will join us as co-conspirators.
We are organizing a group of her blogging friends to raise funds to help pay for her treatment and those forms of care and pain management that will not be covered by insurance: acupuncture, massage,naturopath, etc., as well as create a trust for her son. These are things Jen desperately needs, but can’t afford. This is help she won’t ever ask for, because she is too worried about everyone else. So (with her permission) we have decided to take matters into our own hands.
We are going to host a charity auction, through ebay, and all money made will go directly to her care and to a trust for Jack.
Sound interesting? Want to be an elf too? We need help!
1) If you have or know someone who has, items/s that could be auctioned, we would be grateful for any donations. We are open to receiving all offerings. Some folks have already pledged to donate hand made items and art–handknit pieces, jewlrey,prints, zines etc. Others have offered things that perhaps they were getting ready to auction off themselves (that kitchen aid that you got as a wedding gift and have never used….). The only consideration is shipping costs. For example, if an item is heavy and expensive to ship, we just want to make sure it would earn enough money in the auction to balance this out. If you have an item to donate please email us at weloveyoujen at gmail dot com and let us know what it is and we can get you the information on where to ship the items. (We will handle the fufillment from one central location in Chicago) We are asking that all the items be sent to us by April 18th so that we can photograph them and get them ready for the auction. If you have questions, feel free to email us here as well.
2) Help us drum up donations. If you have likeminded friends who you think might want to contribute to this cause please share this post with them. Also, if you have a blog, please help us by posting on your blog too. You can send people who want to donate to welovyoujen at gmail dot com.
3) Help us publicize the auction itself. Check back here and when the auction is up and running, we will have a link to it. Please let your friends and contacts know about it. Post about it if you can to help us drive traffic there.
4) Got other ideas? Please email them to us at weloveyoujen at gmail dot com. We are doing this as a team and are hungry for new ideas, thoughts and are willing to take on other partners!
We are not a non-proft. We are just a gang of women coming together to support one of our own. We are rallying behind Jen because the reality is it could be one of us and we strongly believe that this is what community does. But alas because we aren’t a non-profit we can’t offer a tax deduction for donations. We hope you, your friends or contacts still can help out anyway.
Of course, we ask that you continue to hold Jenni in your thoughts and prayers and continue to support her through leaving your comments and warm wishes on her blog. I am a believer that prayer and love can do wonders to heal, if not the body then the heart and soul.
We are continually amazed and inspired by what a small group of women and their friends can do. Won’t you join us and spread the elfen magic?
a pile of sambusa ready for the frying pan
The day my housemate and I delivered mandazi to many of our beloved neighbors, we were sitting in Jackie’s kitchen. “I need to learn how to make these,” Jackie said.
And so, our idea for my housemate’s cooking classes began. She is a trained chef from Central Africa and cooks amazing and beautiful meals. She is so powerful in the kitchen. While she is there, 
working and singing I want to sit at her feet and listen to her lilting voice, listen to the chop chop chop of her knife. She transports me back to a time and place I never knew I missed, but now I long for like a child separated from home.
On Saturday night we piled into the house–6 beautiful women. She gave us each a chef’s knife, a cutting board and instructed us in proper technique. We giggled and gossiped and the kitchen started to smell of ginger and curry and garlic. The spices were as thick as the laughter.
Sambusas are fried meat dumplings and are, when made completely from scratch,complicated affairs. There is the meat which must be cooked and seasoned and then the envelopes that must be made–flour and water mixed to the right consistency, kneaded until stretchy and soft, rolled out to the perfect thickness, cooked but not too much, trimmed, cut, folded and stuffed before they are dropped in oil and fried.
Making sambusa is a kind of meditation. And an expression of love. To stand in the kitchen and go through so many difficult steps to arrive at the perfect meat dumpling is something you would only do for love. For love of the diners perhaps, or love of cooking itself. But it is not a task one takes on lightly.
My mother-in-law lives in rural Oaxaca and cooks this way. Each tiny step executed patiently in its own time. There is no rush to get the food on the table. The grinding of the chilis, the crushing of the tomatos, so much better done by hand. “That is how the love gets in,” she would say. “Love is the most important ingredient.” It seems like in our rush rush rush convenience society it is a critical nutrient that too often gets left out of our diets. No wonder we are so malnourished these days.
As we sat down to dinner at 10 pm, a luxury for all of us with small children, the love seemed to seep out of the food. Each bite was glorious. I sat back from the table full and yes, completely nourished.
Just a few of the people who make us feel like family…
My divorce hearing was over a week ago now. It feels like a lifetime ago already. Shaky-legged I walked through a door in my life and it closed. And I am content with the new place I am. I am more than content.
At the time Juan and I separated, one of the most bitter emotions I felt was the loss of a sense of “family”. I had grown up in a happy, if normally dysfunctional, nuclear family. Two parents, two kids, two cats, two cars in the garage. That was family to me.
Living far away from both sets of our parents Juan and I had been family to each other. Max completed our picture. When they placed him in our arms and we looked at the perfect picture–a mom, a dad, a child, we felt whole.
With Juan gone, that first year, it felt like we were never quite enough, as though something was missing. It was just the me and the baby at dinner, me and the little one at bedtime. I felt a little like an amputee. There was a tingling sensation there, reminding us that part of us had been cut off, that something was missing. But over time I healed. It happened so slowly I barely noticed it was happening.
Like a crab who loses a claw and regrows a stronger one, we have redefined family. Now our “family” includes people of all different ages and races, people who let themselves into our homes as we let ourselves into theirs. We dealt with the loneliness in our home by opening it wide open, by claiming others, blurring boundaries.
Almost every week we are eating dinner communally with some part of our urban family. There is always bread in the center of the table, wine being poured, hugs hello and goodbye.
When all the kids got lice last week, we used it as an excuse to order in Thai food. Later we sat like monkeys grooming our young, in it together–community. A broken washing machine in one house is not a cause for despair (or maybe only a little despair). It is an excuse to do a laundry party at another house and to sit and play guitar while the clothes tumble.
Late in the evening last night, my dear “brother” brought me to a party of his good friends and did what I needed someone to do, something that I had dreaded for years. He made me get out there. Yup…He took by the hand and with a sense of humor that only he could get away with–he introduced me as an adorable single woman, looking to meet someone interesting. Did they know anyone? Yes it was baptism by fire, but I needed the little kick in the pants to get myself into a new frame of mind.
Sometimes family is a place to retreat, and sometimes family is what propels you out into the world. But family is the place where you go when you need to be reminded of your best self, when you need to fill up your heart, when you need to recharge.
At dinner last night, I told the newest member of my family that if and when I do meet someone and fall in the love they will need to fit into this crazy, messy, huge and spontaneous family. We giggled thinking about how this poor guy would rap his head around it, me and all my beautiful baggage.
For its not just “Love me, love my child.”
Its more like “Love me, love my child, love my dear soul sisters and their kind husbands, my guitar teacher, my guitar teacher’s wife, my across the street neighbors, my mentor and his wife, my comrades at work, my housemate…and all their children…Love me, love all my dear ones. Love me…love my family, my big huge messy urban–we ain’t related but we’re family family…”
Good luck guy…who ever you are.
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.
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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.
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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.
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The day they placed Max in my arms. I knew I had it all wrong. He would never stop loving me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.
Last night I went to sleep very late and dreamt of nothing but red paint, every color red–deep maroons, shameless scarlets and luscious shades of pinks in oils and acrylics and watercolors. I woke knowing my dream was about love. And creating.
I have been in a deep inner place. I have been hibernating and hiding and resting. I have been sitting on the sidelines alot, watching with joy and interest but a bit reluctant to just jump on in.
But when I woke today the sun was shining and the air felt as though a Caribbean breeze had just blown through. AWAKEN! it seemed to shout at me in a voice both compassionate and bossy.
It seemed like the only thing to do was to create.
My housemate and I plotted. We wanted to do something kind– guerilla style. What would it take, we wondered to make mandazi–Rwandan style donuts–for the entire neighborhood? What would happen if we walked through this day, just dropping off dozens of hot, steaming fried sweet breads at house after house? How would it change the week for these people? Would people be different in their jobs, their families and their lives for having been brought little sweets tied up in bows? For some of them it would be nothing but a nice community touch but for others–perhaps it would be the reminder that they needed that they weren’t just somebody who had bills to pay or somebody who had problems to solve but they were somebody loved.
For nothing says you are loved like flour and sugar and vanilla and butter.
We made a list of the people who we thought had touched our hearts in one way or another. We broke out the fanciest vanilla, used the finest of our sugars and mixed and cut and fried and wrapped the donuts by the dozen in craft paper. We made homemade tags for each family with a note just for them and piled the packages high in baskets and we set out.
Delivery was swift but gratifying–many families were not home. We left their packages like little babies in baskets on the front doorstep, a note from us explaining the package. We giggled the whole way around wondering what they would think when they saw the package of sweet fried breads and carried it into their home. The families that were home were touched, surprised, grateful…and yes a few were quite perplexed.
I feel I have retreated so far inside myself that I am starting to turn back outward–that I have flipped myself inside out. I feel I am a bit more comfortable in my skin for having loaded up my basket and then emptied it out. I found myself with more patience for myself. I found myself able to dive deep into the day instead of hanging on the margins feeling wounded and a bit scared.
I feel I have spent my day painting my world with the brush of deep red love. And I have discovered that I too, am somebody loved.
I have a dear friend named Jenni. She is just like me in many ways. We both drive slightly beat up ’97 metallic blue Mazdas. We both have sweet 6 year old sons that were born within just 48 hours of each other. We are also both single moms. We both love art and writing, and on many subjects of the heart we can finish each others sentences. Our souls vibrate on the same frequency.
In other ways we are different. She lives on the other side of the world in Australia. She is blond and I am not. She is into scrapping, me… I’m more of a knitter.
Oh…and she has stage 4 colon cancer.
Even though we have never met face to face, she has fast become a dear friend. We talk almost every day via email. Chatty gossipy emails, deep philosophical emails. We talk about being single moms. We talk about hope. We talk about men, music and books. Over time she has come to learn the secrets of my heart. She is able to see right through my denials and tell me exactly what is going on even when I don’t want to admit it. She is able to tell me how it is and she is always spot on. She is able to raise the hard questions–the ones that get to the heart of the matter. She gets me. She is the real deal, this one.
The other day I got an email from her. It was entitled “What would you do?” She is so brave, my friend. She is trying to make sense of some bad news after three delicious months of being cancer free. She is reassessing concepts like time.
When Jenni asks me a question, no matter how hard it might be I answer it. This time her question was terrible and beautiful and deep. To paraphrase it…
What would you do if you knew you only had 12 months left?
So, because I love her dearly, after I put Max to sleep, I sat at the computer with a heavy heart and began to write. Some 45 minutes later, with tears streaming down my face I hit the send button.
Much to my surprise however, the tears, were not only tears of grief for her struggle. They were also tears of joy and of relief. Because in answering Jen’s email, I realized I had written the roadmap for getting out of my own petulant and silly winter funk.
The last few years have been punctuated by too many sudden deaths. A colleague’s husband had a massive heart attack and died unexpectedly at a very young age. A guy I knew in high school took his daughter to the bus stop, got stung by a bee and never made it home for his EpiPen. A college classmate was in the World Trade Center when the plane’s hit. Another friend walked out into a street and was struck by a car and died instantly.
Each time I heard this news I stood shocked–baffled. They were so young, so healthy, so vibrant! Death cannot be so cruel–can it? Each time the news rattled me to the bone. And each time I breathed in a lesson that I promptly forgot because it was convenient to do so.
We don’t get to decide when we die. Just because I am (relatively) young, just because I am currently healthy, just because life may seem footloose and fancy free, does not mean that I can count on tomorrow or the next day or the next year.
Time is not something any of us can count on.
Not Jenni and those who are struggling with incurable cancer, but not me either. In this way, maybe my friend and I are not so different afterall.
How often these last few months, have I caught myself feeling stuck and grumpy. Banging around with a bad attitude waiting for something better to come along.
Telling myself that it can all wait until the next day, tomorrow, when I feel better, when I am more on top of it. Tomorrow I will forgive myself. Tomorrow I will be more patient with Max. Tomorrow I will laugh. I will do it differently next time, but this time I will just stay stuck in my bad habit. Next time I will tell them kindly how I feel but this time I will just eat it. Next time I will listen more closely or pay attention or stay focused. No wonder I have been feeling a bit…empty. Too many days, hours or minutes I have been putting off my lovely life until a better time.
Jenni and I made a solemn promise that night. We declared that we would make our lists for what we would do if we knew we had only one good year and that we would live that way, every day for as many years as we had left. That together we would each of us live fully and completely in the hope that it would heal pieces of our hearts and bodies that were broken. At very least it would ensure that whether we had 6 breaths, 6 months or 6o years left we would leave this earth with no regrets. That our lives, however long or short, would be full.
Jen recently posted on her blog that she wants to know how we would live if we knew–knew we had only one good year. I want to whisper part of mine here too-to declare it openly. If you have a moment, go over to her blog and leave her some of your ideas too. And then join us in our quest to live them…
I would make time each week to write love letters to my son. I would keep a journal for him of my favorite memories and I would tell him how I felt about him, even when he got in trouble or pushed my buttons, even when I seemed furious and disappointed. I would write down our family stories for him to read later. I would tell him about how I loved his dad the minute I met him and that I never stopped loving him, even though we divorced. I would tell him about my crazy youth so that one day he could find humor and solace when his life took him by surprise.
I would make a list of all the crazy things I have always wanted to do and then find time to do them. When appropriate, I would make Max my conspirator. I would tell him that it has always been my dream to do this and we aren’t going to wait to make dreams come true.
I would spend as much time with Max as I could without taking away from the relationships he needs to build with other people -the relationships that will help him live without me. I would facilitate more time with his dad, and help him build strong loving relationships with other adults and children who are kind to him. I would help him feel loved and confident not only with me but in the world at large. I would teach him to build community and I would teach him to be alone.
I would rest and take time for myself. I would be with myself more. I would be quiet and still.
I would tell everyone I love that I love them, even if it scares me, even if they don’t love me too. And I would find a way to show them that these words are not just words. I would listen to them–really listen and think before I spoke.
I would walk and dance and move my body every chance I got.
I would forgive myself over and over again for not living up to my own expectations.
I would eat healthy foods, and drink lots of water and do yoga and take long hot baths in candle light. I would do this even though it takes time. I would tell myself I am worth it.
I would forgive myself when I go to bed in a space of grouchiness or sadness. I would allow all feelings to wash over me, gratitude, anger, joy, fear–all of them without judgement. I wouldn’t beat myself up for not feeling grateful every damn second of the day.
I would buy myself a punching bag or a stock of cheap plates so that I could go at it when angry instead of stuffing it down like a good girl. And then, when I was done punching or throwing I would laugh and laugh and laugh, maybe cry and then laugh again until my sides ached.
I would play my guitar loudly and sing at the top of my lungs even though I play in a way that can only be described as “flawed but authentic”. And I would play in front of people and not apologize.
I would write and write and write for the joy of it, for myself, for the love of words and stories. I would stop worrying about whether anyone read it or liked it or cared.
I would make these things, not the rest of the “stuff” my measuring stick. I would give up worrying about position or role or whatever.
I would breathe and pay attention and catch myself living over and over again.
This morning I woke up with two cats and two boys jumping on my bed.
Only one cat and one boy are technically mine, but the others are my family, they all belong to my heart. Jakey is Max’s best friend. I like to tell people that on the weekends, I have other either two children or none. Max and Jake live together from Saturday am until Sunday pm, sleeping at one or the others houses almost every weekend. Separating them is painful and only done when necessary. It is the kind of friendship that I shared with Erica, the warm, wonderful and comfortable feeling of having not one home but two, of being able to walk in the back door without knocking, of knowing that there, always and anytime you are welcomed and loved, wanted and yes, even needed. That home is a place that is so much wider than a house. That you belong to something greater.
Toby, the orange cat is our neighbor’s pet. But when Rosie was recovering from cancer 3 years ago, she adopted him. He was a kitten and she was a cat exploring her maternal side. She used to carry him by his neck through the cat door. Now Toby wanders in and out of our home as though he belongs here. It is his home. He belongs to us. Just like our house belongs to Jake.
And just like Max and I belong to Jackie and Eric. We open the door to their yellow bungalow and announce our arrival with a shout. Often it is acknowledged but sometimes it is not. No matter, I let myself in and start to cook dinner or settle in to knit. Children run through and I kiss their boo-boos while I chop garlic and pour myself wine.
This morning I brought Jake back home and sat with Jackie having a cup of coffee. My dear friends Stephen and Marilyn come by to see Jackie’s almost complete remodel and seek her wisdom with their own kitchen project. While Marilyn and Jackie pour over photos and samples, I pour Stephen coffee while we huddle about work and talk about coming by to see his brother and nephew who will arrive for Thanksgiving on Tuesday. Max climbs in and out of his lap.
I glance at the clock and excuse myself, leaving Max upstairs to play with Jake, Jackie and Marilyn with the catalogues, Stephen with the coffee cup. I have a guitar lesson and need to clear a place in the war zone I call my living room for Jeff and I to sit. Its been weeks since my last guitar lesson and I need the help. Its been weeks since I’ve seen my friend Jeff and I need to hear him tell me a story, I need to hear him sing.
I leave the door open for Jeff who comes in and settles on the couch, Toby stretched out between us. Jeff and I wrestle with the hard parts as I stretch my fingers and try and make my guitar sing. We switch for a minute and he plays my little girl while I try his beautiful baby, a guitar with a sound as big as Texas. I laugh and switch back, the chords are no easier on a better guitar. Its me, not her and I just need to practice. He writes out my homework and I promise that I will play every day–that I will work hard. I am solemn in my promise.
We are rapping up our lesson as our housemate comes home from church. “Please Jeff,” I ask him, “Play for her. She has never heard you play”. She and I sit at the dining room table while he plays songs by the great Reverend Gary Davis in a way that makes you want to whisper Amen. I close my eyes and time stands still. “One more, please” I say like a little girl, “just one.” I would have sat there at the table asking for one more song for hours but the phone rings. It is Jackie.
Jeff and I head out.
We wander over and say hello to Eric who has been locked in the basement saudering things, melting metal and fixing pipes. We cross over to the park where the boys are climbing “Dirt Mountain”.
Max has been craving Jeff for weeks–He has been gone for the whole month for work and fun and Max feels it in his bones. He and Jakey climb all over him , play chase and tag with him, while Jackie and I collect leaves in the park. They are so brilliant this year–especially the red ones. I want to pick up red ones and press them in a book to remind me of this day with the sky so blue and the air so cool and brisk. Max sits in Jeff’s lap and snuggles his head on his chest. He is safe here–he belongs to Jeff as much as he belongs to me, this park, this tree he just climbed.
As the sun goes down I head home again, this time to pick up spinach and onions and potatoes and Gruyere. All the stuff for dinner and our housemate too. She cannot dine alone on a Sunday. We let ourselves into Jackie’s, wash spinach and cut potatoes . Jackie and Eric rearrange furniture while we cook for all nine of us, tripling the garlic in the recipe, doubling the butter.
Barbara, my other mother, arrives with Jackie’s girls. We pour wine and eat the leftover Gruyere. We talk about art and music and paint colors and wool while the gratin bubbles and bakes and the world feels right. Norah, the littlest one climbs into our housemate’s arms as though she knows that this mom, whose own children are sound asleep in a village in far away, is in need of a daughter’s love. At this moment, this woman belongs to Norah and her angel bell-like laugh.
This is my life as I love it. Community and friendship, connection and music, a shared life with boundaries so blurry that love can just seep through. Of belonging to one another with all the messiness and joy that this brings.
The rhythm of my life is doors opening without knocking, vegetables being chopped, coffee being poured and chores being shared. This is my life as I love it. This is the rhythm of my life.
